 |
| The Singers Photo: Tribeca Festival |
“On social media, several of the guys have followings. Mike Yung was on America's Got Talent and he's sort of like a New York legend, he's been performing in the subways for so many years,”
Sam A. Davis is talking about his short film The Singers, which works its magic with a highly talented cast whom most viewers will never have heard of before. An adaptation of the Ivan Turgenev story of the same name, it centres on a bar where lonely men come to ease their sorrows with hard liquor – until, one night, a penniless stranger offers to trade a song for a drink, sparking an impromptu vocal contest which reveals unexpected talents, changing everyone’s perceptions of themselves and one another.
“The thing that really made it come to life was the idea of a modern riff on the story where we cast all first time actors who are viral video singing sensations and other one-of-a-kind personalities from around the internet,” he says. “I was really excited by the concept of having this bar full of these geniuses hiding in plain sight, these diamond-in-the-rough talents, and letting them slowly reveal their gifts throughout the course of the film.”
He has a lot of reason to be excited, because the film has had an extraordinary journey.
“We premiered at South by Southwest last year, almost a year to the day from the upcoming Oscars, and it had a really successful festival life. We played at 50 film festivals and won some awards along the way. And now here we are. It's surreal. I'm still kind of processing that we're Oscar nominated.”
Sunday night will no doubt make him nervous, but it took a fair measure of courage – and persistence – just to get started on the project.
“I commented and DM'd hundreds and hundreds of people,” he says. “I said ‘I'm a filmmaker in LA and I'm interested in having you come and be in a movie and play yourself. It'll be really easy. You don't have to memorise any lines.’ Most of them never replied to me, but some of them did. And the ones that did, you know, I started a conversation with them and just tried to feel out how much depth was there. Because we needed more than just a beautiful singing voice. We needed personality and we needed emotional depth, so that's really what I was looking for in addition to their musical talents.
“We made the film without a script, so all the dialogue other than the music is improvised and stuff that we made up as we went along. It was this really collaborative process between myself and the actors to get to that, but the dialogue feels very true, I think, because it's what they would say and not what I would say, not what I would write for them. But yeah, all the cast for being first time actors just kind of blew me away with their ability to show up and quickly adapt to the process and have this huge camera in their faces and somehow be able to still be themselves.
“A lot of the humour came from them genuinely bantering. Improv doesn't really work without a good group dynamic, so were really lucky to have this great collection of ingredients.” He laughs. “It's kind of like how I like to think of them. If this whole experiment was like a bowl of soup or something, and all these people we found on social media were ingredients and they could add a unique flavour to the mix. I felt really confident when I showed up on set. I couldn't believe that we had all these people under one roof at one time, but I was very confident that something interesting would emerge from this experience.”
Some of the actors may have been able to approach the job with confidence because of their past experience of other kinds of performing, he says.
“The dynamic was quite different, I think, from performing on stage, but Chris Smither in particular, who's the most established of them – he's the old man with the oxygen and tubes – he was really confident. I said ‘Don't worry, you know, it'll be fine. You just play yourself and I'll walk you through it and you don't need to be nervous.’ And he kind of cut me off and he's like, ‘I'm not nervous. This sounds like the most fun thing I've done in years.’ He kind of has ice in his veins the way a great performer has to, you know? He's kind of unflappable, so he picked it up really organically.
“The film has been viewed millions of times on Netflix, and there's a lot off interest in them. What better outcome for a project where we wanted to make a love letter to these types of unsung, underdog, humble talents out there? It's really cool. And they're going to get to walk the red carpet at the Oscars. That's insane. I keep saying we'll be the motleyest crew to ever walk the red carpet at the Oscars. I think they're going to wear suits. One of them, the guy who plays the piano, asked me if he could wear a dress. Who am I to judge? But yeah, they're a really fun bunch of personalities.”
Those personalities are not all that the film has going for it. It’s gorgeously lit, taking advantage of the low lighting in the bar and the men’s curling cigarette smoke.
“The lighting style was really inspired by Renaissance era paintings,” he says. “That's what were trying to achieve, that glowy Caravaggio kind of skin tone and contrast in the environment and so on. We wanted it to feel like a dive bar but still have this sort of warmth to it, almost like a cosiness. So it is quite dark.
“Part of it too was wanting to light in a way that accentuated the faces and all the years of wrinkles and texture on those faces, because they tell such stories, each of them. We found that if we skipped hard light off the bar top, it would glow back upward for them, and that accentuated the lines on the faces in a really beautiful way.
“We had a really great team, from lighting to lighting cigarettes. There were three people dedicated to running around just keeping cigarettes lit, and I have a newfound appreciation for the way cigarette smoke registers on film. Because I honestly, going into it, I was like, ‘Yeah, we should have some cigarettes,’ but I didn't realise they would be as strong and consistent a visual theme in the film. There's a magical quality about the way that they register on film. They show up kind of blue in the smoke. That was a happy accident.”
I mention that I also liked the way that a train rattling past the bar and shaking its contents contributed to the atmosphere.
“The train was sort of an Easter egg or a nod to Mike Yung, who played the bartender, who started in the subway station in New York,” he explains. “The first video that I saw that inspired this whole idea, he was singing and his voice was somehow overpowering these trains that were rumbling by. I wanted to subtly call back to that, so I had the idea of situating the bar by a railroad track and having that be a wrapper around the story in a way, to begin with that train and for it to punctuate his song at the end of the film.
“It surprised me that we were able to actually do it because it was such a crazy pitch, you know? I called my producers and said ‘I want to adapt this 1850 Russian short story starring all first-time actors from Instagram and TikTok, and make it without a script and shoot it on 35 millimeter film.’ No one should have said yes to that. But somehow we got some yeses and we managed. It's a good reminder that outside the box ideas really can, if taken a chance on, stand out for their originality and for their ambition and go far, the way this has.”
Does he think it's an important time to be talking about male vulnerability the way that this does?
“Yeah, I think male vulnerability and also, just universally, loneliness and community. It's a really simple story about coming together and the power in this case of vulnerability but more specifically, music as a really wonderful tool to do that. And yeah, the film opens with a fight and ends with a hug. And the hug is not necessarily meant to be literal. You know, I think at that point we're in sort of this heightened place and the hug is, to me, almost like a fantasy. How nice would it be if it was as simple as that and were as communal and compassionate as that?
“I think also masculinity, the idea that we aren't often healthy communicators of our emotion as men – I think men and women, really, but I grew up in a place where I wasn't really taught as a man that it was okay to be sensitive or vulnerable. So that's an important message here as well.”
Nevertheless, the film ends on a comic note.
He smiles. “I didn't want the film to take itself too seriously. I think that idea lands and then we sort of undercut it and send people on their way with one more laugh.”
