Film Interview

Interview: “Not in a Happy Place” – A Conversation with FAILED STATE’s Christopher Jason Bell and Mitch Blummer

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FAILED STATE is an independently produced feature film about the pandemic summer of 2020, told from the perspective of Dale, a package delivery worker in New York City. The film uses a combination of cinema verité footage of the star, Dale A. Smith, doing his real job day by day, alongside constructed narrative scenes. Very little media over the last four years has depicted the peak of the pandemic with such honesty and clarity. Carter Moon chatted with the film’s co-directors Mitch Blummer and Christopher Jason Bell about their unique process in crafting this one-of-a-kind film. 

You can watch the trailer for FAILED STATE below:

From talking to Chris [Jason Bell] about this film, I understand you had a very unusual production process, can you speak to how this film was made?

Mitch Blummer: We started by following Dale around in a pure verité documentary style while he was working. This was during the beginning and peak of the pandemic so it was very interesting and vivid to capture his labor against this distinct backdrop. Chris and I had had some long conversations about Dale and the nature of his work and some of the opportunities it might present for storytelling, so these preliminary doc days were research in a way. After the shoots we would talk more and I would get Chris’ reactions to the footage. From there, we started scripting and constructing scenes more. We did this day-by-day style, rarely shooting on two consecutive days. I, of course, was barely working during this time and Chris was remote, so there would be days that it was just me and Dale and one assistant, and I’d video call with Chris throughout the day, or if we were doing interiors in a controlled space I would pipe the image into a Zoom feed so Chris could direct remotely. Chris empowered me with a lot of trust in the co-director role, which gave me the freedom to make a lot of creative decisions on the fly. 

On the days Chris wasn’t physically on set, I was generally still channeling my inner Christopher Jason Bell and asking myself what he would want/do as a director in these situations. That said, my directorial and practical inclinations vary from Chris’ to a degree, which is why this film, to me, is a collision of our styles and vision. After a year-and-a-half or so of this, Chris had a rough cut of the film, and from that we kind of constructed the ending. We butted heads at times on the best way to portray our pessimistic, yet hopeful, ending, but I’m super satisfied with what we came out with. I think this approach may be unusual, but it was the only way to tell this story. It needed to span time and cover a lot of ground. While it’s a dream to live in a project for a period of time where you are doing nothing else, I think our day-by-day process actually makes this film stronger, as we had a lot of opportunities to reflect on the footage and material we were capturing to chisel away and find the essence of what we wanted to say with this film. 

The main character of the film, Dale, is so distinctive. How did you get connected with Dale originally and how did you develop his character with him? What did the collaboration with him look like?

Christopher Jason Bell: When I was in college I was in a MySpace fan group for ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT and the owner of said group was producing a film and needed extras. I think I was a freshman at the time and thought it’d be good to be on a set that wasn’t just other students, so I joined. Dale was also an extra, so I met him there and we chatted. I then proceeded to run into him on other sets for the next few years—over and over. At some point I was like man, if you could write a film around him, it’d be fantastic. It took a very long time but I ended up doing two short films with him: THE FINGER and TRAMMEL. And those went very well—THE FINGER was more of a quiet art film, TRAMMEL utilized the power of his voice, and that was a way more obvious and direct collaboration with him. Dale is a very open guy and will talk about anything and give you a lot, and for that short film I had to pull out a bunch of stuff just by giving him topics, like random stuff: “Hot dog.” He’d roll his eyes, but then proceed to have a really amusing, poetic story to go on about.

After TRAMMEL I did other things and wrote maybe two or three features around him, but they were never refined in a way that I felt comfortable with, and they also needed a lot more money than the shorts. With FAILED STATE, I took a few things from all of those and then fashioned some scenes with the TRAMMEL method of finding things he could talk about, and then we decided who would also be in scenes with him and what they could talk about, what they were comfortable bringing in from their real life, etc. We had phone calls where we would do various “rehearsals” like this to figure out what worked best, and then we would write ’em into the film.

MB: Dale is Dale. In my mind, there really wasn’t any developing of his character—and this was a big learning process for me. What ended up working the best was to just put Dale in circumstances where he could be himself and operate as he would if there weren’t any cameras filming him, and I think this is his biggest strength as a performer: He keeps it real unless you try to over-direct him and force him into what you think is the “right” way for the scene or shot or moment to go. Of course, there are practicalities in filmmaking where you need someone to hit their mark or hold something in a certain way or work with the light. These were the moments where Dale and I would go toe-to-toe. Dale maintains proudly that this film truly represents his life (he calls it a “docu-film”), and while I’m not sure what that term means, I think it’s a testament to the fact that Dale would only do what felt true to him and the film thrives for that reason. Surely he’d get annoyed or complain at me when I’d make him do takes or tweak his body positioning or something like that, but I think that some of those battles were worth it to achieve some of the cinematic moments and compositions that are speckled throughout the otherwise very naturalistic film. 

My first collab with both Chris and Dale was TRAMMEL, which is a piece I’m hugely proud of and that Chris did incredible things with in his approach to making it and cutting it. The approach to that film was much different that FAILED STATE, of course, but when I look back on it I see Chris’ method of working with performers like Dale and I admire it all the more. 

Failed State Still

How much were your other actors in the film traditionally trained actors as opposed to people who’d never done professional acting?

CJB: I kind of think only David Hayter, who was the voice of the boss. Melissa Rocha is mostly a comedian and painter, but she had done some acting before. Jack Sullivan was into theater growing up, and now he does what you see in the film: puts on a show for people at Coney Island regularly. 

MB: While the other performers in the film aren’t necessarily trained traditionally, I think that most of them had a language and ability to work in a structured way which was necessary to give Dale a direction in some of these scenes. You can’t just tell Dale to say something, but you can guide him into a certain subject by using another performer as an instrument to get him where you want him to go. 

What was the writing process for this project? How were you developing these scenes as the production went along? How much of the footage in the film is essentially documentary footage versus scripted scenes?

MB: I’d guess that the footage is approximately 35% doc and 65% constructed… But the line is blurry. While we may have been doing a constructed scene, we’d end up with something unplanned and maybe that gets categorized as doc? I’m not totally sure. Chris would have long phone calls with the actors and Dale on the days before a shoot and I feel like that part of the process was really the bulk of the “writing.” He’d establish the material he wanted to cover in a given scene and build a structure on how to get there. There was a literal written, script-like document which is actually shockingly close to what the film turned out to be, but I think we used that more as an outline skeleton for the general structure of the film. There were also many more “written” scenes in the film which were taken out. I think there’s an entire other film’s worth of material of Dale in his apartment which was like a B-story that we dropped… Some really funny stuff in there. 

CJB: Oh yeah. In some ways we wrote too much! We had an entire section of Dale getting a side job, it was some shady digital gig thing where he would choose a word, define it in his own words, and then have to use it in a story to better explain it. It was really, really fun and hilarious and poetic and poignant in many very strange ways… But it was entirely too much. The film was clearly telling us what it needed to be, and that’s the film that you see. I do think one day we will rework those scenes into a short of some kind, but at the moment we are working on other things.

Failed State Still

Can you talk about the title and its meaning? 

MB: Chris and I were not in a happy place during the process of making the film when thinking about the state of society and looking at the world around us. There’s of course a lot of talk about the nature of healthcare in this country right now given recent events, and there was a lot of talk about it during the international health event which is the backdrop to this film—and yet, nothing has changed, and the system has arguably gotten worse and more expensive for the little guy. We wanted this film to be a societal critique to some extent, second to Dale’s personal story, of course. The title is a good way of bringing viewers back to the intention of the film given its meandering, life-like qualities.

What do you see as the significance of depicting the summer of 2020 the way that you did? My wife and many friends I’ve talked to say they don’t want to engage with media about the pandemic, but I find myself yearning for depictions of that tumultuous and transformative summer, and I was really grateful to see it documented in a film like this. 

MB: I’m glad you enjoy it and are thankful for it! To be honest, I feel the same. When I see imagery of people in masks and pandemic stuff, I either get bored, triggered, or annoyed by my memories of how difficult that time was, especially as someone who was living in Central Brooklyn for the whole of it. I think what’s successful in our depiction of it is that we don’t make it the focus of the narrative. It’s a canvas on which we can talk about Dale’s personal story and the collective story of workers in general. It’s ever-present in the story—you can really feel it in the exteriors and JFK scene—but I think the imagery of it says enough without us having to constantly talk about it directly in the film. 

Can you talk about the scene where Dale talks to the woman in the cemetery? It was one of my favorites in the film and I was curious what inspired it. 

CJB: There was a collection of more and more absurd delivery jobs for Dale to do, and one of the more intriguing ones to me was him delivering flowers to various graves. Visiting and placing flowers on a gravesite is a very spiritual and very personal ritual, so to have someone else do it for money really got at a lot we were exploring in the film in terms of service work and just the state of humanity and the system we live under. On the surface, too, it was both incredibly sad but also pretty funny—in Dale’s performance, too, he takes it seriously, but also has fun with it. 

Since the film is just about Dale’s job and the nature of it with him trying to carve out a social life in between tasks, there were a lot of instances where we had to decide when and where he was going to talk to someone. The environment had to have a lot of texture across the board—the cemetery seemed like an obvious place that would look and feel powerful. It then afforded us a moment for Dale to pull himself out of his job and the concerns with it. His boss won’t help him, so he asks someone random for help. It’s a funny thing to feel so lost and assume that anyone around can help you with such a strange task, but it’s the kind of thing that people constantly do in life. Dale takes a moment and realizes how much he intruded in this deeply personal moment of this character, and then proceeds to apologize and has a small heart-to-heart with them.

The actor Michelle worked with my wife at the time and had mentioned she wanted to get more into acting. I think she was mostly a model before that. She was a cool person and down to earth so we chatted and I explained to her the project, and then we discussed who she would be visiting and figured out what she wanted to pull from her actual life. Her grandfather owning his business, getting bought out, being a war vet… That was all true and fit perfectly within the story. It also gave Dale the opportunity to talk about his mom, who he loves dearly, and also his life before being a messenger.

Failed State Still

Why did you choose to mostly stay away from using music or a score in the film? 

CJB: I came up adoring Michael Haneke and the Dardenne brothers, and for a long while they didn’t use any score or music, so it’s something ingrained in me that I mostly fall for projects that use the general soundscape in place of what would be a score. Everything feels more immediate and visceral, it’s stripped-down so you really take notice of every passerby, every insect flying around, every crinkle of a bag, and so on. There’s so much more texture and I don’t want to shy away from that. I also don’t want to mess around too much in telling an audience how to think—sad song for a sad scene, etc. I think we’re doing enough of that kinda thing in the movie and I’ve always found that method distasteful. I’m not opposed to music/score in the future, though, because on the other hand, there is a percentage of this mindset that is a little bratty and reductive and I should mature out of it.

MB: While music can be a powerful tool to evoke emotion in an audience, it can also be a crutch to artificially affect viewers when the story and performance doesn’t do it alone. I think for a film where we are trying to render a certain reality, music isn’t needed.

I’m curious what films and directors you guys were referencing as you put this together. 

CJB: Generally Iranian New Wave stuff. I also sent Mitch TAKE OUT by Sean Baker, MEDIUM COOL by Haskell Wexler very early on… 

MB: Yeah, Sean Baker is a big one for me on this. I love Kelly Reichardt and I was trying to channel her especially in our sound mixing process. Hamaguchi.

Why did it feel important to depict a person who works a fairly precarious, physically demanding job like Dale does? 

CJB: When we shot, this was really one of the few projects that we could do safely and almost right away: because we had worked with Dale before, and because I had a bunch of things already written in one form or another. But yeah, I’m generally thinking about our economic system, let’s say, and I’m pretty cognizant of the fact that the service sector makes up a huge part of this country’s employment. I haven’t really seen that represented much in American cinema, so that was an extra drive to proceed with the project

MB: Dale represents an increasingly prevalent trend in American work life of people who are “gig workers” doing self-motivated, often physical work on a freelance/independent contractor basis. Our healthcare system specifically punishes these people, as the “norm” is for people to be tied to their job for health insurance. These people (myself included) are in an incredibly precarious situation, because if they do get hurt they can’t work. I’m not saying this because I’m against the “gig economy.” On the contrary, I think it empowers individuals to be their own bosses, create a schedule that works for their own life and it does allow for a certain freedom, but this is why our antiquated “healthcare through your job” system makes no sense in today’s U.S.  

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Carter Moon
Carter Moon grew up raised on Star Wars and Toy Story: there was almost no way to avoid falling headfirst into a love for the art of filmmaking and screenwriting. Born to parents who insisted on well-reasoned dinner conversations, Carter was writing arguments defending his opinions from an early age. His critical affection for pop culture drives his writing and podcasts every week.

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