“We made it to Colorado. Shit’s fucked up,” Hilarie (Jennifer Harlow) says casually on a voicemail to her sister in “No More Time,” with director Dalila Droege leaving it an open question as to whether anyone is actually left alive back home to hear it. A deadly pandemic has swept through the country, leaving Hilarie and her husband Steve (Mark Reeb) to hit the road to find safety and while they are reminded at every turn that such a place may be impossible to find, they have no shortage of empty houses to take shelter in, ultimately taking refuge in a luxurious enclave in a mountain town where they could reasonably expect not to be bothered at all higher elevation. Still, even if it’s difficult for other people to reach them in person, it becomes obvious that fear can still creep in when they’ve become suspect of everyone’s intentions and any sound that they don’t immediately recognize in their newly adopted home.
“No More Time” may find the terror in being left to your own devices in a time of paranoia, but it’s a hopeful product of the creativity that can emerge as a result of such independence when Droege and husband Jay Keitel, the esteemed director of photography behind such films as “She Dies Tomorrow” and “A Desert,” and Harlow and her husband Reeb plotted a production in the midst of the COVID lockdown that would take advantage of benefits of a frozen time and pull some of the anxiety from the air. Although that’s now a moment that most would rather forget, the nifty thriller works well outside of the context in which it was made when its characters come to question their own judgment as they wonder how much their attitudes to be shaped by the environment around them in both figurative and literal terms. While each interaction with a stranger instills at least a tinge of self-doubt when everyone holds vastly different opinions about what’s happening and nothing can be certain, Hilarie comes to suspect the forest outside their home is haunted and it’s hard to discern whether perspective is genuinely warped by changes that are actually happening outdoors or inside one’s mind.
With the highly saturated colors of Keitel’s vibrant cinematography creating a nearly psychedelic feel at times as Hilarie and Steve become increasingly overwhelmed by their surroundings, “No More Time” shifts from summoning suspense at first from a survival of the fittest type scenario as cars and houses are fair game for swiping to facing the threat that the ground itself is shifting beneath Hilarie and Steve’s feet in such a way to render any squabbling between humans minuscule by comparison and Droege delivers a unique sense of unease to go along with the typical jolts of dread that are to be expected of a psychological thriller. As the film becomes available on digital, the director graciously took the time to talk about how a film that became so unexpected in so many ways – even to her – took shape, filming in the wilderness of Crested Butte and finding her calling in filmmaking.
How did this come about?
In the summer of 2020 when we were in the initial lockdown, Jennifer Harlow and her husband Mark [Reeb] had recently moved to this town in Colorado called Crested Butte. They called us [in the middle of the pandemic] and they were like, “This sucks. Let’s make something about it.” So my husband Jay Keitel, who’s a cinematographer, and I flew out to Crested Butte and wandered around the mountains and talked about what was going on. They had a lot of ideas about what they wanted and they had a location and [said], “Look, we’re going to shoot something in six weeks. It’s going to be about a couple” and they wanted to play this couple. The only silver lining about what was happening [in the world in general] was the fact that nature seemed to be coming back without all the flights and the diesel and the driving. There were so many birds in our apartment complex in L.A., so ultimately we decided to make a movie about nature taking back the planet [in this place] where we’re surrounded by this incredible natural beauty, which was our fantasy about what could be happening.
You really do make such great use of the location. How much did you shot list this versus taking in what nature could give you?
I actually had a lot of anxiety before going into the shoot because I had six weeks to write the script and I was talking with Jay and I’m like, “Well, we’re not gonna be able to shot list this whole movie because I was literally finishing the script as we drove up to Crested Butte to start shooting the next day. So we decided to embrace a more improvisational approach, just because of the nature of the film. That was actually really magical. There’s a scene in the film where there’s sheep in the woods and we did not plan that. We were driving to location and we came across it and it was this magical sight, so we just stopped the car and got out and shot it.
Can I just say Jay [shot] this movie by himself? With a $2,000 camera and no crew. [With a] husband and wife director/DP team, it’s always like this push and pull, but I try to give him as much freedom as possible to find what feels right and we both feel is in the world of the film. He’s such a master at thinking in terms of the tone of the film and transitions. It’s not just about creating pretty shots. It’s about how all these all this connective tissue works together and he’s just amazing to work with for that reason.
You can tell it’s quite instinctual. Were there things that you saw on location that you could build around?
We were really lucky because we hired a local drone operator to do our drone shots and he mainly did like real estate videos. He had never done anything cinematic before, but he was an avid hiker and he knew all of all of these locations to go for this drone footage and aside from that, we just did a ton of scouting. There were so many beautiful locations. One of the stories that I like telling is I had written a shot of a fox walking through the house and I really wanted to try to get a fox on location, but there was no animal wrangler near Colorado. And it would have cost over $20,000 to bring out a fox from LA, which was not in our budget. But at our picture location, there were two foxes that circled the house twice a day, so we were able to film those foxes. So nature provided.
You built up a real cast and crew around the four of you. What was it like to start a production at a time like that?
It was crazy. It was great, but it was also really hard. We shot in the fall of 2020, so there were protocols that we had to follow. But we were also shooting mainly outside. There also wasn’t a lot of production happening, so we were able to bring out a couple of really amazing actors and we just kept our crew super tiny. People were available, and it really was like a really small family feeling making the film.
What was it like working with Jennifer and Mark as a couple?
I remember talking with them and Mark especially was concerned because sometimes real life couples don’t have any chemistry on screen. Jennifer also hadn’t acted in a really long time. But we wrote the characters for them and tried to incorporate aspects of the real-life personalities into the characters, and it ended up being a lot of fun. We were all living together and making the movie together.
From what I understand, the shoot corresponded with the actual changing of the leaves and what you do with colors in this movie is amazing. What was that like to take advantage as part of the film’s tone?
That’s why we only had six weeks to write the script because winter comes hard in the mountains. It was so funny because the day after we arrived it actually started snowing very early in September, but we got there and we wanted to capture those leaves changing and when the snow cleared, we got the whole range of colors. I don’t think we understood how fast it would change. We got the green and then we got the yellow and we got the red and then towards the end there were no leaves on the trees.
In terms of color, we worked with Jay’s favorite colorist Nat Jencks, who also did “She Dies Tomorrow” and he’s just such a wonderful collaborative person. The fun of making this kind of genre film was how far we could push the color in post. There was this blackish purple we came up with in the color process that I called dark iris. In the final shootout scene, we went with a pink and gold color that the three of us felt like we hadn’t really seen before and that was really exciting in color to be able to come up with something like that and fits the spirit of the film.
You’re really able to bring in the natural environment through the soundscape as well. What was it like to work on that part of the process?
It was just having a lot of conversations and then working with really great people. We really wanted, with a low budget film and not a lot of money for VFX, [to figure out] how do we create the character of the woods as this omniscient presence that’s ultimately driving everything that happens in the film. The virus isn’t human created, it’s nature created, so how do we create this presence of nature? We tried to do that with the drone shots and with the mirror images, the color and then with the sound to create this feeling that there’s something alive that’s not human.
I love when sound design becomes music and vice versa and it’s really hard to do because the composer tends to work isolated from the sound designer. Mary Ellen [Porto], the sound designer, was just incredibly attuned and she had spent some time in Colorado, so she was actually pulling like native birds and [other] things that were native to that environment and I talked a lot with Zak [Engel], our composer who was coming from classical music. I [told him] I don’t want anything classical — no piano, no strings, let’s make this weirder and stranger and more electronic. I just gave him permission to be as weird and far out there as he wanted to go and that’s how [we] came up with a lot of the combination of these strange visuals with the music with the sound design to create an atmosphere.
You’ve said before sound design was important because of your past as a classical pianist. How did you end up making movies?
My dad was a painter and then I was exposed to music and it’s funny because I chose to do music instead of visual art because I saw my dad being alone all the time and I wanted to work with other people. But then as a pianist, I found myself in a room by myself for eight hours a day practicing the piano, so it wasn’t a very collaborative medium. When I was a teenager, my brother was taking a Bergman class and brought home these VHS tapes of Bergman movies and I [thought], “This is amazing. I would love to do this.” But we didn’t have a video camera. I didn’t have any film classes. Wanting to be a filmmaker was the same thing as saying I want to be an astronaut. It’s like, how would you even do that?
But when I was in my twenties, looking for a more collaborative medium, I actually met this former classical pianist who’d become a filmmaker who just gave me the push I needed. He [said] “Yes, you can do this. There’s things about your musical background that will translate to film and just go for it.” And I took a film class and fell in love and I never looked back. I’m just so happy that I found film because it’s such a collaborative medium and I don’t have to cut off these parts of myself to be become really good at this one thing. I can incorporate theater and visual art and work with all these amazing people and constantly learn and expand and grow.
Obviously you’re a credit to the profession now. And I imagine this film, which came together in a whirlwind, was an interesting way to make your feature debut when it’s the kind of thing you build up in your head. What’s it like to have made it?
I’m just incredibly lucky as a filmmaker to be given an opportunity to make a feature. I spent over a year-and-a-half on a short film script before we started making this and to go from laboring for years [over] 12 pages to “Let’s write a feature in six weeks” was a big challenge, but it definitely gave me a confidence that it was something that I could do. I don’t know I’ll want to do that ever again with six weeks of prep, but it was really creatively freeing. I also teach filmmaking and it’s given me a new perspective in terms of how we teach film to students and this idea that you have to have as a director you have to have everything in control and everything planned out [where] you’re just executing the plan as opposed to engaging in a creative way with your collaborators, allowing surprises to happen and just being open to the possibilities of things that you might not have expected.
We just utilized these things in the town, the locations, the people, the characters, and made something together. It was such a collaborative experience. It was really joyful.
One of the most wonderful things that fell into our lap was the character of Tuck in the film, the Native American spiritual being that comes out of the woods. Tuck is a real-life character who lives in that town and spent a lot of time learning bow and arrow hunting. He made all his own traditional clothing that he wears in the film and we talked about this final speech that he’s going to give and I talked to him a little bit about what what I wanted, but he actually wrote the speech that he gives. That was just one of the amazing things about making a movie like this with very little time in an improvisational way.
“No More Time” will be available on VOD on December 19th.