On a hunt for the Fountain of Youth, three teenagers in 1980's Honduras buy drugs, harm nature and have magical encounters. Tons of landscape footage, a meditation on Mayan Archaeology and a heavy TV teen vibe highlight this very funny impulse-buy spiritual adventure.​

Jay Chung: When we worked together on Untitled, you seemed to organize the production almost as you would a party—the cast was made up of friends, the location was a comfortable place to hang out for a few days, and the whole thing was undertaken with the spirit of going on a weekend getaway. One tends to think of filmmaking as being ordered around a hierarchically structured team and a regimented schedule—maybe that’s a cliché but it still strikes me as commonplace. Is that something you are explicitly trying to avoid?

Lev Kalman, with Whitney Horn: Yeah, like food and travel are always the biggest items on our budgets! Actually, there's parts of official filmmaking hierarchy we like—we appreciate that everyone (at least ideally) gets credited and compensated for their work, and all efforts on a shoot are in service of the film. But we like working with these tiny crews, friend-actors and small budgets, so that means Whit and I are in an intentionally weak position of power. We can neither threaten nor bribe, so working on our films just has to be a pleasure. We don't always achieve that every day, but that’s always the goal.

JC: You hear these stories about people like Lars Von Trier creating a paranoid, stressful working environment. On the other hand, there’s also a cultural cachet that comes with the enfant terrible figure. In mainstream film, the systemic pressures of money and the concentration of power also lead to coercive conditions. For us, part of the fascination of filmmaking is that it invites one to think about how a small community can be organized. In your films, the main characters are introduced to the audience as a kind of merry band. Do you feel responsible for the chemistry between people off-screen? Would it be possible for you to work with someone who might be difficult, but whose presence brings something unique to the film?

LK w/ WH: You can't make a group of people, mostly strangers to each other, live and work together and not expect some friction. Acting is emotional work—even with our fairly low-key performance style, it still requires on the base level, somebody critiquing the way you look, how you talk. And looking back at Blondes, for such a small group, practically everybody came from very different backgrounds, geographically and in terms of class. Plus there were mosquitos, days of rain, and lines to learn. I'm sure we were all "difficult" for somebody at some point!

But as for Von Trier, I long ago had to give up fantasies of either being a cruel tyrant, or a benevolent daddy like Truffaut in Day for Night. Some cast-members are going to get annoyed or frustrated with me, or with Whitney, or with one another. That's inevitable. What's important is that nobody feels totally isolated. That's bad for them, obviously, but also can kill the energy overall. One of the reasons we bring certain people back again and again, Andy for example (Bret in Blondes), is that he just naturally makes connections with people who might otherwise feel alone. That's as important as his performances on-screen.

JC: It didn’t occur to me that the cast in Blondes was so diverse. Can you tell me a bit about the cast and crew? Do you and Whitney have similar backgrounds? On screen, the characters in your films give the impression of being a homogenous group––humorously so. The audience knows they are supposed to be more than a little bit self-absorbed. What techniques do you use to convey this? I suppose it starts with having a specific direction for the delivery and intonation of the dialogue.

LK w/ WH: So, like Ingrid (Amber) was a very young, Canadian, international model. And y'know not all of the cast were that! The way we needed Amber to speak was not native to Ingrid. She worked really hard with us to pick up the accent and east-coast uptalk cadence—which, yeah, is basically how me and Whit talk. I remember, to write her rambling Bill Murray monologue, we transcribed word-for-word, me trying to tell the story. And even still, we ended up taking out like half the "like"s!

It's true, we tend to be more interested in groups than individuals. And ways of speaking are a great way to create and communicate group membership.

JC: So there is a double translation that takes the lines from your spoken delivery to the written word and back again to the spoken in Amber’s mimicking of your accent and cadence. I know you guys have spent time looking at and thinking about TV teen dramas. What you make of the dialogue in Dawson’s Creek? I only vaguely remember it, but do you think they were going for some kind of Brechtian hyper-reality?

LK w/ WH: Hmm, neither of us watched Dawson when it came out. We tried watching it more recently, but besides the Pacey-teacher affair, nothing really clicked for us. Degrassi, Saved by the Bell, The OC,  those were bigger influences on Blondes. Two things about teen TV:

1. The group is the main character. Even if one character takes center, the feeling is still that the soul of the friend-circle is really the thing at stake.
2. Teen TV shows are ok with the idea that the characters are in the process of formation. If they're inconsistent from one episode or season to another, it's not read as a mistake – it's because they are still changing, still learning new things and having experiences for the first time.

Even as we make movies that aren't about teens, we come back to those ideas – they feel liberating.

A more froufrou example of a similar thing: in Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle makes no sense at all. Scene to scene, he feels like he's glued together from radically different drafts of a script – and I bet that's what happened. I think this (probably unintentional) inconsistency gives his character that unforgettable inchoate menace.

JC: Another theme that comes up in your films (I’m not sure about the newest one [Two Plains & a Fancy]) is the social sciences. There’s the strange archeology book in Blondes in the Jungle and the PhD thesis in L for Leisure, to name two things just off the top of my head. I guess you could say this gives another slant to the subject of the group dynamic. Maybe there’s  also a connection to Jean Rouch in your films—the 16mm and the cutaways to the landscape, the goofiness.

LK w/ WH: Ha ha you should see the newest one—there's a huge scene all about Franz Boas! With Blondes in particular, I was just coming from working a job at the American Museum of Natural History where I spent a lot of time with their archival footage and old exhibitry. So that was one thing we were reacting to for sure. As for Jean Rouch, I'd say yes he's an influence, but not so directly because of his work as a social scientist but more for the reasons you mentioned. He makes filmmaking seem like an everyday human activity, that can be done with more or less seriousness, or goofiness, or technique or not, and all of it's valid and potentially great.

Credits

Film by
Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn

Starring
André Frechette III, Trevor Hoff, Coogan Martin, Travis Nutting, Ingrid Schram, James Ward

Music by El Jefe and the Executive Look, John Atkinson, Chris Baio, Julianna Barwick, Rostam Batmanglij, Mike Collins, Ezra Koenig, Billy Pavone, Judd Schoenholtz, Chris Tomson

Cinematographer
Whitney Horn

Sound Recording
Lev Kalman

Associate Producer
Alex Orban

Sound Mix
William Pavone

Additional ADR
Jeff Curtin

Jungle Guides
Francisco Javier Anchecta, Erick Jonathan Chavez, Scott Koch, Victor Voight

Honduras Food and Lodging
Cabanas en Bosque, Las Mangas

Filmed in
Las Mangas, Honduras

New York City