The warmth inside the bar that Sam Davis found for “The Singers” was real, though sometimes it could be a little too much so when telling the story of a group of strangers who find harmony with one another on a cold, wintery night and the production had to commence in the Los Angeles suburb of La Habra on a summer’s day.
“I remember at one point, the opera singer was warming up in the walk-in refrigerator because his voice is so loud and needed to insulate himself. It was also the only place he could go to cool off, so he was in the walk-in freezer, just belting opera and I was like, “What is this bizarre world we’ve created here?” says Davis. “As I reminisce, I want to go back there now and be there again with those guys. We had so much fun.”
It can feel as cool and refreshing to walk into “The Singers” as opening a fridge door when Davis’ experience in both the doc and narrative worlds uniquely positioned to try something new. After partnering with Rayka Zehtabchi, who’s a producer here, on such films as the 2018 Oscar-winning doc “Period. End of Sentence” as a cinematographer, and the gripping 2021 dramatic short “Are You Still There?” which he co-directed, the filmmaker took the unusual tact of gathering together a collection of talented amateur musicians he saw online from around the world for an extremely loose adaptation of a Russian short story about an impromptu singing competition.
A hundred dollars may be held out as a prize for who reaches the deepest into their soul among the men for it to echo, but the opportunity alone for the singers to belt out “Unchained Melody” and “House of the Rising Sun” without judgment yields an entirely different metric for winning and when Davis worked without a script and had people from different walks of life step into the same space to engage, the result reminds of such disarming docs as “The Work” and “Bloody Noses Empty Pockets” where the shedding of inhibitions and a hardened facade becomes deeply moving in its seeming spontaneity while the director tastefully burnishes the corners for that cinematic quality of being a place and time just one step removed from reality, offering a lovely escape. As “The Singers” continues its festival run at Tribeca this week after first appearing on the circuit this spring at SXSW, Davis generously took the time to reflect on the creative process that led to the inspired short, extending the surprise he felt on the set to audiences and creating such a magical environment for people to reveal their true selves.
How did this come about?
Three years ago or so, I read a storytelling book called “A Swimming Pond in the Rain” by George Saunders. He breaks down these five Russian short stories that were written mostly in the 1800s and he uses those as a framework to delve into story structure. One of those stories was “The Singers,” which was written in 1850 by Ivan Turganov. I read this story, and was immediately inspired by it, but I wasn’t necessarily thinking about making a movie. I read it late at night before I went to bed, and I closed the book, picked my phone up, as I so often do, but really shouldn’t, and the first video on Instagram was a video of a guy busking in the subway station in New York. I watched this video, and I was in awe of the soul and the power of this man’s voice. He was a genius in the rough, and I was really moved by what I watched. Then I swiped to the next video, and something about my algorithm must have been on these viral singing sensations, because the next one was also a singer on the street performing, and I started to imagine a sort of modern-day take on that short story, but with all these unknown but incredible singing talents cast as patrons of a bar, so you have no idea what’s coming, but over the course of the film they reveal themselves to not just be these ordinarily downtrodden men, but incredibly talented singers.
I stayed up the entire night after I watched those first couple viral videos, and I was like, “Um, I’m screwed for the night [because] my creative filmmaking mind was just exploding, and I kept uncovering these different personalities — not just singers, but also just interesting people with a story. The first phase of casting was about finding the singers, but then those non-singing roles are just as important, and I set out for a year, maybe a little more, tracking these guys down and putting together a cast. It was all going to be first-time actors and that type of person wasn’t necessarily easy to get a hold of, so I had to do some detective work. Usually when you reach out to someone who’s never acted before, and you say, “I’m an Oscar-nominated filmmaker from Los Angeles. Will you be in my movie?” They say, “Fuck off,” because they think they’re being scammed.
But the whole concept of my approach to the film was this idea of curated chaos and I thought, “What if I put my background, [which is] as much in documentary as it is in fiction, [into this idea where] we find a perfect bar, and then we’re adding these different characters from around the world. Judah came from Australia, Mike came from New York, Will came from New Orleans. Muffin, who’s the heckler at the end of the bar, came from Arkansas. I found him on TikTok, and the video had 200 views at the time, so I don’t know how I found him. It wasn’t his account, someone else posted it, but he’s one of the customers berating someone at the hardware store in this hilarious way and I couldn’t tell at first if it was a bit, or if it was just his personality, but my casting director Natalie Lin got ahold of this guy, and even though he’s not a singer, he had this incredible personality. I just knew if I could get him to be at the bar, he would be a perfect antagonist and there wasn’t going to be a script, so it was all about curating this cast of interesting personalities who could be themselves and hole up in this bar together for a few days and hopefully something wonderful would emerge.
It did and I’ve heard there was no real rehearsal, so was the engagement largely happening in front of the camera?
There was some rehearsal. The film is really pretty loosely based on the original short story, so we had the core concept of a group of downtrodden, lost souls who slowly over the course of the night begin to express themselves through song and open up through the shared experience of listening to it and enjoying it. Once we got everyone there, which felt like a miracle, I’ll never forget walking into the bar the first morning and looking around at all these faces who I had spent the last year trying to track down on Instagram and TikTok from all over the world. It was so surreal, and I’ve never been on a set that felt like such a world of its own. The bar took on this magical timeless quality with these faces and personalities and anytime we weren’t rolling, someone would hop up on the piano and just start playing.
We would rehearse a little bit, at least for the songs. We didn’t know which songs each of the guys would sing until the day before and I didn’t feel like we could necessarily decide what they would sing until we were there and could live in it a little bit, so we tried some different things and settled on what each of them would sing. We ironed out all the music the first day of the shoot. And then performance-wise, it truly is so improvisational. What was cool was that I could never have written what these guys are saying. I would guide them and the story that we were telling, but it came out in their words and that gave the film this documentary authenticity because you have these guys from small-town Arkansas or wherever it is and the dialogue feels really true because of that. If there’s a writer of this movie, it really is the cast because it this really odd and fun collaboration between every cast member, myself, and the producers.
On the second day, I had a little panic attack because we had five singers — Chris, Judah, Will, Mike, and then the opera singer — and [I thought] “Oh man, the bar looks great, but it’s going to get stale. It’s too many songs for a 15-minute film. It’s going to be visually repetitive.” And then I was so stressed because Judah flew in from Australia the day before on a 30-hour flight and I thought I was going to have to tell him that he’ll be in the movie, but he’s not gonna sing and he came all the way here. He won “The Voice Australia,” so I was panicked, and I walked off-set, into the bathroom, just to take a breather. And when we were scouting the bar, I never really looked at it, but I walked in to this little old, dingy, pink-tiled bathroom, and it had such a different vibe visually from the rest of [the place] and I had the thought [of a scene there with] Judah because in real life, he was shy. When we tried to do some light rehearsals in the bar, he was nervous. And I put myself in his shoes, [thinking] if I was going to participate in this, I would either have to go psych myself up in the bathroom or I would just leave and keep it my secret that I have a beautiful voice.
The other thing was the quality of sound in the bathroom was so angelic because of the reverberation, so I went back to Judah, and said, “What do you think about singing in the bathroom stall while you pee?” He thought I was joking, but [I said], “Seriously, I think it could be really cool.” I had to talk him into it. He was wearing a parka [in the film], and it was the middle of the summer in La Habra, and there’s a fire burning, and it’s so hot, and I have him crammed in this little bathroom stall and make him sing while he pees. But it’s one of my favorite moments in the film and it was completely improvised and spontaneous. It’s a good example of the fluidity with which the film was made and helped to make it feel really unique.
Did that sense of spontaneity apply to the visuals as well? It seems extremely well-composed, but you get that feeling of the bar and the patrons there being all around you.
My production designer Michelle Patterson did a great job kind of transforming the space, because the bones of the space were good. It was a Moose Lodge in La Habra, and it had the wood paneling and felt very middle of America. But it was covered in modern TV screens and Digital Club Keno panels and those all broke the spell for us, so we spent a day before the first shooting day just removing this bar from time. I wanted the film to have a fablesque quality, and to me that means we wanted to strip away at anything that was unromantic and placed it in a specific time period. We added the dollar bills on the ceiling and what inspired me the most about this space was just the combination of these singers and the cigarette smoke and the lighting. The bar was filled with movie prop smoke, which smells like clove cigarettes and has this really distinct smell, and it sure was fun.
Did the actors actually have a say in what they wanted to sing?
They definitely did. It felt like a pure collaboration between myself and the singers, and when they came in the bar, we had some ideas going into it, and we auditioned some different songs, and it was pretty clear right away. I had never even heard “It Hurts Me Too,” the song that Will sings. He just sat down at the piano and started belting that out, and I was like, “That’s what you’re singing.”
Then Mike, [who played] the bartender, was in the video that I mentioned before in the subway station in New York, singing “Unchained Melody” and you can look it up. It’s this haunting performance and the way his voice reverberates through the subway station is just unbelievable, so even from the first night when I had the idea. I [thought], “I have to have Mike Young.” And in the film, the train rumbles by while he’s singing at the end — that was a callback to the subway train that rumbles through his “Unchained Melody” performance in that first video that I saw of him. There’s a lot of little details like that that no one will ever really know, but at least for me, it helps give meaning to what I’m doing. And [Mike’s] not an actor. He was on “America’s Got Talent” sometime after his viral video, but for whatever reason, his career hasn’t really taken off in a consistent way, so to put him on a pedestal like this, I’m just so excited for Tribeca because it’ll be a hometown screening for him, and I know his family will get to come.
I imagine that must be a special part of this. What was the premiere like for you at SXSW?
It was so cool. Of everything I’ve made, this film is the most unique, but also the most crowd-pleasing, and it’s a slow simmer intentionally, because you’re almost supposed to be lulled into boredom [as is felt by] all these uninspired men see you in this bar, and then all of a sudden, this incredible moment transpires. But it was really special for [all the actors] to see the movie and see themselves on the big screen, and the response was unbelievable. During Will’s [scene] when he plays the piano, he finished his song, and the theater mid-screening broke into applause, which is something I’ve never heard before. It was almost like the audience was actually at a concert, and then when Mike sings after that, he finished his song and no one makes a peep and you just hear sniffles. I love that effect of flipping the room on its head, and every opportunity I get to show the film in a theater full of people, I’m grateful, and excited because it really does play well with an audience on a big screen.
“The Singers” will screen at the Tribeca Festival at the Shorts Theater at Spring Studios on June 5th at 9 pm, June 13th at noon and June 14th at 5:30 pm.