My direct experience of "A Motion Selfie"

Who is the hunter, and who is the hunted? You’ll have to watch the movie to find out. 

The film­maker and pho­to­graph­er Jamie Stuart’s first fea­ture, A Motion Selfie, hit the on-demand mar­ket the oth­er day. It’s a funny, creepy, metic­u­lous movie that’s a clear land­mark in that it’s an entirely one-person show. Jamie, besides por­tray­ing the lead char­ac­ter, a fic­tion­al­ized ver­sion of him­self, handled every single aspect of behind-the-camera pro­duc­tion him­self. He shot it, edited it, wrote the ori­gin­al score to which the rhythms of this entirely dialogue-free movie are syn­chron­ized. He logged in prob­ably lit­er­ally count­less hours on col­or cor­rec­tion and oth­er post-production niceties that few film crit­ics know about or per­haps can even con­ceive of.

He did not, how­ever, play all the roles. And that’s where I, and sev­er­al oth­er peopled more accom­plished at per­form­ing than I, come in. The movie begins with “Jamie” enjoy­ing some recog­ni­tion with his short bliz­zard film Idiot With  A Tripod, which was cham­pioned by Roger Ebert after Jamie put it up on his site in 2010. (Roger’s own praise of the film also pos­ted in 2010; the link is to an updated ver­sion of the post.)  But in the world of this movie, the recog­ni­tion brings him more trouble than sat­is­fac­tion. Jamie’s tor­men­ted by a Twitter troll with what may by now seem an over­fa­mil­i­ar handle. And he’s cor­por­eally stalked by a dis­turbed man who’s obsessed with the red car­pet shots Jamie’s done at film festivals.

Guess which char­ac­ter I play.

I am not eager to re-litigate my early years as a bad cit­izen of social media, but it was in this peri­od, I sup­pose, that Jamie, with whom I’ve had a nod­ding acquaint­ance for over a dec­ade, saw some­thing in me that could com­plete his vis­ion. My mailbox-cleaning habits mean that I don’t have Jamie’s approach e‑mails, which star­ted com­ing in 2015, but if I recall cor­rectly they were tent­at­ive. Although not sheep­ish. Jamie, soft-spoken though he may be, is not a sheep­ish guy. Some time pri­or to start­ing Selfie, Jamie had asked me to stand in a shot of one of his New York Film Festival-related shorts. And to give the cam­era the fin­ger. Always eager to sup­port the arts, I obliged.

Somehow, to Jamie,  I had become emblem­at­ic of a cer­tain film-critical hos­til­ity. And he wanted to expand on this with Selfie. My char­ac­ter doesn’t have a lot of screen time in the “real life” of the movie, but his abus­ive tweets, dir­ec­ted at Jamie, take up a lot of real estate in the character’s brain. The only time “Honey Badger Mofo” (as the char­ac­ter was first called—his name’s been mod­i­fied for the fin­ished film, but that’s always how I’m going to think of him) does show up in the movie’s real wold it’s because Jamie’s tracked him down—he sus­pects this is the guy who recently broke into his apart­ment and scared the beje­sus out of his cat sit­ter. (He is not. And that’s not a spoiler.)

After I agreed to appear in the film, I only worked one day of the whole shoot. In my pri­or film roles, after hav­ing had the para­met­ers of the char­ac­ter laid out by writers, then an AD fol­lowed by the actu­al dir­ect­or,  or a writer/director, I was instruc­ted to let loose—that is, I impro­vised all my dia­logue and had rel­at­ive free­dom of move­ment. Here, not so much. Jamie always had “the whole equa­tion” of the pic­ture in his head while block­ing and shoot­ing, it seemed. Each performer’s style had to con­form with the unam­bigu­ous, prac­tic­ally mech­an­ized pro­vi­sions of the film’s cir­cum­scribed style. All the effects that A Motion Selfie aspires to, and I believe achieves, are arrived at via a spe­cif­ic set of constraints.

Which meant that my main task as a per­former was not to dis­play my per­son­al­ity. But instead to hit spe­cif­ic marks, main­tain con­tinu­ity on the fact that my char­ac­ter has only one ear­bud in when he first appears, not unzip my ridicu­lous white hood­ie, and so on. I remem­ber ask­ing Jamie wheth­er I should make any kind of indic­at­ing facial on see­ing his char­ac­ter across the street from mine. He said abso­lutely not.

Instead, I was merely to come out of door­ways, go down streets, and whatever else you’ll see in the movie. It was rather like being a liv­ing piece of a jig­saw puzzle. I knew and admired Jamie’s work in still pho­tos and short films, and I’d seen swatches of Selfie before I signed on to par­ti­cip­ate in it, so I had con­fid­ence that he was mak­ing some­thing spe­cial. But it was a little pecu­li­ar, this mix of min­im­al and max­im­al that I was being asked to enact.

If you watch the movie, and I think you should, you’ll see the end result…works. Every per­form­ance has its own very par­tic­u­lar tone but they all exist with­in brack­ets that Jamie very solidly con­struc­ted. But the organ­ic whole of the movie doesn’t feel strained. Rather, it’s alive with form­al ingenu­ity and play­ful­ness, and also with pos­sib­il­ity for aspir­ing movie­makers. Check it out and see for yourself.