INFORMACIÓN EXCLUSIVA

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT...
  Nostalgia and trauma are often linked. Two days into my first silent meditation retreat, the image of a sinking watch shot into my mind. I didn’t understand what it meant.
  When I emerged, I realized that this vision was both my life’s greatest challenge and the meaning of my film, which I was nearly finished editing, after some financial and creative challenges.
  I was linked to the three main characters not by biography, but by the struggle to let go of time. Charlie Sway, a glamorous matriarch in her seventies, seeks her own past; her burdened grandson Ollie seeks the past’s perfection only to destroy it; and the outsider, Nikolai, wants to steal someone else’s past as his own.
  Spending summers in the Adirondacks as a kid, I was fascinated by this place that seemed to exist outside of time. On the lakes lived a declining American royalty. Along with their unfair privilege, its members were saddled with emotional paralysis. Still, I was jealous of those private lakes. For me, the real sway was always out of reach.
  When Elizabeth Bull and I embarked on the screenplay, we had our own kind of nostalgia, for the intimate French and Swedish summer movies that made us want to write.
  We took on the subjects of nostalgia, projection, and longing through characters who cannot tolerate the present. For Ollie Sway, we needed an actor who carried the shock of recent loss on his face, and found it in the immensely sensitive Rory Culkin. For Nikolai, an immigrant whose adoration of a heroic fabled America meets reality in the Sway family, my Russian director friend helped us choose Robert Sheehan - recognizing in him a one-of-a-kind mix of charisma and clown. And for the role of Charlie, which demanded icy majesty, sensual beauty, and hidden layers of feeling, we were lucky to work with the magnificent Mary Beth Peil.
  We filmed on Blue Mountain Lake, New York, pretending that it was once a glamorous private estate. Despite the intimate cast and crew, the schedule was in constant flux as we danced to the ever-changing weather, or to the piano when the power was knocked out for real. Mary Beth’s brooding maid Marlena, brought to life by Elizabeth Peña, gave me one of my greatest experiences as a director. I’ll never forget rowing across the lake for a secret midnight conversation with Elizabeth, where she asked me to consider a scandalous possibility about her character’s history with the deceased “Captain Sway.” I approved, and suggested adding dialog to hint her idea to the audience. “I’ll do it better without saying a word,” Elizabeth said - and her performance is a testament to that gutsy truth. What a rare actor to ask for less lines! Her loss is a huge one.
  Smell and music are the strongest triggers of human memory, and because you can’t smell a movie (though I tried!), I counted on my gifted twin brother Ethan to weave brilliant original music with my vintage tunes, to catapult the audience through frozen time, like that watch. Music is a boobytrap that yanks us into the past, which can be intoxicating or toxic, depending how we process it. Ethan understood that the song - created for the film but suggesting history - had to dance with the imperfection of the present. That dance is the real sway.

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