Interview with the Director - Aidan Guynes

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background in film.

I started making random videos early in high school with a family video camera and iMovie. They were either just fun or like “mood” pieces. I remember just loving creating new worlds and feelings from nothing, it was very satisfying to me. My grandparents gifted me my first “real” camera and then I started taking it more seriously in high school and then later college, getting paid to make various things for various people. I studied directing at Temple University in Philadelphia, and slowly my “videos” started getting bigger and more complex, eventually becoming actual “short films”. Now, I still live in Philadelphia and I work as a filmmaker. By day, I work on commercial projects to pay the bills. By night, I work on my narrative films which satisfy more of my creative desires.

How did Untitled Floating Mom Short first come together as a project?

The idea originally came to me as just an image in my head of the floating mom with her daughter in the living room. Then, the script flowed out from there pretty quickly as a stream of consciousness. The script mostly stayed the same after that, and a friend of mine convinced me to make the film. We started casting and gathering crew in the Winter of 2022 and then shot the film in March.

So uh….how did you make Mom float?

That’s a trade secret… Just kidding. We tried a few different ideas using green screens, but I really wanted to maintain the realism of having the two characters in the same space together, interacting, to sell the effect. We built a large wooden stand with an office chair (with the seat removed) and a plank on top. The office chair mechanism helped to give the spinning, floating movement. Our floating mom (Laurel Kornfeld) laid on top of the plank and our lead (Thea Henry) was able to push/spin her as desired. Then in post-production, I removed the wooden stand with rotoscoping. It was painstaking but worth it!

Just to stay on the behind-the-scenes craft, it was interesting to see how you crafted that wonderful shot at the end of Squatter using a forklift. How do those shots come together? Do you get the idea for the look of the shot first, or do you come across a method or technique you want to experiment with?

For me, I usually come up with the idea of the shot/story first, and then try to figure out how to make it possible. I avoid doing things just for technique's sake, because I feel like usually that results in following trends and not staying true to the story. For Squatter, I wanted the character to have a spiritual transformation at the end, something that felt otherworldly and magical. From there, we came up with that crazy forklift contraption haha.

The film is a wonderful balance between some pretty poignant portrayals of depression or mental health struggles and levity/magic realism. Did you feel the need to push the mood of the film one direction or the other during shooting/editing?

People have told me in the past that my films feel dark and/or sad. For this one, I did make an effort to try to inject a certain level of humor and absurdism into it. I find that some of my favorite films don’t ever take themselves too seriously, and humor is always a good balancing agent to the heaviness of life. Happy and sad moments often coincide in weird ways. People make jokes at the wrong times and tragedy can strike at any moment. So it’s important to me to emulate that reality to try and make a more complex emotional experience. Magical realism is something I’ve discovered as an interest of mine. I like the idea that beneath the surface of our lives, something mystical is happening. It’s very exciting to me creatively and sparks a lot of imagination. Film presents a unique format to explore that subliminal reality, visualizing or suggesting it in a way that speaks to our larger existence, often putting our normal realities in a different, helpful perspective.

You keep a blog on your website with little snatches of ideas and poetry. It reminded us a lot of the narration in the film, which leads us to ask: how much of your script is you expressing yourself versus the character you’ve written expressing themselves? Is there a separation there?

Yea, good question! As I’ve grown as an artist, I’ve found that when I stay true to myself in terms of what I want to express, it usually makes the best stuff. It’s also what excites me and gives me that catharsis. At the same time, I don’t want every character to just be a carbon copy of me. So, I try to distance myself somewhat and put myself in a different person’s shoes. I believe we all are more similar than we think. My problems are similar to someone else’s problems, just with different context. So I basically try to connect the dots of my expression with my character’s context and express myself through them. So to answer your question, I guess it’s kind of an even mixture of both.

You’ve mentioned previously that moodboards were important in your creative process. What sort of references and touchstones did you have for Untitled Floating Mom Short?

Yea, I always use moodboards to help discover the visual language and set a standard for what I want to make. For this film, there was a few different touchstones that I think were probably influential. The first, and most obvious probably, is the show The End of the F****** World. I just absolutely loved that show and it inspired me a lot. The characters’ ambivalence and detachedness spoke to me. Second is one of my favorite filmmakers, Andrea Arnold. I’ve always striven to achieve her work’s level of realism and poignancy in my cinematic worlds. The third is Tarkovsky. Both philosophically and technically I greatly appreciate his approach to filmmaking, so his films influenced a lot of the choices in UFMS.

What projects are coming up for you next?

I have three different feature film scripts that I’m slowly working on, each at a different stage. The one I’m working on now is about a young woman who, after her father’s death, is attempting to discover how much truth was in these imaginative stories she was told as a child. As she follows a trail of interconnected coincidences, it suggests they may have been more real than she ever believed. In addition to that, I am wrapping up another short film that I shot this past Summer. It’s much simpler than UFMS, and is actually just a sequence of compositions inspired by still life paintings. These compositions and a narration tell a story about a man who attempted an extreme experiment in minimalism in order to relieve life stress. However, this act creates an almost larger problem for him in the end, one of a different nature than anything before. Other than that, I’m not sure exactly what the future holds. I might attempt another short film, or just dive straight into my debut feature assuming I can muster up the courage!

Any message for our Melbourne fans?

Wish I could be there with you all! I hope you enjoy the film and that it speaks to you. I’ve heard many differing opinions on what people think about the film, and all of them are interesting to me! Other than that, enjoy the warm weather cause I’m freezing over here in Philadelphia.