Name and Year: Dylan Hansen–Fliedner & Jason Jadick, C’14
Majors: English/Creative Writing & Cinema Studies
Website: www.lunarcircleproductions.com
STREET: How did you each get into filmmaking? What caused you to start making films together?
Dylan Hansen–Fleidner: I worked on a friend’s set one day and decided to drop out of engineering school. I switched to SAS after my freshman year to pursue cinema studies. That was like the big “sea change.” Jason and I became friends the summer before school because we (and our roommate Seth) said that we liked Animal Collective on the Class of 2014 Facebook Group.
Jason Jadick: It really all began with fooling around with a video camera in middle school with friends. It always seemed like a hobby, but freshman year I was trying to figure out what I could do and my mom said, “You could be a movie director.” Shortly after that I saw Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” here in Philly and walked out deciding I wanted to try pursuing film. Dylan had a similar awakening and we were friends, so it made sense.
STREET: You have a very particular, hyperstylized aesthetic––how did you come to that? What do you strive to achieve aesthetically in each work?
DH: Each project has different aesthetic demands, which we often establish at the beginning. These are open to change as we move into shooting and then editing. Often, it’s inspired by a mood we want to evoke. The “hyperstyle” you are referring to is more of a desire to be consistent. For something like “GRAVEBANGERS BALL,” we wanted to evoke horror movies we grew up with on VHS, art horror of the 70’s and MTV. Everything from typeface of titles to color correction to the music we had composed contributes to that. We re–recorded the dialog so it sounds like a bad Italian dubbing, which contributes to the camp of the whole thing. A film like “real life-like” was designed with a generational character set in mind. That necessitated a pastiche of different outsiders—rebels, artists, geeks. We wanted a more natural, “realistic” feeling so we shot in our apartment and outdoors. Sometimes we obsess over details but most of the time, and more so lately, we end up liking the incidental details we didn’t plan the best. We just finished an experimental documentary called “travel slides,” that has some influences in Structuralist filmmaking as well as people like Stan Brakhage, but it’s also just an attempt to condense the experience of a road trip. Like we’re making you sit through “travel slides” as we attempt the impossible, to explain how it felt.
STREET: What are some of your influences—film and otherwise?
DH: Friends, film theory, conceptual art, social media, my high school job in a mall video store, Gus Van Sant, Andre Bazin, David Lynch, Harmony Korine, Jim Jarmusch, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jean–Luc Godard, Todd Haynes, Richard Prince, John Cage, Terrence Malick, Andy Warhol, Paul Thomas Anderson, Selena Gomez… I could keep going. Really everything we’ve ever seen or heard is an influence. There’s definitely a continuum of artists we’re working in relation to, but it’s a complete mix of all that and our surroundings. Plus, every movie we make changes how we view our own work/style/process. I also would just like to mention Walter Benjamin.
JJ: You always have to mention Benjamin. That’s a great list but I would add Sonic Youth. They have influenced a lot of our aesthetic.
STREET: What’s your filmmaking process, from initial conception to the final product?
DH: Think. Outline. Wrangle friends. Shoot. Edit.
JJ: Reach insanity.
STREET: What have been some of your favorite projects together? Least favorite? What are you working on now?
DH: They get more fun as we figure out what we need to be doing, so it’s less like we–should–prepare–every–fucking–thing–down–to–the–last–detail and more like “ready?” We stayed up for 60 hours straight to edit “GRAVEBANGERS BALL.” So that was insanely stressful and almost a breaking point, but it was also really fun to stay up stabbing chickens and looping audio at sunrise as birds were chirping in the background. We’re really bogged down by school right now, but we’re hoping to put together a longer film over the summer. We also have footage from a Mac Demarco concert at Pi Lam we need to edit. Bookmark lunarcircleproductions.com
JJ: Yeah, we’re going to update the site soon with new films. We just finished shooting a film we’re making as a sort of prequel to Gus Van Sant’s “Last Days.” That will be done soon. We had the privilege of working with Dane Mainella, Sam Horn, Emily Rea and Ben Davis on this recent project. School is not conducive to our goals right now, so we’re just trying to jump through the right hoops and make it somewhere. We want to work on a longer piece with the rest of the Lunar Circle this summer.
http://vimeo.com/50500539
http://vimeo.com/49504694
http://vimeo.com/41681785
