WE’RE STILL TOGETHER A NO-BUDGET GEM
Montrealer's first professional feature wins positive reviews at film festival
How low can you go?
That was the question guiding Montrealer Jesse Noah Klein as he shot his first professional feature, We’re Still Together, on a rock-bottom budget two summers ago.
“There are all kinds of different demarcations of what low-budget can mean,” Klein said, dropping by the Montreal Gazette last week on a break from his day job teaching film studies at Dawson College.
“I find it more useful to use the term no-budget. This was a nobudget movie. My actors wore my clothes or their own clothes. We were constantly getting equipment donated, we had no permits. We paid for some locations, but a lot were donated. It was no-budget.”
That didn’t stop Klein’s unpolished gem from landing a coveted spot in competition at the Karlovy Vary film festival in the Czech Republic last year.
“We were super-excited,” Klein said. “The première was great. I had never even shown the film to anyone. It was kind of my first film festival experience — 1,200 people, black tie. (The whole time) I was like, ‘Is it boring? Is it boring?’ You just don’t know. Only a handful of people had seen it. Then it got an eightminute standing ovation. It was surreal.”
The screening elicited positive reviews from established film publications, with industry go-to magazine Variety calling the movie a “plucky, rough-hewn character drama” and Indiewire praising it as “smart, sensitive and instantly engaging” while observing it’s “a resourceful micro-budget affair that works as a drama but will likely prove more effective as a calling card.”
And that’s all you can ask, really. In an industry with no shortage of go-betweens — from producers to distributors, sales agents and funding agencies — to make a feature on a shoestring and get festival attention, positive press and a shot at making another one is the filmmaking equivalent of hitting it out of the park.
What makes Klein’s little movie stand out are the audacious emotional nuances the writer-director weaves into the narrative.
The story follows the unlikely friendship that develops between Chris (Jesse Camacho), an overweight twentysomething with self-confidence issues, and Bobby (actor-director Joey Klein, the filmmaker’s brother), an unpredictable alpha male who takes Chris under his wing.
The intervention leads to a long evening of conversation and intermittent action as the pair ambles through an array of strange situations. Chris fends off phone calls from his mother and ogles the cashier at the local dep while Bobby stirs up trouble with his estranged wife and young daughter.
“I consider it a buddy road movie that takes place in Montreal over one night,” Klein said. “It’s about platonic male intimacy, and how two people are able to forge real closeness. Before the film commences, they each feel so alone in their lives.”
Klein was inspired by the idea of putting a pair of outcasts in close quarters and exploring how the dynamic between them evolves over a relatively short time.
He based Bobby not exactly on his older brother, but on what he knows he’s capable of as a person and an actor.
“I knew I wanted to write a role for him, for multiple reasons,” Klein said. “There were parts of his range that had gone unexplored and that I hadn’t seen in a film before — like the ways in which he acts out, how he can be destructive but almost do that out of love. (Bobby) always has the best intentions, but leaves destruction in his wake.”
For Chris, Klein talked in depth with his good friend Camacho, etching out the lines of a wellmeaning guy who just can’t seem to catch a break.
“There’s an aspect to his character which is very overeager,” Klein said. “He doesn’t understand why that’s a problem. We talked a lot about how we wanted his character to be afforded his own dignity, autonomy and agency — for him to be able to go up to a girl and talk to her, or get frustrated and talk to Bobby the way he does. So on the one hand he is disenfranchised and alienated, and on the other hand I liked how he could have no filter and be domineering at times.”
Shooting on the fly in the streets of Montreal with a barebones crew brought its own challenges. For the film’s opening fight sequence, in which Bobby is picked on by a neighbourhood tough guy, Klein knew he was asking for trouble.
“Shooting a fight scene in front of a métro, you’re going to get attention immediately,” he said. “Someone called the police.”
The same thing happened during a late-night shoot involving Bobby’s daughter (Brielle Robillard).
“Someone saw a little girl getting in and out of a car and thought she was being abducted. Multiple police cars came. Luckily, her mother was 20 feet away.”
Klein’s next film, Like a House on Fire, will begin shooting in 2018. A larger-scale project co-produced by a company in Ontario, it tells the story of a woman who returns home after a three-year absence because of postpartum depression and must renegotiate her relationship with her ex-husband and her fouryear-old daughter.
It would seem Klein has a penchant for putting his characters in uncomfortable surroundings. It’s a means to an end, he explained.
“I tend to want to make movies about people figuring out how to stay close, stay connected, learn from the past and live in the present.”