Interview by Zach Dennis
Many people are doing their best to process the current state of the world amidst the coronavirus pandemic, and attempting to do anything creative has become impossible. While an onslaught of projects will percolate in the future related to this time in quarantine, it will be difficult to find one that resonates quite like Sophy Romvari and Mike Thorn’s short film, Some Kind of Connection.
Following the outside of Mike’s Calgary-based window, the four minute short chronicles the excruciating helplessness we have been feeling through the pandemic as the world moves around us, and we’re shut up inside.
Cinematary spoke with Romvari and Thorn about making the movie, how they started their romance and then were quickly swept up in a pandemic lockdown, how the collaboration process has helped in the making of Sophy’s films, and what they’re watching and thinking about art in the age of the coronavirus.
Watch Some Kind of Connection here or at the bottom of the post. You can also listen to the full conversation between Zach, Sophy and Mike on our Patreon page at patreon.com/cinematary.
Cinematary: So what’s the backstory with your relationship? Did you just recently start dating and then the pandemic shut everything down?
Mike Thorn: We've been online friends for a long time. We originally connected in 2017, when I first saw Sophy’s film It’s Him. In late December 2019, we started talking a lot more about things unrelated to cinema, what we were going through in our lives. In early 2020, I suggested we talk on the phone sometime. Our first call was nine hours long – we had this very immediate, intense connection. Around that time, I was going through a really dark patch, and I needed to get out of Calgary. I had a trip planned to Toronto, and Sophy offered to let me crash at her place, just as friends.
It was totally unexpected for both of us, but we fell in love. We both agreed to take it slow initially, but Sophy had planned a trip to come visit me in Calgary for March. Shortly after she booked her flight, the WHO announced a global pandemic. After she got here, lockdown measures started to be put into place, so she canceled her flight home, and now she’s here indefinitely. So yeah, very normal beginning of a relationship.
Cinematary: So between the new relationship and the pandemic starting, what led to what would eventually become this film?
Sophy Romvari: I think all of my films, including the one we made, begin with the question: what is the simplest thing you can do? And what are the things around you that you have that you canutilize?
In this case, we just looked around the apartment and asked, “what do we have?” And initially, we thought, “okay, Mike has got a lot of books… maybe we could do something with books.” And then we’re like, “Mike has this big window with this view of the Calgary sky, and of this parking lot.” We just took what we had, and we shot it on my Android phone. This was what was available to represent this experience, and that’s essentially all the film is. It's very, very simple.
The simplicity allows it to happen without having to really over-commit creatively. Because I agree, it's really hard to think about the creative process right now. Mike and I are both trying in our separate ways. But I think by keeping the film simple, and by doing it a little bit at a time, it kind of let us sink our teeth into something. And then the editing of the film was really where the harder work took place, technically speaking.
Cinematary: Had you ever shot a film on a smartphone before?
Sophy: No, my director of photography Devan Scott and I usually work with this Blackmagic camera, which is a little pocket-camera, essentially, but it has a good dynamic range on it.
Sometimes we shoot with multi-cams, and then we'll just use another camera that's as close to that quality as possible. But I'm almost always shooting on a tripod, at least in the last couple of years. So, it's pretty simple in technological terms. For Some Kind of Connection, we didn't even have a tripod, so we just set up a little tape-marker on the windowsill where we would know to place the phone, and that was our tripod and camera setup.
Cinematary: Did you have an idea of when or what you wanted to film or did you just let the camera run and see what came back?
Mike: We came up with the idea that there would be a series of shots of that view. We were looking for different events, because we figured even the minutiae of someone crossing the parking lot, or a car moving, or a weather event like snow versus sunshine would come across more dramatically within such a spare visual context.
At some point, we were messing with the footage a lot more. I just told you about the origin of our relationship; in a much earlier cut, that made its way into the film. We had a more romantic version, I guess you'd say, and it didn't work. We just kept paring it down and paring it down. And then those little events did become more dramatic visually.
Cinematary: Where did the film’s title come from?
Mike Thorn – Read his writing at https://mikethornwrites.com/
Mike: Initially, I was just a fan of Sophy's work, before we became friends. And I remember watching all of her films in close succession up to… this would have been in 2017. Around 2019, I had watched and re-watched her films quite a bit, and I pitched an interview with her to Vague Visages, and the title of the article was “Some Kind of Connection.” That's the only remnant of the “love story” version of our film, which we ended up reworking. Originally, we had voiceover of Sophy and me telling our story, and we weaved those elements into the narrative, but it just felt strained. We wanted to make something particular, but also something that worked cinematically, and ultimately, that original version just didn't pan out.
Sophy: Including the romance in the narrative was fun as part of the process, or to consider that as an option, but then we came to our senses.
Mike: Interestingly, though, Sophy identified at around three a.m. the night we were editing that it would be really interesting to bring in our mutual love of cinema, bring in the films we were watching. She suggested we use the “Think Pink!” song from Funny Face, and we have a clip of Bela Lugosi from The Black Cat… quick audio sections of films we were watching together. They're very specifically curated to capture our experience.
Cinematary: What was the decision process behind those shots that did make the final cut? What did you want to express since the romantic version didn’t really work?
Sophy: I think we got, I don't know, about 30 shots that we liked. It was about creating enough variety in the order of the shots to make it look like it was a different day for every shot. But we were actually repeating a lot of shots, especially by the end. Technically speaking, we were trying to create enough variety by not putting two shots that were similar close to each other. When it came down to editing the quicker cuts at the end, we had to really find the right rhythms for slowly transitioning to that space.
We had three seconds per shot, and then we were decreasing it slowly down to frame by frame. So, I think it went from around twelve frames for a while, to nine frames, to six frames, to four frames, to two frames, and then to one frame, and so that was just a lot of minute cutting. I actually did a little editing tutorial for Mike, helping him learn how to use the editing software, which he didn't have experience with. So that was fun. And it was at like five in the morning. So, yeah, really relationship-testing moment.
I think for the most part, just a lot of minute detail work can be good for the brain, to focus on something outside of what’s in front of you.
Cinematary: The entire pandemic has created this kind of specific loneliness that I haven’t been able to verbalize, but exploring loneliness seems to be a trend in your previous work, which is maybe why you handled the subject so well in this film. Have you noticed that quality in your films?
Sophy: I've had a few people comment or make the connection in my work, that there's a theme throughout, which has now been called “lonely girls on laptops.”
That is what you see in a lot of the films I've made… in Nine Behind and It's Him, and even Pumpkin Movie. My most recent one, Still Processing, is mostly just a woman by herself, either communicating through technology or on her own. So, it's interesting to think of this new film as engaging with loneliness on a much more communal level. I guess a couple of my films don't have humans, mostly just dogs, which has its own loneliness. Even Norman Norman features a lonely girl on her laptop, although she’s technically just in the background.
Cinematary: I agree. The feeling of loneliness here is this helplessness while life seems to pass by, and that’s something articulated well through Some Kind of Connection.
Sophy: Mike and I both talked before we made the film that we wanted to make sure we represented our experience, but that we were trying to be aware of our privilege, the fact that we don't have to leave the house.
Because obviously, the pandemic is playing out a lot differently for someone who is not given the opportunity to just stay in their house and wait, and I think this has been a good moment to pause and think about that as well. All we can do is wait. It feels very powerless, but it's also a privilege to get to sit on your hands and say, “well, we can't do anything, so we'll just sit here and wait, and look out the window until someone else fixes this.” That's not necessarily something that we communicate in the film, but it's definitely just one version of what's being experienced right now. Because there are more eventful pandemic experiences than what we’re having; this is the monotonous version.
Cinematary: Mike, this was your first filmmaking experience; what did you make of the whole thing?
Mike: I've been interested in filmmaking for a long time. Initially, when I was close to finishing high school, I was really passionate about acting, and that was originally a career path I was considering pursuing. A lot of guidance counselors and other grownups said, “Don't do that. That's a bad idea.”
I ended up continuing to pursue my other passion, which is my lifelong interest in creative writing. I'd love to continue exploring the cinematic form. This was definitely very fortuitous. I mean, the folks through Canal 180 reached out to Sophy asking if she'd like to participate in this project, and given that she and I are together 24/7, we just started talking about it together. It ended up being a collaborative thing, very serendipitously.
The theme of the Canal180 omnibus was freedom. So, at one point, Sophy pitched the idea of having us read excerpts from books in my apartment related to freedom. I was finding passages in everything from Aleister Crowley to Simone de Beauvoir. We were going to have this strange voiceover collage related to freedom. And then we started bouncing other ideas back and forth.
I'd love to continue exploring cinematic form in the future. I don't know in what capacity, exactly, but this was a lot of fun.
Sophy Romvari – Find more of her films at https://sophy.me/
Cinematary: Sophy, you seem to collaborate on a lot of your projects. What about the idea of working on a creative endeavor alongside someone is appealing to you?
Sophy: I work with such small crews generally – I have shot almost all my films with my friend and cinematographer, Devan, so he's consistent as a collaborator. When you have less people, in some ways, it makes it more collaborative, or it needs to be, because you’re performing a lot of roles together.
On my thesis film, Still Processing, it was literally just the two of us, so it was very collaborative. We were both setting up the cameras and putting up the boom, and whatever needed to be done. There's a higher level of communication necessary when you're collaborating with just one or two other people. I think that creates a better atmosphere for the kinds of films I've been trying to make, because they're quite personal and intimate. I’m always asking for feedback or specific help. For example, my friend Will Ross often helps me with the sound design on my films. And so, it's just about being open to realizing that you're not going to have the best idea about every aspect of your film, and working with other experts in that field.
Cinematary: I would think that with so many different aspects going into making a film, having different, incredibly capable and intelligent people to surround yourself with would be imperative.
Sophy: I'm lucky that most of my films have been made with two to four people. So, if I continue making films like this, I'll probably have a path forward once the lockdown starts to ease, but most films could not be made with those restrictions. I think that's why a lot of people are trying desperately right now to figure out how we can move forward with the film industry. The industry at large is trying to think of all these insane workarounds; they're talking about quarantining cast and crew for two weeks prior to shooting, and filming romantic scenes with the two people apart and then bringing them together in post-production.
There are these desperate workarounds because number one, people don't want to lose money. But number two, people don't want to admit there's a possibility that we're not going to be able to go back to that normalcy, you know, at least not in the near future. And with film, it is very easy to realize how quickly it will be affected and dismantled in terms of the way it's been done forever. Because just cramming people into a sweaty room and working long hours and sharing food … it's a cesspool. There's no way.
Cinematary: I’ve been dreading the eventual output from pop culture about this period where every other Netflix movie is some pandemic teen romance. I’m curious on your perspectives, as creatives, on how pop culture and art will process the coronavirus pandemic?
Mike: Well, as a fan of the horror genre, I'm dreading the ham-fisted pandemic horror that I'm sure will come out of this experience. George A. Romero already predicted this, in a way. I've been thinking there will probably be a lot of bad pandemic horror novels and films… maybe some good ones too. But I don't know. It's a hard thing to articulate visually or creatively.
Sophy: It’s already cliché… we're in it, right? We even found during the making of this tiny, tiny film, there would be moments where I’d say, “Oh, that's going to feel cliché, or redundant, or cheesy.” How is something cheesy when we're living it right now? Even mentioning the word coronavirus was an issue. We didn't want to go overboard with that, because it would come across as clichéd. It’s kind of crazy how quickly that has happened, because we're ingesting so much media about it.
It pushed us to try and be more nuanced about it. But even still, it's going to be on the nose because it's what everyone's experiencing. So, the cliché came about a lot faster than I've ever seen happen before.
Cinematary: What have you all been watching in quarantine?
Sophy: Well, since we're talking about Mike Thorn, we have a list – Mike is a man of many lists. We made a mutual Letterboxd list where we're putting our favorite films, things we felt we wanted to rewatch, or things we haven’t seen; it's just a giant fucking list. 200 films or something. We’re just working our way through it. But the hard part is that we open the list and we're like, “okay, which film do we watch?” and that's when we end up watching something else.
Mike: Yeah, we're like, “Well, we could just watch The Waterboy…”
Sophy: We've been having a lot of really weird double bills, like Never Been Kissed and White Zombie…
Cinematary: I know one thing on many cinephiles minds is what the future of the movie-going experience will be after this is all over. Has that been something you all have been thinking about?
Sophy: Yeah, definitely. It's terrifying. I really hope that experience can somehow live on, post-pandemic lockdown. The thing I miss the most is going to the movies with other people, having that shared communal experience. Particularly with regards to film festivals, it's my favorite way to share my work. And it's scary to think that that might not be an option moving forward, in that most of my work will be screened by people at home on their own, to not be able to engage with people. That's the thing I really like about sharing work: getting to have conversations with others. You can do that online, but it's just not quite the same.
I have a film I recently finished, and I'm waiting to see if I'm going to play some festivals, or if it's just going to be something that's online. And that's a very overwhelming feeling, because it's something that I really want to share with audiences in person, and I just don't know at this point. I really just don't know if I'm going to get that chance.
Cinematary: Yes, I agree with that. Having a conversation online is fine, but doesn’t substitute for talking to people in person. You can only go so far on Twitter.
Sophy: Twitter is good in moderation. Honestly, if there's not going to be the communal cinema experience, then Twitter's going to be the closest we'll have to sharing our feelings about film in a communal way for some time. I can watch a film, and when I'm excited about it, I can share something on Twitter and have mutual-minded people express their opinions. I think that's really cool, to have that space. I'm so glad that exists, even right now. It's a good way to feel supported and connected to that world. And I think people are not talking about the pandemic as much as we were even a few weeks ago. We're all just trying to maintain some level of normal, shitty discourse.
Cinematary: Yeah, like let’s find something to be angry about regarding movies to keep our minds off this virus.
Sophy: Exactly.