It sounds like it’s refreshingly laid back.
Martha Stephens: It is. It’s a good way to take a step back and be like “wow.” This isn’t like a life or death situation if I don’t lock this location. I think as a country in general, we are workaholics and we are high strung, and it must be nice to fail and be encouraged to fail because the Icelandic people don’t put such pressure on themselves and each other to succeed like we do.
I saw that many of the people involved in the making of this movie were, like you, graduates of the North Carolina School of the Arts. What is it about that school that is so great?
Martha Stephens: I think because it’s a school that’s in like a mid-size city. It’s not NYU and it’s not UCLA. There are less distractions and you really form bonds with your classmates.
Aaron Katz:Yeah. So many of the people who worked on this movie and both of our past movies went to the (North Carolina) School of the Arts, and I think it’s just that you get to know people really well and you get to form connections with people that will last forever. It’s the city.
Martha Stephens: Their approach to having students make films is a lot different. It’s not about how much money you can raise on your own or how much can your parents give you to make your short. It’s all very evenly divided. The school gives you a small sum of money to make your films, and everybody gets the same amount.
Aaron Katz: And everyone has to work on each other’s films. In school I did craft services for a film Martha made.
Martha Stephens: You have to learn every job, that’s what the first two years are about. So you really develop and figure out what you like to do and what you are good at doing.
Aaron Katz: And you also see everyone else working in different capacities, so I think by the end of school people really want to stick together and even across classes. Martha and I were separated by two years and David Gordon Green, who is one of our executive producers on this movie, didn’t even go to the school when either of us went there (he graduated before). I think just the bond of having that shared experience is really important.
There are a lot of great spontaneous scenes with Earl Lynn and Paul in this movie. What surprised you the most about working with them?
Aaron Katz:Well everything Earl Lynn does is a surprise (laughs). We shot the Kentucky thing separately. We shot that in May of last year and then had three months before we shot the rest of the movie. We hopefully tried to get most of the surprises out of the way then and were kind of just trying to check what the chemistry would be and set up their characters. At times we turned them loose and there are certainly some surprising moments.
Martha Stephens: Actors have bonded, but I’ve never seen people bond as much as these two do here. Their relationship almost became like eerily real to me. I really believed that these two guys had a history and they in fact did not.
Aaron Katz: It does feel so real. Watching them onscreen, it’s hard to believe they have known each other for one year now.
Martha Stephens:And the way they interact now, it’s like they’ve known each other for decades.
I love that you used the song In A Big Country by the band Big Country in the film. What made you choose that song?
Martha Stephens: Well we knew we wanted one pop song for that ending montage. We were just listening to different songs, and when we played that one it instantly hit a nerve. It’s a sad but fun song, if that makes any sense. It has really sort of poignant sad thoughts in the lyrics, but there’s this like sort of upbeat dance quality to it.
Aaron Katz: And it feels like a song about anything can happen. It feels like it captures the spirit of the movie. Initially we were only planning to use it once, but then the idea of using it twice…
Martha Stephens: We were so obsessed with it. It seems like such an 80’s thing to do.
Aaron Katz: It’s another example of how we really just tried to cut loose and have fun, and that’s a good example from the editing process where we were like, ”This is crazy! Why would we do this?” And then we’re like, “Let’s just do it.”
Martha Stephens:We would often just be like, “Alright, balls out!”
Aaron Katz: We’d also sometimes just try something thinking we’re really not going to do this. We’d just put it in, and then we were like a few days later, “Well it’s still in. I guess it’s staying in.”
That concludes our interview, but we’d like to thank Martha and Aaron very much for their time. Be sure to catch Land Ho! when it hits theatres this Friday!