Promoting Twisted: A Balloonamentary, Sara Taksler and Naomi Greenfield excitedly exchange memories regarding their first collaboration on a theatrical documentary. The directorial duo recall the inspirations that led to their creating Twisted, from developing its humorous title to discovering its distribution.

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Official Biographies

Sara Taksler

Sara is an associate producer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Her first short, Stop the Ignorance: The Beauty That Is New Jersey, was a tribute to her home state. While making a short documentary about the 2000 Presidential election, Sara interviewed the likes of Al Franken and Rob Reiner. She was a College Marketing Representative for Buena Vista Pictures Marketing, a journalist for DoSomething.org, and worked in production for Nick At Nite and MTV2. Sara has performed at Caroline’s Comedy Club in New York City and The Arts Factory in Byron Bay, Australia. Her random talents include talking backwards, playing harmonica and guitar, and a remarkable fake sneeze.

Naomi Greenfield

Naomi began balloon twisting at age 13 to combat her fear of balloon popping. Many pops later, she twists balloons at parties, street fairs and private events through her own small business, The Red Balloon Company. Prior to earning a Masters Degree in Technology in Education at Harvard University, Naomi worked in children’s television development and production at Sesame Street, Fox Family Channel, Scholastic Entertainment, and WGBH Boston. She has produced several short films, including three films, Twisted Romance (2003), When Given Lemons… (2004) and Eat To Defeat (2006) as part of the 48 Hour Film Project in Boston; Eat To Defeat was an Audience Award Winner. Naomi is currently a Creative Producer at FableVision, an animation and educational multimedia studio.

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Josh E Armstrong: What inspired you to make Twisted: A Balloonamentary?

Sara Taksler: Naomi and I actually met in college. We discovered that we both knew how to twist balloons. It was just a fun hobby that we learned as kids.

Then I had an interest in making a documentary. Naomi heard about these conventions. After we graduated, we discussed doing some sort of project together. We went on one scouting mission, started filming and really loved the stories and the people we found.

JA: Who came up with the film’s title?

Naomi Greenfield: I think it just sort of came out one day and then it sort of stuck. Toward the end, when we were about to enter festivals, we did a bunch of focus groups, and we tried out some other titles. It always sort of came back to [Twisted: A Balloonamentary].

I guess we leaned toward having it just called Twisted. But we thought it had sort of a negative connotation. So I guess adding Balloonamentary to the end made it have sort of a serious side but also a lighter, fun side as well.

ST: And we always kind of debated if maybe that was funny or not.

JA: What were some of those other names that you came up with?

ST: We had a whole list: Three Twist Dogs… [to Naomi] Do you remember?

NG: No, I don’t. [laughs]

ST: We had like ten names, and we asked people for lots of suggestions. I really don’t remember. I remember Three Twist Dogs was one which is very straightforward, which we went back and forth about. Or Twist and Shout, the name of a convention. Every play on the word ‘twist’ we could think of.

JA: Were there any other subjects you considered making a documentary about?

NG: Yeah, I think this is the first one that sort of came together. This is a topic we both wanted to do. We thought there was enough material there, after we met some of the people at the conventions and heard their stories. This is the first idea we pursued really.

JA: How did you get Jon Stewart to narrate the documentary?

ST: There’s a short animated section in the film that’s just a couple of minutes long. It goes over the history of balloon twisting. That’s the part that he narrates.

We got him because I am an associate producer at The Daily Show. We wanted a familiar voice to narrate that part of the film, to introduce that we would be going over the history of balloon twisting but it would be in a fun way. So I asked him if he would help us out.

JA: [to Sara] How did you become associate producer for The Daily Show?

ST: I’ve worked in TV for a while now, and I was on a few other shows. Then a friend of mine was working there and suggested my name. So I applied, and I’ve been there for about three years.

JA: How did you choose which people to follow in Twisted?

ST: At every convention, we had a second crew that came with us. They could shoot B-roll while we did preliminary interviews in our room. We would just set up a little corner in the hotel room to be a mini-studio where we could talk to people, and we would just interview people. From that, we started to see stories emerge. From the ones that interested us, we would set up follow-up interviews and go talk to people further and discover more about their stories.

Some of the stories were subjects that we wanted to cover. Like at the very first convention, we went to a gospel balloon service, and we thought that was really interesting and unusual. We wanted to tell that story. We pre-interviewed a few people who might be good for that, and we found our main story.

At other times, somebody ended up standing out. We were at one convention. It was the last night we were there. The whole time, we’d not bothered to talk to this one young girl. The cameraman had a crush on her, and he really wanted to talk to her. So finally, we said, ‘Okay. Sure.’ It’s the middle of the night. Last night of the convention. We walked up to her. He said, ‘How did you get into balloon twisting?’ She said, ‘Oh, I started when I was fifteen to get off welfare and out of the trailer park.’ We couldn’t believe we’d not talked to her the whole time, so we immediately made plans to film her and do follow-up interviews.

JA: What were some things you wish you had caught on camera but weren’t able?

NG: Often times, we found that people would say something in an interview that was really great. But at the same time, a train went by, or an airplane or something that would make it really difficult to hear. Then we would ask them to say it again, and it never really came out as good.

There were a few times, without giving away too much of the film, where there was a big event that happened that we didn’t have our camera for. But we managed, through acquiring footage from a couple of other people who were also at the same event, to piece together footage for that particular event.

But most of the time… We shot 180 hours of footage for a 79-minute film. So we did capture a lot that we were able to use.

JA: How did you go through all that footage? That must have been hard!

NG: Yeah, it took a long, long time!

ST: Naomi lives in Boston, and I live in New York. So we would work on planning the edits, separately. Then when we would get together, we would actually stay up and do the editing. We would work at night. If either of us were on a break from work or things like that - vacations - we would work nonstop. We would try to break up the editing with dance breaks throughout the night to keep us energized.

Basically, we would just go through it. We made a storyboard of what we thought we might want each section to be, and we kind of worked on the film in different sections. Then we kept rearranging them. So it helped!

JA: How did you find distribution for the film?

NG: We had our world premiere at South by Southwest (SXSW), which is a great film festival to get exposure from distributors. A lot of people saw it there, and there were some that expressed interest.

Some film festivals have a documentary marketplace, where distributors can go and watch any film that’s at the festival or sort of on the market. Our DVD distributor ended up seeing our film at the ‘hot doc’ marketplace and contacted us. It took a while to finalize in terms of a deal. But we were able to get our DVD distribution through that.

Then our theatrical distribution was done independently. We sent out screeners to lots of independent theaters around the country and cities where we had been in festivals or knew people. That’s how we ended up getting our theatrical run.

JA: What projects are next for both of you?

ST: We don’t want to cheat on this movie with a new one yet. Even though when people go to see the movie, it feels like it is all done for a while, we actually are still very heavily immersed in the theatrical distribution and getting press. So we are still actually very busy with this movie.

We haven’t even thought of the next project yet. Right now, we are just enjoying the ride with this. Then we’ll need to take a breather for a while and then see what becomes interesting again.

NG: I’m actually leaving in a few hours to go to Portland, Oregon, where our film screened this past weekend [7/11-13/08] and is screening again this weekend [7/18-20/08]. That’s the last of our theatrical run for this group in the summer. But we also have a theatrical run in Boston in the fall, and maybe a few others. So we’re still plenty busy! [laughs]

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For more information on Twisted: A Balloonamentary, please visit its official website at TwistedBalloonDoc.com.

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