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As he did in Sophia Takal's film Green, Nandan Rao, your DP, does some very nice work with bright natural light and a slowly drifting camera. You two make some interesting choices with framing, which is often withholding; and focus, which often lags behind the action. What’s the rationale there? It seems like you’re maybe trying to get at Josh’s sense of slow-rolling disorientation…
The bottom line with visuals is that Nandan and I just do what we think feels right. I could never sit down and think, “Ok, I have this whole list of things that I want to convey, how do I do that with the camera?” I’d go insane. For us, it’s the story that lends meaning to the visuals, not the other way around. As a filmmaker, all I have to do is make some sort of interesting aesthetic choice and the more savvy viewers will provide an interpretation that’s way better than anything I could’ve come up with. Like what you said about “slow-rolling disorientation”—that’s great! I’m not saying that the decisions are totally arbitrary—you do have to be sensitive to the material. For example, I wouldn’t have thrown a bunch of quick zooms in there. Tone is the most important thing for me, and a lot of my visual choices are made accordingly.

In terms of the genesis of that stuff, it’s hard to say. Nandan and I are so much on the same page by now that it seems like a lot of these ideas just materialize out of thin air. I had told him about the tight framing and the slow pans, and then I think that the focus thing was his addition to all of that. He pitched it to me during our first few days of shooting, and I was running around trying to get the action and the performances right so I told him to go for it without really thinking. And when I watched the footage I was like, “Wow, you kind of went overboard here bro.” But it was interesting, so we ran with it.

Your movie is a contemplatively paced movie based around subtle incidents, and much of the dialogue is subtitled. How’d you fund it?
The thing is that it’s a way cheaper movie than one might think. I don’t want to get much more specific than that, because then the budget becomes this thing that everyone focuses on, whereas it’s actually pretty irrelevant. But I will answer your question! I did a Kickstarter campaign that wound up covering everyone’s airfare, and then the rest was a combination of some money that I’d saved up at a desk job, as well as some that I’d made by selling Bummer Summer. I’m not big on fundraising. I love sharing the work with audiences and I’m delighted when people seem to identify with it, but the bottom line is that they’re personal projects and so it seems appropriate that I should have to pay for them. Even doing the Kickstarter thing was an uncomfortable experience, because it was really just my friends and family that were donating and they certainly don’t owe me anything. That being said, I’m sure that if someone with the means actually did offer me money with no strings attached, I’d take it in a second.

I and the person I watched the film with both assumed the shot through the cab windshield, about 25 minutes in, was a Happy Together homage. What did you watch, and take cues from, for this story of a guy who’s a little lost on the other side of the world?
Ha, that definitely wasn’t intentional. I mean, it’s a fine idea, but Wong Kar-wai is on such a different level stylistically that an homage would never have occurred to me. I did watch Happy Together pretty early on in the writing process, just because I hadn’t seen it and it seemed like an obvious choice, but I don’t remember being influenced by it in any specific way. Maybe the bright colors, I don’t know. It’s hard to talk about influences because most of the time they’re too subliminal to actually pinpoint. I actually watch a lot of Argentine movies as part of my weird, unfounded obsession with the country, and a lot of what they produce is incredible.

For example, I paid close attention to Celina Murga’s Ana y los otros while writing my movie because the plot has a lot of similarities. Well, it’s not too similar, but enough so that I was able to look at what was working and learn from it. And then a few years before that I saw a movie at Lincoln Center called El otro by Ariel Rotter. At the time I don’t remember getting too excited about it, but I found it online and re-watched it recently when I was just starting to edit and it blew me away. I was actually glad that I hadn’t seen it right before shooting because I would’ve stolen everything from it. But in both of those movies you have these mysteriously despondent protagonists who are away from home, and there’s a lot of ambiguity about who everyone is and what happened before. To me, that’s the most important lesson that I’ve learned so far as a filmmaker—is how to use ambiguity in a hopefully interesting way—so I guess the fact that I shot my movie in Argentina just makes it one big homage to the stuff that I took cues from.

I should probably also ask you about the significance of the title.
I just think it’s funny. The protagonist is figuratively choking in the sense that he’s blowing it with everything that he does, and then the movie takes place internationally. That’s all there is to it. I think I’m attracted to more joke-y titles because I want people to know that I don’t take myself too seriously. The stupid part is that I made this bilingual movie, and yet the title is untranslatable. Everyone in Argentina was completely baffled by it. I think that they thought it was pretentious, whereas it’s actually just a corny joke. But the movie has a couple of small things in Spanish don’t quite translate either, which I like. It feels appropriate considering the subject matter.