“We Were Well Under A Half Million”: Interview With Harry Greenberger, STARING AT THE SUN Writer/Director

Low-budget filmmaking is built on risks and can push the envelope in a way that movies with more than a half million bucks to burn simply can’t. That’s what Harry Greenberger found with his debut feature film, Staring at the Sun, which he wrote and directed. He produced the film, too, alongside longtime collaborator Carmine Famiglietti.

Staring at the Sun follows two girls, Tasha Segal (Taylor Rose) and Edie Glaser (Jill Shackner), who escape from their lives as Hasidic Jews in New York City to look for freedom. They embark on a road trip, crossing paths with a wanderer, Sonny (Raúl Castillo), and a waitress, Dolly (Sarah Clarke), as they make their way to Arizona. The film ended its festival run at the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival in Ithaca, New York, this past April, and Greenberger is seeking distribution for the project while he finishes his second feature, the Christina Ricci–starring drama Faraway Eyes.

I had the chance to speak with Greenberger about Staring at the Sun, his influences, casting process, distribution and experiences with ultra–low budget filmmaking.

Clement Tyler Obropta for Film Inquiry: So how many times have you seen your own movie?

Harry Greenberger: Well, if you’re counting all the different times during editing that you’re sitting through pieces of it and sections of it, then it would be in the hundreds. But I’ve only probably sat through the entire thing beginning to end maybe 40 or 50 times, which is a lot, but you have to watch your own film to understand how it’s coming across. And then the editing process, you have to sort of sit back, and instead of just working on and polishing the same scene or the same section of the film over and over again and watching that, you really have to look at it as a whole.

It’s kind of like — it’s going to sound like a pretentious idea — but if you were painting a very large painting, you can’t just do the hand and work that out. You have to keep stepping back to see whether the hand looks right with the body. So you have to watch it over and over again. And before you even put it out, you have to wind up screening it privately for groups of people.

You really don’t know your own film until you watch it with a group of people, even if it’s four. It just suddenly feels different in the room for you, and you immediately [feel] like things that fall flat become immediately apparent to you and things that work better than you thought, or even just the simplest mechanical part of it, where if something gets a big laugh every time, then you realize you need to leave a little time before the next crucial line. So just things like that, that you only learn from an audience. Or a joke that falls flat or something that people take as a joke and it wasn’t meant, so you have to shift it — so it’s so crucial. So I’ve watched it many, many, many times.

Including tonight, right?

Harry Greenberger: Yeah, I’ll be there watching it again. I can’t get enough of watching it with an audience because it’s different every single time. Different things get laughed at, different things get reacted to — it’s so fascinating. I swear it’s not narcissism. You know, I’m not just sitting there relishing the applause or anything. I’ve worked in music a lot, and it’s true for songwriters: They’ll go out, and on a different night, a different song will get a huge response, and you don’t know that. Every song feels great to you when you write it until you get it out in front of people, and they’ll tell you.

So with Raúl Castillo — this is pre–We the Animals Raúl Castillo. What’s your relationship to him?

Harry Greenberger: I’ve known him for a long time. I worked on a really beautiful film called Amexicano with him. The guy who produced both of my features is a guy named Carmine Famiglietti. He made a beautiful and brilliant film that went to Sundance and got an Independent Spirit Award nomination. It’s called Lbs., and [Carmine] starred in that, and it’s the film where — and this does lead to the answer about Raúl — he wrote a film about a guy who weighs 385 lbs. and loses about 200 lbs. to change his life, and he did that on-screen. It’s the most any actor’s lost on-screen.

After that, he made a second film called Amexicano, and he starred in both of these films, and in Amexicano, he plays a guy who’s like a vaguely racist Queens sort of working-man guy who winds up being given the task by his boss to find an illegal immigrant to do a job. And he does that, and Raúl played the illegal immigrant in that. And we became friends.

He happened to live near me, so I drove him to and from set, you know, just for convenience, and we really became friends and worked on a couple other things together, and then I knew that he was interested in a part in Staring at the Sun, and so I gave him the script to look at and said, “Any of these parts — primarily the male ones — that you might be interested in playing? Just let me know.” And you know, he chose, I think, the one that interested him the most, which is Sonny, the one they meet on the road on the way, which for me was always a little bit of a nod to Thelma & Louise.

The minute you put two girls in a car and send them across the country, you’re invoking Thelma & Louise, and I thought, “Well, I’m gonna have to play with the fact that they’re gonna meet kind of a young buck on the road,” and I tried to play a little with their expectations of where that will lead because it leads to a different place with Thelma & Louise. And then he chose that role, and he’s really wonderful to work with, and I think he’s a little more experienced than some of the other actors in the film, and I think everyone just upped their game.

It’s like they say, when a boxer gets in the ring with the champion, they actually suddenly get a little better because they notice they belong in the ring with the champion on that day. And so I feel like it was like that on set: When you have someone like that, everyone else steps it up a little. They start to realize, “He’s such an amazing actor, but I’m here too.” And I feel it gives a little confidence to everyone. He’s such a tremendous actor. He’s nothing like any of the characters he plays on screen. He’s a very quiet, poetic, studious fella, and [he’s] — they’re calling it the first Latino superhero, El Chicano.

That point about the heavyweight boxer — I thought the same thing about later in the film in Arizona, when the girls meet Sarah Clarke’s waitress character, Dolly. From the second she was on-screen, everyone had this energy that was being brought out. What was casting her like?

Harry Greenberger: It was great. She’s a terrific actress. She had a huge part in 24, the Kiefer Sutherland Fox TV show as the — it’s a spoiler for anyone that would be reading this — she plays his partner who turns out to be a double-agent, and she’s completely evil and does something horrible at the end of season 1. So I knew her from that, and when her name came up in casting, even though I’d worked with actors for decades and I know that they aren’t their roles, she was so indelibly the evil Nina Myers from 24 that I kept thinking, “I don’t know if she’s right for the part.”

I even told her when we first met, “It’s funny, I’m a fan from 24, and I just couldn’t get Nina Myers out of my head, and she said she has people coming up to her in airports and going, “I hate you! I loved you in the role, but I hate you!” And you know, I thought I’d be immune to that at this point and realize that actors aren’t their characters, but I guess when they’re so indelible, you can’t get past them.

She always brings more to everything you give her because she’s always thinking about the physicality of the scene and thinking about how to use her environment on set to make the character. The very first thing we shot with her was that moment where she’s looking for Edie in the bathroom, where she walks in and goes “Edie? Edie?” and walks around to the stalls. And for schedule reasons, we just had to throw that in on her very first day. It’s the only thing she shot that day. And if you watch that, she plays like seven different distinct notes of character moments in the maybe-23 seconds of that shot. She walks in, she scans the room, she bangs on the one door, she looks under the other stall door, looks up, sees her own reflection in the mirror, checks her hair, remembers what she’s supposed to be doing and then leaves. And none of that came from me in the script or in the directing. The script just said, “Go and check the bathroom for Edie.”

And that’s the way she was with every shot. If you watch the movie, she’s always doing these perfectly natural, organic moments. Her character’s never just reading dialogue. She’s always so in the moment that she’s either taking a sip of water with her hand from the sink in her own place, which just shows how comfortable she is in her own place, and it’s just a subtle detail you’d never think to pay attention to, but that’s why she does it, to make you realize, “I’m in my own home, so let me just go drink with my hand from the sink.” And she works it out beforehand with me, going through, “How about if I go over to the sink and do this?” So it was tremendously impressive. Just every single thing she brought something new to.

So other than Thelma & Louise, what are some other influences in the script and in the look of the film?

Harry Greenberger: It seems funny, but I always say, I had Wizard of Oz in mind because I always thought, they leave this beige monochromatic world, and they go out into the full Technicolor world that’s beyond their confines. And they leave home. They meet people who sort of offer something to them narratively the way they do in Wizard of Oz, and not to give away the ending, but it becomes about the question of whether or not you want to go home and what the outside world makes you think in retrospect about your own home and what you learn about your own home. So to me, there’s little Wizard of Oz references woven in.

And there’s one very explicit one, in the dialogue.

Harry Greenberger: Right! Also used to show they don’t have any of those cultural references that we all take for granted. A lot of the time, people are speaking in idiomatic language to them that is meant to show they wouldn’t follow all of our normal conversations. Our normal interactions in life in America are sort of filled with all these cultural references.

Me and my friends would be referencing Seinfeld or old movies, Star Wars — but I mean, even just in our choice of expressions — like at the one point where the waitress says, “Well, whatever you do doesn’t step on my blue suede shoes” — just an old song reference. But it’s something that’s meant to show they aren’t following any of this, and when the waitress references, “You might meet a scarecrow and a tin man,” she’s saying something that any other American of her generation might recognize [as] “You may go on a fantastic journey,” and these girls have grown up without all these cultural references.

So we’re trying to do that a lot, where they don’t recognize that the joint they’re being handed in the car isn’t just a cigarette. In my mind, they’re not gonna be culturally literate, and when they hear him say “Right hand up to God” as an expression, that means way more to them. They take it very literally. And Sonny is just casually using an expression. [The film is] meant to have a lot of that.

And to me there’s some Terrence Malick hopefully in there. I realized I was so close to Terrence Malick in my intention, cinematically, that I’m kind of quoting a line from [Tree of Life] as a way of copping to the fact that I’m kind of ripping him off a little bit. There’s almost a direct quote in a line of voiceover, and I’m trying to take that and put a spin on it so it’s not just a rip-off, it’s a reference.

There’s a lot of Badlands in Staring at the Sun, too.

Harry Greenberger: And then even Tarantino’s aping of that in True Romance — that’s his Badlands in a way. He was borrowing/ripping off that, which is fair. I realize that we’re playing with the fact that some audience members would be expecting that the girls would fall in love with each other, and I think that especially nowadays, you have to keep in mind that that’s where some people expect the narrative to go.

I was thinking about that a lot while I was watching. I thought, “OK, is there any possibility in any of these scenes where this could pivot into romance?” And the performances are very platonic, and I think they feel like they’re so adult when they’re going out on their own. And they’re so unaware of the world that it seems like romance would have never crossed their mind as a possibility.

Harry Greenberger: Disobedience came out right after we were already finished with this film, but I worried at first, like, will we be eclipsed in its shadow? But in the end, it’s just such a different film because it does follow that road. And I thought — I don’t know that they wouldn’t consider it, but I think they would, our two girls, if that’s what they were feeling. You know? If they were into it and they were interested in each other, they would just naturally feel that, and either one or both would follow on that.

But I thought that film has been made here and there. There’s documentaries about that and stuff, and I just thought in my head, if that was their reason for running away, or if that was their reason for deciding whether or not to stay, I worried it would dilute the basic human rights message. And in this way, I hope that their individual sexuality was irrelevant to their choices. The fact that they’re heterosexual is irrelevant to their choice of staying or going.

So I don’t know if that’s a successful choice, but it always felt like it always needed to be just under the surface as a possibility because whether we wanted it to be or not, it would be. But I felt like the more important thing was always to show that their innocence and their ignorance about the world outside the confines of their world was dangerous in a way that they didn’t understand.

Their complete lack of preparedness for the fact that they were already going to be in a game that they didn’t know they were playing the minute they got out into the world, the minute men started talking to them when they were where they’d never be allowed to speak to men or engage with even boys in their school — that’s why they talk about it in such an abstract way in the Hasidic community.

Because they’re kept away from relationships, they’re aware that they’re going to be matched up with somebody at some point and be told who their husband is and told to start having kids, I thought that all that would be sort of an abstraction to them and they would just start talking about boys even though they had no control over it and no context to it — they would start talking about who likes who, that it would all be nonsense in their world. Background noise. And then when they got out into the world, they’re prey.

Whether they realize it or not, they’re innocently talking to people, and they’re also following their hormones without even realizing it because they haven’t been taught that and they haven’t been prepared for any of it, and they haven’t been taught what these men will even be wanting from them or what they’ll be seeing in them. And while in their community, maybe it protects them by not telling them anything about it, the minute they’re out, they don’t have that thing the rest of us have where when you’re 12, 13, 14, you’re almost starting to have practice relationships or practice interactions with the opposite sex, with the same sex, or whatever you’re gonna… you’re gonna start tiptoeing into that world, but they’re never allowed to.

So was it hard writing two teenage girls who come from that background?

Harry Greenberger: It was. It’s the question most asked, I think, at the — besides everyone always asks what your budget is.

Just so I can hear it, what was it?

Harry Greenberger: My producer always wants me to never actually say, but we always say we were well under a half million. I think that’s called “ultra-low” in the film business. Or “modified low,” depending on who you talk to. In SAG terms, I think it’s “modified low.”

But people often ask, I don’t know if it’s either, you know, “how did you write from the perspective of two teenage girls,” or “who do you think you are to be writing from the perspective of teenage girls,” but they’re both probably valid. I just really tried hard to put myself in their shoes, and you start making decisions in the writing process, and once you’ve made a couple of them, you’re kind of bound in a certain direction. And once you decide that it’s gonna be two girls that run away rather than a boy and a girl or two boys, I think that leads you toward thinking, well, how are you gonna do that?

And the reason, I think, I stuck with two girls was that the original newspaper article that I read that sparked the whole idea said that two teenage girls were missing. That stuck me on that line, but the reason I kept it like that was I thought, if you’re going to talk about the repression of religion, women always get the worse end of it. Especially in any fundamentalist relation, women are always gonna get much more in the way of restrictions and obligations, and I felt like if you’re really gonna talk about freedom and self-determination and identity, then women are overcoming more in that regard generally.

And so once I established that in my head, I thought, well, I’m gonna have to be writing two teenage girls, and so I just really tried hard to put myself in their shoes. I was an atheist growing up in an agnostic Jewish family in a rabidly Christian small town, so I knew what it was to be a nonbeliever in a believing environment. And I was having those same questions in my head about the illogic of it all.

I imagine we all must have had some of that, where somebody tells you a rule or a concept that just doesn’t fit with your own sense of morality or logic, and I started thinking about, what if you were born in a fundamentalist society and you were a nonbeliever, what would you do, how would you feel, and how soon would you get the hell out, and what would you be looking for when you left? And I started just extrapolating those things, and then I think, you know, characters start to build themselves from there.

I started trying to think of the character dynamic that would get you there, and I sort of thought of the idea that the one girl leaves with big ideas about how she’s going to be completely free and thinks of her friend as the tagalong sidekick, and I thought the other girl, Edie, would be leaving kind of because it sounds like fun and her friend is leaving, and she starts as a follower, and then once they get out, I kept coming back to the maxim in my own head while writing, which was “Tasha looks, and Edie leaps.”

And every time something comes up, Tasha steps back and is contemplative and cerebral about it and thinking about is this the freedom, is this the thing we came here for? Is it now, is now the time to jump in the pool? And while she’s doing that, while she pauses to reflect, Edie jumps. And I think partly because in my head, it’s possible that Edie doesn’t think that she’s going to leave forever. Analogous to the Rumspringa thing in the Amish world, it’s this sort of vacation from that life, or [Edie] at least wanted to taste it and feel it and see if it was for her.

Now — this was shot on location in Arizona.

Harry Greenberger: Some of it, yeah.

They’re on this quest to get to the Grand Canyon, but they never make it there. Was it a budgetary reason why they couldn’t go, or was it always a story thing?

Harry Greenberger: A little bit of both. I always wanted it to be the place that they sort of fantasized that they might go see because it seems so alien to Brooklyn and their upbringing and it seems so free. It’s just this endless expanse, or seemingly infinite expanse, of detail and freedom and wildlife and all these things, so I always wanted them to not make it there, but when we were shooting there, somebody had the idea — maybe it’s a good idea to show Tasha there alone at the end, that as part of this new life, she would go there without Edie, and that was where the budgetary concern came in.

Because when we’re shooting in Phoenix, which we were, it’s a much longer drive than you think to the Grand Canyon. And we would’ve lost a day of shooting, and it was a great idea, but I think evoking it just in the voiceover at that point at the end, not only representing the left behind but repressing the place they didn’t make it to.

I just thought that was sort of a sad and poignant notion: the big plan that never came together. I had a girlfriend a long time ago that was like, we kept saying, “We’re going to go visit this lake,” and we never did, and when we broke up, I remember thinking, “Ah, we never made it to the lake — that thing we never, ah—” so I thought it was a poignant image to talk about that they never did the one specific location they wanted to make it to, but that’s where some of the budget comes in.

Maybe that’s where some of the Thelma & Louise references come in. They’re both, in a way, making it to the canyon.

Harry Greenberger: Yeah, exactly. They make it there, but not in the best way either. But again, that’s another thing where definitely Thelma & Louise comes into it. In fact, we even thought about putting a picture of the Grand Canyon in Tasha’s room at the beginning so you’d see that it was always something that she dreamt of, but I thought that was too literal.

There’s a great piece of advice a film professor told me: “It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission” with regard to low-budget shooting. Do you have any other maxims that you’d like to pass on? Never work with kids or animals?

Harry Greenberger: I just, for my second movie, had to work with a kid and an animal in the same scene. We had Christina Ricci on set, and we had a kid and a dog, and my producer came to me and said, “We gotta hurry, we have to get done with this scene,” and I said, “No, we have Christina until 8:00.” And he said, “No, it’s the dog. We’re going to go into overtime on the dog.”

“That dog’s unionized.”

Harry Greenberger: Well, the dog was at a very high rate. And it’s funny. We had Christina for like 12 hours or whatever, but the dog was expensive — it was a trained dog, trained to do what we needed — and I remember thinking, really? It’s going to be more important for the day for production reasons to make sure we get the dog finished in the scene. Like, we could go longer with Christina. Just the little irony of it.

And I remember thinking, yeah — don’t work with kids or animals. But just the maxims that come up, the sayings that come up, are so situational. We were joking about getting retroactive permission in the master class. I don’t think you were here for that, but you know, we shot something in Staring at the Sun in a home where we probably should’ve told them what we were doing beforehand exactly, but we didn’t, and the actress later pointed out, “Hey, that’s not fair,” so we went back and got retroactive permission.

Which scene was that?

Harry Greenberger: The scene with the David Bowie song, if you know what I’m talking about.

When she’s still in her house in New York?

Harry Greenberger: When she’s still in her bed with her headphones on. I don’t know how clear it is to you as an audience member what’s supposed to be going on in that moment or not. Sometimes people say, “Oh, it’s completely clear,” and sometimes people don’t get it.

Oh! No, I didn’t get it.

Harry Greenberger: Do you get it now?

Oh — she’s masturbating in her bedroom.

Harry Greenberger: Right, so the homeowner [didn’t know] at first. We explained what’s going on, and he didn’t make the connections. We just shot it, and then afterward, the actress was like, “Well, don’t you think that’s kind of unfair because we shot that in his daughter’s room?” And we’re like, “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

I hadn’t thought about it — you know, you get into the mentality where you’re like, the most important thing is, what do you have to do to get the shot? And she pointed out that for a crew who tried to be very ethical, that maybe that was not as on the up-and-up as we’d like to be. So I went and given that we actually had another day to shoot there, I basically gave us the opportunity to kick us out by saying, “This is just, I want you to know what’s really in that scene,” and he said, “Oh, that’s real life!” Thankfully, because that could’ve changed everything. Talk about better to ask forgiveness than permission, that was more like, “Can we get your retroactive permission to do something awful in your daughter’s room?” Well, not really awful.

There’s a million little things that come up, and you start to think that they only pop into your mind situationally. There’s little things that are more mechanical — you’ve probably heard the thing that’s, “never run on set, but also never walk when you can stand still, never stand still when you could sit down, never sit down when you could be laying down,” because rest is gonna get you through working on a feature.

What’s the distribution like for Staring at the Sun? Is it still going around festivals?

Harry Greenberger: Yeah, actually. This will be our last festival, I think, of a couple dozen festivals, and then we’re talking distributors now trying to nail down the exact plan. We had a few distributors that were interested early on, but they always wanted to make changes that we didn’t want to make. So we felt like let’s let it play out its festival life and gather awards, which it luckily did, and then come back to the table with maybe a little more of a position to be able to say we want the movie the way the movie is.

We had a distributor who said, “I’ll get it into theaters right now, just cut all the sex and all the drugs and violence out of it.” Yeah, that’s a short movie, but it’s a very different movie. We’d have to reshoot because it’d be a short, I think, at that point, and just to — you know, it’d be a pilot episode of a series or something. I think if we did that, he wanted us basically to cut all the male characters out, essentially. And it’d be a very odd movie. It’s about how much waitressing is boring or something.

It’s about a road trip to Arizona to work in food service.

Harry Greenberger: Right. But he, the guy — “I loved the movie,” you know. He’s like, “I’ll take it right now, get you in independent art theaters all over the country and like 20 festivals.” But that’s the funny thing about distribution. I always felt like no matter what, whoever distributes it is gonna wanna make some changes to it, but I would never agree to that one. That’s too weird.

How much time passed since completing the film — or “completing the film” — the last day of shooting, whenever you finished a fine cut, to now?

Harry Greenberger: You know, that’s one of those maxims, is “films are never finished. They’re just abandoned.” I forget who said that, but that’s a good one. And the other good one is the William Goldman one you’ve probably heard, which is “nobody really knows anything.” And so remember that during everything I just said. I don’t really know anything.

We finished shooting in late October 2014. And then we spent — Sara [the editor] had other projects she was editing, so our editing was interrupted a few times, and we edited mostly through 2015 and into 2016 and then spent some time kind of doing post on it, doing pickup shoot stuff just to fill in the gaps narratively. There’s things in there that you know, you’d probably notice is not from the original shoot — that’s usually the case in movies — and then it sort of had to sit while we were waiting to hear back from festivals, but at that point, we were starting work on my second feature, Faraway Eyes, and the funny thing was it started getting into festivals right when we were prepping Faraway Eyes.

Usually I’m there in the editing room the entire time, but some of the finalized stuff and the sound mix and things like that had to happen in a hurry while we were racing into production on Faraway Eyes. It actually had its premiere at a film festival during a break between the fourth and fifth week of Faraway Eyes. So I actually went off-set from shooting Christina Ricci. I left set and had to race over and put on less sweaty clothes and do the premiere of Staring at the Sun. And luckily most of our cast from Faraway Eyes and most of our cast from Staring at the Sun, like both casts sort of converged and went to the premiere, and that was kind of cool.

And so then that started its year in festivals, and that was late 2017, so it’s been a year and change since then. And you know, there’s been talks with distributors ever since. It helps since Faraway Eyes has a bigger-name cast, so distributors are reaching out to us in advance of even seeing that one. We’re like, “Well, in the meantime — we’re not showing Faraway Eyes yet, but if you’d like, you can take a look at this one.” So that’s helped.

How much has the film changed between festivals? Surely you tinkered with it a little bit.

Harry Greenberger: Believe it or not, we didn’t. We did — our very first screening was at the Tribeca screening room, and we showed it just to cast and crew, so that was an unofficial premiere. So that was different, and we made some changes. And once we locked in the cut at our very first film festival, it’s not changed one bit. We probably cut maybe 15 seconds out of it between that first screening and the Big Apple Film Festival premiere, but it was just for a clarification of something. And we changed the music for legal reasons here and there. But that Big Apple cut is what you saw last night. So it’s been untouched.

But in the meantime, we’re editing the other one, so that’s part of the reason. But if it gets distributed, we’re probably gonna have to change some things narratively here and there. Little things that’ll probably happen as requests. But also we’ll probably have to switch out some of the music because it’s incredibly expensive to take some of the things we have in the music for this version into perpetuity rights, which is when you get to use it locked into the movie forever. This is — what you’re seeing is — festival rights.

Like for the David Bowie song, we have the right to use it in film festivals, but we can’t put it on TV that way. And it’s still ridiculously expensive just to get festival rights, especially for something like that. And we got turned down by a few people, and that was right before our premiere, so in the last three weeks, while I was shooting Faraway Eyes, I’m having an assistant editor switch out music because we got denied permission from people. Bowie gave us his permission, but let’s just say less well-known people oddly didn’t even though they would’ve been paid just to show it in festivals.

People, you think, would just want the exposure. Some of them just deny rights for whatever reason. But it’s a complicated process and one I wasn’t prepared for. I went in thinking I knew everything, but the music rights licensing world is more complicated than I realized. You have to get the sync rights, the master rights and the performance rights for everything. And those are all separate contracts.

That sounds terrifying.

Harry Greenberger: It’s intimidating. And that’s why we have a composer doing music for the second film. We got lucky. We got a brilliant composer who I’m a huge fan of. [The second film is] a love story set in the afterlife, so it plays with an afterlife set in New York City where the dead find out that if you didn’t die with true love, you have a little bit of time to find true love among the other recently dead or else you don’t really get to go on to the other side. And so they walk the streets of New York City looking for love. And we have the two girls from Staring at the Sun in small roles just because I like the idea of the universe still containing them.

So with low-budget filmmaking, do you feel it’s your duty as a filmmaker to push the envelope and to try to tell stories in new ways?

Harry Greenberger: Definitely because if all you’re doing is making a clunkier, low-budget version of this stuff that you’ve seen before and that the industry just churns out, then there’s really no purpose in doing it. Because there’s plenty of that already. That’s why when I go to film festivals, I’m always looking for — and I feel like there’s a lot of people who, and there’s no offense to people who want to make a heist film, but I feel like there’s a lot of that. Some of them are done absolutely brilliantly. But I feel like Hollywood makes serial killer films and heist films and action films, and if that’s what you’re gonna do, you’re just gonna make a more poorly made one.

Film Inquiry thanks Harry Greenberger for taking the time to talk with us.

For those interested in Staring at the Sun’s upcoming distribution plans, you can find updates at its official website and Facebook page.