Peeling Away the Artifice of Self with Dissolution Director Anthony Saxe

In some ways I feel that I have always been myself. When I think about things I thought or experienced at 20, or 14, or 6, from a first person perspective, mentally, I’m me. I am a constant. But this is most likely a fallacy of subjectivity; because the memories are first person, I’m transposing my current self upon them and experiencing them through current eyes. But I like to believe there’s a through line to my inner monologue that reaches all the way back to the age of reason.

It’s impossible to know the degree to which this is true, but we do, mercifully, change. This can be a comfort when past actions or opinions make us cringe, but there is also something inherently sad about looking back on yourself and feeling alienated from that person. One doesn’t have to have undergone massive shifts of personality to feel it. As we live in different places, surrounded by different people, doing different jobs, we become different selves.

With Dissolution, the short film which won the Narrative Shorts Jury Award at SXSW, director Anthony Saxe explores this disconnection from the past by looking to his parents. Through home videos captured in his infancy or before he was born, he investigates who his parents were to themselves and to each other when they lived completely different lives to the ones he now knows. 

The film is unnerving because it reminds us of the inevitability of old age that bathes us all in existential dread, and with that a realization of the artifice of self image. That we very well might be iterations of ourselves but for moments in time, with no constant, static self that exists without a context of age and community and circumstance. And as we age, we gain not just a distance, but an alienation from some of these former selves. 

It was a pleasure to chat with Anthony about the intense emotional exercise of turning your family into art.

The interview below has been edited and condensed for clarity.

HFC: You open with an archival video: a home movie from the 80s or 90s in which a middle-aged man stands on a hillside, probably on vacation, and lightheartedly berates the camera operator. We then shift to the narrative film, in which the visual language is filmic and expected for that format, as we follow an old man walking his dog and coming back to his lonely house. There are a couple more shifts between the film itself and archival footage, and no context is given. 

It takes at least a couple minutes for us to put together the connection to that footage and the realization is truly jarring. It’s like the floor dropping from under you. The moment of realization for me was the juxtaposition of a close-up of a young woman in the home video with a close-up of the actress in your film. It is undeniably the same person. And you are not present in the beginning of the film, but the presence of a baby in the home videos tells us that these are your parents. There is a delay in connecting the old man in the film to the middle-aged man in the videos, as he now hides behind long hair and a beard and doesn’t speak very much.

This is a sad film, not just about the dissolution of a decades long marriage, but about the degeneration of old age. It’s a very sensitive film, but one would understand not wanting to be the subject of it. How did you introduce this concept to your parents and did it take some time to get them to agree?

Anthony: I had made a graduate thesis at NYU, and that wasn't very successful, so I wanted to make another short. But we had a time limit as alumni [on university resources]. They give us an alumni rig with some gear. And so I sort of had to write something and get it made under the clock. 

I had all these videos of my parents, and I was watching them as they were going through their divorce, and I was watching these old videos, all this archival footage, 15 hours of footage or something like that, and just as an exercise, I decided to use it to write. 

At that point in my life when I was writing this first version of the script, my mother and I were almost completely estranged from my father. So there was no real possibility of actually making it with him in it. I did a draft of the script without him and that didn't quite work so rewrote it with him. And I was just sitting on it because there was no relationship there. There was no question to be asked of “Will you do this film or not?” because there was no relationship. 

And what happened was my father ended up in ICU for about 10 days. He was found on the floor of his apartment and he was taken to a hospital. He was in the ICU for 10 days, and then he ended up spending about six weeks in the hospital and nursing facilities. And at that point, my mother and I were sort of forced to come back into his life. He needed someone to help him get back on his feet, and rehab physically and just do very basic things. He couldn't even walk at the beginning. 

And so we were brought back into his life in that way for a while, and I had the script, and I thought it would be good to give him something to do. And I knew it would be difficult for him. My parents are not actors, but I thought it would be a way to sort of bring him and my mother back together in an intimate way, a way that may not have been possible to facilitate outside of this. 

So when I found that he was healthy enough to maybe even consider it, I asked him if it was something that he would have any interest in doing. And he really just said, “Sure.” I don't think he necessarily knew what he was getting into. And my mother was actually quite excited to do it and required really no convincing at all.

HFC: That's so interesting to me, because I thought about how if I tried pitching something similar to my own parents, it would be an absolute “No!”

Anthony: Well, I think the other thing is they are divorced in real life, but they do love each other very much. And it was an opportunity to spend time doing something unique and emotionally intimate with someone that he loved very much. And I think that was something that had great appeal for him. And for my mother as well.

HFC: It's very sweet. It also feels like a way to say I’m sorry.

Anthony: Yeah, that was a huge part of it. And it wasn't even so much for me, it was for my parents to say to each other. They had been married for 48 years. And then they were divorced and had essentially no relationship. But they still had a deep connection to each other. And I knew that in doing this it would facilitate them getting closer, which I thought would be good for both of them.

HFC: As you said, your parents are not actors, but they give striking performances. Truly, if you took away the archival footage, I would have assumed they were actors. What was your process working with them? Because I imagine it was threefold. You first have to deal with them as human beings, as your parents, and manage their emotional reactions to this project, because they're very emotionally invested in a way that actors wouldn't be. Second, you need to be a director and work with them as actors in the portrayal of these characters. And then there's all the technical aspects of film acting—like hitting your mark and eyeline and depth of field that are all really alien concepts to somebody who hasn't acted for film before. So were you able to compartmentalize, and was it difficult managing all of that?

Anthony: Yeah, I was able to not be so emotionally involved. I think maybe that aspect was a little more difficult for them but was good for them. I think that was helpful for them. 

In terms of the performances and the process, we had the opportunity to do rehearsals for like six weeks, which is something I had never had the opportunity to do on anything in a long, long time. And so we rehearsed maybe five days a week, for a month and a half before we shot the film. I was rewriting the script all the time, based on what my parents were comfortable doing, and what I thought they were capable of doing. 

My DP also came up about 10 days before production and we pre-shot the entire film with them. And we sort of decided on the visual language then. A lot of that was informed by the technical aspects of the film. That was something that we discovered during the pre production process: they couldn't find eyelines, they couldn't hit marks. So we decided on a very limited, one beat per shot, visual approach so that they didn't have to account for where the camera was, and movement and motion. I think that stillness also helped and was what we were looking for. We tried to make the production as easy for them as soon as possible.

HFC: You are asking so much of your father here. It’s colossal vulnerability, especially considering what we can glean of his personality as a younger man. He’s boisterous, he’s pompous, he’s a little intimidating. He’s a dad archetype I know very well: a guy who fills a room, and dinner is on him, but he’s also never, ever wrong. And the man we see today is so shrunken, so inward. He has trouble getting around and he’s let himself go and he seems to live a solitary, almost hermetic life.

So much of the film is that very sad juxtaposition of “This is what we were,” and “This is what we are." Did he have a sense of that

Anthony: It's honestly something that I have not talked about with him in depth. You know, there's still not necessarily that open level of communication. With my mother, certainly. But my father is not like that. He's not a person who discusses emotional things or engenders the comfort to do that. 

HFC: This film concept could so easily be a documentary, and it would be a very good, very moving one. You could be very artful and still use many of the same conventions you used in a documentary. But this is not a documentary, even once we know these are your parents and they’re to a degree portraying real life: this is a narrative film. Can you talk about how you walked the lines with artifice? 

Anthony: I think most of the artifice comes from the compression of time in the portion set in the current day. All those events, and even bits of dialogue, are taken directly from things that have happened, or directly from things they've said to each other that I have written down. And so a lot of that is stitching those elements together, and compressing them. The present day events in the film take place over one afternoon. But emotionally and even literally, factually, a lot of that stuff in the film is close or very close to their actual experience and actual things that happened.

My dad was also in a better state when we filmed than he appears in the film, and that is a level of artifice. He was not using a cane at the time of shooting. He was a bit more mobile.

I don’t know if this is necessarily artifice, but my parents never had a full script and I didn’t tell them that the archival footage was a part of the film. I didn't want them thinking about it while we were shooting, so their concept of what the film was was quite different from reality.

HFC: I'm immediately reminded of films like Abbas Kiarostami's Close Up, in which the line between documentary and narrative is very hazy, and non-actors become actors in the exercise of recreating their recent past and even their present. Your film is certainly very different, but did you have films of that sort of micro-genre in mind while you were making this?

Anthony: Close Up is a great film. My DP and I watched a lot of narrative films while preparing for this, but not really documentaries. I've never really done any documentary, and it’s not something I’d ever been super interested in doing. The only reason that I even thought to do something like this was because my parents were going through this divorce. And I had these videos that presented a vision of their marriage that I had not seen that I found very interesting. 

My parents had me when they were quite old, when they were in their 40s. So there was this entire life that they had lived before me. And after I left, there was this entire life that they lived without me that I also hadn't seen. In order to bring these two things together in a story that worked in a film, it was going to have those documentary elements, but we mostly watched these very austere, cool films about elderly people.

HFC: Like Amore?

Anthony: Amore, yeah, that’s one we looked at. That’s a great film. But there wasn’t a lot of visual guidance. There was no lookbook. We started with the actors on the locations, and we tried different things with them and we just saw what worked.

HFC: It's interesting to hear that it was so, almost improvised, because it is so visually striking.

Anthony: We sort of set up the challenge for ourselves of having to accomplish a lot of the scenes in one or two shots. There was no cutting back and forth, we couldn't rely on coverage, because we didn't have any coverage.

HFC: The stillness ends up making it like a series of paintings. It was also probably easier on your parents to not have to do full coverage and have to worry about matching previous takes.

Anthony: That’s why we did it. It allowed them to get comfortable, because we we would set up a shot and we would just keep doing it over and over and most of the time it took them many takes to get comfortable enough for it to work, for them to let the crew recede into the background and get a sense of what the scene was. But then once we had it, we wouldn’t have to set up again, we were done.

HFC: You went through so much archival footage. How long did it take you? I imagine it must have been months and months of going through it to find the few moments that fit in the narrative.

Anthony: I couldn't tell you the number of hours but I've watched through all the footage multiple times, taking notes about stuff that was interesting because I had no idea how it would work into a narrative. There was probably a good four to five months of working on the script where I would watch the footage over and over and over and over again.

HFC: I feel like you must have, through that process, become so intimate with these versions of them that they've probably kind of forgotten. It's a beautiful film on so many levels. What's next for you as a filmmaker?

Anthony: I'm working on a handful of feature scripts. Next is my first feature.

HFC: Good luck. We’ll be following you.