‘Yellowjackets’ and ‘Girlfight’ filmmaker Karyn Kusama’s advice to young directors? Get more sleep
Let’s say you’re a Chicago-based director, or working on it. Any age. Maybe you’re in film school, eager for a glimpse of your future, and some wisdom from a filmmaker with a wide range of experience and a quarter-century or so of struggle, success, more struggle, more success.
In that case? April 5 is your day. As part of Cinema/Chicago’s calendar of events — the nonprofit that’s best known for the Chicago International Film Festival — director, screenwriter and producer Karyn Kusama will conduct a master class on what she has learned directing for television and film. The session’s title: “Directing for Television and Film.” Kusama shares that title’s forthright quality.
It took her several years of finance hustling to make her 2000 debut independent feature “Girlfight” starring Michelle Rodriguez. The “no”s Kusama encountered en route came with a wearying refrain: Make the aspiring boxer at the story’s center a white girl, not a Latina. She held out for Rodriguez, who took off from there.
Kusama made “Girlfight” for $1 million. Her second feature, the Charlize Theron futuristic assassin thriller “Aeon Flux,” cost 62 times that. Paramount Pictures didn’t love Kusama’s cut, which led to significant cuts, reshoots, changes and, because studio inference always knows best, a financial failure. Up and down; down and up. This is the way of most filmmaking careers, especially careers straddling independent work and the conglomerates.
I love a lot of Kusama’s films; one of my favorites, her 2015 indie “The Invitation” — another $1 million gem, shot in three weeks with 12 actors and one hillside LA house — works like sinister gangbusters. Without giving the premise away, it ends with a beautiful, ice-cold whammy reminiscent of the ’70s paranoia thrillers Kusama adores.
More recently, she has flourished in television, directing the initial episodes of Showtime’s “Yellowjackets,” which she executive produces. This summer she starts filming “The Terror” for AMC, a six-hour miniseries — directing two of the six episodes, executive producing the rest. Master classes such as the April 5 Chicago talk, part of Cinema/Chicago’s Chicago Industry Exchange series, provoke all kinds of questions from attendees, she says. Some gravitate toward the aspirational and idealistic, she says: “What is the art we want to be making? What is the art we want to be seeing?” Others spring from career doubts and the ability to buy groceries, i.e.: Can I make a living behind a camera?
Now 56, Kusama joined me on Zoom from the Los Feliz LA home she shares with frequent collaborator, screenwriter husband Phil Hay, and their son. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: You’ve done these sorts of master classes before. Is “How am I going to make a living?” the question that keeps coming up?
A: It’s the evergreen question, and it has a way of getting overlooked sometimes in relation to matters of personal vision and art-making. Finding a professional path we can actually survive on — how to make this industry and art form work for us, as professionals — that’s the question. And it’s become even more urgent these last couple of years.
I feel like I’ve learned so much in my 25 years in the business, but I’m struck at how it literally never stops changing. And so rapidly. In my own work, I’m thinking a lot about provoking and encouraging an audience to cultivate a more thoughtful attention span. The attention span of viewers has radically shifted away from … paying attention (laughs). I mean, that’s just the noise of our particular world right now. But it’s an important mission: to get people to sit down and watch something with total engagement. That’s a high bar as a filmmaker to reach, and it’s a high bar for the viewer. I wish it were easier. But I’m open to the challenge of it.
Q: You directed the pilot episode of “Yellowjackets.” This was just before the pandemic?
A: We had our last day of editing the day before the national lockdown in March 2020. Right down to the wire. I remember thinking: Huh. I wonder how bad this virus might be? (With the pilot) we had to be mindful of a television audience required to make a lot of connections between a character we establish as played by a teenaged actor and then that character’s adult counterpart. There were so many things in that first episode we wanted to feel effortlessly connected, hopefully, for the audience. While staying engaging. That’s a constant mission for any filmmaker. Keeping questions about the story alive, while answering enough of them so that a viewer doesn’t feel lost.
Q: So: clear. And interesting.
A: Clear, but just clear enough. And engaging. That’s a tough balance to strike.
Q: It reminds me of your Trailers From Hell segment on “The Parallax View,” the 1974 Alan J. Pakula film. I’m a little older than you but we both saw that at a pretty young age —
A: I just saw a print of that here in LA at the Egyptian Theatre last week! It was so great to watch it on the big screen again. And to be reminded how mysterious that movie is. Inspiring, really. A true artifact of a great era in filmmaking.
Q: There’s a lot of small-screen production going on in Chicago, as you know. And there’s a lot of uncertainty and anxiety among folks graduating from film school here. Wherever you are, in Chicago, LA or New York — you came through NYU yourself, before working for filmmaker John Sayles — it’s not easy to make the next step. What do you tell students about that?
A: Well, let’s start with this: Chicago is one of the greatest cities in the world. If I could live anywhere other than LA or New York, it would be Chicago. So much about it is historically, architecturally and politically significant to me. I see it as a center of art-making. And I like to instill that sense of local pride (in young filmmakers) of where we come from, where we got our education, wherever we first truly interacted with art. There’s always so much interesting material in the place we come from. I grew up in St. Louis, which always wanted to be Chicago, but for a lot of reasons it didn’t turn out that way. Yet I appreciate everything I got out of living there.
I’ve talked to some of the film schools in Chicago, and I don’t lead with the idea that all the action’s in Los Angeles or New York because I don’t think that’s true. There’s a wealth of young talent gaining real skills in Chicago, different from the skills they might’ve gotten from film school in Los Angeles or New York. It’s a more intimate community, and a great place to make some lifelong connections. There are times with LA particularly where it just feels sprawling and impossible.
Q: Coming out of NYU, did New York’s compression or however you want to describe it — did it make things easier?
A: It can. But wherever you are, there’s the likelihood of doing a lot of the wrong kind of work for a while. I went along a path working on music videos, and industrial videos, which is good training. But I didn’t necessarily find my direction for a while. It helped to meet a filmmaker like John Sayles, who was such a mentor to me, and in many respects a bridge between the indie film world and the studio world, for which he wrote a lot of screenplays. I was really lucky my trajectory led me to him. It takes some time to find those people.
Q: When you talk to groups, based on how you watch movies yourself, is there any advice you feel is important to pass along to younger filmmakers about what to do, literally, with the camera? How to use it in a way that serves the material, and in ways that won’t feel like nobody in particular designed the shot?
A: I think young filmmakers have to identify how they like to see, and what they respond to in the films they love. The films that make them feel something. There are films we may admire, or be impressed by, but for me, the goal in making movies is to make people feel something. I encourage young filmmakers to let a movie work its particular magic on them, and then revisit it in order to unearth what made the movie work, what kept you up at night. Some movies just disturb me so deeply, I want to get better control of it, in a way, and learn for myself how and why it works the way it does. And then you can start to look into technical choices, every element and detail of the filmmaking, the sound, the color, the movement, and of course, the performances. It all builds your emotional reality.
It’s not something you learn overnight. Or ever fully learn, period. Luckily.
Q: Let’s say I’m 23. I’m about to direct my first feature. I show up to your master class, and I’m looking for one good practical piece of advice. What is that advice?
A: Honestly? I’d tell you to make getting a good night’s sleep your mission in life. Every single night. I am now at an age where a single night of bad sleep throws me off for too long. And I can’t afford it anymore. Young people should get in the habit of great sleep hygiene. It makes or breaks your ability to think on set.
Q: That’s fantastic advice. I’m not making any movies, but I’ll try it.
A: It’s mom-of-a-teenager advice, I guess. Which I am. But I’ve come to believe it for myself.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.