director’s statement

Leland Orser

The idea of Morning grew out of my time as an actor at the Sundance Institute, a place and an experience that I found deeply inspiring and moving. On my way home from Utah to Los Angeles, I jotted down ideas for a short film on Southwest Airlines cocktail napkins. I finished the script and directed the short as soon as I got back. The short premiered at SXSW Film Festival in Austin.

From the short was born the feature. The short told a story from the perspective of one character, the husband/father. The feature opens up to include and ultimately center around the character of the wife and mother.

There was never any question in my mind that I wanted Jeanne to play that part. I have always suspected that she is one of the great actresses of our time and her performance in the film proved me right. She has a natural and easy access to a wide and deep emotional range. Her choices are profound, not obvious and never sentimental. She also happens to be my wife. In working together she and I talked a lot about and took inspiration from John Cassavetes and his work with Gena Rowlands.

Other filmmakers who I took inspiration from are the Dardenne Brothers from Belgium, the American, Kelly Reichart, Gus Van Sant in his movies Elephant and Last Days and of course Kieslowski in his Decalogue series and the beautifully stylized trilogy of Red, White and Blue.

The questions I want to ask in the film are simple. Can love survive anything or are there experiences in life that one simply cannot recover from? Can a parent survive the loss of a child? Can a marriage survive guilt, regret, blame? There are conflicting studies in the media that address these very questions with differing conclusions.

In my first film as a director and writer, I chose to explore one of the darkest and most unthinkable of fears. It is a fear that I, as a parent, live with every minute of every day of my life. I suppose this film is an exorcism, in a way, of that fear. That being said, I actually think of Morning as a love story; a love story between a man and a woman who happen to be husband and wife.

Collaborators

My first collaborator on the film was Todd Traina, a childhood friend from San Francisco who I have always admired as a producer. He always chooses unusual and unconventional projects to produce (Grace is Gone, My Suicide, Punk’s Not Dead) and was recently included in Variety’s Top 10 Producers to Watch.

Emmanuel Lubezki introduced me to my cinematographer, Paula Huidobro, a fellow Mexican and one of his camera operators. She was recently named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces.

I always felt this story needed to be shot on film: that the brutal subject matter needed to be presented on a beautiful canvas that only film could provide. Through the generous support of Panavision, Kodak and Technicolor who championed the project from the start, we were able to shoot on 35mm film.

I always wanted the film to be told from two points of view and I wanted those points of view to have their own distinct styles. I wanted to show how two people can react to and process the same event in very different ways. Alice’s camera is subjective and movemented. It shows the world as she sees it as she is experiencing it. Mark’s camera is still, locked off, voyeuristic, removed. I wanted to give the impression that Mark was being observed and guided through the house by an unknown force. Towards the end of the film, I wanted these two camera styles to overlap and switch. As Alice sits for the first time in the grief counselor’s office, her camera steadies and locks off. And as Mark finally leaves the house to go out to the swimming pool, his camera becomes handheld and very subjective.

Steven Soderbergh introduced me to my editor, veteran Stan Salfas. Stan is also a teacher of editing at AFI and proved to be both a great collaborator and teacher. He was wide open to my vision and my ideas but firm and grounded in his understanding of the editing process. He allowed me to explore but never get lost.

Stan lead me to my sound designer, Hamilton Sterling who treated the sound in this movie as if it were the musical score which in many ways it is. He brought with him an extraordinary team of foley, and adr people from his work on big budget films. Paul Massey, one of the great sound mixers of our time, did the final sound mix on the Cary Grant stage at Sony.

Chris Douridas and I were introduced through Paula. He brought on board Michael Brook who wrote the original score for the film on which he plays ten guitars and his wife Julie plays the violin. Jeanne’s brother a drummer in Austin lent three songs to the film each from a different band he plays in. Chris also enlisted Patty Griffin to write the devastating piece of music at the end of the film.

I was lucky early on to have the collaboration of casting director, Debbie Zane. Having her on board opened many doors and allowed us to pull together an amazing cast of actors all of whom worked for scale and shared tiny dressing rooms.

Directing is objective. Acting is very subjective. We scheduled all my acting scenes for the last week of the shoot. I would consult with a few key people after each take and together we would determine whether the performance had been truthful and if it could be improved upon. Then we would move on.

I didn’t go to film school. I think directing somehow grew within me as an extension of my acting. I think of Morning as my film school. I studied and learned the craft as I went through it though I was surprised by how much I already knew from my years of being an actor. I learned to trust my instincts but to always keep myself open to the wisdom and experience of others. What I’ve learned more than anything is that filmmaking is a collaboration. I was very lucky to find myself in the hands of very capable and talented collaborators who not only understood my vision but were able to show me how to realize it.