AMERICAN INDEPENDENTS
NATHAN SILVER AND MIKE OTT TALK ACTOR MARTINEZ
AFI FEST regulars Mike Ott and Nathan Silver play themselves in ACTOR MARTINEZ, a delightful Denver-set experiment, which they also direct, that blurs the line between documentary and narrative. AFI: This film has an improvised feel, as your two lead actors play characters that share their real names. Did you work from a script or outline?
Nathan Silver: We worked from a two-page outline. We drew a lot from Arthur Martinez’s life and Denver in general. We recreated many events and incidents and pulle d in a lot of people we stumbled on during pre-production in Denver, and used these elements to dictate what we would shoot. AFI: How did you juggle directing and acting in the film? Mike Ott: The way we structured the film was key to getting inside Arthur’s head. We needed to insert ourselves into the movie in some aspect, so it wasn’t a matter of being difficult. It was frustrating, but that frustration made it easy to play frustrated directors. AFI: Part of the fun of watching this film is trying to figure out what is documentary and what is narrative. How did you approach this as filmmakers?
MO: We knew that it would be a puzzle before the shoot, but how to structure the puzzle, we didn’t know. We didn’t figure this out until the edit. We knew we wanted multiple layers of fiction and documentary elements in the mix, but just what we would do with these layers, we had to deal with in post.
NS: Maybe it’s just that I have a short-term memory, but the interactions you see between us and the actors on screen probably give you an idea of what went down. I no longer remember what’s true or false about the movie.