Vincent Gaine:
I’ll start by saying that I really enjoyed “By Night’s End.” I found it tense, I found it absorbing. I was interested and often surprised by the developments that it took. I was very impressed throughout, so good stuff! This was your feature debut, is that right?
Walker Whited:
Yes, it was.
VG:
What was the journey like for this film from initial idea to completion?
WW:
Well, as you know, in this business, as with every single job, if you want to get into the industry you need to have done that job beforehand. It’s that weird paradox where it makes sense but at the same time it doesn’t make sense. Oh, you want to be a PA? Well, you need PA experience. How do I get PA experience if you won’t let me be a PA? Oh, you want to direct a movie? Well, you have to have directed a movie. Where do I get the money to direct a movie? For years I’d been trying to start one project and it just kept falling through. I’d meet with an investor and they’d be like “Yeah, I’ll give you $10000!” and then you’d meet with them “I’ll give you $1000.” What? So it was that kind of process of trying to get something done and it never happens.
A few years after I was trying to get that first project going, I was camera operating, met a bunch of people, producers, had done a bunch of shorts with a great team, had been travelling as assistant camera with Philip (Wages) who shot this movie, had directed a few commercials with him in that same trip. And then I was camera operating on another movie, and it was one of those movies where I’m like, sure this is cool and everything, but why aren’t I doing this? So, during that movie, I was laying in bed one night when I got home from set and it just popped into my mind what if someone was in the crawlspace, because the house we’re in is the house from the movie. I got up and started writing the beats down, and probably had like 80% of the movie on paper, beat wise, that night. Went to set the next morning, and at lunches I would start writing, and it was like a week later, week and a half later, I had kind of a rough draft, and I was in Jason Wynd’s driveway, one of our producers, and he was like, “I just want to go out in the woods and shoot some movie, not worry about money and not do all this having to go find financing and all that, let’s just go do it ourselves!” And I was like, “Oh, I have an idea. What about this movie I’ve been writing that is written for my house? It’s written for location, it’s one location, it’s three characters.” And he was like, “Oh yeah, let’s do it! That seems easy enough!”
So, when I left his house, I called Philip, the DP, I called Sean, who’s my writing partner and one of the producers and he does post with me as well. I called Ryan who is a huge producer friend of mine and has done tons of movies. I was like, “Guys, I want to do this idea! Are you down? I think we can do this for pretty cheap.” They budgeted it out and said “Yeah, I think we can do this for about $25000,” and that’s what we did. We all came together, put some money together, and made this movie.
VG:
Having previously worked on short films, what had you learned on short films that was immediately applicable to a feature? And also, what were the major differences for you between a short film and a feature?
WW:
Differences with days, for sure. The longest I shot on a short film was three days, and this was, we still only shot it in twelve days but in one location it felt like about thirty days. Things I learned, the last three shorts I had done were all in one series. I did one called “Codes Abided” and I liked the characters, so I thought what if we go and follow these other characters and see how they got to this point. We started doing three to five-page things for each of them. We got three of them done, and what I had been doing through all of them and what I’d started doing with the first one was: what can we leave out of the story and still tell the story? How much can we leave out and how much can we not shoot?
So, for example, I don’t like inserts. If we’re going to have a close-up on a gun that someone dropped, I don’t want to cut away from what we’re doing to see that – put it in the action somehow, or don’t show it at all, do it with sound effects. So, in “Codes Abided,” we did stuff like that. We’d leave out the shot, and just have the sound effects, so you’d still get the idea. Or we would just drop it straight into the action, not lead up to it, and never really discuss what led up to it, just have little bits of dialogue informing us and we can piece it together. So, through those films it was what can we leave out and what can we not show or tell and still tell the story? So that was what I was learning, those were tests, as short films should be, learn and figure it out as you go. We brought all that kind of stuff to the table.
And we also did this series called “Weird Ending.” Philip, who shot the movie, it was the first narrative stuff we shot, and they’re minute-long things. The idea is take a plot to a movie, for example one of them was, a girl walks into a room and she notices under the Christmas tree there’s a gift with red goop coming out from under it. “Ooh, what’s going to happen next?” They’re a minute long, so the end is a weird ending. She goes and opens it, and someone’s gifted her a jar of jam that’s broken. So each one was just like, serious cops are about to break into this house, and steal all the money, and then one goes “What if we just got a bank loan to fix our problems?” “Oh yeah, OK,” and they leave, and that’s the end. We did three of those and each one we took and applied it to “By Night’s End.” So the cop one, we played with rain; in “By Night’s End” there’s tons of rain, so we applied what we learned with rain. The other two, one of them we would shoot this angle, and the lady goes over here and we shoot this angle, there was no movement, the camera was just planted, planted, planted. We used that in one of the scenes in “By Night’s End.” They were all shot in this house too, so we got to see how light played and figure out that we needed to paint the walls.
VG:
What you’ve said gives an idea of the multiple tasks involved with any kind of project. Concentrating on the roles that you filled, you directed, you wrote, you produced and you edited. Did you find these multiple roles to be challenging, liberating, or was it purely functional?
WW:
A little bit of everything. Mainly it was functional just because we had no money, low budget. Everyone was doing something. One producer’s cooking breakfast one day because we don’t have breakfast that day, stuff like that, everyone’s doing a bit of everything. I always say I came from editing, I just love editing, and if I get to do another film I’ll probably do that one as well, but down the line I’d like to have my own editor, help figure out what’s going on and bring other input to the table.
Producing was liberating because, while I had to ask questions and say “Can we do this?” but at the same time, well, I’m paying for it so I’m just going to do it. It was a little bit of all of that, liberating, stressful at times, because there’s still a lot to do, and it’s all new. It definitely was a good experience for the first one to just go at it and do as much as possible.
VG:
From the perspective of an editor, how did that you find that editing informed directing and how does being a director inform editing?
WW:
That was another thing that we did with those shorts, especially the “Codes” films. Everything that we shot on the first “Codes” film, all that we shot were the shots I saw in my head, I didn’t get any coverage, I didn’t shoot anything extra. And I found out that was a bad idea! So on the film, we’d get a little bit more coverage, I don’t like getting as much coverage as possible, I know how it’s going to cut together so let’s get it, and we’ll get that extra thing to help that if we need it. And that really worked out, it really did. There was one scene that we really cut down and there was another scene that we cut out and then we put back in and we cut out and we put back in, and went back and forth on. But other than that, pretty much what you see is what I shot, and what I thought about doing. There’s a little bit of extra coverage, but not a lot. I guess I can see it because I’m used to editing, and I know how it’s going to cut together, with transitions and things like that, I can figure out the transitions before we shoot, and know how the next scene is going to flow to the next scene.
I guess for directing going into editing. It’s interesting, because there was one scene where I kept thinking, OK, we need this scene, because it gets us, to the next scene, but it also informs us of this character more. Other people were like, “No, I have kids and this is not how this would play out, I don’t think this is right.” I’d be like, alright, “I don’t have kids, but I still think this is cinematic and emotional and maybe it’s not extremely factual but I still think it works.” I would take it out to appease certain people on the team that have kids and I’d go, no, this still doesn’t work, when we go from this scene to this scene it makes this character feel weak without all this other stuff in the middle. So, I started going around asking other people with kids, “Hey, does this work with it?” And I kept getting “yeses” so I was like, alright, I’m going to take the positive and put it back in. So, there was this balance of, yes, I’m the editor, so I need to listen to these other people but I’m also the director and really want to make sure the story works, so I would go out and kind of find those answers from people. It’s that dialogue with myself – normally it would be director and editor discussing it, but it’s just debating with myself to leave it or take it out.
VG:
I was really impressed by the production design. I think that Ariel R. Kaplan did an amazing job. One of my questions was going to be, was the film shot in an actual house, which now I know it was, it was shot in your house. Were there any sets?
WW:
No, we thought about doing the attic as a set but we didn’t have the money so we went in the attic and shot the attic. It was cool shooting here; all the walls in the house are white though, so when Philip was shooting he was like, “We got to paint all the walls.” I was like, “We don’t have the money to have someone paint all the walls, what are you going to do?” So, we went and got this grey colour, talked to Ariel about it, she approved it, and for two days we painted all the walls and then after production I painted them all back to white to appease my wife.
Ariel would go through and she’d gather tons of art and lamps because one thing Philip really wanted was practical lights throughout the house, so she went out and bought tons of lamps, tons of art and just started hanging and making sure it fit characters. But the only thing we built, which isn’t really a building, you know that scene where she stomps through the roof before the big oner, she’s not actually stomping through the roof, we went to the back porch and bought some drywall and made what looks like the corner of the wall and then she just stepped off the porch and stomped through, so that was a “set” we built.
VG:
Necessity being the mother of invention seems to be a regular concept in independent filmmaking. You said a bit there about your pre-production process, in terms of working with Ariel and Philip, getting the space ready. At which stage do the cast come in? Do they literally turn up on the first day of shooting or were they involved at all in the pre-production?
WW:
I think we met two days for pre-production, but it was because I knew them all, so I wrote with all of them in mind pretty much. The first movie I was trying to get off the ground years ago, I really wanted Michelle (Rose) to be in, and this time I was like, “Oh, she’d be perfect for this,” when I was writing, wrote for her. Same for Michael Aaron Milligan as the bad guy, Kurt (Yue) as Mark. So, they were easy, they would come to the house for a day or two before, we’d talk through scenes, rehearse a little bit, which is more just talking the dialogue instead of really rehearsing. Then on the day we’d rehearse a little more but they were definitely involved, we’d have conversations. Michael I’d talk to him on the phone a lot.
VG:
Another question I had was to do with the casting process. You had these actors in mind all the time. In terms of the supporting roles, like Parker and the other thugs, did you hold any auditions or were these people you already knew about?
WW:
I knew everyone except for Carlos (Aviles). I think Megan (Messmer) introduced me to him, one of the producers, she also does some casting stuff, and she knew Carlos, local guy, he was in “Triple 9,” and now he’s a big star in NBC’s show “Good Girls.” He was the only person I didn’t know. Troy, the stunt guy that she fights in the crawlspace and Lucius who’s in the slo-mo shootout, both of them I’d worked with before. Lucius was in a film I edited and my company did all the post on. Troy – I was a camera operator on one of his music videos that we destroyed a house and did stunt stuff in. And the cop, Jeff (Ridgway), is one of the executive producers. We did a bunch of post-production on one of his short films, so we’ve known him for a while.
VG:
There were plenty of very tense moments in the film, but I think the bit that really made me jump was the point where the cop got the arrow through the neck, because that was beautifully unexpected.
WW:
Thanks! That was fun, it was one of the scenes where I don’t want this to be CG. Being from post-production I can tell when there’s CG, so I was like I don’t want fake muzzle flash in this movie, and I don’t want that fake arrow. Our make-up department Britney (Trambauer) and her husband, they went and bought an arrow and cut it and made all the things and glued it to his neck and it was gruesome looking.
VG:
Saying a bit more about the style of the film, you mentioned the oner, which is not a term I’ve heard before, so thank you for that one! I am a huge fan of long takes and there were a couple in the film that stood out. The first was when Moody first enters the house and Mark calls the police, and another when Heather is escaping and the camera pans all the way around before she appears and strikes. What are the particular challenges of a long take, and how do you approach them?
WW:
On this the challenges were we don’t have any money or any time, so we just have to go. For the oner, we had never practiced it, so on the day we shot the crawlspace fight and the oner. That’s a lot to do in twelve hours, so as soon as we were done with the crawlspace fight, we came up here and I walked everyone through exactly what we were going to do. Philip and I had gone through it for days and hours, he and I had gone through it a lot. It went through a ton of different iterations, we had tons of tests going around with different cameras, finally we got to it, we walked everyone through it, we walked the actors through it again, they would go off into their spots and do their lines and figure things out, and then we just ran it. We did it about twelve times, not full, but we had twelve takes, not all of them were complete, and we got it on the last one, because we ran out of time! We also had a two-hour lightning delay on that day, so that was fun.
But it was good, the coolest thing about that oner to me is that there’s no digital manipulation, it’s all one shot. When you go to the wall, if you turn your brightness way up you’ll be able to see bricks and probably even the thing our gaffer’s standing on as we go by him, but we just brought the blacks so high that you can’t see any of that. All of it is one shot: it goes up there, and it brings it back down and hands it off to the operator and we keep going, there’s no manipulation, stitching shots together.
VG:
Cool. Talking a bit more about the story side of things, I really liked the amount of backstory the characters had. There is an assumption that the events we see in a film are the most interesting events in the characters’ lives, but Heather and Mark clearly had so much more behind them and then “Here’s something else!” This was really refreshing and interesting. Was there a particular balancing act in the writing between the earlier events and those of the current drama? Was there ever a sense that the backstory is threatening to overwhelm the current drama and vice versa? What was that balancing like?
WW:
I never thought about the background stuff overwhelming but what I did think about was is Mark’s problem going to outweigh Heather’s problem? Is Heather’s problem going to outweigh Mark’s problem? They both have issues and they both have issues that overlap and they both need to communicate about those issues, I guess. I’m not a military person so military people told me this works for PTSD and how we handle it is good, but that was the big thing, I don’t want to say anything bad about PTSD. It was really making sure that their problems don’t outweigh each other because they both have to come to terms and say OK, we do need to deal with both of these problems by the third act and we need to come together, because the main thing is communication and coming together.
I don’t think I ever thought about their problems outweighing the main action. One thing we did think about a lot though was seeing flashbacks. Normally for Heather’s PTSD we’d go back and we’d see war footage or something, and we got that note a bunch, we should see that. Every time I was like, “No, I don’t want to do that, I only want to hear it, and I only want to see her reaction.” The first time we hear the PTSD happen, you hear that loud screeching noise and the music track and the blur kind of condenses into her head. If you listen to the base track, you’ll hear machine gun fire and a helicopter flying by, which is hinting at the story she tells a lot later. Same thing when she’s telling the story, if you listen to the base track, you’ll hear an explosion, you’ll hear a helicopter fly by, so it’s always just audible, and with writing that, it was always making sure we hear these things, and never see them. I think it worked, I thought it was a good idea, you tell me!
VG:
I got a very clear idea of Heather’s PTSD and her background. It’s interesting to think about it in relation to, as you say, you get the sort of inserts of that footage, so here we have something that looks a bit like “The Hurt Locker,” or the Lynne Ramsey film “You Were Never Really Here” did that, there were insert flashbacks…
WW:
They had the money to do it!
VG:
Of course, that may have been a factor! You show a really great example here that one can do a lot with very limited resources, because I always got the impression that she has been through some stuff, I don’t need to see it, I get it. Very well put across.
This is part of what I thought was a nice aspect about representation in the film, that you have a mixed-race couple and the wife is the veteran and the combatant, while the man was the victim. It was really nice that the film doesn’t make a big thing about this. Was that always going to be the case or did those aspects come about because of the casting or other factors? Did you always envision doing it this way, and if anyone pointed out “Oh, there’s a mixed-race couple”, you were like “Oh, so there is.”
WW:
That’s pretty much how it was. I like Michelle, and I like Kurt, and I cast them, and it so happens that they are not both white. Writing for Michelle, I don’t remember honestly, when I go back, I think in my notes I had it as a man but when I wrote it, it was a woman, because I think I was thinking about what if my wife as going through it? She’s not military or anything. I think in my first beats when I woke up that night, I wrote it as a dude, and then I changed it and wrote for a woman, but then after that I never honestly thought about it. It’s just one of those things, it’s one of those conversations that we need to have about female actors and representation and all that, but I was never thinking about it, it was just this was how it goes.
VG:
Which is the best kind of representation: you weren’t setting out to make a statement, you were doing what felt organic to the story.
Just a slightly throwaway thing, what was the deal with Moody’s hat? I happen to be a hat-wearer myself so when I saw that I thought “That’s interesting!” Was that an on-set decision that someone just suggested or was it decided earlier?
WW:
It was on my mood board and my look book actually. When I was thinking about Moody and what he should look like, I wrote down and had images. I think I said modern tactical, so boots and kind of tactical-ish but he’s got that modern flair and that jacket and a hat, and that’s all I knew. With that character especially that’s all I knew, even in the writing. Sometimes he was British, sometimes he was southern, I didn’t know which way that character was going to go. So when I brought Michael in I said, “Look, I need you to help me figure this character out, I want you to make this character.” He came up with the voice, he decided on the moustache, he died his hair blonde every day. The hat we got the day that we sent our costumer out, that was probably the most expensive thing we had on the movie was that hat. She made the jacket as well, she found the jacket and she sowed a handkerchief or whatever that was on the back, and I still have it because that jacket is awesome. It was a collaboration effort to figure all that out, and the hat was by design but the costumer Emily (Erdelyan) went out and found the exact hat.
VG:
Were there any similar decisions like that? Happy accidents that happen on set?
WW:
Not really when it comes to costume. There were tons of happy accidents though. For example, the scene where they’re sitting in the hallway, the quiet scene where they sit down and we finally have that beat of their connection. Originally it was another scene, and on the day we realised that scene wasn’t going to work out. It was supposed to be Mark that drags the officer into the bedroom and Mark’s got blood all over him, so he’s got to take the jacket off and change. She was going to walk by and see him changing and we were going to see there’s still this spark of intimacy and physical attraction between them, because we’ve started to see the emotional attraction, we now need to see they’re still a couple. We realised, “Oh crap, he’s been wearing this jacket the whole movie,” he was supposed to take his shirt off and put the jacket on but he’s already been wearing the jacket so, there was some mix-up in wardrobe so we couldn’t do that scene. We went and thought about it for a minute and then thought, let’s put them in the hallway, they just sit down and have a quiet moment together. That’s my favourite scene of the movie now!
VG:
That’s really notable, I think, because one of the striking things about this is a film taking place entirely in the domestic space, with the spaces of intimacy like the bedroom and the living room, but it felt like the most intimate point they had was there in the hallway. It was an interesting way of disrupting the domestic space, which was, as you say, a happy accident.
WW:
I’ll take what you just said and start saying that from now on!
VG:
You’re welcome! I always think it’s interesting to see films that are about something but also about something more. The standard one is “Jaws” is not about a shark. In this case, we’ve got a film that is ostensibly about a home invasion, but it also feels like it’s about a lot more: PTSD and the Iraq War, financial inequality, possible embezzlement, an interesting notion about home and property, and the scandal. Were you making a conscious effort to reference or even comment on these wider topics, or was your concern more about fleshing out characters?
WW:
Honestly, I think it was more about fleshing out characters, embarrassingly, I guess. All these things that are happening are issues and things that I might not exactly be going through but stuff like the business talk that happens at the beginning during the day. Some of that comes from real life and hearing other things that people I know go through, but it’s more about fleshing out the characters, I think. Then, of course, those issues are important: a lot of our people on set were vets and they would, one of them came up and told me “Look, I like how you’re handling the PTSD stuff, this makes a lot more sense than other movies,” and I was like “Oh, cool. I don’t really honestly know anything about PTSD, I just kind of assume this is how it would work and glad it’s working out.” I don’t know if that’s good or bad to say, but a lot of it was just kind of more about character than anything else.
VG:
I think that’s helpful. If you try doing something that is very much trying to make a point…
WW:
It can come off too obvious, I think. And that was one thing we did struggle with, because we didn’t want things to be like “HEY! PTSD!” Obviously, they talk about it and she cries and there’s issues, but we didn’t want it to go overboard and feel like we were wringing your neck with these issues.
VG: The film reminded me of various films confined to a single location, like “Repulsion,” “Assault on Precinct 13” and especially “Panic Room.” Despite that, “By Night’s End” still feels very much its own beast. Were films like these a reference point for you, or others perhaps? Are there particular films or filmmakers that inspire you?
WW:
I watched “Assault on Precinct 13” before making the movie. I tried to find a bunch of one location things beforehand like “Dial M For Murder” and stuff like that. I think I watched “Panic Room” after we made the movie actually. There were a couple of things I watched after I made the movie and I’m so glad I didn’t watch them before we made it. “Panic Room,” “Everly,” I was glad I didn’t watch that before the movie, it all takes place in an apartment. I watched some one location things and other things I tried to avoid and then you can tell there’s “Die Hard” references and homages to the movie, Christmas and stuff like that.
Scott Frank is a big inspiration, he did “A Walk Among the Tombstones” and that show “Godless.” A lot of his stuff is planted and centred and just that kind of moody feeling, dark and noirish. People like Taylor Sheridan, he wrote “Sicario” and he’s just awesome, all his films are incredible. I really like Joe Carnahan, he did “Narc,” that was his first movie, second movie, “The Grey” is probably one of the best movies of the past twenty years in my opinion. So those kind of directors who I feel like they really take time with their characters but also care about this moody stuff and the noirish feel. I’m also into big gritty crime thrillers, I’ve got a list on my Letterboxd full of gritty crime movies like “Edge of Darkness,” there’s tons of gritty crime movies that I just love and reference either visually or character-wise.
VG:
Interesting that you mention Joe Carnahan, and I remember some interviews from around the time of “Narc,” he referenced “The French Connection” a lot. So you have “The French Connection” and William Friedkin influencing Joe Carnahan and now we have Carnahan influencing you. Thinking about the continuity and continuation of filmmaking, as an independent filmmaker who has made shorts and now a feature, what advice would you give to upcoming and would-be filmmakers?
WW:
It’s tough, because I used to hate hearing “Just do it, just go do it,” because I was always “What the heck does that mean?” Now I’ve finally figured out what that means which is get on sets, meets as many people as possible. All these stunt guys in the movie, actors, producers, I’ve met from various sets or editing or whatever I was doing. Meeting people, go film stuff, yes, you can film stuff on your iPhone, but if you can go meet an audio person and say “Hey, do you want to make this thing?”, talk to them, try and make something. This film happened to be another “Just Do It” example, which was I had met all these people, I had worked with all these people and now it’s “Hey, I’m just going to do this, are you on board or not? Throw your money in if you want!” It just happened that it worked out because I had worked with them so much. It’s really just go out and keep doing it, I hate that I’m saying that now because I used to not understand it, but now I totally get it. It’s not just about just filming but also meeting people, getting on sets and building those relationships. That’s a big one.
VG:
I’m not sure how much you can say about your next project but are the people that you have these good relationships with working with you again?
WW:
We’ll see. I’m in that weird limbo of I’ve made a movie and now let’s see if someone else will let me make another movie. I haven’t gotten to the next project yet. I’ve got tons of scripts, I’m always writing. During the quarantine I wrote three different scripts so I’m always writing and we’ll see if someone asks me for something and hopefully I’ll be making a new one soon. We’ll see what happens.
VG:
Having really enjoyed “By Night’s End,” I very much look forward to whatever your next project may be, and when I see it, I’ll say I talked to that guy!
WW:
Thank you, I appreciate that. And hopefully we’ll talk again after that one.
VG:
The film comes out in October on various streaming platforms?
WW:
I think it’ll roll out throughout the year, so October 6th it’s on various platforms, I think in November it comes out on something else. I think in December it also comes out on DVD and I think iTunes is delayed until December, but it’ll roll out through to the end of the year.
VG:
I will certainly make a point of recommending it to people I know.
WW:
I really appreciate that.