A pet is a traumatic proposition. We bring these little creatures into our home, and we take their silence as an invitation to dump upon them our insecurities. We talk to them and they give us undivided attention. When we feel insignificant or unloved, they are beacons of devotion. They fulfill the need for physical intimacy when it cannot be met by humans. It’s an intense relationship and it’s a private one; no one outside of your household has it. We enter into this relationship knowing it will last maybe 15 years if we’re lucky, and the loss is profound. The grief I’ve experienced over pets has been as intense as for a human. Most people own pets, and most people experience this grief, but we’ve been conditioned to regard indulging that grief as eccentric.

The Rainbow Bridge, which was featured in the Narrative Short Program at this year’s SXSW, explores that grief and how it makes eccentrics of us all. Set in a vivid, analogue world of ‘80s style futurism, synths and crystals aplenty, directors Dimitri Simakis and Suki Rose manifest all of their intense feelings about companion animals. They realize this through brilliant sets and puppetry, with help from wild, manic performances from James Urbaniak and Heather Lawless, tempered by a sweetly stoic Thu Tran. Both Simakis and Rose have backgrounds in fabrication, immersive art, and video production: Dimitri through Everything Is Terrible and Meow Wolf, and Suki through years of wardrobe and production design. Their collective vision is brought to stunning fruition in The Rainbow Bridge and I had a great time sitting down with them to talk about it.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

HYPERREAL FILM JOURNAL (HFJ):

The basic premise of humans wanting their pets to live forever comes from a pretty obvious place, but talk about how it took the form that it did, narratively and aesthetically, because you made some very bold choices in terms of the world in which this plays out. It’s not explicitly the ‘80s, but the tech and the aesthetic is very ‘80s. Why did that aesthetic speak to you and why did it feel right for this film?

DIMITRI SIMAKIS (DS)

Thematically, that [aesthetic] was a big goal. That, to me, is the ultimate movie: late ‘70s to ‘80s sci-fi/fantasy. It’s a genre that I admire so much, and you don't get to see it enough [in festivals]. And also, you don't get a lot of chances to make a big short like this. So [I thought] if we're going to do it, I have to combine everything, like every genre that I love, even musicals, to the point of being maybe too much. I just kind of kept adding, and adding, and adding [genres], but kept it in that style.

SUKI ROSE (SR):

But it's not a period piece. You're super correct. We're utilizing a lot of things that point towards a whole bunch of different eras. And I think that one of the things Dimitri likes to focus on is world building. We like the tech. We like the look—

DS:

—We want to be around it. It’s fun to be around. If you're going to work on something for months of pre-production, production, and editing, you want to look at stuff that's beautiful to you.

SR:

And the film—it's outside of reality. It’s something else entirely. And so there are no rules. I feel like, at least for me, as long as there’s no cell phone in the movie, it can take place anytime.

HFJ:

This film relies heavily on production design, costume, practical effects, and puppets, all things we love at Hyperreal. I know as a filmmaker what a colossal amount of work that is, but also how much fun it is to build a world from scratch and play god and decide every tiny object that exists within that world. I want to ask you about that process, both creatively and practically.

DS:

There's something about Thu Tran [the actress who plays Tina] that we just love so much. She's such an amazing just person and artist. We wanted to sort of build a sandbox around her. We knew what we wanted [plot-wise]. We had a draft and felt like, "Great, okay, it's all on paper. Waiting room, science lab, fantasy realm.” And then you kind of realize, when you're in pre-production, why wouldn't you spend every minute just adding more and more and more detail?

Immersion is so important to us. I'd been working with Meow Wolf for the four or five years before [The Rainbow Bridge], working on a room. [I was working] obsessively since about 2017, and just kept building on it during the pandemic, and it opened in Denver in late 2021. So I was still living in that mindset of building every detail, that everything has to be to the point of insanity. If you look at [the film with] a magnifying glass, or if you went into the set, everything's legitimate. There's real phone numbers that no one will ever see, websites that no one will ever see, all that stuff.

HFJ:

I thought that the film really effectively walked the line between honoring the very real and powerful connection we can have with our animals and acknowledging how silly we can be in canonizing them in a way that we don’t even do for humans sometimes. I personally have a clump of my cat Lyla’s fur in a ceramic box that I will never ever part with. I’m not even extreme.

Errol Morris has a whole documentary on this topic and I saw in another film once how someone had their deceased cat stuffed and turned into a lamp. I would never do that, but it is interesting how we would never in a million years entertain the idea of mummifying our relatives, but someone might find comfort in the taxidermied remains of an animal companion. Have either of you ever done something like that with an animal?

DS:

When we met, when we met, she already had a beloved Axel.

SR:

The film is dedicated to him.

DS:

He was a little beautiful white, white cat.

SR:

We have not let another pet into our lives since Axel. Here's the thing, your pet is in your daily life, like, ever present. So in some ways, it can be as disruptive or more disruptive [to lose them] than a relative that you don't see very much. Just in terms of how you move through every day, you know, so losing Axel really sucked. And you have to ask: was it worth it? You zoom out and the entire problem with loving or being close to anybody is that yes, losing them is inevitable and it sucks. And you just have to hope that it's worth it. But with Axel I have a vial with a bunch of his whiskers because cats lose whiskers so you just grab them and pop them in the vial. I have a ton of those.

DS:

Part of our inspiration was thinking about when they come to euthanize your pet. The vet comes to your house. They do that thing where they put the paw in the clay to have it. That’s something that Dr. Bailey definitely represents. I think Dr. Bailey is not totally a villain. There's a part of her that I think we all sort of sympathize with. Like no, we all want to live forever, with our pets forever.

The film itself is a love letter to your beloved furry friends that you've lost. You see on Instagram where it's just like maybe someone’s like, “I lost my dog, 15 years, the greatest friend I've ever had,” and it's like what do [you do]? You give a like and a sorry, but it's not enough.

HFJ:

And that grief gets trivialized even though we all go through it because most people do have pets.

SR:

I think the American relationship to grief in general is very broken. I think all anybody wants is for someone to be okay, whether they actually want them to be okay or they just don't want to deal with the discomfort of somebody who's grieving. But if we push away grief, then it's even easier to trivialize the loss of a pet and be like, “Well, it's just a dog or it's just a cat.” I don't know, maybe there's a shift that's gonna happen with that?

DS:

I don't think I was equipped to write something about humans, so I think this was my way of comprehending it. You bring up the concept [of grief] to some people, and they're just like, “No, no, that's too upsetting. I can't think about losing my little Mimu.” And it’s like, think about it, it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Again, it can be like screaming into the void in that way. Embrace it. I think that part of it is don't be like Amber, don't be like Dr. Bailey, and try to deny it. Instead, get through it. Get through the colors and just fucking scream.

SR:

Anticipatory grief is a lot. And I think that's a common thing with pet owners.

HFJ:

An aspect of pet ownership that is probably also reflective of an issue Americans have is with intimacy, like physical intimacy and emotional intimacy. I feel like we get so much more physical intimacy from our pets than we do from any other humans. Because they’re just there all the time. It’s like the song in the film, “Thank you for the snuggles,” but it's true. That is such a need and you can't ask that from another human with that constancy.

DS:

And the endless conversations you have with your pets…

SR:

One of the hardest parts of the grief process is if your pet sleeps in your bed, the snuggles are gone.

HFJ:

There’s always a film you write, the film you shoot, and the film you cut. I’ve found that to be true with everything I’ve made. There’s always an adjustment to the translation process of actualizing something from your brain. What aspects of the finished product were different from your original idea and why?

DS:

I can't believe I'm saying it, but it was better than I imagined in a way that never happens. Like I've done so many things, but it's never… it's always a little off. Lighting wasn't just right, or I should’ve spent more time on the edit. Or it’s not that it was good or bad, it’s just different [from your original idea]. But I can truly say this is something that I was like, “No, that's right."

I was so nervous doing this type of film for the first time. I'm so used to [working with] found footage and either only using found footage or mostly using it. Where you’re making a narrative out of other narratives. You have to find it. And then [with The Rainbow Bridge] to be able to be like, “I can make it?!” So I was very meticulous. If you do a one to one of the storyboards it's almost identical [to the finished film].

Also, if you had told me that James Urbaniak of Oppenheimer and The Fablemans and American Splendor would be in this, or Heather Lawless who I’d been such a fan of since forever… I think the surprise came there. When they're saying your lines… it was great. It was [also intimidating] in that way. And for me, at least, because I'm not as good at performance directing as Suki is—

SR:

—We worked together a lot on this. I do love working with the actors, and it's like, puppets, but people. But Dimitri edited, he’s a seasoned editor. And what we learned in the process, I think, is that you're writing for the edit and you're shooting for the edit.

DS:

The most important thing about filmmaking to me is thinking about the edit. It's like It's either there or it's not. It’s kind of binary that way. We do one more take because I'm gonna yell at myself in the edit. I think we’ve all been there looking at the final edit being like, “You fucking idiot, why didn’t you go again? You knew that wasn’t right.” So I think just giving it that extra time. Even though it's never enough time.

SR:

Also, those two rooms [in the set] are the same room torn down and rebuilt. So we had the waiting room, we shot all that, then the day in between we shot all the green screen while they tore it down and rebuilt.

DS:

You start from the edit and you work backwards. It's the only way I can understand how to do it. I'm not a writer in that sense.

HFJ:

I always end with asking, what's next for you?

DS:

Suki’s been in the game for a little bit longer, in the narrative shorts world trying to get features made. This is a bit new for me in that way. But I think that, obviously, a feature, we want that. This is a calling card in that way, we'd love to get that going. We know that we need to work more together.

SR:

We’re co-writing and co-directing now. And we have a couple of shorts that we would like to make as shorts to features. We have a low-budget horror script we're working on now, which would be lovely to make. And then I have a horror feature with my other co-director, Cricket Arrison, who is in almost all our projects. She's the duck waiting room lady in Rainbow Bridge.

DS:

We got so bit by this bug. But it's not all just like, a straight path, you know what I mean?

SR:

We’re also trying to support the projects of people in our team. We're producing a short for another director, Emily Wilson, who edited my last short. We’re just trying to lift everybody up with us as much as we’ve been lifted up.

DS:

And keep the party going, keep it moving, not being too precious, and not taking ourselves too seriously. We do not like film sets that are very militant, which so many of them seem to be. It's just uncomfortable and turns me off. We want nothing but love, no bad vibes. Everyone eats, everyone's needs are met—

SR:

—we’re nice to everybody—

DS:

That's our number one, we never spared on that.

HFJ:

That’s everything. Set vibes, set morale is everything. I've been on those terrible toxic sets where you're like, “For what?”

DS:

The only thing we're militant about is not being that way. And we're serious about making the work but it's like building others up. We love it when people speak up and say, “Hey, you know that's not right.” Imagine that stupidity of being like, “Don't talk to the directors.”

Crossing the Rainbow Bridge with Dimitri Simakis and Suki Rose