Truer Than Fiction

Lynn Shelton explores improvisation on film

By Annette Boe

Lynn Shelton’s improvisational film My Effortless Brilliance explores the break-up of two men in a deeply passionate yet platonic relationship. As Shelton says, “It’s essentially a ‘buddy movie,’ yet the passion carries the same weight as it would in a romantic film.”

The film is a significant departure from We Go Way Back, Shelton’s successful first effort which took the Grand Jury Prize at the Slamdance Film Festival in 2006. Where that film was a carefully scripted piece exploring the emotional journey of a girl becoming a woman at age 24, Brilliance focuses entirely on male leads and draws heavily on Shelton’s background as an actor in experimental theater and her work on documentary films (The Fruits of Our Labors: 10 Mother Stories (2005); The Clouds That Touch Us Out of Clear Skies (2000); The Down of Her (1995)). As the concept behind Brilliance evolved, Shelton says its shooting style took on a documentary feel, with largely improvised acting.

After the making a splash with her first film, Shelton says she knew her next would be centered on local actor and musician Sean Nelson, her friend and frequent collaborator. The idea for a film about a friendship break-up stemmed from her experiences over the years losing friends who had seemed like soul mates for life.

“I thought that maybe the friendship break-up was just a girl thing,” she says. “But Sean said, ‘Oh yeah, I’d love to explore that topic.’” The intense break-up depicted in the film is in fact based on something from Nelson’s own life. “In the end, I was happy it was with men,” she adds. “It’s harder for some men to talk and figure out emotions and I prefer a heavy subtext under the surface.”

The result is a uniquely imagined story that works as a raw portrayal of male intimacy with the sense that it unfolds before your eyes. As a director, Shelton says she carefully selected her cast and crew, created boundaries to the situation, and then stepped back into an “invisible style”-not telling the actors where to go but just watching for false moments.

Giving up control, she says, “You see people shine and they take the film to a height you can’t reach on your own.”

“I thought that maybe friendship break-up was just a girl thing. But Sean said, ‘I’d love to explore that’”

After her experience shooting We Go Way Back, which involved rehearsed, memorized lines, 10-12 takes of each scene, carefully limited amounts of 35mm film, and a $250,000-$300,000 budget, Shelton realized it would take only a few thousand dollars to use video instead, allowing her unlimited footage. She could also create a more intimate environment with a small cast and crew and less equipment. This intimacy, she says, allowed for a more collaborative process and gave the actors the freedom to improvise.

At the beginning of the process, Shelton says she talked with Nelson about creating a character based on himself and his own experience. “He was willing to be vulnerable and generous with himself,” she says. The two had meetings about characters and Shelton felt she wanted another character-maybe two. Local actor/musician Basil Harris, who appeared in We Go Way Back, had an existing rapport with Nelson that encapsulated the type of friendship she wanted for the film’s climactic break-up.

“One guy is desperate to get his friend back,” Shelton explains. “While the other needs to assert his independence and can’t go back to the way the friendship was before without being super co-dependent.”

Another Seattle actor and director, Calvin Reader, came on board to subtly shift the dynamics and create a relationship triangle to heighten the tension. Shelton asked her three actors to brainstorm storylines while she outlined the movie on a spreadsheet. She says she had about 50 scenes-some with one-line descriptions and others with a particular plot-creating an emotional relationship map to clearly articulate a certain dynamic with each scene.

In one scene, Shelton says she wanted a montage of her lead actively avoiding the day while suffering writer’s block, so Nelson came up with several ideas for images. Other times, Shelton voiced her own clear idea of content. The actors improvised their lines and collaboratively wrote down a few lines.

Shelton says she was careful whenever several takes were needed, as in the emotional moments before a cougar hunt scene. “I didn’t want them to be in the groove of ‘I’ve been rehearsed,’” she says.

Working with DP Ben Kasulke, she shot the writer’s block and break-up scenes in an established home office in Seattle. Changing out a chair and a rug transformed the female-style office into a masculine one, and they required no special lighting equipment other than a few light bulb changes.

The rest of the film takes place at a cabin in Eastern Washington, which the crew shot over two weekends using a Panasonic HVX-200 in 720p. Reader was only available for one weekend, so the crew shot certain scenes out of order except for a drunken night and a cougar hunt scenario. Depending on the scene, the small crew used one to three cameras and recorded onto P2 cards instead of tapes.

Where Shelton had to restrict We Go Way Back to 9.5 hours of footage, My Effortless Brilliance had 20 hours of footage to edit down to 80 minutes of film on Final Cut Pro. “Editing was very different with acres and acres of footage,” she says. “It was similar to a documentary edit where the writing happens in the editing room.”

After screening her first cut to a packed house at the Northwest Film Forum last October, Shelton sent the film to Sundance hoping for a premiere at the festival in January. After further editing changes, she plans to send it off to more festivals. “It’s basically massaging it from this point on until I have a date to premiere,” she says.

Shelton adds that as a result of this film, her new filmmaking priority is to make the production experience “completely positive, so much so that everyone involved wants to repeat it.” She calls the experience of making Brilliance “amazing, fulfilling, fun, and creatively fabulous,” since everyone working on the film was equally involved and felt vital to the production. “It was a true creative collaboration,” she says.

CREW BOX : My Effortless Brilliance

Cast: Sean Nelson, Basil Harris, Calvin Reader, Jeannette Maus
Director of Photography: Benjamin Kasulke
Sound Recording and Design: Vinny Smith
Production Design: Jasminka Vukcevich
Producers: Lynn Shelton and Mark Price
Director: Lynn Shelton
Writers: Lynn Shelton, Sean Nelson, Basil Harris, Calvin Reader, Jeannette Maus
Camera Operator: Nate Miller
Additional camera operators: Lynn Shelton and Elie Goral
Editors: Lynn Shelton and Sean Donavan
Music Written and Performed by: Ted Speaker