A Film to Move You: Moving Takahashi

By Angela McCormack / February 20th, 2012 in Film / California / 1080 views

Sift through Vimeo and you’ll be assaulted with that blindingly crisp image —speckled by shallow depth of field bokeh—offered by DSLR captured films from the doe eyed and digitally bred young filmmakers of today. Without getting into the whole exhausting DSLR debate that plagues film nerds’ egos constantly, I’ll go ahead and say that nothing quite undoes me like a film shot beautifully on film. It’s baffling that just a slightly grainy texture, coupled with those uniquely warm tones can be so fundamentally—yet somehow vaguely, mystifyingly—nostalgic; it’s astounding how the way the color blue in a fluorescent bathroom is captured (bereft of digital hostility) can be so stirring, so poignant.

Moving Takahashi, quintessentially about a girl wanting to die and a removalist not letting her, was filmed on Kodak 35mm and absolutely shattered me because it ticked every box: it’s subtle but unexpectedly affecting; its script is perfect and every shot is gorgeous. But perhaps most (simply) enchanting of all is the light in that house, the light.

Takahashi gathers considerable momentum for a short: in the space of eleven minutes we see major plot movements and fully formed, developed characters. How often can you watch a short film and feel you understand a character deeper than their highlighted quirk, or beyond the immediate event at hand? It’s in the details that director Josh Soskin gets it right: superb, sparse art direction and subtleties with the soundtrack (Jacques Brel on vinyl ringing throughout an empty house—incredible), a minimal, but extremely well executed script; that hint of humour to relieve a dark subject matter; excellent performances by Boyd Hollbrook and Kristin Malko; realistic characters and their realistic woes.

Impressively, this is only Josh Soskin’s second short fictional film to date and his first dappling in 35mm. We spoke to Josh and asked him about his experiences with such a fickle and precious medium for filmmakers, and about creating that imperfectly perfect look on film:

We spent so much time trying to get that look, adding in grain filters, crushing and coloring until it looks like film—it’s like, why not just shoot on film? For me, this being the first film I shot on 35 there were certainly some challenges. Especially being a digital kid, accustomed to endless takes, etc, I had to get used to this notion of having to conserve your takes. That was probably the toughest thing. For the circular dolly living room scene we shot through our entire stock for the day in two hours! My producers were freaking out, making last minute runs to Kodak on a Sunday. In retrospect it was kind of funny but at the time that added stress sucked. I did also miss just that immediacy of a small DSLR like camera, just being able to pop things off. I come from a doc[umentary] background and I love to get that kind of stuff, the stolen moments.

PORTABLE: Takahashi deals with suicide, a topic that’s always difficult to approach in a film. What was it like navigating such a delicate subject and what compelled you to go there?

Suicide is like one of those things people discourage you from dealing with as a young filmmaker. But for this it was right. I actually imposed that onto the story because I really wanted to deal with a ticking time bomb scenario, to have this built in tension surrounding their relationship. But balancing the gravity of suicide with the playfulness of their escape was definitely a challenge—I had one of my closest friends kill himself when I was in college. It was completely unexpected and we were all a little unaware of where he was at mentally. I always have sort of kept this question in the back of my mind: could I have said something that would have changed his mind? So I was also fascinated with the ‘What ifs’, the ability to change somebody’s life I guess.

Lately there seems to be this kind of clichéd short film ‘genre’-so to speak– there’s so many funny, quirky, but kind of fleeting short films being made. Takahashi deviates from that in so many ways, what draws you to short films and the way their stories are told?

I’m not sure if we, as filmmakers, stop and really think about it enough, or if we just march in a directional, almost blind way into shorts because that’s what the set, hierarchical film industry path says to do: you know, go to film school, make a short, then a feature, etc. In my case, Takahashi was born from wanting to try and make something with my good friend Patrick James (the writer) and see how our two styles would mesh. He came to me with this idea, this simple image of a poor mover and a rich girl in the suburbs and we just took it from there. We were a bit rushed to try and get something done before the festival deadlines so we moved really fast. We wrote the story in like three days and had it funded off Kickstarter within 10 days! It was insane…I think the short flim is a great medium, especially as the collective societal attention span continues to shrink, we as filmmakers will have to get better at telling stories in shorter and more compelling ways.

Moving on from Moving Takahashi, Josh’s next project will be less about stealing hearts and more about stealing drugs: in the works this year is his first feature, which he summed up as being: “A period piece about drug smugglers in the seventies in California, and I’m dying to make it.”

We can’t wait.