Pre-Production/Development
Justin Benson: I was saying that I just grabbed every internship I could. And so at one I met Aaron and the other one, I was forced by the company to be David Lawson’s production assistant. I was a must-hire. And so Dave had to hire me as a PA on these jobs and I was probably a terrible PA. But I met Dave and I met Aaron and then we all came together.
Aaron Moorhead: I don’t even know exactly how this fits in, but for us, the writing and development process is exactly the same.
Benson: Filmmakers operate in wildly different ways, in terms of what works best for you, creatively. For us, it’s less about putting ourselves in a situation where you have to just totally run on instinct.
If you looked at our shot lists from Resolution, Spring, or The Endless, the written shot list is almost the movie exactly.
Moorhead: One of the big things that’s crazy important to us is rehearsal. We feel like we find what we want out of the movie, basically, as we round out the script. And that’s kind of the movie that we try to execute. And rehearsal for us is where we already know about the movie, so we start learning about the actual production, where you start seeing the color of the walls, and all that.
We like to rehearse on the actual set, for quite a long time. The best night of a play is never opening night. And it’s never rehearsal night. It is normally a few months in. So we want to see that performance and we want to see that energy before the camera’s rolling, because then we know it exists. And then we just say, let’s recapture that, rather than trying to figure our way through it as we go.
And then also, there’s three of us. We have to be in line. And we wouldn’t work together if in general, our brains didn’t work the same way, and we didn’t have the same tastes and we weren’t generally just always trying to make the same movie. … When the clock is ticking and the gaffer’s on his fifth cigarette, you don’t want to still be working out what you really want.
David Lawson: Honestly, we can sit and talk about movies forever, the three of us love movies, we love each other, so it’s like, let’s just sit around and talk and figure this out, and that way, we have a very clear plan. When somebody asks me something or somebody asks Justin something, or somebody asks Aaron something, all three of us give the same answer. I usually don’t have as intricate an answer as Justin or Aaron, but we at least know what the plan is.
Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, Jamie Dornan and Anthony Mackie on the set of Synchronic.
Moorhead: We find that our pre-production is way more sleepless than our production. A smooth production is really important to us if we can get it. We don’t have personalities that thrive on chaos at all. When everybody understands each other — that works very nicely for us.
Benson: Is Synchronic our most scaled-up film? Absolutely. Is it as big as someone might think, given it’s starring Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan? Probably not.
Moorhead: Yes, technically there’s some trucks that we normally don’t have, the meals are a little bit more delicious. But beyond that, there’s not that much difference.
Lawson: The meals were a lot more delicious
Moorhead: They’re not Costco.
Lawson: One of the things that worked really well on Synchronic is that because in general we prepare so thoroughly, we could also disseminate information to a larger crew pretty thoroughly. When you have an eight-person crew, everybody can get on the same page, super easy. But when you’re talking to department heads, who then have to talk to their best boys who then have to talk to the crew, it just lengthens that process. But it was an easy transition into doing that, because it’s how we prepare anyway.
Moorhead: And the goal, by the way, is a good movie. The goal is not smoothness. But we do believe that allowing the brain the headspace to not just be solving logistical problems, but to start it working subconsciously on artistic problems, lets you make a better movie.
Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson on the set of their fourth feature, Synchronic.
Continue for Synchronic moviemakers Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, and producer David Lawson on Production
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