Sydney Film Festival: Noah Stratton-Twine and Jake Kuhn on The Peril at Pincer Point
Addy Fong sat down with Noah and Jake to chat crabs, sound recording, low budget filmmaking, and their latest feature The Peril at Pincer Point which is playing at Sydney Film Festival:
Hi, I’m Addy. I see it says, ‘Jake’s iPhone’, so I’m assuming you’re Jake.
JAKE: Yeah, that’s me.
Is it 9am where you are?
JAKE: No, I’m in Japan. I’m calling from a Japanese theme park. If you hear screams, it’s not because there’s something horrible happening, it’s a lot of people screaming and yelling. I’m sorry I’m doing this from a theme park; I mistimed myself terribly.
I mean, it might’ve been fun to do this interview on a rollercoaster. I’m in Sydney, it’s like 6 p.m. now. I’m doing a masters of sound and my class was supposed to end at 5:30 but it ended super early cause the teachers were like ‘stuff this, we’re going to the pub.’ I’ve been busy so thankful for the break.
JAKE: It’s only 5pm for me here. I think Noah’s just getting up.
NOAH: No, no, no. It’s nine. It’s not that early. I’ve been getting up at five every morning the last few weeks. This is a bonus.
Cause you’re both filmmakers. I don’t know if this is part of the interview, we’re just chatting.
JAKE: Everything from now should be in the interview. We’re about to say some terrible things.
[Noah and Jake laugh]
I’m automatically recording on Zoom, but because I’m paranoid, I’ll also record you on my phone. I can edit it cause I’m doing sound design. So, you know, get ready for some blackmail.
JAKE: That’s how we like it. [laughs]
We just wrapped a feature 3 days ago and so I’ve taken this holiday. Well, I booked it beforehand. It’s lined up ideally just before coming to Sydney. I think Noah’s recovering after like 17 days of hell. I booked Japan way, way before we knew about Sydney. We’ve never been to Australia so we’re super excited to be going.
I read somewhere you’ve both have just finished film school?
JAKE: I did. Noah didn’t. I just graduated in March.
Finishing film school, graduating, the idea of imposter syndrome was a big theme in the film. Was this based on personal experience?
NOAH: Film school or no film school, I think the imposter syndrome is accurate, but that goes for filmmaking in general. Especially now we’ve just come off the back of another one. Every day you’re like, what’s the point? Why have we all assembled here to do this weird mystical magic thing? Then you get to the end and realise, oh, I put myself in that situation and I’m willing to sacrifice everything I am for it for some sort of reason, there is some sort of calling. That was part of our conversations, probably more on the back end as we were filming. We had a general idea of the message of the movie, or at least the mantra for Jim is, how much are you willing to sacrifice yourself for your art? That certainly carried across, but it almost came fluently or effortlessly because it is very much a film about filmmaking or just making something in general. In the end, of course, he does sacrifice himself for something which seems quite ridiculous, but that’s kind of what we sign up to do almost every day in any artistic profession sometimes. That’s how some people see it, that’s how we tell ourselves, I decided to do this, I’m going to be the one to see it through because I can’t coward out now.
JAKE: I think imposter syndrome is way easier to get when you’re doing something on a much larger scale. When you have loads of people around and they’re all looking to you it’s a different experience. For Pincer Point, we shot that with our friends in a very small group, we went out there and did it. One of the things with Pincer Point for me is, it’s very much about how I was, how Noah was, before we started making features, we’d sort of be like, yeah, we’re filmmakers. We’d be like, ‘we’re filmmakers, we’re filmmakers’ in the same way that Jim sits around going, ‘yeah, I want to be a sound designer, I want to be a sound designer’ but he’s lazy, he’s not putting himself out there and doing it. So, the whole mantra of the movie is to just get out there and do it. The idea of putting yourself out there and being like ‘I’m just going to make this thing no matter what’ is a great cure for imposter syndrome. There is no acting the role of a film director, it’s very much a mission statement of this is what we’re going to do. You really feel that impetus has come from you, rolling the boulder up the hill yourself, as opposed to when it somehow feels like, ‘my God, there’s 19 people working on this and they’re all pushing a bit of the boulder and for some reason, they want me to direct which way it’s going.’ That’s the stuff that I think is a lot harder to work out. It’s interesting having just done this movie now which is a lot bigger, suddenly imposter syndrome starts to emerge a little bit more as you start building hierarchies on set or more formal approaches like checks which was not there on Pincer Point in any way.
Pincer Point, was a micro budget feature and the one that you’ve just wrapped up had a bigger budget, so more crew and more pressure on you guys to create?
JAKE: Pincer Point had a five people crew. It was like me, Noah, a cinematographer, a sound person, a first AC and actors. This crew [for the film] we’ve just done, it was 25 to 35 people a day, more of a normal sized crew. Pincer Point was the complete opposite for better and worse; the new one had more money. It’s a big step up for us, but still very low budget.
I think people may equate Pincer Point to David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Was Lynch an influence? Did you guys use black and white for that low budget reason, focusing on composition?
JAKE: One of the funniest things we’ve had with making this movie is different people coming up to us and being like it reminded me [of] Whistle, I’ll come to you of that scene in Bait and we’re like…sure! But the whole thing was so instinctual, and me and Noah really come from a place of cinephilia. We’re both people who absolutely love movies, loads and loads of different types of movies. We will watch literally anything. I think because it was so instinctual, much of things that moved and inspired us have somehow bled their way into this. That seems to me at least to be what people are responding to, it plays off a cine-literate mind, it’s very easy to be able to pick things up cause a lot of the time you start with very clear base stereotypes. I think that if it’s black and white and sound heavy, you’re suddenly like it’s like Eraserhead, which is quite funny.
NOAH: I think at its core level, there’s reasons for it. Our initial seedling was, we’re making not a mockery, but in servitude of like the 1950s B-movie, Roger Corman Fair. Immediately we knew we had to do 4:3 and black and white. Thing is our subject couldn’t be further from it. The behaviour of our characters and actors, they’re playing the tropes of those kinds of movies, but they’re all based around our friends and the way act. Certainly, with the more mystical, David Lynch style things, I think, nobody really did it like him and we’re both big fans of his work so it’s impossible not to bring him into anything that we’re doing. I’m personally far more a fan of his much more accessible stuff like The Straight Story. Every shot on my end was touched up with visual effects and through that process of just over-egging everything in black and white and with grain and halation, you get a pass of pushing things a little further or pushing an image because we’re already detaching. The way that we look at black and white films now does feel like a relic, it does feel like a memory. I think if Eraserhead was in colour, it would be a very different experience. Just by adding a lot onto these black and white sequences without me knowing, it probably took on a strange, ethereal, dreamlike quality, which makes it feel probably more part of the family. After we premiered in Texas, I was certainly taken aback. We knew it was a weird movie, but we thought it was weird because we thought made a movie which sums up, compartmentalizes 10 years of our humour together.
Like an inside joke
NOAH: Exactly. People were coming back about the weirdness is why it works. They were saying this as if it was like the movie’s trophy. For me especially rewatching now, I do see there are very strange sequences. I think because the film takes its premise so seriously, we have a moment in the movie where a bunch of crabs start speaking to him from the bucket. For us, that’s just a funny opportunity to get a bunch of friends in a recording booth to pretend to be crabs and call the man who’s pointing a microphone at you handsome. If everyone’s in on the movie and they’re watching it and everything else is taken seriously, when that scene comes along, we can’t blame people for stroking their chin and being like, what does that mean? A lot of the scenes in the movie are surmised by that. That’s the practice that me and Jake spent a long-time putting in.
JAKE: I would also say, the thing with David Lynch I love so much is he truly believed what he’s saying and the way he chooses to express it. There’s a lot of filmmakers out there who are like, ‘I’m such a weirdo, nobody gets me’ that sort of thing. I think if you asked David Lynch, he’d be like, ‘what do you mean? I’m not weird.’ It’s super understandable, the story, because he genuinely believes it. I would say me and Noah both genuinely, genuinely love this, enjoy this and think other people will enjoy it too. I think that authenticity or lack of any pretension seems to be connecting with people. Obviously comparing to Lynch with this movie is ridiculous, I appreciate you saying it. I mean, Eraserhead is one of the greatest movies ever but maybe it’s that feeling of being genuine about the arc and really believing it, which is something me and Noah strive to do.
What made me think of Lynch is, his ‘F this’ aesthetic which I saw in your movie. Pincer felt like a bunch of dudes having fun, like the roommate with the wig and sailor’s hat.
JAKE: That’s Noah
Noah? [Laughs] I was like, I love that!
NOAH: That fucking ugly freak!
Have you seen Love Actually? I think there’s a dude, this roommate who’s randomly naked. I don’t know if he’s a German bike rider or I’m just making this up, but it’s gives fish out of water energies. In your film there’s a lot of crabs, all these different, sea related puns. I was going to start this interview asking, ‘why crabs?’ Do you just love creatures with hard exoskeletons?
NOAH: We centred the entire movie about a place in Suffolk we were going two, three years prior to write, this quiet little place. Britain is very connected by train and it’s hard to find places that aren’t out in the sticks which are perfect for writing retreats. This place you get a train and either a 3 1/2 hour walk or a 20-minute taxi and taxis are few and far between. We’ve been going there a while and the town’s infamous for two things for us, probably got a lot more important history, but there’s a local beer on tap called a Ghost Ship and it’s one of Britain’s top crabbing destinations. There’s a bit of the low marsh just before the tide and a classic infamous bridge where there used to be a world crabbing tournament. As we would do our walks, we would see exoskeletons disregarded, the skeletons of crabs gone by and we would go crabbing sometimes. When we were on the train ride up, three weeks before we started shooting, thinking about what we were going to make the movie about, nautical stuff made sense. The fact we could get crabs on camera, real crabs, was certainly a definite thing. Obviously, there’s crabs in the bucket, there’s the crab at the beginning of the film, the fake film, and that massive crab at the end of his bed. Those are all real crabs we sent one of our associate producers to go and get while we were shooting.
JAKE: Yeah, he was just sitting on a bridge all day crabbing. We’d come up and be like, ‘how many crabs now?’ He’d be like, ‘I got three.’ He’d put them in a bucket, and we’d be like, fantastic, keep going man, we’re just going to shoot this one scene and then we’ll be back to shoot the crabs. It was that feeling of taking them out the water, putting them on camera, and Noah green screened a bunch into the movie as well.
NOAH: Yeah, we had open casting for crabs. We would get like 20 of them in a bucket and choose the grizzliest barnacle encrusted one. From the back of it as well, there aren’t a lot of movies with crabs. There’s one we cite Roger Corman’s Attack of the Crab Monsters, which works by influences on multiple levels. I think what works for me, especially, it’s easy to say after the matter of the fact is that they’re so un-expressive and that felt like we could do absolutely anything with them. They only walk in one direction which helps us put them anywhere we want, crossing frame, whatever, that was amazing.
You can keyframe the crab and it can come towards you, just rescale.
NOAH: I did try that. I had a plate of a crab walking from left to right and I was like, if I fix the position so he’s never quite going right and getting bigger, but it just didn’t look right.
Because I’m doing sound, I wanted to ask what prompted you to cast Jim as a soundie? Usually, sound isn’t really thought about so I’m all about soundie awareness. What was the purpose of writing his character?
JAKE: For me, briefly, it’s 2 reasons. One is budget. We could really build out a world with sound, which makes the film feel way bigger. Obviously, we didn’t have that much money. It was an amazing way to build out these ghosts and find interesting, a sonic level to the movie, another layer for it. Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how tactile sound is, especially for someone who’s doing in essence an investigation, where in the conversation seeing someone turn the dial and point the mic and something getting louder, it’s very easy to read as an audience. It’s very easy to understand his process, sending him out into the field to direct that mic at something and find that sound and locate it. It’s a beautiful, simple way of following someone’s thought process in a way that you can visually describe which I think is great. It matches with that layering of sound.
NOAH: I just think it’s just a good profession for horror like someone in a mystery or thriller to have because it puts them in places they wouldn’t usually be. Just setting our character up as a guy, a sound recordist who really wants to prove himself, and his goal is to capture a sound, which his mythic director has told him get something that’s never really been heard before it creates circumstances borne out of situational humour, where should he, in another movie, see a ghost, he would be like, ‘shit I gotta run.’ But in this character, he sees a ghost making a ghostly noise and he goes, ‘think I’ll get a bit closer’, you know what I mean? ‘This is good for me.’ And of course, there’s not a lot but the lineage of, the Brian De Palma movie about the sound recordist Blow Out, there’s so many things in that movie, the greatest thing that I’ve ever seen in a thriller mystery before, because he’s a sound recordist, especially the final moment in that movie and it hasn’t been treaded on again. I’m certainly coming from a discipline where I’m far more concerned with sound over visuals, and like Jake was saying, about really boosting the budget and creating as big of a world as we could, aurally and sonically was far more compelling to me. Right now, the standards of shooting, you can always touch stuff up. There are some shots in this movie we did on the fly, which frankly, in their raw form, don’t look good. The fact we were able to black and white them, enhance them, engrain them and put a fake sky in, moon, stuff like that and make something out of crap, frankly, was fine, but with good sound it’s so much more unforgiving.
JAKE: He’s talking about our compositions also, not the actors. The actors are doing good work.
NOAH: Oh, the actors were doing wonderful stuff with limited resources. Yeah, especially when you’re making these low budget things with no marketing budgets, it’s just another identifier that people can remember it by. We’ve got the crab thing, the style of the movie, the black and white thing, but also the fact that the protagonist is a sound recordist. I feel like people are kind of picking up on that and it also separates itself from movies made about movies. I feel like there’s a greater frequency of those these days and I’m still not sure where it’s landing with people. We, of course, love them being in the business, but this is a different angle where some people might watch this and be, ‘oh, I couldn’t even consider that would have been an actual job that someone did.’ Obviously not what it entails in the movie but the fact that someone’s employed to do something like that.
I’m excited cause that gives so much visibility to soundies. Ever since I started my course, I’m like, OMG there’s more of us than I thought. Yeah, representation!
JAKE: Yeah, sorry that’s the hidden third reason. Me and Noah are obviously super passionate about representation of Soundies.
Yeah! [laughs]
JAKE: The thing is though, clearly, we’re not because we might have to add, and we apologise in our Q&As, an apology to anyone who takes the sound craft seriously because we clearly don’t. If you look at the equipment he’s using in the film, none of it’s plugged in, it’s plugged in by Cellotape. He’s taking USB sticks out of analog tape recorders, it’s so stupid. There’s a point where halfway through shooting, he’s on a windy coastal island, doesn’t even have a windsock, a dead cat on his microphone. I think we did have a line in there about it, but Jim’s clearly not taking it seriously, but it does come out of a place of, we care.
I think step one is representation and acknowledgement, and step seven is drinks at the pub to drown our sorrows.
NOAH: Hell yeah.
The Sydney Film Festival program is packed. I only found out about your film because my friend, my classmate, was like, ‘Oh, this film’s about a sound recordist. We gotta watch it.’ Watching Pincer Point I did some stalking on the equipment. I thought, ‘what microphone are they using?’
NOAH: Do you want to know?
A Shotgun? Um, Yeah!
NOAH: It’s a Rode NTG4+. It’s the microphone I used making all my short films way back when.
Oh, an NTG4! I’ve used NTG1, NTG2, but not NTG4+
NOAH: Yeah, it’s one of the rechargeable ones with a tiny little thing in it. I think the NTG3 was the battery ones when you had to take it out. I haven’t even really thought about that. That’s kind of an Easter egg on my part. I did 10 short films before I even made this thing and that microphone had recorded all of them and now, we’re throwing it around in the sand like it’s nothing.
It’s been traumatized. It’s heard a lot of things.
NOAH: It’s a strong microphone.
Um I also stalked your audio recorder prop. I found out the recorder is a Realistic Portable Stereo Disco Mixer from the 80s apparently made by Radio Shack.
JAKE: That would make sense. Just a week before shooting, I went into my film school prop room and stole as many things as I could get my hands on and that was one of them. I was like, ‘oh, this is going to look wicked. It’s looks real.’ And so, we literally jammed the jack into it, as hard as we possibly could, and taped it all up. We were like, God, we’ve completely destroyed this thing, it doesn’t work at all.
It looked plugged in, but it was just aesthetics.
JAKE: It was just aesthetics. It’s the same with the pistol grip thing for the microphone. That did not fit at all. I can’t even remember how we did that. That was taped on. It was horrendous. We were just like, it looks right.
Thanks for the chat. It felt a bit chaotic, but it was exciting.
JAKE: Thank you so much for taking the time to chat to us. We really appreciate it.
The Peril at Pincer Point screens at Sydney Film Festival June 6th (8.45pm at Dendy, Newtown) and on June and 9th (8.30pm Event, George St). Details: The Peril at Pincer Point – Sydney Film Festival.
Interview by Addy Fong.
