In Your Eyes is getting a lot of attention as the latest Joss Whedon project, and that’s probably what they hope will bring attention to the micro-budget film. Whedon wrote the script and produced it under his micro-budget label Bellwether films, the same company with whom he made Much Ado About Nothing. Brin Hill directed In Your Eyes, starring Zoe Kazan and Michael Stahl-David as two people who discover a telepathic connection, despite being thousands of miles apart. I spoke to Hill by phone where he was screening the film at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it was announced that In Your Eyes is available online now at www.inyoureyesmovie.com.
CraveOnline: How are sales since In Your Eyes went online?
Brin Hill: You know, it’s funny. I haven’t even had a chance to ask anybody. I’ve been running around doing screenings still for the festival and press. I haven’t even had a chance to breathe and remember to ask anybody. Hopefully amazing, I don’t know.
Right now, it’s a rental only, right?
Yeah, as far as I’ve understood it, it’s a rental only and I don’t know when that will change but eventually I imagine it will at some point. For now, rent it.
Is there any talk about when it will be available to own?
I’m not sure exactly. That’d be more of a question for the producer side because I just haven’t been in the mix on that. I’ve been so busy doing all this stuff that I haven’t been privy to the details of that plan yet, the rollout.
Was In Your Eyes shot shortly after Much Ado About Nothing?
Yeah, it came on the heels of that film. I can’t remember exactly. It was several months later, some of the same crew on both movies, but it was the next evolution in the Bellwether thing. They knew it was going to come next so we were talking about it during Much Ado.
Did In Your Eyes take longer to come out than Much Ado?
No, you know, it was more about I think timing everything, spacing the things out for Bellwether. Part of it was just Joss’s schedule and trying to align ourselves with that and just trying to be smart about it. I think for Bellwether it was just about feeding stuff so it wasn’t one thing right after the next. It was like all right, let Much Ado live in its own space. Let it have its run and then go to the next thing, and treat them differently. So I think for them it was just about spacing stuff out.
Much Ado shot entirely in Joss’s house, so did you have more location scouting and was it harder to find locations for In Your Eyes?
You mean because we weren’t just in Joss’s backyard? Yeah, this is a totally different movie in the sense that it’s a much different undertaking. It takes place in two different places that are 3000 miles apart. We shot in New Hampshire for half the shoot and then Los Angeles for New Mexico half the shoot. There are some large set pieces in the movie. There’s snow, there’s planes, there’s trains, there’s automobiles. It’s just a different beast, different story. I wish we could’ve shot a train in someone’s backyard but evidently no one has a train in their backyard. We just found a guy who owned a train in New Hampshire, go figure. So someone owns a train. They just don’t have a really big backyard.
Was it a commercial train? I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a private train.
It was some guy who owns a train honestly. It’s a miracle. It’s a testament to our producers, Michael Roiff and Kai Cole, who somehow found a guy in New Hampshire that would give us a train with like no money. I don’t even know how we did it. We’re a micro-budget and it was a super ambitious movie and somehow they made it all happen, so it’s a testament to them.
Like most of Joss’s supernatural stories are a metaphor for something real, do you see In Your Eyes as the story of two people who can’t connect with the world?
Yeah, for me it was always the theme of connection. The one thing that I’ve always loved about Joss’s stuff, and I think it’s something that he and I share, just have worked in different genres telling similar stories, but I always love this idea of loner heroes who are forced to band together to overcome adversity, overcome limitations based on their environment or socialization or whatever, and discover their fate or destiny, or discover the road toward that. Whether that’s Avengers which I think has that theme or “Buffy,” or Much Ado on a certain level, obviously he was starting with Shakespeare, but I think that was one theme that’s also in this and that really appealed to me.
I think it lent itself to this notion of connection. I think there’s a really timely theme here. In a lot of ways, what Spike Jonze was trying to explore in Her, there’s some of that here. How are we connecting in this new world order? Obviously the movie doesn’t deal with it in a necessarily tangible way but I think there’s a subtext there of how do we connect now? How do we find another person to take steps forward?
As someone says in the film, “Be where you at” is an important thing also.
I think so. How do you learn to live on the ground. I think that speaks a little bit toward my directing approach to it which was I wanted to root it on the ground in a lot of ways and treat the supernatural aspect of it as something that’s just rooted in reality. So I think there is that theme of how do I learn to live in the here and now, instead of my own head, instead of alone by myself somewhere? How do I found common ground or community or other people like me?
Did you audition for the roles of Dylan and Rebecca?
Zoe Kazan came about from just discussions that we had. Joss, myself, Michael Roiff, Kai Cole just talking about who would be the most interesting, against type personality, person or actress for this role? Zoe just kept coming up because of her range, her dynamicness, if dynamicness is a word. Her dynamic skill set and there’s a quirkiness to her and a really interesting beauty to her that I think appealed to all of us. Joss loved her in this movie that he calls Splody Girl, The Exploding Girl. We all loved her in all of her different things so we met with her, if memory serves me right, we met over some blueberry muffins in a coffee shop. She really sparked to the vision that I had for it and the notion of what Bellwether was excited about which was matching Joss’s voice with my aesthetics and seeing what alchemy came out of that.
Michael Stahl-David auditioned and he was just awesome. He came in and he understood the rhythm of Joss’s writing and kind of got what we’re after in a way that no one else seemed to be able to when they were coming in that room. Everyone was like, “This is our guy.” We knew him from Cloverfield and stuff but when he came in and auditioned, he was the guy.
Were there ever any combinations of Rebeccas and Dylans?
No, more just on paper. I always have a draft board, a laundry list of people. What about this person? What about that person? More just ideas we were pitching internally between us.
Did you have any rehearsal time for In Your Eyes?
Some. It was quick. We got to do a table read where Joss and I were there. Michael Roiff was in New Hampshire on the ground. I was there and then flew back for it with Michael Stahl-David and Zoe, and Kai Cole was there, and a couple other folks helping us read lines but I think Joss and I were playing all the other characters. So that was the first opportunity to hear it and then Joss and I, after hearing them go through it, went and talked through cadence and rhythm of some of the writing.
He went and tweaked some stuff and then I got together with Zoe and Michael for a couple rehearsals, and then got to rehearse a little bit in New Hampshire on our off days with Mark Feuerstein. Not a ton of rehearsal time but their dynamic was so good, I think it helped that Zoe and Michael just coincidentally knew each other socially. Then they were on set the whole time together, so when we’d do walk throughs and stuff it was a little bit like having rehearsal.
I was surprised that In Your Eyes was such an early script of Joss’s. Do you know if he’d tried to get it made through other channels?
Yeah, I honestly don’t know the history of all that. I just know that it was something that they’d wanted to do. It was sort of a passion project of sorts. I have no idea what the history of it is, because it came to me, it just felt fresh and new and timely in a lot of ways so I don’t even know when we wrote it, and I didn’t really ask. I was just like, “Oh, this is an interesting story. I love the themes in it. I love what it’s doing and I would love to try to tackle it and see what comes out the other side.”
Will your next film be another Bellwether film?
I don’t know what the next step is for me. I think for Bellwether, I know their mission which is to try to make stuff and bring it to audiences. I don’t know what’s next on the plate for them. For me, I might try to go do something totally different again. I’m looking to do a thriller actually so we’ll see if that happens. I’m actually looking to try to do a couple television shows, but it was fun.
I’m not an overt sci-fi guy but I think there’s a little Silver Surfer in me. I think I’m the outsider always trying to protect home. So I respond to that. I would love to try to do another sci-fi thing. I was thinking the other day about how much fun it would be to do a psychological thriller, but I’m always open. I kind of bounce around between genres so I think people in the industry are trying to make sense of what that means.
Is Silver Surfer your go to reference?
I don’t know. Should it be? I just like him. I always respond to him. I used to read that comic a lot when I was a kid. My best friend is a huge comic head, he’s always trying to get me into other stuff but I’ve always felt like that. I felt like him a little bit.
You’ve been a working screenwriter too.
Yeah, I’m fortunate enough to get paid sometimes to write scripts. Sometimes I’m just working for myself.
Had you ever tried to transition that into more directing jobs?
You know, I started as a writer/director so my first feature, the shorts that I made were stuff that I either cowrote or wrote myself. Coming out of film school I actually had a deal to be a writer/director at Dimension making comedies and horror movies. I don’t know what happened there. It just all fell apart, so it started as much more but I’ve been doing both, trying to explore both and will continue to try to do that.
Have you written more scripts that didn’t end up happening on the development side?
I have. I have a number of them in the graveyard. I’ve written some stuff that hasn’t happened and I’ve done some rewrites on stuff for stuff that hasn’t happened. The last couple things I wrote for studios got greenlit right away so it was very exciting. I’m in the process of writing another thing for somebody.
Any interesting titles that we’d know of that we’d be surprised didn’t get made?
Probably not on my end. Actually, I’ll tell you one really funny one. When I was in film school, like I said I got a deal at Dimension and they wanted me to make a Children of the Corn movie. So I pitched them Children of the Corn 666 which I thought was genius. Bob wasn’t really feeling [it] I guess.
Wait, they did make Children of the Corn 666.
I think they eventually did make Children of the Corn 6. I don’t know if they added the 66. Maybe if they did they stole my idea.
I think it was 666.
I wouldn’t put it past them. [Laughs] I was sort of going down the absurdist horror [path]. I was like well, if we’re doing number six… I was having to pitch them my horrible ideas but they were pretty ingenious to me at the time.
What was your plot for Children of the Corn 666?
I don’t even remember the plot but I do remember they would give me mandates at Dimension like, “All right, I want you to make a hip-hop comedy.” I was like, “All right, what’s it about?” He goes, “Well, there’s a street team in it and they’re promoting a concert and you’ve got to have one strip club scene.” I was like, “All right, what else?” “That’s it.” In this, they were like, “Children of the Corn, it’s all going to take place on a fairgrounds.” As a kid I was extremely afraid of the centrifugal force thing. You’d spin and get trapped on the wall and the floor drops, and it would make me utterly nauseous. I was like, what would you do if you took corn in the centrifugal force machine? We fill a dude with popcorn kernels and he just explodes on the centrifugal force machine, which is like the worst idea ever but that was one I pitched them.
I don’t know how that would work but it sounds awesome.
It kind of sounds amazing, right? And there’s popcorn coming out of every orifice.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
