Independent Filmmaker Monique Sorgen Is SORRY NOT SORRY

Writer/director Monique Sorgen is obviously pleased to hear that I liked her short film, Sorry Not Sorry: “Oh awesome!”

Which brings us right to question one.  Sorry Not Sorry is expressly inspired by William Carlos Williams’ poem “This is Just to Say,” which is ostensibly an apology by the poet to another person, whose plums were left in the refrigerator and which have been eaten by the poet. With all attempts to avoid spoilers, it is safe, and unavoidable, to say that Sorgen’s short film takes the poem in the darkest direction imaginable. How did she get there?

He was told not to eat the plums…

“I think from the outset I was struck that the poem is about, that this man was clearly told not to eat the plums,” she says. “He did it anyway and so, feeling bad about it, he sort of gives this apology about how the plums were cold and delicious and such a pleasurable experience for him. So I always pictured it being a husband, and I always wondered what the wife would do. And I think that it’s also a commentary on marriage and how people take each other for granted, especially once they have been together a while, and they just stop listening to the other person’s needs, and it just builds up so much anger that you really couldn’t be blamed for doing crazy, crazy things in response to even the smallest of things after a while.”

Although the behavior in the film is well, extreme… “I also think of the fact that this poem was written in 1934, in a time when divorce was not nearly as popular as it is now, and people were just kind of stuck with whatever they found,” she continues.

Warning: Spoiler Alert.

In the interest of full disclosure, I admit that I used to practice divorce law for a living, and if a client came in and said she wanted to divorce her husband because he ate her plums, I’d have had to say we’re going to have to do better than that. Now if someone says she trashed my car and murdered my father…

“You forgot about using her best friend for adultery,” she says. Sorgen has some pretty well-known names in her eight minute film, particularly the instantly recognizable character actor, M. Emmet Walsh. “He is an icon,” she agrees.

So how do you get people like him to do an eight minute movie?

Actors are always looking for more work

“You know, my theory about actors is getting more work,” she says. “Actors love acting. And especially when it comes to character actors, because if you think about it, the people in my film are really character actors. Getting the attention on the level of the ingénue, you know, the ingénues are usually booked for three to four years out, but character actors are really going from movie to movie, and TV show to TV show, just trying to explore the full range of acting and characters that they can play. So, Wallace Langham, M. Emmet Walsh and Jessica Oyelowo are really character actors. And they love acting and trying new things creatively, and M. Emmet Walsh is bigger now so there are many roles for him, I mean I wish there were more, and I am sure he would be happy to take on more roles if people wrote stuff for him.

Basically, how it happened, which is what you are asking me, is that I had a personal connection to Wallace Langham, so he is the person that I got on board first. I hadn’t met him before, but he has a very old friend who is close to people in my life including the DP, Troy Smith, who was already on board to shoot the film. So I didn’t actually end up going through Troy Smith, I went through another person from their friend group, and he already agreed to shoot my film, I didn’t want to also ask him to put me in touch with this actor. So I went through somebody else and they are all part of this whole group of friends, they’ve known each other forever and that person just sent Wallace the script and asked him if he wanted to do this shoot, and Wallace wrote me back and said he could do two days work and was like yeah, this looks like this looks like a lot of fun let’s do it. So then when I was going out to the other actors, I already had an actor on board who had been on CSI, on The Larry Sanders Show, on Veronica’s Closet as well as so many other TV shows, sometimes in invisible roles, and great movies where you don’t even recognize him because again, he’s a character actor.

Of course Langham is also an established pro, and having him in there kind of gives some obvious caché. Other actors see him attached to a project, and they’re probably more inclined to take that project seriously, aren’t they? She agrees. “Yeah, and you want him to be available on the day that we were shooting, if he hadn’t been available, if he had been doing something else that day – it would have not worked out. So once I had him, it made it easier to go out and say like – hey, this is a legitimate 8 minute film. [laughter] That people sort of trust it made it easier to get people like M. Emmet Walsh to believe that this project is now vouched for if you will.”

How long did Sorry Not Sorry take to shoot? “We actually shot it in one day,” she says. “We started in the afternoon and shot into the night because there are day scenes and night scenes. But it was really was rushed, because there were a lot of little details, and a lot of little action to get, so we did block shot it. Block shooting is when every time I had a shot facing a certain direction where the camera was set up and the lighting was already set up, I shot the next shot in that direction even if it was from a completely different scene. I was shooting several scenes at once.”

Which obviously saves time, but means that any given shot is probably done out of context for the actors. “You have to very organized as a director and the actors also have to have the challenge of knowing where they are at emotionally in each scene,” she says.

Learning to keep a tight rein on a production

Naturally, since the actors are doing things out of order as well. Was that the greatest challenge, by the way, having so little time and having to have such an organized tight grip on her production?

“I mean that was a big challenge,” she agrees, “but I was trained as a director’s assistant in television.  I worked for a director right when I graduated from college and I was in charge of putting her shot list in the most efficient order, so that was something I already knew how to do. There’s definitely a challenge when you get to the set and you realize you have too much to do and you have to cut some things that you were planning or hoping for, but I knew that I had too much so I sort of put things in an order that I knew what I could get rid of as well if I didn’t have the time. But I would say that was probably the biggest challenge in production because everybody on my set was super nice and super professional and just knew how to do their jobs. But I think actually the biggest challenge in the whole thing was finding a location that we could afford on our budget in Los Angeles. That was actually what took the most amount of time was finding the right location.”

How did she get funding to do a short film like this?

“Well, you know, filmmaking is not a safe business for sure, so you might make some of your money back if you get distribution but you most likely won’t make even your work budget back. So it’s kind of a money losing proposition, and it’s something that you do just to get a show reel to show people what you are capable of, and use it to get something that will make money. I only felt comfortable asking for a certain amount of money.

I basically made an elaborate lunch for my mother and my stepfather and I explained why it was important at this point in my career to make a movie and why it was important for me to make this movie and that I basically put together  – I had already written the script at that point, I had already put together the whole pitch and I was able to show them exactly what I wanted to do. I had already gotten the rights to use the poem from the publisher, and I sat them down and I explained to them, look you know this is a non-profit endeavor and I really won’t feel comfortable asking anybody but you guys because you care about me, and this is a time in history that’s never experienced the issue of taking female directors seriously, so I think it’s really important for me to make a move right now with a short film in a way that it will be noticed.

I had made other films before and they did things for me, but didn’t lead to as much as I felt like this one could, simply based on the time period that we are in—with the awareness that women directors should not be ignored. So I basically gave them my plea and my mother said no, but my stepfather said yes.”

When did Sorgen know she wanted to make movies?

Working as a director’s assistant on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

You know, you’re in LA, you are at UCLA and you realize very quickly that there is no money in theater and here you are in the heart of film and television and so yeah, I did want to know more about it and I did take those classes while I was there and then when I graduated I got really, really lucky I was recommended to be the assistant to the director on a multimedia project that UCLA was doing with an outside director. That director, whose name was Kim Freedman, was just coming back from a four-year maternity leave and going back into her television directing career. She was an Emmy-nominated television director, and she hadn’t directed for several years and she was just coming back into her career and she needed an assistant right at the moment when I was graduating, right at the moment when I had sort of impressed her with my assistant abilities on this multimedia project at UCLA. So my first job out college ended up being director’s assistant on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.”

Was it an advantage for her to be able to start out working for a woman director? She says: “It was an advantage because she took me seriously and she really believed that I could do it. It was a disadvantage in that I didn’t realize there was sexism in this industry.” She laughs. “So I paid for it because I just thought – ‘Oh I’m a woman, I can accomplish anything I want to accomplish and I’m working for a woman who has accomplished exactly what I plan to accomplish.’ But it didn’t prepare me for the later pitfalls that I was going to encounter. But you know, I also don’t know that a male director would have taken me on as his assistant because I don’t know that at that time in American show business men were even trained to think about taking on a female assistant.”

Oddly, in silent movies going into the early 1930s, women directors were not unheard of, and women writers were fairly common. “I actually looked into that a little bit and I think what happened was women were getting a chance to write and direct movies when it was sort of this rogue, start-up industry that nobody cared about, and it changed when people realized that movies were going to be a huge money making opportunity and that’s when the door slammed. According to some of the history I have read, that’s kind of what happens for lot of industries—that women are sort of the pioneers in an industry but it’s becomes an industry where there’s big dollar signs and men kind of step in and take over.”

It does seem that the door is getting forced back open again. Towards the end of its most recent season, The Walking Dead featured three episodes in a row that were directed by women. “Isn’t it interesting that you would have never noticed three episodes in a row were directed by men,” she says. There is no way not to concede that it still stands out. “There is definitely being an effort made and I’m very happy about that,” she says.

Word is there’s a short that Sorgen’s prepping which may be something’s can pitch as a feature.

Bad BFF

“Actually, I’m not in prep, I’m in post,” she says. “It’s really just a scene from the proposed feature film, and actually the short film I did it with a different actress, but for the feature film version it’s actually something that I am putting together with Jessica Oyelowo who stars in Sorry, Not Sorry…She’s so good in it and I was so entranced by her acting, and just the details and the subtlety of what was going on in her mind – when I got a chance to show her the film I immediately said to her, ‘Hey, how would you feel about getting involved with the feature film I want to make?’ That feature film is called Bad BFF – it’s also a dark comedy – but it’s a different kind of dark comedy, it doesn’t involve anybody dying, it’s more fun.”

She goes on: “Bad BFF is about a girl who pretends she is getting married in order to get her best friend to pay attention to her. So in that way it sounds like a silly premise but it’s actually a very personal movie for me because it’s sort of this thing that happens when your friends get married and they start having kids and they start neglecting their friendships and very, very painful for the person on the receiving end of the neglect. As you can tell from Sorry, Not Sorry, I am not someone who is a fan of marriage.” She laughs.

“And I never put marriage on my list of things I wanted to do in life and I always thought that I would have my friends as people who would be this stable base of people I could love and who would love me for the rest of my life, and what I learned as I got older and all my friends got married and had kids is they kind of moved on to their own new nuclear family and the kids and parents at the schools and the parents from the dance classes and as their ‘single friend’ you do get pushed out. And I don’t feel like that perspective has really been shown from a point of view – I just want my friend back. I am very excited about it because I feel like it’s something that a lot of people can relate to.”

And Sorry, Not Sorry is on the competition circuit now? “Yes, we have been to Cleveland, and the Florida Film Festival, I am actually allowed to say now that I have also been accepted to the American Pavilion of Emerging Filmmaker Showcase at Cannes, so I am very excited about that one as well.”

The best of luck to you, I say, “I have an idea that we’re going to be seeing more of you.” “Thank you. From your lips to God’s ear as they say,” she says.