Aaron Katz: Mumblecore Comes In From The Cold

Last year mumblecore went mainstream. This ethereal, unfortunately named genre is no longer ghettoised to hip indie film festivals SXSW and Sundance. For the uninitiated, mumblecore is the accepted term for the unofficial wave of movies that have flourished with young American filmmakers over the last decade thanks to cheap DV cameras and home computer editing software. These films, from directors such as Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation) and Joe Swanberg (Kissing on the Mouth, Hannah Takes the Stairs), have such low production values that they make so-called American indies like Juno look like epic Cecil B. DeMille productions.

Usually autobiographical, the typical mumblecore movie is low-key and episodic. The plots, if they can be described as such, involve groups of white, middle-class 20-somethings floundering in the quarter-life funk between college and gainful employment. They’re often romantic and funny, but they are not rom-coms – the emotions are too raw and the comedy is too toe-curling to satisfy Jennifer Aniston aficionados.

Mumblecore filmmakers, because of their limited budgets, have relied on friends and family to make up the bulk of their films' casts. But lately familiar faces have been drawn to the genre. Last year’s Cyrus, directed by mumblecore veterans Jay and Mark Duplass (Baghead, The Puffy Chair), was a big studio-mumblecore hybrid starring John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei and Judd Apatow favourite Jonah Hill. The film was a success and found a similar audience to Apatow’s films without having to make too many compromises. Elsewhere, mainstream filmmakers are co-opting the movement's style and casting its actors. Director Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale), for example, having admired the easy-going naturalism of mumblecore queen Greta Gerwig (Hannah Takes the Stairs, LOL), cast her opposite Ben Stiller in Greenberg.

The timing seems perfect, then, for Aaron Katz (Dance Party USA, Quiet City), the most talented and lyrical of the mumblecore bunch, to make his move towards the mainstream with his third feature Cold Weather, which blends the mumblecore style with a detective procedural.

“I started writing a script about a brother and sister, and it was supposed to be a straight family drama,” Katz told me after the film’s UK premiere at the London Film Festival, “but I had been reading a lot of detective fiction – things like Sherlock Holmes and Raffles – and then late at night, probably sleep deprived, I started pushing the script in that direction.”

The idea stuck, but as a filmmaker whose greatest strength is capturing intimate, painfully real moments, was he worried that the genre element would spoil that?

“I was, but even in the scenes that were more mystery orientated I wanted people to put the dialogue in their own words. I really want actors to be comfortable and be themselves essentially, but in the fictional situation of the movie.”

Indeed, much of the film’s humour comes when the mumblecore aesthetic and slacker attitude collide with the plot contrivances of the detective genre plot. However, would he be tempted to drop the genre style he’s helped pioneer if the money was right?

“Cold Weather was the ideal experience in that we had a little bit more money to play with so we were able to have access to a few more resources. At no point did anyone say, ‘you have to do it like this, you can’t do it like that’. In the end, the money invested was so little that everyone basically left us to make the film we wanted to make – there’s nothing better than that.”

That's refreshing to hear, but will there come a point where it’s no longer possible to make films in this way? Could we see mumblecore commingling with another, more expensive, genre? A mumblecore period drama, perhaps, or mumblecore in space?

“Hopefully, regardless of budget level that’s what we’ll keep being able to do: making films the way we like to make them. Whether that’s two people talking in a room together or a movie set in the old West with dinosaurs chasing people.”