Q&A WITH JULIAN CASTRONOVO
Julian Castronovo is an LA-based writer and filmmaker. His debut feature, Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued, premiered at this year’s edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam to critical acclaim. Castronovo has described the film as an “inverse autofiction.” It concerns a version of himself who stumbles upon a mystery surrounding an enigmatic art forger. Made on a modest $900 budget, Castronovo’s Debut represents one of the more ingenious new works directed by an independent American filmmaker this year.
Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued is screening in select theaters across the country.
Q. Your film is rooted in the tropes of detective fiction; it even invokes the genre with its reference to Raymond Chandler. What was it about the detective caper that interested you as a filmmaker?
A. Two things. The first has to do with the fact that I had been trained to think in a “structuralist” way. The fundamental idea there was that you could decode the world, or that there is meaning beneath things in the world. I felt it resembled the logic of a detective, or a detective story where things could operate as clues. It was that logic taken to its extreme.
The other reason was purely artistic. I knew that I wanted to experiment with images, and in order to get away with that I thought I’d need a linear narrative. Detective fiction, even as it spirals, is rigorously linear in that one clue leads to another. So that’s what drew me to the detective thing.
Q. You’ve also cited modernist literature as an influence on your practice. What authors and works were you thinking about when you were writing Debut?
A. Flaubert, in the sense that he was preoccupied with things, with smallness, and a certain logic in which the world is represented through the listing of small things. He saw the yellow table. He saw the chair. And on. And on. And on. To me, that’s a different logic from how images typically create meaning, which is more rooted in a dialectic, or in the general illusion of a continuous space.
I also felt that the logic of little things resembled the detective thing I wanted to explore, because it’s aligned with a sort of forensic gathering — a kind of piecing together of things to suggest a narrative.
And the other thing that I was thinking about with regards to Flaubert is how the character of Madame Bovary is a proto-performer, and that her performance implicates material things. She’s always falling in love, and her feelings of love always correspond to different outfits she wants to buy. She wants to become a different person because of those things. I felt that there was some resonance there, with trying to become a different person by surrounding yourself with things that do or do not have meaning.
Q. Debut has a unique visual language — it combines Photo Booth footage, scanned documents, video performance, digital ephemera, and more. How much of your visual language was the result of budgetary limitations, or was the intention always to rely on more casual recording devices like iPhones and laptops?
It was both. The intention was to have a pastiche quality because of my material limitations. But it was also a methodological thing because I had been kind of lost with live-action filmmaking. I was frustrated with it and also did not know how to do it. I wanted to live the life of an artist. I wanted to wake up and work on things, rather than write a script and then mobilize resources to bring something into existence within a couple of days. In a way, the film is a reflection of a way in which I wanted to live. A way in which I could devote myself to something in a semi-solitary and independent way.
Q. What comes to mind first when you’re working on a project — stories, characters, sounds, images, or something else?
A. I approach filmmaking as an intellectual exercise, or as a puzzle to solve. Which is to say, meaning comes first. There’s a thing that I want to express, an idea. I see cinema as offering a unique set of tools for expressing that, or as a means of trying to express something that utilizes what’s unique about those tools.
At the same time, and this is a contradiction, which I suppose is the point, the film that I made is a reflection of my own frustration with that way of working. I also wanted to make art that is simple, pure, and moving, rather than about my own gravitation toward density.
Q. What is the last film you saw and loved?
A. I saw Robert Altman’s 3 Women a week or two ago and I really loved it.
Q. What’s a project you’d like to make someday, however impossible it might seem now?
A. I’m trying to do a vague adaptation of a Melville novel called The Confidence-Man.
Q. What have you been listening to lately?
A. K-pop.
Q. What image would you like to end this interview with?
A. I’d like to end with a picture of Shohei Ohtani that I took at a Dodgers game. The reason is because I find nothing as extraordinary as the way in which he plays baseball.
