Interview: Director Matew Porterfield on I Used to Be Darker

Matthew Porterfields microbudget indie I Used to Be Darker is getting great reviews. We talked to the director about his films unique style.

Matthew Porterfield lit up the indie film circuit with Putty Hill, a doc-narrative hybrid about a community on the outskirts of Baltimore. Hes back with I Used To Be Darker, a feature narrative that unfolds at its own deliberate pace.

Unhurried and unconcerned with the pacing and stipulations of the "traditional cinematic narrative" (whatever that may be), Matthew Porterfield garnered himself a respectable indie-film following when his last feature, the doc-narrative hybrid Putty Hill, debuted at the 2010 Berlin Film Festival. After receiving distribution (via Cinema Guild) and rave reviews for the picture, Porterfield is back with I Used To Be Darker, which is certainly as buzzed-about a film as a micro-budget indie can be. Purely a narrative feature, I Used To Be Darker explores the fraught minefields of interpersonal relationships as they fray - and, perhaps, strengthen. It follows Taryn (Deragh Campbell) a runaway Irish teen who comes to stay with her aunts family during a wayward summer. The only problem is that her aunt (Kim Taylor) and uncle (Ned Oldham) are in the process of separating, and her cousin Abby (Hannah Gross) is understandably stressed by the whole situation. With each of these four characters caught in the midst of transitional periods they have yet to convince themselves theyll ever escape, difficult emotional confrontations are bound to occur, and do - but make no mistake, I Used To Be Darker is no shouting-match kitchen-sink drama. Rather, by its subtle narrative mode of leaving much unsaid and more only hinted at, Porterfield constructs a tone poem that provides the audience with the space to fill in many of the films blanks themselves.

I had the chance to speak recently with Porterfield about the impressive picture.

Tribeca: What is your relationship toward backstory and exposition like? You leave many pieces of information out, and I wonder what the process is like of parcelling all that out.

Matthew Porterfield: I think about it quite a lot - I spend a lot of time thinking about the characters and their backstories. I usually work from the inside out, trying to fully develop a world. I tell as much as I can through images and sounds, and try to use dialogue less. In my first film I tried to avoid dialogue almost entirely - I dont like to feel like Im being told everything through the dialogue. Part of the fun of making this film was figuring out how much we needed to explain in order to keep people involved in the story, and how much we needed to withhold, because I think less can be more. Its good to let audiences think beyond the screen, which is my goal.

Tribeca: Whats the process of making those determinations like?

Matthew Porterfield: Theres a little bit of mystery involved, and Im okay with that, but definitely its a lot of conversations with my co-writer and I - we did about ten drafts of the screenplay. For example, in one draft, Taryn had been pregnant the summer before. We made the decision that it would be more powerful if she had just found out she was pregnant as the film starts. That way shes in a transitional period. I like characters in transitional periods - those are the characters I want to write about. I dont like characters who always know what to do - I like characters who are trying to decide how they feel. So we tried to give just enough for audiences to be guessing a little bit as to whats going on.

Tribeca: You mention an interest in characters in transitional periods - in this film so many characters are in a state of limbo. Can you tell me more about what makes that state of being so interesting to you?

Matthew Porterfield: I feel like its a very human experience that isnt often portrayed in film. I feel like most stories we see onscreen are about a character who is declaring their will - theyve made a decision in response to a particular conflict, and the film is about how their will plays out, how they articulate their will. I dont know many people like that. I mean, we all make decisions, but we make decisions based upon any number of things, and often its very hard to decide how you feel or how youre going to act. It seems like a natural state to put characters in, a place that feels very human, very real, very open to interpretation.

Tribeca: Theres a strong deterministic drive in most contemporary narratives, thats true. This is a film about affect and atmosphere. Theres a real sense of honesty, of the genuine, that came across for me in the film. Is that the tone youre after?

Matthew Porterfield: Thats what I want to achieve - something authentic. Im not going to fool myself and say that this is real, its just a representation, but I think it can have a kind of truth-value. Id like to achieve honesty in my work. I think a lot of it comes through the collective, the process of working with the cast, communicating to them so they have this shared idea of what the film is going to be. I think we achieved that - Im very happy with the performances. Its a world that were trying to create.

Tribeca: How do you imagine the ideal audience member watching this film? Because like you said, this style of storytelling isnt found too often in films today.

Matthew Porterfield: Sometimes I appreciate the passive experience as a moviegoer, but normally Im more excited when I have to be active, and I want audiences to have that kind of experience. As an audience, you have to go in and accept that this story isnt going to have a big arc, even though it deals with a number of big themes - it takes place over the course of just a few days. Theres no huge action, no big conflict or set pieces. And of course theres also no stars. What I really want is for people to be willing to approach the

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