Privacy & Intimacy Explored in Swanberg’s “Alexander” (Interview + Trailer)

“I worked more collaboratively this time than I have in the past,” Swanberg noted. The film was produced by Anish Savhani and filmmaker Noah Baumbach, who served as a key off-set creative consultant to Swanberg. Baumbach had seen “Hannah Takes the Stairs” and got involved with trying to help Swanberg get another project off the ground when “Alexander” emerged.

Working with Baumbach made him more confident as a director, Swanberg explained, especially in working with a professional group of actors. “[He was]  encouraging me to get things out of them that wouldn’t necessarily occur to me… Shooting multiple takes [and] being more decisive about the things that I wanted, and more confident, Swanberg explained. “Going in, I wasn’t as forceful and brave a director as I am now.”

In “Alexander The Last,” Swanberg is exploring the complications of emotional intimacy with creative collaborators. The sexually driven play being created at the heart of his new movie would seem to parallel some of the similarly explicit films he’s made in the past. But, the new film is not just about him, he maintained, it also reflects the experiences of his collaborators.

In a society that finds itself grappling with issues of personal privacy and intimacy reflected probably most clearly with the emergence of popular social websites like Facebook and MySpace, Swanberg said he felt the need to tackle such topics. “People’s everyday stories and status updates have become drama…” he explained. After the conversation, I went back to him and asked him to elaborate a bit on this point. He responded by email:

“Our lives are becoming more public, and we are turning ourselves into ‘characters’ in an interesting way.  Status updates have become sentences in a book we are all publishing about ourselves. The more intimate and personal we all get on a mass level, the more intimate and personal I feel my work should get if I want it to be an accurate depiction of the times we live in. I think my films are competing more directly with Facebook than with Hollywood.”

“When I made my first few films, YouTube and Facebook didn’t exist, or at least were not the cultural forces that that they are now.  Those early films attempted to provide an intimate look at young people that I wasn’t seeing in the media.  Because of YouTube and Facebook, we now have an overabundance of intimate representation of young people.  It’s fantastic, but it means my work needs to change if I want to provide something that doesn’t exist.”

Looking at his own life and relationships, Swanberg revealed that ultimately, his new film is, as he describes it, is “about something that I had to resolve for myself and wanted to discuss.”

“Nights and Weekends’ is what it looks like when I am resolving something while making it,” Swanberg added, “‘Alexander The Last’ is when I’ve reached my conclusions about certain things.”