A man moves into a mumblecore film.

Director’s Statement

The writer, Sophia Broido, came to me with the idea of a comic short film set in the world of ‘mumblecore’. Given ‘mumblecore’ was more of a movement than a genre we felt able to cherry-pick stylistic choices from across the board, as well as sign-posting the influence of French New Wave. What links the films is naturalistic performances, focus on dialogue over plot, and twentysomething characters navigating their way through adulthood, so we made this the foundation of the short. Everything else is fun icing.

Sophia’s script covered structure, story beats and examples of dialogue, and then dialogue was improvised by the cast, and later forged in the edit. The Director of Photography Andrew Rodger created a style that was the filmic equivalent of having your cake and eating it. We wanted it to look great, whilst aping certain qualities of low-budget filmmaking. We then ignored the rules of the form by having non-diagetic music in the form of one brilliant song by artist Pat Dam Smyth. The Ides of March has this brilliant pensive journey which feels like watching a whole feature film.

Overall, it’s made with love of the genre that wasn’t a genre.