With Chronovisor, their formally bold first feature, filmmaking duo Kevin Walker and Jack Auen have taken their fascination with the juxtaposition of high art and genre and made what they’ve dubbed an “academia noir.” Throughout the film, based on an obscure real-life conspiracy theory, we follow Beatrice Courte, often from her own perspective, as she tirelessly scours rare archival material, researching… investigating… becoming consumed by the fantastical claims of Father Pellegrino Ernetti.
Beatrice’s intentional opacity invites the viewer to project their own experiences onto her. At one point, she’s literally shrouded. As her obsessive research begins interfering with her work and personal life, I couldn’t help but project my own struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder and addiction onto the screen. It isn’t all so dire, though. The film also lovingly captures the thrill of researching a topic you’re passionate about, that feeling of falling down a rabbit hole and wanting to absorb as much information as possible. The dimly lit libraries, the page-turning, the satisfying sounds of her pen—it’s all very intoxicating. It’s easy to imagine the film being used in one of those “unintentional ASMR” compilations on YouTube.
Several critics have made favorable, and valid, comparisons between Chronovisor and great works of experimental and avant-garde cinema. Interestingly, though, Walker and Auen have been open about their unexpected Hollywood influences: Chris Columbus’ atmospheric work on the first two Harry Potter films, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and National Treasure: Book of Secrets are among them. Indeed, even with a small budget and so much of the film devoted to reading, Chronovisor successfully captures the magic of a blockbuster adventure. A key piece of the puzzle is the expert use of music throughout (a mix of diegetic and non-diegetic music, some recorded by Ernetti himself), most prominently Gustav Holst’s The Planets, which perfectly accents Beatrice’s breakthroughs as the mystery unravels.
Leading up to the film’s September 4th theatrical release, I had the great pleasure of speaking with Kevin Walker and Jack Auen, during which I filled them in on Bob Dylan’s latest side-project, among other topics of discussion.
junkiesRpeople: Your film has been extraordinarily well-received, and it’s been lovely to witness. You’ve both said you knew going in that this would be somewhat niche, and I’m wondering, especially with it being your first feature, what does it take to confidently commit to making a film you know might be polarizing or inaccessible to a general audience? Does that just speak to how excited you were by the material?
Kevin Walker: It mostly stemmed from the fact that, I guess we knew since nobody knew who we were, that nobody cared what we did and nothing was at stake financially, for us at least, and it was so cheap that we knew it wasn't going to be too much to at least pay back our investors. So we were kind of like, let's just go for something crazy, something that excites us, something that feels maybe fresh and like we haven't seen too much of, at least recently. And we always think about the audience when we're making something, of course, because that's who it's for. But we are also like, our audience is probably just going to be film programmers at festivals who also might just reject the film entirely. So we were kind of mostly unconcerned with questions of nicheness and alienation and its appeal or unappealing nature. I think that's where our heads were at. Jack, correct me if I'm wrong…
Jack Auen: No, that's definitely right. There are a few advantages you have when you have never made a feature before and you have no money, and so one of those is a uniquely long leash, and we just figured we might as well lean into the one advantage we have.
JRP: I would imagine working on a small budget almost forces you to take more formal risks, but do you think the final product would have more or less turned out the same regardless of the budget? I know you've kind of joked about the $50 million version of the film, but say with a few million, do you think the film would be much different?
JA: That's a really great question. Honestly, we've talked about this exact thing, which is one of the things that excited us about this idea and this treatment of the subject matter was that we didn't feel like we were making any creative compromises in terms of the finished product for budgetary reasons. We've said before, if this had ten times the budget, it would probably look exactly the same in terms of the audience experience. The only difference would be we would have paid our crew a fair rate rather than the friend discount they were giving us, and we would have bought more rolls of film so we could do more takes, and we would have paid our own rent, which we didn't do. So, other than that, it would have been more or less the same experience.
JRP: Despite so much of the film being text, it never feels like an information dump, which is an impressive feat. Tell me about the process of editing down the massive amount of archival material and figuring out what to include and what not to include. Is that when working as a duo really starts to help, just having that other set of eyes?
KW: Well, I don't know if we've ever mentioned this to anyone, but the first cut of the film was almost two hours and 40 minutes, which was obviously not a sustainable length, and for a long time we couldn't figure out how to cut it down because we were like, all these breadcrumbs are so important, and the web of the mystery is so intricately laid out that if we remove one thing, the whole thing will crumble. But we eventually realized there are these essential elements, these essential things about the story of the Chronovisor that need to be communicated, and that they can sort of speak for themselves, and two and a half hours’ worth of information and a true info dump of everything about the Chronovisor story, so much of which we left out would be unnecessary to address the thematic ambitions that we had with the project. So, it's just interesting that you bring that up because boiling the film down to those fundamental qualities of what we consider to be profoundly important about the possibility of this device existing was probably the most important part of the editing process, really.
JA: Yeah, I will just also add, I'm glad that it did not feel like an info dump for you [laughter]. I don't think that's a universal experience. But we did want to avoid that feeling, and I'm glad at least for you that that worked.
JRP: Yeah, I found it exhilarating! So along those lines, you’ve said you couldn’t have submitted the film to Rotterdam a day earlier than you did. How did you know when you were definitively done editing and not get caught up endlessly tweaking it?
JA: In this case, it was purely just the beauty of having a deadline where ‘pencils down’ was called for us. The editing experience was honestly pretty hellish because we were shooting at the same time, more or less as we were editing, and we were shooting things multiple times because we were doing some camera tests for some of the reading sequences digitally, and then reshooting them on film for the final product. So it was a whole web of never-ending tweaks, exactly as you were describing. Once we had cracked that issue of it being an hour longer than we knew it needed to be, it was sort of like, okay, we cannot make the festivals wait any longer, and so we just sort of had to force it out of our hands.
JRP: You’ve spoken about wanting to challenge yourselves by making the “inherently un-cinematic, cinematic.” What do you enjoy about the problem-solving aspect of filmmaking? Does staying on your toes keep you from sorta going on autopilot creatively?
KW: I think sort of the fact of the matter is that Jack and I have to be excited about it, and we just simply cannot go forward with the project and don't even have the motivation to unless it has like either intellectually or artistically stimulated our brains in some way, and for some reason the thing we keep latching onto is when something sounds like a really bad idea. That is when our interest gets piqued, and Chronovisor, as we conceived it, definitely sounded like a bad idea. I'm sure many people continue to think that it was a bad idea, but for us it's fun. And again, we're like, no one is watching us. So if we want to make something really stupid that is a huge mistake and everyone hates it, then we'll do it in secrecy, and we can try again the next time. But yeah, that's kind of how we felt about it.
JRP: Do you feel more pressure for your next project now that people are watching?
KW: Good question.
JA: Yeah, I mean, I still don't really feel like the people are watching us. Every time I see press or something about the movie, it feels a little bit like it's happening to another person. So I don't think that's quite hit us yet, and hopefully never will. But we will definitely do our best to just disappear, go off in our little corner where we can pretend like no one's watching again, and try to make a movie that way because I think that's the only way we know how to do it.
JRP: Anne-Laure Sellier has a wonderful screen presence. She’s a real one-in-a-million find. When she was coming to you with questions about Beatrice’s personality and inner workings, were those things you kinda had to consider on the spot, or was that already figured out? Did you want to explore it with whoever you cast?
KW: Yeah, that was a really interesting process because we had never, I think, had to have that intimate of a relationship with an actor before. We've only ever worked with non-actors, and the roles were relatively straightforward, and not so demanding because they were short format. This time we had a single character, and there are really no other characters in the movie. And she's on screen in every single scene, and outside of the archival material, she's in every single shot. So we really had to mine the depths of our directorial abilities to try and communicate what we needed to to Anne-Laure, and we got so lucky because even when we weren't articulating ourselves well, she was intuiting what we meant and what we wanted. And Beatrice is a hard character to talk about because we wanted… there's a lot going on in her head, most of which Jack and I didn't have any interest in communicating to the audience, and so it was this fine line where we had all these ideas about what was going on inside Beatrice, but then all these hesitancies about whether or not it should show up on screen, because she, to some extent, is opaque, and we don't have much access to her psychological experience, which is purposeful. So yeah, that was unique navigating that. Anything else coming to mind, Jack?
JA: I definitely wouldn't describe our on-set relationship with Anne-Laure as coming up with stuff on the spot because Kevin and I had a really solid understanding of what we wanted from the character long before we began filming. But it was a real expansion of our muscles in terms of how do we communicate it in a way that honors her craft as an actor and her desire to understand and embody a real person? When, as directors, you're thinking about a lot more than just the character and its place in the shot composition, we were doing a lot of characterization by absence or by negation, which is not really helpful advice for an actor. So yeah, that was the part that was difficult to figure out, or required new skills of us that we had never had to use before.
JRP: Kevin, I have a quote here from you: “What is the best character, or characters, to use to explore the Chronovisor and the larger questions we want to provoke?” I don’t know if either of you are familiar with Bob Dylan’s Patreon series “Letters Never Sent”, where he uses AI to create fictional correspondence between historical figures who never interacted, like Benjamin Franklin and Marlene Dietrich. But it struck me as interestingly adjacent to Chronovisor, both thematically and in terms of this idea of using imagined encounters to explore historical figures. And then there’s the connection to the school assignment that Cosmic Salon is named after. I’m curious if you have any thoughts on that.
JA: Yeah, that's where my head went too. It's like exactly what the assignment was. I actually was not familiar with the “Letters Never Sent” series…
KW: Wait, he uses AI?
JRP: Yeah, it's been very polarizing and bizarre [laughter]. But yeah, he uses AI…
KW: Wow, that’s fascinating. I did not know that was what he was up to.
JA: That's definitely very up our alley, I want to see what those are like.
KW: Yeah, that's definitely something we think about a lot. You know, as it pertains to the Chronovisor, is this idea of a meeting of the minds from the past, and also that's kind of, to an extent, what reading is. You're kind of in a dialogue with someone from the past. The act of reading itself is a little bit like stepping into a cosmic salon, or at least that's how we think of it.
JRP: Last thing: I know you’ve been hesitant to speak about how you achieved the film’s final sequence, and I want to respect that, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask: is there anything more you’d like to reveal about it now? Any nuggets?
KW: No, we totally understand why you want to ask. We love that people care enough about the sequence to even ask about it.
JRP: That was the first thing you made for the film, right?
KW: Yeah, a little short film. It was like 10 minutes. That was everything that is in that sequence except the parts that Anne-Laure is in, because we hadn't even encountered Anne-Laure at that point. And so, yeah, the technique for it was figured out very early on. Part of the reason we don't want to reveal how we did it is I think it would be quite disappointing to find out the answers. But I think one thing to stress is absolutely no AI involved or anything like that. It is all to some extent analog in the way that we captured it. It is culled from a huge variety of sources, both archival and things filmed ourselves. I don't know, Jack, is there any, even tiny, Easter egg we can give? I don't think so…
JA: No, I think that's really it. As Kevin said, it is analog. Everything at the end that you see on screen was shot on 16 millimeter. So, that's the final step of the process, and then maybe an Easter egg is, sonically, all of that stuff was also recorded or made by us as well or people in our lives. So none of that is like stock effects or sounds. That's all like distorted things that we recorded. Maybe I'll just leave it at that.
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junkiesRpeople is a film and music writer who currently resides in Providence, RI. He first rose to prominence as the key grip on John M. Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven (1945).