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“Two Strangers Meeting Over Something So Unusual”: Paula González-Nasser on Her Tribeca World-Premiering Feature Debut The Scout
The Scout Back in 2022, a scrappy feat of independent filmmaking came across my radar. Written and directed by Florida native Justin Zuckerman, Yelling Fire in an Empty Theater is a Mini-DV shot journey of a young woman attempting to create space for herself amid the cacophony of New York City; it harkens to mumblecore while remaining entrenched in the unique hostility that young (even would-be) creatives currently face amid price-gouging and the decimation of DIY communities.
This film was the first feature project undertaken in part by 5th Floor Pictures—the production collective co-founded by Ryan Martin Brown and Paula González-Nasser—itself an attempt to restore the communal lifeblood inherent to artistic creation, particularly a practice as costly (in every sense of the word) as filmmaking. Since then, they’ve produced Brown’s first feature, the excellent office culture sendup Free Time, which had a limited theatrical release last year. The time has now arrived for 5th Floor to champion González-Nasser’s completed feature debut, The Scout, which has its world premiere at Tribeca on June 5.
Visually ethereal yet melancholic, the film centers on Sofia (Mimi Davila), a location scout embarking on the preliminary search for apartments to be featured in a new TV show. The viewer follows her throughout an increasingly taxing day, which includes awkward interactions with strangers in their intimate abodes and self-absorbed heads of production. As Sofia traverses the city in search of the perfect place for this shoot, she can’t help but feel unmoored herself, adrift as she drives through endless tunnels and side streets in her trusty sedan.
Loosely inspired by her own experience as a location scout for New York City media like Broad City and High Maintenance, González-Nasser undertook the role once again for her own film, which features homes that span in appearance from gentrifier chic to endearingly cluttered to tech bro sterility. Brown also returns as producer, editor and AD, while fellow Florida State University alum Nicola Newton adeptly lenses this vision of overcast promise emblematic of springtime in New York.
González-Nasser and I met at a Brooklyn cafe to discuss The Scout the week before it debuts at Tribeca. Below, she elaborates on the structure of 5th Floor Pictures, the Chantal Akerman film that granted her permission to create this project and the serendipitous inclusion of a baby into the film.
Filmmaker: First, I’m curious to know how your collaboration began with Ryan and co. at 5th Floor Pictures.
González-Nasser: It’s funny; Ryan and I are constantly trying to figure out what is 5th Floor. And every year we’re like: What is it? What has it become? Where is it going? Ryan and I met at Florida State University, and we collaborated quite a bit there. We made our thesis film together then graduated and were sort of like, “What now?” We really liked the model in our film program where everybody works on each other’s stuff, and we were like, “What if we just do that but in the real world?” Because it was looking really impossible to make a film otherwise—unless somebody gives you a lot of money.
And so that’s kind of how 5th Floor was started. At the time, we lived on the fifth floor of an apartment building, and we just said, “What if we just call it that?” Nobody protested. We lived with two other former classmates of ours at the time. The four of us were making short films on the weekends, nothing crazy, just trying to stay creative while trying to break into the film industry. That very quickly burnt us out, and as we started growing in our respective careers, we realized we weren’t gonna be able to make all this all this stuff.
It wasn’t until 2019 that our other classmate, Justin Zuckerman, was like, “I’m gonna just go and make a movie.” And we were like, “Okay man, good luck!” We made fun of him a little bit, because he said he was gonna shoot on MiniDV in his apartment. We were like, “All right, you go and do that. Let us know if you need anything.” But he did it and it actually turned out, as you know, quite well. We were all really proud of Justin. I think it energized us to just go and make something ourselves. Maybe not on miniDV in our apartment in four days, but we could try and get a group of people together who are hungry to do stuff.
That’s kind of how Free Time came about in 2021. I was really excited to produce that because I wanted to see how we could implement everything that we’d learned up to that point. And it was so much fun. I think the model of Free Time definitely informed how we were gonna shoot The Scout. So 5th Floor really brought our friends together. Officially just Ryan and I run it, but unofficially there are so many people involved who have been a part of all three projects. I hope we continue to make stuff together, because it’s the only thing I love.
Filmmaker: When did that moment crystalize for you that it was your turn to make a feature?
González-Nasser: When I was at Florida State, I didn’t feel like I was a “director.” I very quickly figured out that my skill set was more on the producing and logistical side. I mean, I had directed a short film before and that was fun, but I still didn’t feel quite like this is something I should or want to do. And in producing Free Time, Ryan was such a great collaborator and really let all of us be a part of the creative process. I fell in love with the way he worked with actors and the way he built a scene together. Being part of the edit, too. I was like, “Oh, this is super exciting. I want to make something…I didn’t know what yet, though.” I had written some features that were kind of too big to make at our scale. I was thinking about what I could do that is similar to Free Time and Yelling Fire. I had just finished working as a location scout and realized I needed to take some time away from it. But I had kept a journal of some of these site visits where I was meeting people on my notes app, basically just of weird things that happened. Then I watched this film, The Meetings of Anna [Les Rendez-vous d’Anna] by Chantal Akerman, and that was the moment where I found a container for this idea: I could just do it as a series of vignettes and meet people and never see them again and move on. That’s when I was like, “I want to write and make this feature.” Of course it took me a year and a half to write the script, because I’m not as fast as Ryan. But yeah, I started writing it at the end of 2022, I think.
Filmmaker: Yeah, I noticed you have some really interesting credits from your time as a location scout in New York City, like Search Party and Never Rarely Sometimes Always. How much of the script is transposed from your own personal anecdotes ripped from the Notes app versus broader professional truths?
González-Nasser: My first word vomit of a draft was pretty much just real things that had happened to me—of course fictionalizing it here and there—but they were very much true to what had happened. I realized that it was actually really hard to operate from writing the real thing, because I would get kind of defensive about what had happened. But it actually wasn’t working for the story very well. It was the best thing in the world to take a step back and start from scratch: figure out how characters would serve these points that I’m trying to make about what working as a location scout, maybe inspired by people I have met along the way. That was a total game changer. It made the script so much better. And it made it more fun, because now there was this idea that I could change something; not be so precious about it and play around. Once we cast it, I also continued to sculpt it based on what that person brings to it. I would say no one in the film, as a character, is directly pulled from someone in real life. But there are certain phrases or mannerisms that were inspired by that one person I met that one time on a job. But their homes and what they say about them were taken from real experiences. I would meet someone for 10 minutes, wouldn’t get to know them very well, but immediately had an impression of who this person was and what they cared about based on their environment.
Filmmaker: Mimi Davila is wonderful as Sofia. Would you say that she acts as a personal avatar of sorts?
González-Nasser: I still can’t figure out how much of her is me. I definitely think she brings a duality in her performance that I don’t think I have in real life, where she can be so playful and so serious with the flip of a coin. She can be a lot more charming, I think, than what I would imagine my experiences were. But I definitely know I’m channeling something of myself through her. Mimi had a lot of questions about my experience, so I can imagine that some of me is definitely in Sofia.
Filmmaker: I’m curious about what conversations you two did have in terms of shaping this character. How much of Sofia was baked into the narrative versus what she uniquely brought to the role?
González-Nasser: Mimi brought a lot of great ideas based on her actual lack of knowledge of scouting. She definitely had a lot of questions about the process of scouting, like, “How do you take photographs of a room?” But she had ideas that actually made the film so much better. She made the observation that I hadn’t yet made that these interactions are filled with tension because it’s two strangers meeting over something so unusual. She had the idea of not knowing who the cast members would be before showing up to set and doing the scene. I think that brought such an amazing awkward tension, and it’s so true to what that experience is. You have a script in your head, but you’re also trying to read if this person is really believing what you are telling them.
Filmmaker: Of course, there are so many locations—namely intricate interiors—on display here. Did you secure these settings through the process which we become intimately aware of in the film, or was a different approach utilized?
González-Nasser: I think it was a combination. Knowing that I was also producing the film, I had this voice in the back of my head that said, “Be logical about what’s possible with the budget that we have.” New York City is just a difficult place to shoot. I would have ideas in the script, those locations always had backups within them so that when we started scouting, if it was looking like we were hitting a dead end, we could pivot and find other spaces that could equally work for the character. But the interesting thing that happened is once we started looking for locations, we did a combination of social media posts, put some flyers up—like you see in the film—and I looked through all my old files of people I had met.
Filmmaker: I was also curious if that had come into play.
González-Nasser: Definitely. I mean, it was difficult because I knew when I first contacted those people I had an actual budget from a network to work with. So a lot of people said no from that pile, but there were some yeses and some people were kind of intrigued by the idea of me making a film about the thing that I was doing. But as we were getting location options in, they were sort of re-informing the script. That was the first thing we did even before casting, was get location ideas and rewrite the script to those locations while making sure that we weren’t just trying to make something fit that didn’t. There’s a scene with a character, Lance, who’s played by Ike [Ufomadu], at a location I had actually scouted for when I worked on High Maintenance. I had become friendly with the homeowner because she lives in my neighborhood. I would see her on walks and we’d say hello. One day I told her, “Hey, I’m thinking about making this movie about the experience you had in your home,” though maybe a little more negative than what she actually had experienced. She loved the idea and that ended up being the house that’s in the film, which meant so much to me because it proved that she trusted us with her space again.
Filmmaker: If I’m remembering correctly, that’s also the scene where you bring in all the film crew to scrutinize the space. Did your relationship with the homeowner allow you to bring more people in for the shoot, or was that just coincidental?
González-Nasser: The first pitch to her was, “You know those times when we bring the van full of people? That’s kind of the thing that I want to do here.” She thought it was very funny. She even remembered details like somebody coming in with an iced coffee and then just leaving it on her furniture. So disrespectful, you know?
Filmmaker: Then in terms of the interiors of these places, did you end up changing anything for the shoot, or was the point to showcase these places as they were?
González-Nasser: Early on, Ryan and I were very much prepping our production designer, [Alexandra Añez], who worked with us on Free Time, that this was gonna be one of those films that didn’t have a lot of money, time, and resources to make a space the way that she ideally wanted to. So my promise to her as the location scout was that I was gonna find spaces that could really bring what she had in mind for some of these characters to life. But of course, Ale being amazing, she still found ways to add with very little prep time. Usually right before shooting, her and Kate Lopez, the art director, would transform some of these spaces with little details. Like in the software developer’s home, they built that crib and they brought this playpen. I think that added so much to this idea of caged innocence.
Filmmaker: That baby adds a lot to that scene.
González-Nasser: Well the baby is actually a good location story. The homeowners of that location had a baby. One of them’s an actor and they were very open to letting us work with their child. It was incredible because they got to be part of the process. I didn’t want them to feel shut out—we were just renting their home—so I hope that they felt involved with the project.
Filmmaker: I also want to highlight Nicola Newton’s lovely cinematography. What conversations did you have in terms of capturing New York City, from car commutes via the tunnel to walking on Rockaway Beach during the off-season?
González-Nasser: Nicola’s work is the reason this film works, in my opinion. I’ve known Nicola and been a fan of how she works for 12 years now. She was the first person I spoke with in class. She was always like the camera girl, you know? She just always understood where to put the camera to capture something. What I mean by that and how it translates to this film is that she almost has this documentary-like sense of understanding people and their movement and how to capture that non-intrusively. She’s the type of person where sometimes we’ll be hanging out and I’ll be like, “Where’s Nicola?” And I’ll notice that she’s just capturing a small moment on a street, just letting time pass. I just knew that I wanted her to lens this movie because so much of this film feels like we’re just being let into these people’s homes and not necessarily supposed to be there. We want the spaces to speak for the characters when they’re kind of saying a whole lot of nothing, but exposing themselves in different ways. Our conversations about how it should look were aligned right away. She knew that this film didn’t need to feel rushed, even though the characters’ having such a manic day. We wanted the film to let us breathe and contemplate what was happening to this character. We didn’t need to rush with her. Nicola was somehow magically able to pull off those beautiful shots with the very limited time that we had. I mean, we only shot for 10 and a half days. That meant we couldn’t really light a lot of these spaces in the way that I know she would have maybe liked to, but she always found a way to use what was already there, just like Ale with the production design, and make that work rather than trying to fight it. Nicola is also a writer-director herself, so she had a lot of great blocking ideas that informed the shot design. For example, in that scene where we meet the creative team coming in the van, I always saw that scene happening in the living room. Then when we went to see it, she had the idea to block it in the dining room, because we could see them enter the space and just take over. I thought that was so brilliant. It also helps for lighting, too, but I think it was motivated by what these people would actually do.
Filmmaker: I need to ask about that location where she runs into her old friend whose roof has a peephole down into the bar: Is that real?
González-Nasser: That is Dirty Precious in Gowanus, the roof of where I used to work. When I worked at Public Record—not the music venue, the production company—I was writing the film. I would often see people going to have lunch out there. One day we went out there and I didn’t realize you could see into the bar downstairs. I just thought that was so awesome and I had to write that in there. They very kindly let us do that, which was very sweet.
Filmmaker: I love the bureaucratic absurdity of her being on the phone while she has to get the boot off of her car. That feels like something learned from actual experience and not merely a narrative device, but correct me if I’m wrong.
González-Nasser: It isn’t, but I’m so glad it feels that way. Originally I wanted to have her car towed. Logistically, that was kind of impossible because they’ve removed the tow pound in Manhattan. You have to go either to the Bronx or to the Navy Yard. So I was like, “What’s the police department doing these days?” I don’t know if you noticed this, but in early 2024, there was this epidemic of cars being booted that I don’t think is happening as much right now. But everywhere I looked, cars had this sign and the boot. I said, “Oh, what if we could just have her car booted? That’s a little more realistic to what would actually happen since she has all these parking tickets.” Our producer, Matt Romanski, actually had the idea of getting a boot. I was like, “I don’t know how, we can’t tell the police department that we’re doing this.” One day we’re just walking around shot listing by the park near our house and there’s a boot sitting on the sidewalk with no owner. We waited two days to make sure that someone truly discarded it and we took it.
Filmmaker: Finally, are you going to keep on producing at 5th Floor? Are you now invigorated to continue screenwriting and directing? Is there another avenue of collaboration that you’re exploring with that group now? In general, what’s next for you guys?
González-Nasser: Maybe this will sound silly, but when we made The Scout, I didn’t anticipate having so much fun doing it. I felt so motivated and creative and I didn’t think I had it in me. At the same time, I still really enjoyed being a producer on the film and still having that hat on, because I think it actually helped me be a better director.
I love working with Ryan. I want to work on his films forever and I hope that I get to work on many of his films. That being said, as we kind of keep growing and making more stuff, it’s becoming way more difficult to figure out how to do that and still pay our rent and still make our own stuff. While he was producing my film, he also edited it and was the first AD. I know that it took a toll on his creative endeavors and now he’s trying to focus on making his next thing. So I think I’ll want to keep directing. I would really enjoy it if I get another opportunity. But I will still probably produce my films alongside other producers and probably produce Ryan’s movies, if the opportunity comes.
Filmmaker: So it seems like the collaboration is definitely still there, but maybe the scale or the title of it is maybe in flux a little bit.
González-Nasser: Yeah. Making these small movies lets us do them rather quickly. As we sort of scale up, we realize that things are just going to take so much longer. It’s just going to look like a lot of time will pass before we do our next thing. But collaboration is really important to us and we probably won’t pursue projects past a certain point if it doesn’t mean working with the people that we love working with. That’s honestly the most important thing to us. The reason why we want to make movies is just to do them with our friends, honestly. So hopefully we’ll find some kind of balance to keep doing that.
