Documentary or skilfully edited fiction? We can’t really talk too much about Catfish, the Sundance hit that swims into theaters this week on a wave of word-of-mouth, because, well, it would ruin the experience of watching the film’s events unfold. What we can say is the film — which charts the unlikely online friendship between New York photographer Nev Schulman and an 8-year-old Michigan girl — taps into a social phenomenon wholly particular to our time, keeping its audience guessing as it twists and turns into unexpected revelations. Or… are they? Rather than spoil the film, we caught up with co-directors Henry Joost and Rel Schulman (Nev’s brother) and asked them to run through their five favorite films. “Can we do 100?” asks Joost as they begin reeling off an exhaustive list that runs from from Les Diaboliques to Heat. “We’ve been agonizing over this.”
Oh, and read on afterward as we get what we can out of them about Catfish… beware spoilers.
Stand by Me (1986,
94% Tomatometer)
Rel: It’s the movie I watched most between the ages of eight and 12. It was about camaraderie. It was the friendship I always wished I had with three other guys.
Rosemary’s Baby (1968,
98% Tomatometer)
Because I grew up down the street from the Dakota. I have been up in the apartments but never in that apartment. I think Polanski makes the best thriller around.
Grizzly Man (2005,
93% Tomatometer)
I guess because Werner Herzog might be the coolest man in the world. I like how he inserts himself into all of his stories. I’m a big fan of, I guess, “direct” cinema, but I don’t believe that a documentarian has to be a fly on the wall. That would be dull. I would listen to Herzog read anything. He could read the yellow pages. [On the influence of Herzog on Catfish] I guess just the basic instinct on our part just to be in our own films, to be a cameraman and a voice behind the camera and perhaps a character at times. We definitely get that from Herzog.
Money Talks (1997,
17% Tomatometer)
Money Talks, by Brett Ratner. [both laugh] Rel: Henry, why do you like that? Henry: Because it’s a pitch perfect action comedy. We watched it recently. You know what’s also a pitch-perfect buddy comedy? Rush Hour. But that’s not in my top five.
Next: Schulman and Joost discuss how Catfish came about, and the trickiness of marketing the film.
It must be exciting, what with the buzz around this film.
Yeah, it’s been wild.
Did you expect any of this?
No, we didn’t even expect to make the movie. It was sort of an accident.
At what point did you think that this accident could become the movie we see now?
It’s a very particular point, which is in the movie. It’s right after the “song discovery” — that’s when it became clear to Henry and I that there was an arc to this.
The movie plays almost like a thriller — did you have that sense when you were making it?
That’s the way the experience was in real life. It actually took us a little while to find that in the editing, because our instinct was to shoot voice-over narration and stuff like that, which we ended up just cutting out.
Without giving anything away, what was the most eye-opening moment in making the film?
[laughs] Too hard to answer!
Okay, how do you approach the marketing of the film, then, given the less you know about it the more entertaining it is? Was that always your intent?
Yeah, I mean we always wanted audiences to have the same experience that we had on it, going into it blind, basically — never knowing where the story is headed. So that’s the great challenge of marketing it, to preserve that innocence.
What’s been an interesting reaction so far?
Well now people are reacting to the marketing and saying, “I went into the film thinking it was going to be The Blair Witch Project but I was totally surprised that it was a documentary that it did so much more than that.”
I was kind of expecting a horror twist but it was surprising where it does go.
Yeah, I mean so far people haven’t been disappointed by that.
It’s also pretty timely that your film is releasing just ahead of Fincher’s Social Network
It is good. Maybe they’ll work really well in tandem — you’ve got the beginning of Facebook and you’ve got the status update.
What do you two have planned next? Another documentary?
We’d love to make another documentary; we’ve got our cameras on at every single moment, just in case. But I don’t think we’re gonna find another story that’s so spontaneous, so we’re just ready for it to find us. In the meantime we’re writing a Polanski-style thriller .
What’s it called?
[laughs] “Less is more.”
Catfish opens in limited release in NY and LA this weekend, with other cities to follow.
