Making a Pit Stop

Gabe (Bill Heck) and Shannon (Amy Seimetz) in Yen Tan's Pit Stop. Yen Tan: 'It's like being the matchmaker. I expect the audience to participate.' Photo: HutcH

With New York Fashion Week in full swing behind us on the plaza at Lincoln Center and before his screening at NewFest - the NYC LGBT Film Festival - Pit Stop director Yen Tan discussed his collaboration on the screenplay with Ain't Them Bodies Saints' director David Lowery, and the time audiences tend to give a film. Resisting François Truffaut, hold-ups, the importance of little bread crumbs and the smell of freshly cut wood, helped to complete the picture.

Pit Stop deftly braids the lives and loves of Gabe (Bill Heck) and Ernesto (Marcus DeAnda) in a small Texas town. Gabe's ex-wife Shannon (Amy Seimetz) and the two men confront, to various degrees, their past relationships while attempting to move forward with openness despite the wounds of old.

Anne-Katrin Titze: From the start, you confront the audience with conventions from other movies. Several characters enter the pit stop and the way you positioned the camera, made me concerned about them. Will they come out again? Is there a hold-up going on? Might they be shot?

Yen Tan: You mean, there's a tension?

AKT: Yes, great tension. Is this Texas prejudice or did you set the scene up to feel this way? You seem surprised.

Pit Stop director Yen Tan on the plaza of Lincoln Center during New York Fashion Week Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

YT: I can see what you're saying. It was not meant to create tension. It was to set up the location. To me, gas stations in America have sort of like a cultural iconic thing to them. Especially gas stations in small town America have a certain look. I think it was just a matter of setting that up. Setting up the landscape and the place more than creating tension.

AKT: Did you invent the name Texan Market?

YT: No, no that's a real location, a real signboard and everything.

AKT: Another prominent location you have is the lumber yard. Your characters work with wood and I could almost smell the wonderful scent of freshly cut wood. What were your thoughts when you gave them these professions?

YT: The focus was on working class, blue collar characters. They do labour-intensive work with their hands, like being a carpenter, contractor, or that kind of stuff.

AKT: This theme already connects the people who don't know each other. You want the audience to be the matchmaker?

YT: Yes. Ideally, exactly. You have an understanding of where they come from. We are introduced to these characters from their external lives, their occupation and the people in their lives. The next step is to go into their internal lives, so you know their romantic history. So you are their matchmaker in the sense that you kind of know that they're right for each other before they meet.

AKT: That is a very nice involving structural device. How did you work with David Lowery?

YT: Yes, you did an interview with David recently. David and I have been friends for more than ten years because we both started making films in Dallas, Texas. I started writing Pit Stop also almost ten years ago. We exchange scripts and give notes to each other. He was always giving me notes when I was rewriting Pit Stop and it got to a point when I felt I needed some help with certain aspects of the story. He came on board and we sat down and went through the script from page one and he did his input.

AKT: Can you mention a scene where you would say, there's the Lowery touch?

Marcus DeAnda as Ernesto. Yen Tan: 'I don't have any qualms in calling Pit Stop a gay film because of the subject matter and because gay cinema is still like an evolving genre.' Photo: Nathan Smith

YT: I would say, probably the most Lowery scene is when Amy Seimetz, who plays Shannon, the ex-wife, comes home from her date and she is sitting on the couch and has that conversation with her ex-husband. I tend to write almost in a general way and David knows how to add more specifics, more details to it. So I would write two general lines and he would add like three or four more lines in between those two to make it feel more nuanced. So to me that scene felt the most David.

AKT: I did note down a line from that scene. Shannon says she misses the way they were. That's very powerful because obviously it is being allowed the illusion that she misses. I believe it was François Truffaut who gave the advice that important characters should be named early on. Maybe having been a film critic himself, he knew how much easier it is to take notes. You don't do that at all! It takes forever, forever in your film before you tell us their names.

YT (laughing mischievously): It's like being the matchmaker. I expect the audience to participate. I want people engaged from the beginning, so I'm giving you little bread crumbs [like Hansel and Gretel?]. You have to pick it up and in the end know what it all means.

AKT: You throw us back to our own perceptions. You show what looks like the classic family at the dinner table, then you give new information and we reverse what we thought, only to come back to the initial idea. It works like a wave.

YT: That's a really good observation. Ideally, that's the intent. The design of the story is told in that particular way. At the same time, now that we have gone to so many festivals, I got a good sense that there's not a lot of patience in general with audience. There's the audience that says, this is so slow, this is too boring.

AKT: Do they tell you that after screenings?

YT: They don't tell me but I read about it afterwards on social media. Some reviews also - the film is just too slow for them.

AKT: There's so much going on.

YT: If you're willing to be open to that. Ten minutes is usually the limit for the average audience in terms of do I like this or not. If I don't, it's over. I'm totally out of this… the title Pit Stop is a metaphor. In relationships, people come in and out of your life in the way they go in and out of gas stations. They stop, they move on, they come back. Relationships have that same kind of movement.

Ernesto (Marcus DeAnda) and Gabe (Bill Heck). 'Many women responded to the love scene between the guys. They said how moved they were and how they thought it was so erotic, too.' Photo: HutcH

AKT: You use food in an interesting way to inform about the relationships. For example, you show one person eat what looks like a home cooked dinner, while the other is eating ice cream out of the bucket, sitting on the kitchen counter. You don't need much more to explain where they are at in their relationship. Food isn't used this way in a lot of American films. It feels very European.

YT: Right. That's another really good observation. I look at both objects and food as sources of memory, if that makes sense. Especially when you have a relationship with somebody, you know their habits, you know what they like to eat, and what they don't like. And then there are the identifications: So-and-so might have liked a particular flavour of ice cream so every time you see that flavor you would remember that person when you're eating it. That's an unconscious idea of the film itself.

AKT: There was a second time I thought about Truffaut and how you do not heed his warnings. In Day For Night (1973) he has that beautiful scene with the kitten, who does, or doesn't, drink milk from a bowl on a tray to explain the nightmare it can be to film with animals. You have a cat and a dog in your film. How was it directing them?

YT: The dog was very easy. The cat was very difficult. It's easier to communicate with dogs because they're very engaged with you.

AKT: He rolls on his back in bliss.

YT: That was complete improv. He seemed connected with the actors really well. Cats are just very different in general, very aloof and independent. The problem we had with this cat was in a key scene when he was at the door and wanted to get out of the room. To get him to do this paw thing we had to have a can of tuna at the other side of the door to tease him. But he was very hard to tease. We rolled the camera on him for almost half an hour to get maybe 20 seconds of usable footage.

AKT: David has kittens in Ain't Them Bodies Saints. They are not related to your cat?

YT: No, they're not.

AKT: The cat and dog also connect the two guys, your human characters.

YT: Yes, that they have animals at home.

AKT: Not just that, you give the back stories. Both of them rescued their animals. That says a lot more about a person, don't you think?

YT: Oh, that's right. You're very detail oriented. I like that. You notice things most people don't.

AKT: Thank you. Talk about the short cuts you are using when you show the characters online dating.

YT: When you introduce the internet or people dating online, I don't like to show computer screens. That's like the fastest way to date your film. Two years from now that display is out of date already.

AKT: You were at quite a lot of festivals. Were there reactions that surprised you?

Pit Stop US poster

YT: When we premiered the film at Sundance in January we were very surprised by how much women responded to the film in a very vivid and emotional way. Many women responded to the love scene between the guys. They said how moved they were and how they thought it was so erotic, too.

AKT: There are some really universally relatable moments. I am thinking for example when Gabe gets ready for his date and tries very hard to look as though he hadn't put any effort into it at all. That is something, I am sure many people can relate to very well.

YT: I don't have any qualms in calling Pit Stop a gay film because of the subject matter and because gay cinema is still like an evolving genre. It's getting more complex in its portrayals which is a good thing. My thing was always presenting characters as real-life as possible. I think we're all very complicated people, there's a lot of layers to ourselves. Some of them we show to people, some of them we don't.

AKT: I enjoyed working during your film. My mind was active, because I was putting the puzzle pieces together, and then with new information I had to un-puzzle it again.

YT: That's good. You are the ideal audience for this film.

Bill Heck and Marcus DeAnda were awarded the Grand Jury Award for Best Actor at 2013 Outfest Los Angeles. For more about the film, visit the official site.