The Old Testament Book of Job depicts a righteous man whose unwavering faith is put to the test and thus is forced to endure great suffering. It’s a concept not unique to Western religion being that it’s very much part of the tapestry of our modern day lives and as such, provided a rich source of inspiration for filmmakers Maxwell Hughes Klaiber and Jordan Moran’s new short JOB. A one-shot film captured from a celestial vantage point that leaves itself open to interpretation, JOB is a prime example of what can be achieved through the combination of a well written and considered script, assured cinematography which adds to the scope of the narrative, and trusting in the adaptive talent of your cast. Klaiber and Moran wanted their biblical adaptation to reflect the often forgotten reality that suffering is not an isolated state of existence, while convey the raw emotion of a voyeuristic view of the human experience as we follow the worst day in someone’s life. As JOB premieres on the pages of DN today, Klaiber joins us on behalf of the duo for a discussion about how the filmmakers’ own religious upbringings played a role in their adaptation of such a well known story, how they gave their actors the support they needed to improvise, and their desire to return to a more forgiving reading of films in the modern digital age.
How do you and Jordan work as a filmmaking duo, you have clearly landed upon a winning partnership!
To go back in time, Jordan and I have known each other since we were babies. Our families were friends and we went to the same elementary school together. We both had similar interests and even were planning on taking very different life paths than the ones we are on now. At one point, Jordan was studying to become a dentist and I a doctor – or really just something within medicine. It was around late high school when I decided I wanted to pursue something else, a seed very much planted by my Grandpa who loved watching movies with me. Thankfully, around the same time, Jordan was on a similar journey and began falling in love with the idea of telling stories. We came together and started making music videos and little short films with our friends before finding our way down to Los Angeles together.
From those early attempts at making movies, we found our natural sensibilities that we both drifted towards. For me, I seemed to do a lot of the pre-production workflow such as scheduling, rental agreements, contracts, and all the general work accustomed to a producer. Jordan would be in charge of editing, DIT, visual effects, coloring, and all the work accustomed to post-production. Yet, we both love directing! Our workflow became this natural assembly line progression where we would pass responsibilities onto each other. Now, of course, we do a little bit of everything but it definitely all started with us just wanting to make stuff and delegating tasks to one another.
The thing that keeps us going is really this insatiable drive to keep making stuff that excites us, to keep learning, and to grow into the filmmakers we want to be. We hold each other accountable and really push each other to get better. Jordan has such different tendencies about filmmaking than I do and we think it makes for such interesting collaborations. Thankfully, we both agree that we will do what is necessary to make the best project possible, even if that means learning entirely new skills. It is nice to share a similar mindset and drive as the person you are working with. And it helps that we are roommates!
We are all collectively going through life on this floating rock where it feels like at every turn some other new thing to deal with has to be handled. That is something unavoidable
Where did the idea to adapt such an epic tale in your own way come from?
The initial concept came after my Grandfather (whom the film is dedicated to) passed away and I wasn’t there to be with him. I was away on a film job with the promise that I would make it home in time before the cancer took him. A lot of this film is me trying to process those feelings. Jordan was there when I received the phone call from my mom that my grandfather had passed. He was there for me in the same way Eli ended up being there for Job. Some time later after his death my family and I were in Ireland – a family trip we had been planning and saving money towards for years.
Even though I was on this magical trip, I couldn’t leave behind all the ways in which I felt like my life was falling apart. A mix of career pains, personal pains, and even existential pains. I was complaining while in one of the most beautiful countries on a trip with my family! I was so thankful for the people around me to remind me of the good and that we are all collectively suffering in one way or another. My head had to be taken out of my ‘ass crevice’ if you will. We are all collectively going through life on this floating rock where it feels like at every turn some other new thing to deal with has to be handled. That is something unavoidable. Perhaps the only things in life that are guaranteed are death, taxes, and some form of suffering. It was after I was done weeping about my grandfather, the man who helped me fall in love with films, that I felt like I had a story to tell. One that connected me and my grandfather and one that I hope connects with others as well.
We wanted the shot to feel voyeuristic, as if we are spying on a man having the worst day of his life.
How did that seed then germinate into the production of the short?
Once the idea was had, it made sense right away to do it in one take. The theatricality of the project was apparent from the start. We wanted the shot to feel voyeuristic as if we are spying on a man having the worst day of his life. Or, to some, a high angle as if God Himself is looking down upon his creation, not involving Himself. Which, truth be told, is a major element of the Biblical story. Jordan and I both come from a religious background so a story like this felt natural to dive into. The hardest part was finding out where and how to film it in a single take. We drove all around Los Angeles looking for streets and neighborhoods to potentially film this at. It wasn’t until we reached out to our DP Andrés Aragón and we saw how his neighborhood looked from his balcony that everything fell into place.
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Andrés (we call him Andy) works for RED so we were able to acquire a RED Raptor with a S35 sensor. We paired that with a Zeiss 70-200mm lens to get the zoom effect and softer touch we wanted from the imagery. We had no money really as we were paying for any expenses out of pocket so this film really was a collaboration of friends coming together. For example, Skyler Bible is a brilliant actor who gets some good roles and work. He’s a mutual friend and we met at a party. We were having the toughest time casting for Eli and were about two weeks out from our projected start date and he thankfully agreed via me just randomly pitching it to him. He only had about a week of availability as he was coming off a movie and then going on a trip so during the week leading up to the shoot we had one collective rehearsal (just the actors going through the scene) and we blocked camera / physical blocking hours before the shot. And, his last name is literally ‘Bible’. How great is that!
It truly is the worst day in this guy’s life. How did you pull all of the disastrous moments together in the script, lean into the comedic absurdity combined with the pounding of grief and add it all to Job’s shit pile?
It really is the worst day for this poor guy, huh? I guess that’s on me. As mentioned previously, it always felt right for this to be a one-take and thankfully Jordan agreed once he read it. Many of Jordan and I’s conversations were about justifying all of these terrible moments in sequence, one after the after, without it getting too heavy handed in either direction. We needed the levity and the comedy to create a natural equilibrium with the suffering Job was enduring. And we think that life has a natural way of doing that! Is it not common to be crying one moment and laughing the next? And vice versa? We think as humans, we really are all just piling ‘shit’ onto our own ‘shit piles’. Every day there is something new that is either happening globally for us to bear witness to, or something happening personally for us to deal with. It only felt right that with each new ‘shit’ to add onto the ‘shit pile’ of Job’s life, that it be captured in one long take and that there be some sort of realistic absurdity to ground us again. We wanted the audience to really feel his suffering and cutting away from each new moment felt like a disservice to the journey this guy was going on.
We needed the levity and the comedy to create a natural equilibrium with the suffering Job was enduring.
When I wrote the piece, I was in a pretty bad headspace. I was still dealing with the death of my Grandpa, the one aforementioned, while dealing with my own health issues and the inability to afford healthcare. And still can’t! I don’t want to bore the reader here, but I will summarize and say I was getting ‘rocked’ so to speak by the universe. Thankfully, I had people in my life like Jordan who helped me pull myself out of my own ‘ass crevice’ and remember that I am not the only one suffering. Suffering is not an isolated experience. We are not islands suffering on our own little islands all by ourselves. It is a collective human experience that every single person will go through at some point. Death, taxes, and suffering I always say. It is something we all have in common, and if we can’t look at something like that and have the ability to poke fun at it, I think we will eventually drown and succumb to the melancholy.
Were there any worries in adapting such a well known biblical story and making it your own?
That is a great question, and I would have to say both yes and no. I’m sorry! I think both are adequate answers and I’ll explain. Jordan and I both grew up in the church and were around a very religious community. I think adapting or working within any sort of spiritual or religious environment has an element of pressure to ‘get it right’ or to ‘do justice’ by the story. Maybe that is God or the Holy Spirit weighing on our hearts? We’ll give Him a call when we can and ask. So yes, there was a worry to some extent to avoid being blasphemous or disrespectful. But, I would say mainly that no there wasn’t. Adapting a Biblical story and giving it a modern context gave us absolute freedom. We didn’t feel bound to be a copy and paste of the original story, but rather to capture the essence of the extremely dramatic Biblical prose. This idea of human suffering and it being something that we all seem to go through. And when we face such suffering, what is our response to it? Do we let uncontrollable situations in our life dictate how we react and deal with the controllable things? Is that justifiable? All of these questions naturally led us to make the choices we did in regards to the language of the piece.
Adapting a Biblical story and giving it a modern context gave us absolute freedom.
The story can be quite heavy and thematic with certain elements of theatricality, and we wanted that to come across. However, we knew that not everyone watching this film would have the context of the Biblical story. So, we set out to make something that didn’t need to rely on an understanding of the Book of Job to fully understand our film. The Book of Job has very universal themes and we at least wanted to convey those as best as possible, and if it makes people want to go read the actual story of Job then how cool would that be! I must say, they will be in for something far more insane. If you thought our Job suffered, wait till you read about what happened to Job in the Bible. Our film is very much a declarative “THIS IS HOW WE FEEL!” and we didn’t want to get our personal interpretation of the scripture muddled into the other themes of the Biblical story. The story itself has been adapted in cinema before with films such as A Serious Man by the Coen Brothers so we knew that this challenge was possible to achieve.
The voyeuristic/God’s eye view nature of the short is incredibly powerful, how did you nail that essential blocking of the film just mere hours before shooting it?
Far too kind, thank you so much! That voyeuristic feeling was very important to the piece as a whole. Is it a nosy neighbor watching something they maybe shouldn’t be seeing? Or, is it perhaps God looking down upon His creation, unwilling to intervene in the face of suffering? Who are we to say! As for the blocking, early variations of the short had us street level to the characters. It was when we decided upon the location that we knew the voyeuristic high angle fit perfectly with what we were hoping to achieve. Once we had that, it was a matter of trial and error.
Our cast was incredibly pivotal to the blocking. So much of it was walking it through and talking it out while sound and camera were setting up. To give a quick shout out to the sound team, they did relatively the whole short using just LAVs and one of our operators hid underneath a car with the boom pole for the very end to capture the wrestling. We established physical guard rails for the actors to know where they roughly could play around during certain moments. We thankfully found interesting visual elements in the natural space during the rehearsal blocking such as using the tree for some surface division between Job and Si-Si and the mixed black and white color scheme that was the parking lot garage, cars, and costumes during the scene with Eli. We only had time for about two rehearsals and we ended up shooting, I believe, a total of six takes. The last take was the last possible take because the sun dipped over the horizon as soon as we finished. The last take is what you see!
Was the dialogue all as scripted or was there room for improvisation?
We would say it is a little bit of both! Jordan and I love allowing for improvisation and for the actors to embrace their choices – even in the dialogue. We don’t like giving ourselves the term of being actor’s directors but it seems to come up with us. We think it’s just because we love seeing what actors can do! I know for me, I tend to write for performance, and less about plot I have come to find out. I come from the school of Cassavetes and Altman, but for a project like this, because we were dealing with a certain theatrical language, the actors felt more comfortable sticking to the script for the most part. They all come from theater, which was a huge benefit and something we definitely wanted from the ensemble.
There are definitely moments of improvisation that you see such as Jeremy, our lead, throwing his headphones after the phone call. It almost became planned improvisations because we wanted to set up moments where things like that can naturally happen and then run with it. We create the bumpers or guidelines and allow the actors to walk the tightrope within them, knowing they have a net to fall into that Jordan and I make sure to establish. We mainly just want our actors to feel like they can take risks and that we will be there to help catch them. We hoped to blend heightened theatrical language and performance with at least some sort of grounded realism and we thought the best way to achieve that was for the actors to feel the freedom to improvise lines the way they saw fit in the moment while staying on track with the script. Staying on track with the script as much as possible I would say mainly helped from a pacing and timing purpose.
How on earth did you direct and shoot your actors from that balcony?
The great thing about having two of us is that we have created an efficient system of being in two places at once. Once Jordan and myself are on the same page, we can split up and tackle two different needed tasks at the same time. While I was down helping blocking with the actors, it allowed Jordan to be up in the balcony working with our DP to work on framing and when to zoom in and out. Thankfully, we had walkie talkies on set and our whole crew was in constant communication. During the take, one of us was up on the balcony watching the monitor while the other was out of frame on the ground being able to direct the actors from a closer perspective. We would all regroup in the driveway after the take was over for a couple of minutes to give any needed notes and blocking changes. It was quite funny, in hindsight, as it probably looked like Jordan and myself running up and down stairs constantly like cartoon characters. All of this, and a whole lot of trust in everyone executing their jobs. We are beyond grateful for the friends who hopped on to help us.
During the take, one of us was up on the balcony watching the monitor while the other was out of frame on the ground being able to direct the actors from a closer perspective.
A less creative decision behind the one take is that we had no money for permits and had little to no time to shoot the project so placing the camera up on the balcony also kept us from getting caught so to speak. It made for interesting moments as people just going about their day would stop and watch our actors perform since they didn’t know there was a scene happening as our camera was hidden away. There were definitely people walking past who also thought this guy was having the worst day ever.
As you mentioned, it is a human story and that comes through very naturally. How did you keep this in mind throughout post and produce a finessed film which isn’t overly polished?
Thank you for saying that. That feeling of something that isn’t overly polished was what we definitely insisted upon and really tried to achieve. To give a quick shoutout, this was the feeling we wanted to carry over into the score of the film. Jonny Colgan, our composer, fully understood this assignment and leaned into a body of work that carried with it some natural bumps and bruises and embraced certain imperfections musically. We think it added to the anxiety and the tension that was growing within Job as each new scenario arose. We literally had three sessions over Zoom as he is in London and we are in Los Angeles and in that time he was able to achieve the score you hear.
To continue, we think digital filmmaking carries numerous pros and cons but we think one of the downfalls of digital cinema is this false idea of being able to achieve perfection. There isn’t much grace for the films that aren’t as overly polished today since most films can now accomplish a polished look due to so many advancements in technology, such as AI. It felt like we forgave older films for not having an overly polished look because we allowed for it due to the time period and lack of certain technologies. That forgiveness doesn’t seem to exist anymore, and I think we should go back to embracing the human messiness that is making movies – to an extent of course. You can alter shots completely and clean up so many of the bumps and bruises of the shot, which can be a good thing, but to us, we really wanted to embrace those bumps and bruises if they were to happen. Those are the things we think give films a specific character that may be hard to find in most other mediums. It’s human!
We think digital filmmaking carries numerous pros and cons but we think one of the downfalls of digital cinema is this false idea of being able to achieve perfection.
This feeling of not being overly polished felt perfectly aligned with the story of Job. At one point we considered enhancing the zoom digitally but ultimately felt like we were betraying our own desires with the project so we left it as is. To be honest, the only correction we made was when Job gets tossed around by Eli, you do see his microphone pack. It was way too noticeable and completely took us out of the scene, so we removed that digitally. Again, pros and cons!
I hope this partnership is continuing…what are you working on next?
Absolutely! Jordan and I plan on working together and helping one another achieve our goals for a very long time. Very Affleck and Damon of us. Jordan is an insanely talented individual with his own sensibilities and his own desires to create things that can differ from my own and I want to be there to support – however that looks like. And the feeling is vice versa. Whether that is directing with him or just producing the project, we just want to make stuff.
We both have been working within the commercial and fashion space recently which has been lovely, but currently, we are in the process of two different types of narrative projects. Jordan is leading the charge on a high-concept experimental narrative. He comes from the school of Nolan and Villeneuve which is why we are trying to figure out how to blend practical filmmaking techniques with certain digital effects in a way we haven’t done before. We really want to get uncomfortable and push ourselves as filmmakers with each project we take on. Reach out if you’re interested, it is a fascinating piece that we think is incredible! As for me, I am making my feature film directorial debut this fall with a psychological horror comedy film called The Rattlin’ Bog. We are currently looking for a final push of investors and supporters before beginning production. We are beyond excited for the next part of our filmmaking journey and want as many people as possible to come along with us in our partnership.
