Interview with the Directors of Oscar-Nominated Short: "Jane Austen's Period Drama"

With each passing day, we draw closer and closer to the 98th Academy Awards. In addition to rewarding the best features of the past year, the Oscars also pays attention to animated and live action shorts. One of the most pleasantly surprising nominations this year is Jane Austen's Period Drama by Steve Pinder and Julia Aks, who also served as lead actor. The film is a comedy that pokes fun at men's ignorance of female anatomy, no matter how expensive their education might've been. This week we got the unique opportunity to speak with the two directors behind this short that has captured the Academy's attention.

Eric: "Thank you to both of you for taking the time to talk today. The film is wonderful, congratulations! I would love to start by asking about all of the ways you guys pay homage to Jane Austen and authors like her throughout the film. There’s stuff in the costumes, and the cinematography, and the script, and the music, it’s really everywhere you look. So I was wondering about your process crafting that stuff, how much prep went into that, and just your various methods for crafting the mise-en-scène."

Aks: "We tried to do it from every angle. I mean, if you’re going to tackle a period piece, you know, we really wanted to tackle it. We wanted to do the best we could. Our background is in sketchy comedy, and a lot of…janky low-budget sketch comedy. But with this we really wanted to pool all of the resources we had into paying the most homage to those Jane Austen films of the 90s, because we felt that the more we got that visual world right, the more the humor and story would hit. We were really adamant that we wanted that first shot to be a long zoom lens shot, where we find our main characters in the hills. Because we see that all the time in those films from the 90s and we think that that set the tone for the rest of the film."

Pinder: "Yeah, and I think from a script standpoint, of course we spent a lot of time with the language, and trying to find language that felt like it was coming from one of Jane Austen’s books - but then also having a balance of modernity and bits of humor so that it was really accessible to everyone. Yeah, but from the script on, I think we were thinking about 'how do we capture the essence of Jane Austen?' and the style, and giving it our own twist."

Aks: " I do think when doing a period piece, there is a lot less of 'finding things on the day,' you have to really plan. The only thing I can really think of was…we’re based in Los Angeles, and we shot all of the interiors in a home in Los Angeles, but for the exteriors we needed the rolling, green hills of England. Our cinematographer, Luca Del Puppo, is from Connecticut, which has a lot of lush, rolling green hills. What we wound up having to do was take a bunch of donated sky miles, and fly about 7 of us out there for the first scene of the film, but we didn’t know exactly where we were gonna shoot. We didn’t have a specific location that we had scouted, so, we were just gonna show up and try and find some green hills, and ask permission, or forgiveness depending on what we needed to do. But luckily, when we got there, we had rented an Airbnb for us and our crew and it’s like right next-door to the hills that you see in the film. So when we got there we were like: 'that seems pretty good to us!' So we ended up getting very, very lucky by just having the Airbnb we booked have some green hills next door that looked a lot like England."

Pinder: "We just had to VFX a couple of light poles."

Aks: "Yeah. But it wasn’t much!"

Eric: "I love that! That’s how some of the best stuff finds you. I would love to talk about the character names, because, first of all, I want to know how you guys came up with all of them because they’re hysterical. But the parts of the film that I found myself laughing the hardest were the moments where they say their names for the first time. Vagiana, in particular, really got me. The first time she says: 'Vagiana go find a chicken for slaughter,' or something (laughs). It feels so precise in the edit and the timing. So I was wondering how you guys went about the timing in just revealing character names."

Aks: "Thank you for saying that. The names themselves were initially just the result of our really juvenile sense of humor. We thought 'oh Vagiana is just so funny!' But in writing that humor we actually found a deeper meaning that really connected with the message that our characters are living in this world that has a lot of sexual ignorance. And they can actually live in this world where no one recognizes that they’re a play on words, or that there’s anything weird about them. But, the names were really the main thing that we thought about in terms of introducing the audience to our world of comedy. Not just the world of Jane Austen, but our specific world of comedy. The first laugh in the film is a name, and that was very intentional on our part."

Pinder: "Right, because we didn’t necessarily want the characters to be doing anything silly. We didn’t want them to be the source of comedy because they’re having a genuine, authentic interaction that’s dramatic. But we needed a way to invite the audience to laugh, so that was what wound up being our goal. And I’ll also say that we found that the names need to have this really perfect balance where they really do sound like they could be a real name. Like if they’re too silly…they also don’t work, it has to be just right. That’s why Vagiana is so perfect because it sounds like a real name!"

Aks: "I mean we really toed the line (laughs). To be clear, like…we really went as far as we could!"

Pinder: "You really start to forget, that’s when you know it’s working. Like when we were writing and we forgot that these names are silly. You talk about how we placed them and revealed them; some of that was really intentional, the last one in particular…"

Aks: "That was one of our biggest conversations we had in writing. Where to place Estrogenia, where to reveal “Essie”’s full name, and we disagreed about it for a while."

Pinder: "Yeah that one was definitely a point of contention. But beyond that, I think that we had gotten so used to the names that I think when we first saw the movie with a crowd, it was like 'oh, these names are funny” and they do kinda come out in a good order."

Eric: "That’s awesome! I’m always really curious to talk to filmmakers about working with animals. And I’ve never gotten the chance to talk to someone about working with a chicken. The chicken gives a wonderful performance in the film. I’m sure a chicken is a bit more difficult to wrangle than a dog, or even a cat in certain instances. I mean, even the moment where the young girl is taking the chicken out of the room, and he flaps and tries to fly away. I’m curious how much you guys had to adapt to with that chicken, and if things ever changed from what you originally planned because the chicken was misbehaving, or if you caught something organic at all."

Pinder: "Well, prepare to be shocked, Eric. The chicken was…completely docile (laughs)."

Aks: "She really was! Except for that take [you mentioned], which was not planned. Nicole Alyse Nelson who plays Vagiana, I guess it was one of her first times working with Snow White the Chicken, and I think she just picked her up a little wrong… I mean not wrong. The chicken was fine. No chickens were harmed in the making of this film! But, you know, then Snow White really fluttered and tried to get away and Nicole actually got pretty freaked out by it, but that was the take we ended up keeping because it actually worked."

Pinder: "Yeah, but beyond that… we had a chicken wrangler. It was a real job, and he brought several 'ladies' and he offered if we wanted one of his 'chattier' ladies and we said 'no.' We wanted a really docile lady, and that’s what we got. Snow White was so chill, you could just hold her, pet her, she was very sweet."

Eric: "Well, that’s very nice to hear. That cut of the chicken flapping as Vagiana carries her out of the room kinda leads me into my next question about your edit because, it’s very very sharp. I’m wondering how much…I know you talked about with a period piece it kind of limits your ability to find things on the day but, in terms of the comedy if there was anything that you did find on the day, or anything that you found in post while you were cutting it together that you didn’t necessarily have planned?"

Aks: "Two moments come to mind.  There’s a part in the story where Essie is explaining where babies come from to Mr. Dickley. That was not in the script. The line was just 'and that’s where babies come from.' It was supposed to cut just right to the end of whatever she was telling him. When we were in the editing room, and we had cut it together, it was really the only part that kind of…dragged. It felt like it lost steam. This was a puzzle that we were trying to figure out for quite a while. And then I think we were in our office, and I think [Steve and the crew] had gone to lunch, or something, it was me alone in there, and I was like 'I think I remember improvising before all of those takes.' Just as an actor, I was trying to lead into a scene that I would inevitably cut towards so that it feels like it’s at the end of something. So I went back and looked at the footage, I was like 'oh yeah, I just kind of made stuff up before like five takes' like 'the head goes' and 'the cervix is really large,' and I was wondering if we could just jump cut. I was worried that it was too modern of an editing device because we had been living in something that hopefully felt like a world out of a Jane Austen film from the 90s. So I put that in, and I think they came back from lunch, and I was like 'guys. I think this might have fixed it. Did it fix it?' It kind of re-energized the edit in that moment and presented something new. So that was something that we discovered in post."

Pinder: "Yeah, and it almost feels like she’s bringing him into a modern world so the editing really feels like we can start to go on that journey with her. Then of course, the credit song is also super modern, so the movie almost carries us towards modernity, and that’s a big part of it. The other thing is: there’s a moment where Essie is describing what it feels like to have a period, or have your period start. And Mr. Dickley is like, 'well does it just gush?' and she’s like 'well it doesnt exactly gush it um…'. When Julia wrote that scene originally, she always had the same idea in her mind about the specific sound Essie would make. So when we were on set… I don’t know why, but I sensed that we could get something else. And so I sort of threw Julia off balance and I was like 'let’s try it again, and give me something totally different.' Then she improvised that moment, and i’s still probably my favorite moment in the whole film. It’s just delightful, but beyond that, it was very tightly scripted, and the actors really showed up and knew their stuff. Everyone just brought it to life as it was on the page."

Eric: "Great, I have one more question for you. I really admired how you were able to balance the satire of sexual ignorance and societal expectations, but let the analysis still be really lighthearted. Nobody is going to leave the film feeling brooding or upset about the current state of things, so I would like to know how you guys went about choosing to balance it that way."

Aks: "We played with a lot of rewrites, that balance was very important to us. Figuring out how to balance the heart and what we want to say and what we want to put out into the world in terms of our responsibility as artists. We love to make people laugh, and we love to entertain, and entertainment was key. Those things are not mutually exclusive, they can go hand in hand. I think when it felt right to us we both knew that it was the story we wanted to tell, it felt like the balance we want to put out into the world. Luckily, the response has been confirming a lot of what we were hoping would be confirmed."

Pinder: "Satire is so tricky because when you’re writing by yourself, there’s a real impulse to write from a place of hurt or fear, and both of those things can result in kind of like a jabbing form of art, you know? Where you’re sort of attacking a part of the audience, or some people that may be watching. I think one of the advantages of working together is that we can catch those impulses in each other and we can help balance them out. Ultimately we don’t want to make art that is hurtful. We want to make art that is helpful, and that everyone can enjoy and everyone can be part of, because that’s also how we move the conversation forward. 

Eric: "I love that answer! Well, on that note, thank you guys so much for taking the time to offer your insight. Congratulations, again. I can’t wait to see more!"

Aks: "Thank you, Eric. This was lovely."

We here at Cinemasters would like to thank Mr. Pinder and Ms. Aks once again for appearing on our publication and giving us some insight into their film. Jane Austen's Period Drama is currently available to stream on Kanopy and hopefully will be coming to a screen near you soon! We wish the cast and crew all this luck at next month's Oscars ceremony. Thank you for tuning into Cinemasters.net and remember to never stop watching!