A mumblecore fan gets talked into a bigger film
‘Around the Sun,’ set in French chateau, playing at two S.F. festivals
Jonathan Kiefer was working as an editor and a film critic when a DVD crossed his desk of Andrew Bujalski’s 2002 drama, “Funny Ha Ha.” Set in Boston, where the Connecticutborn Kiefer studied film at Boston University, the milieu piqued his interest.
A prime example of what would come to be known as the mumblecore genre — tinybudgeted films with production values to match and an emphasis on everyday lives and more dialogue than plotdriven — the film focused on a recent college graduate’s work and romantic travails. Kiefer was struck by it and shared his new find with a friend.
“She came back, ‘This is terrible. What do you even see in this?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I know, but there’s something about it.’ There was something about it that was totally indie, no frills, but true to life in a way that I responded to,” says Kiefer, who now lives in Alameda, during a conversation at SFFilm’s FilmHouse, where he recently started a residency.
“I was inspired by the mumblecore people a little bit. I think it was that wave of filmmaking that sort of woke me up in terms of starting to make stuff.”
That Kiefer, 46, cites mumblecore as an inspiration may seem surprising in light of “Around the Sun,” director Oliver Krimpas’ debut feature, for which Kiefer wrote the screenplay; it screens Thursday, Jan. 30, and Wednesday, Feb. 5 at SF IndieFest (and Feb. 17 at the Mostly British Film Festival). It is an elegant drama, romantic and tinged with scifi, and inspired by Bernard le Bovier de Fonte
nelle’s 1686 science book “Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds,” in which a philosopher and a marquise discuss astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’ assertion that the Earth circles the sun.
The film stars Gethin Anthony (“Game of Thrones”) as Bernard and Cara Theobold (“Downton Abbey”) as Maggie, Britons in Normandy. He’s a film location scout and she is leading him on a tour of the chateau where Fontenelle wrote the book, a favorite of Maggie’s.
Gorgeously shot by San Franciscoraised cinematographer Michael Edo Keane with an elegant score by Steven Gutheinz, “Around the Sun” riffs off Fontenelle’s notion of parallel universes, reintroducing the characters and certain scenes with alteration to details that shift the relationship between them.
Kiefer’s own life was changed by an altered routine when he and his partner, Amy, traveled to England to visit her aunt. Kiefer remembered he had a friend from college, Krimpas, who lived in London and who had made several shorts, but had yet to direct a feature. It was a fruitful reunion, albeit one that took years to realize. Their first idea for a collaboration was overly ambitious for a first feature. Then Kiefer thought about “Funny Ha Ha.”
“I said to Oliver, ‘The technology has changed and there’s ways to do it now. We should just try to do something really, really small,” Kiefer says. “He wasn’t quite sold on that, which is why we wound up with a movie that’s set in a mansion in France.”
As it turned out, Krimpas knew someone with a chateau and sent Kiefer pictures.
“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s beautiful and how amazing it would be to make a movie in France.’ And I was still thinking like guerrillastyle, like runandgun. You just do a really strippeddown, simple story with as few people as possible, just to sort of get the first feature under your belt.”
Kiefer came up with a dozen log lines for a possible movie, but the fact that the chateau really was where Fontenelle wrote his book provided the ultimate inspiration. Kiefer read “Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds,” finding it charming and still contemporary. Ironically, the production lost access to the location but found a similar chateau down the road.
As an indication of how long it can take even the most modestly budgeted film to actually get made, Kiefer remembers sitting on his inlaws’ couch in Nevada City, working on his script. He and Amy had just bought their house, but it wasn’t ready to move into yet. Amy was pregnant with their second daughter. She’s 3 now. (Their elder girl is 6.)
Eventually, it all came together. Kiefer, who had visited Paris right after college but nowhere else in France, went on location for the shoot in Normandy. He remembers drinking Calvados (something Bernard and Maggie do in the movie), picking apples, attending a wild boar feast prepared by their host, and going to the set every day and watching a story that had been in his imagination spring to life.
“We’re all staying here, making this project, having a good time and working hard,” Kiefer says. “It felt really nice, and it felt sort of sheltered from the real world in a way that was clearly special and rare. It was a treasured experience, and it sort of set a strange precedent for future film projects.”
Kiefer himself is a director as well as a screenwriter with several shorts under his belt. The latest of those, “Let’s Not Go There,” shot in his driveway by “Around the Sun” cinematographer Keane, makes its debut in March at Silicon Valley’s Cinequest Film & Creativity Festival.
At FilmHouse, Kiefer is focusing on two projects. He is writing a feature set backstage at a regional Shakespeare festival about the relationship between the actresses playing Gertrude and Ophelia in a production of “Hamlet.” Then there is a short he has been wanting to make for his daughters that he describes as a “somewhat animated and freeform essay” about his parents, who died before the girls were born.
Someday, if his children are interested, Kiefer can envision putting them in one of his films.
“It’s an interesting thing, the intersection between art and life,” Kiefer says. “It sounds sort of pompous when you say it that way, but once you have the bug and you’re thinking about making things and then you spend time with other people who are doing it, it’s like, of course, that’s a way of making sense of the world or just taking a break from the world. I’m always thinking about that.”