With an upcoming weeklong theatrical run in Brooklyn, Bell returns to Split Tooth with co-director Mitch Blummer to discuss their latest film
Christopher Jason Bell has amassed a quietly impressive filmography of shorts and features over the last 15 years. Across these films, his greatest strength as a director is not just seeing characters on the margins with empathetic eyes, his critical attitude to key moments in American history, or his ability to turn a self-reflexive gaze to the filmmaking tools at his disposal; his great asset as a filmmaker is the instinctual synthesis of all these abilities.
Bell’s new feature, Failed State, co-directed with Mitch Blummer (director of photography of the 2020 short film Trammel) is a new high point in this great synthesis. With Bell’s frequent collaborator Dale Smith returning in the lead role, Failed State follows Smith’s everyday experiences as a courier as he darts around New York City at the whims of his clients. Throughout the film we witness Dale’s gradual physical decline even as his personality remains buoyant. But this isn’t a portrait of inspirational resilience; Bell and Blummer’s perspective remains attuned to the indignities of a society based on austerity and lack, one that demands so many to make choices between necessities. Not ones to offer their audience just a single framework of understanding, Bell and Blummer eventually turn the camera on us, implicating our participation in Dale’s life as positioned somewhere within society’s exploitation.
Failed State is screening for one week at Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, New York, from September 13-19. The Friday showing on September 13 will be hosted by Split Tooth’s associate film editor, Bennett Glace. In anticipation of the Spectacle theatrical run, we sat down with Bell and Blummer to talk about Failed State, their filmmaking methods, the secret behind getting the best out of Dale Smith’s performances, and what’s missing from most movies these days.
Split Tooth Media: Can you walk me through how the two of you met and started working together?
Christopher Jason Bell: We have a mutual friend, filmmaker David Lombroso, who had started a screening series in Brooklyn. I had made a short film and that was one of the first films that he played there. I ended up programming in that series for a year and a half or two years, and through all that I met Mitch. I knew Mitch was a filmmaker and a DP and that David was shooting a film. He told me that Mitch had shot it, and it looked really good. So, I had an idea for a short film, based upon Dale who’s in Failed State. I spoke to Mitch about it, and we did it. Did that lose any flavor, Mitch? What would you say?
Mitch Blummer: I think that covers it.
Chris, you’ve worked a few times with Dale Smith as a lead actor. How was this collaboration born?
Bell: I met Dale because I was in an Arrested Development MySpace group, and the moderator was like, ‘Hey, if anybody’s in New York, I’m working on a student film and we need people.’ He needed extras, essentially. And I was in film school, so I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll just go and be on someone else’s set.’ So I took a friend, and we were extras, and that’s where I met Dale. Dale was an extra. He just did that for fun. And it’s Dale, so you have to talk to him. He’s going to talk to you. He was very amusing to us. And then, a year later, I had worked on another film — my professor was the DP, so he brought us on — and I saw Dale again. And then I did an AC gig on a music video a few months or a year later, for Josephine Decker. And Dale was there. I kept seeing him, so eventually I got in contact with him. He’s an interesting guy, you know, and we got Dale on board for a film I was producing for a friend, Wake Me When I Leave (Tyler Rubenfeld, 2015).
I just always thought that he would be really great in something. He was very much a real life character, one of those guys you don’t see movies made about. And I had already been working with guys like him, non-professional actors, but it was usually quieter things, and Dale’s not quiet. So it took me a long time to figure out how we could do something together that would allow Dale to utilize his particular skill set. The short films stand on their own and I’m proud of them, but there were a lot of false starts to scripts where they just weren’t letting him be himself.
What’s a typical Dale icebreaker? How does he start a conversation with a stranger?
Blummer: He’s got laser-beam eyes, man. He’ll just start looking at somebody and he attracts them into his sphere. And maybe somebody notices him looking at them, because he’s not the kind of person who’s — I mean, he takes the train all day — he’s not the guy who’s looking at his phone, ever, unless he’s trying to figure out the directions to his next delivery. He’s looking for those interactions. And he’ll say anything, too. The amount of times that he got into completely unprovoked conversations with people on the street is pretty profound, actually. He’ll just talk to you, especially in a situation where there’s a lot of waiting around.
But like Chris was just saying, the success of both Trammel and Failed State, the way that Chris composed a lot of these scenes, is that we were just allowing Dale to be himself in the space, and then also have cameras on him. It wasn’t so much that we were constructing a narrative context with specific things we wanted him to do. He’s much better when you just let him be himself.
There is a mix of deliberately planned scenes in Failed State, though. I’m thinking of one with a character named Mohammad (Mohammad Dagman) — who people might recognize from your other films, Chris — and scenes that look and feel much more spontaneous, like a guy on the bus who can’t seem to grasp the fact that Dale isn’t homeless, for some reason. Can you talk about modulating these scenes or how you went about making them each feel like they belonged together?
Bell: There’s a bunch of different ways to do it. Trammel was very good for this because for that I would give Dale topics and say something like, ‘OK, this is a film about you and your friendship with this service worker, so all I really need is this conversation.’ I know Dale is a guy who can talk, and he’ll have really interesting things to say. So, ‘Dale, talk about mustard.’ And he’ll scoff, but then he’ll talk about mustard. He’ll have a story about it. And I’m a silly person, so it’s very easy for me to come up with stupid ideas like that, which I know I’m gonna be able to get material from. And I’ve done it more seriously where I need authentic conversation and I know what type of conversation it needs to be. And then you talk about the topics and we figure out which ones are the strongest for the scene.
These deliveries Dale makes in the film, that’s his real job, so we knew that we were going to shoot and just follow him around with the camera. So that’s pure documentary. And then maybe Mitch will tell him to do something that looks cool, like, ‘Oh, walk by that.’ But that guy on the bus saw that we were shooting and was just like, ‘What are you doing, what’s going on?’ And Dale told him, and now he’s in the film, you know?
These are more of the micro storytelling aspects of the film, but then there’s more macro storytelling, which deals with the arc we wanted to build. So questions of how Dale should be acting at a certain point in the story, like when he should be walking slower, that kind of thing. And that’s all heavily constructed, obviously; it’s in writing. And then it’s in post where we have to be like, ‘OK, now we have too many silly things, and we need to start getting serious.’ So it’s always a weird mix, but it’s a lot of fun to kind of come up with stuff like that. You’re always having to think on your feet.
Blummer: In terms of days of shooting, to break it down really simply, it was like 60-40 of going in with something specific or with other actors coming in to work a scene with him, and 40 percent was just Dale working that day, following him around with the camera. We would prompt him a little bit. But there were days where it was true documentary, and I’m shooting through the subway door or even distancing ourselves from affecting the scene even more — just letting him be himself without thinking about what we’re shooting. I think that some of the best shots, in the verite style, were the ones that I’m on the longer lens, standing further back and observing him in a more naturalistic way.
And there’s times when he’s doing a delivery and we could tell he’s rushed. He’s getting mad at us because we’re slowing him up when he’s gotta go make a delivery. So it’s a little bit of a push-pull there. But even the scenes that are constructed are very much based in his everyday truth. The park we see him hanging out in throughout the film is actually his base camp where he goes between deliveries. So we would use these kernels of truth to build out stories and characters.
Chris, what interests you in playing with the distinctions between fiction and documentary, particularly in how it pertains to the way you have to make your films?
Bell: I figured out early on that I wasn’t going to have resources to make films like everyone else. I was in school when mumblecore was popping off and then there was a Brooklyn version of mumblecore, which was a little bit closer to what I wanted to do, at least at the time. People like Aaron Katz — not to diss the movement — the way they were composing shots, they wanted it to look good. That’s being very glib about describing the movement. But, I looked to the Iranian new wave directors like Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, the Dardennes brothers were really big for me in college, and Michael Haneke, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the Turkish director. Thinking about it, you could make a version of those kinds of movies with very little. The Iranians, and Ceylan especially, were working with non-professional actors and utilizing their skills. So I thought, I can make the kind of film I want to make and make it feel the way I want to feel, and I don’t have to do the Duplass brothers, Joe Swanberg kind of thing.
I still don’t have any resources and I tend to enjoy things that feel like they have life leaking in. I remember when I was a critic for a time I was watching stuff at the New York Film Festival, and I saw an older movie by Christian Petzold. I liked it a lot, but I was like, ‘Ah, man, I wish he, like, knocked over the camera,’ or something. It was feeling too rigid for me. I wanted to see a mistake or whatever. How do you make it so that it feels alive and unpredictable? And how do you make that be a part of the film? And it’s funny because you say I do it all the time, and I think in my head I don’t do it all the time.
Blummer: I think it comes down to casting. It is a little bit of improv, but you’re also finding people who suit the kind of archetypes that you’re looking for, rather than taking a traditionally trained actor and telling them to do exactly what you want them to do. Find somebody who’s already interesting to you and have them do their thing. Chris has a lot of references for the kinds of classical filmmakers that have experimented with this, but there’s also quite a few filmmakers who are doing this in a commercial way, like Sean Baker. He’s casting people off Instagram, casting people on the street. And he’s finding a lot of people who you wouldn’t otherwise have in a film like this and getting raw performances out of them that you would think are more constructed.
How are you responding when you see what you call these ‘mistakes’ in a film, or when you wish there had been some kind of mistake?
Bell: I’m not sure I can say this across the board because I still really love very formalist filmmakers like Tarkovsky…
Blummer: Chris loves Tarkovsky.
Bell: He’s still my guy, but there’s something that’s hard to put into words. Tarkovsky’s got it, and I’m not saying Petzold doesn’t have it. But it’s just a feeling I had. If I could broaden it, a lot of things I don’t like in modern cinema comes down to the stifling of the soul, of things that are inexplicable or just weird. I’m trying to find that weirdness outside of the rules of how to shoot a scene, how to direct a scene, how to construct a scene, and how to write a scene. There’s pleasure in that kind of formula, for sure, but I’m more interested in playing with the form and hopefully unlocking a new way to tell it.
In Incorrectional (2018) I wanted to tell the story about a father and son who have what seems like irreconcilable differences and they have to get over it and come back together. And the way I can see that is by breaking the form so the audience feels this crazy blowout fight through the form of the movie, which is now turning into a documentary following the actors. How do you make these feelings feel new when they’ve been done over and over and over? Especially now in the last 10 or 15 years, my whole life, even, it does feel like film and TV is so cheap. And I do consume a lot of it, but it’s also impossible not to consume. I want to find these new avenues to do something different. I want life to keep poking through.
Related: Read Bennett Glace’s 2023 interview with Bell
I was thinking about something that James Kienitz Wilkins told me when I programmed his film The Plagiarists early last year. He said that they conceived of the film with their own limitations, financially at least, baked into it, meaning they didn’t write anything that they knew they couldn’t achieve. What’s your response to something like this?
Bell: I know no other way. But I also don’t mind; I always have something ready to go if an opportunity presents itself in the form of some company or actor that could make it possible. Having more resources would be fun and cool, but it’s something I do because I find some fulfillment in the expression of cinema. The important thing is to do it. And the fun part is coming up with ideas with everybody, having a set that is not grueling and annoying, and you’re not exploiting people or damaging them. These things do end up taking longer than I think is normal, but I mean, it takes a long time anyway. A lot of times when I see bigger movies of late, they feel really small. And I find that really sad. Because it’s like, where’s the money going? Why are these movies tiny, and not in a good way?
Blummer: Like they’re trying to hide how tiny it actually is, right?
Bell: Yeah, they feel really small in scope. There’s something about a film like Wonka where so many times I asked myself, ‘Where is everybody?’
Blummer: But that’s the beauty of our approach with Failed State. You can’t help but feel the immensity of the entire city. We’re out in the streets and it’s chaos, and buildings are boarded up and with the backdrop of Covid when we started filming. You have an inherent sense of place, scope, and atmosphere when you are just filming in the streets, in reality, in the subway. I think that gives us a different kind of production value. And there’s something to be said for the philosophy of ‘everything in the frame is a choice. But if your choice is to be in the alive and vibrant world that is the sidewalks of downtown Manhattan where Dale lives his life, then to embrace anything and everything is the choice.
It’s being able to make use of the scope already there rather than creating it outright.
Blummer: Another thing I will say about working at this scale and working with our resources is that the technology in the last like five to 10 years has helped immensely. New camera and lighting tech has enabled us to do a lot more with a lot less, which helped when we shot the ending scenes. It was the one time we had a lighting team because there were lighting cues and colored lights and some more stylized camera movements. We’re still small and scrappy, you know, it’s really just a handful of people, but what we’re able to do with a handful of people might have required a much larger production footprint, even 10 or 15 years ago. So, I think being aware of the tools that are out there and staying in touch with that, for me, has brought a lot of value to a lot of projects.
Is that something you were able to get experience using on your commercial work?
Blummer: For sure, yeah. And I’m a bit of a gear nerd to begin with, but that’s really where I get to test stuff out, where I can actually have a little bit of a budget, and then take from that what was the quickest and easiest things and apply them into a more fast-paced, lightweight narrative production footprint, which can be great. Frankly, it ends up looking better than this commercial crap.
It’s like what Chris is saying. It’s not about being perfect and pristine all the time. Some of my favorite shots in the film are the ones where the polish really is taken off. And in the edit Chris finds those moments really well, the balance between the scrappy and the intentional. That’s another thing going back to the documentary versus reality thing. This could be a five-hour film and it wouldn’t even be a fraction of what we’ve got. I mean, I’m not saying it should be a five-hour film, but I think that’s how we found so much good stuff. And it’s how we found the ending. Those were definitely the necessary steps that we had to take to get there.
That’s a good segue into talking about what I assume is the most constructed part of the film, which is the ending. Dale’s found himself in a pretty awful situation where he’s injured and can’t work or pay for healthcare, and the ending draws out this all-too-familiar scenario in pretty grim ways. What were some of the ideas you bounced off each other about what this ending could be, and how did you establish a mood that felt most appropriate?
Bell: I don’t know. I mean, I know we had pretty brutal endings that we had to keep dialing back.
Blummer: I remember I was trying to push you towards a more conflicted and intense ending, and then, yeah, you wanted to dial it back. I think we both agreed that it needed, to some extent, to reflect the title of the film, so kind of a sense of failure that’s going to alter Dale’s life and what he’s able to do physically. As far as finding the balance on that, we did talk about it quite a bit. I know at one point I was pushing for a shot of him being stepped on on the sidewalk, which…
Bell: It’s so funny, because I remember thinking that’s too much. And I was thinking about that the other day, like, ‘Hold on, I fucking wrote that.’ I wrote scenes that were pretty much exactly the same as Mitch’s idea and thinking they were too much. I don’t know if I told you that. But it’s interesting that both our minds went there at different points.
Blummer: We went to, like, the darkest place, but it can’t be that though. I actually see some hope in this ending. He’s not dead, and he’s got somebody to help him. And this sounds so dramatic, because it’s not that, but in a way it needed to be something that was alarming enough, that shows that our society is not doing enough for people like Dale. And you would think that after what we’ve gone through over the last few years that there would be a way to take care of somebody like Dale, but I’m not convinced he would be taken care of if something did happen to him, whether it’s a mental or physical break.
Bell: I don’t know if it’s a hopeful ending, but there’s some sort of feeling of kindness and care, and some sort of peace. We didn’t necessarily want to make it super, super bleak, but we really didn’t know what else to do.
Blummer: Yeah.
Bell: Especially during that time. Like, nothing felt right. And we didn’t want to be fake about it and purposely give it a happy ending. But my gut instinct is to always be bleak, you know, it’s having the Haneke in my bones. But it was Covid, and it was sad and scary, and we’re making this film, and you’re thinking about what people do for work and how they’re not taken care of, compensated, how they’re exploited. So at some point I don’t know how to not think bad things. So that was basically it. We knew it had to be a little sad, it was kind of unavoidable. But I think we found an interesting and subtle way to pull back and show that there is care and kindness in the world. Relationships are important, community is important.
Watch the short film Boundaries (Christopher Jason Bell, 2022) starring Frank Mosley below:
Part of why I found Failed State so interesting is that there is some kind of broader applicability to the challenges of doing what fulfills you. In the past few years so many of the most interesting films outside the traditional commercial context in America reflect these anxieties about facing the obstacles to doing what makes you happy, and oftentimes they originate in capitalism. I guess I risk implying the horrible cliche that this is a film about filmmaking, but I do wonder if this crosses your mind as it pertains to your own filmmaking.
Blummer: Given the time when we were making Failed State, it was kind of my medicine. It was giving me a lot of purpose at a time when I felt kind of purposeless, not only in myself but in the world. You know, there is an element of filmmaking as a way for us to control our own reality, even if it’s just for a short period of time. One of the reasons I love movies so much is that you can step out of yourself and experience someone else’s pain for, you know, however long that lasts. But as a filmmaker it is a way of exerting a certain amount of control on your environment and on the story that you want to tell, even when it is a naturalistic and somewhat documentary story that comes from truth and comes from reality. Going back to when I was 12 years old and making videos with my friends, what attracted me to the camera and editing was manipulating time itself, doing slow motion, and having one 10-second moment be able to last forever. So that’s kind of my therapy. That’s what I’ve always been attracted to in the moving image.
Bell: I kind of try not to take that too seriously. On the one hand, I love movies. But on the other hand, I hate them, and I hate that I feel the need to express myself through movies. But I try to also keep in mind that the things I care about are people. Ultimately, I don’t really care about the movies or filmmaking in the same way that I care about people being able to work together and take control of their lives and the places they live, and have food and shelter. So I kind of hesitate whenever we talk about cinema so seriously. And it’s like, ‘Oh, man, it sucks as an indie filmmaker,’ and it does, but I don’t have to do it. Nobody has to do it. The idea of what we’re making the film about is more important than the film.
Failed State is screening for one week at Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, New York, Sept. 13-19. Get tickets here.
