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| Brother Verses Brother |
Director Ari Gold's Brother Verses Brother takes Francis Ford Coppola's idea of 'Live Cinema' and follows Ari and his younger twin brother Ethan through the music bars and streets of San Francisco. Predominantly shot in an improvised single take, Brother Verses Brother stars Gold's 99-year-old father, Herbert Gold, author of more than 30 books, Brian Bell from the rock band Weezer, San Francisco poet laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin, and Dutch singer-songwriter Lara Louise.
Ari is determined to help Ethan express himself through his music. When they meet musician Louise (Lara Louise), who offers to introduce Ethan to some folks at a few venues she knows, Ari finds himself smitten. As day turns to night and their father fails to show up to watch Ethan play, the brothers set off in a desperate search.
Gold made his feature debut with the air drummer comedy, Adventures Of Power (2008), which was followed by his sophomore feature, The Song Of Sway Lake (2018), a romantic drama about a plan to steal a valuable jazz record that's derailed when its two protagonists fall in love with two different women.
In conversation with Eye For Film, Gold discussed the one-take experiment, sharing stories that access our humanity, and how we are all playing versions of ourselves.
Paul Risker: We last spoke several years ago for the release of The Song Of Sway Lake. A fitting way to begin our conversation would be to catch up on the past several years.
Ari Gold: I have these big and expensive projects I've written that I'm trying to get off the ground. A Belarusian filmmaker friend, Nikita Lavretski, invited me to make a no-budget short film based on these crazy stories that happen in Belarus. So, I did, and he had a screening of it in Spain, which I went to. He screened all these shorts based on weird Belarusian stories and then also screened a movie of his that he did on an iPhone with his girlfriend. It was just one camera following them around one evening. After the film, I said to him, "I want to do one about me and my brother. I love this idea of a one-shot improvised vision of a fictionalised version of a real relationship."
With the concept of Brother Verses Brother being one that would include songs and be about the difficulty of separating from the people we love, it would be about the relationship with my brother, but also about our dad, who was 99 at the time. I thought, 'My dad's an incredible and charismatic 99-year-old with a history as a novelist and man about town in San Francisco. If I want to make a movie about a fictional version of our lives, I've got to do it right away.' So, I pretty much went into preproduction instantly and made this happen fast, which is liberating when you're trying to get something made, and you have these other projects where you're trying to convince stars and producers to get involved.
I was also inspired by Francis Ford Coppola, who had written a book a while ago called Live Cinema And Its Techniques. He argued that in the future, people would be able to get little video cameras and make films about their real lives in the streets. I thought, 'Okay, well, I'm going to do exactly that. The future is now.' So that's how Brother Verses Brother came about.
PR: Cinema often presents us with an alternative version of reality. So, the way we can talk, think and act in movies is very different to how we talk, think and act in reality. Watching Brother Verses Brother, the awkward and affectionate moments, the doubts, insecurities and wonder felt refreshingly natural.
AG: I was just reading something that Prince wrote. He was talking about horror movies, and he was asking somebody what their favourite scene was from such and such a movie. The person started talking, and he said, "See, this is the problem; this horrifying thing that you saw on screen is going to be with you forever. It's now inside you."
We have to think about what we consume; we have to think about what we watch. I'm not moralistic in any way, but I do believe, at least for myself, that the stories I want to tell and the stories I want to put on the screen should be good food; not bad food. And the good food is the human stuff.
If it feels natural to you watching it, that's wonderful because that means you're recognising the humanity. And the hope is that we all recognise our own humanity through the art that we watch or participate in.
PR: The absence of edits brings a specific energy to a film, which affects the audience. It's something I struggle to articulate in words because it partially functions as a feeling. At first, I wasn't aware of it because you expect there to be cuts. Then, once I became aware that it was a one-shot film, I quickly sunk into that strange space of being aware, but at times on a subconscious level.
AG: When I saw my Belarusian friend, Nikita Lavretski's movie, I noticed something about the one-shot nature of it. I noticed in the beginning I was kind of bored because my mind is used to cuts. I didn't reject the film at first, but I was bored. Then as it progressed, I found myself so moved by these two characters on screen and their interaction. In his movie, he and his girlfriend pretend they're on their first date — they did it as though they had just met. I found myself desperately wanting them to get together and for him to get her phone number so that he could see her again. This happens because your mind is not being split all the time, and so, it very slowly pulls you into the human side of the story.
Our movie is about the difficulty of separating from the people you care deeply about, either through death or from codependence. There are no cuts until my brother and I walk away from each other at the very end of the movie. The first cut is at 91 minutes, and then as the credits roll, out of nowhere come the cuts. So, this was playing with that theme of separation and being stuck.
There's also a movie called Victoria, directed by Sebastian Schipper, who is a friend of mine and Ethan — he has put us up many times when we were in Berlin. We talked about the challenge of doing a one-shot movie, and he didn't really give me any technical pointers, but he gave me a very good truth pointer. He said, "For some reason, in a one-shot movie, if the actors are bad, they will look like they're lying. They won't look like they're bad actors, they will just look like they're not telling the truth. So, whatever you do, make sure that everyone you know is a good actor, or they're acting well, because otherwise you're gonna think the characters are something they're not."
My dad was acting for the first time, and the rest of the cast included Brian Bell, who's a great actor, Tongo Eisen-Martin, a poet laureate of San Francisco, and Lara Louise, a wonderful Dutch singer I know in San Francisco, who had also never acted before. I talked to them before we shot about just being themselves. I said, "Here's the structure of the scene or scenes that you're in, but be yourself as much as you can and forget everything else." It was a big experiment.
PR: It's a captivating film that stays with you even after the credits have finished rolling. There's something about the emotional landscape of the story that latches onto you as an audience.
AG: We had our première yesterday at SXSW and Francis Ford Coppola boarded the movie as an executive producer, which is incredible for this tiny little movie to have someone like that, who was so inspirational, take it under his wing.
It was interesting to watch it with an audience because I had never had that opportunity before. It was a big audience — it was packed. I'd wondered if anyone was going to show up. There was a lot of laughing throughout the movie, which was great because I wanted there to be a lot of humour. Then there was a huge number of people crying at the end, and people came up to me and my brother afterward. They hugged us and said that whatever was going on in their lives had been brought to the surface in a beautiful way by the movie.
I've always felt that the more specific I can be with the characters, the more universal it becomes. So, this is a very specific story. These are identical twin brothers in San Francisco struggling to play music and fighting with each other. Well, not that many people are identical twins or not that many people are struggling musicians. There's so much that's not universal, but by being so honest, it becomes universal. It was wonderful to see the audience react that way because no-one else is me and my brother, but they felt it as though it was them and their families.
PR: In the past year, there have been discussions about how cinema is no longer the dominant art form, which feeds into what appears to be an existential crisis. Attending festivals, I witness the enthusiastic appetite for cinema, and if its dominance has peaked, it has lost none of its power to affect us and stir our humanity.
AG: I'm really hoping I get distribution for this movie. It makes no sense to get distribution for a movie with no stars that's shot in the streets of San Francisco, but I believe that cinema certainly has an effect and a power that nothing else has. A big part of that is not just watching it in a cinema, which is a big element, but the other element is that the story ends.
As cinematic as episodic TV can be with its great writing and beautiful photography, it doesn't have the ability to create in the traditional Greek tragedy way, where you bring the audience to something that's an emotional flower that explodes, and then it's over. Overness is one of the biggest powers of cinema. What happens to your mind and your dream life after the story ends is really where the juice is. But with TV you're still thinking, 'Oh, what's going to happen with the next episode or the next season?' That's not catharsis.
That's one of the potential tragedies if people stop caring about movies, because to tell a story in 90 minutes and have people have their whole life and family connections, their hopes and dreams ignited in some way is amazing.
PR: When the film ends is when we begin to consider more deeply the film's themes of angst, creative struggles and aspirations. Brother Verses Brother is also about family and the responsibility we feel towards one another, and the generational shifts in the ideas of brotherly love. Even the moment when you discover your father's book is not in the bookshop has a thematic resonance. Brother Verses Brother observes, and plants seeds in the audience's mind, allowing the themes to emerge from the story's emotional landscape.
AG: Having something that wasn't scripted helped me avoid any bad writing tendencies, like, I've got to work that theme into the dialogue. How would they say that in a way that has some wit and charm? All these things were in there in paragraph form. It said we were gonna pass the bookstore, and we can't find his book, so I will complain about it to the young lady I'm trying to chat up. It was written that these things would happen because I wrote a combination of a simple story with the themes inside it. Then the way we talked about it wasn't planned, and it happened how it happened.
Of course, there were things that we forgot to talk about or forgot to have happen. And then there were things that happened, like the hundred pigeons who flew up in the air when we walked into the alley. You couldn't have planned that nor written that — it would have been an impossible visual effect shot. Instead, we walked into a San Francisco Chinatown alley and there were 100 pigeons, which felt like a metaphor and thematic thing — Oh, this is about how they're trying to fly away from each other. But no, there were just birds in the street.
PR: One of the film's central ideas is that we're playing versions of our true selves, and we're nothing but players on life's stage.
AG: It's so funny you say that. In the original or one of the openings of the movie, I said, "This is a movie where we're playing versions of ourselves, as we all do." I thought that was maybe laying it on a little bit thick, but that's so cool that you said that, because that's how I feel. We're playing ourselves, but every time you walk down the street, you're playing yourself. Are you playing the cool version of yourself today? Are you playing the pissed-off person? Are you playing the professional? That's what we do.
Brother Verses Brother premiered at the 2025 SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas.
