Film Show 074: Dan Sallitt

Dan Sallitt

Dan Sallitt (b. 1955) is a film critic and filmmaker born in Pennsylvania and based in New York City. After becoming obsessed with films during college, he moved to Los Angeles where he then became a critic for the Los Angeles Reader. Eventually, he found it necessary to make films himself, eventually crafting his microbudget debut feature Polly Perverse Strikes Again! (1986). More than a decade later he released his second featureHoneymoon (1998), one of the great masterpieces of ’90s American independent cinema. Since then, he’s crafted multiple works—including The Unspeakable Act (2012) and Fourteen (2019)—that are defined by a minimalist aesthetic, naturalistic dialogue, and a raw and incisive look into interpersonal relationships. His newest film is What Can’t Be Mentioned (2026), which will have its world premiere at this year’s edition of the New York Film Festival. The film is considered the second part of a trilogy after The Unspeakable Act. Along with reprised roles for Tallie Medel and Sky Hirschkron, Sallitt brings on Tone Glow favorite Kit Zauhar. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Sallitt on August 19th, 2026 via Zoom to discuss his path towards cinephilia, working with intimacy coordinators, and the making of his new feature film.

Joshua Minsoo Kim: In the behind-the-scenes photos you sent me for your new film, What Can’t Be Mentioned (2026), you’re wearing a Big Star shirt. Decades ago, one of your web diary entries from the Honeymoon (1998) days mentioned going to the New Orleans Jazz Fest. You’ve also played in bands yourself. How do you feel your experience and engagement with music informs your approach to filmmaking or even film criticism?

Dan Sallitt: Boy, I wonder how much it connects. I think this period of my life is a little less musically active—I don’t get to listen to as much music now because I don’t have the apartment to myself as much. I was deep into it for most of my young adult life. Big Star was certainly one of my favorites. I’m a huge Richard Thompson fan. I’m a Byrds fan in general and a Gene Clark fan in particular.

That stuff means a lot to me for sure, but whether or not it connects to film… I don’t know. I tend to keep them a little bit separate. I don’t use music on the soundtracks—that’s too substantial! I think the only time I’ve used music, unless I’m forgetting, is on my first movie, Polly Perverse Strikes Again! (1986). My friend Larry Jacobson, who is also very much into Big Star and power pop, composed a really nice theme that I used. The purist in me feels like that’s almost too many inputs to control. [Editor’s Note: Larry Jacobson and Dan Sallitt played together in the rock band Blow This Nightclub].

Is this about the sanctity of film as a visual medium?

A part of me likes the purity of film without anything else involved. I like the fact that all you have is how it’s framed, where the cuts fall, and the acting. This is not a philosophical position—I’m totally happy with any film using music—but if I don’t like a piece of music and it’s in the movie, will that affect my view of the film, and should it? That kind of purism runs through my mind, but I don’t want to activate that. I don’t want this to turn into a philosophy of filmmaking.

I know you were born in Northeastern Pennsylvania, and both Honeymoon and All the Ships at Sea (2004) were shot there. Do you mind talking about what that place was like in the ’60s and ’70s?

I was born in a small town—it was neither the countryside nor a big town. It was an odd place, the kind that people try to escape from. And I did that too. I went to school somewhere else, I went to graduate school in Los Angeles and lived there for 15 years before I went to New York. I turned myself into a big city person. It worked out well for filmgoing, and certainly when I moved to New York it was because it was the most practical thing to do short of moving to Paris, in terms of seeing movies. I’m fond of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania now. My mom and brother still live there and I enjoy visiting them, but if I didn’t leave, I wouldn’t be so fond of it. It’s easy for me to feel good about it these days.

How early on were you itching to get out of there?

It was always destined to happen. I was not unhappy in high school—I had friends of various groups and sorts. I wasn’t yet into movies, but I was fine. I got into movies shortly after I went to college, and I instantly started seeing a lot of them. As soon as that happened, I started evaluating places differently. Not that I had a terrible time in Wilkes-Barre—I was first into the classic American cinema, and this was a time when cable television would service the classic American cinema well—but when I went to big towns, I went to theaters. Living in New York now, I almost never watch anything at home even though some of the films I’d like to see would be easier to watch at home. And that’s still my life.

Were your parents or other family members interested in the arts in the same way?

My parents were not particularly into the arts. Certainly my mom likes old movies, but I didn’t come from that kind of background. I wasn’t, by birth, meant to be an artist or something (laughter). I broke away from where I started.

What was the film that started it all, that set you down the path to being an obsessive filmgoer?

That’s an easy one. I went to school in ’72, and on November 10th, 1972 I walked into To Have and Have Not (1944) at the Park Square Cinema in Boston. I walked into that film a dilettante and walked out a crazed filmgoer (laughter). The transition was very clear. I don’t know how long it took me to get up to speed, but I was certainly seeing a lot of movies very quickly.

What are the most outrageous lengths you’ve gone to in order to see a film?

Oh boy, it’s hard for me to answer because those outrageous lengths would have probably been during an earlier phase in my life. When I was in Los Angeles, I may have gone to San Francisco to see things, but the goal was to have things close to him. I wish I could tell you a good story, but I don’t think I ever jumped on a plane and went to Paris.

I wanted to talk about your filmmaking. I know you’re disapproving of Polly Perverse Strikes Again! nowadays, but it’d be more than a decade until you made your next film, and I’m curious what things you learned throughout that process. What things do you remember about making it? What led you to making it in the first place?

I wouldn’t say I disapprove of Polly, but all I can really say about it is that it’s youngish in some ways, and it’s definitely in the crudest video that I’ve ever used. I would hate to reject it—it meant a lot to me at the time. It’s got some good stuff, it’s got some good acting that I like. I think wanting to make my own movie just came with the territory—it was a really early desire. It was an ambition I had; I was incapable of just being a moviegoer. I was thinking about making movies really early, and I got that opportunity when I was a film critic in Los Angeles.

One of the many places I was covering was a video place called EZTV in West Hollywood. It was run by a guy named John Dorr, who’s no longer with us, but he was a very serious filmgoer and critic himself. He offered me the opportunity. The equipment was made available to me, and all I had to do was put things together. I really owe him quite a lot. So, it was on the agenda for sure. I changed ideas all the time about how I’d make movies. At first I thought I’d become a Hollywood filmmaker, but after a while it seemed like a foolhardy thing and not something I’d even wanna do. But I was always trying to make films somehow.

Were you ever making your own home movies or experiments prior to that?

No, not too much. I wanted to make feature films. Polly is an experiment in a way because the means are certainly much smaller than anything else I’ve done, but I think I was just heading in that direction. At a certain point, I realized that I had to change my life in order to make movies in any way, shape, or form. And I did. I quit my film critic job, and I tried to use my background—I had a math degree—to turn myself into a techie. That looked a little unlikely at first, but I got a job through a filmmaker, actually, named Stanton Kaye. He ran a computer company called Quarterdeck.

So I quit criticism and became the lowliest tech support person. I got good enough at it to make more money. The money I made over the years was not an outrageous amount, but it was enough to save and make my own films if I kept it low-budget, which I do to this day.

I know you went to Harvard to get your BA in mathematics. Do you see a throughline at all between math and art beyond just the fact you could become a techie? Do you think the way you think and engage with the world, typified by your interest in math, is present in the way you think about filmmaking, writing a script, storyboarding, or directing actors?

That’s a difficult one because it’s a different thing altogether. When I do math, I always feel that I kind of vanish and the math problem is all that exists, whereas you can’t do that with any sort of art—you have to be present, you have to be a mediator. I kind of cop to a bit of an obsessive-compulsive approach. I storyboard and plan ahead of time, so there’s a lot of aspects to my life that have a sort of obsessive-compulsive quality, and I’m sure that a lot of mathematicians have that quality before they realize it (laughter). I certainly did! That quality was part of my affection for math. So they’re very different, but there are obviously some personality traits that carry over.

I wanted to talk about the new film. In the first scene we see the couple in bed, and I’m already thinking of Honeymoon. But also much later in the film, there’s a moment when the brother is on the computer and typing away, ignoring what someone is trying to say to him. And that’s also just like one of the last scenes in Honeymoon. Are these intentional callbacks? Are these just your proclivities?

I think we’re talking proclivities because I never thought of this until you just mentioned it (laughs). These characters in the new film, the first couple, are having a hard time with their sex life, and you’d think I’d recall this in my mind, but I didn’t think of it as being similar in any way. And with the typing, I bet you can find that in some of my other films, but if you can’t, it’s just the way I approach a lot of things—I use mundane activities.

I’m interested in how you shoot people engaging with technology. They’re on computers, they’re texting. I know in All the Ships at Sea, there’s a letter written and I believe that was meant to be a callback to Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962). I’m curious if you see these things all in a lineage—is shooting someone writing a letter the same as someone on a computer or on their phone?

All those things are the same, aren’t they? I know when you’re talking about with Vivre Sa Vie. I wasn’t personally doing that, but yeah—Godard did it for sure. There are certain things that I feel where the pure and simple way to do it—without speeding it up or doing any tricks—grants that same sort of quality. With a lot of things we’re talking about, it seems to be in that mode. It’s a way of filming that’s got a minimalist quality, and the minimalism is due to certain character traits that I have. Whether they’re the same character traits as Godard—sais pas.

You’ve now mentioned “purity” twice. What is the reason for this interest in purity? What is the end goal? Purity seems like a conduit for something else, and I’m curious where it comes from and what it’s leading towards. What would be different about your films if they were impure?

The impurity that I could do and try to avoid is almost all on a style level. When I’m thinking of a movie, I’m not thinking about purity. It’s a personality trait, and it does get involved in the conceptual process—you might have an idea and the way you bring it out, pursue it, and draw it into a feature length can come from this desire to be minimalist about it. But coming up with an idea for a movie is not… you can’t just follow a rule there. You have to create, and it’s a tricky thing. You have to plunge into the void and come back with something. The reason I’m talking about things like purity, and maybe I should be using the word “minimalism,” is because once you decide you’re going to do what you’re going to do, along the way—in the process of creating it—I keep it as simple and as close to the initial conception as possible. There’s a lot of filmmakers—a lot of good ones—who don’t think that way at all. They think more is more. I’m not opposed to their movies, but I tend to bring in that minimalist desire. It creeps in, in various ways.

Let’s talk about the conception of your new film. In the press kit for What Can’t Be Mentioned, you note that this is the second part of a trilogy and that the third part will never be made. Why was the framework of a trilogy important? Why not just have it be a simple sequel?

You can make of this what you will, but part three—which I still never want to do—brings this to a certain conclusion. There’s a fulfillment to this narrative. Part two is just kind of suspended. I did have the impulse to bring it to a conclusion, to treat the whole with something that has a shape. The fact is that part three… I just don’t have anything. I don’t have enough to make a movie, and that’s why it’s gone—not because I wanted to have an eternal part two hanging there. Part three just kind of sucks and it never came together in my mind. Part two felt good, and that’s a good compromise. That’s me acknowledging that my master schema was not gonna happen because I failed to come up with something compelling for the third part. So now this is forever a two-part thing.

This particular movie hangs on the characters who were already created. Tallie [Medel], who plays Jackie, gets to act out in a way I find amusing. I actually really wasn’t sure how much I was going to be able to stand behind this movie. I liked it always—I liked the way Jackie was running roughshod over all these established social concepts. It amused me and I thought, I can do this, I wanna do this, I wonder what people are gonna think of it. To my surprise, people are actually liking it better than I thought they were going to. I wasn’t sure of that. It’s turning out the reactions have been more positive than expected, but you know… a part two has a sort of free-form quality, necessarily. It starts and ends somewhere that’s not a finishing point, and that’s the way this one is.

Partially why I liked this film is because Tallie is such an incredible actress. She was in The Unspeakable Act (2012) and Fourteen (2019). And of course with Honeymoon and All the Ships at Sea you were working with Edith Meeks. What’s it like to work with these actresses from one project to the next?

You know, I think Tallie’s amazing. She’s somebody who adds to your conception rather than executes it. You can tell that I enjoy working with people multiple times. You can see that with Strawn Bovee too. I actually tried to get both Strawn and Edith for The Unspeakable Act, but it didn’t work out. I think Edith isn’t acting anymore, and Strawn had a conflict. There’s pluses and minuses. There’s pluses to bringing new things in and that tends to happen. But on the other hand, when you have something good going on, you’re not done after one movie. If you like an actor, you have things to explore, and they inspire things. Several of my movies were conceived of as, like, “What would these two actors be like working together?” That’s definitely how All the Ships at Sea came about. That’s how Fourteen came about, but the actors I thought about did not wind up playing one of the roles. Fourteen came about from thinking about people I’ve worked with or wanting to work with, and Caterina (2019) was conceived around Agustina Muñoz. There’s an alternation in my filmmaking between projects that needed to be cast from scratch and projects that just resulted from me contemplating who I knew and liked.

You brought Kit Zauhar into this film. It makes total sense to me that you like her films. Can you talk about the decision behind bringing her on and what it was like to work with her?

I never worked with Kit but I felt like I knew her films. I don’t think I realized completely how much of an actress she was. I thought of her as a filmmaker, but she’s pretty much a consummate actress, and it was almost a challenge to have her and Tallie together because they’re both so fulfilled in themselves. They’ve both done everything they’ve done to be themselves, but in different ways. Kit came in because I was familiar with her persona and thinking of her for the part made sense. We changed her part of course.

How did things change?

It wasn’t as if I had a specific thing I needed to change because I cast Kit, but once she was there, I wanted to do things that felt right for that character, for that person I’d seen in her own movies. I think that’s just the way it goes when you’re working with somebody—you play into the things that have impressed you about them.

When did you start writing the script for this?

After Fourteen and Caterina, I wanted to do this other movie. It was too big for me to self-finance. It’s called Late Autumn, and it was about an old dude. I still have this script and I would still love to do it, but it has not materialized.

You’ve written about Joe Swanberg in the past and how his approach to improvisation leads to moments that are unique to that. Your approach isn’t like that at all. Can you speak to why you feel improvisation isn’t something that you wouldn’t want to explore for your own filmmaking process? Why does that not mesh?

There’s a little improvisation in everything, and I’m going through the script for this film now because I have to make dialogue lists for people who are going to make subtitles. I’m realizing as I’m going through it that there are things that are not in the script—people change things a bit. Someone like Swanberg… I admire him enormously. I think his intelligence as a filmmaker is really underrated—people don’t realize how much his conceptions help those movies. But it’s true that I would not start a movie with as little as he does. Mind you, I’m not saying he starts with nothing—he brings some stuff in—but he manages to pull it off. He has ideas about structure, too. The fact I’m a little bit more obsessive-compulsive than him, that I wouldn’t go into a film without having things nailed down, isn’t any sort of virtue. He doesn’t improvise in this way where it’s just, “Whatever happens, happens.” He has ideas about form.

Earlier you were talking about your scrapped film, which stars an old man. You typically have women as the lead in your films. Why is that? Is it from other movies you’ve seen, or from the women you’ve had in your own life?

It’s capital-w Woman. I said to somebody recently that if you go to a party and it’s all men there, it’s gonna have a funny feeling (laughter). That’s just the way it is with movies, too. I like the concept of women, I like hanging out with women, and I like putting them in my movies for the same reason. It’s not a principle. When I came up with this other idea that didn’t have a woman in a major role, it was fine. But really, a lot of times… I mentioned that a lot of movies were putting together people that I’d worked with already, and I think I possibly just know more actresses than actors. I’ve worked with several male actors more than once, and they’re awesome, but I don’t know… why are women a little more pervasive in my vision of the acting world? There’s a lot of female performers who have made a dent in me, including those I’ve worked with.

I like how you said you like “the concept of women.” What do you mean by that? And I loved the party comment.

This isn’t too much of an artistic view but a personal one, but if you walk into a party, you’d like to see some women there. And that’s because of the old Adam—it’s the sex differential and the fact that we are drawn to one sex or another. I don’t wanna make too much of that, but it certainly gives me no pain to be making a movie with women for the same reason that it gives me no pain to be hanging out with women. There’s something pre-artistic there and I’m trying to cop to it without taking it too far because it ultimately has to be art—you have to make a work of art out of it.

Given that sex is a notable and significant aspect of your film as well as Honeymoon, where do the dialogues come from? Are these ideas coming from books, films, personal experiences?

I wonder if I ever got inspiration from another film. Off hand, I don’t think that’s it. They start cold in my mind—I usually come up with them myself. The first two movies I did, Polly and Honeymoon, had nudity in them. I like the idea of not having a prohibition against nudity. I like breaking down that barrier. I think it really helps movies. But after doing that twice, I got it through my head that it makes a set different. It puts everyone a little on edge. It puts all these limitations. I started feeling uncomfortable that I was putting people through that slight discomfort. So I stopped, and I haven’t done any nudity since Honeymoon. And it’s too bad to limit your subject matter a little bit, but why turn a set into something a little more tense or guarded than it has to be? I don’t regret leaving that subject matter behind.

Are there examples of other things you’ve stopped doing to make sure everything is good on set, that people are comfortable?

Yes. Directing as a social practice is easy to screw up, and I think I did that in the beginning. Before I had experience, I would say things to actors or give instructions that I would never do now. It was counterproductive. You have to swim in the same water we all do, as the line goes from Chinatown (1974). If you’re working with actors, you want to help them as best as you can. The initial impulse of why you wanted to make the movie, or your immature idea of what a filmmaker does, might not be the best thing on set. It might have the opposite effect of what you want. I do think that as time has gone by, I say fewer useless or counterproductive things to actors, but at the beginning I was full of useless, counterproductive things (laughter).

Can you give an example? What’s something you wouldn’t say now that you did in the past?

If you talk about something that you might think as a critic, like the way that something works, or something about the thematic or stylistic structure, and I’m not saying that an actor doesn’t want to hear that, but it’s not something they can use as they perform. If you unload that sort of thing on them at the wrong time, they’re gonna shut you out and go to the place in their head where they can actually perform. Why introduce that sort of obstacle for them? After a while, if you get some sense of what they care about in that moment, you can help a little bit. You can say things that relate more to what they themselves are gonna have to put in their head as they perform. And it’s different from actor to actor, too. But still, there are things that nobody wants to hear. If I went off and pontificated about what I was trying to do with the scenes artistically… nobody wants to hear that on a set! (laughter).

This is funny to think about because you were talking about directing as a social act, and it’s kind of the opposite of being a critic, which is an antisocial act.

Uh huh.

Do you think your critic brain and directing brain are separate?

Yes, and it’s fine. As a critic, you try to consummate the idea, and nobody needs to read it besides those who are interested in what you’re writing about. When you’re making a film, you have to get it out of your head that that’s all there is. You may have started thinking that way, but what is happening is a bunch of people coming together in a certain configuration to do certain things. There are different personality types that correspond approximately to some of the roles they have, and if you’re gonna be unaware of that, if you’re gonna be ignorant, it doesn’t hurt anybody except your movie. I wouldn’t wanna do the same thing on a set that I would do in an article. I would like the movie to be worthy of an article, but that’s not the same thing.

You don’t see filmmaking as a sort of end game of criticism? There’s a history of film critics who ended up making films themselves, and I think of filmmaking for some of them as being an extension of their criticism. Would you say that’s not true for you?

I don’t wanna say there’s no connection, but there truly shouldn’t be too much connection. If you wanna connect those things fully, you’re gonna be a very limited critic. You’re only gonna like things that connect to your inspiration, and your inspiration about filmmaking tends to be personal and narrow. You don’t want a filmmaker to be too much of a generalist—you want them to focus on their own personality and the things that attract them to filmmaking. But as a critic, you want to do more than that. When you see a filmmaker writing some criticism and they’re just trashing a film because it’s not what they like, it doesn’t do anybody any good and it’s not the essence of criticism either. The essence of criticism is to expand your view just enough so you can take in multiple approaches.

With this new film, you had an intimacy coordinator. When I was reading through the diaries for Honeymoon, there’s one where you’re talking about Edith’s first nude scene where her character is masturbating, and you talk about how it was a tricky thing to navigate. What was it like working with an intimacy coordinator for this film?

I took the intimacy coordinator because Tallie, who I love, wanted one. She asked so nicely. I was a little uncertain, and it’s because an intimacy coordinator is kind of like a director on the same set as another director. They may try to make things easy, but it’s a different agenda and authority on set. If I were imagining an ideal world, I don’t think an intimacy coordinator would be one of the first things I’d think of for my movies, but Tallie wanted it and I love her so it’s fine. Their actual work on the set was kind of funny to me, but I kept it to myself. I did sit there thinking this was weird, but I didn’t express it. Everyone was happy. And no, the film didn’t suffer for it. But I can imagine it being a problem in the future.

So the strangeness comes with both the unfamiliarity of it and also the power dynamic on set?

It’s the power dynamic that’s funny. The intimacy coordinator—let’s be frank—is there to keep the director from being a jerk and running roughshod over the actors’ sensibilities. Of course you don’t want to be a jerk, but on the other hand people have different conceptions. And that’s two powerful visions that could collide. There weren’t any problems on the set. I mean, I was sitting there thinking, geez I hope no one can see what the intimacy coordinator told the actors to do instead of sex stuff (laughs). I don’t think anybody could see it, so she did her job properly. But it was a different agenda altogether, and there’s a little stress that goes with that. But it’s fine and I shook it off. Next movie I’ll confront it again if somebody wants it.

In 2002 you wrote a diary entry about how the script was already written for All the Ships at Sea. And then you said in a solemn tone, “Sadly, it didn’t run more than 55 pages, which means it’ll be less than an hour long.” Obviously the movie ended up being more than an hour long, and the new movie is a similar length to that one. Why’d you say that back then?

The world makes a distinction between short films and feature films, and I didn’t want to fall into the one category as opposed to the other one because I think of these films as developing over a feature-length scale. In no case have I padded a script out, nor do I think I’m tempted to. It’s just the way it is. I think the sadness I expressed in that old diary entry maybe now I don’t feel as much. But it’s the same situation: I’m glad this film is 60 minutes as opposed to 59 minutes. It makes a difference in terms of where it’s gonna play.

That reminds me of a lot of your other diary entries that lament the film industry, the film festival circuit, and all the politics and frustrations that come with that. It is funny that the way people view a film can be as arbitrary as a single minute.

I think of some films that are shorter than an hour as being a feature. There’s something about the ambition or stretch of a film that’s more important than the actual running time. There’s a gap between the way the world sorts features and shorts, and what is in a filmmaker’s mind as separating a feature from a short. The short I made a few years ago was a different approach altogether. The structure was completely different, and I didn’t take that approach with this movie. I’d like for people to think of this as a feature because I had to think of it as a feature when I was doing it.

You used to joke that your target audience was “the 15 auteurist film critics in the world,” but then The Unspeakable Act changed things because it was more popular than all your previous films. Do you have any thoughts about your films gaining more fans over the years? Do you think there’s anything different about filmgoers today than in the past?

Well, I think there are more than 15 (laughter). And to tell you the truth, I’m still kind of amazed at how different filmgoers are now in terms of what they want and what satisfies them. I like the fact that people want to see my movies, but I don’t understand it. I don’t have a gut feeling about it. I still think that my target audience, if I have any, is those 15 auteurist critics. Maybe seven of them are in Paris and three of them are in New York (laughter). It’s really hard to know. I’m glad people want to see the movies—it helps—but I don’t understand it. The whole question of how two people come together when a little bit of probing reveals aesthetic differences… it’s a mystery. I just try not to think about it. I just try to make the movie I want to make and hope that there are 15 people out there.

I have a few quick questions I wanted to ask. Can you speak to me about what you like about Hong Sang-soo’s films?

You know, I’m not sure if he’s an influence but it’s hard to say. He’s more convincingly against structure and style than Joe Swanberg—he doesn’t mind violating structural ideas that Joe would not violate. He’s just so intelligent and unusual, and I appreciate the weird way his mind works. There are a couple films lately where it seems like he was too casual, where he maybe took that casualness too far, but I’m really interested in the way he looks at the world and the things he thinks are worth showing. They’re different than what other people think are worth showing.

Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to mention?

I don’t think so, aside from the fact that What Can’t Be Mentioned’s title comes from a line in The Unspeakable Act. And that would’ve been the case for the third film as well. It was gonna be called Irreplaceable.

There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

I don’t know, we love too many things about ourselves. But one thing I like about myself is that I’ve really changed a lot since I was a kid. I’ve discarded some of the headstrong, crazy things. Now I really do approximate the detached, rational person I’d like to be. On set, I think I’m a little bit better, though when I made my first film I was 30 and already past my worst behaviors. I have to admit, with filmmaking you have to hang on to your idiosyncrasies. I’m making a movie about somebody who is willing to disrupt. I was doing that with Polly Perverse Strikes Again!, and there’s something weird about enjoying that sort of thing, but whether or not it kills other people’s enjoyment, this is a movie where somebody leans into her most extreme personality issues, tears down the house, and then goes back home and works on herself. That’s a pattern I tend to follow, especially if I’m aiming for comedy. This partly comes from personal experiences. I’ve actually improved with maturation. I was arrogant, I was careless with people. In terms of philosophy, I would choose things that suited me and would drive them home. That’s not who I am anymore. I’m more able to have a broader canvas and not just approach it with my own predilections or personality orientation. Thank god, because my personality orientation is a little bit weird (laughter).

Dan Sallitt’s new feature film, What Can’t Be Mentioned, has its world premiere at this year’s edition of the NYFF.

Thank you for reading the 74th issue of Film Show. Weird.

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