Speaker 1:	Thank you very much. Thank you so much, and let me reintroduce our producers. We've got Dan Janvey, producer; Michael Gottwald, producer; John Williams, Class of '06, associate producer; and Matt Parker, co-producer; and we have a little visual interest over here, they were saying, "Were you gonna play the whole credits?" and I said, "Well, yes. Our students always watch all the credits. Plus, if you're gonna get your first credit it might be office intern, so you want to see it!" So thanks, I know we've got lots of questions from the audience, I just want to ask one to start. There's such an incredible sense of place in the movie. And, as producers, you had to kind of realize the creative vision of director Benh Zeitlin and make it happen with what you had. And I just wondered if you could talk about one of the more spectacular things that you had to do to make this, to make the flood or the hurricane or something like that. Just to start off with the-
Dan Janvey:	Sure. Should I-
Matt Parker:	Yup.
Dan Janvey:	Matt, do you want to start?
Matt Parker:	Go ahead. 
Dan Janvey:	Okay, Matt. Thank you, Matt. 
Matt Parker:	You're welcome, Dan. 
Dan Janvey:	It's a good question. 
Matt Parker:	Thank you. 
Dan Janvey:	I think the biggest, from a locations perspective, one of the biggest challenges of mounting the film was how are we gonna flood the town. That's normally an extremely expensive thing to do, and if you're doing it in a bigger film, I guess you'd build a set on a stage that you then flood-
Matt Parker:	Mm-hmm (affirmative) 
Dan Janvey:	Or you would do it using visual effects and CGI, and so one of the ways we went about doing that is ... If you notice in the beginning of the movie, every house in the bathtub is on stilts, it's up in the air, and that's actually true of the area that we shot the film in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, where the farther down South you get, the higher the houses get to avoid flooding, because they're in flood zones. And so, because of that thing, the houses are nine to 13 feet up in the air, and we then went and recreated the bathtub in a swamp. And so, let's say you have a-
Speaker 1:	Sorry, you should realize [crosstalk 00:02:50]
John Williams:	Bob. 
Dan Janvey:	Should we maybe not do this slide? Because this is better than I-
Speaker 1:	Yeah, I just [crosstalk 00:02:50]
Dan Janvey:	We'll leave it on this. This is our system prop master Bob. 
Bob:	Oh, [crosstalk 00:02:56]
Dan Janvey:	That's the beginning of a school boat. 
Bob:	It would be nice to have a show-and-tell right here. 
Dan Janvey:	That's the burnt out truck that we built.
Bob:	There's-
Dan Janvey:	Wait, can you pause?
Speaker 1:	Yes. Sorry, sorry.
Bob:	It's probably one of the first times people have seen the truck that became the Turk. 
Dan Janvey:	Yeah. So we brought in a guy from Providence, Rhode Island, which I hope doesn't go under in Snow-Pocalypse, John did Medical School in Providence after graduating from Swarthmore, working on a piece of the [inaudible 00:03:26]. So let's say you have a stop sign, and it's five feet off the ground, if you then put that stop sign in water, just sticking out of water, it'll look like the water rose up. And so we rebuilt a bunch of our sets in a swamp. And everything got destroyed. But that was one of the key things is we found a swamp that had all of these busted houses with water up to their porches, and we said, "This sells the effect," so we just literally rebuilt their house in the middle of water to make it look like the water rose up.
Bob:	Well there were actually three stages. One, there's the bathtub as you see it in the beginning, then there's the flooded version of the bathtub, and then there's the kind of ... After the levy is blown up it's all dried out and dead and everything, and those are all three separate locations that, as Dan was saying, we put physical markers to portray that it is the same place. 
Matt Parker:	It was also in that, too, we were really keeping an eye on the water levels, and we had to pull up a couple shoots, I think the first day we had to pull up a week because ... Where they're kind of boating around the dam, they opened the dam and let all the water out, so we couldn't have even had a boat in there. So we pulled the shoot up a week to achieve that, and then to get up to Honey Island where Dan was just talking, where there's the houses that are built right on the water, the water level was going up and down, so I think we had to pull that up a day or so too. So it was really like timing and a lot of other things to get that look right, and to really sell it in the movie. 
Michael Gottwald:	There were a lot of different things in the movie that we had to keep track of: the weather and water levels, which is a really bizarre way to live your life, like we had someone on the crew that would look at water levels in like Minnesota to know in like a week what the water levels will be like in Louisiana on the Mississippi River. 
Matt Parker:	Especially, it's like army core engineer information and to a bunch of us who've never done anything like that ... I remembered several arguments like, "The information is saying this, or it's saying this? Should we go shoot this tomorrow or a week from ... " Luckily we got it right. 
Michael Gottwald:	And that was with the BP oil spill on top of it. Which was physically encroaching on our shot locations as we were making it. 
Dan Janvey:	And it felt like the world was ... It's a movie about the end of the world, and the movie's inspired by ... It's actually not a New Orleans film, which is a little bit of a misconception, it's inspired mostly by the bayou communities of coastal Louisiana and specifically it's a part of the country where coastal erosion is making communities disappear very rapidly, and there's a football field of land that's just disappearing into the gulf every, I think it's hour or day. And so we wanted to make a movie that sort of dramatized this sense of what happens when your home is literally disappearing. And then it's largely a fishing community, and the BP oil spill just added this extra layer to what we were doing, because it literally felt like southern Louisiana and the gulf of Mexico was just gonna be destroyed. And it was a logistical nightmare on top of that. 
Matt Parker:	Actually the irony of the BP oil spill, which occurred on day one of our shoot, was that for a while there, and no joke actually, they employed a lot of the people in the area to go out with their boats, if you owned a boat you stood to make a lot of money, and go out and help the cleanup efforts. So for a while there, this chief location that we had was turned into something out of like ET, it was like a center for basically the operation to go out and clean up, BP as well as the people working with them. But then after that, after BP left, that flow of money just wasn't there, but there also wasn't any shrimp or crawfish or crab that you could go out and farm. So for a while there, it was very, very dire straits for the community. This was all after we had gotten-
Michael Gottwald:	BP also commandeered a helicopter we had booked for the evacuation scene. Who was it, was it Wink that was gonna go up in the helicopter, or Nazy? 
Dan Janvey:	No, they were supposed to be ... After my starring scene, you mean? When I'm pinning them down? 
Michael Gottwald:	And J Will-
Matt Parker:	When Wink is sick, if you see a big bushy blonde hair fellow, that's Dan. So Dan, in addition to producing the film, is killing the leading man in the film. So way to go, Dan.
Dan Janvey:	Thank you. But, no, the helicopter was one of the few things we couldn't get, actually. 
John Williams:	We had a plan, we had it booked, and BP paid them more and they took our helicopter. 
Matt Parker:	It's not just that they paid them more, the way- 
Dan Janvey:	We learned a lot about the BP rescue, like the cleanup operation, it was massive. 
Matt Parker:	Mm-hmm (affirmative). 
Dan Janvey:	The way BP worked, which we're sort of conflicted, because I guess it's good that they had to clean up their own mess to some extent, but they booked every single helicopter for 24 hours a day for months at a time. 
Matt Parker:	And employed every person down there.
Dan Janvey:	Yeah. 
Matt Parker:	It was kind of like buying their soul back in a sense, you know? 
Dan Janvey:	But we should make this as open a conversation as possible. 
Speaker 1:	So we're gonna bring a mic around 
Michael Gottwald:	Or you can just yell- [crosstalk 00:09:38]
Speaker 1:	Question from the audience. 
Matt Parker:	In the back, yes?
Speaker 7:	Are any of you guys actually from that area? How did you decide to, I guess, shoot that area? How did you get a feel for the-
Matt Parker:	Sure, Benh, who's the director, has been living in Louisiana since August of 2006. And he's always had an affinity for the area and we made a short film down there with him in 2007, and he's basically been living there since, and it's very much a part of Benh's ... It's a center of his creative process that he wants to tell stories with Louisianans about Louisiana, because it's a ... If you've been down there, you know it's a fascinating place, and it's a place that has its own philosophy and sort of feels like it's almost totally separate from the country. It feels like a totally different world. And that's always not only fascinated Benh, but fascinated us too, and since college it's the closest thing that I've had to home too. 
	And I think as far as ... Benh is interested in telling stories that resonate universally, and I think finding the folklore in the specifics of a place. So although the bathtub is not an actual place, it's inspired by the communities that Dan was talking about down there that actually are cut off by levies and actually have been receiving, or the water has been rising for years and years and years and what started as like 800 families and now down to 50, all of that is very much happening and what I think Benh wanted to do is take that predicament, that kind of environmental predicament, but also find some universal themes and story elements in there and create his own place by distilling all the things in south Louisiana, all the disparate cultural elements, which are very disparate, there's a lot of different cultures going on in south Louisiana, and putting them in one place. 
	But to answer your question ... Also, additionally, there was just an exhaustive rehearsal process with the actors to the point where if something didn't feel right coming out of one of their mouths, like if they didn't feel comfortable saying something or a word didn't quite feel ... They said like, "I think I would actually say something more like this," then Benh would rewrite the script with them in that scene. And so it was an intense amount of collaboration. Not only ... We had a lot of crew from New Orleans, we had a lot of crew from the area, and there was also an intimate collaboration between Benh and the actors too. Which they're all from South Louisiana. And they're very different from their parts, obviously, but they collaborate with Benh to kind of hammer out the story and the script. Are we calling people? Is that a-
Speaker 1:	Yeah, go for it!
Matt Parker:	Sure. 
Speaker 8:	So, I know I'm not the only one who was absolutely blown away by Hushpuppy, and she's just ... For someone so young, channels this sort of light and fire that is so unbelievable. So I'd just love to hear you guys, and I don't know how closely you worked with her, but just what the process of working with someone so young with such a gift was like.  
Matt Parker:	We can't speak to the actual directing her, because that's Benh's thing, but I think that it was actually way more of a traditional process, or if Benh was here he'd say it's more of a traditional process with her, actually, that although she was only six when we shot, he would sort of ... It was a traditional process for an actress in that he would tell her what was going on in a scene, she would learn her lines, he would say, "And you have to remember that this had just happened so this and that and this," and she would have been basically like, "I got it, I got it, I got it," and then she would just go into a scene and just like transform-
Speaker 7:	Yeah?
Matt Parker:	And then when the camera calls cut, she gets out of it. I mean she just has a natural something inside of her that allows her to do that. 
Dan Janvey:	J, what are some memories you have of young Quvenzhane? 
John Williams:	So I had maybe the most boring position on the film to recount to other people, but I think I can contribute a little bit to who Nazy is, she is just an exceptional human being, I think it's sort of palpable being in the same room as her. She would come ... I would be basically in a gas station office for like 14, 16 hours a day trying to figure out how we were supposed to do the insane things we were supposed to do with the no money that we had. And so I would be really fatigued just sitting there, stressing, my hair would be going everywhere and they would be shooting inside of essentially an airtight box in Southern Louisiana in June or May for, well, maybe I shouldn't say the actual hours, I don't know. I don't know how long a child's allowed to work legally. 
Matt Parker:	She worked for 24 hours a day. 
John Williams:	Yeah. The adults would be working inside of the hot box for fourteen hours and she would come into the office at like ten pm just wanting to play, she was just not done. She was unstoppable. She's just a force. And I learned really quickly you couldn't ... I would go crazy and start cursing or whatever, and if I had any sense that Nazy was around, I would have to shut it down because she would remember verbatim how you messed up. You know what I mean? She retains information better than most human beings do, and emotes as well. She's the real deal. 
Dan Janvey:	She comes from a really wonderful family too. She has great parents who keep her focused on being a kid most of the time too.
John Williams:	Her mom was my favorite colleague. I sat next to her at Sundance. She's just-
Dan Janvey:	And when her dad would come to set, he would fish. He'd find a place to go fish. 
Matt Parker:	But she's actually very much not like her character at all. She hates to get dirty. 
John Williams:	She hates flies. 
Matt Parker:	True fact. And as she would say, a big difference is she wears pants. 
Dan Janvey:	You know, John was being modest about not being an exciting position. There was one story-
John Williams:	Oh, do we want to recount that now? 
Dan Janvey:	Yeah, do you want to tell it? 
John Williams:	Dan, I think you should recount it. 
Dan Janvey:	Parker, you start. The highlight of maybe our whole time in the Bayou.
Matt Parker:	Well, so we had to get port-a-potties, there weren't very many- Let's first establish what John's position was, what he was doing day to day, so we know what this means.
John Williams:	Have you guys heard of laptops?
Matt Parker:	Dan, describe what he was doing. 
Dan Janvey:	Well the truth is that John had an extremely important job.
John Williams:	I was the accountant. Let's not beat around the bush. Yeah. But the cool thing about being the accountant, other than the fact that it is not cool, is every single ... In many ways I always thought that you could tell the weirdest story about the making of the movie, because every single dollar that was spent passed through you and so you sort of know the insane forensics of the movie. And I do think that the amount of weird stuff that you saw, you know, people buying like birdseed, and like fenders, and I don't even know. [crosstalk 00:17:36] But you sat inside a lot, is I guess the not fun part. 
Matt Parker:	He also, in a sense, became like a therapist. Because when he's dealing with money everybody wants to talk to you about their life, and so John was very good to a lot of people in that sense. But you did become the group's comfort.
John Williams:	But there are probably other questions, so we should ...
Michael lGottwald:	But it also made you go crazy. 
John Williams:	Yeah.
Michael Gottwald:	Like we pushed you to the brink of sanity. 
John Williams:	Yeah, anyway, I rescued a port-a-potty at one point and that's the story. We can-
Michael Gottwald:	No, no, no, okay, we had this ... This is actually a good making up story. So in the end of the film while they're walking on the road, that's the road that's called the causeway, and it's the causeway to Isle de Jean Charles, which is a central influence on the film, and it really is this road with water on both sides of it, and so we're shooting the hero shot of the film and wherever you go in a movie, big or small, you have to have bathrooms, and so we had a port-a-potty left on the side of the road, and usually you sort of bring it in in the morning and bring it out at night or the next day, and a storm hit and the port-a-potty got carried out into the water, and if was after a couple of days of being used so it was just filled with poop. And when you're in communities that aren't your own, you really have to sort of not let stuff like that happen. And so John heroically swam out to the port-a-potty- 
Matt Parker:	Tied to a truck with a rope around his body.
Michael Gottwald:	Indiana Jones-type stuff. And he lassoed the port-a-potty and literally pulled it to shore just swimming in fecal matter. Our Oscar nominations sit on your shoulders. 
John Williams:	It's thrilling, doing the accounting and swimming in poop. 
Michael Gottwald:	Similar. Here in the front.
Speaker 9:	So I guess this is more of a Swarthmore focused question-
Michael Gottwald:	Yeah. 
Matt Parker:	Michael and I are ready for this one. 
Speaker 9:	How did your background at Swarthmore prepare you to swim out into the ocean-
John Williams:	Nice. Nice. I think every day-
Speaker 9:	Was a swim test a part of that? 
John Williams:	Absolutely, I just want to thank the administration. No, at Swarthmore you had to be prepared to get weird every single day. And that's what I did in the Bayou. I had no background in accounting and I was prepared to get weird and figure out how that worked. So I did, and one day it was accounting and the next day it was a port-a-potty. And I think absolutely Swarthmore prepared me for that. 
Dan Janvey:	One of the reasons we hired him for the job was sort of because of Swarthmore, like he must be a smart guy!
John Williams:	Yeah.
Dan Janvey:	Like, he can probably add and subtract. 
John Williams:	We were just talking in the office and they were like, "Yeah, it was because, you know, you had like encountered finance before, and you were like a science major," and I was just like, "I studied film and media studies and minored in German," but yeah, I had a bunch of friends who graduated from here that they knew who were really good at science. They mistook me for [crosstalk 00:21:21]
Michael Gottwald:	You had like this weird perception that John would be really good at doing homework. 
John Williams:	I had recently taken the [inaudible 00:21:30], I think that did it too.
Michael Gottwald:	We don't even know what that is. 
Matt Parker:	Yeah, it helps. 
John Williams:	To answer your question, the swim test helped, yeah. 
Michael Gottwald:	Keep them coming!
Speaker 10:	I saw that the movie was inspired by a play, can you talk a little bit about how the play impacted the movie? 
Matt Parker:	Dan, it's you. 
Dan Janvey:	Matt, I feel like you should take this one.
Matt Parker:	No. 
Dan Janvey:	The play, that's a great question, is called Juicy and Delicious. It's a long, complicated answer. I think in short the play is about a young boy named Hushpuppy with a dad, Wink, who's dying-
Matt Parker:	Ten years old. 
Dan Janvey:	Yeah, ten year old boy in this mythic Southern landscape, and the end of the world is crashing down on Wink and Hushpuppy, and Wink's teaching Hushpuppy how to survive the Southern apocalypse. So I think you see that's all in the movie, and then what we did is we took that story, and then took the story of what's happening in these towns in Southern Louisiana that are threatened and disappearing, and we wanted to make a movie that used both ingredients to tell each other, if that makes sense. It doesn't really, does it?
John Williams:	I feel like the idiom of the film is like-
Michael Gottwald:	It's like the language? The way they talk?
John Williams:	Yeah, right, the dialect-
Michael Gottwald:	I don't think-
John Williams:	I mean, it definitely borrows pretty heavily from the play.
Michael Gottwald:	Sort of, yeah.
Matt Parker:	Not dialect, but like certain phrases and certain sayings that Wink has are definitely borrowed from the play. It's sort of like comically, well it's not so comic in the film, but in the play it's much more comic, the relationship between them, and how he kind of always refers to her as if she was a male.
Dan Janvey:	It's a he in the play.
Matt Parker:	Right, it's a he, right. Okay, fair enough. You know what I'm saying.
Dan Janvey:	The truth is that the adaptation of the play really came to life when we found these places in Southern Louisiana, and we felt like these communities somehow tell the story of a parent dying and a child preparing for that. So yeah, something to think about. That's your Friday night. Get wild. 
Matt Parker:	And Dan did help develop, and I think Michael did too-
Dan Janvey:	Yeah.
Matt Parker:	Like what this is, in the early days, before it got to be a real production. These are true creative producers, so if anybody's interested in film, you can do the suit type thing but also have a heavy hand in the creative process, for the record.
Speaker 11:	Could you talk a little bit about how the aurochs were created in the film [inaudible 00:24:34]. They looked beautiful.
Michael Gottwald:	So, the starting place for the whole idea of the aurochs is you never really know if they're real or from Hushpuppy, or if Hushpuppy's imagining them, and I would say that's true a lot of the film, and one one of the central aesthetic mechanisms of the movie is that this is really coming from her point of view and her imagination. And so, when we went about conceiving how we were gonna do the aurochs, the starting place discussion was how would Hushpuppy see these things? 
	And so immediately it did not make sense to us to have them be CGI or VFX, and so they had to be real. Because to Hushpuppy they would be absolutely real. And we looked to older movies before the days of CG, and we specifically looked at a movie like Willow which does this type of thing, and we looked at a lot of miniature trick photography and so what we figured out is if you ... We raised these baby Vietnamese pot-belly pigs from birth and we actually had like a pig mother, pig whisper person train them, and we figured out a way to dress them in fur costumes and how to get them comfortable, and then we taught them a series of tricks, so how ever many-
Matt Parker:	Popcorn, popcorn was the key.
Michael Gottwald:	How ever many shots there are in the film of the aurochs corresponds to something that we taught them how to do, so in the end, the finale shot is the aurochs bowing down to Hushpuppy; that was one of the things. It would usually involve food, and it was combined with trick photography, where the pigs were about this long and this tall, so they were tiny, and so we built tiny sets to make them look huge. And the whole thing-
Matt Parker:	And we taught them how to run on treadmills as well.
Michael Gottwald:	So all of this was timed perfectly, so we had like a six week shoot, seven? 
Dan Janvey:	Seven and a half weeks. 
Michael Gottwald:	So it was time that the little piglets would be the right size. So that was going on in New Orleans while we were in the Bayou, we'd rented a firehouse. And by the time we got finished with the principle photography, the whole crew moved up and then shot the pigs-
Matt Parker:	It was surreal.
Michael Gottwald:	At the right age. Yeah.
Matt Parker:	It was absolutely surreal. The only exception to the CG VFX thing is obviously the confrontation at the end. Every other aurochs shot is shot in-camera on 60 millimeter film, and those shots were the only things that were green-screened in the film. 
Michael Gottwald:	With digital.
Matt Parker:	Yeah. With everything else it's a practical shot. And we love that type of Cinema. It actually, from a story point of view, doesn't throw you out of Hushpuppy's world. 
Michael Gottwald:	Because there's no technology in the bathtub. There's no computers, there's no I-Phones, the most technology you'll see is like an engine on a boat. 
Matt Parker:	So it sort of fits the whole universe of the film that these things are gonna be real. 
Dan Janvey:	I love those little things. 
Michael Gottwald:	John, is it true one of those pigs is your namesake? 
John Williams:	Yeah, there's a J Will. There's a J Will pig. I think what other pig names ... There was Bo Biden, there was-
Michael Gottwald:	Hannah Montana.
John Williams:	Hannah Montana, Mona, and J Will. 
Matt Parker:	Ohio?
John Williams:	Ohio.
Dan Janvey:	Well no, the Ohio pig was killed. 
John Williams:	Well, one of the Ohio pigs was killed. 
Dan Janvey:	Yeah.
John Williams:	Not by us, please. Calm down. 
Michael Gottwald:	It had pig Leukemia. 
John Williams:	No, no, no, I think- Really? Actually? No, no, it got shot. Like a neighbor shot and killed it in Ohio. Yeah, yeah.
Michael Gottwald:	We don't know how Ohio works. We're only here to defend Louisiana. 
John Williams:	No, but also, the pig that you see actually in the film, that was the first pig that we ever had and we got it so early in development to run test footage with it, then by the time we shot, it was that big. 
Michael Gottwald:	They start cute. [crosstalk 00:29:05]
John Williams:	Yeah. And there was a point, I think, after production where the pig got so big that it couldn't really move and Benh's sister had to put it on a diet so that it would actually get less fat enough so that it could actually walk into the-
Dan Janvey:	I picked up that pig from its birth farm and it shat all over the vehicle. 
Michael Gottwald:	Thanks, Dan. What lesson can we derive from that? [crosstalk 00:29:41] 
John Williams:	We're constantly battling feces on this-
Michael Gottwald:	Wait wait wait, did you mention Ray, did you talk about Ray? 
John Williams:	Oh-
Dan Janvey:	Ray?
Michael Gottwald:	Ray kind of designed the whole-
Dan Janvey:	That means nothing. 
Michael Gottwald:	But it's interesting. Ray Tintori, this guy that kind of designed the whole practical visual effects and the pig thing and all that, is a friend of ours from [inaudible 00:30:04] who also directed a lot of videos from MGNT and things like that. Not that anybody-
Dan Janvey:	Well the most important thing is Ray came to Swarthmore to show his short films.
Michael Gottwald:	Yeah, he was another ... So when we brought Benh in, when this building was new, I think that was actually 2005, there used to be a film society and I used to run the film society and we would bring them in as guest speakers and pay them a speaker's fee that they would then use to make their next short films. And they would just show short films and sort of like curate little programs. So we brought Benh Zeitlin in here in 2005 to show Egg, and then the next year we brought in Ray Tintori who was our second unit director, who I think is now working on his first feature, hopefully. Yeah, so you're in like the hallowed hall of [crosstalk 00:30:55]
Dan Janvey:	They still talk about it. 
Michael Gottwald:	Yeah.
Dan Janvey:	I think I made like $200 and I thought it was the greatest. 
Michael Gottwald:	Yeah, so technically you're [crosstalk 00:31:05]. Over here.
Speaker 13:	Um, could you talk a little bit about the role of realism in the film? It certainly has a lot of whimsy and a lot of subjectivity, you talked about how our ... Seeing things through the eyes of Hushpuppy, but for all of that, it also just felt very gritty to me, very dirty, it has a whole bunch of documentary styles to it that I can see. And so it's a little surreal seeing that, the film, then having the curtain pulled back and hearing about how you would create a flood or create a storm or composite pigs, and so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what role you wanted realism to have in the film and the techniques and-
Dan Janvey:	Well, I think that the way you speak about it is very much in line with how we conceived of it. I think you get this fundamental premise of what we're trying to do, but to add onto it a little bit, the style of the film was always meant to be absolute realism and so a lot of people mistakenly refer that this is a piece of magical realism and we think that it's like the farthest thing from that, and one of the main cinematic influences on the film is a documentary filmmaker named Les Blank. There's a thematic overlap with Les Blank too, in terms of the films that he made about Asian culture and Louisiana which are pretty masterful, I recommend everyone check them out. 
	And so we at all times wanted the camera to address what it was shooting as if it was as real as possible. And it's an aesthetic that I think you see more in documentary film than fiction film, although it does also borrow from fictional legacies like the Darden brothers. And as we were striving for this realism, is also to be as much from her perspective as possible, so if you go back and watch the film again, try to go back and pay attention to the height of the camera, and I think you'll notice that it's very, very unusual because the cameras all shot at Hushpuppy height and so as the camera explores the world around it, it's doing it from her literal eye-line. 
Michael Gottwald:	And most cameras are actually shot from an adult's point of view. 
Dan Janvey:	And the way that we technically achieved that is that the cinematographer wore a rig, it's called an easy rig, where the camera would be hanging off of a pole so that he can maneuver it at a very low height. 
Michael Gottwald:	And also there was a choice by Benh to light every set 360 degrees because with the nonprofessional actors that we had, he wanted to make sure that they could play and improvise as much as possible and I think that the kind of exploratory camera goes hand in hand with that sort of playful feel. So the camera can wander wherever it wants to and everything will still be lit. 
Matt Parker:	And on a basic level you also have to then build sets so you can go anywhere. Which is somewhat unusual as well. 
Dan Janvey:	I hope that answers ... Does that answer your question? 
Speaker 13:	Yeah! 
Michael Gottwald:	I feel like it's a good enough question that you'll think of it ... I'm serious, I think it's a really strong question, but I think it's complicated. Like there are all these thematic things we can talk about, I think you're question also really speaks to the scene where they go to the floating stripper shack to see the mother and I think it's for you to decide what that is. 
Speaker 13:	`[crosstalk 00:35:05]
Michael Gottwald:	Yeah, it's dreamlike, yeah. It is certainly a departure. 
Matt Parker:	And also in case you're asking, there is no floating stripper shack. If that's what you mean by realism. Just because I think that question is posed a lot, how much does it represent the Bayou community, and I think you know, you just have to draw some lines.
Michael Gottwald:	Yeah, yeah, it's not. That's a good point. It's not at all. Southern Louisiana does not look like this in any way.
John Williams:	Well that's not true. What do you mean? In the whole film? The whole film doesn't?
Michael Gottwald:	No, I'm saying that it's drawn on the reality, it's a complete abstraction of it. 
John Williams:	Right, sure. 
Michael Gottwald:	You have houses on stilts. But they're not like weird shacks on top of school buses. 
John Williams:	Right, right, right, right. 
Matt Parker:	Yeah I feel like our production designer added extra bits to the existing thing. It kind of altered or heightened the existing reality that was there in a way that it's not very noticeable. I know a lot of people do confuse it with reality and actually the way things look in the Bayou. 
Speaker 14:	Just a question about the 60 millimeter, is it difficult working with 60 millimeter nowadays, how soon do you get to see what you shot, can you have video taps, anything like that, was it all just kind of handheld, using hand-cranks, or-
Michael Gottwald:	We shot on an RE camera that we got out of New York, and every day our film would travel from the Bayou to New Orleans to the airport, then fly to Seattle, because we were on a budget but we had to grab through the [inaudible 00:36:44] to this lab in Seattle that would process film called Alpha City, so that would be the next day. Then they would process it, then it would come back, so it was like a two or three day-
Dan Janvey:	It could have been up to five days.
Michael Gottwald:	It could have been up to five day turnaround. And it was right at the point, it was right at the Spring/Summer of 2010 before like digital dailies and things like that where they're posting it online, so it was taking a minute to get back, but we had a really excellent camera department, we didn't lose a single frame of film in that whole process and that's pretty outstanding considering like half the time they were on water, un-spooling the film and transferring it. 
Dan Janvey:	Also, to speak to the question of the choice of shooting on film, film's a tried and tested medium. We were in some of the most extreme physical conditions that you can shoot a movie in, in terms of heat and water, and we know that film works in those environments. Film also has an incredible latitude in terms of what you can expose it to, so you actually can shoot a wider range of things on film than digital. Also it has a quality that film can't replicate from an aesthetic point of view. 
	I really, really want to encourage people to think about shooting on film. It can be a more expensive choice, but I think it leads to a very different type of film and film-making, and if you look at this year's best picture nominees, six of the nine films are shot on film. And so everyone is saying, "Film's dying, film's dying," but to me it actually still has a vitality that digital film hasn't replaced and I would encourage you to think about what your story is. You don't shoot Lincoln on red. It's Abraham Lincoln. And likewise, Zero Dark Thirty was shot digitally, and to me that makes complete sense. That is a story as much of our times as anything else. And so for us, what I'm trying to say, is the bathtub is made up of these real ... Everything's real in the bathtub. Everything's built and scrappy, and so we thought that the 60 millimeter aesthetic fit that well. 
John Williams:	An interesting sideline, the cinematographer ... We were interviewing a bunch of people and we'd flown people down and all this stuff, and the cinematographer was actually a friend of everybody's that was down kind of visiting, and he picked up a Prosumer video-camera and followed one of the piglets around the yard. And he was kind of trying to get the job-
Dan Janvey:	He was trying. 
John Williams:	He put the tape of that where Benh Zeitlin could see it, Benh found it, and when he saw it, he was like, "This is the guy." So he won the job on video, but ended up shooting on film. 
Speaker 15:	I was just wondering, for the floating jacket, besides the Elysian Fields, was that the Elysian Fields in New Orleans? Or is that a different place? 
Dan Janvey:	It's probably a tribute to the street in New Orleans, which is obviously a tribute to the Elysian Fields of Greek Mythology, so I think it's hitting two stones with one rock or whatever.
Matt Parker:	Sure. Two stones with one rock. Two stones with one rock. 
John Williams:	It's weird, because it's like a New Orleans reference, but it's also a beyond New Orleans reference. It's, you know, yeah. 
Dan Janvey:	The New Orleans reference is to the-
John Williams:	To the street. Right. 
Dan Janvey:	No, [crosstalk 00:40:41].
John Williams:	Anyway. 
Dan Janvey:	We went to Wesleyan, not Swarthmore. 
Matt Parker:	That actual location during shooting we were sharing with what, the Green-
John Williams:	The Green Lantern
Matt Parker:	Green Lantern.
John Williams:	I feel like in the trailer for The Green Lantern you can see that same weird ship thing in it. 
Matt Parker:	They were in there one week, we were there the next week. 
John Williams:	Yeah.
Matt Parker:	Do you want to go right a little?
John Williams:	Sure. Let's go right. Far right. 
Speaker 16:	I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to the short films you worked on in college and after college to go from there to here?
Michael Gottwald:	J Will, did you work on any short films?
John Williams:	Yeah. We had a little dinner thing and I was talking about this a bit but I didn't quite finish. I worked on a couple here and we just sort of goofed around a bit and then I tried to make ... The first film that I tried to direct was supposed to be my senior thesis and I'd never really written or directed one, and I was also trying to produce it and my buddy starred in it, and anyway, it was awful. I destroyed all copies. I think he might ... Do you have one?
Speaker 17:	We have them, we may have to dig though the box. 
John Williams:	Okay, well don't. 
Michael Gottwald:	You can start that process now, we'd love to see it. 
John Williams:	Yeah, I mean, it was just awful. But when you don't know what you're doing, it's gonna be bad. So my suggestion is make a stinker early. Because you learn. Now I know a bunch of stuff so if I were to make another one, I think ... I mean, it would probably also be maybe even less than mediocre, but far better than the first one I made. So that's one thing I want to say. Especially here, I think Swarthmore's such an intelligent and critical community that a lot of people creatively are afraid to put their work out in front of that critical eye, because people are so sharp here, but you have to start somewhere. The first time you tried to write letters, it's just miserable. Your handwriting was terrible when you were a little kid. You know what I mean? It takes practice. You have to fail at it. It's just everything. 
Dan Janvey:	[inaudible 00:42:58] has the most incredible take on exactly what you were saying, has anyone seen [inaudible 00:43:04] thing on creativity? 
Speaker 18:	Yes. 
Dan Janvey:	It's unbelievable, and what J Will just said reminds me of that. He says, "When you first start, if you're a creative person, and you first start out making things, there's a vast discrepancy between what you make and your actual taste. Because your taste is actually quite advanced, and you really do know what's good and what works and what moves people, and yet when you first start making something, it's so far from your own mark of what's good, and he says the challenge is to actually keep going in that first stage so you get to the point where you can express things at the level at which you imagine them to be good, and that's one thing that we really should bring up. Benh Zietland the writer, director and composer of this film for years he worked on shorts, and he always for years and years and years was working towards getting what he was doing to be at the level that he wanted and I think that this is the first time that it even comes close. So I would recommend going to watch [inaudible 00:44:17]. If you're at all interested in making stuff and the lesson from it is that it can take a long time before you're able to express an idea at the level at which you'll judge it to be good. 
Matt Parker:	It's particularly true of ... Because Dan and I went to Wesleyan, where it's similar in the way that I think J Will described Swarthmore, same deal at Wesleyan. I mean we've had a film program for a while, but it's still a films studies program. You do spend a lot of time watching and thinking and writing about film and so you do have that taste cultivated that Dan's talking about. So it makes it extra challenging to then go out and do your first thing and a lot of senior theses films are bad at Wesleyan or anywhere. Because we only took a semester of production, but I think it takes the perseverance to keep going and trying new stuff to realize where you fit into the whole picture and what you're good at and what you want to keep doing.
Speaker 20:	So I know [inaudible 00:45:20] focuses a lot on these communities, and being productive, and who are these, and I was wondering if you had in mind or were hoping to [inaudible 00:45:30] change.
Speaker 1:	Could you repeat the question? 
Dan Janvey:	Sure. The question was about how the film is influenced by social issues that are affecting Southern Louisiana, and whether or not we hope that the film affects any social change. Is that a fair recap of the question?
Matt Parker:	I'd say, actually no. It's very much and it always has been Benh's prerogative to not make movies as a polemic or as some sort of work that will raise a fist at anybody and say "It's your fault," or "It's your fault," or "This needs to change blah blah blah." I think what makes Benh a good artist is that he's able to tell a story that can conjure a lot of these things that are from our time, but also are from all times, and make people find their own thing in watching the film that's specific to them, without getting too specific. Because I think you actually make a less powerful film if you get very, very specific about an issue, say.
Dan Janvey:	I think we do hope. I think that we each have our personal ... I do hope that it affects social change. 
Matt Parker:	Sure, but that being the purpose behind this, behind making the film.
Dan Janvey:	Yeah, but the question is do we hope that it will.
Matt Parker:	Oh, sure. Yeah. 
Dan Janvey:	I think in particular-
John Williams:	I think
Dan Janvey:	In particular, to me, the film addresses the question ... After Katrina you heard from people on the outside, "Why don't you just leave?" And I do think that after Sandy we heard that too in New York, about like the rockaway. It's like why do you live here? And I think that the film's trying to make a case that where you come from matters and that you fight for those values that that place represents to you until your death. And I hope that the film challenges people's preconceptions about what a legitimate society is as well. Yeah.
John Williams:	And I think Court 13 is ... There are some discussions happening about the future of that as a production company taking on more or some of the social activist role. I know. So I'm in med-school now, I'm very far away from the film world, but these are still the people that I care about, I'm still a Louisiana resident for some reason, I can't leave it. And I would like to contribute in the future, maybe not necessarily to the film making aspect, but if there's healthcare or educational anything, sort of any kind of social outreach, I feel like that's kind of where I might loop back into the picture. 
Matt Parker:	Yeah, I think along those lines what J Will's referring to, I mean we have discussed kind of hitting on the combination of arts and community and how you can make art, and popular art, as a community. And I think that's something that we're very interested in preserving in New Orleans, creating a space for that, that's extremely important to us. And what role that plays socially, I mean sure that serves some sort of function, to be able to have that space and do that, but that has always been of interest to us. 
Dan Janvey:	And regional film making too. 
Matt Parker:	Yeah, absolutely. That matters. 
Dan Janvey:	Going back to the scene with her mother, it's a little unclear, did the mom recognize herself as the mom? And that's the preface to the next question, which is why was it important for her to see her mom, to have that bonding moment with her mom before accepting her father's death, and allowing him to go? 
Michael Gottwald:	Well I think actually your second question answers your first in a weird way. Because actually that moment ... It's not necessarily ... It's very much up for interpretation or your subjective take on it, whether or in fact that is her mom. But I think your second question where you say, "Why does she need to do that before she goes back?" It's like the movie operates instead of on traditional plot logic, it operates on emotional logic. And the emotional logic in that moment is that she needs some kind of maternal presence or force, be it a literal mother figure or an abstract mother figure, before she can realize that she has to go back and be with her father in his last moment. 
John Williams:	Can I also say, I feel a lot of the success of the film is more about that being like, "Do I need a mom?" At that point. Like the space that is left in the film to project yourself into. I think there are a lot of open ends on purpose, and that's part of the success of the film, if that makes sense. I think that's a powerful ... That may be resonating with you right now because of how you, and all of us, sorry to target you, the person who asked the question, but I ... That's a really important scene for me, and I think it's an important scene for me because of how I interact with that figure as opposed to literally what Hushpuppy, what her literal relationship with her is supposed to be. 
Michael Gottwald:	That's a question that in most all the Q and As that I've been in people ask about. And people always kind of have their own opinion about it. It's cool to see how that affects how they view the story and how they view the ending and all that stuff. So I think it's really relatable to the viewer. 
Matt Parker:	Because it may not be her mom. 
John Williams:	Or it may be. 
Speaker 1:	Quick question in the back. 
Speaker 19:	You all have an acceptance speech written? 
John Williams:	No. 
Dan Janvey:	No. I think it will start with genuine shock. 
Michael Gottwald:	Not to be pessimistic, but I don't think it'll start. I will be extremely surprised. I will come back to Swarthmore and run naked in mud if we win. Are you with me, J Will?
Dan Janvey:	J Will I feel like you would do that even without-
Michael Gottwald:	Any of the categories. Not to be pessimistic, but literally this was so far beyond anything we were thinking about when we made the movie that the fact that we're going at all is actually nuts. 
John Williams:	Michael and I both have our outfits picked out, though. 
Michael Gottwald:	Right. Shrimp boots. 
Speaker 1:	[inaudible 00:52:24] who are you wearing? 
Speaker 1:	I think Brooks brothers. 
Michael Gottwald:	But you just said Hugo Boss. 
John Williams:	Oh, Hugo Boss. Josh is wearing Brooks brothers.
Dan Janvey:	Hugo Boss suits fit thickly built dudes. 
Michael Gottwald:	This is what you learn on the awards campaign. 
John Williams:	Yeah. 
Speaker 1:	Thank you all-
John Williams:	We can't end on that. 
Michael Gottwald:	Wait, I have one thing-
John Williams:	Someone must have one question.
Michael Gottwald:	I have a thing. There's actually a fifth crew member in the room, our transportation coordinator Charlotte [inaudible 00:52:57] is in the back. Please wave. 
Charlotte :	Hi Mi-Mi. 
Speaker 1:	[inaudible 00:53:10]
Matt Parker:	For sure, as you exit. 
Dan Janvey:	Let's do one more question.
Speaker 1:	Yeah, I just want to say there's a lot of you here who are happy to stay but I want to say that-
Michael Gottwald:	Oh yeah- 
Dan Janvey:	Absolutely.
Michael Gottwald:	I always think in that poin that if people want to get up and leave they should, but we are totally happy talking about it more and we won't take it personally, it's Friday night, time to get wild. 
Matt Parker:	I like that they laughed at that idea. 
Michael Gottwald:	I used to go out on Friday nights here. I don't know what all this pessimism-
Matt Parker:	Oh, we have a question. Yeah. 
Speaker 22:	So I am just thinking about the title I'm just wondering [inaudible 00:53:56] who [crosstalk 00:53:55]
Matt Parker:	Nice. Love your question, love your question. 
Speaker 22:	[crosstalk 00:54:06]
Dan Janvey:	Did everyone hear the question? 
Speaker 1:	Can you repeat it?
Dan Janvey:	I'll repeat it. The question was about what the title means to each of us individually because it can have many different interpretations or meanings. Right, is that a good?
Speaker 22:	Yeah.
Dan Janvey:	Okay. Now I don't want to start. I think the ... Well I will start. For us internally, I think for the vast majority of the group, the word 'beast' is meant as a positive. It's meant to imply a certain ferociousness, the strength, the perseverance, and sort of the catchphrase of the film is to beast it, and so what we like about the title is that it really does have many different meanings. And I think it's really playing with ... To me it all leads up to that final confrontation between the two beasts of Hushpuppy and the aurochs, and it's sort of recognizing in each other their strength, like letting them be. But I don't actually have an answer. I think it does apply to a lot of different things in the movie. But I will say that it is meant as a very positive thing. 
Matt Parker:	Yeah, I think we actually started using the phrase beast it even before we knew that the title of this film would be "Beast of the Southern Wild", it's just like a phrase that we would use if you wanted to absolutely wreck something you were eating, we would be like, "Beast it," you know what I mean. Or do something to the extreme, but I also think that it makes total sense given the kind of philosophy that Benh is trying to explore in the film, and that we're all trying to explore, is sort of the idea of going through something really rough and just going for it despite the fact that it's really rough and difficult and hard. 
	And just living in the bathtub, for example, despite the storms and everything, is a matter of beasting it. But it's also to get at The Beast of the Southern Wild there's just a certain fierceness, and living despite everything that everybody in the film embodies and I think that's the spirit that we're trying to evoke with the title. That's what it means to me. As well as where does that fit in with other actual animals that are not human, and how did they reflect that as well. 
John Williams:	I guess for me it's a little bit like the term "queer", where it's sort of within the narrative it's put on these people and then they are re-appropriating it and using it as a term of empowerment, and a way to define their community against what they see as sort of crude, inhuman behavior towards them, even though that term is supposed to be describing them as such. And I think in the meta narrative of us making it, and a lot of people reporting back to the world in 2009, 2010 when there wasn't much money or news, and it was sort of just us being insane in the middle of nowhere just sort of like, we believe in this. This is real. It's true. There's passion involved in it. We're beasting it. We don't really care what your outside sentiment is. 
Michael Gottwald:	Something cool, I was in Nashville Tennessee last week and I screened it one day for a group of ... For the Martha O'Bryan Center, which is developmental houses for homeless adults and tries to get them back on their feet, and at the end of it the director came up after she'd seen the film and said, "This was a wonderful film. We're gonna incorporate this into their lesson plan for the next week, and we're gonna ask them, 'What's the beast in your life?'" And she was really emotional about it, she was saying, "Rarely do we see films that they understand, that are relatable to their life, and the problems and the traumas that they face every day, and rarely do they see something inspiring in that sense, in Nazy or Hushpuppy taking on a beast." That was really cool to me and represented partially what the beast means to me. 
Speaker 1:	Anyone in the audience- have an interpretation? We have an image. [crosstalk 00:58:48]
Michael Gottwald:	That's the port-a-potty.
John Williams:	Don't worry, that's safe. That's totally safe right now. 
Matt Parker:	So many people just got up and left. 
Speaker 1:	So let's make a more informal Q and A, I'm gonna thank you again.