We All Don't Float Together with Luca Balser
A quick chat with What Doesn't Float director Luca Balser before his film's Canadian premiere on October 20!
On October 20, filmmaker Luca Balser will be in town for the Canadian premiere of What Doesn’t Float, presented by Bleeding Edge and Circle Collective at Revue Cinema.
Tickets for the premiere are available HERE!
What Doesn’t Float is an anthology of seven different stories, all taking place in a version of New York City that one rarely gets to see in the movies, on the beaches and docks and canals and edges of a city that is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean. It also brings together many familiar names from the New York indie scene, including Sean Price Williams (Good Time, The Sweet East) and Hunter Zimny (Funny Pages, The Scary of Sixty-First) as cinematographers, as well as Keith Poulson (Hellaware, We Are) and NYC filmmaking legend Larry Fessenden (Habit, Wendigo) in acting roles.
Balser cut his teeth as an assistant editor, working on films like Uncut Gems and Rolling Thunder Revue, but he makes his feature debut as a director with What Doesn’t Float. He also co-founded Gummy Films with Pauline Chalamet and Rachel Walden. Gummy Films has made a name for itself producing music videos for artists like Brockhampton, Pavement and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but What Doesn’t Float is the company’s first feature, and two more are on the way.
Luca was kind enough to chat with us before the premiere of his film on October 20.
BE: This is an anthology of seven different stories that are all taking place in New York. Seven little vignettes or slices of life. Was it always imagined to be a feature film, or was that something that came about afterwards?
LB: Yeah, it was definitely always imagined to be a feature film. Shauna Fitzgerald, the writer, came to me early with about three of them thought out and they were mostly based on some personal experiences. We had both just seen that movie Wild Tales and I loved the format. You can jump deep into the characters within a ten minute period. Another reason why the anthology format was really appealing to us was because we had no money and we could do it one piece at a time.
BE: How did you organize the shoot? Was it an ongoing process where you would get funds and then make some more of it?
LB: When we started, we shot one vignette at a time so that we could fundraise in between. Eventually, we did a crowdfunding campaign and we made a decent amount.
Since it was shot over a long period of time, we worked with a few different DP’s. But we got together with Hunter Zimny during the pandemic, who ended up shooting the bulk of the film. We got an Airbnb in Staten Island and everyone just lived there in a bubble for that portion of the shoot. I didn't want it to look like it was taking place during COVID. So it became a period piece of non-existent New York at that time, even though we’re now very much back to the New York where you'll have a run-in crisis like the kind you see in the film.
My friend was walking here the other day and a guy pulled up to him in a car and yelled, “You yelled at me on my bike yesterday!” And he was like What the fuck? And this guy was so convinced he was this person who had heckled him from the street. It reminded me, oh yeah, these moments are now happening again in a post-COVID New York.
BE: Speaking of New York, one thing that struck me was that a lot of these scenes are set in places you don't normally see in movies, like the canals and the beaches and the docks. What motivated that and the water theme more generally?
LB: I grew up in Brooklyn and most of the locations are places I've been going for my whole life. And for whatever reason, when I was a teenager specifically, I would seek out these edges of New York, I think because they felt somewhat sacred, like discoveries in a city where it can seem like everyone knows every place. They also have this isolating component to them. One end is water and you can't go there and you're kind of stuck in it. So it can be a scary place too if you get stuck in a situation where you want to get out.
The water was also a way of weaving the stories together organically because they play kind of fluid. They're not interconnected but they share a theme of crisis, and they're all in the same version of New York City. New York is surrounded by water but we hardly interact with it. So it's this omnipresent force that can be either a beautiful thing or a scary thing. Like even on Friday, the flooding was insane. I don’t know if you heard about that.
[This interview happened on the same weekend that flash floods battered New York]
BE: I heard some of the news, yeah.
LB: Yeah. When the drains get clogged, all the runoff goes into the Gowanus. So it floods way over the canal. It's really gnarly.
BE: With that last story with the dock worker and his illness, that one seemed like a little bit longer and a little bit more thoughtful than some of the other more humorous ones that came earlier. Was that something that you treated in a different way?
LB: It happened naturally. It was one that we felt couldn't be told in ten minutes. I think it's runtime is more like twenty because you have to really get into his head, see his dreams and with the other characters, we kind of just see an external point of view.
It was also the first vignette that we worked with Hunter on, and the most prep time we had because it was during the pandemic, and a lot of people had nothing going on at the time. I worked with the production designer, Daniel Prosky and the interiors are shot in my old apartment. We really transformed the place. There was less of a scrappiness and more time to craft it, not in a more professional way but a more meticulous way, maybe.
The shipyard we found in Staten Island and we got it for $500 for a whole day to shoot there. Those are all real workers who were there during the day besides the actor. It was a lot of lucky accidents that made it feel bigger.
BE: You've already brought up some of this stuff, but obviously like this is a low budget film. Can you talk about some of the ways that you shoot a micro-budget movie in the city? What were some of your strategies to keep those costs down?
LB: We had a very small crew. Our first shoot, we didn't have an AC. Sean [Price Williams] shot it for us. Everyone was down to work for low rates because it was a lot of friends and people who wanted to work on a feature. Everyone had worked primarily on shorts, besides Sean, but we all wanted to be a part of something bigger.
That first vignette, we didn't get permits for anything. We were shooting in Floyd Bennett Field, which is a national park now near the Rockaways. It’s when [Pauline Chalamet and Keith Poulson] are on that skid-marked runway on the motorcycle and within five minutes of setting up to shoot a park ranger came and it was like, “You guys got to leave right now”.
So we're like, oh shit, okay. We packed up, we made it look like everyone was leaving but we stuck a splinter crew and the motorcycle together and we moved maybe half a mile down to a different part of the park, and he found us again within five minutes. So we did that five times that day until we got enough coverage to be like, okay, we can leave, but it was like a chase going on while we were shooting.
BE: This is the first feature film from your production company, Gummy Films with Pauline Chalamet and Rachel Walden. Was that the plan from the beginning or how did this company come together?
LB: It came right when we started shooting because we needed an LLC for the film. The three of us had all worked on bigger projects where we were in lower level positions and we were frankly, you know, ready to be making stuff and having fun with the art form rather than being a low position. So we were all just like, let's give it a try and start making stuff together. And this was the first project that we did.
We've done a ton of projects, a lot of music videos, a lot of short films. We have two features in post-production right now, Www.RachelOrmont.com and I Don't Care About Family Anymore. We didn't know what having a production company meant, but we all felt very strongly that we wanted to continue working together.
BE: There's a lot of familiar names if you know the New York indie film community, Sean Price Williams, Hunter Zimny, Keith Poulson. You also worked Uncut Gems. Did you intentionally draw these names from that community or were these all friends with you beforehand?
LB: It was mostly friend connections. We weren’t going for people specifically from the indie scene here. I met Sean at a party when I was working on Gems and we hit it off because we both wore the same type of shoe, and he is very down to do projects he thinks they'll have fun on. Pauline knew Keith, I think from Paris or something, and thought he’d be great for the role. Keith joined in obviously as a bad boy character, but if you ever meet Keith, he's the sweetest guy you've ever been around.
Hunter and I grew up ten blocks from each other, but never met, but he was using Sean's lens at the same time that we were starting to shoot. So I would hand the lens off in my doorway and then he'd hand it back and we'd always have a conversation and shoot the shit. Larry Fessenden was also a happy accident that really worked out, he's lovely to work with.
BE: Can I ask what type of shoe that you and Sean were wearing?
LB: Spring Courts.
BE: I think the process of getting so-called micro-budget films funded properly can feel opaque to a lot of filmmakers. So do you have any insight or advice for anybody that's trying to do that kind of thing.
LB: Yeah, definitely try crowdfunding if you can. I think we were able to make $30,000 from it, which is incredible. You also have to be a bit of a maniac because I put in pretty much all the money I had made from Uncut Gems and Rolling Thunder Review. I had a little bit of savings from doing those jobs and I was like, I'm just gonna go all in on this film.
My advice too is to start shooting on whatever you have, not waiting for someone to come along and cut you a check.
BE: Just as a last question, like how has the rollout been for the movie. I know it's only played in New York so far, but you're gonna play it in Los Angeles next week, I believe.
LB: Yeah, so it played for a week and a half at the Roxy in New York. I think they added a couple dates in October without Q&As and then it's going to LA at Braindead Studios soon. It's playing in London at Deeper Into Movies. It's playing in Toronto, as you know, which is very exciting. And yeah, I think it’ll play in as many rooms as we can get it in and then it'll be released on streaming platforms sometime late October. And Kyle from Circle Collective has done just an incredible job for this film.
We’ll see you on Friday, October 20, at the Canadian premiere of What Doesn’t Float!