From his first attempts at feature filmmaking as a teenager, his creative breakthrough with Quietly on By and the “dystopia” of Hohokam, Ross discusses his early years as a filmmaker

Split Tooth Media’s film editor, Brett Wright, has been in correspondence with filmmaker Frank V. Ross since 2016, when he was preparing his Master’s thesis on Ross’ work while studying at Boston University. What follows is the first of a three-part, career-spanning discussion of Ross’ life and filmmaking compiled from three years of emails and phone conversations. Ross’ words offer not only practical insight into modern independent filmmaking, but an unprecedented look into the imagination behind some of the most perceptive films of the past 20 years.

Split Tooth Media: In your first two films [A Story in a Life (1999) and Oh! My Dear Desire (2003)] you can see many things taking shape that would develop in your later films. How old were you when you made A Story in a Life?

Frank V. Ross: Seventeen or 18.

It takes guts to go out and try to make a feature at that age.

There’s a big difference between guts and arrogance. I definitely thought I was the smartest person in the world. I thought that everybody had it wrong and I was going to do it right (laughs).

What were you doing for a living when you made your first films?

What I have always done for a living: waiting tables. My mom was a waitress for most of my life so it seemed really familiar. I was working at Arby’s when we were writing Story in a Life, but a lot of that movie is in a restaurant and no one would let me shoot in a restaurant. So I got a job in a restaurant just to butter it up. I figured they would be more likely to let me shoot there if I worked there. I had jobs at a few other restaurants and I worked at Connie’s Pizza, a popular family-owned place. If you go to a Sox game, you go to Connie’s. Then I worked at Vincitori in Westmont [the principle location for Tiger Tail in Blue] for the longest time, probably about 10 years. I got the job at Vincitori right before leaving for Arizona to shoot Hohokam.

What do you see as the major difference between the first two films you directed and Quietly on By? 

I remember writing down that on A Story in a Life I was a production coordinator and on Oh! My Dear Desire I was a screenwriter. For Quietly on By, I needed to be a director. Dear Desire was such a big undertaking because there wasn’t any money. It was like three movies. Thematically, I tried to have relevance, but I think I was just trying to get a lot out of my system. I remember watching the final cut and realizing the three lead males didn’t have dads. I didn’t do that consciously but decided to stop trying to control everything and let stuff like that fall out. In Quietly on By, it was like: three friends make a tire swing. I built it out from there, and the more interesting story is actually what’s going on with the sister, and she is just in the background of the movie. So I just wanted to try that.

Was there anything that consciously instigated your change in approach?

In Oh! My Dear Desire, there is a party scene earlier on with a group of girls talking that is intercut with a group of guys in a kitchen. There is a moment when the camera grabs one of the girls, just as she sort of looks down to have a private moment, before she joins back into the conversation. It’s literally one second, but I was like, ‘I like that. I want to do that. That look…’ Another character is supposed to be the one who is sort of watching everybody, catching what everybody looks like from her point of view, but it just didn’t play as well as this one girl just sort of looking down in a way. 

In the script for Quietly on By, there is a voiceover for Aaron that didn’t make it into the final film. Did you ever have an alternate cut with the voiceover? 

It never even got recorded. I was always on the fence about it and after we shot the tire swing scene I went and crossed it all out and announced to the gang that it was gone. Quietly was also originally written to take place entirely in the house as an entry for some 48-hour film contest or something like that. It was a bad idea broken down and rearranged.

Towards the end of the film, when Aaron shows up at Sarah’s house to confess his love to her — and after beating himself up on the sidewalk — she sits him down and he looks at a missing persons flyer on her kitchen table. In the film, he reacts to it in a shocked manner but we never get a clear glimpse of who is on the flyer. In the screenplay, you make it clear that Aaron sees the Mystery Man who drives the white SUV on the flyer and that is why he reacts so violently to it. Did you intend for the film to keep this idea of the Mystery Man being on the flyer but present it as something that the audience cannot entirely understand?

It plays exactly the way I wanted it to, that’s what I’ll say. If you look for it, the guy who plays the Mystery Man, who comes out of the woods in the beginning, he is in the film a couple more times.

I noticed him at the train station near the end of the film.

Yeah, and Aaron also walks past him on the sidewalk, and he says, ‘What’s up?’ to him. There is something funny to me, kind of like a wink joke, about having someone not famous do this, because you don’t know who he is, so why would you connect it? Also, the white SUV and the guy are just like the whole outside world. When I made the film, people were talking about gas-guzzlers, and this is right before the Humvees came around, and it was like, this is the world outside of me, made up of strangers and cars. It’s fucked up. I think I told you something there… I like that Aaron sees it and just tosses it right back out. It’s like you don’t care what’s going on in the outside world, you only care about your steaming little pile. There is something else that is huge going on in the background of this movie, and it’s the sister, but it’s this other weird subplot.

Back in 2005, you made comparisons between Quietly on By and Sartre’s Nausea.

Kari [Ross’ wife] was reading Nausea around the time we were getting to know one another, which would have been while I was writing or shooting Dear Desire. If I recall correctly, there are at least two shots or motions I took from the book in one way or another for Quietly on By: Aaron leaning his head against the window, and when he drags his fingers across his skin [while lying in bed]. I guess I was looking at the visuals of Aaron alone as the prose narration of those feelings in something like Nausea. Who knows? Like when he’s on the ladder and looks over at the view, or when he is stretching and it turns into stomping. Or, when he’s at a loss for words at times. Today if you ask me, I might say Quietly on By is All Is Lost (Chandor, 2013) without the boat or water.

How did you assemble the cast for Quietly on By? Did many of the actors have prior acting experience?

For Quietly on By we did auditions. A few of the non-actors were friends that were also in Dear Desire. But here is why I stopped doing auditions: Somebody auditioned for my part, and he did better than me (laughs). And I was like, ‘I’ll go home, and put myself on tape doing the audition,’ and I sucked. And I said, ‘Fuck that guy, I’m doing it anyway.’ I thought, ‘What am I doing? I’m wasting people’s time.’ [Later] he got like a Bud Light commercial so I think he is doing fine. He should have had that part because he did so well in the audition, but nobody could have played that role but me, because that scene on the back porch, that’s just me and Tony improvising. And when Danielle laughs, she laughs because I am making her laugh. 

You have said Chicago actor Kurt Naebig has been an important mentor.

He was the first professional actor that I ever knew and technically the godfather to one of my cousins. I was writing Dear Desire, and I was almost done with it, and I got the script to him. I think he was just impressed that a 19-year-old kid put together something so coherent and big. And he thought it was good so he agreed to do it. I learned a lot. Like, he’s got that scene where he’s masturbating, and I was like, ‘How’s he going to behave?’ And he just showed up, took his pants off and got in the bed. And I realized, ‘You just do it. Got it.’ He’s an acting teacher here in Chicago and he sends his students to my auditions. I give him a script, he gives me names and they come in. Since Hohokam, I’ve just met with them and we bullshit.

Tony Baker, who plays Aaron, has been in all but one of your films. How did you two start working together? 

Tony and I became friends after my dad died. He had an older brother that died so I think we just needed friends. We played in a band together and the movie thing happened slowly. We wrote the script for A Story in a Life together, dropped out of junior college and pulled together some resources.

How did you and the actors prepare for your roles?

Lonnie, Danielle, Tony and I all went out in public in character because I read that Mike Leigh’s casts did that. We figured out how to appear normal in an unnatural situation. Funny story: You know how Lonnie chases Danielle around the house [during the tire swing scene]? Prior to that take Tony made fun of me, mocking something we had done in Story in a Life, and I jokingly threw down my script and chased him around the house. The fun we were having off screen was feeding the energy in the movie. It was great. 

How often does the energy on set alter your ideas about a scene?

I try to let it happen. There is a moment in Dear Desire in which the actors genuinely laugh at each other. And we were like ‘that is beautiful’ but it doesn’t look like the rest of the footage so I can’t use it. It was too genuine of a moment to fit into the movie. I always say that the tone of the scene is fine, let’s keep it this way, but if they do something that makes you laugh, it will kind of look like the rest of the scene. Like, if you and I are sitting and talking, and we are supposed to be arguing, and as a retort to your line I don’t do my line and I fart, and you laugh, keep going. Let’s see what that does. You need to foster accidents. You can’t control everything, so if something pleasant or genuine happens, it better look like it fits in the movie.

One of my favorite details in any of your films is how both the Riley siblings in Quietly on By are named Aaron and Erin. How did this come about?

Oh, God, I think I just thought it would be funny. I know that we had the name Aaron for Tony’s character first, but then Erin Riley was my high school home economics teacher and I thought it would be funny to name the sister Erin. And you only get it that one time, when the mom yells ‘Aaron’ and they both go ‘what?’ That was interesting because, they were like, ‘So this isn’t funny to us, right?’ And I went, ‘No, this isn’t funny at all. It’s just the way it is and you both say, ‘Yes?’ like it’s happened a billion times.’ And Jenny just goes, ‘That’s so cool.’ Like, it’s a good joke, but you don’t get to play the joke. We were all young enough to go, ‘Look what we’re going to do’ (laughs). And that’s something I still think is funny. I never grew out of it because my daughter’s name is Frankie.

You mention Mike Leigh quite often as an influence. What drew you to his work?

It was something Ray Carney wrote about Leigh’s stuff. I had never heard of his films and I just started working my way through. Life is Sweet, that was my first one, which is such a fucking gateway drug. When I watched it, it was kind of like, OK, this feels right. This is something I haven’t seen before. And I figured I could do an American version and do it better. It wasn’t exactly what I went on to do but… I guess I quickly got over being under the anxiety of influences. You watch Leigh, then you watch Fellini, then Cassavetes and Bergman, maybe a Western. Then it becomes clear to you that the way you see something, the way you want to do something — that’s your thing. Just go do that. Don’t try to imitate or else it’s just going to look like an off-brand version of that.

I was happy to see in one of your past interviews you mentioned Albert Brooks as a favorite.

I love Albert Brooks! When I was growing up, my dad and I watched Defending Your Life a hundred times. Without exaggeration. He always said that Albert Brooks was the funniest man alive.

It’s hard to argue with that.

Modern Romance’s foley editing sequence, with the engineer character as they are recording the steps, when Brooks asks, ‘What do you think?’ after doing the last minute foley, and the engineer answers, ‘I think you saved the picture.’ I saw that and thought, ‘that’s what small roles could be!’ That guy has a personality, he’s tired and he wants to leave. Don’t forget that! Somebody’s got to be there — give him something to do! 

How did you start working with Allison Latta?

Through Kurt Naebig. I had met with maybe half a dozen actresses for Lori (from Hohokam), because I wrote it for Danielle (Ostrowski, Sarah in Quietly on By) and she ended up not doing it. And then, you have to think about what a super weird offer the role of Lori was because Tony (Baker) was going to an audio school in Mesa at the time, so it was just going to be whatever stranger girl we brought with us because there was no crew, so it was just ‘come to Arizona with a couple of weirdos for a week’ — and Kurt said that too, like, ‘it’s a weird offer…’ But Allison, I just liked a lot. And she does have this gastrointestinal thing [as seen in Hohokam], where she can burp really loud and cannot hold it in. And she did that within minutes of meeting me. And I was like, ‘I think this is my gal.’ You don’t want to call anyone your favorite, but I just love working with Allison. She has a great energy to have around and she is also just really good. [Joe] Swanberg just used her in Easy. 

What led you to set and shoot Hohokam in Arizona rather than Chicago? 

It was a History Channel program talking about Phoenix. They named it that because it’s built on top of past civilizations like a phoenix rising from the ashes. It just seemed so perfectly arrogant. 

You have also mentioned that there was a science fiction influence.

I see Hohokam as a dystopian film. ‘Hohokam’ is Pima for ‘vanished ones.’ We were already past the date of so many dystopian and science fiction films and have so many of the technologies they predicted, so why exaggerate anymore? I was thinking, ‘What makes us so fucking sure about our permanence?’ I started writing the script based on that.

I knew the setting here was going to be very important because it was in Phoenix and Mesa, Arizona, these new civilizations built on top of an old one. And I just thought that these scenes with Lori [identifying herself] into the phone with a credit card number and working in a cubicle to me felt very science fictiony. So I treated it that way because we don’t need to exaggerate anymore. You read something like 1984 where Orwell is talking about ‘unspeak’ and stuff like that. It’s done very bluntly, as if nuance is totally dead in the world out there. We have people with bumper stickers, trying to feign it off as knowledge. It feels like we are living in Orwell’s nightmare of what people would have eventually talked like. We are well past the dates, I mean Demolition Man was like 1999, and all the restaurants in that film are Taco Bells and Schwarzenegger is president, and by that time he had already become governor. We were so close!

In your scripts you often include very detailed descriptions for scenes that end up in the final film being very quick and simple. For instance, there is a moment in Hohokam where Anson glances at a beautiful woman passing by, but in the script you go into an incredibly nuanced passage about Anson’s attraction to the back of a woman’s knees. Are these descriptions mostly for the actors?

Yeah, especially for a film like Hohokam, because we had no time to rehearse and I knew it was going to be a very fast and intense shoot. After Quietly on By, I started writing screenplays that would answer every question an actor could think of. I also noticed that on Dear Desire, Tony didn’t read the stage directions. He only read the dialogue and because of the way he delivered certain lines, I would go, ‘Oh, if you had read the stage direction, you would have known he is changing his attention over there.’ So it became a challenge for the actors where it’s like if you ask me any questions that are answered in the script, you’re not going to be in the movie (laughs). It came down to that. But I think that it’s also the writer in me that was trying to get out.

I am curious about the zoo sequence in Hohokam. In the screenplay you leave it so open.

It isn’t even a full page.

Did you have anything sort of mapped out in your head before shooting? 

The only thing that we planned was that Anson didn’t feel good. Since we didn’t want to lose this idea, you can hear someone say the word ‘hawks,’ which was me from behind the camera, queuing Tony to act like his head hurt.

How about that beautiful moment in front of the baboon exhibit? Was it planned for Tony and Allison to walk out of the frame while your camera stuck around to capture more people interacting with the monkeys? It is one of my favorite moments from any of your films.

It’s one of mine too. I love that moment because it just happened. I didn’t choreograph it at all. Tony and Allison walked away, and you have to give them credit because they saw that people were coming and they just let the movie breathe. And I stuck around, got my coverage and as soon as I was done I just cried. 

Read part 2 of our interview with Frank V. Ross here

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