Those who’ve followed Nathan Silver and Chris “C. Mason” Wells’ careers might find themselves bewildered in recent months. Compelling enough that their latest collaboration, Between the Temples, premiered at Sundance with at least three major figures (Jason Schwartzman, Carol Kane, Robert Smigel) aboard; more notable that a filmmaker long associated with smaller distribution would become a Sony Pictures Classics player; and now names are being dropped on The Tonight Show to applause. (Does Jimmy Fallon actually know Silver’s work? Let’s print the legend.)
Wells’ cinephile record (inasmuch as such a record could exist) is inveterate: currently director of distribution at MUBI, he brings decades of experience as a viewer and industry figure to Temples, one of the most sharply and distinctly written films in recent memory. We discussed Temples‘ creation over Zoom and voice memos (which you hopefully can’t distinguish), distilling a complex project into intention and inspiration.
The Film Stage: You’ve been doing other interviews?
C. Mason Wells: I’m actually doing two more right after you today, so this is the first. So we’ll see how rusty I am at this. Maybe this’ll end up being the warm-up. I’m doing Nic Rapold’s podcast and also the Screen Slate podcast––all things you can imagine I’d be doing for this.
This will be a printed interview where everything you say is really preserved in ink.
All of your “gotcha” questions.
You were at Sundance but it doesn’t seem you did the promotional circuit quite so much as others.
Yeah. I was at Sundance and Berlin, but I was not at Tribeca this year––actually because of day-job obligations, of all things. I had a work retreat that was in Barcelona. All told, going to Barcelona for free, going to the Tribeca Film Festival––basically the same thing, right? [Laughs] No, I was sad to miss our hometown premiere. By all accounts, it went well.
Have you found talking about the film interesting, enlightening in any way? Are you learning something about it?
I don’t know. I think it’s interesting to talk process about the movie because we made it in a way that… I don’t think is groundbreaking, but feels more idiosyncratic than a lot of other independently made movies are. I don’t know how much you know about that side of it, but what we wrote for the film wasn’t a conventional 90-, 100-page script for the film; it was called a “scriptment” and it’s a 40-to-50-page document that’s in prose. It’s still in Final Draft, still has scene headings, but it kind of describes the scenes with bits of dialogue or other pertinent details that we know won’t ever be in the movie or even be shot. Sometimes I will put in things that I know, realistically, can’t be filmed, but they add something of texture for the person reading it and the actors and for the production designer. You kind of want to give people a suggestion of the world of the movie, and then a lot of decisions are really made on-set. I was on-set for the entirety of the shoot, which I think is fairly rare for the co-writer of a film. That’s because I was often writing dialogue morning-of and would give it to the actors maybe a couple hours before we would shoot their scenes.
I think that kept me on my toes; it kept the entire production on their toes; certainly kept the actors on theirs. It’s a maddening way to work for some people and I think others really take to it and enjoy it. Jason and Carol are two informative performers and they’re both very smart, so it helps a lot when you have actors that level of intelligence, that are that intuitive, who have worked with a lot of different great filmmakers on a variety of projects and are comfortable with improvisation, with voicing their opinions, with giving their notes on things because that makes the movie better. I don’t know… I haven’t read too much about the film itself. I think I read some of the reviews at Sundance. It’s hard to know because before a movie is released a lot of the––as you can imagine––quality of the criticism is pretty… surface-level.
Don’t I know it!
Because there’s not an opportunity, maybe, to watch a movie again or dig deeper into it. I guess I would be more eager to read about the film three months after it comes out, or six months or a year later and see what people have to say, as opposed to drive-by festival reactions. Or even release ones. Just to get a deeper sense of it from people. But I’m always curious to hear what people thought and took away from it. You especially. You are someone whose opinion I trust very much, so I’m eager to hear what you have to say.
Good. I’m keeping that praise in the interview. Anyway: it’s funny that there’s Between the Temples lore, like something that doesn’t survive the film but goes on the fan wiki. How do you identify what’s a good-enough idea to keep in the film? What makes something not quite on the level, where it’s “part of the text” but isn’t going to burden the viewer? You want all the ideas to be good, of course.
Right.
So what’s a good-enough idea?
I think a lot of it, from the dramaturgical perspective, is backstory. Working out the histories of the characters which… something I like about Nathan––one of the reasons why I was attracted to working with him in the first place––was, from his earlier films, the sense that he cared about dramatic structure in a way that a lot of independent American filmmakers, in particular, really didn’t. He started writing in school, and I think that shows in the ways that, though his movies might be made in a very loose way, there’s a real attention to how the story is told. It’s something that I just personally respond to. I actually think a lot of backstory has no place in interesting drama, but it informs decisions of character, bits of dialogue, and I love to talk through those things and work them out––especially in collaboration with the actor.
Nathan and I had multiple long Zooms with Jason after he agreed to do the film where we kind of worked through Ben’s backstory and history, and we were changing it constantly. Which is part of our process. We’re often changing what a character is or where did they come from, what did they do at certain points in their life. It’s porous. It’s not really set in stone, even by the time that we’re shooting––because we want things to come up during the shoot that we can incorporate into the movie and rewrite things, and that’s why we work the way that we do. Nathan and I are on the same page of thinking that makes the movie better: when you’re reacting to what’s in front of you and not trying to force some prescribed idea through. So I think a lot of what doesn’t end up making into the movie are great ideas for scenes, but they’re not scenes happening over the several weeks in which the film is happening, and trying to work out what those things are and what they can give you for the present-tense moments that we’re actually watching.
I’m curious about the difference between you and Nathan writing dialogue in a room and––at the earliest––it’s a year until actors recite it, where you can take all that time to refine and improve it, versus you and Nathan writing dialogue in a room and in two hours it’s going to recorded on film forever. That seems harder, but I wonder if the inability to second-guess plays into the freshness you’re talking about.
I think that that’s part of it. Nathan and I are very anxious and neurotic people, and the movie was second-guessed to death a lot over the writing of it. So it is far more immediate when you’re right there in front of people. But you also just get a sense of people’s voices––like their literal, actual voice. Hearing Jason talk and Jason coming to set looking a certain way, being in-character a certain way; Carol as well. How we can use those things to their advantage and not necessarily forcing them to adapt to two lines that we’ve written, but trying to write lines for that person right in front of us. It’s a meeting point in-between. When we first met Carol––and did a separate interview with Carol––she is more alive than you could ever hope a person would be. She is feisty and hilarious and she suffers no fools. She’s close with Gena Rowlands and worked with Cassavetes and, in real life, feels like she wandered out of a Cassavetes movie in the greatest way possible. She’s a raw nerve of a human being and will tell you what she thinks. She will seduce you.
She’s just so intoxicating that, on meeting her… when we first did a rehearsal a few days before we started shooting I was like, “Okay, if we can get a fraction of who Carol Kane is in real life into this movie, then we’ll have accomplished something.” It’s something I don’t think I had seen captured, necessarily, in a number of the Carol performances I had seen. So it’s about trying to get some of those elements of who the person is in real life that don’t really get caught normally. The same thing is true with Jason. How can we challenge them as actors––to give them scenes or moments that we don’t think they’ve done before, that we haven’t seen them do, to push them a bit––but also bring in elements of their real-life persona to the characters.
Those are two people who, if you wanted to compile their voices, you have hours and decades of material. I can understand why writing dialogue for them would be easier. And not to let us see you bleed here, but you’re keeping a pretty level head about having worked with this level of talent, and I wonder if there’s an element of being starstruck that they and Robert Smigel are actually reciting your dialogue. It can be a little head-spinning, right?
Of course; I don’t think it’s possible. We get involved in movies––we fall in love with them––at a very early stage. They’re bigger than life; Rushmore looms very large for me. It was the movie that came out when I was in high school and probably single-handedly got me interested in movies. Because of that––because of the number of times I’ve seen that film––Jason looms very large as well. Meeting someone like that, having the privilege of working with him, is daunting. But it’s also super-exciting, and getting a sense of how he works, what his process is, how smart he is about every aspect. He’s such an unbelievably intelligent actor––not only in terms of what he does, but what he asks. His script notes are some of the best script notes I’ve ever gotten from anyone. He is a writer––he’s co-written some of Wes’ films––but he’s a better writer than most full-time writers are in terms of what he’s honing in on, what he’s asking about. Carol is someone I’ve been watching my entire life. I owe so much of my sense of humor to watching Conan in the ‘90s, staying up late, and a lot of that was written by Robert!
Getting a chance to work with these people is a true honor, but you hopefully want to give them an experience they haven’t quite done before. Like, some sort of… again, it’s a meeting point in the middle of, “All right, you’ve maybe made movies in this register before, in this process.” Robert, obviously, is such a titan in the comedy world. “Come do our indie film and work they way that we work.” Because I think what his strengths are as an improviser, as a comedian, can lend themselves to a dramatic sequence, but he hasn’t really had the opportunity to flex those muscles in that form. So the Shabbat scene and the dinner, and you have Robert, who’s so amazing at reacting to people live when he’s Triumph, when he’s doing a dog puppet, but then have him on-camera reacting to people in the same way––you’re going to get that same level of energy and wit that comes through, but in totally different circumstances. So that’s kind of what I love: taking people, hopefully, outside their comfort zone a bit. Nathan loves the set of opposing energies and forces and what can result from it.
From what I understand, Carla is based on Nathan’s mother. Which suggests Temples––at least the initial idea––came more from him. But I’m happy to hear about the creative splits between you both––who contributed what, what proposals were disagreed-upon and how you go about those conversations––and be proven wrong.
So yes: the idea of a woman getting a later-in-life Bat Mitzvah came from Nathan, but I do think the tone is something that we developed together. And the approach… something that we wanted to try was “screwball at the speed of everyday life.” This felt like a good opportunity to do that. Both Nathan and I like love stories onscreen very much, but I’d long been interested in trying to do one that kind of fell in-between the cracks––that wasn’t a straight romance or a straight friendship or a straight, you know, mentor-protégé kind of relationship. That was sort of indefinable and undefinable. It’s the theme of religion that gave us this opportunity to explore that, because religion is all about those types of ambiguities.
I would also just add that Nathan’s process, as I’ve talked about, is so collaborative––so sometimes ideas for different things in the movie will come from different collaborators. A couple of casting choices were things that I came up with or pushed for. When we were thinking about the rabbi character, Robert Smigel came up––both because I was raised on ‘90s Conan and remember watching The Dana Carvey Show when it was on and Smigel’s a hero in many ways. But I also really liked his low-key performances in Punch-Drunk Love and in Marriage Story, so l wanted to give him a little more room. And I knew that he would be a great improviser––what he does with Triumph––so being able to bring the energy onto the set was really important and watching how he could intermingle with a Carol or a Jason was really, really exciting.
And casting Matt Sheer in the Nat role was an idea I had because I had met Matt before––he’s in Mistress America, where he plays kind of a loosely fictionalized version of me in college. We had met at a party once and so l immediately thought, “Okay, he has, kind of, that right energy.” But that’s for Nathan’s process, where different ideas come from different places. Like, Sean had ideas for some of the music in Thirst Street and, you know, I wrote in “Wish I Was a Single Girl Again” into Temples. So different ideas come from different places, and Nathan’s very receptive to great ideas coming from any source or any kind of collaborator on the movie. Which I think is very rare; it’s a very open process.
As an active cinephile, can you identify how your relationship with films has changed after writing scripts? Once you’ve done it, you can’t not notice how almost every line of dialogue is exposition that maybe, at best, can be clever; same with character-building or plot construction. I wonder how your habits, tastes, etc. have changed over time.
I think you have a greater appreciation for when it’s done well [Laughs] than maybe you did before. And I think you’ve probably encountered this as well, too. You also detect the formulas––you know when things are happening in certain movies––and how to fuck with them. Nathan and I have actually been watching a lot of Grémillon stuff recently. Something we found interesting… because we talk a lot about structure. The structure of those films, oftentimes what would conventionally be the end of act one in a lot of movies happens about 40 minutes into the Grémillon films. It’s not right, and that destabilizing feeling still hits, like, 90 years later watching those films. But he knows what he’s doing. The story is supposed to turn at this moment; he’s not actually having a turn then. You get a sense of wondering, “Where are you going?” It’s wandering, and then it all of a sudden clicks into place and it becomes even more satisfying as a result.
I watch a lot of movies for pleasure, still, and I watch a lot of movies for research as well. And that’s not to say the movies I watch for research can’t be pleasurable, that the things I watch strictly for pleasure can’t give me inspiration and ideas. I actually think that it comes from unlikely sources all the time. I probably do my best thinking about movies when I’m watching other films in the theater. I’m someone who takes a lot of notes during movies, but not notes about the movie I’m watching, necessarily. It tends to provoke something else in me. There’s something about that meditative state of sitting in a cinema for a set amount of time with the lights down that actually is very fruitful for me, for creative process. That’s one of the reasons I like going to see movies: not just for the films themselves, but for the inspiration it provides for other things I’m working on.
But yeah. The writing process for Nathan and I is: we do watch a lot. I think there’s a lot of study involved for actors we like and possibly we want to work with; for stories, what’s been done before. It also makes it fun. Writing is total hell, and so you get to do it with a person that is a friend of yours and you get to watch movies while you’re doing it. As silly as they may be sometimes, it becomes a new kind of experience––a new way to watch them.
There are certain things that’ll be cited as influences––the fact that the poster references Minnie and Moskowitz, for one. Or Philip Roth. Or Joan Micklin Silver. But what are some secret inspirations nobody’s picked out?
Yeah, there are a lot of references in the movie to many things. It surprised me that it took a while for someone… I went to several Q&As before someone even mentioned that the lead’s name is Benjamin [Laughs] which is literally the name of the protagonist in The Graduate and no one had caught on that for a while. So there are lots of purposeful references to other films, to Philip Roth. There’s a bunch of things that are in the movie––authors that we care about. Something that I find inspiring is actually film criticism and reading about a movie and maybe what that phrase says. Even if you don’t necessarily think that that’s what the movie is that’s being described, trying to conjure what that movie is and feels like.
There is Dave Kehr, his capsule of Intimate Lighting, the Ivan Passer film. Which is a movie I love very much, but he calls it “a genuinely melancholic comedy,” or I think he uses the term “a gray comedy.” And that phrase was something that rattled around my head a lot as we were making this film. Spiritually, a lot of what we were trying to capture, there was some affinity with the Czech New Wave work. But it was almost that bit of writing about one of the films––not even Intimate Lighting itself, but a piece of criticism about it. “Okay, what is that? What does it feel like? Can we make something that has that tone and energy to it?” I would say that’s probably a secret influence. Because it’s not explicit in the way that a name of a character or the construction of a scene is reminiscent of something else; it’s not a direct homage. But it’s spiritually trying to get at something similar.
Do you think you succeeded?
I hope so. I think that’s for other people to say. I think the way that Nathan works allows the movies to have a very particular, peculiar energy to them that are unique to him. And I love that. I love knowing that, even on the page, something––whether it’s a plot turn or even a line of dialogue––can maybe register as conventional and it won’t come out that way in the final mix of the film. Which… that tension is very important to me, I think. Probably why I wouldn’t just want to write screenplays for anyone. I like writing for Nathan in particular. But also knowing that you can almost give someone a cliché and it’s going to be perverted.
There’s an excitement there that feels closer, to me, to a lot of music that Nathan and I really like than movies. We’re big fans of Dead Moon, for example, and that’s another thing that feels like an influence on the movie––those songs are so beautiful, melodically, and they’re recorded like shit. The singing and the playing are off. All of those things. Yet the light pokes through the song every time. I love that idea of having a sound dramatic structure of a movie and then the pleasure can come through in the playing, in the mistakes, in these other things that can come out through it. And also that push-pull battle of other creative forces, too.
The thing I was thinking about recently was Death of Ladies’ Man, the Leonard Cohen record. Leonard Cohen lyrics, Leonard Cohen singing, and you have the Phil Spector production on top of it. That, as an album, is a boxing match between two creative forces. I don’t think it’s many people’s favorite Leonard Cohen record––it might be mine––but it is for those very reasons that these two things shouldn’t necessarily… there isn’t a harmony there. They shouldn’t go together. But what it produces is maybe something far more interesting than maybe either could have made, I think, individually.
Nathan really welcomes that tension on-set––discord, in a way. Having those different elements. And that comes through every stage of the production from the writing––us fighting about the writing––to Nathan and Sean fighting about the shooting to Nathan and John fighting about the editing. He wants to be working with people who have similar sensibilities, to a degree, and a frame of reference that we share. We’re all people who make movies in different ways and come at them from different directions and love cinema, but have different strengths and talents and whatever, and then what happens when you have those different people involved at different stages of the movie and how it keeps getting remade, rethought, reconfigured.
And also my knowing what Sean… it’s a trust thing as well. It’s like: I have a lot of trust about what our actors can do with certain lines. I have a trust in Sean that a scene can feel a certain way with how it’s shot. I have a trust in John with how it can be cut together, ultimately. The way we did the climactic scene of the movie is: we wrote multiple versions of the scene and we shot multiple versions of the scene because Nathan wanted everyone to be very confused, and they were. It’s great because, when you have four different versions of the scene, in order to create a sense of chaos and confusion, you need someone like John––you can cut four different versions of the scene together and create something that is harmonious that’s in the same time and place, but it has different rhythms and energies to it. It feels almost like solos that you’re giving in a live performance––again, for music.
Ultimately we want the movies to feel like live records and not studio ones. Some of the playing might be off; the lyrics might get changed mid-song. It’s not the perfect version of the thing, but maybe it’s the more interesting and alive version of the thing.
Between the Temples is now in limited release.