"As You Are" director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte explores filmmaking in the age of Trump
For his debut feature film, “As You Are,” 24-year-old director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte went back to 1994 to explore adolescent isolation and confusion in his native upstate New York.
Joris-Peyrafitte spoke with CBS News about the importance of setting “As You Are” in the Clinton era and how artists have to adapt to the age of Trump.
Why a period piece? Why this period?
For us, setting it in the ‘90s allowed us to deal more in the immediate connection between people. It was important to find these kids in a moment when they really need a community, somebody else who understands them and when they don’t have the intermediary of social media or phones or anything like that. It also puts it into a cultural time and place that pushed a lot of the ideas that we wanted to be in the background -- this idea of coming out of Reagan and the reassertion of gender roles and family values, which I think is very much what everyone in the film is trying to navigate.
That’s where people like Kurt Cobain fit in. That’s a person who tapped into and became the cultural zeitgeist to a certain degree. It was a voice coming out of the darkness speaking to these kids, and that’s an incredibly powerful thing. For us it was less about showing that things were harder at a certain point -- because I don’t believe that that’s necessarily true -- and more about being able to deal with the emotions of that and live inside the emotional complexity of that.
What would the challenges be to tell a story like this today, when everyone has a phone and is online all the time?
I think it would be a different kind of film and would require a different storytelling style. I think that there are ways of telling those stories now, and I think that’s going to be the mission of filmmakers now to come -- how to adjust and re-present a culture that’s sort of all about this cannibalizing of images and content and communication.
What’s coming up next?
Hopefully in the next few months we’ll be going into production on “Mother’s Milk,” which takes place in Poughkeepsie, New York -- so I’ve moved 20 miles away. It’s a kind of film noir and revolves around the opioid epidemic that’s going on in Upstate New York and all over the country. Most of the old noir films were made by filmmakers who were running away from Nazi Germany, and those films are about a loss of morality and an attempt to find some kind of moral center in a rapidly devolving world. I think that’s something that’s very poignant right now.
Does the changing political landscape inform how you approach new work as a filmmaker?
I think right now is a really interesting time -- I mean, terrifying, obviously -- but especially for people in the arts or film, it’s a time to take inventory of what we’re doing and what our effect has on the culture at large. I think there’s definitely a responsibility at this point, and at least for me the feeling has been kind of galvanizing: “OK, I know that this needs to mean something. There needs to be a reason to tell these stories.” And that doesn’t mean that they need to be political movies, but I think that an awareness and a sensitivity to what’s going on and finding a way to tell stories that exist in that world is really important.
“As You Are” opens in New York Feb. 24 and Los Angeles March 3.