by Dov Kornits
“I went to a film production program as an undergraduate,” Nick Pinkerton tells us when we ask how it feels to move from film criticism to film production. “I did not graduate, but did a good three and a half years, and it was at a, let’s say, not enormously prestigious university [Wright State University]. It was a program outside of Dayton, Ohio, near where I grew up. And it became evident to me at a certain point that very few people coming out of programs like the one that I was in, went on to have auspicious filmmaking careers, not without exception of course. It just came to seem unrealistic that I would be able to operate on a level beyond pulling focus or doing production stills or loading camera or whatever. Once I put the kibosh on whatever aspirations I had in film production, I rather impulsively moved to New York.
“I’d always enjoyed writing and thought I was perhaps an above average writer and just ran across a thin, very new publication, Reverse Shot, that at that point had a print edition. I was new in the city, didn’t really know much of anyone, and just sent out a cold email and started writing for them and continued sporadically for the next decade while working various odd jobs until such a time where I was actually getting more money from my freelance writing than I was from my day job, which didn’t last long… That sent me into a full-time career as a freelance ink-stained wretch.”
Today, Nick is touring Australia to promote The Sweet East, his first produced screenplay, directed and shot by his friend Sean Price Williams.
The Sweet East is a throwback to a time when American movies experimented with form and were influenced by World cinema, and appropriately, The Sweet East premiered at Cannes.
“We always wanted a European premiere just because we felt that that was the context that we were operating in.
“I think by virtue of the fact that Sean and myself are Americans, the settings of the film are very American and that perhaps even some of the themes touch on contemporary American ideological tug of wars. But I think a lot of the points of reference that I had in writing, that Sean had in shooting, are really not American points of reference.”
The Sweet East follows a young woman (Talia Ryder) as she goes from school field trip, to an anarchist collective (led by Earl Cave and his pierced penis) to a nazi sympathizing intellectual (Simon Rex, who is actually Jewish, Rex, not the nazi) to a couple of street hustling filmmakers (Ayo Edibiri and Jeremy O. Harris) to movie stardom (opposite Australia’s own Jacob Elordi) to a compound filled with Middle Eastern men who pray and love EDM.
“We’ve done very, very well both critically and for a film of the size of our film in box office in France, much more so than in the English speaking world, which you could chalk up maybe to the fact that they don’t understand how bad the dialogue is… But I also that quite a few of our frames of reference come from outside of not only American cinema, but also American literature; things that I think for certain Anglo-American critics that there’s an expectation that a film does that our film does not do. The tradition that we’re working in is maybe sometimes better understood outside of the Anglo-American world.”
Has he read the reviews/criticism? “I’ve kept up with it, certainly. I have probably read more contemporary film criticism since May of last year than I did in the previous decade.
“It comes as no surprise to me that it’s not a film for all tastes,” Pinkerton reflects. “I don’t think that we ever thought that was the sort of movie that we were making. I will say that there have been some very gratifying responses and that I found these generally to be the more thoughtful and well-written. And there have been some rather snide and dismissive responses, and by an enormous coincidence, they’re also shittily written. So, I really don’t lose an enormous amount of sleep over what fucking idiots think.”
How does Pinkerton feel about the proliferation of self-appointed critics since the birth of social media? “The interesting thing is criticism as it functions in most people’s lives now, is popping onto a handful of review aggregator sites where evert critic’s opinion is given equal weight. All these things just get tossed into the hopper and ground up into paste by the aggregators. And yeah, that’s a drag. But I don’t think I’ve ever really been writing for the consumer review reader. And there are certainly other people who are pursuing a similar line. And for people who have an appetite for that kind of writing, they will, I imagine, have the wherewithal and curiosity and ambition to find that kind of writing. As to whether that’s going to afford a decent living to many or any people, that’s another question entirely.
“But film criticism still matters at certain levels. In terms of festival coverage, reviews can still, I think, do a lot of good for films and galvanise attention. I think also for smaller films like ours, it can still move the needle. But it also then depends on what one means by criticism mattering; does it matter because it has some economic impact? I’ve never really been terribly interested in that aspect of it. Does it matter because it’s able to elucidate things about the immediate experience of a film and unpack the very tangled and multivalent object that any film is? I think if it’s well done, it continues to matter in that regard. As to the role it has in determining economic factors and having a role in distribution and exhibition box office. Probably it matters less now than it did, but I think it still has a role to play in the world.”
As our conversation comes to a close, we tell Pinkerton that we read a recent film criticism piece of his on the Reverse Shot website, appropriately, where he takes apart his first published piece. Does he think that 20 years from now he will have similar feelings about his contribution to The Sweet East?
“I should hope that what I’ve produced in my late thirties, when I started writing the thing and down to the time when the shoot was wrapped, that I’m doing something that’s a little more insightful than what I would’ve produced 20 years earlier,” he says. “And in point of fact, along with the compunctions I had about the practical possibility of working in film production, I did have a bit of a crisis of self-confidence, which sort of bled in part also to jettisoning my film school education where I was like, ‘what do I really know? I’m a 21-year-old from southwestern Ohio. I don’t really have a rich pool of lived experience to draw from’. Hopefully, something has occurred in 20 years has occurred that makes what my contribution to the movie worthwhile.
The Sweet East is in cinemas now