'Nor'easter' Thriller Blows into Sarasota Film Festival

Prepare to put your sleuth skills and theological knowledge to work while watching Nor'easter. 

The full length feature film stars David Call as a young priest, Erik Angstrom living on a Maine island. His parish is small, but his challenges are big as he tries to help out the Green family with a missing son and the priest goes too far to figure out why the missing son, Josh, unexplainably returns. Is it a sign of God or a sign of trouble? 

The movie will show at 2 p.m. Saturday, April 13 and 2:30 p.m. Sunday, April 14 at the Regal Cinemas Hollywood 20 as part of the Sarasota Film Festival. Tickets are $12.50.

The movie is part of the Independent Visions Contest presented by Factory 25 where the movie could win a wide-ranging distribution offer from Factory 25.

Patch caught up with Nor'easter's director Andrew Brotzman to talk at length about the film and the subtleties within that makes Nor'easter a must-see psychological thriller. 

You can learn more about Nor'easter at Noreasterfilm.com and Facebook.com/noreasterfilm. 

Patch: What led you to make Nor'easter?

Andrew: I try to use the filmmaking process as a way learning more about myself and more about what I think of the world as well.

I write my own script, I produced the film as well, and I oversee everything that has to do with the project. What I'm really trying to do is create a document to show what I've learned or what I had decided about along the way. 

What I wanted to do is to write about something I knew very well, which was Maine. I wanted to show Maine in winter, and I thought I wanted to investigate something I didn't know very well, so I spent some time to think about what subject would be most important to me and most important to a character in a dramatic situation. 

I thought a lot about gender and race and location in the world, demographics, and one thing I came along was religion. That seemed like something that was very closely tied to the way people see themselves, the way people think about who they are. When people ask, 'who are you,' your religion and your, if not your religion, then your perception of what life and death actually mean, I think that comes up very soon in the discussion of who you are and what is important. 

I decided to write a character that is as closely tied to that as possible. I wound up writing about a priest and from there, developed a lot of my own ideas of the importance of religion and why people would make religion their vocation and make everything revolve around that.

It was just about trying to pursue something that I knew very little about, and trying to make a character who had that as closely tied to himself as possible.

Patch: What type of research did you have to do for this film? I saw you have a religious adviser you credited in the film.

Andrew: Jim Martin is the religion adviser. I'd say he is the common Jesuit. He appears on the Colbert Report a lot. He has a number of published books and broad social media presence as well. 

He was also the religious adviser for the movie Doubt with Philip Seymour Hoffman. The breviary that the priest uses in our film is the same that Philip Seymour Hoffman used in Doubt. That's actually the very first thing you see in the movie. 

He read the screenplay and read through it page by page with our lead actor David Call in person. He advised me on the phone a couple times. 

Me and David Call did quite a bit of reading what the life was like of a priest. There are quite a lot of unexpected things, like the way priests have to live in isolation and the kinds of loneliness that they can face. Just the fact that most churches are very poor and have very little income, and the social life is very circumscribed and they often live at the church.

There's often basic elements of what we think of humanity that is cut out of their life. Like there is certain elements of social life and home and shared experiences that aren't really part of a celibate, single priest's life.  

We met with priests in their churches and asked what their daily lives are like. We watched reference films and read fictional novels. The Diary of a Country Priest was definitely an influential novel and tried to give me a sense of a daily life of what a religious person might be like.

And then I spent a lot of time in church. I go to churches and think about the religious experience there, and think about what it would be like to take my life there to spend a lot of time there on a daily basis. 

Patch: I found the confessional scene in Nor'easter interesting. Did you have to have that conversation with either the religious adviser or talk to other priests about how they handle a situation where they learn information they could act upon but don't because of the sanctity of the confessional?

Andrew: The way that David speaks before he addresses Josh is specific to that. That is one of those things we ran by [Jim Martin] to make sure the mechanics were correct.

We did do research into if the seal of confessional was that vital, and it really is. Not only is the seal of confessional treated as absolutely sacrosanct from a religious point of view, it's treated that way from a legal point of view. There are many standards that have help up a priest's right to withhold information given to him through confession, regardless of whether other people's lives are in danger, which is pretty remarkable, but supported by a landmark case in Wisconsin that basically set the legal standard for that.

… The seal of confessional there is more important than that specific danger, which is interesting and obviously controversial in many circles, but it provides a lot of dramatic juice throughout Nor'easter.

Patch: Were there any elements of other people's lives or something you witnessed growing up in Maine that you incorporated into Nor'easter?

Andrew: There were elements of the film that were cut out, actually, that were directly taken from other people's lives. That's one thing that has proven quite true about the writing process. 

It's a very difficult thing to understand. Even as a writer it's a difficult thing for me to understand, and it's more difficult for people who don't spend all day trying to write stories.  

A story itself has a particular nature, and once you chosen the story and you have the seed of that story, there are things that will be true to it, and things that would not be true to it.

And a lot of times when you try to compose things on a story, you will find that they are not part of the story. No matter how much you want them to be in the movie, they do not belong to the movie because they are not developed from that seed of the idea.

They are simply things you just want to staple onto the side of the story.

There were a lot of elements that felt particular to my own experience and particular to the history of some of the non-professional people that were cast in the film that really were just irrelevant to story, and that was a very strange thing to find because I felt like because they were from Maine, because they had specific ties to the subject matter, that they would fit right in. 

When I got to the edit, I realized they were superfluous, and that was surprising.

The editing process always proves to be like that. When I'm working on a script, and I want to take an image or an event or something from something else and put it into my film and tweak it, it always ends up coming up. It always ends up being something that just doesn't quite fit well within the story.

Those inconsistencies unfortunately sometimes get filmed, and you're like, well, that was a waste of time and money and that doesn't belong in the movie. Really, as a writer, it's your job to know exactly what everything in the script is doing before you get to the shooting stage for obvious reasons.

Patch: You spent a lot of time trying to get the film made. You had a Kickstarter campaign that raised more than $20,000 in 2012. How do you feel as an entrepreneur going from the idea mode to release?

Andrew: I feel great about it. I'm really, really happy to be able to finish the film and bring it to audiences. In a lot of ways, there's nothing more satisfying about the filmmaking process than that.

As far as how long did it take--films take a long time. We often hear about movies or think about movies in terms of their releases, but many, many movies that you see are in development for extraordinarily long times.

Even movies that are enormous commercial successes can be in development for a really long time. A movie like Inception—an enormous hit and was in development for over 10 years.

It's not as uncommon for a film to take as long as this one. We shot in February 2011, we finished the movie in early 2012 and released the movie the end of last year and we're still on our festival run. Then we'll continue on. 

The life of movies is always surprisingly long. 

For me, I never tire of the movies. For me, the movie is very much like a child where you have made the thing, the thing continues to exist, develop and surprise you in ways that are really exciting and pleasant. I never get tired of it.  

I'm grateful that I'm very proud of the movie and that I like the movie a lot. I'm grateful that the movie is the kind of movie I want to see. I'm grateful the movie is unique in many ways.

I know when people come and see it, they will find things that they wouldn't find in other movies. 

Patch: Do your post-movie Q-and-A sessions lead to deep, philosophical discussions or people discuss the movie more on the surface?

One thing that I have been aware of since the very beginning of making the movie is that Nor'easter is not a what you call a piece of dominant cinema.

What I mean by that is that it is not a movie that is written from the point of view of the majority. It is a movie about an outsider in an isolated community. Just by the nature of choosing a story like that, you are addressing a minority of the audience. 

Or in terms of the film festival audience, although you might have the majority of the film festival audience interested in your hand, you do not have the majority of the moviegoing audience in your hand.

One of the things about that is many of the people who see the movie won't really access it. But for those who do, it is a rare experience. It is a movie that they've been looking for and they wish they could see often, but they just simply don't. And when they do, there's a real grateful, passionate response, and that can be really exciting.

…

It never fails that the Q-and-A's we have done for the film revolve around the ideas in the movie. The Q-and-A's do not revolve around the budget, the shooting schedule, what camera we shot on, what days we shot on, and those kinds of questions that I think are trivial.

Q-and-A's have revolved around philosophical and religious ideas that are clearly embedded in the film. People who have come to find our movie have engaged those ideas in really intelligent ways.

The Q-and-A's have been very thoughtful. The questions have been very probing, and I feel that the audiences have been very intelligent of the craft put into the film, and they've engaged in a way that is really satisfying for me.

When people are able to engage it that way, I've succeeded. That's basically the goal of the movie, is to engage those ideas and when they leave, talk to others to engage those ideas, which I've also found people have done.

If I'm at a festival for three or four days, people run up to me a day or two after they see my movie and say how they're talking about it with their spouse. That's a big success—a home run.

Patch: Do audiences interpret the characters differently than you intended?

Andrew: There are always going to be people who misinterpret the plot or miss character motivations or project a character motivation onto them that I don't believe is there, but that's the right of any audience. You can't really attend to everything like that.

As far as people who have raised their hands, there haven't been any egregious mistranslations of the film. 

One word that gets thrown around a lot is ambiguity, and what people often mean when they say ambiguity is not knowing something, or not knowing what's happening or not knowing why's something happening. 

To me, the word ambiguous means you know exactly what is happening, but the fallout or intention or the effect of that thing is ambiguous.

For example, Nor'easter is full of ambiguous moments. It's full of moments that are heroic and deeply condemnable. Like the priest's entire conflict is a deeply ambiguous one, which you know exactly what is happening but you could wrestle on what side of the issue you personally are on and wrestle what side a person ought to be on. 

Like you can wrestle with it in terms of a universal moral standard. You can wrestle it in terms of your own personal morality or in terms of your own relationship with faith in general or Christianity specifically or Catholicism specifically. To me, that's the nature of ambiguity—the number of layers and the closer those layers are tied to your identification as person, the more deliciously ambiguous that's going to be.

It's not interesting at all to watch something that could be anything and you don't even know what's happening. That's not ambiguity, to me that's just laziness.  

There are certainly parts of the movie that I didn't do as good as a job that I could have done to make the narrative clear, but not on purpose. That's just a mistake. As far as the way things come to a head, the way things come to a head is very clear. 

There haven't been many misinterpretations of that.

Patch: What about audiences asking about the deeper backgrounds of the characters?

Andrew: The Q-and-A's have been very rich in terms of the moral questions that the priest faces, and the ideas of abuse that the family faces and the conflict inherently of the sexuality of the kidnapper. The discussion around those three elements have been extremely rich.

The discussion of Paul the kidnapper—there are certain audience members who want to label him as gay and then there are other audience members who want to label him as a pedophile. I would certainly label him as a pedophile. I consider pedophilia to be a form of sexuality that's distinct from homosexuality. I don't consider Paul to be a homosexual in the more traditional sense of the word.

His nature and his violence have definitely sprung some great back-and-forth discussions within the audiences, then there are times when there is a minority member of the audience who want to label him as gay, and you can feel in the room the growing tension because you can feel the majority of the audience interprets him not as gay, and interprets him as a pedophile, as a special criminal.

The distinction there creates some great tension between audience members as they verbalize those distinctions. Maybe as they verbalize them, they have conflict within themselves that they weren't even aware of, and that's been really great. That's been really fruitful to ask people to sort though those ideas. 

I've always seeing going to films sorting the major ideas of my own life, and I like being a part of that, too. It's satisfying.

Patch: The transitions used between scenes and the placement of the camera feels like we're a floating spirit. Should the audience be reading into those choices?

Andrew: It's definitely true that making a film about a Catholic priest it lends itself to an extremely strict photographic style. That was definitely something we were aware of when designing the movie.  

The transitions themselves were also designed so in almost all of the cases we knew what the visual transition would be from one to the other. In those situations, we're just trying to make something as aesthetically pleasing as possible while also being true to the content.

As far as the sense of floating, that's definitely intentional. The attention to the base of David's neck in the sense were right behind, we're with him all the time, that's definitely creating a sense of a divine presence and a sense of David's soul. That's really was something intentional and agreed upon between myself and the cinematographer Ian Bloom.

We thought the base of his neck would be the closest representation of his soul and of a presence that is always behind him and is always with him. So those many transitional sequences that shoot him from behind—that's something we definitely did on purpose. I'm glad that it comes through. 

It's certainly a repeated motif, so it's kind of obvious that it's there but I don't think it's necessarily obvious why it's there or what it's doing, so I'm glad that came through for you. There are certain number of shots that are aggressively that way that it's kind of hard not to pay attention to it or address it, so I'm hoping that viewers will feel that. 

My favorite shot of those is the one after he goes to see Father Michael. Father Michael tells him off and then makes him do those chores, then there's the shot of the back of David's head where you can't see his body, you can only see water in front of him. You can't see the boat that he's on at all, and it's feels like he's flying over the water. I really, really like that shot a lot.

Patch: Where do you go from here with Nor'easter?

Andrew: We'd like to continue to show it at more festivals. We have quite a few more in April. We have our international premiere at the Bradford International Film Festival on April 18, then we'll be at the Arizona International Film Festival on April 20th in Tucson. 

We'd love to continue to get it out there and definitely like to encourage you and your readers to check out my website and our Facebook page. We have updates going up there quite a lot.

As the film goes along and it's made available later this year, you'll be able to catch it that way and share it with others.

Patch: Do you have a distribution deal yet?

Andrew: We hope to have an announcement for that later this year. We don't have anything we're ready to announce just yet. Best thing I can do is say please pay attention to our site, our blog, our Facebook page of where our movie will be made available. 

Nor'easter

Showings: 2 p.m. Saturday, April 13 and 2:30 p.m. Sunday, April 14 at the Regal Cinemas Hollywood 20 as part of the Sarasota Film Festival.

Tickets: $12.50.

Genre: Drama, Thriller

Runtime: 85 minutes

Cast: David Call, Richard Bekins, Liam Aiken, Haviland Morris, Rachel Brosnahan

Director: Andrew Brotzman

Cinematographer: Ian Bloom

Responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.