Antebellum A Talk With Directors, Bush + Renz

Automatically transcribed; may contain errors.

i want to talk about the opening scene of antebellum because obviously it's been a piece you've been talking about forever i'm sure and all the logistics of making it work but what i want to know is why uh it was it was uh it was crucial to us that the opening shot of the film fully immersed the audience in the seduction that they are living through the antebellum south um and the only way that we felt like we could achieve that was through a continuous shot as arduous and challenging as that proved to be um but then also it was really important as we had it in the script that the film is book ended with starting at sunset which is the gloaming the very part of the day and concluding at sunrise which represents a brand dawning of a new day and so having to shoot at a very specific time also made an already very difficult shot to achieve that much more difficult but it was that important to us because we we made the calculation creatively and talking to our dp and and talking to each other about it ad nauseum that i we didn't feel like we were going to be able to achieve that seduction of locking the audience in to the antebellum south without taking you from in front of the plantation house all the way back to the back of the property and antebellum only comes up on the screen after the enslaved woman has been captured and killed was it worth it honestly for you i think so we think so i mean once we put uh uh roman and nate's score on top of it it really just all it came together it was it was definitely working for us we were very happy with it it was very powerful i have to say absolutely we want thank you very much and we wanted um you know uh hitler was obsessed with wagner and we wanted something that that uh tipped the hat a little bit to history buffs that it had a wagner feeling that was the only note that we gave nate and roman those brilliant um composers but yeah and it was this first scene of our first film ever so we wanted to go for it it's our first movie and we're like this is our first movie and and and by the you know we didn't i think people were under the impression that we had all of this money for the movie we had less than a 10 million dollar budget wow you know and we had 27 days to shoot and yeah that's intense well you may never get to do it again but it was memorable and so for your first movie why not go for it uh i i do want to talk about casting janelle because she is so incredibly talented what was it about her that made you want her to play veronica i mean there are so many things i mean i think first i mean we were just so happy that her passion equaled ours i mean that that the script was sent out to her and that her and her team were so passionate to to be a part of it that they they this is what she wanted to have as her first leading role and and that passion we we didn't initially see her in it we were such huge fans of her as a as an artist as a as a musician um from her first single and and so once we started thinking about it we we began to see the role but her passion for it really really helped i i agree with you i felt like she was a part of it um let's talk very quickly you have a couple other projects coming up rapture inkwell what can you tell me about them um rapture so look rapture is all we can say is that it's about uh the global disappearance of millions of people um and the weaponization of religion um wow and that's it but uh we won't be backing away from controversial topics no obviously not and then our show that we just closed with hbo inkwell um that is that's gonna also be quite a conversation starter um but you know we got we got the first you know antebellum is a really difficult subject matter it deals with slavery and and so you know rapture and inkwell uh albeit they are still provocative uh films and tv shows that we wrote and that we're directing they are also it's a bit of a of a of a departure in the sense that it's not it's it's it's um i think that it'll be more digestible in a sense okay okay the hbo show is a little you know it's it's a little bit more commercial um but uh rapture i think we think is gonna be a big conversation starter and it's a big theatrical film um so we're excited about it well i cannot wait to see it especially after antebellum you guys have got long long careers ahead of you so thank you so much for your time thank you we appreciate it [Music] you