Born October 29, 1981, independent filmmaker Aaron Katz has already established quite a respectful resume. His early credits include acting as a second assistant director on the short The Tragedy of Glady (2004), directing the short Hoopla and co-directing the documentary All the Stage Is a World (2005).

For his subsequent directorial project, Katz crafted Dance Party, USA (2006). He followed that feature with the widely acclaimed Quiet City (2007). With the latter project, Katz was nominated for the coveted John Cassavetes Award by the Independent Spirit Awards, while also receiving the BendFilm Festival’s Jury Prize for Best Direction.

On Friday, February 29, Aaron Katz and I discussed his career thus far, particularly noticing his work with feature films. Looking from the past to the future, our conversation also brought up his intriguing next project, Lay of the Land.

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Josh E Armstrong: When did you first realize that you wanted to make films?

Aaron Katz: I don’t know exactly. In high school, I thought I wanted to be an actor. But I made some Super-8 stuff anyway, and I’ve always been really interested in film.I guess when I decided I really wanted to do it, it was probably through a bunch of conversations with a theater teacher at the school I went to. He was a really cool guy. I ended up deciding that film in general was what I really wanted to do and that I should go to film school instead of acting school.

JA: What was the first step you took in achieving your dream of directing?

AK: It’s hard to state the very first step. It’s all little steps. It was deciding to make Super-8 movies with my friends in high school. It was deciding to go to film school. It was deciding to make a movie right after film school - I guess that was maybe the biggest one, because when you’re in film school, there’s a lot of talk about, ‘You shouldn’t go make a movie until you have a certain amount of resources and money.’ It can seem like you’ll never get around to making a movie.

I had a script I had written for my first film, Dance Party, USA, and was just really overwhelmed and thinking about how I could possibly make it into a film. Brendan McFadden, who ended up producing Dance Party, really was encouraging to the idea that we should just figure out what resources we had access to and how to make the movie with those items rather than saying, ‘Here’s what we need. How can we get it?’

JA: How did you meet Brendan McFadden?

AK: We met at the North Carolina School of the Arts. Almost everyone who’s worked on both films is from there.

JA: How was your experience at the NC School of the Arts?

AK: It was really good. Obviously, every school has its pluses and minuses. NC School of the Arts has its minuses too. But overall, it was really good.

The best part about it was finding a group of people who were all excited to work together. Like I said, everyone who’s worked on both films came from that school. These are a lot of people who maybe aren’t exactly like-minded but whose different ideas work really well together. We sort of stuck together after school.

JA: You mentioned that Dance Party, USA started with a script. Could you elaborate on that beginning?

AK: I wrote it between the second and third year of school. I guess it was the summer of 2002. I was back in Portland, Oregon, which is where I’m from. I was staying with my dad. I was doing a lot of writing that summer.

It just so happened that I also - I don’t know if it was just circumstantial or if I was more open to it - but I overheard a lot of conversations that I thought were really interesting that summer. I didn’t have a car, so I was taking a lot of public transportation, taking the train and the bus a lot to Portland. I started writing down some of the conversations I overheard. Two of them I ended up thinking were particularly interesting and used those as a way to start writing Dance Party, USA.

I went back to school with a script. I had written most of that script really quickly, after those initial two conversations. In probably just a couple of weeks or even less than that, I had a first draft. I brought it back with me to school and showed it first to my roommates, Brendan and Marc Ripper, who ended up also producing Dance Party. Everyone thought it was a pretty good script. I didn’t know exactly what to do with it, so I just kind of sat on it until toward the end of the senior year. We all decided that we were going to go ahead and try to make it right after school.

JA: How did you get the resources to do that?

AK: Instead of saying, ‘We need this, this and this. How can we get them?’, we decided to think about, ‘All right, well, we have this, this and this. How can we use them?’ The guy who ended up cutting the film had a camera, a DVX100, which is a MiniDV camera that’s pretty good. We knew we had access to that.

We decided to go ahead and make the film in Portland, where I’m from, because we knew we could have a lot of resources there, in terms of locations and people to help out. My mom’s college roommate had an interior design business. At her second house - that’s her office - the upstairs wasn’t used, so we just stayed up there for the whole time. The whole crew ended up staying there.

In terms of the other equipment, we used stuff from a place called Portland Community Media, which was like a cable access station. They had all this really great equipment that was almost not being used because they had mostly talk shows and stuff they shot in the studios and some interview shows. But most of their movie equipment - which they did actually have a decent amount of - they didn’t use, so we used some of that.

Then we went to this local chain of stores called ‘Fred Meyer.’ They have them in Oregon and Washington and maybe Idaho. They’re sort of like a local version of K-mart. Anyway, we got some more equipment from there.

Really, the only money we spent was on some stuff from the department store, food for people and airline tickets for people who didn’t live in town. We only spent about $3,000 or so on that movie.

JA: How do you know when you’re completely done with a movie? For instance, a lot of mainstream films are done when the executive says, ‘Okay, we’ve got to have this film out this summer.’ With your directing independently, though, I imagine you have more of a say as to how long your picture takes to be completed.

AK: Well, in terms of shooting, we figured out about how long we thought we’d need and then added a whole bunch more days in because you never know what’s going to happen. Now that was with my first film, Dance Party.

Then with Quiet City, we shot that in about a week, not because we wanted to shoot it in such a short amount of time but because the main actress, Erin Fisher, had to get back down to Charlotte, where she’s from, to do some stuff there. She was only available for a week.

In both cases, it was kind of like working with what we had, in terms of shooting. Then with the final product, on Dance Party, we kind of had all the time in the world to finish it. Like you said, with a movie made by a studio, there are people going, ‘Okay, when is this thing going to be done?!’ But with this, no one even knew it existed. So it was done when it was done.

Actually, Dance Party took an enormously long time to complete. It took almost two years. Part of the reason for that was because I had moved to Brooklyn around the time we were cutting it. Zach Clark, who was editing it, lived in Virginia. He would work on it and send it up to me on DVD. I’d give him notes, and he’d work on it a little more. Except for twice - once I went down there and once he came up here - we were totally separate. We didn’t have the chance to sit down and ‘Try this!’ Things that would take five minutes to try normally if we were sitting down together, would take a week to try. So it took a really long time. But actually, on that movie, I think it ended up making it better, because we thought of some things I don’t think we would have thought of just right off the bat.

Then with Quiet City, we were aiming to have it ready for South by Southwest (SXSW) 2007. That was actually a pretty tight schedule, because we shot it in October 2006. I was cutting it myself, and I just knew I was going to be staying up some late nights. We cut that in about two months.

As far as knowing when a film is finished, you know when something feels right. In the case of Quiet City, there was a deadline ahead. You try to match those two up and work hard to get it so it feels right and is ready in time.

JA: I’m glad you mentioned Quiet City, because my next question is, ‘Where did the concept for it come from?’

AK: Dance Party had just premiered at SXSW 2006. Brendan and the guy who ended up producing Quiet City, Ben Stambler, and I were all talking about how it would be really easy to get involved in different festivals with Dance Party and sort of let that take over and not work on anything new. So we all resolved that we were going to try to work on something new as we were doing the whole festival thing.

I was writing a script that took place in Pittsburgh, because I think Pittsburgh is a really interesting city and I do want to shoot something there. But that script just didn’t work out. It had some trouble right at the root of it, I think.

One interesting thing is that the script contained a character who ended up being the character of Jamie in Quiet City. I eventually decided to let go of the Pittsburgh script and just take that character of Jamie and put her in a new context. I decided she was visiting New York and trying to meet up with a friend. When I started, I didn’t know what was going to happen. I just kind of wrote it very quickly. It took about a week, I think, to write that first draft of Quiet City. The idea was to just put her in a situation and know the character and see what happens.

I wrote the script, not on a computer but in a notebook that I bought. I was at that Cincinnati airport, thinking about how frustrated I was with the other script. So I bought this blank notebook there and made some rules for myself, in terms of writing Quiet City. Those rules were that I had to write ten pages a day and I had to write those pages without stopping and thinking. Also, I had to keep the pen or pencil moving, and I couldn’t look back at anything I had written until I came to the end of the first draft. That way, I tried to make it as organic a process a possible.

JA: So that early script - the one you ended up cutting - are you ever going to revisit that?

AK: No, I don’t feel that need to be like, ‘Well, I put all this time and spent all this energy in it! I need to make something of it!’ I feel like that script wasn’t working as something to make. For me, it was good to have that experience, trying to write it and have it not work out.

I don’t think that script is something I’ll ever revisit. Maybe I’ll never even look at it again, even out of curiosity. I’m pretty much totally moved on from that script. Who knows, maybe something I learned from writing it will work its way into something in the future. But I’m not going to take anything from it consciously, I think.

JA: What was scheduling like, each day, for Quiet City?

AK: It was a pretty tight schedule. We shot it in about a week, and we had to be really careful about not getting behind. Most of us were staying at the same place, an apartment in Fort Green, Brooklyn. We’d get up each day and usually try to get started shooting around 10 or 11 in the morning.

Usually, we’d get 2 or 3 locations a day. We’d have something big at the beginning that we’d shoot and then have some lunch. Then we’d shoot a couple of little things - maybe there’d be a location where we’d only have one thing to shoot - and then we’d have a big thing at night, like the art gallery or the park. We’d get done usually after midnight.

We really didn’t have much time off. It was pretty much all work, especially for Brendan and I. Ben was in Korea at the time, so he wasn’t involved with physical production. He was involved more with the film’s business and administrative-type stuff.

But Brendan, and Andy Reed, the director of photography, and I would spend any time when we weren’t actually shooting basically planning what we were going to shoot - how we were going to do it, making calls to extras, calls about locations, etc. Andy and I would check out locations.

It was really a full schedule, much more than Dance Party. With Dance Party, we had three weeks to do it and had many days where we didn’t do anything other than plan. But I needed to sleep for days after finishing Quiet City.

JA: Aside from time, what was another huge obstacle for Quiet City?

AK: I guess maybe there was the unknown. There were just so many factors that were unknown. Part of the idea for the film was that the actors would adhere basically to the structure of the script and kind of what each scene was about, but the lines themselves would be improvised. A lot of times, we didn’t know what we were going to get at a location. Things would be out of our control at a location, like shooting on the subway, for example.

All of that was definitely hard. But actually, I think all those same things that were potential obstacles were also good things. We tried to be open to what was really going on, whether that was with the actors or with a location. Maybe someone would show up with a thing at a location, and we’d be like, ‘Hey, maybe we should put that in the movie!’ We tried to really be open to the unknown, within certain guidelines, though letting it be pretty free.

JA: As far as creation of the film - not the film itself, but its creation - is there anything you would do differently if you could?

AK: In the finished product, there are a couple of things that I look back on and go, ‘Aw, I wish we had this kind of shot or that kind of shot.’ But I’m very proud of the film, and I think everyone who worked on it is really proud of it.

I think that to go back and try to do something differently with the process would have changed so much. I think much of the film is because of how we made it - because we did it quickly, because we were staying in the same place and all in it together, and because we didn’t have a lot of money for extra stuff. I really think that any of the negative things that those circumstances created were responsible for all the positive things.

I wouldn’t want to go back and change anything. I think it is what it is, and I’m glad it is what it is.

JA: On that note, what would you say is your greatest memory from the making of Quiet City?

AK: The greatest memory from the making of the film is - well, I’ll give two. One of them is not from shooting, but it’s from our one day off. It was a Sunday, around October 30. A bunch of us went over to the home of this guy who was our gaffer and first assistant cameraman - basically he did everything except operate the camera. We went over there, because both he and Brendan are from Pittsburgh, and we watched a Pittsburgh Steelers game.

After the game, we put on this Sam Cooke record, Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club. There were a bunch of us there. Erin Fisher, who plays Jamie, and Sarah Hellman, who plays Robin, and a lot of the crew were there. For some reason, we all started dancing to this song. It sounds stupid, but it was spontaneous dancing and not like joke dancing. It was the most fun I’ve ever had dancing in my entire life, just to this one song.

Even though it wasn’t during shooting, I think it was really indicative of the spirit of making the film, with all of us dancing together. That’s a great memory for me. That’s the one that stands out the most.

As for the second memory that I’ll say, you know that shot where they have the race in the park? That was on our last day. That was the longest day. We started shooting that day, probably before midnight, and went all the way up. Erin Fisher had to go back to Charlotte, through what was probably a 7 p.m. flight out of New York. So we had been shooting all day. That was probably our sixteenth hour of shooting or so, because there was stuff we hadn’t finished yet.

We were in Prospect Park, and we were running out of time. There were some other factors going on. There was a problem with keys having been taken from somewhere. We were all very stressed out with figuring out this key situation and also trying to shoot the rest of the movie.

Andy Reed said, ‘Well, how about we shoot this scene, pointing right into the sun?’ I said, ‘That’s a good idea. All right, so they are going to run, and what if they run over that hill and disappear.’ So I ran and said, ‘Okay, Reed, tell me when I’m out of sight.’ Finally, he said, ‘Okay, you’re out of sight.’ So I put a twig down on the ground to mark that spot and told the actors where to run.

That shot was one of the most unplanned shots in the entire movie. I also think it was probably my favorite shot and my favorite scene in the movie. We only did one take of it. Everything just kind of came together there. I think that was because of how we did it. We followed the same language and all had a spirit of being open to what was really in front of us.

JA: How did you become associated with Benten Films?

AK: The Benten guys saw Quiet City at SXSW 2007 and really liked it. We were talking to a couple other companies, but ultimately we decided that Benten was the one we felt most comfortable with. They really seemed to get the movie. I was also excited by the idea of being part of the process of coming up with art for the DVD package, which is something that wouldn’t happen with most companies.

JA: What feature is next for you?

AK: Well, I just finished a draft of a script called Lay of the Land. It’s about a jazz drummer - a black guy - and a white guy who’s a country musician. They’re living on the outskirts of Sacramento, in the early 1970s.

The film is about their friendship. They’re getting closer to middle age and not really achieving what they thought they would. They’re just playing with house bands and not really doing anything exciting.

Eventually, the country guy’s niece shows up in town, running away from her boyfriend. Shortly thereafter, her boyfriend arrives.

The film is dissimilar from Quiet City and Dance Party, in that it takes place in the ’70s and the characters are a little bit older and the scope is a little bit bigger. But it’s similar to those films, in that it’s about human interaction.

JA: That must be pretty difficult to make independently, with the movie taking place in the ’70s. For instance, how do you avoid various contemporary cars coming into a shot?

AK: The thing is, this film I can’t make on my own. Dance Party cost about $3,000, and Quiet City cost even less, about $2,000. We were able to do that, because the scripts didn’t call for anything like the 1970s.

But this one will definitely have to have some outside help. Right now, I’m in the process of getting the script into decent shape to show around to some people, to try to get some money for it.

JA: I’m eager to see Lay of the Land. It sounds like a really good film!

AK: Yeah, I’m excited about it. I hope that I get to make it. Everything that happens with it will be a new experience for me. I don’t know exactly how to navigate the whole process of getting someone behind the film. I’m sort of just learning how the process works. But I’m really hopeful that I’ll get to make the film, and I think it will be good, if I do.

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The Quiet City and Dance Party, USA DVD set is now available at Amazon.com.

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