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Since 2020, Nicky Otis Smith has been very busy. Between writing and editing at Splice Today, publishing the local movie zine “The Servant” (available at Beyond Video and Normals) and taking part in DIY screening series, Smith has made three feature films, the most recent of which he has been releasing piecemeal over the course of 2024. Smith is now preparing to wrap up the long editing process on the whole of Satur-19 and premiere it at Station North’s Mercury Theater in a four-showing engagement from December 6-8th.
Satur-19 is Smith’s most ambitious film yet, both broad in its scope of cinematic language — often manifesting as saturated, blown-out, torn-apart images collaging over each other — and deeply personal in its content. Smith describes the film as a “culmination” of his work these past five years since his Saturn return happened to coincide with the start of the Covid pandemic, with Satur-19 bringing together his collaborators old and new to piece together a “solipsistic” anthology film journeying through the mind and memory of its director.
Late in November, I sat down with Smith to talk Satur-19 and his philosophy of no-budget filmmaking. What you see below is an abridgement of our near two-hour conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Alex Lei
How long have you known you wanted to make a film around your Saturn return?
Nicky Otis Smith
In the spring of 2020, in the very beginning of the pandemic, I was doing a lot of writing and preparing for whatever was going to happen. That’s when I wrote my first film Hasn’t Been Grounded. I made some short films that year. Just as an exercise in screenwriting, in May of that year I wrote a screenplay for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, which would be a dream movie to adapt. Like everyone, I was trying to keep busy. One of the things that popped into my head was this phrase “Satur-19.” I wrote it as a play, at first, which is even crazier considering the circumstances at the time. Having said that, it has stayed with me for the past four-and-a-half years.
We were just talking about how I still haven’t locked the print of the movie because I’m still having fun adjusting the colors, and there’s still a lot of technical work to be done and it’s just about sitting down and doing it. I’m still adding little interstitials and little montages of the water colors my mom made for the movie. It’s a lot of fun, and while it’ll be very satisfying to finish it, I also really love working on it.
The films Satur-19 most resembles are We Can’t Go Home Again by Nicholas Ray, Oddsac by Animal Collective, My Winnipeg, Fantasia, and…I’m probably forgetting some others. The other thing that I wanted to do is I recorded an entire original score with my longtime collaborator Jordan Romero. I really wanted to make a proper visual album. And also make a film where the overhead was very little. We shot it over the course of a year, from the summer of 2022 to the summer of 2023. I recorded the score throughout 2023 and added some stuff this year. I’ve just really enjoyed taking as much time as I can. A lot of these segments were shot over two years ago, so the people in them don’t probably even remember being in them [author’s note: I forgot that I was in a small segment of the film when I went into this interview].
I might be jumping ahead a bit, but when I started making the movie one aspect that I really embraced about it was trying to create a situation where I can make a movie that just comes into being. So it’s a strange film in the sense that no one really knows what it’s like except for me. I work in a pretty consolidated way, but this is the most extreme. But that’s why the title card just says “a film by Nicky Otis Smith.” A month ago, if I dropped dead, I don’t think anyone could’ve put it together. That doesn’t mean it’s any good, it’s just the way I decided to make it.
You know how it is, you follow your intuition.
AL
Going back to that living quality to the film and its form constantly changing, from when you were first shooting it to when you got in the editing room, did it become much more of a collage film? Because watching “The Couch” segment, it plays much straighter than the others.
NOS
Most of the segments [released ahead of the full-film’s debut] are essentially music videos. The movie is not a music video compilation, but there are at least three or four segments that you could easily call music videos, and I even put a little MTV chiron in the New York sequence. “The Couch,” you’re absolutely right, is more of a straightforward segment. The remaining segments are like that, including the one you’re in.
I’ve been editing since I started shooting. I had the title sequence done over a year ago. The thing that happened when I was editing was just tossing segments that didn’t work. It’s very easy for me to do that. It’s very upsetting to the people I work with sometimes, but you gotta be a good judge of your work. It’s all about getting the pace of the thing right. But the movie ended up in the way that I saw it. There are three or four basically music video segments, and then the other half are straighter. “The Couch” is probably the funniest one, the others are full of dread.
AL
It’s interesting how you talk about some of these sequences having a narrative momentum of dread, which often implies a forward motion, but where Satur-19 arrives is at is the past.
NOS
Satur-19 I see as basically a wrap-up and culmination. It’s not only my third feature film, it’s in a lot of ways the culmination of everything I’ve done to this point. So that’s why there are a lot of references to my early life.
There’s a song by Jim O’Rourke called “Life Goes Off.” Great song on the album Insignificance. The end of the song is this rising — I wouldn’t call it cacophony — but it’s this rising thing of do-doo-Dooo-DOOOOOO. I wanted to make a movie where you were kind of nose-diving, a kind of kamikaze movie. Although on the whole, it’s a very mournful movie. If anything the dread is all regarding the present. Nothing specific. But whenever the past is invoked it’s a very kind of dreamy and idealized way, from the New York segment to the very end of the movie.
To your previous question about the Saturn return, that’s why there’s all the stuff in the movie about myself and the factual circumstances of my birth and life. The movie ends with a clip of the presidential debate between George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot, which I believe is the one where George Bush looks at his watch. That’s not the clip I used. But that’s from the night before I was born. Again, I don’t know why I picked that. I grabbed that clip that’s in the movie, and it fit. I would have to work backwards to explain the final photo montage, but that’s probably my favorite part of the movie. You’re right, it does end up in the past there. And it goes all throughout my life.
Another reason why I kept the overhead so low is that it’s a very solipsistic movie. Like you said, coming to terms with my Saturn return and my place in the universe. I try to make it entertaining by making it hopefully a cool movie to look at and hopefully the music is good. Hopefully it’s not some monologue or something.
AL
10 years ago or 12 years ago, did you see yourself more as a musician than a filmmaker?
NOS
In 2012 I just really didn’t have the…appetite is not the right word. But that was a period in my life where I was pursuing music in a very serious way. And I was pursuing music in a rock band context, and in the context of rock bands you have a very limited window in terms of being able to do good work and achieve a certain level of awareness. I was very conscious of that. From 18-23, that’s what I was focusing on. I was living with musicians, very talented musicians. We were all interested in film, but none of us were…I’m still learning what all these roles are. I mean the film world is so much more conservative due to how much of a bigger operation it is.
I always knew that you can’t be in a rock band once you’re 30, unless you achieve a certain level [of success]. It’s a long answer to your question, but another thing happened where about 10 years ago I got money to make a feature film. A very small amount of money, vanishingly small, and had no idea how to spend it. It was so demoralizing that I didn’t think about filmmaking for a while. I didn’t stop going to the movies, but that’s why there’s not really any films from that period. The only thing that I made when I lived at the Copy Cat is a documentary, A 100 Couches, which I’m really proud of and really captured the vibe of that time. I really do feel like I squandered a lot of time, or at least a couple years there. We had a lot of space and there were very talented people that were ready to be activated. If it were today, it would be different.
Having said that, it all worked out. The band broke up and I finally had the appetite and the interest to consume and — I hate the word consume, I hate it so much — to watch and catch up on all the film history that I hadn’t seen. This is around when I was 23, so 2016. Especially in 2017, I started watching at least one movie a day that was new to me. Within a year that grew to two. When the pandemic hit, it was four a day. When I don’t do it now, it’s like I didn’t take a shower, I don’t feel good.
I’ve been a lifelong moviegoer. It’s always been the ultimate art. It is the pinnacle of all expression. But like so many others, my very first experience getting money to make a movie was so demoralizing, I checked out. When I came back, I had more energy and enthusiasm than ever.
The last thing I’ll add is that about a year into the process of really deep study, I saw a clip of Richard Linklater talking about Every Man For Himself by [Jean-Luc] Godard. He said something to the effect that by the time he had made Slacker, he was watching 600 movies a year. I went “that’s my goal post,” watching 600 movies a year. When I was doing this I couldn’t write anything. I wouldn’t call it writer’s block, I couldn’t come up with anything. Part of the reason why that film that I’m referring to from 10 years ago fell apart is that I had like 20 pages [of script]. I couldn’t write a short film to save my life. After just four months of doing a movie a day, one popped into my head and that was my film Ashville Soundcheck, I think it’s on YouTube or Vimeo. Like Every Man For Himself, I like to call that my second first film. There is certainly a separation between those two periods. In 2012 I couldn’t have made anything because I didn’t have the interest and didn’t have the knowledge. Any filmmaker needs to educate themselves on film history, just to spark their imagination. Everything I was coming up with before I did that was very boring and autobiographical, which you see a lot of today. You see a lot of mediocre work that is very navel-gazing. I realize I’m saying this in an interview about Satur-19, but again, I tried to make a movie that was so self-involved to be…you know, actually, another movie I would compare it to is Megalopolis. It’s not as ambitious as Megalopolis. I don’t think it’s as strange as Megalopolis, either. But that’s certainly a film I don’t think anybody could’ve reassembled if [Coppola] croaked in the middle of it.
AL
You described Satur-19 as a very solipsistic film, but from conversations that we’ve had, I know that the experience of going to see a movie in a theater with people is really essential to you. If this is solipsistic, this is the way that you can get people into your mind and have them understand you.
NOS
I’m not really concerned with people understanding me. If I were to write out what I think Satur-19 means, it would be terrible, it would be awful. So much of the great stuff in the movie, I think — it’s great to me — is a total chance operation. I’m interested in communicating with people, I’m not necessarily interested in being understood. I’m interested in, no pun intended, projecting something to the audience and giving them something. I don’t expect anything in return. That really is the way. Again, the pandemic also proved to me that a streaming film doesn’t exist. There’s no such thing as a streaming film. Someone said to me, “I don’t think of it that way, TV movies have existed forever.” Well, a TV movie is different than a direct-to-streaming release, because a TV movie airs at a certain time, it premieres on a network, a certain amount of people are gonna be watching it at a certain time, same as a TV series.
AL
There’s still that communal aspect to it.
NOS
There’s absolutely that communal aspect to it. Either you’re going into work the next day, you’re going to school the next day, or now you go on the internet and you talk about, I don’t know, the HBO show’s everyone is talking about. If Euphoria had been a direct-to-streaming thing I would never have watched it, ever.
I never went to film school. The only film class that I ever attended was the Young Filmmakers Workshop run by Steve Yaeger from 2004-2008, and actually I met a lot of friends and people I still work with there. I remember coming in the day after a Demetri Martin special had aired on [Comedy Central] at like 5pm, 6pm on a weekday. And everybody had seen it. That’s not in praise of Demetri Martin or against him, but I find it very lonely when I can’t talk to anyone about a band or artist I really like. Lately I’ve been really obsessed with this guitarist Alan Holdsworth, and I have one friend I can talk to about it, my friend Dan Garrett who is a virtuoso guitarist.
These streaming things that get dumped on there don’t exist. In the “Year of No Movies,” which was 2020, Beyond Video opened back up in June 2020 and I went there and rented a bunch of new stuff all the time, a movie like Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets — a really phenomenal movie — also Eugene Kotlyarenko’s Spree is fantastic, and Sophia Coppola’s On the Rocks, sort of screwball romantic comedy, which I love. Nobody really knows about these movies. Maybe Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, because it’s a smaller film, it has more people actively advocating for it, which is great. But Spree and certainly On the Rocks, it’s like they don’t exist, and that’s very disturbing to me. If it were different, I wouldn’t mind streaming as an end. It is what Francis Ford Coppola said, streaming is direct-to-video. That’s what they are. That’s the place they occupy in pop culture. In the popular imagination they occupy the same place as American Psycho 2.
To that end, I’m trying to make a moviegoing experience of seeing Satur-19 as special as I can make it when you’re doing a four-wall engagement at a theater. For example, I thought about playing brief acoustic sets before the film. The film is 80-minutes long, and I thought about doing a 10-minute acoustic set with three songs from the soundtrack. But there’s a reason why I really hate Q&A’s and introductions, it destroys the spell. It sounds totally corny and everything, but there is a spell that hits you when the lights go down.
When they showed Vanishing Point at The Charles, they had some guy who wrote a book about it — and no disrespected to the dude who wrote the book on Vanishing Point — but I didn’t come to see a fucking introduction. I came to see Vanishing Point.
AL
It’s more like being in a museum than a movie theater.
NOS
I don’t need the cinematic equivalent of wall text. A lot of very formative experiences are from coming out of the movies. The movie just happens. A really pivotal experience I had was seeing Bicentennial Man when I was seven. For anyone that’s seen that movie — it’s kind of like A.I. Artificial Intelligence, just a touch lighter. I can’t help but make the really corny analogy of going to church, or any type of thing where you’re given a life lesson. Not necessarily a moral lesson. Bicentennial Man is all about the passage of time and the inevitability of aging, and the cruel and indifferent — really, more indifferent — march of time. Another moviegoing spirit that has lately reared itself more and more is when I saw Broken Flowers in 2005 when I was 12. This is before I ever had a girlfriend or anything — I have never identified more with a character than Bill Murray in that movie. I only recently rewatched it last year, and then a couple weeks ago.
To the same token of leading up a lot of these elements of making Satur-19 by intuition, by chance, by whatever is something that is inherent in moviegoing, is this ineffable sense of a higher — I wouldn’t say power — of a higher consciousness. I think there is a higher consciousness in a movie theater which is completely eliminated at home.
I wanted to make Satur-19 almost like a middle ground between the film world and the music world. That’s a kind of a mindset. The film world is just far more conservative because of the nature of the medium. The notion of someone writing, directing, editing, scoring, producing…what else do I do on the movie? Shooting — Ralston Finney is the director of photography, but I operated the camera. I don’t understand why there aren’t more filmmakers that don’t consolidate as much of the creative aspect of it, because to me the only way to make a film that is satisfying or really any good at all is to be as much the contemporary version of the total filmmaker as possible. Now again, I didn’t go to film school, so I’m coming at this basically from a moviegoer’s perspective. Satur-19 is a movie I would want to see. I wanted to make a movie that would hopefully illuminate aspects of the film world and the music world to people that only exclusively belong to one of those two worlds, if they even still exist. A lot of it is very mournful and about the past, as you said. I’m not even sure if anything I’m talking about is still relevant. I know the film world is still very conservative.
This will be the last thing I say: Sean Baker made Tangerine on iPhones. When I was 12 and in my teens, that was the beginning of digital cinema and digital projection. There was this completely bullshit notion — it ended up being bullshit, which is very sad — ”it’s gonna totally democratize filmmaking.” Even if that weren’t true on a distribution level, I’m just amazed that more young filmmakers really prize production value and the proper way to do things over the end result. Now, if you’re working with a lot of money, I understand that position. But again, you don’t need a lot of money to make a certain kind of film.
[the editor thanks Nicky Otis Smith for providing the stills for this piece.]
