A different kind of city symphony,Weeknights finds the real rhythm of city life being composed in the dark hours of the night

Alfred Giancarli’s Weeknights is as simple as they come. Handsomely composed shots of lonely buildings, skylines, and human faces are stitched together to tell the nearly wordless story of Julian’s (Julian Velez) night of work as a security guard at a local medical school in the Bronx. During his shift he wanders the campus, sits idly behind his desk, and visits a local bodega to get coffee. Along with two other characters, bodega worker Marat (Marat Shad), and Uber driver Huston (Huston Pigford), Julian bears the weight of his work and his isolation with dignity — not imposed by the camera or Giancarli himself, but emanating wholly from within.

The result of all this is a different kind of city symphony. Rather than through hustle and bustle, Weeknights poses the idea that the real rhythm of a city is composed in the small, dark hours of the night, by the unheralded labor of workers that usually goes unnoticed. It’s a film about the small tolls of work, and the infrequent moments of communion that break up long stretches of isolation.

Ahead of a weeklong theatrical engagement at Williamsburg’s Spectacle Theater, of whose programming collective he is a member, I caught up with Giancarli to talk about his inspirations, playing with sound, and the pleasures of cinematic discovery.

Chris Cassingham, Split Tooth Media: Can you tell me a little bit about why you wanted to make Weeknights?

Alfred Giancarli: I started with the campus, with that central location. It’s a place I knew really well, and I live close to it; my cousin, who I go to the movies with every week, lives very close to it, too, and that’s where I would drop him off. So movies were kind of on my mind whenever I was there. It struck me as really beautiful and very peaceful for such an empty and quiet place in the middle of the Bronx. Sometimes I would go during the day, which is when it’s really busy. You have a lot of cars, buses, and pedestrians, and you have lots of students because it’s an active medical school, and you have the hospital that’s around the block. Whenever I walked around at night I’d begin to imagine shots and imagine the lives of the one or two people that I would see working there.

Eventually I began to talk to the people who worked at the campus, who were very friendly and open. In the early stages of making this film I tried to do it with the med school’s permission. One of the security guards who I was talking to gave me a person to contact, but I got nowhere even after sending them a bunch of materials, including a pitch deck. Eventually I got this response that, to this day, still annoys me. It was some ChatGPT generated response along the lines of, ‘We were unable to accommodate your request at this time,’ and I remember being so annoyed that that was the only thing they could say to me. They couldn’t even reject me like a human being.

We decided that the location was still so great and that we would just steal as much as we could, so that’s what we ended up doing. We had a very small crew, and most of it was with one actor, and we also filmed on Labor Day weekend so the already quiet location was even quieter and even more desolate, which was great for the film.

What drew you to the other places in and around that campus that we visit, specifically the lead character, Julian’s, neighborhood?

I also have a very personal connection to that because it’s my neighborhood where I live in the Bronx. The church where we shot the opening scene is my church, still a block and a half away from that highway overpass we see a few moments later. I’ve stood on that overpass and watched the traffic flow my entire life. So I’m very familiar with a lot of the stuff in the neighborhood. The final two shots of the film are in my apartment. My cousin, who’s my movie buddy, said that Weeknights was a tribute to its Bronx location, which I thought was great because it’s not necessarily a conventional tribute. But maybe it could be read as this quiet tribute to my home borough, and hopefully to the working people of my home borough.

Tell me about meeting and working with the three actors Julian Velez, Marat Shad, and Huston Pigford. Was there a traditional casting process?

Julian, who plays the security guard, is a good friend. He’s a non-professional actor, but we met playing Magic the Gathering, I think in 2014. I just thought he would be good for it. I wanted to find people who really felt like the working dudes that were really stuck there, working the overnight shift, and were cool about it.

Huston was the easiest one to find after Julian, and was also an absolute delight to work with. He plays the Uber driver and the facilitator of the meeting in the first scene of the film. I met Huston on a friend’s short film. We got along great and I really liked him as an actor, so I thought he’d be good for this type of father figure role, someone older who’s giving something back to others. He’s active in that sense, but also, like everyone else, feeling the crunch of life. I imagine that character has a day job before he shows up to lead the AA meeting, or however you interpret it, and then he’s driving an Uber overnight to make ends meet.

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And then for the younger character, I imagined him to be even younger than Julian. That one was cast in the most traditional sense. I found Marat on backstage.com. I did a lot of that searching while I was the media manager for the Netflix doc Martha, about Martha Stewart. I was stuck in a hotel room just waiting for them to bring me footage, which I would spend hours downloading. So I had all this time while I was waiting to do video auditions. So it was in that week, during that job, that I did most of the casting.

Because there’s not much dialogue in the film, we would just talk about the film. With Julian, for example, we did a version of the scene over Zoom where he’s sitting at his desk and he’s watching something on his phone. I sent him a video of my brother, who used to be a semi-professional Salsa and Bachata dancer, during one of his dance competitions, and just had him watch it and see how he reacted. I think we had him watch the same video in the actual movie.

I really loved Julian’s presence in the film, which feels very warm. And because there’s very little dialogue, as you’ve mentioned, he has to embody all of that in a very literal sense. How do you convey that challenge to a non-professional actor?

Julian actually got into it very quickly, particularly the very slow pace of the whole film. I feel like this is a very blunt method, and I didn’t do it in any sadistic sense, but the fact that we were actually recording overnight, and there were long hours in the middle of the night after he was working his normal job, I think he was really exhausted. I recently asked him to come back and do one night on a new film I’m working on right now, and he told me he’s not working overnights anymore. It was something that I noticed with the other actors over the course of making Weeknights, too. But the more we did it, the more we got into a rhythm that slowed things down in a way that didn’t feel forced, it felt natural to the type of movie that we were making. And because of this whole process, by the end of the shoot those scenes had some of my favorite performances.

Who are some filmmakers whose work has inspired you and the making of Weeknights?

I really got into Tsai Ming-liang in the early stages of the pandemic. My cousin and I started watching his films together, and then I would watch them at home alone. At that time in my life I was going through a pretty intense depressive episode, just feeling the isolation of the pandemic. But watching those movies at home really hit me hard, both in what I was feeling for his characters, but also in the formal possibilities they opened up. They made me think about how I could use duration, off-screen space, how I could withhold certain details from the audience. It seemed to come together while watching these movies. And, thematically, they were really interesting. Whether you watch his movies in order or come back to earlier ones after starting late, you see his relationship with his muse, Lee Kang-sheng, really evolve. You feel his age, and how his neck injury that he can’t seem to overcome in Days harkens back to an earlier film. In Stray Dogs he’s living on the street and being so brutally ground down. I remember watching those scenes where he’s under an overpass, holding up signs like he’s a human billboard. The camera is unflinching, watching the wind whip his face and the rain come down. I think I’ll always look back at his films and say, ‘oh, I want to get to that point.’

Another big inspiration are the three films that Gus Van Sant made that are sometimes grouped together and called his Death Trilogy: Elephant, Gerry, and Last Days. I had seen these films when I was much younger, but there was something about revisiting them and paying special attention to the formal elements, especially the use of duration, non-professional actors, and the mix sometimes of professional and non-professional actors, and thinking, ‘Oh, this is him.’ Even now, they feel so daring and provocative because they took these stories, like Columbine and the death of Kurt Cobain, these things which had been treated in a tabloid way in the culture, and by using these arthouse elements, these distancing devices, created this poetic approach of looking at them. They confer a type of humanity and dignity, and a radical empathy.

I’m glad you mentioned Tsai Ming-liang, because there’s a long scene at the bodega between Julian and Marat which reminded me of Days, which sees the unexpected convergence of the two characters. The scene in Weeknights isn’t sexually charged like the one in Days, but there is a kind of unspoken history that they build up in seven minute chunks every night when Julian goes to get his coffee.

I wanted to play with the idea of these two people who can just share silence. There’s an incredible shot at the end of Stray Dogs, which seems to go on forever — there’s something like three different train passes in the background. But it’s these two people, not even looking at each other, and he holds the two-shot forever.

Julian’s got nowhere else to go. That’s kind of what I was thinking about in the world of the story. He’s got one break where he can go to the bodega, and neither one of them really has anything to say or anything to talk about, but he can just be himself there and drink his coffee in peace for five minutes.

To what extent did the theme of loneliness come from your experience visiting this medical school campus? Is there something closer to yourself that provided the seed for this exploration?

There are two periods I was really drawing from. The first was the early part of the pandemic, which was really rough. There were lots of lonely evenings in this very apartment where I would be pacing, and I didn’t know why I was pacing. It was almost like this physical force, this weight that I was carrying, and everything just felt so heavy. It’s like stepping outside of yourself, to where you can almost see a wide shot, not from my point of view, but like if a camera was set up in the corner of the room.

The other period came before that, and I already mentioned it a little, when I was working as a media manager. Another project I did was the show Couples Therapy, which is on Showtime. For Season One there were six cameras, and for Season Two there were eight cameras, positioned all around the therapist’s office where they would shoot these long therapy sessions, sometimes for an hour or an hour-and-15 minutes. So they were covered by six cameras, and we would do three of them each day, which meant there was a ton of footage that I was responsible for downloading very late at night and into the early morning hours. All alone. And that was my overnight job. You can try to be like Julian in the movie and keep yourself occupied watching things on your phone, or read a book, or listen to a podcast, but something about being in that space all alone really got to me. I was definitely drawing on that experience.

I was really intrigued by the sound design. There’s a lot of natural, ambient noise, but you take some liberties at a few points — I’m thinking of a shot where Julian is sitting alone on a bench at the medical school and all the noise fades away. I’m curious about the choices you made around that.

We definitely went for naturalism. I really like to give myself and my collaborators rules to follow strictly, but also find the right place or places to break them. We felt there should be no music in the film; everything should be diegetic and natural. We really just wanted ambient soundscapes. But then there were a couple places we diverted. One of them was the one you mentioned, where the sound of the bells drops out and Julian sits on a bench in the middle of campus in complete silence. We had this unique opportunity to do something with the sound that made us feel close to this distant character and reflect on the emptiness around him. The other place in the film was during a sequence of shots of a crosswalk in front of a building on campus. We extended the beeping of the crossing signal longer than it naturally goes so it unified all the different angles we shot.

You’re a part of the programming collective at Spectacle Theater. What’s that experience been like for you, and how has it shaped your cinema-going life in New York?

It’s immensely gratifying. What’s so cool about Spectacle is that we have this reputation as the movie theater that plays stuff that no one’s ever heard of. And when you start programming there, part of you wants to impress people with special knowledge about a film or filmmaker that you think people should have heard of, or find some value that other people have overlooked. And then when you have a whole group of programmers that are all trying to come up with the thing that no one’s ever heard of, you get all of these hidden gems and overlooked masterpieces. I’ve been exposed to so much amazing stuff through the collective.

And because I’m involved in the collective, I was able to test the sound mix and color grade at the theater when we were in post-production. I would play it at Spectacle when no one else was there, late at night, so I know that it looks, and plays, and sounds good in that intimate, 30-seat space.

I think it’s great that you get to have this homecoming for Weeknights, because indirectly it seems like Spectacle is part of the community that helped to get it made.

I probably should have given them more of a thank you, now that I think about it. Maybe I was too literal about who I thanked in the credits and didn’t consider how much Spectacle, even just as a movie goer or a filmmaker, has influenced me. There have been dark times where I’ve just wandered in not really knowing, or barely knowing, what’s playing, and I end up seeing something that blows my mind. It’s just a very comfortable, safe place where I run into friends. It exists as a source of encouragement and hope. It was pretty cool that they wanted to play Weeknights. I’m honored that now I have a film that gets to play there.

Giancarli will be in-attendance during Spectacle’s week-long run of Weeknights from Dec. 16 to Dec. 22. Q&As following each screening. Tickets are available here.

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