by Stephen Garrett

One of the standout features at this year's Los Angeles Independent Film Festival is Rob Schmidt's dark, elegiac drama "Saturn," about Drew, a 24-year-old man burdened with taking care of an invalid father severely afflicted with advanced Alzheimer's. The film measures the emotional tension between responsibility and recklessness, as Drew resents having to nurse his own parent and seeks pressure valves like joyrides on borrowed motorcycles and all-night heroin benders with his friends, always coming home in time to bathe his dad and give him the medicine he needs to stay alive.

The taut, restrained direction of the actors and rendering of their tortuous circumstances reveal the depths of Schmidt's ability to tap into the truth of his subject matter in a way that's fresh without resorting to emotional shorthand or clichéd dialogue. What emerges by the end of the movie is evidence of an undeniable filmmaking talent who, in his feature debut as both writer and director, is already showing signs of maturity.

Now in pre-production on his second feature, "Crime and Punishment in High School," written by veteran screenwriter Larry Gross and produced by Gross and Christine Vachon for G2 (a division of MGM where Vachon has a production deal), Schmidt made time to talk to indieWIRE about his experiences as a filmmaker.

indieWIRE: Considering its bleak subject matter, how did you get "Saturn" made?

Rob Schmidt: I made a short film of "Saturn" about six years ago. Christine Vachon saw that at the Kobe International Film Festival in Japan. She was the first person who tried to set up the feature, but at that point dark films were not in fashion. [laughs]

iW: I can't imagine that as a short. How long was it?

Schmidt: It was about 25 minutes. It's really just about the father and the son; it doesn't have their whole world in it.

iW: So Mia Kirshner's character, Sarah, wasn't in it?

Schmidt: She's in it for about thirty seconds. "Saturn" is a pretty fast feature, about 90 minutes; but as a short, it was a very compressed thing. It was something that, at festivals, worked well as the last film in a group, because it was such an intense thing.

iW: Were you always planning it as a feature?

Schmidt: I didn't know how long that movie was going to be. I was improvising with actors and things, and there was a point when that short film was 50 minutes long, and people were saying that I should make it into a feature. I ended up making it into a short instead.

iW: How different is it from the feature?

Schmidt: It's pretty different from the feature. The relationship between the father and son is a concentrated version of what it is in the feature. It's still a movie about love in that kind of "guy" tough way, but besides that, it's very different.

iW: How did that tough-guy love become your focus?

Schmidt: I think there's this tacky way that father-son stories are told. I mean, it's kind of awful and I just felt that it's hard to make an honest story about people who love each other. It wasn't a designed thing that I wanted husky tough guys. But those are who those characters are --they're guys who work with their hands and drink too much and they're also people who love each other and, when someone's having a hard time they try to cover for the other person.

iW: Can you talk about the improvisation on the film that you mentioned earlier?

Schmidt: Actually, there was always a script. As we went along on the short, we did add some scenes and change some scenes; and part of that was foolishness on my part. I used my own money to make it, and I would work as a grip and make money until I had enough money to shoot a scene. Then I would shoot it and spend three months editing it on a flatbed. And then I would save up money and shoot another scene -- and that is not a good way to make a movie (laughs).

iW: Did new ideas gestate at that time?

Schmidt: I did some shorts and some music videos, but if you're a filmmaker and you're not making films, it's a little painful. Actually, "Crime and Punishment' and "Saturn" both got set up at the same time, by some freak of coincidence; and I really wanted to do "Saturn," so we did it first. And I really think film is a craft, and the more experience I get the stronger the films are going to be. So waiting six years to do "Saturn" made it a stronger film.

iW: What made you think the LAIFF was a good place to debut your film?

Schmidt: A buddy of mine, Larry O'Neil, had his movie "Throwing Down" at the LAIFF about three years ago and he was really psyched about it. And [producer's rep] Bob Hawk felt that, in light of when we were finishing the film that this would be the very best festival at which to introduce it.

iW: When did Bob get involved?

Schmidt: I met him at almost the same time that I met Christine. And they together were trying to set up "Saturn." Both of them were trying to get money for it.

iW: Why is it called "Saturn"?

Schmidt: I wanted it to be Brooklyn, but I wanted Brooklyn to be a wasteland, sort of like outer space. And also that's one of the oldest myths, of how Saturn consumes his children. And the way Matty Libatique shot it, he did a pretty damn good job of making that world.

iW: Was the story that relentlessly nocturnal in the short?

Schmidt: We couldn't shoot that much night in the short because the film stocks weren't fast enough (laughs). It's a movie that follows in that noir tradition, where a lot of times the best way to shoot is at night. We were shooting a lot of that 320 stock and we were pushing it a stop, so we could shoot on the city streets without lighting. And because of the way that we were flashing the film, it could make this weird spaceland look out of it. And that was one of the things that Matty did that was so great in "Pi." Matty's amazing at that stuff.

iW: And you grew up in that area?

Schmidt: Yeah, my family's from that area, but I was raised in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania. But they weren't really country people, and they ended up moving back. All my extended family is in Brooklyn.

iW: What is your dad like?

Schmidt: My dad died of a brain tumor. He was a small-time inventor: built wind generators and stuff like that. He was part of that Seventies alternative movement, so those locations [in the movie] and that loft space felt familiar to me.

iW: How old were you when your father died?

Schmidt: I was twenty-six, but it took him a long time to die. Four years, I guess.

iW: So this movie was inspired in part by your experience?

Schmidt: My experience was considerably less dramatic, but the emotions were similar, yeah. That's what I was saying about trying to make stories that are truthful. I think that the emotions are pretty honest in the movie, and I'm proud of the work that the actors did in it; and in this particular movie that was important. It's a funny thing, because in pop music there are these incredibly dark themes that are rendered in a beautiful and moving way, but rarely do movies get that dark. Even independent films are a conservative medium, and it's getting progressively more conservative. Dark themes seem to be so taboo.

iW: If you were asked by a major studio to make a film, would it be hard to turn down?

Schmidt: Studio films should be studio films, and independent films should be independent films and not junior studio films. It depends on the subject matter. There are studio films that are great. "The Matrix" is a really fucking cool movie. And "Out of Sight" -- studios are for making these kind of films. And "Crime and Punishment," which MGM is releasing, is in that gray area. And I will make a film that audiences will go to see. The deal with making films is that you try to serve your audience. But when you're making independent films and festival films, the point of that is supposed to be from the heart and a real experience. It just feels that a lot of them now are people are trying to train for a studio movie. And that's not the right thing to do with them.

iW: So do you see yourself working in both worlds?

Schmidt: I think if you want to make movies you care about, then you have to go back and forth.

[Stephen Garrett is a film editor and contributing writer to indieWIRE.]