Near and Far: A Conversation with Dwayne LeBlanc

It was very standard. As a kid, I liked movies just like anyone else: Jaws, E.T. I remember when I was going to college, I loved film and gravitated to it, but I never knew, especially as an immigrant, that it could be a career. You don’t think movies are manmade; they’re just these magical things that arrive on your TV set. But you notice the logos before and after the film, or in the commercials, so you realize it is a job and you can probably learn it. I pursued art in school, but it wasn’t until I left corporate America that I started to do so more seriously.

I watched all the karate movies, all the westerns—these genres I’d heard about and could hold on to. It wasn’t until a friend of mine sent me a list of films—the Fellinis, the Godards, the Antonionis, the Vardas—that my education started to evolve. I always give credit to the film that broke open my consciousness about what a film could do or be: Chantal Akerman’s La chambre. It was unlike anything I’d seen, but I felt like I understood what it was doing. It’s a silent film composed of one shot that rotates 360 degrees in a woman’s apartment; it stops at one point, then rotates the other way. I didn’t know films could operate like that. Without knowing what I was searching for, that film set me off on my path.

Malik Hassan Sayeed, who worked on Belly. It’s so underrated as a work of image-making. It has some of the most complex images I think we’ve been offered in cinema. I also think of Arthur Jafa’s work on Crooklyn. The detail, the lighting, the compositions—that film really taught me about cinematography and what can be done within the frame. Then, obviously, Daughters of the Dust [also shot by Jafa].

There’s one Charles Burnett short film called Several Friends that I think—on the level of its cinematography [by Jim Watkins], and in terms of its depiction of the quotidian—really stands out. There’s a small moment in that film where somebody’s just moving a bottle cap on the table. The fact that it’s framed and given the same amount of attention as a face or another major detail influenced a lot of how I approach cinema. And his work on Killer of Sheep.

There’s a film I want to mention, Deshotten 1.0. Malik and A. J. [Jafa] worked on that. It’s very dramatic in a lot of ways. But it’s one of the greatest short films in terms of the utilization of form, as well as camera technique. There’s a character in a liminal state who’s experienced something very violent, and he’s drifting in between his reality along with alternative realities of what happened to him. I studied it a lot before I made Civic—frame by frame, what was happening in focus, what was happening in sound, how it was sequenced.

I have to give Malik and A. J. their flowers. I know they aren’t necessarily lesser-known names, but we know them because they put in the work, and I want to give them the credit because they influenced me a lot.

That was one of the most incredible moments of my life. I used to say that I always wanted to be on the fence, the border between the two worlds: I wanted to make things that would speak to my mom, my friends, and my community while also staying true to the cinema and art I was drawn to. I wanted all of those things in the room at the same time.

Now, balancing those two worlds can feel overwhelming. And Berlinale isn’t necessarily a place where you’re going to see my community, period. People like me aren’t invited, and if they were there, they probably wouldn’t necessarily feel welcome. Berlinale was happening at the same exact time that I got the grant for the Netflix program, which came with the lab. I was ending Zooms from the Berlinale lab and going into meetings for the Netflix lab. At Netflix, you might get the conventional note about communicating an arc or detail to their audience. Berlinale gave such subtle notes, but they were also very tied to story and things under the surface of what you might expect an American script to attack.

It was so fascinating to hear the difference between what might interest an audience like the one at Berlinale and what would interest Netflix. In the end, you get what you’d expect. I think one of the first notes I got from Netflix when I sent the director’s cut of Civic was “Do you have any more coverage on these scenes?” And I was like, “No, I don’t. These are very specific angles.” The limitations were a concern for them, but I saw those limitations as a strength. I think, ultimately, the answer was that Netflix wanted more roundedness, more 360. Berlinale leaned on the specificity: yes, let’s do the silhouette, but what does that mean?

There were character details that Andrew Yuyi Truong and I wrote into the shot list. We approached it as if we were writing a text: we described what the identity of the camera was, and how that related to the audience’s relationship with the film. In Civic, we wrote the camera as if it were a ghost entity that had its own interests, perspective, and relationship with Booker. Sometimes the camera just wants to focus on that without framing it in a conventional way.

The idea of cultural and physical proximity is important to me. It’s interesting to invite the audience into the car and put them next to the characters, but the characters aren’t necessarily speaking to them. The meaning of certain details in what two characters are saying to one another might not be clear to an audience in, say, France or Brazil. Certain things in our community may translate more directly; we might understand a nuance in a way that another audience member can’t. I think that kind of culturally specific language, and that kind of drifting in between, allows for two things. One is for the audience to be able to trust in the film’s journey while slipping in and out of their own consciousness, and to think about what they might say or do in that same circumstance. It also allows the audience to invite themselves into the movie while being aware of the character’s experience.

In Now, Hear Me Good, the camera was an uninvited guest. It’s almost as if me and you were going to a party thrown by a good friend of mine you didn’t know, then I couldn’t make it at the last minute but said you should still go because they’re good people. There’s a little loneliness, but the party is still appealing. You don’t feel invasive, but no one’s necessarily speaking to you all the time. You’re in a safe space. Even though you’re very close to the characters, you may not be invited into some of the language they share.