Isaiah’s Phone With Isaiah’s Phone, French-American filmmaker Frederic Da caps off an informal trilogy cataloging the contemporary teenage experience by corralling his film students at a private high school in Santa Monica as crew and on-camera as actors. Short “Ava Dates a Senior” was expanded into the ensemble feature Teenage Emotions—both of which are lensed on multiple iPhones and had their premieres at Slamdance.
Da’s latest, Isaiah’s Phone, employs a diegetic, found footage framing device, following a young student Isaiah (Isaiah Brody) as he navigates the difficulties of high school. On-screen text up top teases “a horrific act of violence,” explaining that what you’re viewing is a camera roll of a student “seized by police as evidence.” Da loves movies like Teorema, in which “a stranger comes into the life of the character and destroys his life from the inside.” Here, the stranger is the phone which “enters this kid’s life and destroys him.”
Isaiah’s Phone had its world premiere this spring at the Mammoth Lakes Film Festival, where it nabbed an Honorable Mention award for Best North American Feature. A few days after the premiere, Teenage Emotions had its Los Angeles premiere, which I helped organize; Tyler Taormina (Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point) gave the film’s intro and Roger Avary (The Rules of Attraction) moderated the Q&A. With the chance to interact with many of these former students at the screening, who are all now in college, the takeaway was palpable affection and respect for their former teacher, manifest largely in these former students roasting Da at any given chance.
Da now lives in Paris with his wife, actress and producer Roxane Mesquida and continues to make low-budget films lensed on iPhones—his latest short stars Christophe Paou (Stranger by the Lake), swapping teens for adults. Da would love to shoot something on film at some point. “It’s either iPhones or film. Either you’re going full shitty or you’re going full beauty,” he tells me. “The middle thing feels a little lukewarm to me.”
I spoke with Da over the phone from Paris, where we discussed the process of directing Brody remotely, why “love it or hate it” responses are preferable and why letting too many people into the creative process is a mistake.
Filmmaker: How did Isaiah Brody get involved in the film? Was he in your film class?
Da: Isaiah took my film class when he was in sixth grade and ended up taking all my classes through high school. I gave him film lists based on his age, starting with Stand by Me. By 16, he was watching Apichatpong’s films. I didn’t have a role for him for Teenage Emotions, but he was always there helping out. In my film class, there were two groups of people—stoners who just wanted to watch movies and not do anything, and then you had these geeks. I like both types of people. Through the class they started hanging out more, and helping on each other’s films.
Filmmaker: What was the process with Isaiah in terms of calibrating his performance and with his camera operation? I understand he recorded most of the footage himself and send you it to review.
Da: There were hyper-specific notes: “Right here, we can’t shoot this vertical. This needs to be horizontal. We need to breathe at this point. I want it to fill the frame.” Or, “your pan there doesn’t work—it’s too slow.” “Take your time here.” There was a never ending list of technical minutia.
Isaiah’s performance was about fine-tuning the character. Sometimes he would dip into playing the character too strange and have to shoot something again. I’d remind him, “He’s not a psycho.” Going back to all of those movies he had seen—he knew my sensibilities and took that very seriously. So with the scene where Max (Max Vadset) is asleep, on its own,it shouldn’t be that shocking. It’s the situation that’s upsetting. It’s a Chuck and Buck situation. And he had seen Chuck and Buck— so had Max—so they knew where the discomfort lay. He would send back videos and I would check the Dropbox. I’d see footage of his room, and say, “Actually, can you pick up that Lego and spin the camera around? It would be cool to have some movement here.”
Because I’m editing it so fast, I can quickly see what’s working. There is structure to the movie: a beginning, a midpoint and an “all is lost.” When he’s with his dad walking, I’m physically there for that scene, feeding them lines. I want the dad to say, “Go to the pier,” so when Isaiah and Sasha (Sasha Hibon) go to the pier later, it’s within the universe of this movie, giving the sense that this is naturalistic. But actually it’s grounded in some structure, which is the same way we did Teenage Emotions.
Filmmaker: He’s a teenager, so were you ever concerned about overwhelming him with these acting and directing notes?
Da: All the time I’d have to say, “Yo, calm down.” He might get super excited about something he did and you have to figure out how to tell him that you don’t like that at all. You have to feel it out. You have to, dare I say, manipulate. These are conversations I have with him now, because he lives in Paris now, so we see each other all the time. He spends his life in movie theaters, seeing three, four movies a day. He’s how I was when I was his age. But they’re still kids, so they’re not that self-conscious. That’s the magical thing about kids—if they think you have good intentions and trust there’s a vision, they will give you this natural performance. If you can mold that and project it somehow within a context, you get good stuff.
Filmmaker: How does making movies for little money affect your creative process?
Da: There’s really two options to me: You can make movies for nothing or for a considerable amount of money. With the movies made for nothing, you have to lean into the limitations. There’s a lot of pluses that you get. First of all, it costs nothing. You also get this complete freedom to make mistakes, to figure things out. You have to fight time, in the sense that Isaiah is getting older, and he will morph. This was the same for the kids in Teenage Emotions. You also need a challenge, something that excites you. In Isaiah’s Phone, an audience needs to get the sense that there are no cuts between each sequence. Otherwise it feels fake or cheap. No one’s editing within their phone, and since you’re just watching his camera roll, you need the moment where he turns on the camera and turns it off at the end of each scene.
Filmmaker: The narrative rhythms are tightly plotted. The gun is introduced 10 minutes in, and it’s almost 30 minutes where we switch from vertical video to horizontal for the drumming scene. Were you discovering these rhythms while you’re editing?
Da: I make it the way I write a screenplay. I like to shit out a diarrhea draft, this horrendous thing that no one will see. Maybe my wife will have the displeasure of reading it to see what’s salvageable. From that I might get a sense of some things that I like. I get rid of the rest and build around those things, and then keep doing passes, re-reading it 1,000 times: “This feels bad. Take this out. I have to change all of this.”
When you make a movie like this, you have a similar luxury where you can keep taking things out. The amount of times I’d call Isaiah up and go, “Yeah, this whole section here that we thought was the key three weeks ago? It just doesn’t work.” Once you finally get it, then you start cleaning things up and filling in the blanks. That’s how Teenage Emotions was made as well.
David Milch says to write every day, print it out, put it in an envelope and send it to someone. You write it, send it and never read it. This tames your ego, which is always going to talk you out of doing something, so you’re never faced with your own mediocrity. It knows it’s better when it’s in your head. You write all the time and don’t care about the quality, because you’re going to edit it. To be able to sculpt something, you need that clay. That was me before: “It’s not ready. We need to think about it more.” Now I’m just like, “Alright, let’s go. Let’s shoot something. I need stuff to edit.”
When you’re making movies for nothing, you need something formal in there. Teenage Emotions would not work as well if it was shot with nice cameras. Friends will make movies and tell me they did things so that it looks like it’s made for $50,000 but they only had $10,000. Although that works sometimes, overall I think it’s the wrong approach. You should be working the other way. You should be using the tools that you have, and using them confidently. You want some formal aspect that stands out—it’s not necessarily a gimmick…
Filmmaker: A conceit that drives the narrative.
Da: I want it to be formally creative, but it has to be linked to the content. With Teenage Emotions, I have all these bored kids sitting on their ass all day. They keep telling me, “Let’s make something.” How do I make this fresh? What about shooting them like a [Abdellatif] Kechiche movie, like The Secret of the Grain or Mektoub My Love? But I’m using five iPhones, and editing down a single 55 minute take into a four minute scene. If people are going to love it or hate it—which is always the response I get—I know I’m doing something right.
Filmmaker: For an artist, anything’s preferable to a shrug. A shrug is the end of the world.
Da: What’s funny is that a lot of movies right now are just shrugs. We’re in this shrug era, because we’re so obsessed with consensus. We want everyone to like it. That, by definition, is a shrug, because, if people love something, there will be people who hate it. That’s just the way it is.
Filmmaker: In a found footage movie, inevitably, there are moments where the believability is stretched and you wonder, “Why are they still filming here when they’re in such clear danger?” It’s unavoidable, because otherwise the film wouldn’t exist. Isaiah’s filming throughout feels plausible in a way that most found footage movies—even the best ones—don’t have.
Da:I wanted to make a found footage movie that was a social drama. Found footage is always associated with horror films or super high concept movies like Chronicle. I was thinking a lot about Zero Day, which is about school shooters who filmed themselves. It flew under the radar because Elephant came out the same year and took the spotlight. David Holzman’s Diary is maybe the first movie made about a guy who films himself.
When I first attempted this idea around 2016 with this unreleased project lonewolf_98—before it would eventually become Isaiah’s Phone—I was watching Snapchat stories. There was a video that went viral on the news in France, where some guys sexually assaulted someone at a party. This video shown was haunting. The way I remember it, you see them walking and getting beer. Then you see them—like a Dardennes movie—on a moped filming. Then they’re going upstairs in a building. Then it just cuts, and there’s music and dancing, and there’s a couple girls there. Then it cuts, and there’s maybe two girls there. Then it cuts—there’s only one girl there. Seeing this I remember thinking, “Holy shit. This is a movie. This is a story, and it’s not a horror movie. It’s a social drama.” These kids were just shooting moments, but the tension was mounting. When the moments are strung together vertically—because I remember the black bars on the left and right—automatically I’m feeling something. 50% of that work is there already.
There are just certain things that instantly provoke a reaction for free. In Isaiah’s Phone, seeing videos in vertical instantly causes a reaction. You know people are going to see it in a different way. In Teenage Emotions, it was the same thing: close ups on teenagers’ faces with low quality control from an iPhone instantly elicits a sensation. That’s what you want. You want to get a reaction out of your viewer. You have to use everything that you have within the right context. I think about that stuff all the time.
Filmmaker: Isaiah’s earnestness when he gets excited over a girl like Sasha or a new friend in Max—we all know that feeling. It obviously starts to die more as you get older—you naturally become more cynical. But it’s easy to connect to those moments because you remember exactly how they felt back then.
Da: It’s the anti-Euphoria. I was watching that show at the time thinking, “Damn, I am with the rich kids of Los Angeles every day. This is not at all who these kids are.” Euphoria is this fantasy in two ways: It’s a nightmare fantasy for parents to watch and think, “Oh my God, the kids these days.” And then kids watch it and think, “Yeah, that’s what my life is like, bro.” But it’s not real, and it feels like a lot of movies about teens are like that. You don’t see this earnest, naive, innocent, non-cynical version, where they’re just like kids. Isaiah’s Phone is that non-cynical version with no drugs, no alcohol, no sex. Even though the movie itself is sad and sort of cynical in the end, the moments you’re seeing with Isaiah and Max or with Sasha, are pretty bright.
Filmmaker: I’m curious about your wife Roxane Mesquida’s role in your projects. She’s listed as a producer. What was her role?
Da: I need the people I show things to be brutally honest with me. I like criticism. I’ll get defensive and argue the point. But if the person can argue against me, my mind can be changed very easily—if the argument is good enough. Roxane and I have been together for 15 years, so we can have those tough conversations. It’s fun. She’s an essential part of the process.
Filmmaker: I do wonder about letting too many people into the creative process, where seven people have seen a rough cut say, “This part is great,” and seven others say, “No, it was better before.”
Da: I don’t talk to anyone about anything. Roxanne was integral in this. She says you don’t tell people anything until it’s done. This entire industry is a long game, especially if you’re trying to make movies close to your heart, so you don’t want to burn yourself out. I’ve seen so many people just drop because they get very excited. The highs are high and the lows are low. You want to try to find this middle zone. Having kids helps with that, because now there are things that are more important than my shitty little movie. It grounds you deep down.
My short Fuckin White Boy is about a white rapper trying to get people to listen to his mixtape. In Jesus Lady, an evangelical goes door-to-door asking, “Can I talk to you about God?” The vibe of those shorts is how I used to feel: “Can I show you my movie?” I saw myself in all these people. When things entered my life that I love more than myself, it grounded me, and I have this clearer view of my own stuff. It’s a healthier relationship.
To your original question, you don’t want to show things to too many people. You want a few people that you trust, who you know are going to tell you, “This sucks,” or “This is good.” Make it an eclectic group. I like talking about my screenplays with my mom because her point of view is going to be very different, and she’s not afraid to tell me, “Well, I don’t like that.” I trust her, but it’s also that I know where she’s coming from, so I can figure out whether I agree or not. You need to argue about your stuff, because you need to be confident about your creative decisions.
I always have a focus group of people who don’t know me well, and when I show them something, I don’t really care what they think. It’s more about their reactions when they are watching. Did they laugh here? Were they looking at their phone here? What they think about the movie doesn’t interest me as much, but how they react to something is as honest as it can be.
Filmmaker: The interstitials where Isaiah is talking to his phone at night, under the covers, are visually unique. You can barely see his face. And they’re well paced throughout.
Da: The idea came from that video I liked back in the day, “Leave Britney Alone.” That guy had a lot of videos, and some of them were dark and shitty like that. The idea was to have these little self-confessionals. They were tough to get right—we did a lot of takes. If you watch them, they look like single takes, but because it’s in the dark, I’m dropping the opacity and when it gets too dark, there’s a cut there before bringing the opacity back up. It looks like one take, but really it’s me mixing five or six takes that he gave me. There’s a part in Isaiah’s Phone where he’s in the bathroom and some guys come, talking about him. That’s five different moments shot on totally different days. The line “Who’s in the big stall?” is an outtake from Teenage Emotions. Isaiah recorded his response “I’m in here” line a couple of days ago. There’s so many cuts in that scene, but it doesn’t look like there are any.
I prefer editing to shooting. When I’m shooting, all I’m thinking about is how I can edit the footage. When shooting I often have my eyes closed, because I like to just hear what’s being said. Then I’ll interject with lines for them, because all I’m thinking is, how am I going to create a story out of what’s being said? I’m constantly editing words and sentences with other sentences. Sometimes I’ll edit just the sound, and once I have the sound I find the images that go with it.
When you’re filming on your phone, sometimes you tap the close-up zoom, and I use that in the film to disguise cuts. I would also tell Isaiah, “If you’re doing a long take, shake the phone every now and then, because I can cut on those shakes,” and I’ll add some fumbling sound over that cut. The under-the-cover scenes are the same. If you look back on it now, you’ll see it. It’ll be pretty glaring to you. But when you don’t really know, it works.
Filmmaker: Both in the trailer and at the beginning of the film, you overtly tease the violence in the film with on screen text, which helps contextualize the things that happen to Isaiah throughout the story.
Da: Showing a cut to people a year and a half ago without that text, they had trouble entering the movie, understanding why they were watching this. The style is jarring. You have to give some kibble to your viewer to keep them there. I went back and watched The Blair Witch Project and the film’s poster has the same wording: “In October of 1994 … a year later their footage was found.” If I watched Blair Witch without that text, would it work? Would it be as exciting? Now, the question is whether it is cheap? I don’t know the answer to that. But that was always the idea when I would pitch the movie: “Some kid did something fucked up, and they found his phone, and you’re seeing what’s on the phone.”
Filmmaker: What I like the most about these two movies, and really any good teen film, is that they straddle this line of being a snapshot of a certain generation, but then teenagers are teenagers in any generation. The core anxieties you deal with as a teenager are always the same.
Da: When my dad, born in 1946, watched Teenage Emotions, he was said it reminded him of when he was a teen. Part of the charm of Isaiah’s Phone is that it brings you back, because it’s so up close and personal. It recalls the irreverence of when you’re a kid, but without the montage and hyper-stylized form. It feels like you are there, because you are just there. Max and Isaiah were just going into rooms where kids were having their lunch and some kids were in on it, but not necessarily all the kids of them. So, you have this docu-fiction vibe, where it feels authentic.