Josephine Decker: 'Filmmaking Is Lonelier Than Ever' — and She Has a Plan

Josephine Decker will receive the Indie Star Award at this year's Tauron American Film Festival, joining previous recipients Jesse Eisenberg, John Waters and Christine Vachon. In an interview with Variety, the director of "Chasing Summer" laid out both a plan and a warning for American independent cinema.

The plan is a residency.

"I have this crescendoing dream of creating a residency for movies without scripts. That's how I made my short 'A Stable Marriage.' We basically had one paragraph, and then we spent a whole day improvising together. It was so much fun and so refreshing," Decker told Variety.

Decker has directed the award-winning dramas "Madeline's Madeline" and "Shirley," the latter starring Elisabeth Moss. Her latest film, "Chasing Summer," was made with the star comedian Iliza Shlesinger. Decker says Shlesinger sought her out for a specific reason.

"I think Iliza was interested in working with me because she wanted the film to feel artistic. I was thinking: 'What's an art comedy?' 'Punch-Drunk Love' was the only one I could think of, so I watched it a bunch of times. It was fun to push myself in that way. I don't always do that," she recalled.

Why community, not solitude?

Decker insists that collaboration is not a preference but a method.

"I don't write alone. I either write with a community or build stuff with actors. Of all my films, 'Madeline's Madeline' is probably closest to my heart because I never felt like the idea was totally mine. It emerged from many people and many minds, not just one," she said.

Festival director Urszula Śniegowska framed the retrospective in similar terms. "Her stories and protagonists, mostly female artists, illustrate Josephine's own struggles as a woman in a changing art world. This retrospective has been a long time coming, and the new film provided the perfect opportunity to celebrate her complete body of work," Śniegowska said.

Decker traces her approach to childhood. Her father, a poet and film buff, showed her esoteric Mongolian cinema when she was 11; one of the first films he presented was "Andrei Rublev." She also arrived late to nearly every movie of her youth.

"My concept of cinema was that you were sculpting a narrative out of something you don't totally understand," she said.

What has changed for indie filmmakers?

Plenty, according to Decker — and she names the mechanism.

"Since Trump came into office, it has become much harder," she said, arguing that corporate America has "bowed to him in different ways. It's just survival in a capitalist society." She added: "The things that are getting funded are very safe and appeal to his audience, or ensure they don't piss his audience off."

The market has narrowed further. When Decker took her film to Sundance this year, she found that only three buyers remained in the American market: HBO, Netflix and Amazon. She describes her 20 years in the industry as the hardest stretch she has known, citing streamers' control and waves of consolidation and mergers as causes. "It's crushing for young folks trying to get started," she said.

Yet low-budget success is still possible. Decker points to Curry Barker's horror film "Obsession," produced for $750,000, which became one of the biggest box-office successes of the year.

Decker's advice

"Filmmaking is lonelier than ever, probably just because the world is lonelier than ever," she noted. Her answer is to detach outcome from process.

"We put all this pressure on ourselves to get our movie made because we think it's going to 'save our souls'. Art won't save you. But the process [of making it] could," she stated.

"At a time like this, when it's hard to get things made, it's important to think about the parts of the process that we love, adore and crave. Making work is really fun. So, so fun! Instead of sitting alone in a room desperately sending your script to everyone in the world, you're with your friends, writing in community," she said.

"I've never really given this advice before, but find the process you love. Then, hopefully, you'll eventually get to apply it to cinema, but maybe apply it to your life first."

Whether a script-free residency can be funded in a three-buyer market is a question Decker does not answer. The Tauron honor suggests at least one institution is betting on her