Last spring, a strange thing happened: I walked into my garage and stumbled upon my roommate building an AR-15 rifle. This, naturally, led me into a line of questioning: "Why are you building this? What does this piece do? What's your favorite place to go shooting?" The mechanism of a firearm was mysterious to me, but I ended up watching him at his workbench and eventually running to the other room to get my camera.
After shooting some footage of him focused at work, I became fascinated by the images we were creating. There was an undeniable seduction, repulsion and power in these images, and they became the basis for my new film Shadow of a Gun.
In my first film Menthol, all I wanted to do was create something that felt “real.” I wanted to push the rules of a traditional narrative framework to create the illusion that anything can happen—to make an audience believe they are witness to a present moment.
