In the four years since he started making films, Joe Swanberg has received the kind of attention some directors long for their whole lives. Each of his three features has premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival. His latest, Hannah Takes the Stairs, is rolling out in theaters nationwide and airing on television through video-on-demand. At 26 he’s already had his entire body of work showcased at the IFC Center in New York and been written up in the New York Times. But so far the attention hasn’t translated into financial success. “It hasn’t changed my life at all,” Swanberg says. “I’m still sitting in Chicago wondering how I’m going to buy groceries. I’m not getting phone calls from agents or studios saying, ‘What are you up to?’”
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Swanberg rented a Logan Square apartment for the shoot during the summer of 2006. The cast and tiny crew–Swanberg and sound recordist Kevin Bewersdorf– lived there and spent practically every waking moment together. The lines between life and art blurred frequently. “We disappeared off into that world,” Swanberg says. “We rarely left the apartment. It kind of became a compound. I would take things that were naturally occurring and say, ‘Just keep doing that, Kevin’s gonna get the equipment ready and in an hour we’ll shoot.”
In the title role Swanberg cast New York playwright Greta Gerwig, who literally phoned in her performance in LOL, appearing only in cell-phone photos–many of them nude–that she sent to her boyfriend, a costar. Swanberg had never actually met Gerwig before the movie’s premiere, but they wound up working together during the festival on an episode of Young American Bodies, a Web serial Swanberg created for Nerve’s video site. “Greta was really cool and easy to work with,” he says. “She didn’t have a lot of limitations or restrictions. When the wheels started turning for Hannah, I thought it would be fun to work with her again in a more challenging way.”
Swanberg financed his first two movies with just a few thousand dollars. Hannah Takes the Stairs was bankrolled by Film Science, an Austin-based production company. While it was made for significantly more than either Kissing on the Mouth or LOL, producer Anish Savjani will only say that the budget was “under $100,000,” a common hedge when a film has financial deals pending.
Not that he has any intention of turning his back on features. Nights and Weekends, in which he and Gerwig play a long-distance couple facing a pregnancy scare, is currently in postproduction, with Gerwig as coeditor. Also on the horizon is Save the Date, which could prove to be Swanberg’s biggest production yet. Film Science and New York-based Camelot Pictures, which produced Garden State, are backing the project and trying to put together a substantial budget. And for the first time Swanberg plans on working with a script: Chicago comics artist Jeffrey Brown, best known for his graphic novel Clumsy, wrote the screenplay with playwright Egan Reich.
