Cigarette Candy

Mike Fishman of Ourspacemovieblog sat down recently with director Lauren Wolkstein (MFA Degree in Film, Columbia University) and producer Brigitte Liebowitz (MFA Degree in Film, Columbia University) to discuss their SXSW award-winning short film, Cigarette Candy. Excerpts from that conversation follow.

Synopsis: Forced to play the role of “the hero” at his homecoming party, traumatized teenage Marine (Eddie) forms an unlikely bond with a rebellious young girl (Candy). Visit the official website: http://www.cigarettecandy.com/

Mike Fishman (MF): I’d like to start by asking you about the genesis of the project. Lauren, your father is a Colonel in the Air Force but (fellow Columbia University film student) Jeff Sousa wrote the script.

Lauren Wolkstein (LW): I wanted to make a film about coming home, that’s the type of story I know and am drawn to. Since I’m not in the military, the way I’m involved is by seeing my father come home, and my friends coming home, from Iraq and Afghanistan on different tours of duty, and I felt the need to tell that type of story. Jeff and I were on a writing retreat in Maine with (Columbia University Film Professor) Lewis Cole (facebook dedication page) and I pitched Cigarette Candy. Jeff had some amazing ideas that we bounced off each other, and he said he’d like to work with me and that’s basically how it happened. I was struggling with the material because I felt like it was too personal to me, too close, and I really wanted to take it outside of what I had experienced to make it something universal, and Jeff was as passionate as I was about telling this story.

MF: Did you at that time already have the idea of a Marine coming home who had accidentally shot and paralyzed his commanding officer?

LW: That came a little later. When I originally pitched it, it was a different story. It was a ghost story about this girl, Candy, who was the main character.

Brigitte Liebowitz (BL): It took place in an abandoned house and someone close to her who had been a soldier had passed away and was haunting her.

LW: I originally wanted to make a film with a Southern Gothic aesthetic, but the story ended up being very different, much more realistic and corporeal because we felt that was the best way to tell a truthful rendition of this type of story. So, I am glad we changed the tone and made the main character Eddie. We went through many drafts of the story, and we finally boiled it down to this one event, this one incident, the party.

BL: It was always a coming home story, there was always this element of someone being haunted by war, by trauma.

LW: It was always that general idea because that’s been haunting me. The very first film I made at Columbia was about a 10-year-old girl whose father comes home from war. That was very autobiographical. The girl accidentally pops a balloon that is at her father’s coming home party, and the father reacts to the balloon popping as if it was a bomb going off. My father experienced that. I was drawn to telling the story of a loved one coming home changed and how that affects everyone, not just the person coming home. I also like coming-of-age stories, so we decided on the idea of this guy who’s not yet a man but who’s forced to be a man because of the situation. I think that’s a big problem now, there’s a lot of people going off to war and they’re not ready to be adults, so there’s this line between “am I a boy or am I a man now?”

BL: And Candy is his foil, she’s rebelling against that. We had a lot of back story for her that didn’t make it into the film about the fact that her father is in the military and so she, in her own way, was forced to grow up too quickly as well. She and Eddie are two sides of the same coin, he was in the war and she’s trying to play the “grown-up.” She lost her childhood, which doesn’t really seem to be valued much anymore anyway, it’s all about how grown-up can you be, how sexy can you be?

LW: We all know people like that type of girl, she’s over-sexualized and is forcing herself to grow up too soon. So she and Eddie are kindred spirits in that way. Candy is actually very much like the soldiers.

MF: Which brings us to the title, Cigarette Candy; her name is Candy, she’s a bit of a Lolita, and there’s quite a bit of smoking throughout which represents so many different things: rebellion, adulthood.

BL: It’s a mask for her, a veil.

LW: Before I even started writing the story I had in mind the photograph by Sally Mann called Candy Cigarette. It is a picture of her 13-year-old daughter looking very sexualized holding a (candy) cigarette. That image stuck with me, as did this other haunting photograph by LA Times photographer Luis Sinco called Marlboro Marine, which is an iconic image of a Marine who has dirt all over his face, a helmet on and is smoking a cigarette. So these two photographs kind of told the whole story. These are the two central images that I always carried with me when we were shooting.

BL: The central image was part of Lewis Cole’s curriculum for developing story which has since been a tool I use when working with writers and director to develop material.

LW: You can get so lost in all these drafts you write that you can forget what it’s really about, and what Lewis taught was to always keep in mind that image you had in your head when you first set out to write it.

BL: Those images serve as your beacon.

LW: Those two images are so evocative, they’re really like portraits of wounded people. That’s really where the story came from.

MF: There are several evocative moments in the film, one when Eddie steps out of the house towards the party; he’s going from dark to light, as a soldier might go out –

LW: Onto a battlefield? Exactly. We called that the “thrown to the wolves” scene.

BL: Right, or like a gladiator.

LW: It’s supposed to evoke that feeling of floating through a space that you don’t want to be a part of yet you’re forced into. In a lot of ways he’s being thrown to the wolves, forced into battle with these people he can’t connect with.

MF: He can’t relate to anyone except for Candy, although when they’re having sex he can’t look her in the eye.

LW: He’s zoning out (when they’re having sex). He doesn’t really connect with her until the end. You feel like he’s searching for something but in that moment he’s just trying to escape the party, she’s an easy target so to speak.

MF: Which you take to an extreme in a way, because they are actually having intercourse.

BL: For a long time I didn’t want that in the script, but now I’m glad it’s there. I felt like it was a little too obvious, but the more we worked with the idea of lost innocence and the idea of "playing" adults, it made more sense.

LW: That was a way to numb his pain, through this physical act. It had no emotional attachment to him. The real emotional attachment comes at the end when Candy really connects with Eddie. She notices his pain when he’s zoning out as they have sex, that’s when she realizes for the first time that there’s something wrong with him.

BL: It’s not just fun and games – they're not playing "house."

LW: Yeah, it’s not fun and games. Whereas before she was like, “I don’t want to have anything to do with you, but I’m going to show off and make you come and get me.”

MF: She even flashes him.

LW: That was an accident.

BL: A discovered moment.

LW: She was supposed to be seducing him, of course, but her flashing her panties at him, it just happened. I love happy accidents.

MF: Just before he’s about to talk to another young woman, Christina, a former high school classmate, there’s a shot of the back of his head, which you used as a still for your publicity materials and website. The scene is shot from behind him, and it has the feel as if he’s on a precipice.

BL: And you see a kid running in front of him in slow motion.

LW: That’s a motif we have throughout, the back of his head. And we wanted to give the sense that he’s disoriented from his environment, to show how disconnected he is; things are going in and out of frame.

BL: When you watch it, you feel almost like you’re on a ride or you’re floating.

LW: That’s something I really wanted to explore in the film, the subjective experience. I’m very attracted to films that are completely one character-driven, where we see things only through that character’s eyes and we experience it with them, like in Clean, Shaven, Lodge Kerrigan’s film, which I really admire. And that was what I wanted to show, through the camera, so the back of his head expresses the fact that Eddie is “not really there” – he’s not present.

BL: You don’t see his eyes.

LW: He’s lost. You don’t have access to him, he doesn’t have access to himself. We used that image three times in the film.

MF: Including the opening shot, when he’s in the shower.

BL: After he breaks down at the end with Candy, we don’t see the back of his head anymore.

LW: He’s not playing that role anymore.



MF: The film is a well-paced 13 minutes. What was left on the cutting room floor?

LW: It was a much longer film, at one point it was about 22 minutes. It was a real lesson in editing and what you need and what you don’t need. Because if you have to tell a story in such a short amount of time there’s so much unnecessary fat that you have to take out so the story doesn’t get lost in all these other things. We had some scenes with the parents that didn’t feel right for the short. For the pacing you’re talking about we could only tell one story. And that story was about Eddie and his inability to connect with anyone, so if we showed him connecting with his mom or his dad then it would have less of an impact when you realize how different he is from everybody. We had a scene between him and his mother that had a great little moment between them, but to have him connect with her – Eddie doesn’t really talk much in the film until he explodes – so if we had him talking before that, that moment when he explodes, that monologue, would be less effective.

BL: It would be moot. Any signal that he needs help that is perceivable by anyone other than Candy would work against the whole tenor of the film. The dramatic irony.

LW: No one really understands what he’s going through, except for the audience, through the camera. Like in The Graduate, that’s another example of a very subjective film. The film is beautifully executed because the camera is expressing for the audience the protagonist’s emotional state.

MF: Cigarette Candy has won awards and screened at some very prestigious festivals, including Palm Springs International ShortFest, SXSW, San Sebastian, and Cannes. Any particular reactions from audience members that stand out or were especially gratifying?

LW: At SXSW, there was a kid that came up to me after one of the screenings, he was 17 or 18, and he said, “My father’s being deployed in a month, he’s going to Afghanistan for a tour and I really appreciated seeing your movie.” I told him if he ever needed to talk, he should give me a call. We’re in contact with each other now, and that means a lot to me.

BL: That’s what it’s about, connecting and healing. Using stories to create empathy between human beings where there was once only emptiness and loneliness.

LW: Talking about it.

BL: You have to start there. Our Facebook page is almost surreal. One person wrote that Cigarette Candy haunted her dreams after she saw it screen at the Florida Film Festival.

MF: The film is dedicated to the memory of Lewis Cole and Private First Class George Howell.

LW: Right. It’s dedicated to Lewis because without him, the film would never have been made, and George Howell because he was a friend of the real Eddie Van Buren.

BL: It’s a bizarre story, but when we were casting for the role of Eddie Van Buren, which was a completely fictitious name, I got an e-mail from a soldier stationed in Iraq whose real name was Eddie Van Buren.

LW: He had googled his name to see if he could find articles about when he played sports in college and he came across our casting call.

BL: And he was like, “This is me. Why are you making a film about me?!” And part of Eddie’s monologue came from a story the real Eddie told us.

LW: Eddie wrote us long e-mails, he wanted to connect with us. George Howell was a close friend and fellow solider of Eddie’s who died in Eddie’s arms in Iraq. Eddie told us many heart-wrenching war stories, one of which was about an IED hitting Eddie’s truck, and his second in command came up to Eddie and put a cigarette in his mouth to make sure he was alive. We actually had that already in the screenplay where at the end Candy puts a cigarette in Eddie’s mouth to make sure he is okay.

BL: It was kind of amazing, that we already had that in there.

MF: You now intend to make this as a feature film.

LW: Yes, Jeff Sousa and I wrote a feature-length screenplay. It expands upon that story we set up in the short. It’s about Eddie seeking atonement for paralyzing his sergeant. He seeks forgiveness, but while he tries to find that forgiveness and confess to his sergeant at home, he falls into an affair with the sergeant’s rebellious teenage daughter, Candy.

MF: A soldier who goes through something like that, what do you envision happening to Eddie (in the short)?

LW: I don’t think he can go back (to the Marines). At the end of the film he strips off his uniform; he takes it off and he becomes totally exposed and the crying is like a freeing, it’s a way of cleansing himself. I think once you go through that experience you can’t really go back.

BL: He’s been emotionally wounded.

LW: My Dad works at the VA/DoD Liaison Office at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington, DC (http://www.va.gov/) and is also doing work to try and figure out how best to treat our veterans. He is working at helping them with the psychological wounds because there are so many veterans who have problems with psychological repercussions in addition to just the physical, partly due to advances in medical technology; people are able to be kept alive now when in past wars, they would have died. It’s important to me that this film was not intended to show that they’re not heroes, because they are –

BL: Very much so.

LW: We’re just trying to show the reality of the situation.

MF: That’s a beautiful connection between the film and what your father is now doing.

LW: Yes, my father joined the armed services when I was born so this is all I have ever known, and it is a story I felt that I needed to tell. My father’s shown the film to the VA, he wants to promote it within the VA. I was worried that he might have an issue with the film, but he connected to it.

BL: We always had the goal of creating a very respectful piece. To be sensitive. The only thing the film could be said to be judgmental about is war, just war itself.

LW: We always wanted to tell this individual story of this PERSON who is coming back home and how does he re-adjust to what he once knew? His parents don’t know what’s going through his mind. That was something I really wanted to explore by using the camera, to show someone going through an experience in their head and the emotional impact he’s having on others around him. It’s not an objective movie. You really don’t see how his parents see him, you just see how he sees the world. That’s something I really wanted to explore – the audience knows, but his own family doesn’t know.

Cigarette Candy was the Winner of the Short Film Jury Award for Best Narrative Short at the 2010 SXSW Film Festival.

For more information, visit the website: http://www.cigarettecandy.com
and join the Facebook group:
http://www.facebook.com/CigaretteCandy