Boston LGBT Film Fest :: Jared Vincenti On 'Day of Youth'

There's a fine line between being an artist and being a poser. No one knows this better than the filmmakers who clamor around independent film festivals.

Jared Vincenti is on the road to making his film school dreams come true. He has made a feature film (How many of you can say you've done that?) and he's screening it at the Boston LGBT Film Festival this Saturday at the Paramount Center in the Theater District.

Vincenti calls "Day of Youth," "a romantic comedy for people who hate romantic comedies." And at its heart it is about a group of people with difficult dreams and a plethora of pretentions (in other words, the description of a typical hipster). His characters are "artists" who are stuck in the ideals of graduate school and must choose between slowly moving forward or finally moving on.

In the movie, a young woman named Rhee (Ally Tully) is unable to recall the last three years of her life due to head trauma. Fortunately nothing much has happened to her in all that time. She's got the same shitty job, she's dating the same stupid people and she's still living at home with her dad.

Though it sucks for her, memory loss provides the perfect opportunity for her ex-boyfriend, Aran (Joe Kidawski), and ex-girlfriend, Nat (Alex Sweeney), to make her believe she never broke up with them.

I sat down with Jared in at a hip coffee house (packed with art students from BU and Berklee) to talk about his film, and because everyone says it's the place to go if you wanna look cool.

Make his own way forward

EDGE: You spent over three years making this movie. Why would you choose to put all your efforts into making this particular story come to the screen?

Vincenti: I finished film school and I was just not having any success at finding my way as a director. I was really worried that I had sunk a lot of years and money into developing skills that I'd never use. So I wrote a script I knew I could shoot on a shoestring budget, and I decided to test myself and make my own way forward.

EDGE: Tell me about production. How did you get this movie made?

Vincenti: The whole crew was a circle of friends, and most of us lived a short walk apart. We begged and we borrowed. We shot in our backyard and friends' apartments and in public spaces and on empty roads late at night. We asked our friends and coworkers for help. And we raised money on Kickstarter to help finish shooting and for post-production.

Less graphic?

EDGE: "Day of Youth" wasn't always an LGBT movie tell me about how that came about.

Vincenti: When we were casting, both of Rhee's lovers and a couple other characters were all men. But we were having a really hard time finding the right fit. A friend suggested that I cast the roles as women instead "and see how it goes."

It was brilliant advice. I instantly got a film with stronger performers, and some really interesting women characters.

About a year later, Geena Davis wrote a piece in the Hollywood Reporter suggesting that every filmmaker make half of the characters in their film women, no matter how they were written. It's a great idea, and every filmmaker should try it at least once.

EDGE: The original script you wrote was more graphically sexual. Why did you change that?

Vincenti: You have to be open to letting the film change as you make it, because otherwise you'll never make a movie--certainly not on our budget. Some things change for practical reasons and some things change because you learn more about your characters or because your collaborators bring something to the table that you hadn't anticipated. It needs to be an organic process.

Eating out of a dumpster

EDGE: So Rhee has an ex-boyfriend and an ex-girlfriend and she has to make a choice.

Vincenti: When we see them in flashbacks, both Nat (the ex-girlfriend) and Aran (the ex-boyfriend) have found some early success as artists, but in the present day neither of them has seen that promise realized.

EDGE: Talk about Nat. Do you think of her as an artist or a poser?

Vincenti: Nat has doubled down on her commitment to her music, even though that means she's living out of her band's practice space and nabbing dinner from restaurant dumpsters.

EDGE: Have you ever eaten out of a dumpster?

Vincenti: No, but I do have about a hundred photos of various dumpsters on my phone from when we were scouting locations.

More than anyone else in the film, Nat has committed her life to her craft, so that absolutely makes her an artist in my mind.

Talent = success

EDGE: But she's terrible. At one point Rhee actually pays her to stop playing her violin.

Vincenti: Being talented doesn't guarantee being successful, and not being talented doesn't mean you can't be a star. Most importantly, as an artist you can't choose how good you are. You can only choose how you apply yourself, so I wanted the focus to be on Nat's choices and not her artistic prospects.

EDGE: Aran's taken the opposite tack, and he's trying to make the "grown up" choice by making peace with not getting anywhere as a photographer.

Vincenti: I don't know that either of them has made a right choice.

EDGE: Is he the one with the best chance of winning Rhee?

Vincenti: He's a barista at a coffee shop with two hundred dollars in a retirement account. That's not a whole lot of security.

I think he is trying out what life is like if he's not a photographer, and that comes with a little comfort. Maybe that's more attractive than sleeping in a warehouse and eating garbage, but I don't know it's much of a competitive edge over Nat.

Nat and Aran are both pretty lousy choices. They lie to her when she has brain damage!

Move beyond the past

EDGE: How much do you think our ideas of monogamy and "true love" play into our expectations of choice in this film?

Vincenti: Romantic comedies have a bad habit of forgiving a lot of demented behavior on the road to "true love." "Day of Youth" wears the skin of a romantic comedy, because romantic comedies love easy beginnings and easy endings.

The journey for all three characters is to grow to see past that, and to learn that you have to be okay with where you are before you can be excited about where you're going.

EDGE: Do you believe in true love?

Vincenti: I think in the real world, all love is true love. In narrative, the notion of one "true" love makes storytelling easy because it gives you a neat ending: the hero finds true love, it's perfect, there's nowhere else to go, the end. Life isn't so neat, and writing stories about love makes me aware of how hard it is to convey that real-life messiness in a satisfying story.

EDGE: If this is the only movie I get to see at the festival, tell me why I should go see this movie? What have you provided to compete with the other material that's out there?

Vincenti: We're the hometown team! You definitely want to come see a movie that was made by local hands--how often does that happen?

EDGE: How often do Matt and Ben make a movie?

Vincenti: Come on! Also, you really should see as much of the fest as you can. The festival has put together a really great lineup this year, and there are a lot of movies that I'm really looking forward to seeing. Other filmmakers aren't the competition if they're making stuff I love - I'm an audience member, too.

EDGE: There's a lot of independent film out there, do you ever feel lost in the shuffle?

Vincenti: I can't keep the other filmmakers from making movies, so I just focus on my work and hope that people will like it and spread the word. I'd rather live in a world of good art than be the very best in a world of crap.

"Day of Youth" plays Saturday, Apr. 4 at 5 P.M. at the Bright Family Screening Room in the Paramount Center (559 Washington St, Boston). For tickets visit artsemerson.org.

Watch the trailer to "Days of Youth:"