William Kresch is an Emmy® award-winning Director, Editor, and Podcaster. The best part about all of that is he is also an HHS alumnus!
Kresh recently directed his first movie Alone Together. The film is about Nassdja and her boyfriend Luke. The couple escape their pandemic-ravaged city for the safety of a remote family cabin where they hope their relationship will also get better. They think they are alone in the cabin, but soon find out they are not, while past traumas resurface. This film can be watched on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, or Tubi.
The Clarion was able to get a hold of Kresch and ask him some questions about his high school and film directing career!
Clarion:
What was it like having Mr.Van Winkle as a teacher in Journalism?
Kresch:
I was incredibly lucky to spend time under the wise tutelage of Mr. VanWinkle. The first thing I ever wrote for any audience was for him when he allowed me to write some horror movie reviews for The Clarion’s Halloween edition. My first pass was way too bloodless and Mr. Van Winks let me know it. He reminded me that anytime you are writing, you are in conversation with your audience. I came back with something much more fun, memorable, and (attempted at least) to speak to the specificity and passions of my own experience. I have not forgotten that lesson and harkened back to it in every script I’ve ever written. What has also stayed with me is Mr. Van Winkle’s ability to infuse humor into every and any moment, no matter how pivotal or grim. I’m not sure exactly what to call it, I think the Brits call it being “cheeky” – but tried to take his brand of inextinguishable humor along with me.
Clarion:
Did any other electives you take at HHS have to do with your directing career?
Kresch:
One of the luckiest breaks I have ever had was getting Mrs. Russo as my Art teacher freshman year. At the time, she had popped in as a substitute teacher, but would end up staying on board, as I am sure you now know. I happened to be in that very first class of hers and was pretty much in awe of how good an artist she was. Up until then, I had taken the elective for no reason more seriously than being a pretty good doodler. Mrs. Russo was just out of college and had such an engaging way of showing what art could be, she inspired me to look at it in a whole new light. I’m certain I would never have found my way to where I am now had it not been for Mrs. Russo’s guidance. Most importantly, she let me push boundaries, dip into the weirder, more avant-garde side of myself, and define my singular style. I got into a college as an illustration student based on the portfolio of work that Mrs. Russo helped me create. At the time, I didn’t realize that any art I would ever do would lead to becoming a director, but this was the first step in that journey.
Clarion:
Where was the movie filmed?
Kresch:
We shot the movie in 30 days up in a weird little ski cabin in Vermont. Finding a location that you can completely take over is paramount to making an indie movie. We got incredibly lucky, finding the cabin by total accident. I distinctly remember looking up at it with my jaw hanging, muttering “Oh man, this is it” that first time I laid eyes on it.
It was actually in dis-use and I had to hunt down the power by scouring real estate records of the area. We ended up getting it for so ridiculously cheap, which allowed us to use that budget elsewhere. It’s little things like this that make a micro-budget movie possible. The best part was that our friend owned a house just a quick stroll through the woods. We were able to use the cabin as our “picture house”, basically a live set at all times, stashing our gear and keeping sets built. Then have all the crew and cast live down in the other house.
This saved us huge amounts of money! No hotels, no crew transport, and no breakdown of sets, it’s honestly insane that we got this lucky and I don’t think we could have done it any other way. At the end of the day, any production is a slave to money and time. This arrangement saved us both as well as having the right spooky vibe to be the 4th character in the movie. While working as a production designer, my goal was always to infuse the psychological state of the characters into the physical space they inhabit. That creepy cabin did the trick and we filled it with our malevolent vibes! Even weirder that it burned down just a couple of months after we wrapped shooting…
Clarion:
How did you first become interested in directing films?
Kresch:
I remember sitting with my Dad watching “Predator” when I was far far too young to be watching Predator… I was so enthralled, terrified, and in awe – my little imagination was spinning like a quarter trapped in the electromagnetic pull of an MRI machine. I knew that movies had power and I wanted to have some part in that. I became pretty obsessed with movies, realizing that they are the confluence of almost every form of art. They are a window and a mirror to the human soul, a time machine to history’s best and worst moments, they exist at the cutting edge of technology, they are a magic trick, a way to learn, feel, and escape – and a way to shape the past and illuminate the future.
Clearly, I am still obsessed with them and always will be. It means a lot to me to have done this tiny little movie because, at any scale, they are so, so, hard to make. I knew somewhere in my bones that I needed to make one because loving movies had become a central part of who I was. When my wife told me she was pregnant with our first son, that feeling became a radioactive hum. I wanted to be able to look into my son’s eyes and say something fatherly like “You can do anything you love if you try.” It stung me that those would just be words if I hadn’t done everything in my power to do exactly that. So I set out on my little against-all-odds movie-making quest and got incredibly lucky to have made it to the big screen. So now I can say to him, with absolute truth and the addition of a few well-earned scars, “You can do anything you love if you try.”
Clarion:
Was there a point in time where you struggled with the movie budget?
Kresch:
Indie movies at this level are so, so, hard to realize. Attempting to do what we did with what we had financially is somewhat akin to storming Normandy with naught, but broken beer bottles and a scrappy attitude. The only way we got this movie finished is because, over my career, I had assembled a truly talented group of friends and collaborators. At Syracuse University I had the great fortune to work with some awesome people in the nascent stages of our careers and made sure to keep those bonds strong. As an artist and a freelancer, your job is to impress everyone you ever work for with your skill, style, and charisma. You are always going to be trading on your name and the faith in that name defines who will come aboard your pirate ship. My producer, assistant director, editor, cinematographer, production designer, art director, co-writer, colorist, costume designer, graphic artist, plus half of my dozen investors are all dear dear friends and collaborators from my time in the Visual and Performing Arts program at Syracuse. The lesson here is: that being a good and generous person with your love, time and art is how you’ll find and earn your tribe. You cannot take down the mammoth alone. Yet, even after calling in all these favors, having access to talent you could never otherwise afford and every person on the crew doing 5 jobs, love is only gonna get you so far. You’re gonna need that cash too.
As the Director, that’s the scary part. You can come all that way, get to the final days of shooting, and make a mistake that ruins the pivotal scene of the movie. If you don’t have the money to buy another day of shooting and fix your mistake, you can fumble the ball at the 1-yard line. The stakes are literally that high. That is why, even though the director is supposedly an “artist”, every decision made needs to be constrained to the financial box you are in. Budget is an hourly struggle and worry. The only enemy greater than money is time. It’s rather hard to steal and when it’s gone, it really is gone. When it got really tight at the end of shooting, 5-page scenes became one paragraph because we simply didn’t have time. It killed me to see big beautiful chunks of script die, but it also opened up some really creative solutions. Some of the best, most visceral moments in the movie would have been way different, but since they had to be crazy, roll-of-the-dice one-takes, we got some magical stuff we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Most good lessons are cruel, so you better learn from them.