Talk About the ‘Weather’
Cold Weather is the thoughtful lovechild of Sherlock Holmes and mumblecore cinema, though its director would deny it. Opening Feb. 4, the film chronicles the delightfully average life of brother-and-sister pair Doug and Gail until, about 40 minutes in, Doug’s ex-girlfriend Rachel mysteriously disappears. Aided by his coworker Carlos, forensic studies dropout Doug attempts to follow the clues, stymied only by a dislike of Swedish fish and the lack of a car. Cold Weather is a delicious blend of comically pedestrian moments and nearly suspenseful car chases. We caught up with writer/director Aaron Katz to discuss his latest low-budget masterpiece.
New York Press: How would you say your filmmaking style has evolved since your first film, Dance Party USA?
Aaron Katz: One thing that’s definitely evolved is the approach to acting. Dance Party USA adheres pretty strictly to the script. Looking at that movie now, I guess I wish it was looser. Quiet City is really, really loose, I think as a response to Dance Party. There was a script, but people didn’t stick to it at all. Cold Weather is taking what I learned from both of those movies and applying it. People do stick to the script but there’s, I hope, naturalness and looseness.
It sounds like your actors had some freedom.
The script was written with Cris [Lankenau] and Trieste [Dunn] in mind. Cris I’d worked with before—he’s in Quiet City—and Trieste went to North Carolina School of the Arts, where I went to school. I had the idea that they would make a good brother and sister, and that was the starting point. But they hadn’t ever met. So a few months before we started shooting the movie, before we got money together or the script was even finished, I wanted them to get to know each other a little bit and start that relationship, so they would have a history together.
You’ve mentioned that Cold Weather is a genre film. Is it also an entry into the mumblecore movement?
As much as it plays with genre, we also really wanted to make the mystery stand up on its own merits, not have the mystery be a joke or a spoof. I don’t think it’s so much an entry into mumblecore as it’s just an attempt to make a genre movie that has real people in it. That’s what we’re really trying to do, have the people be really complex and three-dimensional, but also have the genre element be satisfying by itself.
Is that effort what defined the tone of the film?
As I was writing the first draft, I hadn’t anticipated there being any mystery in it. I started writing [it] to be about a brother and sister, but I was reading a lot of detective books at the time. I just started incorporating this mystery stuff kind of on a whim, not thinking that I would go very far with it, but then it got really fun to write.
So I have to ask about the ending. Why the abrupt finish when the action was about to climax?
As much we love the mystery elements of the movie, the story is ultimately about Doug and Gail and their relationship. Ending in the middle of a moment where there’s something that hasn’t been resolved yet is a way to suggest that their relationship continues on past the movie… One thing we actually shot wasn’t a resolution to the mystery, but we were going to do this montage at the end of the film that would take us from shots of downtown Portland to shots of residential areas and suburbs and rural areas and then wilderness. The idea being that it would set it in a really specific place. So we actually cut it together and were viewing it [but] it just didn’t feel right.
You’ve shot in Portland before. How does the city inform your filmmaking process?
A lot of locations were written into the script. I would say 75 percent of the film is shot within a 20-block radius of where I went to high school. I wanted to make a film that really captured what Portland feels like. We tried to include the sky in a lot of shots, and that’s a really important part of what it feels like to be in Portland during any time except for summer, really. I think anyone from Portland will feel like it’s a city they recognize. It’s weird how some films try and disguise the city that they’re shot in. I just saw Love and Other Drugs, which is shot in Pittsburgh, where I live now, and I spent the entire film not being entirely sure that it was Pittsburgh. Why hide that it’s shot there?