About halfway through hazart’s Stay for the Q&A, there is a sound cue that came so abruptly that it yanked a laugh from the depths of my gut. A panel of artists, actors, and producers sit at the front of the screen after an action-packed flick has played for an excited audience. The moderator, played by indispensable Jim Cummings, asks everyone what their favorite sound is, and, from the back of the theater, we hear the ringing of a cell phone going off. It comes so swiftly that it indicates to us just the kind of target the directing duo is aiming for. When you get this many creative people and so many different egos in the room, bedlam will always be on the menu, and hazart lovingly skewers every minute of it.
Last fall, I attended a post-screening Q&A where the moderator didn’t notice his signals to wrap the line of questioning as he chatted with the actors. It was time to move on to the next film or maybe they needed to clear the theater before the next event, but the staff had to crawl on their belly on the floor in order to get the moderator’s attention as the audience was becoming more and more vocally amused by the Q&A not ending. While this incident had my audience in a titter, the audience in hazart’s film has to deal with a weary director (Rhian Rees), an overzealous cinematographer with a flair for the dramatic (Justin Simien), and a horny young couple (The Shards‘ Igby Rigney and Forever‘s Ali Gallo) who just hope the other brought a condom for when this talk is over. A film like Stay for the Q&A is long overdue.
“The truth is that most of what’s contained in the film is from actual accounts of different people, minus the marriage proposal,” hazart admits. “And the active grinding and making out–those are the most extreme things. We were at a screening of a feature film of a friend of ours, and Johnny Berchtold, who plays the short film filmmaker, had a crazy experience. The moderator clearly had not seen the movie, and the opening question is what we kept true for our film for when Jim [Cummings] asks the panel what they are doing next as the credits roll from the film that they just watched. We thought that was the craziest thing you could ever ask somebody. We left that experience thinking that this is rife for adaptation. There is a funny SNL skit where they call everyone up for the Q&A and there is one guy left asking all the questions, and we’ve experienced some version of that, as short filmmakers particularly. Then we started asking filmmaker friends of ours what was the craziest thing they’ve seen or experienced in a setting like this.”
Everyone probably has an idea of what they want to receive from talent they admire when they attend a type of panel like this, but there are a lot of things to consider. Maybe the actors just arrived in time to be rushed to the venue. Maybe there is tension between a producer and someone else on the crew. Everything should, in theory, follow the lead of a moderator who knows how to corral this many people at the same time. Luckily for us, Cummings’ character has no idea what he’s doing.
“The best Q&As have moderators that have clearly done the research, and they have a question or two so that if the audience isn’t participating, they can keep it going,” they say. “We don’t want to poke fun at this too much either, because we love film festivals and we love the audiences who come out to see good work. Anyone can make a situation like this extra weird. If a moderator doesn’t know what’s going on or if a filmmaker isn’t giving anything and just wants to get out of there or becomes combative, it could get bad. Maybe the questions don’t have anything to do with what we just watched on screen together. No one sets out to be malicious or to cause trouble, but it feels like a perfect storm for something to go wrong.”
The film’s tagline, ‘More of a comment than a question…” is something that has drawn vocal ire from audiences from my own personal experience (god bless you, TIFF audiences). It’s a more common occurrence than you’d expect…
“We saw that at a festival in San Francisco in the Castro, which is about a three thousand seat theater,” hazart says. “Someone asked a really inappropriate question about one of the actors’ personal lives, and that started out as a comment and not a question. That moderator was really good and shut it down and moved everybody on, but some people don’t know how they might sound when they have a microphone in front of them.”
When you see something skewering an aspect of the industry there is the knee-jerk reaction that someone might be offended, but hazart’s film clearly has affection for everyone on the panel. Satirizing the seriousness of the superhero machine or how an actor talks about the craft seems like fair game, but if you can laugh at yourself, an audience will fall in love with you even more.
“Something thing that we’ve advocated for is more transparency and more openness as well as making fun of ourselves,” they admit. “Perhaps there’s a little bit of hesitation because people don’t want to upset the gatekeepers and the powers that be, and we would think that probably continues into award season since the stakes are even higher when it comes to people’s careers. There’s an amazing film called Living in Oblivion that every indie filmmaker should seen if they haven’t yet. It received a reissue for its twentieth anniversary, and it stars Steve Buscemi as he tries making a film. Mike White is bringing the industry in with Cannes for the new season of The White Lotus, so I’m sure there’s something great there.
We understand that there is the potential limitation with the comedy being niche if you’ve never been to a festival, so that’s why some things in here could be considered more broad. The cringe comedy is something we all can understand even if you’ve never attended something like this before. We should be able to go into specific worlds that we don’t understand. We watch Industry on HBO, and we know nothing about the financial tech world. Even though we don’t know half the words out of their mouths, we are totally gripped and engaged. We like that they don’t dumb it down.”
Someone in the cast who understands walking the fine line in the comedy is Justin Simien, who fully commits as Victor Ziegler (one of the greatest names in any movie, ever, if you ask me) the “image crafter” who is as in love with his own voice as much as he is with VistaVision and different aspect ratios. Remember when someone told you that you had to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another in “the right format” or you may as well not watch it at all? Simien delivers an amazing run of dialogue with such gusto that it caught quite the number of eyes on Instagram.
“If we’re honest, we’re more like Simien’s character than any of the others,” they say with a chuckle. “All of the characters up there are people either we are or we have known, in part. We’d like to say maybe we’re Charlotte, the director who thinks she’s too cool for the situation. The casting was a fun process of mostly asking people we know that we had worked with before, and we went to school with Justin. We approached him for the role of Victor Ziegler and he took a bit to get back to us, but his team really thought it was hilarious. We had one casting director, because there are a few roles that we just needed help filling before we did a reading on Zoom to make sure everybody was on the same page. With a short, it can feel like you have a day and a half with the cast.
Jim was who we approached first since he has moderated a lot of things like this. He’s every indie person’s favorite filmmaker, and he’s an incredibly talented actor and writer. For our feature, he moderated something for us, so it was a no-brainer to ask him to be a part of it. We had three cameras shooting at all times, and we may have run it 15 to 18 times from beginning to end–just top to bottom. And then we adjusted coverage as we went with the three cameras. At first, Justin asked how big or broad did we want it, and we told him that Ziegler has no bigness that won’t work. He also had the most silly, gibberish stuff, and it is balanced out by Rhian, who plays Charlotte. She is so dry and her character has obviously been put through the ringer on this film–she will have to answer for all the film’s flaws. Brandt [Daughtery] is the most puppy dog leading man that’s just there to be supportive. He brought all this amazing energy to the part.”
When it comes down to it, it almost sounds like keeping everyone in check is reminiscent of…stepping behind the camera and keeping everyone on the same page?
“That’s what filmmaking is,” Hazart says, plainly. “It’s a bunch of really ambitious personalities all trying to figure out their own space in the hierarchy of whatever movie it is that you’re working on.”
Stay for the Q&A will screen at HollyShorts International Film Festival in the Movies On Movies block at the TCL Chinese 6 Theater on August 19. The film will be also available to stream on the HollyShorts virtual platform.
