Joe Swanberg Gets Back Behind the Camera for The Sun Never Sets

For anyone that remembers Joe Swanberg at his prolific heights, crafting as many as seven lo-fi pictures in a year, it’s crazy to think that The Sun Never Sets is his first feature-length movie as a director in nine years.

The Sun Never Sets, which receives its world premiere at South by Southwest, is the story of a young woman in Alaska called Wendy (Dakota Fanning) in a relationship with an older, divorced father of two, Jack (Swanberg’s longtime collaborator, Jake Johnson), who encourages her to sow some wild oats before settling down. Unfortunately for him, this is just when her charming, handsome, and previously absent ex, Chuck (Cory Michael Smith), suddenly flies back into town.

Swanberg has always been open that his films pull from his own experiences and those of the people around him. However, his concerns are no longer those of the sexually adventurous figures of his early films like Kissing on the Mouth and Hannah Takes the Stairs, but those of a middle-aged father. “In 2018 or 2019, I was divorced and dating a woman who was very into camping and outdoors kids of stuff, just a lot more adventurous than I was, and I was this divorced guy with two kids, and I did not want to have more kids. So, I was imagining a movie about someone who was happy in her relationship, but the guy was only meeting half of her needs, and there was another guy who was meeting the other half of her needs, maybe very outdoorsy and adventurous but not very stable, maybe a bit of a bad communicator and a wild card.”

The idea sat on the shelf for years until producer Ashleigh Snead (Shelby Oaks, Scare Package, The Artifice Girl) contacted Swanberg and told him that she had space in her calendar to shoot something in Alaska. He’d originally conceived of his half-formed story as taking place in the Pacific Northwest, “but I bet it could be an Alaska movie.” He pitched Snead, who was interested but there was still something missing – until he was having a conversation with Johnson about the film and his personal life. Swanberg said, “I was going through another breakup, and I was like, ‘Oh, I wonder if merging the kernel of that idea with some of the things that I’m dealing with this breakup would finally pull everything together,’ and the more I was talking to Jake about it, the more he goes, ‘I think this is a movie, Joe.’”

It’s not like Swanberg has been sat on his hands waiting for a feature idea to strike since directing Win It All in 2017: In the intervening years, he directed all 25 episodes of his TV show, Easy, as well as directed and self-distributed his 2020 short feature, Build the Wall, plus he continued acting in films like Invader and Offseason, co-wrote The Rental with Dave Franco, and served as a producer for films including Sword of Trust, Depraved, and The Becomers. But his success was starting to make him uncomfortable. “I’d gotten a little lazy making Easy because I had such a good team around me – great producers, great ADs, great editors, great actors – I just was having the best time of my life, but I had some concern that I was losing my chops. That I was coasting into middle age with this cushy gig, and I was a little nervous that perhaps I didn’t have the run-and-gun mentality – not only the mentality, but I didn’t have the skill set any more.”

Joe Swanberg on location in Alaska

His hiatus from directing was a deliberate attempt to re-hone those skills, and they became essential in setting him up to be able to prepare to film in the most northerly state. “I’ve got my stamina back and was fluent enough in production to ask those questions ahead of time.”

Fortunately, Snead lives in Anchorage and was able to help establish what was and wasn’t available on the ground, and what would need to be flown in from Swanberg’s home base in Chicago. She also helped fill in one of the big blanks of the early idea: who Chuck is. “Ashleigh’s husband is a pilot, and so the idea [emerged] that we would have access to airplanes and maybe we can utilize that in the movie. I was like, ‘It would be cool if he was a pilot.’ And then people started talking to me about bush pilots, this kind of very rugged, adventurous job, and I went, oh, that’s the missing ingredient here. Jake works this stable day job, and the ex-boyfriend is this gone-at-a-moment’s-notice, not very dependable but very hot and exciting bush pilot.”

The very existence of bush pilots is a reminder that Alaska isn’t the kind of place where you can just run out and grab anything you need, and the biggest concern for the production came from Swanberg’s decision to film on 35mm. He’s shot on celluloid twice before, making Happy Christmas in Chicago on 16mm while he made 2015’s Digging for Fire in Los Angeles and Malibu on 3-perf 35mm film. However, those were both very different experiences to filming in Anchorage. And even though they were only shooting with one camera, there was a second 35mm body on set in case of emergencies because “if anything happened to our camera we knew there was nowhere to get it serviced anywhere around there.”

However, film stock was still an issue. Swanberg ordered about half of the stock he needed in advance “and then we were in touch with Kodak all the time, but it was hairy sometimes. If we were shooting more than we budgeted, we had to be a little bit nervous about film arriving in time. There were days that I was nervous that we were going to have to adjust our schedule because we literally would not get a shipment from FedEx in time [and] we would occasionally have people running to the airport at 9am, looking to get our film for that day.”

The Sun Never Sets Narrative Spotlight, World Premiere Friday 13, 9:30pm, Zach Theater Sunday 15, 7:15pm, Alamo Lamar Tuesday 17, 9:45pm, Alamo Lamar Find more of The Austin Chronicle’s continuing coverage of SXSW.

The post Joe Swanberg Gets Back Behind the Camera for The Sun Never Sets appeared first on The Austin Chronicle.