Auden Lincoln-Vogel
Auden Lincoln-Vogel
Currently in the final stages of post-production, Auden Lincoln-Vogel and Philip Rabalais’s feature The Tower casts a curious eye at a cross-section of Fairfield, Iowa: a child who wanders off and takes a camera along to shoot footage; his worried parents, who drive around looking for their kid while bickering ceaselessly and hilariously; two retirement-age women planning some kind of explosion; and the filmmakers, playing heightened versions of themselves arguing in the edit bay. The results are fluid, funny and self-reflexive—a fresh-feeling look at a landscape rarely seen onscreen, and an auspicious joint launch for directors who’ve stayed in the short and medium-length realm until now.
Lincoln-Vogel grew up in Massachusetts and was really into “Calvin & Hobbes” as a kid—“that was all I read until I was about 14,” he recalls. Then, he got interested in art and decided to pursue a dual undergraduate major in that and Russian. Combining those two interests led him to Eastern European animation, particularly the work of Estonian animator Prit Parn, who became his teacher when Lincoln-Vogel got a Fulbright scholarship to study abroad. When he got back to the States, Lincoln-Vogel moved to Iowa because his girlfriend was accepted to the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop. “When I got here, no one here made animations,” Vogel recalls. “They were all doing live action. And I was like, ‘I’ll try this out and see how it goes.’”
Lincoln-Vogel and Rabalais (a 25 New Face last year) have helped each other with their respective projects since 2018, when they met in graduate film school at the University of Iowa, and have worked alternating roles many times since then. (One resulting short, 2021’s Bill and Joe Go Duck Hunting, screened at Cannes in the Cinéfondation selection, Lincoln-Vogel’s highest-profile premiere to date.) The decision to finally work together in a creative sense wasn’t so much a purposeful decision, says Lincoln-Vogel. “It was more like we just started directing it together, it was going well and we were like, ‘OK, what else can we do?’” In addition to a concentrated two-week shoot in 2023, the filmmaking duo shot off and on around their city for the next two years. They had become increasingly interested in what they could draw out of non-performers while shooting screen tests for Rabalais’s 2024 short, Moonroof. “We didn’t know for a long time what it would be,” Lincoln-Vogel recalls. “We were like, ‘Maybe this is just a bunch of vignettes that will become a web series or TV show.’ Then, maybe eight months into it, we were like, ‘You know what? Let’s just make a feature film.’”
Reference points for the episodic film include Slacker and Gummo. Lincoln-Vogel notes that the state’s environmental devastation and difficult political situation under MAGA governor Kim Reynolds can be felt in the plotline involving two women deciding to blow things up—those two “are understandably quite fed up with American politics, and Iowa politics in particular.” That said, he plans to stay in Fairfield, citing its affordability for independent filmmakers, among other incentives. “There’s certain advantages for Philip because he’s from there and knows people, knows what he can get away with and so forth,” he notes. “But also, he doesn’t want to burn bridges—there are times when being a little more of a stranger can help.” For example, that arguing couple—Rabalais “was like, ‘Man, I really don’t want to have to ask my friends to reenact a marital spat.’” Lincoln-Vogel was happy to direct the real-life partners, but, “It turned out there was almost no directing to be done. I described the scene. They were like, ‘This is how we fight,’ with more self-awareness than just about any couple I’ve ever met.” The two directors plan to continue making both solo and joint films. “Just last week, Philip gave me a manila folder,” Lincoln-Vogel says. “He had started writing a bunch of character descriptions, and now I’m writing a bunch of little short stories about each of the characters. It’s quite open.” —Vadim Rizov/Image: Ace Boothby
