DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

"Like most filmmakers, I love to make movies. But we don’t get to do it enough – movies are complex to mount, they require teams of people and years of preparation and fundraising. But with Alison we wanted to say, ‘We’ve got some time, we’ve got some resources, let’s make use of them and get productive.’ We took a sudden leap of faith, and where we were gonna end up nobody knew. The movie was about the process of discovery, of hammering it out and making something and learning only later what it was that we made.

"I’d been watching several mumblecore movies at the time, and was inspired not only by those filmmakers’ resourcefullness and spontaneity, but also by their focus on smaller, more human-sized stories. The irony is that a micro-budget film like Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation is worth way more as a filmgoing experience than something that cost literally 200 times more, like Superman Returns. And there’s something almost literary about so-called ‘small films.’ You don’t have to destroy the world with an asteroid in these movies; some stories are better for their brevity or their small scale. They’re ‘short stories,’ in the best sense of the word – stories meant to be consumed at one sitting. That’s what a movie is.

"On the other hand, I’d been wanting to experiment with some new filmmaking techniques that I’d been working on in preparation for another project – techniques like long, single takes, very basic compositions, and making something interesting happen in front of the camera, rather than cutting and manipulating several takes into being ‘better’ through editing. I liked the committment of a single camera angle; it was a challenge, like playing tennis with a really high net. Also, I’d been watching the films of Bela Tarr, the great Hungarian filmmaker, and his use of the steadicam was breathtaking. I wanted to see if we could find that same hypnotic approach, that immersiveness, with a digital camera like he did through 35mm.

"So with this in mind, I went out looking for people to play with. It was May, 2008. My first thought was to get the best actors and crew I know involved, and have it be a sort of ‘friends and family only’ affair. Production Designer Linda Jean Marlowe was first on-board; both her fun spirit and her unfortunate battle with ovarian cancer informed the movie at every turn. Sadly, Linda passed away after shooting was completed, Jan. 4, 2009. The disease is even referenced at one point in the movie, and because of Linda’s impending health issues a feeling of mortality seemed to hang over the project like a shadow.

"At the same time, when I asked Lauren Fortuna to come on board and literally carry the movie, she informed me that she was pregnant, and would be pretty rotund and physically exhausted around the time of the shoot. Not to be deterred, we decided to forge ahead anyway, and suddenly our movie was gonna be a movie about a pregnant lady. Hmm. We just needed to give her nap times, and not get too rigorous with what we required of her. Thus, even in the shadow of mortality, there was renewal and new beginnings and stirrings of new life.

"In this spirit, Alison was born. We rolled with the punches, made use of the accidents, found beauty in unlikely spots. It was an exercise in punk rock filmmaking, a spit in the eye toward immobilization due to scheduling or budgeting or lack of resources. By September, 2008 we were done – a complete and amazing feature conceived, created and shot in less than four months. To call it a labor of love is to undersell it.

The cool thing is, many of these unplanned moments are richer and more interesting than the things we might’ve planned. For me, it was a new way to make art – to trust yourself, trust people around you, and especially trust the process. It’ll be kinda hard to go back to making movies any other way."

-- Paul Schattel, Director