Among Friends: A Chat with the Directors of Feast of the Epiphany

Farihah: It’s difficult to figure out who’s responsible for what on this project, barring a few things: Michael wrote the script; Jeff is an amazing director of photography; and I brought a lot in terms of producing early in the process. But that’s not what I think about when I remember our collaboration. It all felt so much more fluid than that.

One of the things that was wonderful about making this film is that we all have collaborated in different capacities before. Jeff and I have made documentaries together; Michael and Jeff started Reverse Shot; and Michael has edited my writing there for years. We’ve also spent a lot of time in each other’s company, and the themes you see in the film—grief, food, the importance of gathering—have steeped over time in our conversations. So the movie does encapsulate our shared values.

Jeff: I think of all three of us as people who are restless and are interested in constantly trying things out. Reverse Shot has always been an experiment in film criticism. Michael and I think about the symposiums that we publish there as posing critical challenges to writers and asking them to think about cinema and about their practice in new ways. And now we’ve made a movie that’s half fiction and half documentary, and part of the impetus for doing it was the question: what would happen if we did this? What would it be like?

Michael: We started talking about it around 2011, and my memory is that we were just walking around the farmer’s market saying: wouldn’t it be interesting if you had a narrative where there’s a dinner and then it cuts off at a certain point and drops you into a documentary about where the food comes from? That being said, we weren’t only interested in doing something experimental; we had to have the right reason to do it. And there came a point when we found that this basic framework allowed us to grapple with some very personal things we were experiencing in our lives.

Michael: We wanted people to know what they were watching. Starting out, we weren’t inspired by specific films so much as we were working against certain trends. One of those trends was what we felt to be the sometimes dispassionate academicism of hybrid films that force audiences to negotiate moment to moment between truth and fiction, which can feel emotionally disengaged. We wanted people to get engaged in the narrative; if you didn’t care about the people on-screen before the movie cuts off and drops them, that would have been a failure for us.

Another thing we were working against was this trend in American indie cinema of negativity and nastiness. Usually when you have a movie in which people get together for a dinner, they end up saying horrible things to each other. People think profundity comes out of that. But this movie is about trying as hard as you possibly can to do something nice for someone and failing. To us, that’s much more interesting and tragic. 

Farihah: I think what’s unique about this movie is that typically, with this kind of hybrid film, you would have narrative as connective tissue. But here we don’t give you a narrative handle. We were really asking if it was possible to feel the cohesion of the film on the basis of an emotional rather than a narrative arc.

Michael: From the beginning we were hoping to have a stylized form of acting that didn’t get in the way of the emotion, which is hard to do. Shonni Enelow, who was our casting director and dramaturge, helped in the first auditions. She’d give the actors various exercises, telling them to read their lines in different ways: in the style of a Noël Coward drawing-room comedy, for instance, or in the style of Daniel Day-Lewis in The Age of Innocence. By the time we cast the actors and got to the first rehearsal, everyone knew that we were doing something a little different. In that way, it was more like experimental theater than we’d originally intended.

Farihah: We talked a lot about how one of the uncanny things about grief is that it touches every part of your life, when you’re still in the bell jar, and in complex ways. We didn’t give one-to-one instruction; we never said, “Don’t forget that this character is sad here, so she’ll cut the onions like this.” But we did want to capture the fact that when you’re grieving, you feel so much in your own world, and when your bubble touches someone else’s bubble, it can be unnerving. So we discussed how grief informs your way of moving in the world, and that for some people this happens more acutely than for others.

Farihah: It was fun and off-putting to be thrown into a situation, after having made a few films, where the basics were lost to us. I’d sit down with Ashley [Connor, the cinematographer on the film’s first section], and she’d say, “We’re shooting twelve pages tomorrow,” and I’d say, “Is that bad?” I had no idea. I’d never thought about film and time according to pages before, and you’ve just blown my mind!

Jeff: There were earlier drafts of this film where after the movie transitions to the farm we started doing the things that would normally happen at the beginning of a documentary: introducing people in a certain way, introducing the space in a certain way. There was something not quite right about that. It wasn’t until we screened the film and actually got some feedback that we realized, oh, we’re forty-four minutes into a film at this point. We should reject our impulse to start over and give you all the things that you feel at the opening of a movie. Let’s just put people into the farm space and see how much we can carry the emotion without introducing you right off the bat.

Michael: I think it’s more interesting when people aren’t saying the things they’re feeling. And I think it’s really interesting when people are talking a lot and not saying it. So I love Richard Linklater; I love The Before Trilogy and Slacker. Those are movies where things are talked around in a way they usually aren’t in American cinema.I also want to mention Olivier Assayas—particularly Boarding Gate and Clouds of Sils Maria, which have conversation scenes that go on way longer than you think they’re going to go, and they’re alternated with brief visual scenes. I thought it’d be interesting to make a movie that starts out extremely verbal and then becomes, in the nonfiction section, so nonverbal.

Farihah: Personal Shopper came out after our movie was finished, but it’s interesting to think of films that share tonal DNA. I think about that film and the interplay between quotidian, day-to-day experience with moments that are otherworldly for no real reason—moments where someone just feels an energy in the air. I think striving for that is a real Assayas hallmark, and it explains why the camera moves the way it does in his films—there’s a feeling that there’s a third person in the room. We also thought a lot about the lost art of banter. I was interested in the energy of classic romantic comedies from the thirties—The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby—and what happens when that kind of chemistry is applied to friendships. The spark in the room has to indicate so much more about the characters’ relationships than can be said in the scene.

Jeff: Because I work in documentary, most of the conversations I’ve filmed in the past have been in situations where I didn’t know what the “lines” were going to be. Filming people talking in documentary is hard because you can’t quite anticipate where things are going to go. So it was exciting to know all the time what was going to be said next, and also to be able to think through how the camera works in relation to that, in a planned way, rather than just being completely reactive.