At a city council meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, Adriana Yoto was intrigued by a term she heard for the first time — “underutilized space” — which she and Michael Townsend, her partner at the time, knew well from dreaming up public art projects in their hometown, but never really put words to. When the duo had seen the city’s real estate increasingly eaten up by developers eager to create pricey condominiums and shopping malls, the term could sound ironic, but with their collection of friends who were also artists, they could take it to heart when even as areas with nostalgic value to locals were being cleared in the name of progress for high-rises, there seemed to be opportunities to work within the spaces that were being redeveloped, to the point where they coined a new term for themselves – “microdevelopers.”
What starts out small takes on truly grand dimensions in “Secret Mall Apartment,” Jeremy Workman’s thrilling chronicle of Townsend and Yoto’s truly wild idea to take up residence in the Providence Mall after learning of a crevice inside of it where clearly no one had gone since it was originally constructed. Over the course of four years, they created their own door to the 750-foot storage space and furnished it with finds at Salvation Army, carrying every object, including the cinder blocks to wall off the hideaway from any mall security, up a 2-foot-wide crawlspace on a fire escape-esque ladder and gathered intel from people working at the mall’s stores such as Pottery Barn to even try and get their mail sent there. While only they would know about this quiet form of protest against gentrification during their occupancy, Workman sees their nest as if it were a canary in a coal mine as communities around America and elsewhere have started to lose their local identity in the name of attracting more affluent residents.
If the world is on the verge of becoming more homogenized, Workman has found yet another subject who continues to make things interesting, following up his captivating profiles of Matt Green, who walked every street in New York in “The World Before Your Feet,” and Lily Hevesh, who knocked down more than dominoes as she became a YouTube in “Lilly Topples the World” with a galvanizing portrait of Townsend and his crew who have a habit to turning ugly situations into something beautiful, from cheering up the patients at children’s hospitals with tape art to honoring those lost who lost their lives on 9/11 by acknowledging their presence on the streets of New York. The director honors them with his own creativity in sharing their story, bringing memories to the surface by drawing on their own artistry and zipping back and forth in time to convey the exhilaration of working on such exciting projects discretely.
With the secret about to really be out when the film premieres this week at South By Southwest, Workman spoke about how “Secret Mall Apartment” fits into his larger body of work where people have a way of making the most of seemingly mundane circumstances, the curveballs thrown his way with a large cast of characters and archival footage and why he’s particularly excited for his third feature to play Austin.
Now that you have three features, I’ve sensed a trend in this idea of something ordinary becoming the extraordinary. Is that something you tend to gravitate towards, or is this all a coincidence?
Probably a little of both. This one was definitely more extraordinary that then became something else for me. I heard about this, and I [already] couldn’t believe it, and then Michael Townsend showed me footage, and I couldn’t believe it. I thought it was all fake. Then I really wanted to dig in and show how here was this incredible story, but it had real meaning and impact for all these people and what they were doing. In that way, it’s similar to some of my other projects — [centered on] people of passion who are doing these unorthodox, unconventional things, but really bringing so much to it, and it becomes more than just what the idea is.
Was it a bit different to figure out how to tell the story when although Michael is a central figure, it really is the story of a collective?
It was very different from my other films [where] they’re mostly focusing on single characters. There’s Matt Green, who’s walking every street of New York City in “The World Before Your Feet.” There’s Lily Hevesh, who’s the world’s greatest domino toppler who becomes a global superstar right before your eyes in “Lily Topples the World.” But this was very different in that it was about an ensemble, and yes, Michael Townsend is the ringleader, but it was a lot bigger in the cast than I was used to. I think I did 25 to 30 interviews for this movie, and that was very unusual to do so many sit-downs. My films are usually very verite, observational ride-alongs and this was almost an archival movie where we were like going into all this incredible footage and using the interviews to understand what we were watching. So in that sense, it was a different approach. People had come to me and [asked] “Do you want to do an archival documentary?” And I did it with my short film “Deciding Vote” [made as “Secret Mall Apartment” was being put together], but I had never really done a documentary where it was a lot of archival.
You allude to something that surely makes the film feel very lively when there are ways in which you bring people back to the headspace they were in when they first lived these experiences in some creative ways. What was it like to figure out how to jog the memory?
This event happened 17 years ago, and a lot of the main mall residents had dispersed. They were all still artists, but I thought it was so fascinating that this really resonated with them for so many years. There’s a scene in the film where they all still have the key to the secret apartment that they created — the key to the locked door [that the mall itself didn’t have], and that was something that I was constantly hearing from everybody. Very quickly, I realized I wanted to involve them in terms of what it meant for them now and since they were all such incredible artists, I knew it would be incredible to invite them to participate [in the production of the movie] a little bit.
So many of the eight were talking about how the mall apartment was this meta space in between reality and imagination, this space for them to explore ideas, and many people said it was like a movie set, so from there, we realized let’s rebuild this and really invite the team to participate in the space when it was rebuilt. One character [Colin] builds this incredible model of the mall where the secret apartment was and what he did just totally blew me away. I had no idea that he would go that detailed with it and it took a year and it became something that was really important for the movie. So it was all in an effort to bring the audience in deeper. Yes, they filmed incredible, incredible footage when they were there, but it was with this tiny little camera, and the footage is very, very low quality, and there were only five or six photographs that they took, including the one [being used as the primary press still]. So the documentary goes through a lot of effort to really bring an audience deeper into that space.
Was there anything that changed your ideas of what this could be?
When I first started the project, I [thought], “Oh, here were these artists who are really unique and really different, but they did a wild prank,” but as I started to dig deeper and started to get to know them all as people, I discovered that they were actually artists who had a lot on their mind and really had a lot to say about the gentrification that was happening in Providence and the function of art in our lives. I realized that they were doing all this amazing stuff outside of the secret apartment. They were going into hospitals and doing all these memorials for tragedies in the country — 9/11 and the OKC bombing, all of which you see in the documentary, and that was when I realized, “Wow, there’s really more to this story” and the secret apartment almost was like a Trojan horse to these bigger ideas. That really appealed to me and even in “Lily Topples The World,” that had a lot of that as well.
You stole my best line because I thought they smuggled themselves into the mall and you smuggled those bigger ideas into the film. And I don’t think I’ve ever asked about your process with music, but this is such an invigorating score, as all your films have. At what point do you start thinking about that?
This score was made by this incredible musician couple, Olivier and Claire Manchon, and they also did the score for “Deciding Vote” and some great scores for other documentary films, and I wanted it to be really, really integral in this movie. I’ve always been an editor — it’s been my only paid job, other than now making movies — and [with] my co-editor Paul Murphy, we really wanted this to feel like an experience. I really like that cinematic feeling with documentaries and that it takes you on these incredible journeys with people and characters and places, but it doesn’t feel didactic or academic. These movies feel really immersive, and music becomes really important in our process, so we start thinking about the sound and editing with music very, very early and working on the score with the musicians. At one point, we [thought], “Let’s do a sound that’s edgy, grungy, punk [that would be era appropriate],” but then I [thought], “No, that’s not right for this and it started to evolve from there into this eclectic, unique instrumentation. That became a real sort of soundscape for the movie.
There’s a number of really electrifying sequences, so as an editor was there a particularly exciting one to put together?
There were so many incredible scenes [where] I just was like, “Wow, the scene where they’re creating all this art in the children’s ward at the hospital” or the 9/11 scene where it finally reveals all their artwork that they’ve been doing, but in the middle of this are all these fun, almost like sugar rush scenes of them building the apartment that I wanted to feeling like a heist movie. So it was this balance of watching them sneak into the mall and putting up cinder blocks with these textures of what they were doing on the side, so suddenly you’re just like, “Wow, I didn’t expect this movie to go so deep.” It really allowed me to balance between those different emotions, a that gets a little back to what we were saying about it being a Trojan horse. You’re watching this movie and they’re like sneaking into the mall and it’s crazy, but then it switches gears at all these different times.
I’ll say it when I know you can’t quite yet, but what’s it like to be making a triumphant return to SXSW?
It’s pretty awesome. This is now my third movie to premiere at South By, and the last one won the Grand Jury Prize. This one is not eligible for awards, but what makes this the most special for me is that it’s so relevant for Austin, [which] has this artistic spirit and this [motto] “Keep Austin Weird,” and these clashes with gentrification. Austin’s a bigger city than Providence, but it has a lot of these same issues, so in a weird way, this is the most SXSW movie I’ve made and I just can’t wait to show it to that audience. I think they’re going to really, really love it.
“Secret Mall Apartment” will screen at SXSW on March 8th at Alamo Lamar 8 at 9:45 pm and Alamo Lamar 7 at 10:15 pm, March 10th at the Alamo Lamar 6 at 10:45 pm and March 16th at 11 am.