J Paul Johnson
In the new short film The Serena Variations, the protagonist, Serena (Dylan Brown), a young female violinist with undiagnosed autism, works on a new opus with a charismatic-but-domineering composer-director, one that leads her to a psychedelic journey of self-discovery. At just 29 minutes, it’s an ambitious opus in and of itself, mixing classical references, science-fiction tropes, experimental music, and intoxicating visuals as Serena spirals out of control in her quest for creative enlightenment.
The Serena Variations is conceived and directed by Warren Fischer, a New York-based musician making his first film and in doing so, using his own personal experiences but in the process engaging his collaborators in full partnership to tell a story of obsession with artistic perfection. It’s aimed at celebrating neurodiversity and human experiences by engaging viewers fully in the complexities of the creative process.
Warren Fischer began his career as a violinist and composer, founding the music-based art project Fischerspooner, and has presented over 100 shows in venues ranging from TV shows like Jimmy Kimmel and Top of the Pops to galleries and museums. As a producer, Fischer worked on HBOMAX’s documentary series Nuclear Family, which explores the life of Ry Russo-Young’s lesbian family. Fischer also produced Russo-Young’s films The Sun is Also a Star, Nobody Walks, and Before I Fall. Fischer studied film at UW-Madison and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently resides in New York. He recently spoke with Film Obsessive publisher J Paul Johnson about his work on “The Serena Variations.” The transcript below has been edited for space and clarity.
Film Obsessive: Thank you very much for joining us. Can I have you talk a little bit about what your film, The Serena Variations, is and does?
Warren Fischer: As you may or may not know, I’ve been a musician, well, my whole life, really. Since I was eight years old, I played violin and my mother was an opera singer, and some of those ideas made their way into this movie. But beyond that, I played in different musical ensembles, including an art project called Fischerspooner. And so I studied film in art school, but this is my first foray into making a narrative piece that reflects my view of what’s fascinating about storytelling.
[The Serena Variations] is the story of a young violinist that’s put through a pressure cooker. She has undiagnosed autism, which gives her a sort of unique relationship to the world. And I wanted to take a character like that and see how they would navigate having a psychic break from reality. So, it’s a proof-of-concept short that is connected to a feature-scripted version that I’m hoping to get to produce. And I think it synthesizes all of the sort of things that I’m fascinated in—from philosophy to music to psychedelics and fantasy—and tries to really get at the essence of the human experience to some degree. At least I hope it does!
Wow. That’s fascinating, and maybe we can come back at the end of the interview to the notion of it as potentially a feature film. So you’re at a point now where you conceived of this film a while ago. Now you see it in a 29 minute version that’s readied for festivals. It’s a complex work, there’s no doubt about that. Is it as you imagined it in your head, as you were preparing for it and writing for it? Is it what you were conceiving?
Oh, I would say somewhere between no and absolutely not!
But you know, I find the creative process to be a journey of exploration, and even as an example, this sort of undiagnosed autistic element was sort of intuitively discovered while I was in the casting process by working with the lead actress Dylan Brown and seeing how she related to this character and then learning even more recently that she herself is neurodiverse, and how that stitches into this character’s experience was a discovery. And I think that making things is a discovery process.
I recently heard somebody talk about play and how when children play, there’s no mistakes. And I think in order to create things, you have to get yourself to a place of not worrying and not thinking about other people and sort of journeying into the unknown. And so, yes, how I imagined it originally, like the structure was very different. I imagined the characters slightly differently, but they grew and became so much more three-dimensional over time.
And, you know, I didn’t expect it to have such an experimental construction visually. So at the beginning, I didn’t think I was going to write the music. And John Walter, the editor and creative partner of mine, really pushed me to try to put as much of me into this work as I could. And I was daunted—I’d written all kinds of other types of music—but a film score I had never done. So to do that and have that my personal instincts baked in so deeply on so many levels is what yielded what fruit we have now. The point is, it was I didn’t know that I was going to be doing all this when I started this.
Wow, that is really fascinating to hear. And you know, as I’m watching your film, it reminds me of an orchestral performance in itself, that there are lots of moving parts and personalities coming together to create this this work of art. Maybe we’ll just cycle back to your protagonist, Serena, and her portrayer, Dylan Brown. Now, I had assumed that, you know, you had written her as a neurodiverse character in the script and then sought out a neurodiverse actor to give an accurate rendering of that, but that’s not the case?
That’s correct. That wasn’t the case. I wasn’t thinking of it that way from its inception, but it but I was working instinctually. So my vision for the character was that she would be this very tangent-prone book-report, academic sort of whiz-kid in a way. And since then, I’ve read books like Neurotribes and learned more about this: those personality traits are so adjacent to that type of character. Dylan was able to sort of lean into that and bring that to another level. So it’s like, you know, learning more about your hero as you go rather than it’s a totally different hero than you imagined at the beginning. You know what I mean? It got more dimensional.
Yeah, yeah. And is she musical as well?
She is. She’s a dancer. I know that, but she also I think she was a clarinetist. And I think she played in orchestras, but not violin at all.
And I should ask. So I know that you wrote the music, and you perform some of the music. Do you do the violin for the film as well?
I didn’t play the violin. No, Anastasia Mazarak, a Julliard violinist, was the body double for all the actual technical musical performances. And so she played whatever violin was recorded on set, she’s playing that.
Okay. But music is a huge part of your background in your life. And can you talk a little bit about your FischerSpooner project and your other work?
Like I said, I grew up in this classical musical household with my mother singing opera for Los Angeles and San Francisco opera companies. And not just because of that, but I also was interested in music, and I chose the violin. Then I started playing in rock bands when I turned 16, but I was still playing violin at the time, played violin professionally in a couple of ensembles in the Midwest. Then, then I played in another rock band in Chicago that was very technical in a genre called Math Rock, which is complicated time signatures and multiple time signatures simultaneously.
And then, in art school, I met Casey Spooner and I moved to New York. He moved to New York, and then we started this conceptual pop electronic, almost sarcastic performance concept that worked in a variety of different venues, everything. Our first gig was at Starbucks and Astor Place in Manhattan, which just closed last week. And we played at Museum of Modern Art, we played at the Pompe D’e in Paris, we were represented by two galleries in New York for many years. We’ve released two art books. That was a conceptual musical project.
So this [film] is like a culmination of all the things that I’ve been interested in because I was also doing film work in the background, more commercial work: to take all of my skills and apply them to one work is what “The Serena Variations” is an expression of.
That is fascinating. And I also need to have you talk about the visuals for the film. It has astonishing visual effects here. When I had asked a few minutes ago if the film came out as you intended, part of my intention there was to ask about the visual design of the film, the effects of the film, especially as you’re rendering the altered states, if you will, that Serena is experiencing. Can you talk a little bit about your conception for that? And how those actually got executed in the film? They’re really cool.
Oh, thank you. So, for the record, I’ve had scant few personal psychedelic experiences. So just number one, I don’t want to be painted as like an Ayahuasca guy or anything. But there were a couple of experiences that I had in college, you know, which enabled me to understand what these kinds of visual realms could be like. But it was really John Walter, the editor and one of the writers, Sam Khan, who really put more emphasis on it. And it’s an interesting time for psychedelics because it’s clinically being treated very seriously now: ketamine and a lot of things that people are using now as tools to benefit their psychology.
So getting to the visuals, I had some visions in my head of what the experiences might look like, but it really took some shaping from Sam and John as far as how the steps of the journey, how they really unfolded. And then, you know, I found Bert Veracruz from San Francisco was posting on Instagram, these multicolored sort of patterns that I felt like were really reminiscent of the visuals that I had experienced. And so I reached out to him and I got some elements from him and I worked with as visual effects artist, Daniel Spangler, who I’ve known for years and have done a lot of different kinds of other types of work with. And so he brought his creativity to it.
You know, it’s like sculpting. In the FischerSpooner project, our visuals are very extreme and very striking and very glossy. And so I wanted to bring that aesthetic, and I really liked I’ve always liked very glossy imagery. So I didn’t want anything do-it-yourself. I wanted something very polished. And so anyway, through all of these different people, I was able to get the result that I yielded, but I still think that the visuals I like 60% of where they could be. So knock on wood, the feature happens. I think there’s a way to really make it even more of a wild ride.
Indeed! Are there cinematic inspirations that you looked to, films that you thought a little bit about? It sounds like what you’re creating is something that’s, like, very personal and coming out of your own experience. But did you think like, I’m looking towards Ken Russell or Darren Aronofsky, or Powell and Pressburger here?
Sure. Those are great references. You know, Bergman’s Persona is another reference that’s big on my list, but not necessarily visually for this, although visually for itself, my God, it’s amazing. I would say 2001, the sort of the last chapter of that was a little bit of a reference. But I don’t like the way psychedelic sequences are typically rendered. I mean, I remember Fear and Loathing, the Johnny Depp version, had some nice moments of the acid trips, but I didn’t do, like, a survey of how all the great directors who have rendered acid trips. I just knew that I wanted to make something visually exciting for myself, so as much as I could afford.
Well, and that it is. And I’m hoping people get the opportunity to see it and experience it and what your protagonist goes through through the course of your narrative. Where and when is your film showing?
One that I’m excited about is in September, the Crested Butte Film Festival. I’ve heard great things about it, and I plan to attend that. It recently did the Malibu Film Festival that screened at the DGA Theater on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, that went really well. You know, you know, there have been several in Europe that I can’t attend. There’s one in Vienna coming up in Europe that I’m not sure I’ll be able to attend: you know, I would double the budget of the movie, all the plane tickets to go the places. But it’ll be out online at some point soon, and I’m applying to a couple of development programs too to find the financing to do the feature version. So there’s a new trailer with all the laurels coming up and, well, you know the drill.
I do. And it’s an exciting time. Warren, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. The Serena Variations is an exciting and thought-provoking film with some great music and some great visuals. And I’m sure audiences can look forward to seeing it in festivals, we hope on streaming in the future, and maybe someday, knock on wood a little bit further down the line, as a feature film, as well. So thank you again for taking the time to talk with us.
Thanks, Paul. Really appreciate it.
