Sean Price Williams and Nick Pinkerton’s collaboration on The Sweet East has been a long time coming. Williams, making his directorial debut with this fun, politically charged picaresque, has been a fulcrum in independent cinema for more than 20 years, working as director of photography for Josh and Benny Safdie, Alex Ross Perry and Abel Ferrara among many others. Pinkerton, getting his first screenwriting credit, has been an influential critic for as long as Williams has been behind a camera.
“We’ve known each other well for more than a decade,” says Pinkerton. “We were both employees of different stores of the same video-store chain in New York. It was fairly inevitable that our paths would cross. We had some mutual friends. We were hanging out quite a bit, and Sean suggested writing something. That’s something I wouldn’t have done without his prompt. I’d been to school for film production many years ago, and that’s what I started out wanting to do. But there are barriers. Sean had practical experience working on movies. So it seemed to me that, if I wrote something, it might not just be a castle in the sky. It might actually happen. As it turned out, there was a lot more that needed to be done. And we both had yet to learn quite a bit along the way.”
“I still really didn’t know how movies happen,” Williams adds. “How does the money get to someone to make a movie? Both of us were too busy spending our adult lives just trying to get by and make our rent. And the movies that I work on are not very financially prolific ventures. So I’ve never had the time to take a break and figure out how it’s done. And I still want to know that. We got lucky because we met a guy with money and a dream. In America, independent movies are a strange combination of people with money, people with usually big egos, and a strange drive to do something.”
The Sweet East, which debuted to much applause at Cannes last year, follows Talia Ryder, one of the stars of Never Rarely Sometimes Always, as her character, Lillian, takes a surreal road trip across the United States. The journey unfolds as a series of happy accidents and goofy misdirections. On a raucous high-school trip to Washington, DC, Lillian finds herself slap-bang in the middle of an incident that looks awfully like pizzagate. In the first of many satirical barbs, the gun-wielding intruder (played by the former MTV star Andy Milonakis) is correct: a paedophile ring is indeed operating in the bowels of the building. On the run, Lillian bounces from an anarchist activist, Caleb (Earl Cave), to a neo-Nazi, Lawrence (Red Rocket’s Simon Rex), an academic who, frustrated by the liberal agenda, takes refuge in Edgar Allen Poe and swastika bedspreads.
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Everyone Lillian meets takes a shine to her. A pair of self-obsessed film-makers, Molly (Ayo Edebiri) and Matthew (Jeremy O Harris), “discover” Lillian for their film about colonial America. An American heart-throb, Ian (Jacob Elordi), briefly makes Lillian a paparazzi target. Mohammed (Rish Shah), a production assistant and classic nice guy, wants to “save” her. Cartoonish violence and cocooned subcultures — Christian monks, pierced penises, Muslim hip-hop fans — define Lillian’s zigzag across New Jersey, Vermont and South Carolina.
“The script was inspired by certain things in the contemporary body politic and certain, let’s say, types that I knew I wanted to work into it,” says Pinkerton. “But more important was just letting those things be character-led. Talia’s character was not making decisions based on what would be efficacious, so we could have this nice allegorical trip through the modern-day USA. All of the characters had to have a certain autonomy. Simon’s character was always going to be an alt-right white nationalist, because that sort of person had increased prominence in the US media in 2017, when the film was written. But once you get into the nitty-gritty of it, this is not just a place holder character carrying some allegorical weight. He’s a very specific guy with specific hang-ups and responding to situations in very specific ways that make sense for him.”
Williams has shot nearly 60 indie features, 50 short films and seven TV series since 1999, filmed The Sweet East on 16mm stock, simultaneously amplifying Lillian’s freewheeling adventures and harking back to Williams’s apprenticeship with the great documentarian Albert Maysles. “That didn’t happen by accident,” he says. “Even when we were pitching the movie we didn’t talk about the cinematography very much. But the night before the very first day of shooting, my friend Peter Buntaine, who was another camera operator, came to my hotel room, and we watched Monterey Pop and Pennebaker concert films, including this rare Alice Cooper concert that I have that Pennebaker shot.
“This stuff is very thrilling. You feel them trying to find the shots within the shot within the shot. Gimme Shelter is a miracle. You couldn’t have planned that movie ahead of time. There’s such spontaneity and excitement to it. That was the idea. Can we bring a 1960s-concert-film aesthetic to a feature film? That’d be pretty cool. Not every scene in our film is like that. We explore a few different styles in The Sweet East. But we wanted the spirit of that spontaneity. I still like a movie when we don’t know what it is. Even when I would play GI Joe as a kid, I never knew if Cobra or GI Joe would win until it happened. I think I’ve lived my entire life that way.”
- The Sweet East opens in cinemas on Friday, March 29th
