Written Interview: Brit Marling

Interview via IndieWire with writer-actress Brit Marling (Another Earth, Sound of My Voice). Excerpts:

I saw “Sound of My Voice” at Sundance over a year ago. What’s it like to be doing press for this film, so long after the fact?

I really think that for some reason the film’s become more prescient. Maybe it’s the election or post-Occupy Wall Street movement. I think there is a general unrest or curiosity about what a human future is going to be like, and whether the way we’re living is even sustainable. Maggie is talking about a future that is post some kind of unravelling of the civilized world as we know it. The story taps into unsettling things that people are thinking or feeling in a very cool way. I think it’s really playing as a sort of metaphysical thriller.

I think it’s a nice happenstance. It’s maturing well [laughs].

We last spoke back at your first Park City experience, when you being touted as the breakthrough of the event. You’ve lived up to a lot of the hype. What’s this whole journey been like of you?

I didn’t expect any of this, I really didn’t. It’s so hard to properly articulate the way these films were made, which was in a total vacuum in Silver Lake.

I mean “Sound of My Voice” was shot with a camera you often see with tourists. We shot the scenes on the plane on an actual plane! We bought a round-trip ticket from LAX for San Francisco. We’re shooting on the plane the entire time. At some point the flight attendant stopped and was like, “What are you doing?” And Zal was like, “Oh, we’re just taking pictures on the tail end of our trip.” And the flight attendant was like, “That’s so sweet. Why don’t you go in and I’ll take one of the three of y’all.” And she just takes a photo and they keep go about filming.

The fact that technology has reached a place where you can be that small, that ninja and infiltrate spaces. You’re getting production value in that moment that a movie with $100 million wishes they could have.

When we were doing these, because of their smallness, we never thought they’d enter the world in this way. That has been astounding. And then the response, to have people connect to it, has been overwhelming. The idea that we can continue going about this, and make a living doing this work that we love is really amazing. It still sort of blows that mind.

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