Set against the backdrop of lush green forest and rural decay, a soul seems to be wandering. Almost as if we catch them right in the middle of their yearning, we follow along through moments of pondering and reflection. Void of dialogue aside from a short flashback sequence, the entire picture is accompanied by layers of synth and guitar melodies swelling and fading with each moment of realization and hope. This isn't a film that intends to hand you a plot, a problem, and a solution with a bow tied on at the end to wrap it all up. It's a venture into raw emotion, and as you watch, you will slowly start to find yourself. In the nostalgia of chirping crickets, as the music builds to a climax, you’ll see yourself in the still contemplative faces on screen and feel the warmth of a long overdue embrace as it all comes to a cathartic close. Writers Sophia Stolkey and Amilyn Jones deliver a nine-minute and thirty-three second tribute to those of us who are searching—searching for that someone or that something that will make us whole. The thing that tethers us to this plane, we are oftentimes unsure if it even exists, but the endless quest to find it proves that it has to be. Us of All People is an ode to kinship, following a short but important journey to find a connection while lost in the vast darkness that is the mind. Come along with me as I get a look inside how this story came to be; in conversation with Co-writer Director and Cinematographer of Us Of All People Amilyn Jones.

AT: So where did “Us Of All People” come from? How was the project creatively born?

AJ: Us Of All People was born from me and my co-writer Sophia Stolkey. We did film studies together in college. She's one of my best girlfriends. Actually right now she's going for her masters at UCLA film school and I'm just so proud of her! We said we wanted to make a movie before the summer was over, and she came to me with a script she had written, and we had a night where we went back and forth on it. I made some adjustments, and she came to me with some ideas. For her, she was initially inspired by a friendship she had with someone she met during a stay at a mental hospital, and that kind of companionship and feeling when you need someone in a desperate and dark place. I think that comes across. I hope it does anyway. Things aren't exact from the script, but that's how these things go, and I’ve learned through loving film all my life and doing film studies that there's a difference between having these thoughts about cinema, or these feelings about how it should work and actually trying those things out.

AT: I agree; I think it definitely comes across pretty profoundly. To speak about structuring the story, to me, I think it sort of feels like it starts right in the middle, and we spend those seven minutes building and building to that beautiful ending. Was it hard at all to cut the film down to size and still say what you wanted to say in just a few minutes?

AJ: Well, the script is like three pages maximum; so much of the film was built in the editing. The scene where she's lying in the car was originally meant to be the opener. I mean, we thought the film was going to be like three-minutes tops. We didn't plan for longer. As far as what you said about it feeling like it starts in the middle, that actually makes sense, because when you start off with her in the forest at the beginning—the emphasis behind that for me was you just want a goal and a mood at the beginning. This goal you can see she's walking around, she's searching for something, and you can see this tension building with the shots of her walking and the music slowly creeping in and right as it's peaking and about to explode, we go to her on that cliff, and you just feel an absence. A lot of shots of this thing weren’t in the script at all. I was just off camera, like, “Let me get a shot of this." I didn't know what was going to happen, but I just had Aniya Anderson, our wonderful actor—so beautiful with the biggest eyes on the planet. You can just see her soul right through her eyes. I just let her sit, with what this moment meant to her character searching for this person or this thing that she knows is there, and I just sat there, and I was just like yes. And this is one of the few things I kind of tried to actively take from other films, because I wasn't really thinking about that during the production. We knew it was a nature film, and the most impactful moments in the cinema of nature for me recently have been Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee and Memoria, which just have the most luscious, beautiful, transfixing, meaningful nature landscapes I've seen in a movie maybe ever, and the way the characters relate to it and exist within it. You know it does kind of start in the middle when you have the context, and it's the barest amount of context that you need. When you say it was hard to cut down to size, I think, with a short film, that's what is really dangerous. Because if you give people too much, then it feels like not enough time, and if you don't give people enough, then you can feel yourself really languishing there and, in the edit it kind of felt like that sometimes, but we knew we needed that. Especially that scene with her by the water after the flashback, you need that little pocket there to just sit with her and feel that, because I really think that's where the audience comes together with her as the protagonist. You just let yourself reflect on your own kind of lost friendships that you're looking for or these accidental estrangements you had with people in your life. I think that's where the power of that comes from. I hope I answered your question there.

AT: It's really interesting that it was originally only supposed to be three minutes. Not that I know anything about filmmaking, but I do feel that letting things happen naturally and just letting the creativity flow outside of what's been scripted seems to create some of the best moments in film. It obviously really speaks to the creative abilities of those involved to be able to step into an emotion and curate it for their audience. You were the cinematographer as well as director; you to me have such a distinct, recognizable style. What techniques do you use to achieve your aesthetic?

AJ: My style when I do photography falls under somewhat of a promotional lens. The thing with that is creating things that are eye-popping, so it's about getting it from an interesting angle and getting the shapes right because the basics of any image are shapes and colors, that’s it. While editing the first few times, I just found this freedom of making it look how it felt. With so much of my Buckshot Princess stuff I'm trying to feed off their energy and the thematics of their songs, but with this I knew we had to go with a cleaner look. It couldn't just be that. In my photography, I found I really like this fractured, digitally fucked kind of thing, and even in the cleaner shots of Us Of All People, I like that digital grain. It lets you know that something real is happening; it gives you something to hold on to. Not trying to make the images stronger and not relying so much on editing was definitely a lesson I learned through this and have actually applied that to my photography work post-production. Trusting in what my photography taught me and going farther into it is something I really believe in with photography and videography. You can force yourself through a crowd and you can get all the shots that you want, sure, but I heard this thing that you make a few films when you're making something, you make the film that you write, the film that you shoot, and the film you edit. The film that you edit ends up being the one that's made, but at the end of the day, there's the film that the world allows you to make. There are the shots that the world lets you get, and there are a lot of things we didn't get. It's about what comes naturally. As far as tech stuff, the whole thing was mostly shot on a Nikon D3200 with a 55-200 mm lens. I really liked having to get a little farther away but still getting these flatter images; it kind of just makes everything surround her, and she's just a part of this tableau of nature.

AT: Letting this experience teach you and become what it is instead of forcing any preconceived ideas onto it and having that instinctual approach to your work ensures that everything you make will always be fresh, and even in your photography, you have the ability to get your audience fully immersed in the world the way you see it. Another really emotional aspect of this film is the scoring. The music was such a perfect pair to each sequence. I know you wanted to work with local musicians. How did that play out? Who all got involved?

AJ: Since this whole thing kind of started with me and my friend wanting to make something together before she moved away. It's meant to be this marriage between us, and we are both people who have stayed in mental hospitals, and we have very similar experiences, just two people who have grown to love each other very much. Sophia is one of the best people I know and one of the best writers too. I love her so much. The music was something I was very nervous about before going in because I knew I wanted a lot of different voices to send me what they thought it would be, and I would create something out of that because, by nature, it's a bunch of things that don't know that all of these other things are out there and they're all just making their sounds. That was my original idea, but then, on a time constraint, the only one who got to me in time was Evan Peck of Buckshot Princess. He sent me about seven tracks with his guitar, but there were these two that were long and just this noodling, and they were beautiful, and they had these sections that the moment I heard them, I knew they were going in, and editing those to just explode on that embrace was so nice. So then I asked myself what I wanted to do, so I tried a lot of synths, and I ended up settling on this synthy piano that sort of sounds like a tape, and it does sort of feel like in the midst of the guitar it’s the peace in this cacophony of emotion, and that’s what I love so much about it. For years Evan and I have talked about doing films together, Buckshot Princess music videos upcoming, and other little projects and ideas we have incoming as well, so getting to have that talk with one another was really nice, but I do want to thank all of the other people that wanted to get involved.

AT: Making this film along with Sophia being such like-minded creatives with shared but unique experiences must have been an endearing emotional experience in a way, especially with her leaving, but now being able to have this piece of the two of you together living in this project seems quite a beautiful sentiment. Evan Peck above all else always gets the vibe. What he brought to the table and what you were able to create and put together really captures each moment in the story perfectly. That’s one of my favorite things when a piece of music marries seamlessly with a piece of visual art. Last but not least, is there anything you, as the co-writer and director, want the audience to understand or take away from the film?

AJ: You know I sent the film out to a handful of people before I decided on the final cut, and I sat down and watched a cut not too dissimilar from the final one with two of my friends, Sophie and Sydney Davison—I love them so much—and they cried, and we talked about it for 45 minutes. The thing I got most from it was these seemingly innocuous things like, Oh, we have these nature sounds in the back because we need nature sounds. That was one of the most impactful parts of the film for them; those sounds have reverberation within their memories, and these images, no matter how specific they are to my experiences or Sophia's, Aniya's or Maddi's (our other actor) they have a specificity, and it’s always in conversation with the audience's mind, their memory, and their identity. On one hand, I do want people to take away this crushing loneliness of not having that part of you that makes you happy. And this being a film that I made while starting estrogen there is a kind of thing with two women finding each other and having a kind of catharsis that brings them into oneness with the world around them, and that’s kind of what it means to me, and I'd like that to be taken away, but on another level, the fact that these things will resonate with people at all means the world to me, and for people to have their own take always and their own kind of emotional catharsis with people they used to know and connecting to that feeling of searching. In my own dysphoric moments, I feel like I am still searching for something that I never know is going to be there, but it has to be, and in the deepest part of my heart, I know it’s within me to keep searching. From what I’ve seen so far, the things that this film means to just a few people right now mean a lot, and I hope it brings some sort of peace. That might be a pretentious thing to say, but it brought peace to me, and sometimes I do still think about it on my bad days. You know, I’m still looking for that woman within myself that I truly love. But even on that external level, I also have friends that I’m estranged from; I know I still have a connection with them, and no matter how fractured the past is and how corrupted memories are and emotions with it, there is still that catharsis to be had no matter who you are or what you’re going through.

WATCH THE MOVIE HERE:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gyPdPVjCh8