Joe Swanberg‘s got a Joe Swanberg way of making movies. Working with a cast of hot shot, big name, creme da la creme names though means Swanberg being, well, a little less Swanberg-y. Instead of just “going for it” with Digging for Fire, Swanberg penned his most complete script yet. About ten pages worth of it. But such is the Swanberg way. Have I said Swanberg enough yet?

Although we had some minor issues with Digging for Fire at its Sundance premiere, the mumblecore maestro nonetheless managed to sink his independent teeth into some interesting territory with a stunning barrage of talent, including Jake Johnson, Rosemarie DeWitt, Brie Larson, Anna Kendrick, Ron Livingston, Sam Elliot, Orlando Bloom, Sam Rockwell, Melanie Lynskey, Chris Messina and a glorified cameo from Jenny Slate. Swanberg, Johnson and DeWitt took to the stage to explore the meaning of Digging for Fire and to illuminate the process of Swanberg filmmaking, from making kids cry to spontaneously hanging dong.

During the scene where Chris Messina strip down for the pool, I was curious if that was an organic moment, or something you talked to him about? I know the idea of spontaneity is something you consider in all your film and I’m curious how that comes into play here?

Joe Swanberg: Well, I’m all about male nudity! Yeah, it’s organic; I think I told a friend of mine, today, I told Sam Rockwell and Chris Messina that I just wanted them to feel dangerous. I wanted those guys to come over and for it to feel bad, like something bad might happen. And so we just played around, and afterwards, there was like a lot of legal shit that goes with having people naked in movies – there’s contracts involved, and things like that. So obviously, we didn’t do that, because I didn’t know he was going to take his clothes off. So I wrote him afterwards, and was like, “Well, I think I’m going to use it. What do you think about that?” And he said, “Send it to me. I don’t want to be just like an extra in your movie that got naked.” And I was like, “All right.” So I sent him a Vimeo link, and he was like, “I love it! Use the cock!” So there it is. From here on out, we’re just going to talk about Messina’s penis. “So what was Chris thinking, when he showed his penis?”

How much was worked out in advance, with the script, and how much was improvised?

JS: Jake and I started talking several months before we shot, and then Rosemarie also got involved, at least a month before. That’s the way I typically work but I’ve been writing more and more. I used to start with nothing, but I was also just working with my friends in Chicago. I could just call, and then shoot the movies for like eight months, because I would just shoot a little bit, edit a bit, call them, shoot a little bit more. Now that I’m working with really busy people, who can’t sort of be at my beck and call for a year, I try and figure out a little bit more what actually’s going to happen.

Jake Johnson: When Joe says a lot, it’s not a lot! There’s no script; there’s an outline, but when each actor comes in, Joe says, “This is kind of how this scene ends. However you get there, doesn’t matter.” There’s no dialogue, to go back to Chris Messina’s penis. That was just, he’s supposed to come party. With Rosemarie’s whole story, we knew we wanted to have the wife have a whole arc. Joe and I got together and asked her, “What do you think would happen?” There is a lot more, compared to most movies, but compared to most movies, Joe’s still very different.

In the scene where you’re having dinner, and the little boy starts to cry, did he really get upset by what you were saying?

JS: Oh yeah. Rosemarie scolded him, and he lost it.

Rosemarie DeWitt: I’m still in therapy, because Joe told me to. This is one of his skills as a director; he likes to clue one set of actors into one thing, and another set of actors into another thing. He talks to Jake and Jude about getting really silly and goofy at the dinner table. He told Jake, “Just say ‘poopy’, that’s his favorite word.” And he told me to come in, and get the taxes done and check the mail. When I looked at Jude and said, “We don’t say that, that’s not a nice word.” All of a sudden the lips starts quivering, and the eyes fill, and Joe’s not yelling cut, so we keep going. And now I really am like the bad guy. He really did burst into tears. We kept it in the movie – it wasn’t a manipulated movement, it was the lightning in a bottle that we all hope for, in these kind of movies, but then we did have to go skateboard and ride bikes for an hour!

JS: I’d feel worse, but three year olds cry all the time! He cries fifty times a day! Not that much different from how the scene would have gone, anyway. He did exactly what he wanted.

I was wondering what the transition has been from to for you to go back-and-forth from very comedic television show into independent film?

JJ: Well, they’re just very different. I really like them both a lot. They’re so different, but at the end of the day, they’re not. The process is, but you’re still acting, and you’re still acting with people. I mean, I guess, on ‘New Girl’, you didn’t get to see Chris Messina’s dick.

JS: You have to watch ‘The Mindy Project’ for that.

JJ: Stick around another half-hour; I think that’s when the clothes come off.

Joe, what was your inspiration, motivation, purpose, and journey as a filmmaker?

JS: Jake and I started talking about the feeling of – for me, when my wife and son go out of town, and I’m alone, I just instantly turn into a disgusting, horrible twenty-year-old version of myself, because I’m like, “I have to pack it all in! I have some freedom right now!” I’m must like eating terrible food, watching pornography non-stop, staying up all night. Everything I miss about that old version of me, just comes roaring to the surface. And usually it takes about a day, and I’m like, “I can’t wait for them to get home.” I hate myself. So I didn’t feel like I had seen that particular male point-of-view in there. With Rosemary’s storyline, it’s been interesting for my wife and I – she’s a filmmaker, too, she has a movie here at the festival, called ‘Unexpected’. I think it’s amazing! You know, it’s been tough to find how we both have time to work, how we both have time to be fulfilled as individuals. It’s a real clusterfuck when a kid enters your life, all of a sudden. You feel like you have a long time, with the pregnancy and that, but once the fucking thing is there, it’s like, “Oh my God!” When my son was born, I just had this sense of dread, like, “Fuck! I can’t quit this! I’m stuck with this guy for the rest of my life.” And it’s terrifying. We’re still adjusting to it. And so, for my wife, a lot of that was figuring out, because there’s a lot that I can do to help, but my son has needed her in a different way. He was breast-fed, there’s this attachment she has with him that I don’t have. Even if I’m doing my best, he needed her a lot more than he needed me, that first year or two. So she had a much longer transition back into life. I just want to make movies about that. I did a movie called ‘The Christmas Before This’. That was also digging into that subject matter. There’s not enough movies about women, anyway, but there’s especially not movies about that. So, yeah man, I want to make movies about moms.

How was it, shooting digging in the dirt? How did you decide what music to put in?

JJ: Digging was really great, it was all based on a real thing. The other side of this movie was, my wife and I rented a house in a village, and we wanted to put a garden in the back. We were digging up a bunch of soil, to get better soil in, and I found a rusted gun, and I found a bone that was about that big, and I got really scared. I called the LAPD, and that exactly happened. So I was like, “I don’t know what to do. I believe there’s a dead body in my backyard, of this new rented house, that we don’t want to leave.” And so she’s like, “Well, let’s not get too weird.” Well, yeah, so I called a bunch of my friends, and we got a bunch of shovels, and we tore up the whole yard, and found a license plate, and the remnants of a trunk that had been thrown away from a car; a plastic bag, filled with bones. So digging in the actual movie was really fun, because we did it, so that was actually re-creating something.

JS: I had a really fun picture that Jeff Bayer sent me, an actual picture of you – he was deep in his yard. The yard was above his head. He was down in a hole.

JJ: At the end of it, my buddy Jeff Bayer and I were about six feet in the ground. We were about this deep, and we just kind of stopped and were like, “We can’t do this, man. Got to stop.”

JS: And with the score, I’ve been working with the same music supervisor for the last couple of movies, this guy Chris Swanson, who really kills it. I don’t have very good music taste. I’m stuck in really famous shit from the seventies, is about as far as I’ve gone. Maybe I followed the Talking Heads into the eighties a little bit. Working with a music supervisor, with a really encyclopedic knowledge of music, and the way that we worked was he sends me a lot of stuff, and I’m listening to it before I start shooting, just to get the feel. Sometimes I’m playing it on-set, while we’re shooting it. Just really trying to hone in on the right sound. On the score, I worked with Dan Romer, he did the score for ‘Beasts Of The Southern Wilds’, I knew him from some mutual friends. It was the first time – I’ve had scores for my movies before, but all of them, previously, had been done by a high school friend of mine, a really amazing guy, Kevin Bewersdorf, and that was, we’d known each other for so long, it was like, very mind-meldy experience, that didn’t involve talking. With Dan, we really went back and forth, and tried to shape the music, and went through different iterations of it, and kept working on it. It landed in a place, where we were going for some balance between how I felt about these particular characters, a sort of earthiness, and a kind of natural percussion for Jake’s character, and then we went with the kind of dreamy feel, for Ro’s character, and then figuring out a way to meld those artificial, synthy elements with real instruments and sort of percussive type of things. It was a really fun experience for me.

You continued to return to the book ‘The Passionate Marriage Book’. Why that book?

JS: The filmmaker Lynn Shelton actually recommended it to my wife, when we were having a really difficult time. Lynn had said that it had helped her. It was useful for us, too. The author of that book wasn’t really excited when I asked him if I could use it in the movie! I was like, “Man, I really want it to be that book, and he’s not going to let us do it.” But he was into it. It’s just about, not being co-dependent. About trying to form relationships where it’s two individuals who like to be together in a partnership, rather than two people merging into one thing. That’s been useful for me. I think it’s worth a read.

The scene in the hole, with the hand, was that set up?

JS: The scene in the hole WAS set up, yeah. Especially because I really wanted Jake to actually find it, without knowing quite where it was, or how that was going to go. I worked with the art department for like twelve hours, to not only dig the big hole, but also dig in, so that Jake could really pound away dirt, and find it. And so, it was really fun! It’s a nice way to work. It’s kind of one of the advantages of making a fun, small movie like this, we have that time to really craft that, and think a lot about how that was going to go. We got to have a real experience. It’s like finding those fingers, and going deeper.

JJ: Joe also didn’t want me to see the hand they picked. So they just told me, “You’re going to find something.” So, at first, I’m like, “Whatever.” As it starts, there’s a real natural anxiety that forms. “What’s he going to do to me here?”

And did you keep the ring?

JJ: Because we didn’t throw it in the hole?

Maybe you’d kept it as a little memento of your adventures or something.

JJ: It’s right here!

When you were doing the casting, was there any thought towards racial diversity, when you cast, or was it a decision on your part to not have it.

JS: Yeah. It’s actually a criticism of all my movies, is that it’s just all white people. So, at this point, there’s probably a bit of me that’s like, “Well, I’m going to keep casting all white people,” since it bothers you guys so much. I’m not going to not do that, just as a reaction. But yeah, with this movie, especially, I think that this takes place in a very hippie-dippie, upper class white world. In my experience, it’s a really uniform look; these houses and these people. Paul Mazurski was a big influence – I don’t know if you know his movies very well, but most of them are set in Beverly Hills, and also sort of involve these kind of class conversations, and things like that. And then, beyond that, a lot of it is just about actors that I like, and want to work with. That’s, in this particular movie, just because of friend relationships and things like that, it also ended up looking like that.

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