We Were is a special film for how it presents its emotions honestly and, for the most part, without dialogue. I thought in colors the first time I watched it, especially for how it ties to specific memories regarding new relationships. Director Jonah Haber has created a film that everyone can relate to–heartbreak, after all, is universal.
**We have linked We Were below. Watch Haber’s film and then scroll up to read our chat.
We Were employs a fragmented structure as we see how one young man feels a crush or begins a relationship before it fizzles out as he gets older. Our first loves are almost never our last, and we all try to find courage and communicate in ways that we think we should. One might assume that Haber based his film off of his own personal experiences, but he was quick to set the record straight.
“There’s definitely a decent bit of muself on it, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it autobiographical, especially considering that I wrote it with my friend, Saro [Acharya]. It was kind of pulled from a culmination of both of our experiences, but also just how we can tell a story that doesn’t follow the same arc for each one of the distinct timelines with each of the time periods and relationships. You don’t want them all to end the exact same way or have the same finishing sentiment. We talked a lot about telling a story that has a flow that makes sense. but a lot of the individual scenes are based on things that we experienced. The jar of notes thing is something that we both had, weirdly, gone through. For instance, I had a camp crush, but by no means was that reflected in the film even if the feeling behind it came from someplace real.”
Haber’s film shows us vignettes of connection. We first start at a young age with a young boy crushing on someone at camp before we enter high school and then adulthood and college. Since we see these experiences through one person’s eyes, I couldn’t help but note how we don’t have many stories (feature films, television series, etc.) that focus almost entirely on a male, wistful point of view. We Were plays with memory and time, and I mentioned to Haber how I like to keep mementos in a small, plastic drawer. I don’t look at them very often, but they are there–it helps keep those thoughts and past experiences alive.
“Ultimately, that was the catalyst to make this film in the first place,” he says. “This is a story that I wanted to tell that came from me being in a pretty bad place off of the break-up or end of a situationship that happened. You mentioned the Playbills in your box, but I have separate ones based off of kind of genres of items. I have one for movie tickets and festival passes and another for letters that I got growing up. In 2023, when this situation ended when I moved back to Toronto, I had access to my archive for the first time. I opened a box and I had a feeling very much like the final scene in the short. I reminisced on moments of the past, and it helped me through it. People get out of relationships for so many different reasons and I didn’t want to paint anyone as a good guy or a bad guy. How do you move beyond that? We all have to find a way to do that.”
There is a practical reason that accopanies the thematic choice of not using a lot of dialogue. I enjoyed this aspect of the film, because we communicate so much without words. Our eyes transmit and telegraph so much information when we are in a relationship–even when it gets us in trouble. You say so much without saying anything at all.
“That decision actually stemmed from a limitation of just our funding,” Haber says. “We Were was funded by a trust, which is sort of associated with Filmsupply, which is a stock footage website. A large part of what they look for in projects to funds is that they can sell the individual clips rather than the film as a whole–the shots can be used for stock purposes. They don’t own the film itself, but they do have the ability to license individual shots. So when they’re looking for what they want to put their money into, they look for things that are viable for that purpose. When you’re recording dialogue, you can’t sell that to a McDonald’s commercial–if someone’s saying lines from a script that has nothing to do with what the spot it, they can’t use it. I wanted to write the script in a way that fell in line with that, but it was such an interesting exercise as a filmmaker. It helped me think about how to tell a story without necessarily relying on dialogue.”
When we reach the older stage for our lead character, we can see a new relationship beginning to deteriorate in a moment on a beach. His girlfriend is reading on the shore while he is trying to get her to come into the water. She keeps her eyes on the page as he feels himself getting embarrassed for putting himself out there. Even in relationships, long-term or new, we feel like we need to stay on to keep some magic alive. In this one small moment, the guy begins to dance in the water, realizes that it’s not helping, and he drops down under the surface to hide his feelings.
“That was something that Kevin, our actor, really brought to the part,” Haber says. “It’s not about just being married to what’s on the page. Given how vignette-y the film is, there’s a lot of room for experimentation, and we tried not to explicitly state when we were writing it why the relationship fell apart. It felt almst like that suddenly became too complicated, and it became a question of how you articulate it accurately. The reason almost felt irrelevant to the story. What Kevin brought in his performance actually shaped it as we were shooting it. It’s his natural personality as a person, not even as the character. It was a bit goofier, but we liked how he brought that into the scenes. That water scene was never in the script–we just planned to shoot a beach sequence, but the playful aspect of him calling to her was never written. When we saw him do that, we knew that that was angle we could play with, for sure.”
Something we all latch onto, in and out of relationships, is music. We associate our feelings with something so easily, but sometimes we don’t realize how deep our connection is with a particular song or arrangement. Haber has worked extensively in music videos and with live musical performances with artists like Tinashe and Tate McRae. We Were is a natural fit into Haber’s world for how he utilizes aural characterizations with an emotional connection to his characters.
“From a practical point of view, music videos are just a training ground for how you tell stories without dialogue,” he explains. “Even more so than short films, sometimes, music videos can be such a visual medium since you don’t have dialogue to buy into. If there’s anything you have to show you need to figure out a way to do it purely off of the visual cues, almost like treating the production aspect as a silent film. Music has alway been such an important part of creating this project specifically. We didn’t score it–a lot of the music was stuff that I had in my head during production. Two of my favorite pieces in there are from Washed Out. I did a project with him in 2024 and while we were shooting this, he shared with me a Dropbox of unreleased score that he’d just been playing with. I was listening to some of it and thought the songs would be perfect for this film. It becamse a very integral part of the process of puting it together during the production phase. I do find that during editing, I do turn off the backing tracks, even the temp music, because I find it’s better not to cut to the song unless you’re doing a music video. I think it’s better to cut based off of how long the shots feel they need to be before you finesse and adjust things to the music later.”
