They Won’t Grow Old Together: An Interview with Dan Sallitt about Fourteen and His Earlier Films (Web Exclusive)
by Michał Oleszczyk

Dan Sallitt’s latest feature, Fourteen, premiered at the Berlinale Forum in 2019, premiered in a virtual theatrical enagement at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) in May, and can currently be streamed here, in what already seems a different world due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. The film’s intimate quality may now affect a large number of viewers stuck in the midst of their private home settings, which does not seem entirely inappropriate for a story taking place in what feels like a recognizable, lived-in world freed from audiovisual clichés. The story of two young New Yorkers, Mara (Tallie Medel) and Jo (Norma Kuhling), and their long friendship enduring the strain of Jo’s self-destructive behavior is typical of Sallitt’s writing-directing approach—one that he has been now honing for more than three decades (his first feature film, Polly Perverse Strikes Again!, was made for EZTV in 1986).

A native of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania (born on July 27, 1955), Sallitt currently lives in New York City. He attended Harvard College (where he received a B.A. in Mathematics in 1976) and UCLA’s school of Theater, Film and Television (earning a M.F.A. in Screenwriting in 1979). He served as the first-string critic for the Los Angeles Reader from 1983 till 1985, and has contributed film criticism for multiple outlets, including Slate, the Chicago Reader, MUBI.com, Masters of Cinema, the Toronto Film Festival, as well his own blog, Thanks for the Use of the Hall. His monograph on Japanese director Mikio Naruse is available online here.

Sallitt’s way of telling a story (he has edited all of his films, except for Honeymoon [1998]) shirks away from the habitual propensity of much of narrative cinema toward overt signaling of characters’ emotions and building scenes around moments conceived and executed as aggressively “revealing.” In Sallitt, what happens inside the character’s mind is often as mysterious as it is in the works of his clear predecessors—Robert Bresson, Jean Eustache, and Maurice Pialat. All of these directors excelled at methodical severing of connections between felt emotion and its stereotypical mode of expression—whether by means of elaborate theory put to rigid practice (as in Bresson’s conception of actors as “models”), or else through fresh, impulsive, counterintuitive way of directing actors and structuring films (Pialat). 

Over the years, Sallitt—in works that thematically circle around the notion of individual freedom versus societal inhibition, as well as tensions and existential opportunities generated by familial and emotional ties (All the Ships at Sea [2004], The Unspeakable Act [2014]) — has produced an astonishingly original body of independent work that merges European influences with American tradition of witty, expressive dialogue (that at times reaches the heights of subversive sophistication of Ben Hecht, Preston Sturges, and Whit Stillman). Personally, I have been a fan of Sallitt’s work ever since I first saw his work in the mid-2000s, and I pride myself on having organized his very first partial retrospective at the 2008 edition of Off Plus Camera Festival in Kraków. Twelve years later, as I happily witness Dan’s successful rise to hard-earned international recognition, I can only second the 2005 statement by French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin, who said about Sallitt’s work: “The dialogue is absolutely wonderful, brilliant, discreet, moving. This man, Dan Sallitt, has really found his own voice, which is so rare.” 

We met in Sallitt’s Brooklyn apartment in September 2019. Please note that the following discussion contains spoilers.—Michał Oleszczyk 

Cineaste: Fourteen is your first film that seems to be aiming for something of an epic scale, covering a very long period in your characters’ lives. What were the particular challenges of making a film like that without leaving the limitations of low-budget filmmaking?

Dan Sallitt: I’ve done four films that were reasonably stationary, because it made it easier to schedule and avoid an oppressive amount of work to be done in a short period of time. But you do run out of ideas for that sort of a thing. I wanted to do something a little bit different. And I like many films that cover a lot of ground. But when you take on a project that covers more years or more places, you’re increasing all the things you’ve got to do in a small-budget film by a large factor. As it turned out, when I started working on the movie that became Fourteen, I realized that I was no longer in a position to take the amount of vacation that I would need in order to do everything in one chunk of time. Conditions have changed at my job and I couldn’t count on taking an outrageous amount of continuous vacation time. Instead, I decided that the way to go around this would be to shoot the film in pieces; to take several chunks of vacation time and break the film up accordingly. It’s not efficient, since each piece you do requires a certain amount of preproduction. It’s not as if you’re saving time on the whole. But I figured it would be possible if I worked things out around that structure. It was then that I started to look for a project that would fit that kind of working situation. And a project that covers a great many years is ideal for that kind of schedule, because you try to arrange it so that each shoot covers a certain amount of years. By the next shoot, if anything happens to people’s appearance, it’s fine. So, it was this practical circumstance that kicked me into a different kind of production—one that I actually enjoyed and wanted to do for a long time: a kind of a more [Maurice] Pialat-influenced movie, in which fragments of life are thrown together without too much obvious external or narrative coherence. It was a combination of practical and aesthetic desires.  

Cineaste: One of the aspects of a story taking place across a number of years, at least when you look at more conventional productions, is that some aspects of characterization, like makeup, is flaunted in the extreme, like in Same Time, Next Year (1978), in which you can see the thick makeup peel off actors’ faces. An effort is made to strongly signal the changing physicality of the characters, which is something I feel you don’t do in Fourteen that much, also in terms of adjusting locations or decoration, or lighting. What was your focal point as far as conveying the process of change was concerned? 

Sallitt: I don’t oppose the idea of time changing visibly; I would like the idea, actually. Still, I wanted it to be random—and besides, there are certain things, like heavy makeup, that the Bazinian in me instinctively rebels against. I knew that something like that would not look the way I wanted it to, so I conceived the movie without it. I told everyone working on the movie that the film was suspended in an eternal present. I didn’t want it to begin in 2009 and end in 2029; I didn’t want to see my characters start using cell phones; nothing of that sort. I used only present tense. I wasn’t interested in a high degree of documentation. I encouraged all the actors to get haircuts, to lose and gain weight. One actor, John Sharples, who played Jo’s father, really obliged me by losing a big amount of weight over the course of a year, so when we see him at the end of the movie, he looks quite different than in his first appearance. And if you look closely, you can see moments when [the leading actress] Tallie [Medel] has long hair and then there is a sharp cut to a shot in which she has short hair. But to flaunt that type of thing is not my style. 

Cineaste: This film displays one of your chief strengths as a screenwriter: it’s full of witty, sharp dialogue that at times brings to mind such writers as Preston Sturges and Whit Stillman. Do you start with writing down funny lines, or do you start with character?

Sallitt: I always start with character exclusively. I feel that, both in life and in scripts, things are funny when they grow out of a situation very organically. To me, things aren’t too funny when they don’t. When a scene looks like a joke, or a setup, it doesn’t seem all that funny to me. So, I exclusively think in terms of character and I try to say things in an interesting way, but I just try to follow my instinct both in how I talk and how I hear other people talk. I kind of mix all those things together. If I had a joke in advance, I would be very hesitant to use it. It’s all just me trying to let my personality and my observations get into the movie.

Cineaste: Which character came to you first—Mara or Jo? Or was it the very idea of this strange symbiosis between two women that came first? 

Sallitt: I think the film came to my mind as a story of Jo: a story of a character who is increasingly unable to deal with practical reality—and the sadness of this. It wasn’t a full-fledged idea yet; just an inkling that I had of how to animate that concept of a film that had to be shot over a period of time in pieces. I always knew there would be another character, since I also had right at the beginning the idea of a film that would feature both Tallie and the actress Kate Lyn Sheil. So, when I had the idea of a character who declines, it was Kate Lyn Sheil that I had in mind. I would never cast Tallie in such a role, since in my private lexicon that’s not Tallie. And so, Tallie was always in there. One person was declining, and that was Kate Lyn Sheil, and the other person was standing by and helping. There was no film yet, but it all grew out of this one concept I had. Then I thought of the mechanism of the final part of the movie. I thought of the little daughter knowing Jo only from little fairy tales Mara told her. Also, of the daughter being upset once she realizes that the hero of her fairy tale stories had died—in turn triggering a moment of sorrow in the character of Mara, who was otherwise dealing fairly well with having moved on in life after the loss of Jo.

Cineaste: So it was that image of them crying that started it all? 

Sallitt: Once I had that idea of the mother and the daughter crying together over Jo, that was the movie. All of a sudden I knew it could be a movie, even though I only had one scene and the rest of it was vague concepts. I still have an e-mail I sent to a friend in the middle of 2012 the day I came up with this idea; the movie still sounded vague at this point, but that scene was very clear-cut. So, to answer your question: I started with Jo, but the scene that made me want to make the movie featured Mara and her child. 

Cineaste: One of the scenes that seems freely improvised is precisely the bedtime scene, which sees Mara turning Jo into a character in a fairy tale she tells to her daughter.

Salilitt: The scene was written. The flow was there on the page, and Tallie knew it, but she was acting with a little girl Lorelei Romani, whom I didn’t write lines for and who also was not in the mood to make a movie at all. After two takes, she said it was boring and she didn’t want to continue. Her mother, who was our makeup/hair person, Kelly Miller, had to persuade and bribe her to come back. Tallie had the difficult job of keeping the scene alive for the little girl and keeping her interested. After a while, the girl decided that she would never get off the set if she didn’t humor us, so she started to play along and do what we wanted her to do. What Tallie did, on the other hand, was to take the original script and elaborate on it greatly. So, the story [she tells] is very much the same, but what you see in the film is full of Tallie’s own input. It’s kind of brilliant what she did. 

Cineaste: The scene is in one continuous shot, and it is lovely: in a way, we are in the position of the child, not of Mara. Once we hear how Jo stood up for Mara against her bullies when they were children, we arrive at the emotional core of what Jo’s support meant to Mara. 

Sallitt: It was a writing ploy to hold that information off until the end of the movie. Normally, information like that would be used early. In my scheme, I didn’t need it for anything else besides this late surprise. And I didn’t want to unveil it in the usual way, which stereotypically would involve a lot of overt emotion. I wanted this information to emerge very casually, with no crisis being signaled in any way and with no deep emotional accompaniment. 

Cineaste: Prior to Fourteen, I never associated your films with the notion of melodrama, but I do believe that this film is a melodrama that reworks the clash-of-female-personalities trope of, say, Old Acquaintance [1943], Rich and Famous [1981] or even All About Eve [1950]. What is your relationship to melodrama as such and to the emotional release it provides by heightening affect in the viewer and character alike?

Sallitt: There’s a conflict in me and I think I tried to use that conflict. On the one hand, under the surface, I always liked some large, romantic concept of character. In all my films, there’s always something that’s larger than life and that’s not really naturalistic. There’s a hidden part of me that wants things to be amazing to the point that it makes our mouths drop open. And then, there’s another part of me that absolutely does not want to lean into that emotion, [a part that] disguises it, keeps it way under the naturalistic surface. All my movies have something about them that’s a little unusual from character point of view. In Honeymoon [1998], you have Mimi transforming her personality in an impossible, heroic way, which I don’t think of as naturalistic at all. I used all the [Roberto] Rossellini tricks to disguise it in that film. In All the Ships at Sea, you have this character of Virginia that walks off into the middle of nowhere with nothing in her pockets, without the least fear—it’s a majestic sort of gesture. In The Unspeakable Act, you have this character Jackie at the center, and she is quite extraordinary in that she’s completely invulnerable to society’s pressures, while society puts quite a lot of pressure on the particular thing that she is interested in [namely, incest with her brother — M.O.]. And she couldn’t care less; she’s an existentialist heroine who never looks to society for the validation of her feelings. 

Cineaste: I think that, in a way, you came full circle, to the film of yours that most nakedly exposes this affinity towards the extraordinary characters, namely Polly Perverse Strikes Again! There, the female character is so exuberantly maladjusted that she exerts fascination. Jo in Fourteen in some ways resembles that character. I think there’s a deeply American notion here, one of a character who is a free spirit. How much are you attracted to the freedom that she represents and how much do you see that freedom as some sort of perilous condition? 

Sallitt: I don’t usually allow myself to enjoy the power that a free spirit has. For example, all those nonconformist characters in the films of the 1970s that just fly in the face of authority figures—Harold and Maude [1971] comes to mind—I mean, the 1960s and 1970s are quite dominated by that. The screwball years have a bit of that, also. I never feel empowered enough by those films to enjoy the power that comes with that kind of freedom. In Polly Perverse I am using that character in a very different way. In that early film, she’s not real; she’s one aspect of the male protagonist’s mind. She’s designed to expose the terrible conflicts in his psyche. I do think that the film actually acknowledges this unreality and plays with it. The characters seem almost to realize that she always appears exactly at the right moment to undermine the guy’s everyday reality. The fiction is very much foregrounded there. In the case of Fourteen, I started with something different: with the sadness of the reality of a person we were going to lose. But because of that, I wanted the counterpoint of there being a lot of pleasure in the film and a lot of everyday happiness. I was guided in that by Pialat and by À nos amours [1983], which is a film about a character who can’t be happy and who is unable to find true emotion — and yet seventy percent of the film is us seeing her having a good old time, sleeping with people, and enjoying herself. Pialat knows that unhappy people do not walk around with a cloud over their heads that everyone can see. This was my inspiration. If I was going to make a film in which someone would be inevitably lost to us, I needed to see the everyday reality that makes that loss puzzling—the fact that we see her qualities, we see her excitement for life, we see how much she enjoys relationships and how comfortable she is. To some extent, her pleasure in this film is a counterpoint, where in Polly Perverse it was a symbolic element. 

Cineaste: Mara tells Jo that she admires her piercing intelligence, her “attack on things.” Did you construct Mara in a way that was consciously the opposite of Jo?

Sallitt: There was always the concept that Mara loves Jo desperately, with a child’s love. She will never leave behind the part of her that is that eleven-year-old-girl, happy by at the side of her childhood heroine. I feel it’s in the film, even though a lot of the film shows Mara’s difficulty with Jo and her eventual distancing herself from her. But the love is there, and it allows for no compromise—it can’t be hidden, it can’t be destroyed. I don’t actually think that Mara envies Jo’s superior qualities. In the scene where Jo teases Mara’s companion about lingerie preferences and suggests a sexual swap, you can tell that [Mara] perhaps doesn’t mind so much when Jo flirts with her boyfriend. She seems to not really mind the suggested sexual configuration (which could be very uncomfortable to a personality with a different relationship to power). I think that when Mara talks about the insightful paper [that Jo wrote at school], she isn’t saying she wished she could do a paper like that. I think Mara is seeing the writing on the wall. Mara is looking at Jo in her grave. She’s having a moment in which she can’t stand the loss of a person she values so much and who has objectively so much value. So I think that moment in the film is the moment of the character stepping outside of the narrative and looking forward to a very sad ending awaiting her friend. Her anger is kind of a rebellion at being jarred out of the narrative for a moment and being forced to look at where the story is going—forced to look at the tragic last page. 

Cineaste: How did you work with Norma Kuhling who plays Jo?

Sallitt: To tell you the truth, my approach is to cast the role as carefully as I possibly can and then just to assume that the person you saw in the rehearsals is the person you’re going to get. Norma actually worked on the character enormously, so what I ultimately got of course differed from the rehearsal — but a lot of the magic of directing actors is casting. I mean, there may be people like [Ingmar] Bergman or [George] Cukor who know how to do things with an actor to change them in front of the camera — to bring out aspects of them that are dormant — but to tell you the truth, I’m not one of those people. I really like to see what I am going to get very early on. If the casting is good, usually everything is within reach. It was very hard to cast that role and I cast it multiple times — I lost people along the way. But Norma wanted that role and she really worked at it. She has her own method of approaching things. She’s very systematic, she really does her homework. It was hard to write a line of dialogue so strange that she wouldn’t find a way for it to sound natural. Sometimes, I would say to her on the set: “I don’t like this line, it’s hard to say”—and she would find a way to say it. I think she is a very studied and accomplished script analyst. Once in a while, we had differences of opinion about where to go. In fact, in the big climactic scene where she has to cry, it got off to a very rocky start, because she planned an arc for the character and I was convinced that Jo couldn’t act quite that way, so it looked bad for a second. But our disagreement was resolved by her ultimately saying, “Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.” So I pointed to a specific moment for her to explode with emotion, and that was that. She did it, I said it was brilliant, and we moved on. I’d like to think that she realized that it was really good.

Cineaste: What about editing, which you do yourself?

Sallitt: I have to be very sensitive in the editing room. To see all the different takes that I have, find the moments that are good, select them very carefully. Sometimes I select individual lines and move them from one take to another. That’s the time when you have the leisure to help create the performance. On the set, there are a lot of things going on and you can’t tell what is going to happen on a daily basis. It’s nice to be in the moment, but frankly, I am not always good at being in the moment—I can sometimes be a little too focused on the goal, and I can miss out when something really beautiful is happening, particularly if it wasn’t what I originally had in mind. But in the editing room, I am relaxed enough to catch those beautiful things when I see them.

Cineaste: The mid-movie shot of the Katonah train station is jarring in a way—it stops the movie in its tracks a bit like the long carpet shot does in Terence Daviess’ The Long Day Closes [1992].

Sallitt: I went up to Katonah smiling, telling my crew that I was going to stop the movie dead for four minutes, and they said, “Really?” I always wanted to do that scene in that way. In my mind, the origin of it is that Jo has almost died at that point. The audience doesn’t know it yet, but she did overdose. And she will die, eventually. As a director, I take Jo’s death very seriously; I really would not like to be casual about the fact that I was killing somebody in my film. In my mind, stopping the film was appropriate as an acknowledgement of the fact that this fragile life that we almost lost at this point is actually going to be lost. So I always pictured the scene that way. And then, when I physically got there, I enjoyed it. I had a tear coming out of my eye during the first take, it was so beautiful to see Tallie being picked up by the camera and followed from the station. I liked everything about that shot: also the fact that we see a train arriving, and I love trains. At a station like Katonah, you see the way a commuter town works; you see all those people getting off the train and getting into their cars, getting into the passenger seat with their spouses waiting for them. The whole thing unfolds that way and then we finally see Tallie. To me, it’s a beautiful moment. It’s of course the moment that causes the most problems for some members of the audience. More than anything else, it’s the shot that makes it impossible for Fourteen to be a really commercial movie. There are a certain number of critics in the world who can’t get past that shot and it becomes the heart of a bad review they write. I think it’s actually appropriate and I realized it was going to be a problem fairly early in the editing process, and so I wondered whether I should cut it or make it shorter. A few people felt that I should, but I finally decided that I would regret it if I didn’t use the shot I cried over as I was shooting it. And I thought to myself: it’s much better to take my chances with this shot being out in the world than to regret that I didn’t use it. 

Cineaste: I think it works, but I was certainly surprised by it. Also, at that point I thought to myself that Fourteen would probably not be remade into a Hollywood doomed-female-friendship movie in the vein of Beaches [1989], which was a relief. 

Sallitt: I have no evidence of this, but I always felt like All the Ships at Sea was kind of remade as Martha Marcy May Marlene [2011]. When I saw that film, I imagined someone having watched All the Ships at Sea and saying, “Yeah, this is a bad film, but I know how to make it good.” 

Cineaste: Male characters in your recent films seem all but interchangeable as far as their behavior is concerned. In Fourteen, they drift in and out of the lives of the women, but we don’t really register them.

Sallitt: It’s harder for me, somehow, to cast the male characters. I don’t know why this is, but I like a certain restrained kind of performance—a performance where no clues are given to the audience about what is going on inside a character; no metacommunication going on through silence and gesture and behavior. And for some reason it’s very hard for me to find young men whose performance style I like. Usually, I feel like there’s so much indicating that goes on, so I often wind up casting nonprofessional actors whom I can trust to just sit there and exist. Like Sky Hirschkron [in the Unspeakable Act], who is an intelligent civilian, not a professional actor. Chris Wells, who plays the biggest male role [in Fourteen, credited as C. Mason Wells] is also quite similar—I wouldn’t say interchangeable, but he’s also a very intelligent person who is not really an actor, even though he acted a few times. But he has the intelligence to understand what is going on, to think about lines and to make them better each time we do another take. And those people know how not to show anything—which is what I wanted. I didn’t want stuff to be happening behind their faces. And it was not so easy to find somebody who is like that. In terms of the structure, definitely men are one of the things, along with jobs and apartments, that come and go in the lives of Jo and Mara. The film is about these two women. It’s not because of anything particular about men but for some reason I did choose to make a film about these two women. Making a film about women is a little more exciting to me. It gives me more energy to do all the things you need to do in order to complete an independent film. But the secondary role of the men is just structural, not metaphysical—it doesn’t have anything to do with my take on maleness. It’s just that I wanted the background behind my two main characters to stay a bit out of focus: and the men happen to be in that background.

Cineaste: There’s something redolent of European filmmaking of a certain era in that film. I thought of Agnès Varda’s One Sings, the Other Doesn’t [1977], in which the guys are also background noise in a story of a female friendship.

Sallitt: Rich and Famous is a bit like that, too. 

Cineaste: Do you find filmmakers or styles in contemporary cinema which correspond to your own aesthetic sensibilities? It seems that much of contemporary cinema feeds on the kind of emotional signaling you are consciously avoiding in your films. 

Sallitt: Still, you often see documentary invade fiction. It’s all about the way standards of realism change and renew themselves constantly. I’m interested in what happened with mumblecore and with the advent of cheap video—and the rise of a new kind of amateur filmmaker, who didn’t need a studio or a lot of money. [In the past decade and a half], we saw a lot of amateur actors—often friends of filmmakers—come into those movies, and we saw some good filmmakers collaborating with them to shape good performances. [Joe] Swanberg, for me, is an extremely talented filmmaker who started working with actors in a different way that anybody else that I could think of. I have a preconstructed dramatic idea when I cast people, while he casts people he finds interesting and wants to explore in front of the camera. The fiction comes later; for him, fiction is a tool and the people are primary. I think that he is somebody who helped to codify those new and exciting acting styles that came along with no-budget filmmaking of 2000s. When I worked on The Unspeakable Act, I asked him to recommend people to me—he recommended four, and I cast all of them. One of them was Tallie, one of them was Kate Lyn Sheil. He had an affinity for a certain reality-based acting that was useful to me. In general, I think you often find this force of documentary invading fiction and injecting it with something unique.

Cineaste: When would you locate the moment in history of filmmaking when this particular form of realism first erupted? 

Sallitt: I would locate it around 2005–2007. There were people who went back further, but this was the time when more filmmakers started showing those low-budget films on TV or cable; the films became technically good enough [for that channel of distribution]. Technology made the difference. When I made All the Ships at Sea, I shot it in 2002 using as good a video camera as was cheaply available—and it doesn’t look as good as films that would come shortly after. The difference between how All the Ships at Sea looks and how The Unspeakable Act looks is huge. But I think around 2005–2007 you started to see people galvanized by technology; a lot of changes in low-budget filmmaking come to life in that period. It always is that way; it was that way at other times in film history, when technology gave people the means to do things. The documentary impulse is always drawn upon, because it is something people can relate to and something people know, so when you’re doing a new form, you can always get away with imitating documentaries. It’s a language that people can speak.

Cineaste: For me, People on Sunday [1931] seems one the first outbursts of that—in a way, it’s a proto-mumblecore film. 

Sallitt: Also, after World War II, newsreel footage got people used to certain imagery. And immediately you have people like [Roberto] Rossellini, or [André] De Toth in America, exploring it. The whole pseudodocumentary movement in post-WWII cinema, identified with the producer Louis de Rochemont, could be included here. It’s always geared to some sort of technological change that is going on. After the war, you even see people like [Howard] Hawks doing a film like I Was a War Male Bride [1949] in those bombed-out environments. There was just a spirit after the war of people getting used to new things: handheld cameras, cheap 16mm stock. It influenced everything.

Cineaste: Moving on to Caterina—your short film made just after Fourteen—how was directing actors in a foreign language like? Did that feel like stepping outside of your comfort zone?

Sallitt: Making a short film was already an act of leaving my comfort zone. I don’t make short films, I don’t think in terms of short films. I was very worried that if I took my usual larger-than-life impulses that are buried within my feature films, that would just explode the short film form. I feared that the drama would be too much, that it would swamp everything else. I first had to find a way to adapt my style to a short film in such a way that I could make it work. In the end, I took the coward’s way out: instead of finding a new form, I just stripped away all the drama in the story and I used all the ideas I became comfortable with in Fourteen, only without the benefit of the overarching story. So that was the first uncomfortable thing I needed to get used to. And then, I wrote the script very quickly, right after I got back from the Berlin Film Festival in February [2019]. I shot two months after that. And I am not the kind of person to do things quickly. I do a lot of planning as a general rule. So that, too, was very tricky.

Cineaste: How did you cast the main actress, Agustina Muñoz?

Sallitt: She was the reason the film exists. I wasn’t planning to make a short film and I wasn’t planning to make any film right after Fourteen; I wanted a good long rest. But Agustina and I acted together a few years ago in Hermia & Helena [2016] by Matías Piñeiro. Matías cast me as her biological father and we had a scene together at the end of that movie and that’s how we got to know each other. We stayed in touch. She told me once she would like to make a film with me; then it turned out she was coming to New York for a theatre residency in Long Island. She casually suggested making a film together, and I decided to do it, since I love her both as an actress and as a person. So, everything was designed around making a film for Augustina. There would be no film without her.

Cineaste: There’s this remarkable scene at the bodega, disquieting in its focus on Caterina as she is confronted with an abusive customer. Throughout the scene, we don’t see the shop owner.

Sallitt: I would have shown the shop owner if I could have gotten the camera far enough to the back of the store. A lot of bodegas in New York are laid out around a single pathway. I storyboarded for a different kind of location, so when I ended up at that place, I needed to storyboard all over again. The whole film came together in a very intuitive manner. We were trying to come up with scenes. I had a bunch of ideas for scenes that I told Agustina about. She didn’t like some of them, so I would write new ones. I just tried to get a balance, where everything sort of related to the life of the character, but nothing was obvious. The purpose of that particular scene [at the bodega] was to bring out an aspect of Caterina’s personality—the same thing that makes her do so much for other people, makes it very hard for her when someone decides that she is a bad person. Much of her life is designed to avoid having people think of her as a bad person. This was the central idea, everything else followed. The casting of John Magary, who is a big guy, was also tricky. I didn’t want Caterina to be threatened by him as a big guy; I wanted a psychological effect. I wanted to make her able to deal with him physically, but not able to deal with this pathological hatred which is based on nothing.

Cineaste: Are you working on a new script?

Sallitt: I do need a rest, for sure. I needed it after Fourteen, so I definitely need it after making Caterina immediately afterward. If I start thinking about a script, that’s the beginning—afterward, the process can’t be stopped. I’m trying not to work on anything. I really want to take some time to recover my life and to not live in the tension and the anxiety of making another cheap movie. Once I start taking notes, my vacation is over and it’s impossible for me to stop. 

Distribution Sources

Fourteen is distributed by Grasshopper Film. For current information on virtual theatrical screenings, visit here.

The Unspeakable Act is distributed by The Cinema Guild, and their DVD also includes All the Ships at Sea as an extra. The latter two films are also available for viewing on Amazon Prime. For further information, visit Dan Sallitt’s website.

Michał Oleszczyk is a film critic and script consultant living in Warsaw, Poland. He teaches film history at the University of Warsaw and script development at the Warsaw Film School. He co-edited (with Kamila Kuc and Kuba Mikurda) Boro: L’Isle d’Amour (2015), a collection of writings on director Walerian Borowczyk for Berghahn Books. He has contributed to Cineaste, RogerEbert.com, and Slant Magazine.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 3