by James Mottram
Like Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery before him, cinematographer-turned-director Sean Price Williams cut his film-watching teeth working at a video rental store. His was New York’s Kim’s Video, a formative experience that has clearly shaped his entire outlook on film. “I still think about, when we’re making movies, ‘What section of the video store does this go?’” he says when FilmInk meets him at the Director’s Fortnight beach bar during the Cannes Film Festival.
Certainly, it’s tricky to categorise Williams’ abrasive, anarchic directorial debut The Sweet East, a picaresque odyssey that follows Lillian, a high school senior, as she abandons her class trip in Washington D.C.
Scripted by film critic Nick Pinkerton – a fellow ex-Kim’s Video employee and good friend of Williams’ – Lillian encounters everyone from anarchists to activists, woke filmmakers to Nazi sympathisers. Williams calls it a “vehicle to put a bunch of characters that we would talk about, American kind of characters…all in just one movie.”
Playing Lillian, Williams cast Talia Ryder, the young actress who recently featured in the acclaimed abortion drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always. “She understood the character better than any of us,” says the director. “She’s not that character. But she understood the cinematic qualities of that character. I go and watch the movie and I think, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s several different people in the movie’. And that’s a really awesome quality for a lead actor to be able to appear different, in different scenes.”
Ryder, 21, was captivated when she first encountered Pinkerton’s script. “I loved it when I read it. I was like, ‘I’ve never read anything like this’,” she explains. On set, she was allowed to improv. “Sean and Nick gave me a lot of dialogue agency to make it feel more like myself, or like the character. They’re very understanding that they’ve never been teenage girls. And they really empowered me on set to speak up about things that didn’t feel authentic, to make it my own in any way I wanted to. I feel like because of that, I took a lot of chances that ended up actually being in the film.”
With the episodic nature of Lillian’s journey, the film has already drawn comparisons to Lindsay Anderson’s British 1973 classic O Lucky Man! – in which Malcolm McDowell plays a coffee salesman travelling England in an increasingly bizarre set of adventures. Even lifting a music cue directly from it for The Sweet East, Williams adores Anderson’s film. “I saw it when I was nine years-old,” he says. “Sometimes I see O Lucky Man! and think there’s no reason to have a life. Because that movie is like a life, you know? I could just be locked away in a prison cell and watch O Lucky Man! and feel like I’m having a good life. It’s all there.”
After skipping out on her class trip, Lillian’s first adventure sees her fall in with a bunch of unruly high school punks. “To me, high school kids are the scariest people on earth,” laughs Williams. “When I’ve walked around New York City at three o’clock when all the kids are out from school and they’re on the subway, I’m so scared of them picking on me! They’re the ones that are up to no good. And I really wanted them to be just smelly and disgusting.”
Among the group is Caleb, played by Earl Cave – the son, of course, of musician Nick Cave – who is almost unrecognisable with dyed blonde hair. “His whole look was modelled on a friend of mine that I had in the ’90s,” says Williams. “It’s not like punks look like that now. Punks don’t even exist, really. But yeah, he’s based on the guy who taught me so much, who came to the video store I worked at when I was 18. And he taught me so much… got me into the Butthole Surfers.”
As if to complete the circle, Williams cast the band’s lead singer Gibby Haynes in a cameo. “He’s a music hero of ours.” The film also features Simon Rex, the actor who recently made a splash in the Cannes competition title Red Rocket. Here, he plays Lawrence, a loner that Lillian encounters, who turns out to have far right leanings. “We don’t know if this character has ever had sex. He’s so in his head with history and literature,” says Williams. “I think that’s the thing with a lot of these characters… they’re just so in their heads.”
When Lillian comes to stay with Lawrence, it becomes a fascinating power play. “I think she knows that he’s attracted to her,” says Ryder. “And likes that. Maybe she’s a little attracted to him, too. He’s a good looking guy. Although extremely weird. It isn’t completely one-sided.”
Later, she and Lawrence travel to New York. “She’s on this power-wave of using her sexuality,” the actress adds. “That’s their entire relationship. She likes being watched. She likes watching him watch her. But knowing that space between them is closed.”
On her travels, Lillian also meets two Black filmmakers, Molly (Ayo Edebiri) and Matthew (Jeremy O. Harris), who want to cast her in a movie they’re making. Ryder admits that it’s random moments like this that drew her to playing Lillian. “She’s go-with-the-flow… but she knows what she wants to explore.” She even has a habit of repeating “soundbites” that she hears from one person to the next. “I think she’s just collecting things to keep in her toolkit. I think that she knows how to tell people what they want to hear, help get her what she wants.”
With the film made on a wing and a prayer, like all good indies are, Williams was fortunate to get help from director Alex Ross Perry. “He helped us with getting agents to get the script to actors, which was really critical,” says the filmmaker, who previously shot Perry’s works Listen Up Philip and Queen of Earth. With a wealth of experience as a DOP – he’s also lensed movies for the Safdie Brothers, including Good Time and Heaven Knows What – unsurprisingly, Williams shot The Sweet East too. But making the transition from director of photography to director is anything but easy.
“They’re usually very bad,” he notes. “The better the cinematographer, the worse a director, I think they are. Gordon Willis is a really bad director. He made a terrible movie called Windows.” The exception, he says, is Chris Menges. “He is my favourite cinematographer ever. And he’s a good director, too. He made some genre movies. I would love to do that, some kind of a crime movie. But he’s just one of the greatest filmmakers in general, Chris Menges. And he [transitioned to directing] around the same time [as me], maybe he was 40. It’s kind of a thing that some cinematographers at this point in their career do.”
While Williams is reluctant to talk much about his time with the Safdie Brothers (“one of the reasons I wanted to make a movie is to have not ‘Good Time’ after my name in parentheses,” he quips), he does confess that The Sweet East drew from the same well. “We went the distance on that movie [Good Time] without being abusive to the crew,” he says. “The Safdies… they don’t say, ‘Okay, that’s good enough’. No, it’s ‘We gotta get it again’. That’s the thing that I learned.” Same goes for The Sweet East. Everyone dug in, right to the end. “We felt like this is special.”
The Sweet East opens in cinemas on 2 May 2024
