Film Gecko

Interview with Ethan Shaftel, Director of "Suspension"

by Jane Boursaw on May 27th, 2008

After seeing the movie Suspension, I jumped at the chance to interview director Ethan Shaftel (pictured). It’s a sci-fi thriller that grabs you at the beginning and doesn’t let go until the end credits roll. Read my review of the film here.

Jane: I was reading through some of the other Suspension reviews, and it’s funny that we all used the words “riveting” and “mesmerizing.” I think it’s because I really didn’t know where the story was headed.

Ethan: It’s not quite the same as an action extravaganza that you might be totally engaged in. It’s something slower and more drawn-out, and you don’t know where it’s headed. So, I think that’s why those words come to mind, and it’s what we were hoping to achieve with that kind of effect.

More after the jump…

Jane: I see so many movies, and so often, I know where the story is headed in the first five minutes. But this one really caught me off guard. I didn’t know where it was headed, and I love that you didn’t try to explain why the camera stopped time.

Ethan: We discussed it a lot internally to create our own justification in reality. I like to use the analogy of a plant, which grows from multiple elements. You have to have soil and sunlight and water, and if all those things are in the right combination, the plant will be at its healthiest. But if they’re a little bit different, the plant will still be alive, it’ll just be different. I feel like the power was an undirected kind of energy, like a seed growing for Daniel, because of his specific situation. He was building a camera and formed the growth of this power. The image of his son that he’s rewinding and pausing on grew into this very specific plant. It’s not just the power to stop time. It’s the power for HIM to stop time.

Jane: Maybe that’s why it’s so riveting for the audience. Here is this guy who’s found a way to control time, and in some ways, wouldn’t we all like to do that? To stop time and be able to fix things the way we think they’re supposed to be. Only fixing them really doesn’t work. We’re not supposed to be able to fix them.

Ethan: Yes, I totally agree. But if you really daydream to the fullest extent of what it would be like to stop time, to fly, to have x-ray vision, to be invisible — anything that sets you apart from other people that much is going to devastate your life, no question. While we all want to be unique in that way, when taken to its fullest conclusion, it’s much better to fit in.

Jane: I think of the movie as a psychological thriller. Did you have a category in mind when you were making it?

Ethan: Not when we were making it. When we finally finished the movie and got into the process of trying to sell it and get it out there, that’s when categorizing it became more important. Now I’m used to calling it a sci-fi thriller, because that’s what we put on our entry forms and how we talk about it at festivals and such. But for a long time, I thought it was more whimsical, not scary at all.

Jane: You don’t get the feeling that Daniel’s out to harm anyone. He’s really just trying to help people, but the ability to manipulate things is creepy.

Ethan: Yes, and we always directed from the point of view of the character. Most of the rehearsals with Daniel, we’d sit and tell the story over and over to each other, in a Daniel-centric way. Everything he’s doing is required and more about the responsibility he had for Sarah and everything else. There was that tension of Daniel carrying out these actions, and the audience begins to think he’s crossing the line, yet he’s fully invested in his need to this.

Jane: It didn’t really go where I thought it might go. I thought because both Daniel and Sarah had these serious losses, they might end up together at the end. I guess they did in a way, but not the way you might think. Then there’s that instant at the end where you think, oh no, he’s going to die and then everything will stop, because nobody will be able to start the camera again.

Ethan: That was a really cool moment and one of the things we get a lot of comments on…the capriciousness of the camera itself, in that it turns off and on several times during the movie without being prompted. It’s faulty in some way, or it has a mind of its own.

Jane: Or maybe the son’s vibes were in the camera or something. That’s what went through my mind, that somehow the son was still there.

Ethan: That’s interesting. I hadn’t considered that, whether it was something to do with the son, who’s good-hearted and might be influencing things.

Jane: I’m really glad you didn’t give the camera the ability to rewind. That crossed my mind, too.

Ethan: It would have been a different movie. Being able to go back and change things in your life is schematically different from being able to stop and not progress with things. When we were making this movie, Click, the movie with Adam Sandler, came out. But that movie is ultimately about the ability to fast-forward. He works overtime for a year, but he just fast-forwards through it, so he doesn’t have to feel it. But when he comes out of it, his family doesn’t have a relationship with him anymore. So that movie was orientated on a different type of power than being able to pause time.

Jane: The special effects…can you explain how you make the soccer ball stop in mid-air and then have Daniel go over and touch it?

Ethan: We knew our limitations from the very beginning in terms of what we could achieve with our budget. But we shot things in such a way that it was very conservative, very easy to manipulate. A simple example is, if you watch a movie like The Matrix, they have these special effects happening and the camera itself is moving around, tracking to left, zooming in, flying up and down…the camera is very mobile. But that’s not the case in Suspension. The camera is very static with these effects happening. We locked off the cameras as not panning, not choking up, putting on a dolly for these effect shots, because then the artists have a much easier time doing things like removing wires and adding in elements.

We wanted to walk away from set every day having footage that was very close to what we actually wanted. For instance, the car crash…those are two real cars that had been in a crash – not together, but two separate crashes. We found them in junkyards and towed them to the set, pushed them together, and had a metal worker weld them together. We propped up the back ends with jacks, and then we shot the scene. So when Daniel gets out of the car and walks around to the front, it was very similar to the final shot. Afterwards, the artists went in and removed the jacks, added skid marks on the road, added some extra broken glass…but those elements were a small percentage of the total shot. We wanted to take out things from the shot rather than have to add them in. Many films are shot in a clean environment, like a blue screen, and things are added in. But you can only do that if you have the budget for more on the post-production instead of the production. For us, we had to shoot what we could, and see what we could do later on the computer.

Jane: And the soccer ball?

Ethan: The soccer ball was on a pole. When Daniel walks up to it, he’s touch a real soccer ball on a pole. Then the artists removed the pole later.

Jane: How did you get the people in the background to stand so still?

Ethan: In the shots with a lot of frozen people, you’ll notice there are actually two kinds of shots. There’s a wide a camera, and we’re fairly far away from the subject with a lot of people and you see Daniel walking through — like the shots in the gym and the department store. The scene is built around that wide shot and then a close-up. But the close-up is zoomed in. The camera is moving around a lot following Daniel, and you’ll notice that the people frozen are sort of blurry and out of focus. The camera only catches the edges of them and then cuts back to the wide shot. Those people are just holding still, but because of the nature of the shot — being zoomed in with a shaky camera – it de-emphasizes any accidental motion those extras might have had.

On the wide shot, all the actors are holding still or in the case of the cheerleader in the air, they do their flip and then walk off screen. Then the artists go in, freeze that frame, cut out the cheerleader in the air, and stick her back into the original footage where Daniel is walking through. So, for those two shots, one is not an effect shot at all, and the other is a fairly simple, straightforward effect.

Jane: So, the DVD is available on your web site?

Ethan: Yes — http://www.easy-action.com/suspension. One of the things I was very careful of was giving up too much control. This movie was made in Kansas, and we have a lot of friends, families, and fans in Lawrence that have been a part of this movie. I wanted the ability to not only sell the movie ourselves, but also keep control of it for future technology like digital downloads. If, five years from now, we want to have a site where we can download the movie to our supporters and fans, I didn’t want to give up that control.

So, we had a long process of negotiation, but the end result is that we can still sell the movie ourselves and it will also be released on Amazon, Blockbuster and other DVD outlets. We tell our friends and family and people who were involved with the movie, that if they buy it from us, 75% of that will stay in our pockets and pay off our debt. But if they buy it from somebody else, we get a royalty that trickles down eventually from Warner Brothers and all the different companies involved in the release.

Jane: Is that kind of the trend these days?

Ethan: I think, absolutely, that’s the trend. Instead of making a piece and trying to sell it for the most money to someone who’s going to make money with it, you should have an investment in the life of the project and do more of a hybrid distribution model. You can do some elements of traditional distribution – we licensed the film to Warner Home Video for domestic DVD release, and they’re going to make money off it and that’s great. But we also retained the television rights and theatrical rights. We’re also self releasing it in theaters – that mostly drives DVD sales. We also have all our international rights, and we’re going to sell them one by one as we go to different countries with festivals, etc.

Jane: Thanks so much for talking to me. It’s always fun for me, because I’m such a fan of movies, and I love talking to film makers and finding out what goes on behind the scenes.

Ethan: Thanks, Jane, I appreciate it.

        Aris Blevins, Ethan Shaftel, Alec Joler, Kevin Obsatz

Images: EasyAction Pictures, 2007

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