Video Chats: Abteen Bagheri on "Let Down" by Bored Nothing

"Let Down" by Bored Nothing is a video about a young boy who has fallen in love with his beautiful nextdoor neighbor. He spends much of his time fantasizing about her and looking at her though a hole in his fence as she changes her clothes. Directed by Abteen Bagheri, the video takes the viewer back to when they were 10 years old, realizing what it was like to be attracted to someone – the joy of simply experiencing the feelings of attraction and discovering what that meant. We talked to Abteen about the video, how the narrative related to his own experiences, and how lead actor Garren Stitt was way cooler than he’ll ever be.

Doug: What was the original inspiration for this video?

Abteen: We’ve all seen this story before. First love. Unrequited. Mostly, I was curious what my version of this story would look like - how to take something classical in that sense and make it my own.

The driving force behind the piece is a sense of nostalgia. I wanted to capture a feeling we’ve all felt. I wanted the audience to feel like that kid is them… way back when.

The idea of a little boy looking at a woman undressing through a hole in a fence was the starting point. I thought that was inherently kind of funny, but if there’s any humor to the piece, it’s because we took his love for this woman so seriously. It’s easy to feel detached from our childhood and look back on it with nothing but hindsight. After all, this story’s hopeless - this kid lost the battle before it even started. But to a love-stricken 10 year old mind, in a way, there is no battle.

For him, there’s no real sense of the future. He doesn’t know why he wants this woman or what he wants from her. His fantasies are completely undeveloped, straight out of a Victoria’s Secret ad. My aim was to stay sincere… true to the boy’s actual feelings - how overwhelming these feelings can be. It was about putting myself in his position, and attempting to create a world around him through his eyes, not my own. We enter his mind as his infatuation with this woman consumes it.

Doug: This video has a very American feel to it, with baseball and other recognizably American elements playing a significant role. Despite the fact that Bored Nothing is out of Australia, was the goal for the video for it to be clearly in America?

Abteen: The hope was to make something universally relatable. In order to do that, we were after creating something so specific that it would feel real and strike a chord. The circumstances aren’t necessarily the same ones we’ve encountered in our own lives, but what’s important is that the emotions are, and these emotions are swirling around in a detailed, believable world.

The funding for the video came from Australia and the UK (Bored Nothing being Australian, and Nowness and Somesuch putting in some money of their own). I think that was part of the fun - "alright Australian and British people have funded this video and we’re making it in America with no supervision. Let’s surprise them with a characteristic representation of American suburbia."

I was looking for a nostalgic vibe for the locations, so we started scouting the neighborhood in Burbank where they shot The Wonder Years. Archetypal Americana. Really, that’s where the baseball motif came from. I had originally written that batting cage scene at a bowling alley’s arcade, and once we’d found some locations in Burbank, we started looking up nearby arcades. It just so happened that one of them was at a batting cage called Batcade. I fell in love with the idea. It felt classically American and the idea of baseball running through this boy’s life made him come alive - the metaphor of striking out just seemed to click with the story I’d already built. I changed the soccer ball that his character was playing with into a baseball and downloaded a baseball game on his iPad.

Doug: Much of the story in this video is told through the facial expressions on the main actor, Garren Stitt. Is there something you can do as a director, beyond just telling him what he's looking at, to get those expressions out of him?

Abteen: We were very lucky to find Garren. He’s a natural. He walked into the casting session and shook my hand, winked at me, and made that quintessential cool-guy clicking sound with the corner of his mouth, which I can’t even replicate. That’s when I knew I’d cast him. He sat down and I said, “Alright man, you’ll be playing the lead,” and then I asked his mom when he was available. With children, so much of it is about confidence - sometimes they can get quite bashful in front of the camera. Garren was a pro, with probably more experience on set than I have. As soon as I saw him, I was blown away by his charisma… this kid is way cooler than I’ll ever be and he’s only 10 years old. On set, when I’d give him notes on his performance, sometimes he’d walk back to his starting position and throw up a peace sign over his head to acknowledge that he’d heard me. The stylist mentioned he was flirting with her. The actress was creeped out by how slick he was. Garren referred to himself as the young Joseph Gordon-Levitt at one point, and we all laughed. I said, “no you’re little Ryan Gosling.” When the video came out, the top comment on youtube was “The kid looks like mini Joseph Gordon Levitt.” He wins.

I took some time before the shoot to go over the narrative and his character with him, and he really seemed to get it straight away. There wasn’t a terrible amount of directing on my part, mostly just blocking and making sure he hit his cues, which is the biggest challenge with kids because they’re naturally so fidgety and full of energy. A lot of the shots relied on light hitting his face or his eye in exactly the right way, but cheating for the camera wasn’t much of a problem for him. The fence he’s looking through and the woman’s bedroom were actually the same house, and most of the locations were cheated that way, so for me, it felt more than ever that we were building this world from the ground up using the magic of filmmaking. I would just talk him through his reactions, he’d improvise, and sometimes I’d give him notes within the take.

I’ve worked with kids before, and people have asked what the secret is to getting good performances. I find naturally that I don’t treat them any differently than the adults on set. I just talk with them very respectfully and tell them never to start smoking cigarettes.

Doug: In the Nowness article that came with the video premiere you mentioned that the lead actress, Camille Balsamo, was actually your first middle school crush, and that you didn’t mean for it to have any effect, but that it is "layered in the fabric of the piece." At what point during the process did you realize that this was the case?

Abteen: I should have known when I did my interview with Nowness that this would be the bit of info they’d publish - that the lead actress was my first crush in middle school. It’s a great story and it mirrors the boy’s quite nicely. But I think in the end that’s all it is. I never truly noted the implications on set, only afterwards. We’ve been friends for so long. I’d like to say that it had no effect on my approach at all, and I’d shoot it the same way with any actress, but really, you can’t deny your own subconscious in scenarios like this, so who knows. It wasn’t hard to make her look gorgeous though.

Doug: Camille's part is not an easy one to play. Were any of the scenes more difficult than others to achieve?

Abteen: Camille was amazing, and like Garren, required very little direction. She knew what was up and she killed it on virtually every take. I had her watch some Victoria’s Secret ads before the shoot, so she could understand how I wanted her to play in the boy’s fantasy - which isn’t so much sexual as it is a representation of “sexiness” that a young boy would come across in popular media.

The sex scene was a little awkward. Mostly because I didn’t know exactly what I wanted. I just knew I wanted flesh. I told them, "It’s very important that it feels fleshy so we’ll need to do it with no shirts on. And as bad and raunchy as it looks in real life, with you two rolling around on the bed, the camera won’t be seeing it that way." It took some figuring out. We shot through both a warped pane of glass that Isaac Bauman moved in front of the lens and a small crystal that we used to refract light - the idea being that in the boy’s anger and sadness, his vision is getting blurred. Tears are welling in his eyes. After the first take, I showed the actors what the footage looked like on the monitor and they thought, "hey that’s not so bad," and we did some more takes.

Doug: Was your intention to have people root for the boy in the video? Is he a rule breaker by looking through the fence, or is he doing what we'd all do in that situation?

Abteen: From the start, we’re entering a dream world, seeing everything through the perspective of a child fantasy. In that sense, I thought it was appropriate to blur the line between reality and dreams. We only ever see the woman through the boy’s eyes, so those flirtatious looks and long glances and smiles may have never happened at all.

It was important for me to stick with the character and make sure we identified with him - we’re either with the boy, seeing what he’s seeing, or in his mind. Isaac and I decided on anamorphic lenses and slow, deliberate camera moves to lend the film a dream-like quality.

I don’t think you can blame the boy for his curiosity. 10 year old me is definitely looking through that fence. No question.