Slacking Off: An Interview with Aidan Sullivan

You may have seen Aidan Sullivan behind concessions at the Roxy Cinema in the last year or so. The New Jersey native is also an adept up and coming filmmaker. At the age of 24, he is developing his first feature film through Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein’s production company Central. I sat down and talked to my coworker about his short film Galaxies, airbrush T shirts, and smoking weed in your friend’s basement. 

— Carolyn Ramella

Galaxies is screening prior to Uncut Gems on Friday July 31st at 7pm and Saturday August 8th at 9:15pm.

Buy tickets for 7/31 screening HERE>>.

Buy tickets for 8/8 screening HERE>>.

CAROLYN RAMELLA: Can you talk about how you came to work with Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein? What about their work particularly spoke to you?

AIDAN SULLIVAN: I found out about Good Time when I was 15, I saw a T-shirt that Josh had designed. When I found out that it was attached to a movie, I knew I had to see it. It was before the over saturation of movie merch, it felt really ahead of its time. It spoke to me, the T shirt did.

 

CR: Do you remember the T shirt?

AS: Yeah, I have the T shirt, I bought it.

 

CR: What’s on the T shirt?

AS: It’s a Good Time airbrush, which I think is the coolest poster ever. I pirated Good Time because it was out of theaters at the time but not on Blu Ray – I actually got the Blu Ray for my 16th birthday, but I pirated then, watched it, and then just immediately watched it again in one sitting. I was just blown away by it. Something about it, you know? It’s a beautiful movie, frenetic pacing, it spoke to me in some way. So that was an influence on me when I was 15. Then I went and knocked on their door when I was 17 –

 

CR: You literally knocked on their door?

AS: Yeah, I literally did. Me and my friend who I was making movies with at the time, we had finished a movie, and we went there. I had found their address online and we went there and we got buzzed in randomly –

 

CR: There? Elara [the Safdie brother’s production company], right? Not their home, right?

AS: Yeah, the office. And so I went there, I got buzzed in, I knocked on the door and got turned away by the office manager at the time. But then I ended up getting an internship through a friend of mine. And then I was interning there and they were just this huge influence on me. They didn’t know that I was a huge fan of them when I was there. So I gradually made that known, and then Ronnie saw shorts that I had made in high school, and connected to them in a way. Connected to my influences. So I told them I make movies, and then I made Galaxies.

 

CR: So you think you guys had similar shared interests?

AS: Yeah, I feel like the references and tastes are related. Even before I got there I thought that. I don’t know what it is, it’s hard to explain. I remember seeing Uncut Gems and being really excited about it because I felt that they were the only people who were playing with pop culture and the zeitgeist in their movies in an interesting way. I was thinking “why is no one else doing this?” I felt that it was something important that was being ignored. So I connected with that. 

CR: I see a lot of similarities in your work and the Safdie’s oeuvre of the idea of striving for something that’s pretty silly and meaningless and for that striving to turn into a tragedy.

AS: Yeah.

 

CR: I think pop culture and low culture really relates to that.

AS: I think I learned about mixing high and low culture from watching them. It’s also like, growing up and being into rap music as much as I was into pretentious films. Playboi Carti mattered as much to me as Truffaut. That resonated with me when I was 17 and watched Uncut Gems, but it took years and years for me to understand how to do that in my own work.

 

CR: How much does Galaxies come from observing others and how much of that is coming from inside you? You’re pretty laid back but Galaxies is an intense experience. And I keep thinking a lot about New Jersey being this ultimate experience of low, outsider culture.

AS: I’m a naturally very observant person, I observe people a lot, that’s why I make movies and why I was drawn to filmmaking in the first place. Galaxies and my new film are based on people I either literally know or observed, or observed through the lens of the internet. It’s taking inspiration from other people but mixing it with your own personal experience. Both films come from very personal places. In Galaxies, there’s a lot of things that were filmed in the locations where they actually occurred. Like where they crash a car, I crashed a car there, I smoked weed as a 15 year old in the basement we shot in. I think that’s what makes it special. As you scale up and make bigger movies it’s not possible to do that.

 

CR: How much is Galaxies improvised and how much of it was sticking to a really strict script? Even things like the camera movements and the editing – were there certain things that seem really run and gun but were actually thought out?

AS: I’m a pretty meticulous director. Every shot in the movie was storyboarded. I made this movie in my backyard for sub $1,000. Shot it in14 days, people were sleeping in my mom’s house. So it was very run and gun and you can probably feel that when you’re watching the movie, but at the same time, it was also very planned. I’d say with the script, we stuck to it for 90% and 10% was improvising. It’s not even so much improvising as working with non actors and having them put it in their own words. There were certain jokes that were improvised, but it was scripted for sure. 

 

CR: Were the Nike galaxy shoes themselves part of the sub $1,000 budget?

AS: Yeah, but they were fake though.

 

CR: They were fake?

AS: I literally got in touch with someone in China, over reddit to buy fake ones. And then the day before we shot I was having a freak out over the fact that they were fake, thinking people were going to be able to tell that they were fake and it was going to ruin the whole fucking movie. And people were like, “dude, you’re bugging out.” But yeah, they were part of the budget, $200. They have a cultural cache.

 

CR: You said that you really related to the Good Time t shirt and the graphic aspect of the movie. Galaxies is pretty graphic as well – there’s a prominent air brush t shirt, the galaxy shoes themselves, the formal choices you make with the editing, even just the makeup, as the characters get progressively more fucked up, it’s really over the top.

AS: I have a sense of what I like graphically. As I’m making a feature, you have to have taste and say in all these different departments. The air brush t shirt, I was working with the costume designer Ginger Edmiston and saying that the character has to wear that shirt. The shirt and the shoes are both these gaudy commercialized versions of these heavy, cosmic things. So it felt like it matched the whole thematic idea. 

 

CR: They almost become characters themselves. 

AS: I love the shirt. We spent a bunch of money on the shirt. I got it on ebay, it’s a Kanye West shirt he put out in 2016 memorializing his mom. But it’s like him merchandizing the death of his Mom. 

 

CR: You were working with non actors, were any of them your friends?

AS: They were just random people from the skate park. The main character is my friend Lux Haney-Jardine who is an actor. He was the center of gravity and the other people were able to get into it and take it seriously because he was taking it seriously. And because he is sort of an unknown you can watch the movie and assume that that’s how he is, but he has no relation to that sort of scummy New Jersey white boy. But everyone else were non actors.

 

CR: What can you tell us about your first feature?

AS: I don’t know what I can say, but I’m making a feature. Diving further into my own thing.  I’m working hard on it, and I feel like it’s going to be really good and special, but it’s just a process.

 

CR: Looking forward to it. Do you have something else to say about Galaxies or filmmaking in general?

AS: One thing I think is cool is that Josh named the movie Galaxies, I had a different title.

 

CR: What was your original title?

AS: I’m not gonna say.

 

CR: I like Galaxies because if you tell someone that the film is named Galaxies people think it’s going to be this super far out existential sort of thing… Something spiritual almost.

AS: And it is.