Oscar Week: Interview with Short Film Nominee Steph Green

This Sunday night, the Academy Awards will devote as much time to animated and live action short films as it does Best Director or Best Supporting Actress. Crazy? Not to people who understand how difficult making short films is on almost every level. You're bound by tiny budgets, there are no A-list actors at your disposal, and you have no marketing machine behind you. Steph Green received an Oscar nomination for her short film, New Boy, one of five live action shorts in the running this weekend. Because it's not a perspective you get very often, we jumped at the chance to talk to Green about her film and about the life of a filmmaker dedicated to the smaller but no less impressive motion pictures. Big Picture: What would you say is the biggest misconception about short films? Steph Green: Maybe that they take a short time to make because they're short. People always sound so shocked at how long it actually takes. Sometimes that's because there are so few resources, and you're begging and pleading to get things. In fact, you may shoot for a very, very short amount of time, but New Boy took months and months [from beginning to end]. Isn't there also a common belief that shorts are somehow inferior to feature length movies? Is that just because people have generally been exposed only to the bad, amateurish ones the neighborhood kids make? I'm not really sure why that is a misconception. I guess it depends on what people have experienced as short films. If they've seen YouTube as a short film resource, then maybe that's informing the misconception, but people who go to festivals that show high caliber short films tend to be a lot more open to them. But yeah, they can be less satisfying; I would agree. I've made some less satisfying shorts and I've seen less satisfying shorts, and a lot of times that's because it's younger filmmakers still evolving, working on their skills, and maybe they didn't have the level of help and guidance that's offered at the higher budget level. So how long is the process to make short film, or how long did it take you to get New Boy to this point? In June 2006 we got the rights, and turned in the script in August or September. It plods along. We made the film in 2007, and did festivals in 2007 and 2008. It's a long process, but we've been lucky it's a long process, because festivals have been willing to show the film. So in a way, the longer it goes on, the better it is. We call it "The film that keeps on giving." We never expected it to have this kind of life. It's been shown on every continent except Antarctica. On the same night it was shown in Tehran, it was showing in the south side of Chicago to 600 kids, so it's been amazing to feel that sort of widespread response. It's definitely changed me as a filmmaker.
Watch New Boy in its entirety Technically, you accomplished something that I didn't even catch the first time I watched it. There's the counterplay between the school in Ireland and Joseph's old school in Africa, and it didn't dawn on me until later that you probably couldn't afford to shoot three minutes of a ten minute film in Africa. Was that also done in Ireland? It was all shot in Ireland. There was no way we were going to be able to travel to Africa. And it was also the middle of winter in freezing, gray Ireland. So we had to be creative. We found an old Army barracks and turned it into an African schoolhouse and blasted light through the windows. Those poor boys - they were such troupers - who were so freezing cold, and yet, they'd take off their big coats, and as soon as we'd yell "Cut," they'd put their coats back on and we were in Ireland again. Making shorts doesn't exactly put a filmmaker on easy street. So how do you eke out a living while you're making these movies? In my case, I direct television commercials in order to finance the next however many months of poverty. I definitely drain my piggy bank while making the shorts, and then come back and try to earn something. People find very creative ways to make their films. There's a commitment to the work that has to go beyond the dream and into the reality of being a teacher or a waiter in the meantime. Some of the best advice I got was that you are a director if you're making films, even if you're doing something else at the same time. It's hard. Definitely. I know nothing about the system in place for getting nominations in this category. Everybody's familiar with how it works for features, foreign films have to play in their country of origin by a certain date and then submitted to the Academy. What are the rules for a short? The way it works is that your goal going into the festival circuit, which you do first, is to win one of the Academy accredited festivals. The Academy has a list of festival that they've accredited where if you win that festival, you get to go into the pool for the Oscar nomination. There's two ways to be eligible: One is to win an accredited festival and the other is to have a paid public screening in Los Angeles. Do you know how many films were in that pool this year?> I believe this year there were about a hundred films that were eligible. We sent the film into the Academy in October and we heard [about the nomination] on the 22nd of January. And now, you're going to be in the same room with Jack Nicholson and Spielberg and everybody. Has it sunk in just how crazy that seems, given the scope of your film? It is crazy. It's already crazy just to be in this position, not to be cliché. I think just to be there will be incredible. We're hoping that Olutunji Ebun-Cole, the little boy from the film, will also be there with us. For him, I'm hoping it's a little dream come true. It'll be fun to share that with a kid, because he'll probably keep us grounded, too. He'll probably be like, "I'm hungry," in the middle of the ceremony. He'll be a good person to have with us.