The Sweet East comes to the Great White North
A short convo with Sweet East director Sean Price Williams and writer Nick Pinkerton.
The Sweet East will be making its Canadian premiere at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on Friday, December 15 and playing for the following weekend. Feel free to join Bleeding Edge for an afterparty on Friday night at Mama’s Liquor and Lounge on Dundas West!
The makers of The Sweet East would like you to know that they were not setting out to make a deliberately provocative or “edgelord-ish” movie. If it feels that way, with its references to #PizzaGate, Antifa and the newly invigorated white supremacist movement, it may simply be because of the “milquetoast” nature of contemporary cinema, not because the filmmakers were trying to pull one over on you.
Indeed, we’ve become used to film and television avoiding hot culture topics in recent years, even as online discourse has become poisoned by them. The Sweet East feels refreshing in that it seems to live in the real world, here with us, a world that is messy and incomprehensible, populated by freaks and weirdos trying to make sense of the madness that surrounds them.
At the centre of this story is Lillian (Talia Ryder), a South Carolina high school student who runs away during a class trip to Washington, D.C. and goes on a postmodern Alice in Wonderland adventure up the eastern seaboard, hopping from one socially maladjusted protector to another as she moves further north and chaos seems to follow her. Along the way she encounters a well-read neo-Nazi (Simon Rex), a couple of street-casting filmmakers (Jeremy O. Harris and Ayo Edebiri) and a grotesque puppet.
Before The Sweet East has its Canadian premiere at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on Friday. (Tickets still available!) We sat down with director Sean Price Williams, the prolific house cinematographer of the New York independent filmmaking scene, and Nick Pinkerton, infamous film critic-turned-screenwriter.
Bleeding Edge: So how did you two meet? I know you both worked at the legendary Kim's Video in the past, so can you discuss how you got together.
Nick Pinkerton: We didn't really know one another during that period when we were working at Kim’s. We were at two separate locations. Sean at Mondo [Kim’s] on St Mark's, myself on Avenue A.
Sean Price Williams: And being at the two different locations, we would have automatically not liked each other because there was a weird little rivalry, at least from my point of view, between these two stores.
NP: I never really felt that animosity, but whatever Sean need to get him going. And then we finally met by a mutual friend. I believe it was on Union Square when you were coming from, I think, Woody Allen's To Rome With Love. And then we had many mutual festival experiences and a tentative courtship gradually blossomed into a full blown romance.
BE: I see you’re a happy couple now.
NP: Never has a cloud has scattered across the blue sky between us.
BE: Sean, this is your directorial debut and Nick, this is your screenwriting debut. So why the career change at this point in your lives?
SPW: The truth is that COVID gave us a break that I took advantage of to put together a look book and actually will this thing into existence. Not just me, but Craig Butta, who also is making a big leap for this film as a producer. It gave us the break to decide, OK, what are we doing with our life? Nick had already written the script so he had already made the transition, and actually had been working on other scripts with other people. But I mean, you know, midlife crisis, maybe? It’s a little of that. Another movie that I shot, I was unhappy with how it turned out and wanted to know why.
NP: I would say for my part, I always had stuck in my craw a quote from Kenneth Tynan, which is something to the effect of “no one should be a full time critic for more than ten years.” There are exceptions, obviously, but even very good critics tend to get a tad repetitive after a while. And this is not to say that I don't want to continue writing about movies, but I had been on the lookout for something else that was going to keep things interesting for me and perhaps give me a new perspective on films. So when Sean put the opportunity in front of me, I was happy to make a try for it.
SPW: I think it was an article that Nick had written online about the final Kim's closing and about Kim's Video. His writing, the storytelling and everything in that article really just made me think, Gosh, this guy should really be writing a movie… I wonder if he wants to?
BE: You know, last month we were involved with screening another film you worked on, Luca Balser’s What Doesn’t Float. Looking at the credits for this film from up here in Toronto, it seems like there’s a very fluid film scene in New York, with a lot of collaboration between many of the same people. I see some familiar names in the cast list: Keith Poulson, Betsey Brown, Alex Ross Perry as producer, etc.. Can you talk about how your experience as a cinematographer in this scene and how it how you brought some of those collaborators on board?
SPW: Luca’s movie I barely shot on, but we've got Hunter Zimny and these guys that all kind of do the same thing anyway. I probably could watch that movie and not know what I shot and what Hunter shot. All of us go to the movies together. Alex Perry and I used to a lot. He doesn't anymore, really. He's got a kid and I don't know what he does, but our tastes and everything were informed by the experiences of going to movies together and talking about movies. The next wave of guys, the ones that are not yet 30 are the ones that I hang out with now. It’s not really a clear answer to your question, but there is definitely a posse. I’ll probably see a lot of these people in the next week. We made the movie and we still see everybody that we made the movie with, regularly. We did the Q&A this weekend and Mike Bilandic, who I’ve work with also, he was like, It’s as if the movie hasn't been finished. It's because we still see all of each other every day. Whatever we do, whether we're recording music or we're just drinking or going to movies, we're all still together all the time.
NP: I would say, in these United States, if you're a movie person and you go to New York rather than Los Angeles, it's immediately symptomatic of a certain sensibility. I think we are very much a New York crew who are oriented toward an other cinema, a second cinema. I myself went to a film production program and those who went out of state, eventually, pretty much everybody went to Los Angeles. I’m the only person who gravitated towards New York and it just immediately says something about what you're trying to do in motion pictures.
SPW: We're all motivated by movies. Like if there's an important film series happening, like there was a Marco Ferreri film series earlier this year and we're all just going to be there. We know that. And if you're not there, you're fucking up or something.
NP: There was a screening of Bye Bye Monkey, where I think I literally knew every single person in the theatre.
SPW: Did we paint a beautiful picture of a cinephile in New York?
BE: Yeah, it sounds great! We can get to the movie itself now. I guess it's this Alice in Wonderland-like story about a runaway girl getting lost in these different pockets and subcultures along the East Coast of the United States. It feels like a State of the Union address, or at least your perspective on America at this moment. Is that kind of what you intended?
NP: I hope that it's something more than an allegory. Obviously, it was summoned up from certain things in the atmosphere at the time that I was writing it. But I hope that more than anything, it's a movie about individuals who are not acting as placeholders for certain tendencies. Perhaps there was a bit of that in conception, but I hope it developed into something a little richer than that. I think a State of the Union usually has some kind of driving thesis, and if it's a State of the Union it's a very scattershot one and one that is full of contradictions and it doubles back on itself. One thing that gets my goat a little bit is when I see people responding to the movie saying, What's it trying to say? What's it saying about America? I should hope several things, many of them in conflict with one another, in that it's not a simple, straightforward position paper on anything, because hopefully a movie is something richer is delivering a Western Union message.
SPW: I think we played down that we made the movie really for the spirit of making movies and for cinephiles and people that love movies, to show that you can make a movie like this, very freely and wildly. The politics are something that we've talked about a lot just because, at least for me, it sounds smart or something, and we don't want to sound like we just make movies for movie nerds, but maybe I kind of did, you know? I shouldn't pretend to be such a politician.
NP: I would suggest it's a little smarter than that in that one of the running aspects of the film is that Talia’s character, like a lot of people, very much perceives herself as the protagonist of the movie, of her own life, at least when she is most at ease. The sort of movie movie stuff that is worked into the movie isn't just there to exercise our various movie fetishes. There is something that is, I hope, servicing the narrative and it isn’t just film nerd wankery.
BE: No, I don't think it's that. I did want to ask why is it the Sweet East with a focus on the East Coast? why choose the East, other than that you guys are from New York.
SPW: Well, it's a big country and they only do so much. We made jokes, like you always do, about the sequel. But I have no interest in making The Sweet West. I just don't want to go there. I don't want to be there. I don't know the people there, really. I don't know what happens to people that went west. They’re a different animal. And also the East is this the history of America, you know? It's all here on the East Coast.
NP: The cradle of our civilization such as it is. The movie is often talked about in terms of being a road movie, but I don't think it is per se. There's something kind of perverse about doing a movie that limits itself to the eastern seaboard because Washington, D.C., to Boston, it's the same distance as London to Edinburgh, and there's not really a British the movie tradition. I suppose in some ways it's a willfully perverse subversion of the Great American Road Trip, that they’re going to trundle 5 or 6 hours up I-95 rather than view the mysteries of the West.
BE: You mentioned Mike Bilandic before, who we brought up for a screening last year. Nick, from reading your Substack every once in a while, I know that you appreciate lowbrow culture, or at least are an observer of lowbrow culture. As in your Streaming Follies…
NP: Livestream Follies.
BE: Right, there's a bit of that in this film, too, with the rap-rock at the beginning. But I’m wondering what draws you to this subject matter?
NP: I would say I'm actually quite repulsed by this subject matter. That particular series of pieces was a real self-harm practice. I felt it was something, not significant, but represented something that deserved exploring, but it was also an incredibly punishing wormhole to go down. It was very much inspired by Mr. Bilandic’s researches, and he has a much stronger stomach than I have for the absolute dregs of online culture. He is an intrepid explorer and I felt in this case I had to follow his lead. And I think Internet culture certainly plays into our film.
SPW: Some people have said watching our movie is almost like being browsing the Internet. There's sort of a speed to it and a variety that I guess makes people think of it, which is cool. I like that. Jason Schwartzman said that.
NP: I think something has happened over the last few years where you used to be able to comfort yourself with whatever was particularly mortifying that you encountered on the Internet and say, Oh, that's the Internet. It's not real life. At some point, I don't think that delineation continues to hold. We do, to some degree, live with one foot in the real world and one foot in the online world, which I don't find much cause to celebrate. But that is my lived observation.
SPW: Michael Bilandic is responsible for really bringing in a lot of appreciation of trash. While we were young and pretentious and all trying to impress each other with our artistic whatever educations and endurance and boring movies and things like that. He went straight in and brought us into Giuseppe Andrews and a lot of just like, garbage stuff that we found. For me, it was really refreshing. He continues to find it anywhere, wherever it is. But he's a very intelligent guy, and just in a real general way, it made me able to digest lowbrow. That's Mike's doing. Thank you, Mike.
NP: I would say also the one point where Sean and I have a lot of overlap is a disinterest in high-finish movie-making. I mean, I enjoy a Kubrick film as much as the next guy, but that sort of master builder model of movie-making is not something that feels terribly accessible…
SPW: He's a bad example because actually, you watch his movies and they're kind of…
NP: You don't cast Timothy Carey in a lead role if you don't have some interest in chaos.
SPW: Not everything has to be in focus. When I started making these indie movies, everybody was always talking about Cassavetes, you know, critics and everything. I think that's not mentioned that much anymore. I don't hear it as much as it I used to. I thought I’d be relieved by that, but we watched Husbands the other night and I was getting a real kick out of the liberation that you do get watching his movies and I think that, yeah, I really kind of miss it now.
NP: You can you can find it in independent underground films. You can find it in Jess Franco movies. The particular frictions of something that's not perfectly made, but interestingly made, I think, is something we both gravitate toward.
SPW: Right before we started making the movie, I fell into a real Jess Franco vortex. And that's part of the reason I decided to shoot it myself and focus and do all that. I wanted to have that feeling of finding it while it's happening, like a documentary. I feel like Jess Franco's movies have that too. Anyway. Lowbrow. He had exquisite taste, but the films don't necessarily reveal it immediately.
BE: Just to go back to what you were saying before about how this movie is like scrolling through the Internet. It does feel pretty refreshing in that it sort of resembles my daily online life in a way that a lot of movies don't. And I think even a lot of like independent movies don't touch on certain culture war subjects that seem pervasive on the internet. Was there an intention to kind of go further with that sort of stuff than a lot of movies do?
SPW: Just to have something in our movie that people connect to. I don't see a lot of new movies because I don't understand why I would like some of these things. It just seems so irrelevant and not connected to today. To make a movie takes a lot of time and maybe by the time you've made the movie it feels out of date or something like that. Nick wrote a script a long, long time ago that we didn't have to update because it's pretty timeless, but yet it feels like it's connected to our life now. Everything's kind of a little bit soft in the movie, which makes it which makes it a little more timeless.
NP: I've seen several references to the movie being like, provocative or edgelord-ish, and to me that doesn't really reflect any of the intent of the movie. More than anything, it reflects how fucking milquetoast so many movies are. To my mind, this was never a throwing the gantlet thing, this is just a normal movie. This was a movie that touched on some icky situations and some tainted ideas, but that's what the movies I’m interested in did. You know, it sounds like science fiction, but in 1998, there was a movie about a homosexual pedophile by Todd Solondz, and it was universally adored. To me, all this is indicative of the fact that things are extremely tame right now, not that we’re any kind of crusading provocateurs.
SPW: I show Howard Stern's New Year's special from 1993 to young people when they come over to my house just to show them how far out things used to be able to be. I'm pretty just bored by the rules that we have to live by now. But I feel like if anything, I was disappointed that we didn't go harder. I want to be more illegal.
NP: I would say I'm happy that that wasn't our driving motive.
SPW: It wasn’t, no. If it was our driving motive, we would have a much naughtier movie and that’s the truth because we know how to be filthy. That was not what drove us.
NP: This film is a gentle caress.
BE: Just a couple of questions about some stuff in the film. Nick, you are credited with co-writing a song in the movie. Could you discuss that process?
NP: Well, it was a breeze. As it turns out, I'm a gifted songwriter on top of everything else.
SPW: He also wrote another song that's not in the movie for the White supremacist rally...
NP: It was kind of an Iron Maiden pastiche, “White Warrior.”
BE: Is there a version of this that exists anywhere?
SPW: Not recorded.
NP: The karaoke scene was meant to be Bob Marley's “No Woman, No Cry” and the rights were beyond our means. We had done a location scout where we were listening to a lot of butthead rap-rock, a genre that both Sean and myself detest.
SPW: I was never into that stuff.
NP: For whatever reason, it was just scratching a certain itch…
SPW: Yeah, the Judgment Night soundtrack.
NP: Judgment Night soundtrack, Helmet, and House of Pain. So that was the incredibly explicit reasoning behind it.
SPW: It's also important that everyone's into some shit that Lillian isn’t into. All her peers and her classmates are definitely into shit that she doesn't like.
NP: So it had to be the most grating, unpleasant, in-your-face music possible. When that's what you're looking for, where do you turn? Rap-rock.
BE: I also wanted to ask about the puppet snorting a line of cocaine. I'm curious how that was created?
SPW: That was a much bigger character in the movie. I thought it'd be really great to get a muppet in there. The part was written for a human being, but I decided that it should be some really gross monster instead of a human being. It was the financier of the independent film that Jeremy and Ayo are making. This is that character, just this rich monster. But everyone hangs out with him because he brings all the cocaine and he's got a good laugh or something. But it was really hard to direct a muppet with actors and stuff, And I did a really bad job. So basically, he ended up entirely on the cutting room floor. Except he cost so much money we had to put him in there somewhere.
NP: The character was like this Silicon Valley plutocrat who was putting a little money into a scrappy, independent film and meant to just be a man. When Shaun floated the idea of it being this grotesque puppet, you know, you look at these guys, you look at an Elon Musk or whomever, and they just look wrong. The idea was, not that this would be explicated, but this guy has just done this to himself intentionally. He had at one point an Amadeus-esque 18th century dandy beauty mark…
SPW: Powder face…
NP: This is like a guy who is surrounded by yes men and women who, as he's going through this transformation…
SPW: He has that cosmetically done to his face intentionally.
NP: And nobody will tell him to stop.
SPW: Had his ears removed… I mean, people do this stuff!
NP: None of this would have been explained. We would have just trusted to the audience to extrapolate.
SPW: Also I was working on a documentary about this lady, Jocelyn Wildenstein, the Cat Lady. I was shooting a documentary on her, and I was fascinated by her
BE: Did you encounter her in real life?
SPW: I think they did, finally, I stopped working on that project. But yeah, I think they finally did get her, but yeah, what a monster.
BE: That's it for questions. Thank you for doing this!