Interview — Part 3: Sean Hartofilis (“Beach Pillows”)

From Ivy League lacrosse star to writer-director of the new indie film Beach Pillows starring Geoffrey Arend, Vincent Kartheiser, Annette O’Toole, and Richard Schiff, the career path of Sean Hartofilis has been an interesting one. Recently I spoke with Sean about life as an indie filmmaker and Beach Pillows which has just been released on iTunes, Amazon and other digital platforms.

In Part 3, Sean Sean explores the meaning behind some key lines of dialogue in Beach Pillows:

Scott: Let’s jump to the ending, because it’s both surprising, and yet in a way, like Aristotle talks about plots, it feels like that’s the necessary ending. There’s closure for some key characters, such as a really wonderful little grace note you have with the mother and the ring.

Sean: Oh, thank you.

Scott: There’s opportunities for other characters. Nick, in particular, seems to be shifting into something that could potentially be a viable life pattern.

But then for Morgan, there’s a break with the past. It’s not like he’s going into some sort of profoundly clear future. In fact, the last image in the movie is sun in his eyes and he’s casting a hand to shade the sun. It’s almost like he’s looking into the bright future, but not quite sure what he’s seeing there. Was that always the ending you had in mind or were there others along the way?

Sean: That’s funny. That’s funny you ask. I’ll start with the end.

In terms of the image that I had planned to end the film, it was Morgan driving away and then we cut to behind the car. It was the most sort of figurative thing I was planning on getting into the movie. So we’d cut and he’s driving — a hidden cut — and he’s driving towards the ocean on the beach where Nick first emerged from the waves. I intended to close the story on more of a metaphorical note that says, Okay, he’s heading into the great unknown from whence Nick came, or that kind of personal freedom.

At a certain point we realized, practically, it was going to be too difficult to get the car on the beach. Although we did scout a few places and considered a few different ideas. So we ended up just shooting him in the car and his face, without giving away too much.

I loved it. I loved the way it cut. I loved Geoffrey putting his hand up — that was just a reaction to the light we were blasting into the car as sunlight. When he did it, I was like, “Okay. That’s good. Now we have an ending. That’s perfect.”

We didn’t go in saying, “This is what it’ll mean,” or anything like that, but when it happened, I said, “Well, that means everything we need it to.” Just the idea of his notebooks sitting there on the dashboard and considering, “Okay, now I’m putting myself out there. Now I’m moving forward by revealing everything. All of this stuff about myself, about my past, and how will that be received?”

All this hard, hopefully fruitful work is behind him — I mean, I’m sure he’ll continue to work on it and polish it. But the fact that it’s a little bit out of his hands at this point, just available for criticism and judgment and processing from an audience, is something that I think is just a new thing to be concerned with and maybe afraid of. But hopefully he can get through that part of it, too.

Scott: You obviously have a love and affinity for dialogue. I’m going to want to run through a few lines here for you, and just get your reactions.

Like when you were at Princeton, did you ever dream one day you’d write a laugh out loud line like where Nick says, “If you say ‘terrycloth’ one more time, I’m going to drown you in my mother’s pool.”

Sean: [Laughs] Did I ever dream? Well, I always — thank you, first of all, for thinking it’s funny.

I think comedy is, you know, for me, good movies, good literature — it’s everything. It’s emotional. It’s dramatic. It’s tense. It’s scary. It’s funny. Whether it’s Martin Scorsese, the Coen brothers, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Hal Ashby, anyone good ever — tonal differences, but the movies should have everything, because life has everything.

For me, I’m Irish Catholic. My mother’s family is still in Ireland, hence the title of the production company (Walls Farm Pictures). So the sensibility of dealing with pain by laughing, I think, is something that probably struck a chord with me and has always been the way that my family and people around me have dealt with life and situations. And certainly, amongst friends, busting each other’s chops, we do that as well.

So the comedy of it, I don’t know. I’m inspired by, in addition to guys like Fitzgerald, who is probably my favorite and I think is very funny, especially the short stories — I’m inspired by P.G. Wodehouse and other more iconically comic writers. Hunter Thompson. I think Kerouac can be very funny, despite the tone of some of the recent incarnations of his work. I always saw those stories as road comedies. Raymond Carver. Fredrick Exley was someone I was kind of given by a friend and I felt I’d always known him. Anyway, I can’t say it’s something you — I don’t know if it’s something you can study and get good at. For me, character and dialogue is kind of where it flows pretty freely, or where I find my life and breath and momentum within the script, and always something that I felt very comfortable with and people responded to from my early writing. I had three brothers who were a lot bigger than me, so maybe sometimes I used words to protect myself, or made people laugh so they wouldn’t hit me.

Thank you so much for saying that.

I would say my movies in college had comedic elements. I’ve just, I think, through learning and growing as a filmmaker, I’ve developed my delivery system. I’ve learned how to be effective, because we’ve seen movies where you feel like, “Okay, this person enjoys their dialogue,” but it’s coming across in more of a rambling incoherence, maybe a wasteful or even inauthentic way. I didn’t want these guys just talking to hear themselves.

I felt that this was interesting and humorous stuff, and hopefully it comes across. But in terms of directing performance and achieving that result, I always asked them to play it real and with stakes, and they always made it interesting. If the words are funny, the comedy will come across. But I didn’t want them mugging or trying to make anything funny, because I felt like the script was funny so we didn’t have to worry about that as much. If we could make it real, then it could be powerful.

What I found myself doing through the editing process, in post‑production, was basically taking out anything that was a joke that stood outside of the narrative and we could live without. As tough as that was, because I thought there were a lot of funny lines in there, what I found was by removing the “jokes”, the movie became a lot funnier, because it’s real. You’re dealing with the comedy of the situation and the story and the conflict, the character dynamics, rather than these guys showing how witty they can be.

There needs to be some relief, you know, in the topography of the piece. Comic relief. Is that a pun? Anyway, if it’s all peaks, it’s basically flat.

The writing of comedy is something I feel confident in. Through this process, I just wanted to make it as real as possible and see how much the story and the characters and the conflict could support what I guess is a comedic narrative.

That might be all I have on that one. Hopefully it makes some sense.

Scott: There’s another line: “You will never get what you want.” What’s going on there, do you think?

Sean: That’s around the halfway point of the movie. Morgan’s been beaten down pretty hard. I mean, just those first twenty minutes of the movie, he’s really getting worked over. And when he says that line, he’s almost given up, especially since he had this romantic dalliance the previous night with this new girl, and then he just wakes up and she’s gone.

So whereas a lot of movies in this coming of age realm would make it about, “Well, my heart’s been broken. I need to find love.” To me it was more about loving himself, finding value in himself, so that he had something to offer another person, for example.

Despite some contrary input along the way from certain producers saying, “Okay, this has to be about him getting a girl. We can sell it better that way.” For me, it couldn’t be about that. That was really the opposite of what it was about.

Back to your question. “You’ll never get what you want.” Yeah, I think people feel that way, because whether or not you know exactly what you’re looking for…a lot of people have things that they want that they just feel like they can’t get, whether it’s because the opportunities haven’t come their way or they haven’t really invested enough into it.

I think the thing for Morgan is that he wasn’t honest with himself about what he really wanted, or what would give him a sense of purpose and value, until all these things were taken away from him. So, yeah, that’s a defeatist viewpoint represented there, and Nick hopefully is going to knock some sense into him.

But whether you get what you want or not, I think life has to be about working towards it, because you only get one spin around so why not do what you want to do, as hard as that can be and as uncomfortable as that can be.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Sean reveals some of the details about the actual production of the movie.

For Part 1, go here.

Part 2, here.

Beach Pillows is available on iTunes here and on Amazon here.

Comment Archive