Mike Birbiglia, Jake Johnson, and Sam Rockwell star in Joe Swanberg's Digging for Fire.

With almost 20 films to his credit, you’ll be surprised to learn that Digging for Fire, currently playing at the Gaslamp, is only the second one of Joe Swanberg’s films to land a commercial release in San Diego. Swanberg spent a half-hour on the phone lamenting this fact in addition to talking Uber (is DFF the first film to feature the civilian cab company?), why he avoids reading his own reviews, and, of course, mumblecore, a movement that he helped to father. The latter proved a most enlightening exchange for this once-upon-a-time naysayer.

Scott Marks: Do you remember the first film your parents took you to see?

Joe Swanberg: Yes! The first movie I went to see was Revenge of the Nerds. My dad and my uncle took me when I was, I think, three years old. (Laughing.) A formative impact, nonetheless.

SM: Let’s open on mumblecore. I like to joke that the dirtiest word in the mumblecore lexicography is “tripod.”

JS (Laughing): There’s a lot of dolly work in my new movie. Maybe we’re all changing.

SM: People compared it to the French New Wave, a movement in film history brimming with visual invention. I didn’t see that in films like The Puffy Chair or Baghead. To me it was more a slackers’ take on neorealism. Did you consciously set out to craft a movement, or did the subgenre find you?

Joe Swanberg

JS: I think it found us. The coolest and most exciting thing about going to South by Southwest was seeing all these other filmmakers from different cities who, without knowing each other, were all kind of interested in the same things and trying out a lot of the same things. In my mind it’s always been a performance-based criteria more than a visual one. I totally agree with you. These movies were not cinema with a capital C. They were very much geared towards naturalism, and about creating an environment, and using the new technology to create space for a type of performance that didn’t exist before.

It always seemed much more actor-centric. Most of the mumblecore directors who were grouped into that first wave also acted in their movies. It was always geared towards that, and in my mind that’s the legacy of mumblecore. Whether you feel like it’s a movement or not, it introduced a lot of actors and a new performance style that these days seems to have seeped into the mainstream.

SM: I interviewed a director once who was obviously influenced by mumblecore, to the point that he must have instructed his DP to play keep-away with the camera. His defense was, if it wasn’t shot hand-held the performances would have suffered for it. Shouldn’t performance be an integral part of what determines camera placement and movement?

JS: I’m asking myself those same questions. There’s not an answer to that. For me that’s an investigation I’ve been going on in the last couple of films. Can you have a very controlled, deliberate visual style and still create room for a kind of naturalism and a kind of improvised performance that I was getting in the earlier movies? I think yes, but it’s going to take time and it’s going to take...you see I make a lot of movies. A lot of that for me is about practice, creating all these different environments and all these different spaces where I can try out theories that I have or test things with different actors. It’s hard.

When you have a hand-held camera, you really can capture improv in a different kind of way. The photographer becomes almost like another performer in the scene. Part of your job is to be listening and emotionally engaged so that you’re always moving the camera towards the thing that is drawing your attention and ideally the audience’s attention. The trade-off is a really different look and feel than that of standard coverage. I’m interested in both and am hoping to someday find an answer to the question you asked. It may take another 30 years of experimentation to arrive at some place that I feel is my natural rhythm or my natural space.

SM: Where did you — or was it (co-writer and star) Jake (Johnson) — come up with the idea of finding body parts in the backyard?

JS: It’s based on something that actually happened to Jake at his old house in Atwater Village. He and his wife were putting a garden in the backyard, and he found a rusty gun and a bone and that led he and a bunch of his friends on this ten day, sort of Stand By Me quest. That was the kernel of the movie, and that was kind of the fun he and I when getting getting started on the collaboration. I’m interested in what is happening in their relationship and in their world that is sending these two people on separate journeys over the course of a weekend. Because I write so collaboratively with the actors, casting Rosemarie [DeWitt] was the first step. With each actor that entered the movie, I was asking them to bring as much of themselves as they felt comfortable with.

Rosemarie DeWitt

SM: You like placing your characters in uncomfortable situations. You’re also not afraid to show your characters in an unlikeable light. We learn more about the couple from their time spent apart rather than together. Why does Lee [DeWitt] take the money from her mother’s purse?

JS: In my mind, her buying that leather jacket is an act of teenage defiance. She and Tim [Johnson] are having all these arguments about money and their relationship while house-sitting this beautiful home that is making them both very aware of what they don’t have in their own lives. When she is on her own and ends finding that leather jacket, it’s a Fuck it! I’m just going to do what I want. She immediately feels guilty and panicky about spending money they probably don’t have.

Stealing from her mom is an act of defiance that freaks her out. In my mind, she takes the money, spends it on her night out, and anything left over is put back into their bank account, hopefully before Tim notices. When talking to Rosemarie about the scenes in Malibu at her mom and stepdad’s house, I really wanted her to have this teenage physicality. No matter how adult you are in your own life — she’s married and has a three-year-old — something about being around your parents immediately puts you back into this other relationship dynamic where even though you’re perfectly capable of managing your own life, this other person thinks they know more than you. And probably does know more than you. There’s this kind of angsty feeling that I wanted her to have. Going into her mom’s wallet and taking the money might have been something she used to do when she was 16 and first starting to go out with her friends.

SM: One of the big questions your characters face in the film is do children limit parents. To you, every day is take your kid to work day; your son, Jude, has a featured part in the picture. From your own experience, how do you answer that question?

JS: They are limiting. For sure! If you’re looking for a certain kind of lifestyle, they make it almost impossible. Or the tradeoff becomes how much you value that lifestyle. The complicated thing that I discovered is they make your life better in every single way that they make your life “worse.” Every freedom they remove is more than fulfilled by new feelings of love and emotions that you didn’t have before. A lot of what this movie is about is accepting the current status of your life rather than mourning a lost freedom or lost rebelliousness. Both of these characters are feeling cramped by parenting. This weekend that they go on is a lot about answering the question, Am I still the person I used to be? What they discover is yes, but in the meantime you’ve changed. It’s not going to be the same experience. It’s going to be an older, wiser you foolishly trying to act like a kid.

SM: How big did your head get reading Richard Brody’s review of Digging for Fire in The New Yorker? You know, the one that mentioned you and Antonioni in the same breath?

JS: I try not to read any of that stuff. My wife was looking at it the other day and I asked what it was. She told me that he had written something really nice. Just like I avoid bad reviews, I avoid things that I hear are good, too. These days I avoid it all, precisely because five or six years ago my emotional state around the release of a movie was so heavily dictated by how other people felt about it. I found myself in this place where I was waking up every morning, sitting at the computer and reading something that made me upset that sent my entire day on a downward spiral. These days, it’s better to survey friends on what they’re reading rather than looking for it myself. With somebody like Richard Brody, whose Godard book I totally love, who’s been this amazing champion for my stuff, I will maybe read it one of these days, but I’ll let a little distance pass. Better to save it for a day I really need it.

SM: My head swelled with pride for you just reading it. Is yours the first film to feature Uber?

JS: We actually wondered that while we were doing it. It might be. Any time you say something’s the first, I feel like seven other films must have come before it. We didn’t know of any. It was this cool, modern, real way of placing Rosemarie’s character into these different conversations with strangers. That was my experience taking Ubers around L.A. and Chicago. I would find myself in conversations with these really fascinating people who I don’t think I’d have met otherwise.

There are all these roadblocks in our society towards finding and engaging with strangers. The context of Uber felt so much different to me that a taxicab. Something immediately connects you with the driver. You know each other’s names. You have their face pop up on your phone before that person even picks you up. You’re getting into somebody’s car, and it feels really different than the sterile transaction of a taxicab that’s painted bright yellow. I was never that chatty a person with cab drivers or the people that I sat next to on airplanes. Something about Uber...once I had a really good conversation with a stranger, as soon as I got in a car I would just start talking to people. I’m also really curious about the company, so I’m always asking drivers how they feel about it. It started to be really exciting for me to send Lee on this Uber journey around L.A. that would be an additional way to talk about class consciousness, divorce, and other topics.

SM: This is your first film to play San Diego since Drinking Buddies, and there have been three since. Come to think of it, Drinking Buddies may have been the first one of your films to play here.

JS: I think it was. I don’t remember any of the early ones playing there.

SM: You’re a recognized commodity, and we’re not exactly the smallest market on Earth. I’m surprised that it’s still this difficult for you to get your films distributed.

JS: I know. This is an interesting sort of general crossroads of theatrical distribution. With the remaining art house theatres in the country, as the competition drops away the bigger, more successful films continue to get funneled through the channels that exist. The art house theatres in America right now are showing movies by Woody Allen and Wes Anderson, films that in a previous era would have been wide-release movies. It’s increasingly challenging. For me it depends on the movie and the distributor and whether they think the thing is going to have a certain kind of theatrical life. I’m pushing in that direction.

We shot Digging for Fire in 35mm. I always imagined its life would be one that would have a theatrical component to it. It costs an awful lot of money, and it requires a distributor that still believes in that avenue. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I never know if I’m being nostalgic for something because I grew up seeing movies that way or whether it really is better. To me it feels better, but it’s tough for me to make that kind of value call because I also partake in and enjoy Netfilx and iTunes. If it weren’t for VOD, and if it weren’t for my relationship with a company like IFC that put out a lot of my early movies — barely in theatres, primarily on VOD — I wouldn’t have arrived at a place 12 years into my career where I can have Digging for Fire released in a bunch of theatres. I’m at a very mixed-emotions place on it because as much as I want my movies to have a big theatrical release, I wouldn’t be here right now were it not for VOD encroaching in and destroying that space.

SM: I don’t want my maiden voyage of a Joe Swanberg film — particularly one shot in 35mm — to be on a television set, or worse. It’s bad enough that I can’t see the film projected in 35mm. You can rest assured I’ll catch it when it plays the Gaslamp.

Jake Johnson

JS (Laughing): Very good!

SM: My last question comes from an old friend, Ward Porrill: Would you want to make a sudden shift to big-budget tent poles like your former indie comrade Colin Trevorrow who went from Safety Not Guaranteed to Jurassic World and now Star Wars: Episode IX? What if Marvel voted you the perfect choice to bring their next comic book thrill ride to the screen. Is your answer yes or no?

JS: If Marvel comes calling, than I definitely say yes because I acknowledge at that point that they must be total lunatics. (Laughing.) It’s always fun to work with crazy people. If they come for me, yes, but I’m not chasing those jobs. That is not an area where I foresee myself venturing into on my own volition. Going from a tiny indie film into a massive studio film is a combination of the studios being excited about those filmmakers and that they don’t have to pay those people any money. A place like Marvel has essentially figured out how to do those movies. They don’t want a heavy-hitter director with a lot of experience and power. They would much rather have a young indie guy who they can push around and pay no money to. We won’t see any end to that trend and in a way, that’s good.

One of my heroes is Roger Corman. Roger Corman invented that model. Figure out the movie, figure out the story, figure out what components it needs, and then hire the youngest guy you can who is going to work for the least amount of money. What you get out of that is Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, John Sayles...everyone came through the Corman school of filmmaking. The studios are just taking a lesson from the King of the Indies and realizing that the second unit director, the special effects team, and all those people are essentially going to dictate the quality level. If you have a young, visionary director around the movie might actually be better. It’s a pretty happy marriage. Most of those movies are turning out better than if they had hired some studio hack who has done five of them.