Making Movies in an Uncertain Time

Johnathon Olsen is a filmmaker and editor based in Milwaukee. His debut feature film, Waltz, premiered at the Wisconsin Film Festival in 2009. Since then, he has “split his time between making his own films as writer-director and collaborating with others as an editor.” Off the Cuff caught up with him to discuss his latest feature film, Corridor, as well as the creative processes that come along with creating a film during an uncertain time.

Firstly, what got you into filmmaking? Was film something you always wanted to do? Where did your passion stem from?

I really got into film in high school. I was going through a lot of tough times and movies became a lifeline for me as I dug further and further into film history. From there I started making my own work and kept going from there. Making movies is one of the most fulfilling parts of my life. I love forming a family based around creativity and passion and working together to create a parallel world that helps us understand our daily lives.

How did you get your team together?

The core of our team has been working together since we met in film school 13 years ago. Since then, we have worked on a number of projects and met new collaborators that we have brought along on future projects.

Corridor’s synopsis, although cleverly vague to the public, sounds magnetizing. Enlighten me about the processes it took to produce and navigate such a powerfully mysterious script. When did you know it was ready? When and where did the idea of the story come from?

The screenplay is never done until we shoot it. We spent almost two years working on it before we shot anything and we still are making tweaks and edits up until a scene is shot. We are constantly trying to find ways it could be better and as you get more input from the other collaborators and also start seeing how the film is translating to the real world of production, we try to respond to that in the script.

Some of the ideas in the film have been bouncing around in my head for eight or more years. It was something I would play with and then set aside for other projects when I couldn’t quite crack it. I knew I was interested in a certain kind of character, who would become Gordon, that was the kind of under achieving and self-defeating personality I was seeing around me a lot at the time. I knew I wanted him to be a security guard, a job I had done one summer during college. And I knew I wanted a situation where he misdiagnosed a situation based on his assumptions and made things worse.

The current incarnation started when I brought those ideas to my co-writers Zach Erdmann and Martin Kaszubowski in 2018 and suddenly everything clicked. I think it ended up being a good vessel for a lot of things that were on our minds in the current cultural landscape. It was our chance to work through the alienation, divide, and mistrust that was in the air.

The film’s plot revolves around “a group of night owls whose stories collide one snowy evening.” There are many twists and turns, and it also involves a “murder plot!” What genre(s) would you consider this film to be?

We are calling it a caper, which I think works because it implies a mystery/thriller, but also has some room for comedy. I also like that it is a kind of an old-fashioned term you don’t hear as much anymore, because I think that matches the filmmaking. We are pulling from a lot of classic traditions—screwball comedies from the ‘30s, paranoia thrillers of the’70s, action buddy movies of the ‘80s, and trying to see how they can be relevant in 2021. The ensemble nature of the film really lets us play with a lot of different tones and styles.

Location often impacts the overall outcome of the work that is being produced. Is there a reason you wanted the film to be set in Milwaukee? What made you choose local Milwaukee artists for this production? How has this city influenced, affected, or altered your work process?

Milwaukee isn’t named in the film. I generally don’t like that level of specificity and instead like everything to take place in an exaggerated film world. But Milwaukee, and our experiences of the city are very much a part of the film.

We have put a lot of emphasis on locations for this project. A big theme of the movie is how we see ourselves and how we translate that to others. So that has meant that costumes, props, locations, they all reflect how these characters think of themselves. And Milwaukee has such rich architecture—from the slick modernism of the War Memorial to the homey nostalgia of The Nite Owl diner—that we were able to match those places to our characters.

Tell me a little bit about your crowdfunding campaign. As I hear, you are 70% into completing your goal of $20,000 via crowdfunding to finance Corridor’s production. Has support been growing since then?

We are planning to shoot the second half of the film in the fall and thought it was finally time to reach out to our wider network to fill in a gap in financing. Independent filmmaking, especially in a town where not a lot of feature films get made, can be hard. But we are committed to making films in and about the midwest. That means raising the kind of money it takes to make a project of this scale will always be a struggle and we can use all of the help we can get.

The crowdfunding campaign has been going great so far. We hit our initial goal of 20,000 on Sunday and are now trying to raise a stretch goal of 22,000 to help cover one of our complicated set pieces that we have to film on a soundstage. Even after the campaign is over, there will still be new hurdles to overcome. So if anyone missed out on a chance to help through that they can always reach out to us directly.

Did you and your team face any setbacks or challenges while producing a film during a pandemic? If so, how did you overcome them?

The original plan was to shoot the movie over the course of 2020. We had our initial shoot of six days in late February and early March 2020 and had already planned another set of shooting days for May. But then a week after we wrapped that first shoot everything got locked down.

At that time, I honestly didn’t know if we would ever finish the film. It wasn’t really clear what the effects of the pandemic would be. But as time went on, we saw that it still might be possible and got to work planning. We shot the rest of our exterior scenes in February 2021 to capture winter and take advantage of shooting outside, which everyone was more comfortable with.

COVID changed the way that production had to work. We followed all of the rules and protocol that had been set up by the industry over the course of the pandemic. But independent filmmaking always has those kinds of hurdles and so we made it work just like we do with everything else.

In your opinion, what makes a great production? Which creative and collaborative qualities are needed in order to produce a successful piece of work?

Filmmaking asks a bunch of people to go through the creative process in a very public way. So I think the most important thing for creating good work is making an environment of trust and safety so we can all balance each other's egos and vulnerability to make a work that is more than any of us could make alone.

Are there any cinematic elements or qualities that you utilized in which you hope can be showcased through this film?

One of the joys of making Corridor for me personally has been getting to play with some styles and genres that are new to me. Planning out how to shoot scenes where we need to ratchet up the tension or doing things like a pretty big car chase have pushed our team but are also a lot of fun. We’ve been watching movies like that most of our lives but being able to tear them apart and put them back together for our own project gives you a new perspective.

Creative processes can be a tricky thing. As a writer, I often encounter times where it is difficult to translate my ideas onto the page. How do you overcome this struggle in film? Did you ever experience moments where what you and your team desired could not effectively be translated into what you had achieved?

I think you find that even more with film, because it goes from something in the head of a few people, then is translated to a much larger group, then must meet the reality of the production as you bring it to life. So it is always changing.

My job is to be able to know what must be protected at all costs and when to open things up to what the world presents to me. It is a tough balance and I don’t always get it right. As I’ve made more work, I find that when I watch the finished film I appreciate that balance more than I do clinging to the original thing I saw in my head. I am lucky to work with so many brilliant and talented people and take a lot of joy in seeing the parts of themselves they have slipped into the world I started with.

Was there something that your team did differently, consciously or unconsciously, to subvert from the norm of traditional filmmaking?

I think one of the things that binds our core group together is a love for big, stylized, expressionist films. That hasn’t really been a very popular mode of filmmaking for a while now. Even big popcorn movies are talked about in terms of “realism” and “grittiness” and have a fatalism hanging over them.  And on the other hand, you have independent and foreign films where understatement and a real lack of stakes have taken over. A lot of those films are great, but it does start to feel very monotone.

So Corridor is the kind of movie we want to see. A movie that is first and foremost concerned with feelings and how to translate those to the audience using every tool cinema has to offer.

What films have been the most inspiring or influential to you, and why? Has any of them influenced Corridor in any way?

So many films. I have found in my earlier days, and I think this is true of a lot of people, the way inspiration would work was through emulation. But Corridor is maybe the first project where it feels more natural. So many works of art have become a part of my life and the way I think that they find their ways into my work without me being able to always point a finger at them.

That being said, some of the films that we have discussed a lot while working on Corridor include:

One From the Heart, Francis Ford Coppola

Mon Oncle, Jacques Tati

Point Blank, John Boorman

The Thin Man, W. S. Van Dyke

Beverly Hills Cop, Martin Brest

The Taking of Pelham 123, Joseph Sargent

Does your film hold any running themes or symbolism?

The biggest thing that ties together the different characters and stories in the film is the idea of identity, specifically how the characters see themselves and each other. We were interested in using the genre trope of mistaken identity and playing with it on a more personal level.

Are there any other projects, related or unrelated to film, that you are working on?

I’m currently working as the editor on Out of the Picture, a feature documentary by former Journal-Sentinel art critic Mary Louise Schumacher. It follows the changes in art criticism in the last 10 years as print publications downsize and the internet grows.

A number of other people in our team—actor Wes Tank, producer Kurt Ravenwood, and art director Lydia Ravenwood —are the makers of Story Raps, a series on the Kidoodle streaming service that uses rap to teach kids.

Lastly, what do you hope to achieve with this film? Is there a message you’d like to be taken away from your work?

I generally try to trust my intuition and feelings and sometimes don’t truly understand why I made something until looking back at it. But the pandemic gave me a lot of time to think and I think really this was the movie I needed right now and hope it can be that for others.

I find our current world very overwhelming. Hostility seems to have taken over all of our discourse. The stakes feel very high, and sometimes it is hard to tell if things really are as bad as they feel or if that is being warped by the social climate.

Corridor interacts with all of those situations but does so with a warmth and compassion that I find very comforting. It reframes all of those dynamics that can feel huge and insurmountable, and looks at them on the interpersonal level, where it feels like we have more control. I can’t solve political divide or global warming, but I can be a better person to those around me. I hope that feeling of taking control back of our world by interacting with it on our own level can reach people who see the film.