Advertisement
Terence Nance: I was in Miami, and I wrote it on the beach, based on the first line of a song by Norvis Jr.: "Swimming in your skin again / Blinded by your elegance." While writing, I was hearing about how Miami was sinking under rising sea levels, and thinking about the cultural mix of the place. That all fed into the script. I sent it to Norvis, and he approached working on it like, "We can't do this, we can do this, we can't do this," and certain details he just changed. He added in that everyone should be wearing yellow, and he added the disclaimer at the beginning. Basically the next draft of the script is the one we went with.
Advertisement
I was trying to obey impulses and not force myself to formulate a rationale for any given creative decision. I've been thinking about creating art as more like a bodily function, just pushing it out, manipulating it less. You take in information and stimulus on a daily basis, and the artwork is exhaling. The process of making Swimming was like respiration, or like eating and taking a shit. Or like seeing and dreaming. Things you have to do. The result is something that may seem non-narrative, but every time I watch it I see something that ties it together that I did not intend.The film has been shown on big screens at festivals, but it's premiering online, and that's where it'll have most eyes on it. Was that how you envisioned it?
If we'd had more time and money, we'd have done a feature, but we did what we could with the resources we had. I think that it's definitely a better experience in a theater, even though it's always been a hard-sell to argue that your short film should to be watched in a theater! For something like this, short and bizarre, the idea of being fully engaged by it rests, to an extent, on seeing it in a space where you're required to only engage with it.What are the benefits of putting your work online?
It helps to stay engaged with the industry and your audience in general. If you're only making features, they take a long time to make, and you risk having nothingbearing your name in between. So I stay active, and my name remains in certain conversations, which has a positive effect on my ability to find financing.
Advertisement
I've encountered wildly racist development people and investors, where I'll tell them an idea, and there's black characters in it, and they'll say, "This is cool, but do you have something for a Brad Pitt-type, where he discovers something, and then that gets us into the story?" Those stories are ubiquitous and sad, but they are reality. White supremacy is a real thing, which can have a very real effect on our ability to be prolific, to find the money to make films. I think that's always existed. A lot of my woes have been related to the expectation I had that the wealthy black creative community—black actors, producers, directors, musicians, who have a lot of money, who have development deals at major studios or pools of cash, black film financiers—would be in contact with people from my community about funding "art-first" black films. I've found that the wealth class in black media and film seems disinterested in the vast majority of emerging black writer directors, or at least I have not found them to be vigilant about being in contact with the majority of my peers.
Advertisement
I think artists do, but all people do. If I was a janitor, I'd feel that I had a responsibility to be informed. That's what being political means for me: acknowledging your role in a community and putting forth the effort to play that role to the best of your ability. The climate that we are in, unfortunately, requires a whole lot of vigilance from a community to ensure that a system of government is adequately serving them. If you are apolitical—as artists or anyone else—then the system will do with you what it will. We know that to mean that the system will treat you like a number.
I think it's important to note that Hitler was nobody without [Nazi propaganda filmmaker] Leni Riefenstahl. Media matters. It's a tool. I don't understand where anybody got the idea that a piece of media is inert, or not influencing behavior, or public opinion, or people's understanding of social dynamics. I don't know who even trafficked in that idea that any information is benign; all information is active. The most active information in the world right now is the Bible, or the Qur'an. That information is thousands of years old—fact or fiction—but it's pushing people in all sorts of directions. And that's words on a page.
Advertisement
I'm trying to cast [for my next feature, titled The Lobbyists]. Casting will help me find the financing easier. I want to shoot it next year, even if I need to shoot it on my iPhone. I'm going to shoot something else even cheaper next year—something's coming out very soon. Financial circumstances can't dictate whether I'm going to do it or not. I want to make four features in the next five years.Follow Ashley on Twitter.Swimming in Your Skin Again premieres today on Nowness. Norvis Jr.'s EP Coming Down can be found here, and his new EP, Pyrrhic Victory Disc 03 is out March 4 on Tape Club Records.