IMC Film Festival Q&A: Alex Schwarm

Posted in ARTS to Previews by Joel Gillespie on Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 3:00 pm

The IMC Film Festival is tomorrow and Saturday (it's FREE), and Kristiana Burtness will have a full preview tomorrow, but we'll whet your appetite today with a couple of Q&A's with filmmakers whose work will be featured at the festival.

First up is Alex Schwarm, whose film As Ever, Stan, will be shown Saturday night at 8:41 p.m. (give or take?). The 13-minute work is a dramatization of his grandparents' experiences during World War II, when his grandfather was a POW in the European theater. The trailer is below, followed by an email exchange with Schwarm.

As Ever, Stan (Trailer) from Alex Schwarm on Vimeo.

Smile Politely: The trailer for "As Ever, Stan" is gorgeous. Would you like to talk about what format you shot it, and where it was filmed? How did you round up the vintage automobiles and train cars?

Alex Schwarm: Thanks. I'm very proud of my Director of Photography, Jen O'Leary. She did a really great job shooting the film. We received a nomination for best cinematography at the Lakendance Int'l Film Festival and Jen was 1 of 8 national finalists in the Kodak Film School Competition 2009 with the other film we made together last year, The Fatherless.

We filmed As Ever, Stan on Super16mm Kodak film stock. All the filming took place in McHenry County, IL. We shot the train station scenes at the Illinois Railway Museum in Union, Ill., whose railcars and depots were used in films like A League of Their Own and Flags of Our Fathers. A classic car owner from Wisconsin supplied the 1936 Oldsmobile.

Smile Politely: Not to spoil the ending, but are your grandmother or grandfather still living? What was their response to the film, or what would you hope it would be?

Alex Schwarm: I never had the honor of meeting my grandparents. Stan died in 1975 and Edith passed in 1986, a year before I was born. The film started out as a class project where I crafted a memoir out of they letters they sent to each other during the war. I then used those letters and a few other family artifacts to craft the screenplay. Studying my grandparents' handwritten letters allowed me a chance to really get to know them, to hear their voices and connect with their struggles during wartime.

My lack of a personal relationship with my grandparents was a double-edged sword during the filmmaking process. I felt like I could tell the story anyway I wanted, because I was piecing the story together through family artifacts, yet at the same time I carried so much anxiety with me (really, for about 10 months) because I constantly fretted, "Am I telling this right?" In the end I had to let go of that anxiety and just make the best film I could make. I hope that my grandparents would be proud of me for telling the story of a pivotal point in their lives when they were most vulnerable. The film might expose a family secret, but it makes those who knew my grandparents appreciate them even more for the lives they led after the war.

Smile Politely: How long was the process of making the film? What was the most difficult part about the process?

Alex Schwarm: Like I said before, the film really began as a memoir in a Performance Studies class I took during fall quarter 2007 at Northwestern, but I really started thinking about the project prior to the class in the summer 2007. I wrote the script in early 2008. We received funding to go into production in April 2008. We shot the film in three days in October 2008 and we were in post-production until June 2009. So, As Ever, Stan was on my mind about every day for two years. And really, it's still on my mind.

I'd say post-production was a difficult part of the process and I'm glad we had so much time to make a cut of the film and then not look at it for a week, so we could return to it with fresh eyes and a new perspective. Yet, I'd also say the most difficult part of the process was dealing with the anxiety of wondering if I'm doing this right — if I'm telling the story the right way.

While I made the film I also wrote a thesis paper about my process and about the act of telling "a true story." It was through hours of research and analytical writing that I convinced myself that I couldn't tell a true story, yet at the same time I really was telling a true story. I wasn't creating a historical account of my family's history, but rather turning history into poetry or literature, which in a way, can be truer than the historical account. It'd take me thirty-some pages to explain it, but the bulk of the answers can be found in Chapter 9 of Aristotle's Poetics. When you see the film, you'll notice in the opening credits it says "A true story," not "Based on a True Story." The reasoning for this is found in my thesis paper.

Smile Politely: Are you still a student at Northwestern?

Alex Schwarm: I am not a student at NU anymore. I graduated in June 2009 and currently reside in Hoboken, N.J., a stone's throw across the Hudson River to the West Village, Manhattan, NYC.