Top of the Line: We Are We Going, Where Have We Been?

Hi y’all. Welcome back to Top of the Line, IndieWire’s roundup of Craft stories. We’ve had a busy August, especially in audio, with a ton of great in-depth Toolkit interviews that dive into craft and process — I got the chance to talk to writer/director Jane Schoenbrun about everything from fake blood to the aesthetic of Michael Bay music videos in the wonderfully erotic and erotically wonderful slasher comedy “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.”

In fact, something I couldn’t fit into either of the pieces about “Camp Miasma” — but am putting here because I know that you, dear IndieWire newsletter reader, are cool and are down for a bonus track — is how much the slasher-within-the-film, which we actually get to see a fair bit of, was kind of this indie short unto itself for Schoenbrun and the crew. They shot it on its own week, right in the middle of the schedule, and it was a bit like a camp within “Camp Miasma,” given its different look and tone.

“I had all of the actors that week read this Joyce Carol Oates short story that I love called ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ and there’s something of that short story in this sequence,” Schoenbrun said. “When I watch the movie now, I’m quite proud of it, because it’s obviously something I’ve been chasing throughout my filmography — you go deeper into the portal, screen within screen, and then you forget you’re even in a screen within the screen. It’s always been hard to do that, in a way. Like, with ‘TV Glow,’ if we spent too long in the Pink Opaque, the wheels started to come off the bus. But I think it works in this one because you’re anchored by Amanda’s [Fix] performance, and you’re anchored by her relationship to [Gillian Anderson], this origin story you’re exploring of Billy’s character.”

Meanwhile, in the screens within screens of television, our resident Ryan Murphy scholar Jim Hemphill spoke to cinematographer Michael Bauman about the personal touches he put into “Monster: Ed Gein,” and if you want to know why Ramin Djawadi’s “House of the Dragon” score has gotten a little more twitchy and anxious this last season, well, showrunner and series co-creator Ryan Condall answered that and let us know what’s on his personal “HOTD” writing playlist.

We’ll have our mid-August “Oh, yeah, that show was really good,” slate of Emmy Phase 2 stories coming next week, which is exciting. Actually, a couple of them slipped in early because I love the fact that the “Abbott Elementary” team, and especially producing director Randall Einhorn, happened to be shooting an episode on a Kyle Schwarber four-home-run day. This year’s TV camera survey has gone out to all nominated series — scripted, documentary, and reality — and the results that have come in are already really fascinating. DP Justin Zweifach of “The Yogurt Shop Murders” wrote about how the team had to reassess their approach when the unsolved true crime case they were documenting was, in fact, solved.

“We decided to drop the apparatus. Small cameras, available light, 1.78 framing for the present, limited crew -— we wanted the episode to feel as though looking behind the veil of the series itself, and behind the mystery too. Logistically, the simple approach was better for keeping up with rapidly unfolding emotions and events, and also helped us cultivate an intimate environment with participants, less gear and fewer bodies in the room,” Zweifach wrote in his answer to IndieWire.

For more on that series and many others, check back early next week. Or just hang out and wait for the next newsletter, where I’ll be writing more about this. You do you!