- [on Meet Me in Montenegro (2014)] We watched old movies like Roy Andersson's first film, A Love Story (1970), which Linnea introduced me to. It's a totally different style than his other films. You look at it and say "It's timeless. It's classic. People will look at it in 100 years." It's not about the clothes or topics.[2015]
- I don't think of art as therapy either. It's an unhealthy way to think about it. Sometimes when you go to film festivals, people can kind of joke around and say "it's that person's therapy lesson" and I understand what they're saying. I try to not let that cynicism preclude me. When it comes to things that are close to your heart, I think about it more as a conversation - an ongoing, long conversation that I'm having with an audience.[2015]
- Frank Reynolds, my film editor for In Search of a Midnight Kiss (2007), was telling me a story about working on Todd Field's film In the Bedroom (2001) and having a conversation about cliches. Todd Field said that sometimes cliches are good because you're coming in with the baggage and you can use that or choose to not use that. I thought that that was interesting.[2015]
- There is a tremendous amount of special effects in Meet Me in Montenegro (2014). Linnea [co-director Linnea Saasen] did all of it.[2015]
- [on Meet Me in Montenegro (2014)] Trial and error. There's no map. We worked on it for 4 years every single day. We edited in hostels - it was a long editing process. There was a lot of re-shooting, and we put in pieces of our own lives in it. It's like we weaved together an Icelandic sweater. The flaws are part of the character, but that's our sweater.[2015]
- [on shooting Meet Me in Montenegro (2014)] We're not rich people. That's the cool thing about Montenegro, you can spend five to 10 euros and get a beautiful fish, salad and a beer. To find a place to stay, you just drive and find someone holding up a sign that says apartment.[2015]
- [on shooting Meet Me in Montenegro (2014)] We took our time waiting for the snow to shoot in Berlin. We shot on the cliffs in Montenegro. We got to go to all these underground clubs in Berlin that Linnea [co-director Linnea Saasen] knew of before I met her. It's not in our personalities to be actors, but the plus side was getting to travel to all of these places.[2015]
- [on shooting Meet Me in Montenegro (2014)] You can only wrangle your crew for so long. It got to this point where Linnea [co-director/actress Linnea Saasen] and I were shooting each other with Canon 5D Mark II cameras, carrying all the different costumes and keeping track of everything.[2015]
- [on Meet Me in Montenegro (2014)] I had given up my apartment and life in Los Angeles, so all of a sudden, we're just sitting there thinking, we have no jobs, no careers, and we have everything we own on our backs at this moment. What are we going to do? Along the way, we were talking about making this film about our experience. I had money for the first time in my life at that moment because I had sold a script to a studio and I was like, that can get us started, I will put up a little bit and we can shoot the beginning, then we'll see how it goes. We basically rented a little apartment in Sarajevo and started tacking up ideas. It was really exciting and fun - for [Linnea], it was her first time as a filmmaker, so I got to collaborate with somebody that's bringing a completely different perspective. Also, she's a dancer, a performance artist and European, which was [a] really interesting to create a romance that wasn't just [from my point of view]. If you've seen Sexless (2003), you're filming your relationships, but it's really from your perspective and you're really controlling the whole thing, so you're giving into the chaos a little bit when you're saying, "We're both going to contribute. It's not going to be one person's objectification. It's going to be these conversations about what is transpiring." That is how it began. It rolled on for three-and-a-half years until we were finally done.[2015]
- [on Meet Me in Montenegro (2014)] We knew okay, because we had the cameras [two small Canon 5D Mark II] and it's us, we could go into the Christmas market, the flea market, and the super clubs that we go to. That could cost millions of dollars to stage, but when it's also a club/art event, they were very supportive and said, "Come on in," and we could just film. A Hollywood movie could never choose all those locations. Even though it was exhausting going to all those locations, it was what would make it special, to have an adventure like Wrong Numbers (2001) years ago. I always thought people would want to go on a journey through Austin like this right now, to sit in the back of the car and see all these places. This was the same spirit.[2015]
- [on casting himself in Meet Me in Montenegro (2014)] It was an extremely practical decision. I don't feel actors at heart, but we knew that we could cast actors to play the other roles and shoot them very traditionally. In four weeks, we could shoot Rupert Friend and Jennifer Ulrich all over Berlin, and go to the Kit Kat sex clubs and all of these things, and get their storyline. Our story had to take place over an extended period of time and [more exotic] locations, so if we could play the parts, we would have the advantage of going to Montenegro and film for weeks on end and then take time and edit it, because we can give up our apartments and live down there. Then we can all move to Los Angeles and stay with my family there while we shoot some LA stuff, and then we go back to Berlin. We could never hire an actress and say, "Be available for the next three years while we shoot little pieces and think about it." In that way, we knew we could gain a tremendous amount cinematically if we could just be passable as actors. We did tests with ourselves and we watched it, we edited a little bit together and we thought, "Let's do it." Of course, it's terrifying because there's no layer of safety that you're hiding behind, but that's how it came about.[2015]
- [on writing Meet Me in Montenegro (2014)] I was leaving L.A. to do this film in New York that had been years and years in the making. That's what I thought was going to happen. So I take this vacation to Berlin and meet Linnea, and we fall madly in love on my last night there. And she asks me if I want to take this train ride to the Balkans, and I say, "Yes! Let's do it!" She thinks she's going off to art school [in Amsterdam]. (...) So we travel down there, and it's really terrific. Then she gets the news that she got the axe from art school. She was on the waiting list, but it was supposed to this really easy thing, but now it was not going to happen. At that same time, I got a call from the studio head - and it's bad news when the studio head calls you. My phone didn't even work; I had to check in to this tiny little hotel to take the phone call. And basically they said, "We decided that we don't want to pull the trigger on your film this year." So I walked back out, and we kind of looked at each other and said, "Okay, we have no jobs, no careers, and everything we own is on our backs." And we thought this was a really hilarious way for two people to meet for the first time. So we went to a hotel in Sarajevo, wrote down and tacked up all the ideas on a wall, and then went back to Berlin.[2015]
- [on Meet Me in Montenegro (2014)] You don't want it to be this kind of megalomaniac thing. But we thought for our story, since it took place for so long and over several countries, if we could play these parts, we could have something really special. We could go to the cliffs of Montenegro and shoot, and then have flashbacks from three years ago, and use some of our photographs from real life to add some elements of real time, and we could go to Berlin and shoot in these underground clubs...[2015]
- I can be very cowardly, and fearful of the world. Over the years, I think part of my writing movies was writing characters who would do the things that I would never have the nerve to do. And I did have that thought that, my God, I've been living in Los Angeles for seven years and my biggest experience has been sitting on the 10 in traffic. I would joke with people that my next movie was going to be called General Meeting, because that's all I seemed to do. I had one meeting with a guy who had been working as a producer for twenty years. And he said, "I've been working here for twenty years, and we've never made a movie. We're in the development process, but we've never actually made a movie." And there is this thing where you're so concerned with getting these things made that your own life slips through your fingers. And coming to Berlin and meeting Linnea, who has a much more courageous willingness to take chances, really inspired me. You kind of feel like you have this closed-off connection to the world. And then all of a sudden you're with this amazing person, in a place you never thought you'd go, and you just feel so lucky to be alive. And it's scary to do that. You've got a lot of connections and reasons to do things the way they've always been done. And sometimes you just have to say, don't be such a pussy. Just go for it. So it's nice to be able to dramatize that.[2015]
- [on Linnea Saasen and editing] She brings a lot of energy and creativity, and probably more courageousness than I have, which is inspiring. But her role grew and grew throughout the process. When she began, she had never edited anything. But she went over to Lynda.com and started to learn how to use the software. And like a week later, she started cutting some scenes, and the DP and I were on the opposite side of the room cutting, and in no time she was cutting scenes that were way faster than our cuts, and better! In no time at all, she became the main editor. And then all of her drawings are incorporated into the film; that was all after the fact. And then at some point our DP had to go back, and she was shooting B-roll. And she did all the special effects. It may look like that movie has special effects, but all the skies that look so nice, all those colors are all fake. We were shooting in grey skies in the middle of winter. I think it's hard for her to see how much she became such an incredible voice of the film during this time. That was really fun to see.(2015)
- [on editing Meet Me in Montenegro (2014)] At one point we considered cutting it into a five-and-a-half-hour TV miniseries. There was just so much material and so many side characters. Even characters that only have one line in the film-they probably have several scenes that you're not seeing. So as we kind of shaped it into a movie, that's when it kind of got that forward momentum that Linnea was talking about. When we started getting feedback from people.[2015]
- [on shooting Meet Me in Montenegro (2014)] With a small camera - a little Canon 5D Mark II has the same chip size as a RED camera - we could drop ourselves right in the middle of a Christmas market and start shooting a full-out break up scene in the midst of a crowd of 200 people without anybody knowing we're even filming a scene. Or go into a museum and just start very quietly filming, and the sound guy has head phones on like he's listening to an IPad, he's actually doing the sound over there in the corner, and then all of a sudden you have a really, you know, fresh scene - it would take a huge budget to do these things.[Interview Edinburgh, 2015]
- [on self-financing Meet Me in Montenegro (2014)] I spent every penny I had, she [Linnea Saasen] spent every penny she had, we asked every friend, family, my own agent acts in the film and also helped us, anybody, our manager saved our bacon several times - everybody, you know, that is in your life, contributed a little bit...[Interview Edinburgh, 2015]
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