Talia Shea Levin
Next Time, Talia Shea Levin (2021)
Talia Shea Levin is an American screenwriter, producer, and film director. An alumna of Filmatique Talents 2019, her work has been featured in Short of the Week, NoFilmSchool, The Cut Magazine, and screened at HollyShorts, Nashville Film Festival, and the LA Dance Film Festival, where she now serves as a member of the jury. Her latest short film, Next Time, premiered at Chattanooga, GenreBlast Film Festival, Athens International Art Film Festival, and Nashville, where it won the Audience Award.
Talia Shea Levin participated in an exclusive interview with Filmatique as part of Talents 2021.
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FILMATIQUE: In Next Time we see a very fragile and damaged relationship and there is a very interesting shot where we see the man’s POV: the woman is speaking, but we cannot hear her. That can tackle a lot of different impressions, from sexism to miscommunication in relationships. Was your intent when showing a couple falling apart and facing hardship?
TALIA SHEA LEVIN: I think something for this couple that is very present is the difference between what they say, how the other person hears it or chooses to hear it, and how they view each other. They are not in a relationship with the true version of the other person, but with the version of the person that they want to be with – whatever version makes the most sense or fits in best with their narrative of their own life. They are taking a trip together, so that forces them to confront this lack of communication and neither of them are necessarily present in their most honest true form. I wanted to tell the story of a couple that I thought deserved a shock to the system and this couple’s various ways of shutting out the world, numbing themselves to it and being very selective in what they see, making me want to force them out of that in some way.
FLMTQ: Although they had a very troubled relationship and they are going through a hard time, the characters had a lot of chemistry together. Did you rehearse a lot with them? And how was the process of choosing the actors to play this couple?
TSL: I have a theater background and I love actors who know how to work with their physical presence. I went to school with Amanda, and I know Dakota from the theater community in Los Angeles. Both of them really have a sense of how they can fill a space and how to relate to someone else in that space. Rehearsing was very important to me, and it also helped for the fact that we drove seven hours in a car and spent a lot of time together, building a lot of ease and comfort between the two actors.
Next Time, Talia Shea Levin (2021)
FLMTQ: The billboards we see in the film are very authentic and so weirdly captivating, basically anticipating the fate of the film and the characters. Were they real?
TSL: They are definitely based on ones that I’ve seen here: billboards and the strange surrealism of road advertising. What if they weren’t just selling me nothing? What if there was actually a dinosaur at the other end of this billboard? My inspiration came from the idea that these billboards were the only thing I could see for miles and miles. Our production designer Anna Reeser is an excellent graphic designer and did an amazing job creating these billboards. We ended up renting two of them, so these are very much real, and they were there for a whole month advertising a fake time travel place in Nevada for anybody to pass by.
FLMTQ: Next Time also dealt with a lot of diverse themes inside a relationship, such as loyalty, fidelity, faithfulness and even monogamy and polygamy. Did you want to explore the relationship of a couple who, to a lot of people, is not very conventional?
TSL: I think that the real conventional struggle that I see with a lot of younger couples is how to engage with the new rules of dating—where everything goes and you have to be ok with everything—even if you are not. This story came from this general feeling that the goal of relationships of finding someone you care about, and want to be with, becomes a goal of who can act cooler and pretend they care less. I think that both of the characters are doing that to their own detriment—acting like it’s not a big deal, and that they are okay with whatever.
This film is about a lack of communication between people, and that there must be a confrontation, but even that is buffered and softened by the idea that nothing matters, when in reality everything does. But it is much easier to protect yourself by pretending that it doesn’t matter.
Next Time, Talia Shea Levin (2021)