Quiet City Q&A – IFC Center – August 29, 2007

Quiet City Q&A – IFC Center – August 29, 2007

Aaron Katz, Director
Brendan McFadden, Producer
Erin Fischer, “Jamie”
Chris Lankenau, “Charlie”
Andy Reed, Cinematographer
Keegan DeWitt, Music
…and others

Quiet City is currently playing at the IFC Center for a week-long run and is part of the series, “The New Talkies: Generation DIY.” FYI, last Thursday, I also attended indieWIRE's "An Evening with Generation DIY" panel discussion at the Apple Store SoHo.

Aaron noted that a lot of people who worked on Quiet City from the cast & crew were in the audience (including Joe Swanberg, whose Hannah Takes the Stairs played the IFC Center last week, Michael Tully, and more). Aaron went into the background of Quiet City. He wrote a script for it in August of 2006 while he was on layover at the Cincinnati airport. He’d been frustrated with writing a different script, but liked the characters in it, so he purchased a blank notebook at the airport and started writing new script. He made up some rules to finish the script like writing at least 10 pages a day and to not go back and look at anything he wrote till it was done. He shot Quiet City for one week in Brooklyn in October of 2006.

Audience Questions

Q: How did you get the dialogue to be so natural?

Aaron: I had a full script, but the actors put most of it into their own words.

Chris: We broke the script down into scenes to memorize.

Erin: It was kind of natural because Chris and I never met before and we talked about some things that really happened in our lives.

Q: How much did it cost to make the film?

Aaron: Not much at all.

Q: What were some of the challenges to produce the film?

Brendan: In pre-production, we wondered how could we do this for nothing? For post-production, Aaron edited it at IFC Center where he works.

Q: Was mostly natural lighting used on the film?

Keegan: We didn’t have a lot of resources. We borrowed an HD camera. None of us ever shot HD before. Friends contributed resources. A lot of the lighting was available and natural. We carried household lamps on the subway. The walking scene outdoors in the night was kind of difficult.

Q: Why did you name the film Quiet City?

Brendan: I had a dream where I was watching a black & white version of the film and it was called Quiet City. Also liked a band called Pan-American that had a song called “Quiet City.”

Aaron: We needed a place holder for the title in the screenplay and used Quiet City, and stuck with it, and it worked.

Q: Did you have permits?

Aaron: No. A police officer came up to us when we were shooting the scene on the subway platform at the 7th Avenue F station in Park Slope and said it was okay.

Q: Where did you find Chris (“Charlie”)

Chris: At a party at my house. Aaron convinced me to come to an audition.

Q: How did you pick the music in the film?

Keegan: I usually try to go by an idea of sad little happiness. What small things are like before they’re attained. Tried to make it as simple and sparse as possible.