I had a 1-on-1 sit-down with Chris Gorak on Tuesday regarding his directorial debut, Right at Your Door, a two-hander of claustrophobic paranoia starring Rory Cochrane and Mary McCormack. Since Gorak’s background in art direction and production design had placed him on plenty of big-budget film sets before, I figured he’d have a unique point-of-view on the difficulties of production, and maybe a leg up on other first-time directors. With that in mind, I asked him if he still had any “oh-shit” moments during production, a cramped 20-day shoot.

Gorak’s answer was telling. It wasn’t the production itself that stressed him out; it was a pre-production wrinkle that kept him on his toes. “There was Rory’s character, Mary’s character, and then
the third main character that I didn’t realize until I was in it was the house.
And so the hardest thing to do was cast the house,” says Gorak. “The script is written and you
cast your actors to it, but how do I cast a house, because I can’t build a
stage set. Usually on a bigger film you’d build a set to fit the story — like, here’s
the hallway, and this is where he’s going to enter. But here I was searching,
combing the hills of Los Angeles
looking for the perfect house with view of downtown, and finding someone who
wanted production at their home. And then I would go scene by scene if I felt
right, then I would sit there… it was this exhaustive process and we didn’t
lock the house location until two weeks before we were shooting. So that was a
little hairy.“

At the recent press day for the chatty, loose-limbed relationship dramedy 2 Days in Paris, the subject of multi-hyphenate Julie Delpy’s
two “Before collaborations” with
Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke came up, and not merely because of her most recent
film’s thematic overlap — namely a mixed-culture couple who may or may not be
right for one another working through some issues in voluble fashion — with
those projects. No, it was because Before
Sunset was so well received, in fact, that it kicked up some talk of
another possible installment.

For her part, Delpy isn’t discounting the possibility, but
says that it’s far from a certainty, even in the theoretical realm. “You know,
it depends on if we ever stumble onto the right idea. It took us nine years to
really come up with the right concept for the second film, and we wouldn’t like
to do a crappy third one that will suck, you know? And we could make a crappy third one, you know? It could happen,” she
says. “But we’d really like to stumble onto the right thing for it. Every time
anything is well received is a surprise for me, especially when I’m involved as
a writer, because I’m so happy — that means I say something that has a little
sense. I’m amazed because, for example, when I was writing Before Sunset, my agent fired me because he thought I was wasting
my time writing a stupid sequel to a movie that would never be made, and even
if it was made it would do nothing for my career. So you have to have a lot of
faith and belief in yourself to keep on writing when you’re ditched by your
agent, who tells you you’re crazy to write a stupid sequel. But in the end he
called and was like, ‘Why did you leave us?’ I was like, ‘How could you turn it
around?!’ The guy is so in denial over what he did that he’s actually thinking
that I left them.”

A delusional agent? Shocking, I say. Shocking…

As I’ve mentioned previously, I chatted with Danny Boyle a couple months back about Sunshine,
for a feature piece that will now apparently be pegged to its DVD release later this year, but among the other odds and ends that came up in the interview was the notion of expressly
national cinema, which is to say whether filmmakers have a certain duty or
obligation to their countries of origin to contribute to those cultures, and if
so whether and how Boyle saw himself fitting within those strictures.

“I don’t know whether it’s an obligation,” Boyle says, “but
I personally prefer to work (at home) because I sort of know it, the things
that are important to me, and I can answer the questions. I don’t have to ask
other people to answer them for me.” Here Boyle explains being able to size up
a person and tell roughly what kind of car they drive, or if he’s wrong about
the guess, then figure out why he’s wrong. In America,
Boyle notes, he’s more frequently baffled and adrift.

“The film industry in Britain
I always describe as occasional, which is really the best way of describing
it,” Boyle continues. “Because occasionally
we have a decent film, but we get the film industry we deserve — and we don’t
really go to the cinema enough. Why should we have an industry like America
or France?
That’s what everyone always winges (note: I suppose the British equivalent of
whines) about in Britain,
why don’t we have a movie industry like Hollywood?
And you think, because we don’t fucking go! If it’s a sunny day the cinemas are
completely empty because everyone’s at the pub drinking or at the park. There
isn’t that love or fanaticism about film that you get here, and in France
and in India —
you get it there as well. What we’re good at is music.”