Evan Dominguez is the writer, director, and main character in his film The Superintendent. We met for a conversation at Halyard's on 3rd Avenue and 6th Street in Brooklyn, but the music was too loud to properly record the interview, so we opted for a spot on a bench overlooking the Gowanus canal. Nitrate will screen The Superintendent on May 16.
D: Alright, so we're here to talk about The Superintendent. Tell me, where did the idea for that story start?
E: In 2018 I tried to write a play called The Superintendent, which was inspired by conversations I was having at the time with my friend Hektor. His father is the super of his building, and so after graduating high school Hektor was thinking he would become the super while attending college, and he was considering having me share his duties in exchange for a room in his apartment. Of course, this was a conversation that lasted about a month, and we knew it would never happen.
So around the same time I had an instinct to write a drama, and for whatever reason, my mind latched on to a story about a young man serving as a superintendent in Brooklyn while his peers were out living their lives in quaint college towns... finding themselves.
D: I don't think I picked up on that when I first watched it. You're saying he's yearning about life outside of the building while he's there?
E: Yeah, well that play was very different but that was the germ of it. And then later on the film evolved quite a bit. Originally it was a psychological horror, and then it turned into a coming-of-age piece about a young building superintendent living with the suppressed fantasy of a life outside of the limitations of his occupation. Does that make sense?
I wanted a wise elder figure. I have a friend who teaches chess in Washington Square Park named Cheese.
D: He's a dreamer.
E: He is but he hasn't really had the chance to have dreams.
D: Can you tell me about how you filled out the cast of the film?
E: The actors essentially wrote the script. I knew some real characters from my life that I wanted to cast, so I crafted fictional characters around their talents as personalities, and around what they seemed excited to do.
It began with Sam Gregory, who plays Jack, the tenant, referred to in the film as the "resident asshole." He's a lawyer who lives in my building, and he's always been very performatively cranky. He's a very friendly and loving guy, but he likes to joke around with people by playing the character of the asshole. So the plot's sort of superficial conflict, the leak, came entirely from Sam's aptitude for fun, performative crankiness.
And then I wanted a wise elder figure. I have a friend who teaches chess in Washington Square Park named Cheese. I used to go play with him, or attempt to play with him. And one day I went there with a 16mm camera to shoot a little documentary about him, and I met Johnny O'Leary, who is a regular and has been playing in Washington Square Park since the early nineties. And he was such a natural on camera. I would go hang out with him regularly and eventually I wrote a whole part for Johnny, using his language.
D: Did you ever play him in a real game of chess?
E: Johnny?
D: Yeah.
E: We would play two out of three. I would go there and hang out. It would vary. Sometimes he would win the 2 out of 3, sometimes I would win it. But I will say he would always have been playing all day before I got there, because I'd go after work, so I'd get him when he was down. He's very good.
D: Who are any other characters in that building that we don't see that interact frequently with the super?
E: In my mind, the characters in the film are the only ones that matter. The rest of the building isn't relevant to the story, because you don't have rivalries with most people, and you don't fall in love with most people, you don't play drunken chess on a regular basis with most people, and most people aren't your grandfather.
D: When Felix gets a new job as a super at a different building, do you think that there's something good there in that it feels more intentional, as opposed to ending up with the building that he lived in and had a relationship with his whole life? Or do you think he misses the old building a little bit?
E: I think he misses the old building a little bit, but I think he's always operating on a simple standard for himself, which is how do I survive? And he's only ever known one way to survive, so when that comes under threat, it's difficult to imagine a new world.
D: What's the biggest difference between the script and the finished film?
E: Well, the script changed significantly with a few different obstacles that arose. For instance, the whole advent of Cassandra, the one female character in the piece, came a week before we shot, as well as my own participation in the film as an actor. Originally, I cast my friend Hektor and his father in real life to play the super and the super's father. After Hektor's real father dropped out, we couldn't find the right older Albanian actor. There was dialogue in Albanian.
Rather than stopping everything and waiting until we found the perfect Albanian speaker, which was very difficult, I just said, I'm going to play the role of Felix, and I'm going to have a different person entirely play the grandfather, not the father. Rather than making it the darker psychological thriller it was originally intended to be, I lightened the whole concept, and Cassandra was invented. Very last minute.
The actors essentially wrote the script. I knew some real characters from my life that I wanted to cast, so I crafted fictional characters around their talents as personalities, and around what they seemed excited to do.
D: Was Violette involved with the project at all before that week?
E: Violette was working very diligently to cast an older Albanian man for the duration of the project. I was being very picky, and once I figured it would be best to ditch that effort, she found Richard Vetere who played Al, my grandfather, an amazing find. Richard is a highly accomplished writer who elevated the project in so many ways.
D: I think whatever happened worked out for the best. The moment when the note goes down the chute, when I saw this film for the first time at Film Noir [The Superintendent screened at Film Noir in Greenpoint alongside Toni Marmol's The Scattered Tides of a Blue Moon earlier this year], I almost stood up and started cheering. That moment is so great because you really do pull for this character. Something about the honesty of the work that he does and his relationship with the building. Why did you shoot on 16mm, and why black and white?
E: I had shot a film digitally, with limited training as a cinematographer for documentary shoots, I shot it myself, and I really didn't plan anything properly. I just did what I guess you would call running and gunning, and I made an uneditable film. So then I said, "I need to do the opposite. I need to plan the next film out perfectly." It needed to be done in black and white 16mm stock, and I can't imagine it any other way. I guess that's just where my mind was.
D: What do you hope people walk away with when they watch this film?
E: For me, the film's plot is very superficial. The leak, the sudden appearance of romance for a guy who has probably never had a serious romantic thought in his life – I view these details as secondary to the residual experience of a young man who's got this unconscious instinct to seek so much more than the life he's trapped in, but can't enunciate it, even in his own mind, because he lacks the privilege. His imagination is suppressed.
And it's not to say that being a super is undesirable. Felix is very privileged in some ways. He was born in Brooklyn. He has his grandfather. He has a job. He has an apartment that he doesn't pay rent for. But he can't see beyond the limitations of that life. It holds back his perspective because it's all he's ever known. You could have the same tension within yourself in any other circumstance. You could have that same problem even in the cushiest of cushy circumstances, and plenty of people do. Felix loses his position, he loses his place in the building, his family business, if you will – he loses everything he's ever known, and he is forced to ask himself, "Who am I?"
I really hate to forcefeed things, but there we go. I hope people care less about the leak and the romance, and more about the soul struggling just to hear its own voice.