I was chatting to a screenwriting student at work today, who told me about the filmmaking process of Drinking Buddies (Joe Swanberg, 2013, USA). Swanberg is most famous for his ‘mumblecore’ films, a genre I have only briefly heard about during cinema studies last year. These films are often based on improvisational acting and thus favour naturalistic dialogue over scripted conversations between characters. Like Nicholas Winding Refn, Swanberg also shoots his films chronologically, allowing for stories to naturally unfold.

Apparently Swanberg comes onto set with a general idea of how a scene will begin and what needs to happen or change by the end of the scene; but how this eventuates is ultimately up to the actors. I like this idea of naturalistic acting, because it makes the story seem much more ‘real’; however, I think this would be difficult to capture with a camera. This methodology doesn’t really leave room for multiple takes of shots and the camera work would need to be totally conceived on the day in reaction to the character action. I imagine that creating a continuous edit would also be a struggle. Nevertheless, I think if you had a very talented cinematographer and a close knit team of crew and actors this process would foster ingenuity and imagination. This production process reminds me of Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014, USA), which was filmed over a 12 year stint. Linklater never planned out exactly how the ‘story’ was going to develop or finish and so the final product is a very true to life representation of growing up, but does not necessarily have any narrative arcs (it definitely does not follow a traditional story structure).

These shooting methodologies are actually rather similar to the exercises we did in the first few weeks of this course. Instead of scripts, we received a ‘blue print’ of a scene, which enabled more naturalistic dialogue to emerge. I’m not sure if I could create a whole improvised film like Swanberg, but I do like the idea of some spontaneity…maybe just slightly structured spontaneity.