BRAINTRUSTdv: How did you and Michael Skolnik come together to make On the Outs?

Lori Silverbush: We got together to make a film because we are so fascinated by the lives of inner-city girls, and we kept noticing that violence was up with inner-city girls, and incarceration rates were up with inner-city girls, and we wanted to ask why. Both of us individually were involved on a volunteer level with these populations, and we felt no one was going there, no one was talking about these girls.


BTdv: Do you have a background in social work?

LS: No, I volunteer. I work with a shelter in East Harlem, and I'm on the board of an arts organization that brings arts programming to girls in East Harlem and the East Village in New York. Michael and Paola [Mendoza] are co-creators of the arts organization for kids in South Central L.A., so this is an area that we're both very invested in on a personal level.


BTdv: Had you and Michael worked together before conceiving On the Outs?

LS: Michael and I have known each other for ten years. I cast him as an actor in my first short film, and we stayed really good friends. We stayed really close and worked together on two scripts that we co-wrote. We'd work on separate things, and then we'd come together and work on stuff together. He's really phenomenal collaborator, and we knew we wanted to tell the story of girls.


BTdv: So who pitched the idea to whom?

LS: He was in Arkansas working on something for HBO about gangbangers, and he was coming back and talking to me about the girls—because they're not on camera, but their stories were so interesting to him. And that kind of dovetailed with the work I was doing with inner-city girls, so at one point we just sat down together and said, "Hey, let's make this happen. Let's do this as a film."


BTdv: Why did you choose to focus exclusively on inner-city girls?

LS: If it was a mini-series, maybe I could just have inner-city issues across the board, but you have a hundred minutes to tell a story. It's smart to boil it down to something that has a more directed focus—like in this case it was these girls—so that's why we chose to do that exclusively in this film. I think we wouldn't have been able to go as deep if we decided to tell the story of the boys and the girls.

As a storyteller in general, I don't think either Michael or I exclusively want to stick with this subject matter.


BTdv: How did New Jersey figure in as the setting of your story?

LS: We wanted to get into a prison that would allow us in [to research and shoot], so we called throughout the tri-state area, and the nearest place that responded positively was right across the river in New Jersey. So that's where we went. You know, we could have told this story anywhere. We could have told it in Arkansas or Kansas City or the Bronx, but we chose Jersey City because many of the girls we met in that particular jail came from Jersey City. So our reference points were kind of spelled out for us by them. So then we went to look at Jersey City. It was a very cinematic location because of the backdrop of New York City behind it everywhere, and these kids don't get there, ever.


BTdv: I notice you have a writing credit on the movie, and Michael doesn't.

LS: I think I'm a bit more of a writer than Michael because I've written screenplays. Neither of us were writing students, but I've been writing all my life. Michael and I got together to write stuff in the past, but in this particular project what we did was we created an outline based on the stories of the girls we met in the jail. That outline ended up becoming a series of improvised scenes that we worked on with our ensemble cast, which we videotaped. Then I would take the tapes back to my office and distill it into shooting scenes. So that's why I am sort of labeled as the writer on this—because turning it into a screenplay ended up being my job.


BTdv: So a lot of the naturalistic dialogue, then, is taken straight from what was improvised.

LS: A lot of it was, but the dialogue was only one element in what really made the movie. The dialogue was important, and the kids really contributed a lot to that. The actors contributed a lot to that. In some cases they never even looked at a scene. We'd say, "Remember the situation. Go." And they didn't need to actually see it on the page.

I think what was the harder thing than the dialogue was getting these stories to intersect in an organic way. Structure for this film was enormously hard to figure out. How much time to spend with each girl; when to leave a girl and go into another girl's story; how to get the beats of their lives to intersect in a way that kept the audience engaged without pulling them away from one girl for too long. If you were with each girl too rapidly, you lost track of who they were. It was confusing. The structure of this piece was where the real writing emerged, and a lot of that was in the editing.


BTdv: Did you have any inspirations for drawing the three central characters together and borrowing ancillary characters from one storyline and planting them prominently in another?

LS: We were very inspired by Amores Perros. And that kind of got us thinking about three stories. Initially we sat down, and we were talking about one girl. We were going to make one girl's story. And then we were in the jail, and we met these girls, and we realized we could tell as many stories as there were girls. There were very wide and varied experiences going on here. We chose three, and actually I think it was an act of amazing generosity on the part of Paola Mendoza—who was our co-creator and plays Marisol—because our original plan was to make a film, and she was going to be the lead. And we were watching Amores Perros—we were very influenced, by the way, by all of the Latin cinema that's coming out of Brazil and Mexico right now—


BTdv: City of God?

LS: City of God, of course. Amores Perros. Y Tu Mamá También has been a really big influence. Michael and I were really interested in the work of a lot of the Latin filmmakers right now. They're doing something so interesting with their version of the inner city. It's very colorful; it's very present; it's very tactile. It's not this sort of de-saturated blue-gray Toyota commercial that you see everywhere to represent the inner city—that sort of American depiction of it as a very colorless world. But that wasn't our experience of these girls and their lives. Their lives were very colorful, very pulsing and bloody and warm and fleshy. And that's what you see in Mexican cinema, certainly, and Brazilian cinema. That's the way they handle the inner city, and that made a lot of sense to us, so we wanted to go for that. And we had long talks with our cinematographer about how to achieve that and not go with that sort of "inner-city look."


BTdv: Very specific influences.

LS: Oh, yeah.

So we talked about it, and we said, "You know, what this probably needs to be is three stories." And Paola, who stood to lose the most as our potential star, was absolutely open to the idea—completely. "That's what we need to do." It didn't even occur to her for a second to be a "star." She had no issues with it whatsoever, which I was really impressed with. She put the project before her own career.


BTdv: So how had she been involved prior to everything else developing?

LS: Paola and Michael went to school together at UCLA, and the two of them had created EQUOP, which is Equal Opportunity Productions. That was the organization that brings arts programming and theater to kids in their schools in South Central and Watts and other areas that don't have it. And so the two of them had worked together as youth educators. Paola's a very accomplished person; she has a master's degree in acting. However, she herself at fourteen was running with kids in a gang. She was in that world. So for her it was very personal. So when the three of us got together to decide to tell this story, she was always the third person in the creative circle. And the three of us met all the time. We went into the jail. She actually created the curriculum for the girls in the jail. She was instrumental from the very beginning, and she was part of every creative decision we made. And then at a certain point she had to pull back a little bit and focus on acting once we went into production. But even then she was instrumental through our process.


BTdv: I know some of the actors were professional, and some weren't. Did any cast members work for free?

LS: We paid everybody. We got SAG waivers. We did everything by the book. We paid people, we worked out separate deals for our lead actresses, and in once instance were able to pay her with some back-end participation as well because she has a big agent, and we wanted to make sure she was taken care of. We paid everybody. We budgeted it in, and we paid them.


BTdv: And how about locations?

LS: By and large, we didn't have to pay for locations, but on rare occasions if we felt it would be a hardship to someone, we'd pay a hundred bucks if we knew it would be helpful to them. [Otherwise] we just filed permits, paid for those, paid for cops when we had to pay for them, based on the law.


BTdv: Paid them to be there, you mean, not to be in the movie.

LS: We paid for them to be there, not to be in the movie. Sometimes we put them in the movie. My husband's family are in the next town, and they have a number of cops in the family. So I was able to get cops to come over and volunteer to be in our film, and they were happy to do it. But in terms of local cops, when you're shooting on a block that has a gang presence or a drug presence, they want cops, and you have to pay the cost of the cops, and we don't want the city to have to absorb the cost of the extra cops, so we had to pay for that.


BTdv: I'm curious how many cameras you had on hand and how many times you staged certain scenes—such as the Russian roulette scene. It strikes me that it would be difficult to edit it in a way that would preserve the energy.

LS: One camera. There was some talk for a while of going with two cameras, then at the end of the day, out of deference to our cinematographer, who's truly an artist—Mariana Sánchez de Antuñano—what she was doing was very specific and very thought-out and researched and carefully executed. So the idea of throwing another camera in the mix was sort of an insult to her—like, we could easily cross-cut between her footage and somebody else's was not really fair to her.


BTdv: One camera. So you must have staged the Russian roulette scene a number of times.

LS: We did about six or seven takes of the Russian roulette scene. It was a long scene because we needed them to get to a certain place organically. It was a hard scene, it was the very last scene we shot before we wrapped the whole production, and what we did—we only had one explosion of the keg that we could pay for. It was an effect. It involved pyrotechnics. Our special effects guy had wired a keg—he had opened the keg and added a high-pressure system, and at the moment he heard the gunshot he detonated it, it shot out, it was amber-colored club soda. It was really intense. We could only afford to do one. So there was a lot of anxiety because in my heart I always knew we needed this sort of cathartic release at the end of this very tense scene, and it was really, really important that we get it, but if we didn't get it, that was it, it wasn't going to be in the scene. Because we couldn't build a second keg. So stressful. The house we were shooting in had no heat. It was twenty degrees. We shot that scene a bunch of times—basically we focused on each of the characters in each iteration of the scene and hoped it would cut together smoothly. That scene is totally a testimony to our editor Martha Skolnik. She nailed it. It was a hard scene to cut. Everybody's talking over everybody else, no two takes are the same. It's hard. Then when it came time to do the explosion, we told everybody, "This is it, you're going to have to nail it." And they got it. It was a wrap.

BTdv: And then the scene with the male convict haranguing the girls in prison—you had a lot of coverage.

LS: One camera, numerous takes. The scene with the man berating them—that is Bones Malone, a very respected actor. He really delivered. Our cinematographer wanted to start by shooting up high because there's a catwalk in that jail. And Michael and I insisted that she get down right behind him because we'd never rehearsed the scene, so we didn't know what was going to come out of it. We knew he knew what to do, but we had never practiced with him, and we just had to trust that he would get it, and I didn't have any idea if he was going to get it a second time. [Mariana] was really mad. She didn't want to do it that way because she's all about preparation. She's such a professional. We were like, "This time we're overriding that, you've got to get it in." So she shot the bulk of that in one take, but it went on and on and on. He went in on every girl, and she had different angles corresponding to what they were doing and what he was doing to the girls. Then after Michael and I felt he had really nailed it up close, we put her up on the catwalk and let her get it a couple other times—his approach, a few different things he said—but the bulk of it is one take where the camera is right in there, in the circle with the girls.


BTdv: What camera did you use?

LS: Panasonic SDX-900. It's an awesome camera.


BTdv: The clarity of the dialogue recording was impressive. How did you deal with the usual annoyances of shooting outside in the city, such as wind and traffic noise?

LS: In some instances we would lav-up the girls or we had a couple wireless mics, but what we basically did was have a boom over everything.


BTdv: Wow. And some ADR?

LS: We had to ADR maybe four lines in the whole movie, basically because of what you said: ambient issues, sound on the streets.

One of my instructors has been, you know, "Always bring a sound person when you do location scouting," and every time I'm determined to do that, and every time I don't. And that was a big mistake. Because the block we shot on—Ocean Avenue, Jersey City—was a truck route, as it turns out, with massive sixteen-wheelers rumbling through.

BTdv: One thing that struck me as remarkably authentic was the blurring of cultural lines between black and Hispanic communities—everyone speaks a little hip-hop, everyone speaks a little Spanish. Almost invariably, movies and television shows cordon off these minority communities and depict them as totally separate, self-sustaining, and closed to outside influence. Your movie vehemently avoids this sort of stereotype.

LS: I would imagine that some neighborhoods are very cordoned off, and there are very strong distinctions. Within the Hispanic community we were shooting in, there's a lot of personal pride. Dominicans are proud of being Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans are proud of being Puerto Ricans. But in Jersey City, it just so happens that the demographics blend in certain neighborhoods. Some neighborhoods are a little more ethnically singular. Where we were shooting there was a lot of cross-cultural co-existence, and that's what we reflected.


BTdv: Is that something written in advance, something arrived at through casting, or did it just come from being in the neighborhood?

LS: We didn't write anything in advance in the sense that we didn't make decisions and then seek to support them afterwards. We let our research tell us where our story was going to go. We let our research tell us where choices like that had to be made. And we cast knowing—because of what Jersey City had taught us—we had flexibility. We could cast two Dominicans and a Colombian and be fine.

It's more of a cultural thing in the sense that these kids are of the hip-hop generation—that's what they listen to. They're not self-delineating, and they're not self-segregating.


BTdv: But at the same time they have cultural pride.

LS: Sure. Sure. To an extent they do. I don't think they're raised with strong nationalistic sentiment because in many cases these are parent-less kids. They aren't being raised as part of a strong, attentive community. If they were, they wouldn't have a lot of the problems we're seeing here. In the sense that every kid needs something to feel proud about, they feel proud about their school, they feel proud about "Jersey City in the house!"—about the things that they can own. Their ethnicity and their background is something they can own.


BTdv: By virtue of your methodology in constructing the movie, it can safely be called ethnographic. It happens to investigate a culture to which the filmmakers themselves do not belong, so its cornerstones and foundation and everything else are built from an outsider's perspective. In documentary theory, this approach has become somewhat passé due to its inherent condescension—in recent years there has been much discussion of the ethical and political problems with so-called "ethnographic spectacle." Since your movie sets out to represent the "truth" about these girls as a demographic, it bears some theoretical resemblance to documentary. Now I'm guessing from your surname that you are...

LS: I'm Jewish.


BTdv: As a sophisticated Jewish woman living in Manhattan, what was your ethical orientation to the material? I realize you did your best to limit your own presence in the shape of this story, but a point of view is an insidious and indelible thing.

LS: First of all, we weren't making a documentary. We were storytellers going in to tell a story. So I don't think we can talk about it in the same terms as you would talk about typical ethnographic filmmaking. And I do think a lot of that does come from a very privileged and superior place. I don't agree with the premise that it inherently comes from a condescending place. I don't think that to explore another culture with respect and curiosity implies superiority, and I think that the assumption that it does is actually the condescending position.

That said, we were minorities in the situation. We went in there with a lot to prove. We went in with the classic sort of outsider stance, but we knew that our skill would show itself in being able to erase that division. And the goal was to gain acceptance in the community for trying to do something honest and then—and this is something that Michael taught me because he was really good at this—get the hell out of the way. And that was something that we attempted to do.


BTdv: How do you think the movie would have differed if it had been made by the people it depicts, by the kinds of characters who are in it? It's a bit abstract.

LS: You know, it's hard to say. I think the movie would have been different because different people made it, period. Not different black people or Latino people—or white people for that matter. Anybody brings their own perspective and their own baggage to a situation. I think it's a simplistic reading to say, "Well, it would have been a different movie." Of course it would have been a different movie if different people made it. What's interesting to me is: we did a lot of test screenings when we were editing it, trying to come up with the cut that worked the best, and when African-American friends watched it, they had a very different response than white friends. Our African-American friends who are in film definitely had some issues. Not issues with the movie—they loved the movie—but issues with us as white filmmakers trying to tell it.


BTdv: Do you think some of those issues boil down to the theoretical problems of ethnographic spectacle—the inherent condescension of being an outsider?

LS: Possibly. Possibly. It could boil down to a lot of things in their own personal race dialogue growing up. Who the hell knows? But they definitely had some issues, and they brought it up, and one question that we heard from a couple African-American friends and people within the community was, "How come you're only showing the bad? How come the bad elements of this society or this social group is always highlighted?" And my answer to that is because conflict is essential to storytelling. If I'm going to make a movie that doesn't have tough issues, it doesn't interest me as a filmmaker, period. If I go into a white community—which I am certain I'm going to do at some point in my career—and tell the story of over-fed sorority girls or whatever the hell, I'm sure I'm going to focus on the conflicts and political issues inherent in that group. And, yeah, we opened ourselves up to that kind of criticism.

Our African-American friends who are not involved in film, who are coming at it more as just a viewer, just a regular Joe Viewer, they didn't have any issues with us going in and talking as white people. It seems like they didn't invest it with that much political significance. We simply were people who knew how to use the camera and to pull this off, so we went in and did it. And they laughed at scenes, found comedy in areas where we wouldn't have expected. We were always freaked out and amazed when we had black friends watch the film because they'd be laughing at the dinner scene or, like, really messed up by some other stuff. So I think that different demographics bring different cultural references to the table as viewers, and they're going to elicit from that cultural place in watching a film. And obviously that would pertain as well if they were filmmakers. They would bring different cultural references to the table.


BTdv: You said that some of your friends asked why only the "bad" is shown in the movie. Your point of view is that the central characters are all victimized. Have you had anyone close to these communities ask why they all appear to be victims?

LS: I want to rephrase what I said: I don't think they're all victimized. I think poor kids as a whole—poor minority—and for that matter it doesn't have to be Latino or black; it can be Turkish kids in Germany, or Palestinian kids outside of Paris, or Mexican kids on the border—I do believe that they are—poor kids in general tend to be the last to be dealt with. They are absolutely on the fringe in terms of any real dialogue—and by that I mean money spent by administrations that go in there and say, "This is a gigantic waste of human potential." That isn't being acknowledged, so they're victims of an indifferent society. But I don't think my three girls are victims in a classic sense.


BTdv: I understand that, and I think you've stated it clearly. I just wondered if there was anyone who—in the same way they said you were only showing the negative aspects of this community—if anyone has accused you of seeing only the victimhood of this community.

LS: I would say that the bulk of people who watched the film have had the response you've had, which is: they're really moved by it, they're really charged by it, and they feel glad that someone gives a shit enough to talk about these girls, period. These comments I'm bringing up to you have been a minority, and only really with people who are close enough to go there, and it's always more of a dinner party conversation. No one's written about it or come at us and said, "This is messed up."

I think there's something very messed up about a society in which only black people are considered qualified to talk about black people. I think black people are qualified to talk about white people, and write about them, and show them, and film them. If anything, I think that outsider stance gives them an objectivity that is useful. I think it's a narrow thing to think that people should only write about themselves, and if that was the case everybody would have exactly one movie.

BTdv: What's your best festival experience so far?

LS: Well, Toronto was huge because they accepted us first, and they were the beginning of it all. Noah Cowan, who is the new co-director of the festival, reached out to us early and had so much pride and excitement about the movie. That made it really wonderful. But I would have to say for me, personally, it was going to Berlin. Berlin was just an apex of clinical appreciation that made me feel really great. It was awesome.


BTdv: Did you have a good crowd there?

LS: We had like six or eight hundred at a screening. And just very literate and intellectual people. It was amazing. The Q&A could last forty-five minutes or an hour. Great audiences, great everything. I can't say enough about it.


BTdv: Do you intend to blow the movie up to film for any reason?

LS: Some distributors require that. For example, we've sold our French rights to a company called Fabrique du Films, and they're going to blow it up to 35.

There's an increasing number of digital theaters out there, which could be very interesting and wonderful. We could capitalize on that.


BTdv: Are you happy with digital projection?

LS: Totally happy. If I had the opportunity to work on film, I would do that, too—with a lot of pleasure and excitement. I've worked on film and video in the past. We shot this film and lit this film—this movie—as if it was film because we knew we were going to want to up-convert to Hi-Def and possibly transfer to film, so it had to be lit for that potential transfer. It had to be shot in a way that wouldn't end up with artifacts and problems in the transfer. A lot of what people say about digital—you can go really fast and not worry about lighting—that's not true. You have to take your time and handle it artistically. So we did that. We also had to make choices—because we were shooting digitally—about color. Certain colors just don't work on video, and you want to stay away from them because they're going to scream "video" when you look at them. Shooting this film digitally was why it got made. We could not have made this film with film.

That said, I love that we can project Hi-Def, but a lot of festivals don't have the capability to do that, and that's kind of a bummer. But they're getting better and better. I think we're right in the middle of shifting sands in terms of technology. We're right on the cusp of a lot of change.


BTdv: No matter how far-fetched, tell us what you see as the ultimate long-term goal for digital video technology in terms of production, distribution, exhibition, and public reception.

LS: I think that one great thing that's happened is that it's opened up the field to amateurs, and I think that's always really good for professionals—when amateurs have a shot—because it makes you step up your game.

Ultimately, I think digital projection is going to be the norm. I think satellite broadcast is going to be the norm. I think it's going to be a big adjustment phase while theaters catch up and invest in the hardware. But then, ultimately, it will mean that you can make a film and transmit it over the Internet almost directly to the consumer. But I think we're a few years away from that. I think obviously videotape is going to become obsolete—it already kind of is. And I think studios are going to start to understand that they have to be at the forefront of this because they're going to get kicked in the ass. You know what I mean?