A self-destructive young actress tries to keep her creativity alive after being put under house arrest.

Director’s Statement

Now a Minor Motion Picture came from a feeling I couldn’t shake that I’d blown some chances and set myself back in what I wanted. Silly angst like that can get heavy quickly, so we shot it as a faux-documentary, which made it all the more playful and freed us up throughout the whole process. We shot loose over a weekend with a shot list that changed and scenes we made up along the way. A lot of old worries went away working like that and the cast and crew – up for anything – ensured it was a pleasure.

I was feeding myself with a lot of older documentaries like Grey Gardens that lack any of the ornamentation of more contemporary docos. I like how tactile movies like that feel. We tried to give this some of that flavour. We used long lenses a lot to amp up the sense of things being caught and not staged. Blocking in scenes was mostly pretty fluid. Occasionally I’d try to block things so that the cinematographer and camera operator, Sean, would miss a focus mark or overshoot a movement – but I think he cottoned on.

The key creative team all went through film school together and that familiarity is important, especially on this shoot where we threw out some of the schedule and made stuff up. Everyone trusted each other and it meant we could push our work further. We shot a lot of the best stuff in the film that way. Everyone there is a great creative in their own right, so they came with a real understanding of me as a filmmaker. I got to run wild a little bit.