In Maker’s Dozen, we ask folks in and around the film industry 12 questions and have them ask one of us.
Joe Swanberg is an independent filmmaker best known for micro-budget films Digging for Fire, Happy Christmas, Drinking Buddies, Win It All, and the Netflix anthology series Easy. His new film The Sun Never Sets (read our review) stars Dakota Fanning, Jake Johnson, and Cory Michael Smith, an actor and producer best known for his roles in Carol, Gotham, May December, Wonderstruck, and as Chevy Chase in Saturday Night.
Our chief critic James Podrasky spoke with Joe and Cory ahead of the film’s premiere at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre, where they discussed finding the film’s relationship dynamics, their favorite parts of filming in Alaska, the scenes they’re particularly proud of, and more!
This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
1. What is your 30-second origin story?
Joe Swanberg: I’m a filmmaker here in Chicago. I have been making movies for a little over 20 years now. I went to film school in Carbondale, Illinois, moved into the city and started making micro-budget movies with my friends. And now I’m making slightly larger than micro-budget movies with my friends, so not a lot has changed.
Cory Michael Smith: I am an actor and producer who lives in New York. I went to drama school in Ohio, where I’m from, and moved to New York and started a career in regional theater, went to Off-Broadway, had my Broadway debut, had a transition into film and television, and I’ve been doing that for the last decade and a half.
2. Joe, it’s been a minute since you’ve directed a feature-length film, but you’ve kept busy acting, producing, and even running a video rental store. Did you have a favorite project during that time?
Joe: Yeah, it definitely recharged the batteries. It was a welcome break after a massive burst of productivity. From 2011 to 2019, I basically barely stopped that entire time with film and TV, and then I thought maybe I was retired as a director and then I would just produce films for other filmmakers. My kids are in school, and I thought maybe producing could be a desk job that I could have in a “Monday through Friday, 9 to 5” type of way until my kids are a little older. But being around young filmmakers and producing for them just got me excited about movies again and sent me back to the director’s chair. One of the horror films I produced, called Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round, has been perhaps the most rewarding. I got to work with two young filmmakers from Boston who were right out of film school. Michael Gilio, who wrote Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves that was in theaters a few summers ago, is this Chicago filmmaker who starred in it. It was his first time acting in a long, long time. We kind of pulled him out of retirement. It was just super scrappy and had a very fun success story playing horror festivals and then just kind of catching people. That was the dream when I put on the producing hat and worked on those, that some of these little projects would just organically find an audience, and that one actually managed to do that. So that was a nice little treat.
3. Did that period of time change who you are as a filmmaker at all when you decided to “come back”?
Joe: Being back at it with this film has been the biggest highlight of the last couple years. Not only was I excited to discover that I loved directing and did want to keep doing it, but just getting to make this film in Alaska on 35mm with Jake Johnson, who is a long-time collaborator and then Cory and Dakota as new collaborators, I came out of it feeling ready to make five movies a year again and get back to my old productive ways.
4. While Chicago is often the backdrop for your films, The Sun Never Sets takes us to Alaska, which helps make it your most visually stunning film and an integral part of these characters. Was shooting there a challenge, or did it feel like freedom?
Joe: I cheated by bringing my entire Chicago to Alaska with me. So in many ways it was almost exactly the same experience I’ve been having since Drinking Buddies. Honestly, the biggest difference was that I am often, in a low-budget movie, looking for the narrow window I can point the camera at that will not give away the cheats right off screen and sticking characters in the corners of rooms that look slightly lusher and more extravagant than the rest of the room. This was the first time I ever thought, “Man, I can point the camera anywhere.” I could just keep pulling it further and further back, and it just looks bigger and more spectacular the more scope we get. I think I have wider master shots in this movie than I’ve ever framed up in my life. Every environment was perfect for the character. It’s an uncompromised location.
5. What was your most surprising or favorite part of Alaska?
Joe: Alaska doesn’t allow billboards, which just gives the whole movie this very timeless quality. You’re never reminded exactly where you are or what time period you’re living in. There’s just something nice about not having an onslaught of visual information every second.
Cory: I was very happy to play a pilot. Getting to actually be in a plane and take in that environment from that perspective is one of the coolest things I’ve gotten to do on any job. You try to find ways a character feels at home, and trying to understand somebody who represents Alaska for Dakota’s character, Wendy, it was pretty easy to understand why people can love being there. You really feel disconnected from modern mania. And not only does the film feel timeless thematically, what Joe’s exploring is obviously kind of timeless with people finding distress and chaos in their love life because they just can’t seem to understand themselves in love or the other person loving or not loving them.
6. Cory, you have a really tough role here as Chuck, “the other man,” where you’re not the villain but audiences are going to be skeptical of him. You’re playing this semi-reformed bad boy who’s more of a stuck-in-his-ways, traditionally rugged man who clearly wants to change and grow. You also need a ton of chemistry with Dakota Fanning’s character, Wendy, and you need to convey their shared past. To top it off, your character is more internal, and you express yourself mostly through body language in a movie with a lot of dialogue. What was the process of finding and fleshing out this character?
Cory: Joe and I talked ahead of time about the qualities of this guy in a relationship. There’s also the practical benefit of being cast third and understanding how I can create a character that’s oppositional to Jake’s character, and then some of it just kind of happened naturally as we went along. Early on in the relationship he’s a bit more enthusiastic and playful, and there’s the excitement of newfound old love. I think we see a part of him where you can appreciate his charisma and his sense of play, then as things get more complicated we reveal the characteristics about him that were maybe problematic before. We see how he’s dealing with conflict and grows more emotionally constricted and less able and willing to communicate. A bit of it was intended to begin with, but I think it’s quite beautiful the way it plays out. You really see two different relationships and believe she can love both these people.
7. How did you and Dakota work together to build that chemistry? Did you ever work out your original couple backstory together?
Cory: We spent a little bit of time before shooting hanging out and getting to know each other. But it’s kind of the job, you know? We had a really great surprise in that dynamic between action and cut, when you’re working with someone that you can sort of fall into a scene with, and you’re world-building with an excellent actor in real time. I don’t know what your experience was in watching it, but it felt pretty easy with her.
8. Joe, what was it like working with two different pairings in this love triangle of sorts?
Joe: My experience was very fun getting to work with Dakota and Jake and then getting to work with Dakota and Cory. I feel like I saw very different actors working in very different methods. Dakota is obviously her own person with her own approaches and techniques, but also had the fun of getting to build these two different dynamics. You want to feel that she has her own energy with each guy and that they’re pulling different energies out of her. It was really, really fun to play in those two different dynamics as a director. Working with Cory and Dakota, I just had the distinct feeling that the two of them were on it from take one, while I played a lot more with Jake and also Jake was playing me, which meant I had a lot more to say to him in between takes. He gives me a hard time because we’ve worked together a lot, and it hasn’t always been like that. This time around, I was like, “Not like that, don’t say it like that, say it like this.” And so I felt him really tripping out and watching me and being like, “You’re out of your mind, bro, but OK.”
I think it’s quite beautiful the way it plays out. You really see two different relationships and believe she can love both these people.
— Cory Michael Smith on The Sun Never Sets
9. Even though you now work with bigger-name actors, a larger crew, shooting on film, and outlining more of the plot and dialogue, you still work with some of that same improvisational style that made your early movies stand out. When working with professional actors, is that ever a challenge, and how do you get past that, or is that something solved with a careful casting process?
Joe: It can go a lot of different ways. I made three seasons of Easy, where I got to work with a lot of different styles, sometimes in the same episode, where three people work very differently from each other. One of them likes to improvise take one and then repeat it, while the other one likes to give me something wildly different every single take. How am I gonna get these guys on the same page? Sometimes it just clicks and just feels right, and this was one of those experiences where I didn’t even have to think about that. We’re just honing in on character beats, making sure we’re getting all the information out there. We didn’t talk that much about styles. I don’t think any of the three of them were set in stone on a particular way to work. I always felt we could easily shift if we needed to.
10. Joe, what’s your favorite Cory moment in the movie?
Joe: It’s the final scene between him and Dakota when she comes over to check in on him. I love that scene. I loved it while we were shooting it. I love it every time I watch the movie. I wrote the scene in the outline and it says something extremely simple like “Wendy comes over, Chuck has a person upstairs, blah blah blah”. Really not that much to build on. Watching Cory use the space and choose not to leave the door but to sort of crack it open and start to have that conversation… It’s so good. But then when she becomes vulnerable, just some quiet seconds of looking for the doorstop, putting it in the door, stepping out into the hallway. It’s so nicely done and just adds so much. It’s not that flashy or showy of a scene, but I’m very inspired by it and think it was the perfect last beat for that character.
11. Cory, is there a moment or scene you’re particularly proud of?
Cory: A scene I enjoyed doing was when we’re out camping and we’re by the fire and the smoke is kind of coming into frame. There’s this great shot where part of my head is in the foreground, and you’re really looking at Dakota. We’ve only been hanging out for a couple days and we’re just reconnecting, but she tells me about Jack. I just love the dynamic we had, because you really feel history there and you get to see how Chuck processes issues, and how at first he’s pretty confident and then things sort of shift. I like the feeling of this scene and how we captured an old couple within the first couple of days of seeing each other again.
12. Have you discovered anything or been able to see the film through a new lens now that you’ve been doing screenings?
Joe: I’m very heartened by it. I wanted it to be funny. You can have your best intentions on the day of shooting and imagine a scene is funny, or it can make me laugh in the editing room. There used to be an expectation that you would make a film and the first introduction to the world would be in a movie theater with an audience. Then I spent a big chunk of my career working in a world where that assumption went away and streaming was the assumption, or it would be very iffy whether a movie would get to experience a crowd. So with this one, it has been so fun that we’re doing theatrical and it’s really playing for packed rooms of people who have to sit with each other and their own relationship with the movie. It’s the greatest feeling in the world hearing random people talking to the screen because it’s hitting them, especially with Jake’s character, who makes a turn in this movie. Laughs are a pretty normal reaction to that scene, but I’m also hearing gasps, I’m hearing hisses, I’m hearing boos, and I’m hearing individual humans in the room going, “Oh you motherfucker.” Just some very personal reactions to the movie, and that shows me it’s really working. I will be watching it again tonight because one of my favorite viewings was when we played at the Music Box in early May. That room is so great, and that viewing experience was excellent because of how many people were watching.
Cory: Totally agree. Also, the Letterboxd comments. Reading full-length reviews of the movie I tend to opt out of. I usually read the first paragraph if I’m checking them out, but there’s something about the social media-type brevity of Letterboxd reviews. Sometimes I’m just cackling reading them, and there are a lot of women posting on there that are like, “Take these men out back and shoot them.” You can just tell it is personal. Even when they disliked the movie, I love that level of passion coming out of those comments. Wendy is so lovable. You really want her to be good at the end of the movie, and I just love that these two guys are sort of like ping-ponging around in this mess with her and that, for a lot of people, reaches the point of murderous rage by the end.
+1. What’s your question for us?
Joe: What was the movie that made you not just fall in love with the movies but want to work in this industry professionally and write about them?
James: My dad for some reason thought it was a good idea to show me Ingmar Bergman films when I was a kid, so I’d be watching, like, The Virgin Spring at 10 years old. So I think I just grew up with sort of this strange hodgepodge of experiences.
Cory: Who’s your favorite filmmaker?
James: Wong Kar-wai is a favorite of mine, but I love so much different stuff from low-grade trashy erotic slayers to highbrow stuff.
