The arena of sports has always been a hotbed for toxic masculinity. When an environment is built on a bedrock of competition it, unless acknowledged, is bound to foster an unhealthy relationship to winning. This sentiment is at the heart of Sam and David Cutler-Kreutz’s drama Flounder, which depicts a dangerous water polo ritual in which the friendship of two young men will be tested. The Cutler-Kreutz brothers do an excellent job of embedding you in the reality of these testosterone-fuelled young men, utilising the camera in a way which is loose and visceral, reacting to the intensity of the ritual in a fast and direct manner. It’s truly a film worth your time which is why we had to invite the fraternal directing duo to join us for a chat about the making of their short, the personal history it was birthed from and the challenging practicalities of shooting murky underwater sequences in the wild.
What drew you to explore the pitfalls of toxic masculinity through a water polo ritual?
The initial concept behind the film came out of our experience coming of age as young men in the early 2000s, surrounded by toxic masculinity. It was pervasive in many facets of our lives, from sports teams and youth groups to classrooms and friendship circles. We feel estranged from so many of the masculine postures and rites of passage in our current culture and felt that it was a topic we needed to engage with in our filmmaking.
We felt if we as men can hold up the mirror to ourselves and other men, there is real change to be had.
The dangers of a certain type of masculine culture run deep, and we felt if we as men can hold up the mirror to ourselves and other men, there is real change to be had. We feel it is our job as filmmakers to get our audiences to wrangle with important cultural issues and we hope that it can have an effect on young men who are coming of age and struggling with the situations they find themselves in.
Flounder is shot in such a way that the camera moves freely, almost reacting like a bystander would to what’s unfolding. What drew you to capture the film that way?
Our initial conversations with Gaul Porat our DP were around trying to bring a really wild energy to the shooting. Gaul and our AC Jasmine rigged up the Alexa in a backpack rig, which really enabled us to move around quite freely, allowing Gaul to chase down our actors mid-fight, or swing the camera around quickly to find a perfect shot. We tried to deconstruct the physical body in some way, piecing together our main characters from a large mass of half-naked people. David and I felt that an idyllic summer camp and lake would be the perfect location to both motivate this ritual and juxtapose its specific horror.
You mentioned there about the large ensemble cast and you were also shooting in and around water, did that make for a challenging production and how many shooting days did you have?
All in all the film took about six days to film, and about a year to finish up the post. The film was quite complicated from a production standpoint. We shot during the height of COVID in Aug 2020, so much of the film was designed to take place outside for that reason, and we faced all the challenges that COVID brought. On top of that though, we had a self-imposed challenge of shooting a low budget short with a large underwater section. We felt that if we could really nail this section of the film, the rest would fall into place around it.
How did you prepare for those underwater sections?
We started off just looking at references and struggled with the majority of underwater scenes that we found, finding a lot of them too “floaty” as David would put it, or just lacking stress in general. The conventional cinematography wisdom, from the people we spoke to, was that we should be shooting in a pool with a blacked out bottom or a quarry with as clear water as possible. It wasn’t until we ran across a random video of a guy scuba diving in a very murky river on YouTube, that it really struck us that we were going about it the wrong way. We wanted murk as the lack of visibility would create tension and be more terrifying than the clarity of the situation. So we took it upon ourselves to jump into the majority of the lakes surrounding NYC with a GoPro and do some visibility testing. After a long search, just days before the shoot we found the perfect lake, in upstate NY.
We wanted murk as the lack of visibility would create tension and be more terrifying than the clarity of the situation.
After two intense days of shooting everything out of the water, we rented scuba gear, an underwater housing and moved upstate for one final underwater day. After about three hours of shooting, the thunderstorms rolled in canceling the rest of our underwater day, and we walked away from principal photography with only three shots underwater. We were in a bit of a bind, with no budget left and a large complicated chunk unfilmed.
That must’ve been stressful! What did you do to overcome that issue and get the rest of the footage you needed?
We realized that the remaining underwater shots were really just the extreme wides and a lot of close-ups. I ended up going back to the lake with an A7SII and a photo housing, the two leads, no scuba and shot all of the wides. I was measuring focus with my arm and almost couldn’t see anything wearing a snorkel and looking at S-Log through a tiny screen in a photo housing. But it turned out pretty well. Then we bought an 8ft 30” deep baby pool and filled the bottom of it with 2000 lbs of sand from Home Depot. Much to our surprise the water was incredibly murky. We spent the next day with two hoses ‘washing’ our 2000 lbs of sand to remove all the small floating particles. Our now ‘clean’ sand plus a few handfuls of dirt to match the lake texture created a miniature sandy bottom, and we shot the remaining close-ups with just our two hands and a GoPro. It was an intense experience but really proved that you can pretty much make anything you want if you’re willing to get creative.
Watching Flounder, it didn’t even cross my mind that the underwater sequences could’ve been shot in multiple locations so fair play! Was it satisfying seeing that come together in the edit? How was it tying the film together in post?
Our conversations with our incredible Editor Matt Schaff were mainly around getting the information drip and flow just right so we were able to stay right alongside the characters’ understanding of the situation. We hope the audience will be as surprised as they are. Also helping him comb through all of our underwater footage and separating the garbage from the actual shots. Josh Boholskey our colorist did an incredible job not only making three cameras and four bodies of water match but also creating a gorgeous bleach bypass-inspired grade on top of it all.
It was an intense experience but really proved that you can pretty much make anything you want if you’re willing to get creative.
We decided early on not to have a score for the film, but instead spent a long time with Eli Cohn at Nocturnal Sound, trying to create a symphony of body sounds and setting that off against the heavy summer backgrounds. We tried to create impact with every footstep and breath.
At what stage during preproduction did you decide to shoot 4:3? What was the thought process behind that decision?
The 4:3 came pretty early in the process. We shot the film in 4:3 to really bring a level of claustrophobia and paranoia to the frame. To trap the characters in the bounds of this cruel ritual and box them into the intensity of the situation. We also wanted to emphasise the depth of the water. The vertical real estate helped us achieve that.
What’s next for you both in terms of your filmmaking?
Our second short A Lien is doing the festival circuit right now, it played at Seattle, Austin, Rhode Island and Vancouver Film Festivals, as well as Flickerfest. Our third short Trapped is just starting festival submissions. We’re in development on some longer projects as well, hopefully more news about that soon.
