Tina Kakadelis
Film Obsessive: The concept for Synthesize Me came to you when you were traveling through a small town outside of Mexico City. Can you talk about where the beginning of that story came from and how it solved a problem you were wrestling with on another project?
Bear Damen: It kind of gave me the answer to what the best arena was for Synthesize Me, which was a script I started writing four years ago. It sort of was lingering in my head and actually, at some point, abandoned, because I thought it was a little too complex and too specific. Generally, that’s a good thing, but it’s so specific to synthesizers and I love synthesizers. I grew up with them and sort of had this musical stint when I was younger. That was the reason I wanted to work it into my story.
I wrote it with this sort of metaphorical idea that there’s one person who lives off of electricity, and then there’s this other person who lives off the same mundane source but creates art with it. Something fundamentally different. I thought that was a good parallel for what I had with my dad, for instance. I love my dad. I have a great relationship with my dad. When I was younger, he was a shipbuilder and from this entirely different, rational world, and I was just this guy who wanted to make music and loved films. There’s a disconnect there and I always felt that we lived off the same energy of things, but I just wanted to do something completely different with it.
I originally wrote it for this town in California called Lancaster. I thought it was super cool, because that’s where they shot the ending of Se7en. You have all the electricity and the electric poles, but it turned out to be way too expensive. It was just way too much, way too difficult for the crew to get out there, etc.
Then I went to Mexico and I came into this town. I saw how unstable and twitchy and rough everything was in terms of their electrical systems. People are still, to this day, tapping from the system sort of semi-illegally. It’s all fine. Sometimes one of these panels just overloads and sparks and burns up. It’s very unmanaged, and that’s also the charm of it. When I saw that, I thought, yeah, this is the place where we should set this story.
You were the short’s writer, director, and editor, and you did some of the music for it. What’s that balance like in creating and making sure each part of it is getting the right amount of time? Is there one of those roles that you find yourself gravitating toward more than another?
I’m used to doing things myself because I used to do no-budget stuff. Like no-budget music videos for friends. I’m used to doing everything, which is kind of a blessing and a curse because, step by step, as you become a little bit more professional, or at least you enter a more professional world, it’s the director position that I want. That’s what I love to do. That’s what I want to do.
It’s also a curse because you have to use your brain and your mouth to communicate the vision that you have in your mind. You can’t say to an editor like, yeah, just smoke a cigarette and I’ll do it. That’s not how directing works. It’s kind of the worst thing to do. You just have to get people on board with your vision, have them really see it, and give it their best shot. Then beautiful things happen and they add their own vision.
To answer your question, I naturally gravitate to music a little bit more than directing because I have a history in music, and I used to make a lot of music, I still do. Then editing, just because I’ve always done it, but it’s terrible. It’s a terrible decision. I love editing with an editor, but it’s really, really rough. If it’s all your shit and if you make a mistake, it’s also your very difficult mission to dive back into it and figure out what’s wrong. Rewire it. I find that is extra hard when it’s all your responsibility. You’re the one who came up with it and now you better fix it, you know what I mean?
I love editing and I’ve been editing since I was a kid, just messing around on a computer. The cuts at the end of the short film…I don’t want to spoil it, but when you hit the climax, it’s a tonal change in editing with more jarring cuts. Could you talk a little bit about that change in editing and how it came to be?
This story is about grief. It’s really about a residual form of the relationship between the dad and the daughter. What I try to do, at least in this 15-minute timeframe, is to have people understand each other a little bit more. That’s a kind of coming-of-age part of this film, Violeta understanding her dad a little bit more. The audience also understands the characters a little bit more.
It’s teased in the beginning, via black and white, where you see some imagery of Violeta’s mom, who still lives in her thoughts. Maybe it’s a little overly poetic, but she’s kind of lingering in the wires still. She’s kind of responsible for Violeta wanting to make music and explore her artistic self. The dad is a little bit more stoic and has two things to deal with because he doesn’t really understand his daughter. I think the mom was more involved with what Violeta was doing and feeling. She was a little bit more connected to Violeta than he was. That’s what’s taken away from them.
I just wanted it to be very well-dosed, and that was something in the edit I was struggling with a little bit. How much do I sprinkle that around? How much do I want to involve the mother throughout? I found eventually that it’s best to really take away a lot of it until the end. I just put glimpses of the mother in the beginning to sort of see the whole spectrum and so the audience can get on board with what’s going on.
It works so well because it’s so jarring compared to the rest of the short. I had a question about the subtitles. For the most part, the subtitles are yellow-colored, and then one line is shown in purple. Why make that change for that line of dialogue?
Good question. I’m afraid there’s no creative answer for that, unfortunately. I think it’s a leftover thing that we did when there was a lot of dual dialogue. At some point, we fixed it by timing in a different way. Not a creative decision, but a very sharp eye (laughs).
I was very curious if it was singled out for a specific reason, but it adds a little bit more mystery to the film (laughs). Speaking of mystery, the title is so fascinating because it works on the level of the synthesizer. Then it’s also kind of like you’re synthesizing the mother into this memory and machine. Can you talk about where the title came from and what it specifically means to you?
Yeah, absolutely. So there’s two things to that. There’s a very famous…well, not famous, but underground cult song called “Synthesize Me” by the Space Lady. You can look it up on YouTube. It’s actually really, really sick. It’s this woman, Susan, from California, who used to be on the street all the time in the ’80s. She had a synthesizer, sort of an earlier rendition of the Korg, a micro Korg, where she would just have an arpeggiator in the synth and the tones would go up and down, up and down. Sounded like gaming music. She would then sing through a vocoder.
By no means did that song inspire the story. It was just something that I knew about. I think a lot of people know about it and it just lives parallel. There’s a line in there that’s beautiful that’s like, “synthesize me, humanize me.” I don’t know if there’s any legal stuff going on with that using that name, but it’s a perfect fit for the story, I feel, because I think Violeta has that plea in her. I think she wants to be synthesized and be with her mom in the wires.
That’s sort of lying behind the film. It’s also kind of self-explanatory because of the synths. In that sense, it was an interesting title and something that serves well for people who don’t know what this is. They’re like, oh, it’s about synthesizer. That’s an extra dimension to it, but I thought it was poetic. And maybe you’re right. Maybe it refers to the mother also.
Last question for you. SXSW, are you heading down there? Is this your first time? Are you excited? Talk me through it.
I’m super excited. I’m so excited. This is the first time in this capacity. I went in 2010. I was in a band and we were playing off-SXSW in a Fifth Street bar. We did get the full experience and just got wasted for an entire week. I don’t remember a lot from that trip. The festival has grown so much, especially on the film side, so I’m absolutely honored, super-stoked, and excited.
