In Shaun Seneviratne’s Ben and Suzanne, A Reunion in 4 Parts, Ben Santhanaraj journeys to Sri Lanka to rekindle his relationship with Suzanne Hopper, an American NGO worker, after a long separation. But when Suzanne's boss demands she work during their vacation, their love is tested by a dilemma: desire versus duty. As Suzanne struggles with the responsibilities of her job, Ben tries everything to revive their intimacy, leading to candid conversations and chaotic twists as New Year’s Eve - and Ben’s departure - looms ahead.
Here is my interview with Ben and Suzanne, A Reunion in 4 Parts Director Shaun Seneviratne:
Nigrin: You call your new feature film Ben and Suzanne, A Reunion in 4 Parts a horny romance. Tell us a bit about the history behind making this film.
Seneviratne: It’s a 14 year history so I’m going to try to condense it a bit! I was in a long distance relationship in 2009 and went to visit my boo in India, where she was working at the time. However, things were no longer the same. It was one of those trips where it was terrible but also fascinating in how disappointing, degrading, and educational it all was. I thought this experience would make a great movie and I had been working towards that goal ever since (the reason I make movies period was to make this movie)!
So, what does 14 years actually look like? Lots of writing, developing, productive procrastination, re-writing (always as a page one rewrite, which takes even more time), meeting key collaborators, fear, laziness, balancing a full time job, relationship, and social life, and making short films -- including three that star Sathya Sridharan and Anastasia Olowin as Ben and Suzanne and serve as prologues to the story (Tourists and The Chill of Loneliness, which can be screened at benandsuzanne.com; the third film is still in post-production). Of course there are external circumstances as well (pandemic in 2020, mom passing away in 2021, major Sri Lankan economic crisis in 2022).
I had the feeling I would fall into a deep depression if I didn’t make the movie and I gave myself a start date - July 1st, 2023. I went to Sri Lanka with Anastasia Olowin (the lead actor who plays Suzanne) to shoot a new short (the adventures of Suzanne Hopper in Sri Lanka, which is in post-production right now) and we met with Sri Lankan production company Vision Works LK. The date was set and the first check for work was paid to the production company -- everything else just needed to follow suit!
Preproduction ran from March 2023 to June 2024, where we raised our financing through a combo of my life savings, friends coming on board as equity investors, and crowdfunding. In this time we secured our key team, which now included our co-producer Doron JePaul Mitchell, our cinematographer Molly Scotti, and our editor Joe Violette. Funnily enough, after years of “working on the script,” we went into production with a scriptment -- about 50% scripted and the rest comprised of scenarios and snatches of dialogue, which allowed us to work in a fluid, adaptive way on set. We shot over 40 locations all over Sri Lanka with a 40-person crew in 17 days. The SAG-Aftra Strike hit two days into shooting and we shut down production for a week until we received the Interim Agreement, which allowed for truly independent productions to continue shooting. After a week of purgatory, we were one day away from having to pull the plug on the entire production when we finally received the Interim Agreement to allow us to start shooting again (Thanks SAG!).
After the wrap, everything came together fairly quickly. We had our first cut of the movie by mid- September which we submitted to Sundance and SXSW (literally the first cut of the movie -- no music and a few scenes that had title cards such as, “insert computer screen here”). In December we received our first rejection from Sundance (paired with a very nice, personalized note from the programmer!) and a few weeks later received our acceptance to world premiere at SXSW in March 2024! And the rest of this year has been the honor and opportunity to share the film with so many different audiences all over the world! So the tl;dr -- 13 years of development; exactly 1 year from preproduction to premiere.
Nigrin: Your film has two amazing lead actors Sathya Sridharam as Ben and Anastasia Olowin as Suzanne. How did you find them and tell us how you ended up having them star in your film.
Seneviratne: After my long-distance relationship fiasco, while I was marinating on the idea of this movie, I came across Sathya Sridharan on Tumblr. He was performing a spoken word piece on pizza (“What Happened to Pizza,” which can be seen here). Going over to his Tumblr I saw bits of poetry and embeds of emo music we both loved. This was around 2011 or so and there weren’t a ton of South Asian actors and there certainly weren’t any that had his unique sensibility. I put it in my mental rolodex that when the time came to make this project I’d reach out to him.
In 2014 I had a script for a short film that explored the day before long distance begins between a couple, which would serve as the prologue for the feature, called Tourists. I reached out to Sathya on Facebook to setup a meeting but then I had to find Suzanne. I posted for the role on Backstage and Actors Access, providing a lookbook and thorough character description. The first actor I met with for auditions was Anastasia Olowin. Instead of a traditional audition where the actor reads sides, we did something improvisational, where she had access to the full script and story ahead of time, but we performed a scenario where she was meeting with a friend before her international travel. This allowed me to see how they take in what’s on the page, fill in the gaps, and the energy they bring to the character. Her audition was what I measured everyone up against.
I brought Sathya and Anastasia in for a chemistry read. It was going to be in my apartment but I locked myself out when I went to let them in so we did the scene in the stairwell. And everyone was game and had good humor about the circumstance and the chemistry with Anastasia and Sathya and the way they utilized the stairwell space let me know that these are the actors I need to go with. We made Tourists together, became really great friends, collaborated on more projects, made another short with Ben and Suzanne called The Chill of Loneliness, kept them in the loop and co-developed the feature throughout the entire process.
By the time it came to shooting the feature (after Sathya and Anastasia had been patiently waiting 10 years!), we had so much experience with these characters and this story that we were able to be both disciplined and free with how we approached production. This movie would not be the movie that it is without the 10-year collaboration (friendship, relationship) with Sathya and Anastasia. At one point a producer I met earlier on in the project asked if we would consider recasting the roles with stars - “What if we could get Aziz Anasari and Emma Stone” he said. Absolutely not -- Ben and Suzanne do not exist without Sathya and Anastasia and it was always going to be with them.
Nigrin: Your film is broken down into 4 parts and then is further divided by day. Is this something you planned to do from the outset? Why is your film broken up this way?
Seneviratne: There had been many different structural approaches that I’d explored during the long development process. In its earliest iterations, it was nonlinear, going between past and present. That felt passe and I wanted to explore hyper linearity, where each scene is a propulsive jump forward, each cut hiding an ellipses.
It felt right to approach their journey day by day, like a diary. When you travel, each day makes up an episode, tends to have a particular theme or focus. Then you sleep and the day starts again, with something new and unexplored to come your way. I’m a firm believer of the title card as an element of visual storytelling, in this case to really provide a punctuation, a period, on an aspect of the journey. Seeing how Eric Rohmer (one of my favorite directors and biggest influences on this project) used date cards in his movies provided the path forward for how to approach this (coupled with a rewatch of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining).
The parts of the film were influenced by how I wanted the structure to flow: first we experience it from Ben and his circumstance, then we learn more about Suzanne and her circumstance, then we see them really come together, and then we see them totally separated. Another Rohmer reference is The Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle, which I had just seen and I liked the idea of calling out the number of episodes in the title. Just very factual and direct. The part titles for the movie are cumulative, not successive. Meaning that when part 2 starts, it doesn’t mean that part 1 is over -- it’s adding on to it. So we start with “Part 1: The Degrading Vacation of Ben Santhanaraj” and then we add on “Part 2: The Noble Intentions of Suzanne Hopper” and really both are continuing on, now with new elements and perspectives building on to the experience (continuing into “Part 3: Ode to JOI” and “Part 4: Solitary Confinement”).
Nigrin: I love all the long takes and the home movie quality of your film. Tell us about some of your cinema influences and if they played a role in the look of your film.
Seneviratne: I’m not a long take fetishist by any means (I actually hate the movie Birdman), but I do believe in the idea of “one shot per moment,” something I really got from the films of Robert Bresson and Takeshi Kitano. What is the moment? And what is the best place to place the camera to capture this moment? And then we go into the next moment with a new shot... There is very little coverage in the movie (and even the few shot-reverse-shot scenes in the movie is about the interplay between two particular perspectives), most of the movie plays out in unbroken shots with an emphasis on blocking (how characters move through the space), inspired by classic screwball comedies like Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner.
Our cinematographer Molly Scotti and I set some rules for ourselves: camera should be objective and observational; in live environments we should be at a distance, seeing them as tourists on holiday; emphasize ground over sky; stay true to the light; and stay true to the reality of locations. We shot the movie both digitally and on film -- most of the movie was shot on an Arri Alexa Mini and the travelogue portions of the film was shot on a 16mm Bolex.
The naturalistic lighting and film look was inspired by documentary, movies like Sans Soleil, Tokyo Olympiad, The Human Pyramid, and Rohmer movies (which he had described as “fictionalized documentaries”). I want the movie to feel closer to reality, more like documentary, rather than a slicker Hollywood or Indiewood production.
Nigrin: The music is also amazing. Tell us more about the score and how it came to be.
Seneviratne: I’m incredibly sensitive to the use of music in movies. Nothing irks me more than hearing generic sad piano scores and diegetic music in dialogue scenes. For every movie I make, I make hours long playlists that end up inspiring the work in many ways.
The first song we hear in the movie is a song by the most famous singer in Sri Lanka, CT Fernando (he was like the Elvis of Sri Lanka) called “Bara Bage”. This intro to this song is one of the most beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard and so perfectly captures longing, Sri Lanka, and introduces the saxophone as a musical element.
In editing the picture, our editor and I tested some temp music out but nothing was really feeling right. He suggested that we needed something that had our own fingerprint. I had an instrument I bought in Sri Lanka -- a digital tanpura and tabla which creates a drone tone and rhythm patterns -- and Joe said to send him as many samples as I can. I recorded about two hours of sounds and sent it to Joe who selected and arranged portions as the score in the film.
The complex elements of our score were composed by Jake D’Ambra, an incredible saxophone player that I met at an arts residency called Woodward Residency. We talked about pop music from the 80s and music that is so sincere that it’s on the verge of cheesy. We utilized the saxophone as the primary element, working in samples of the tanpura and tabla, and crafted the score around the idea of it being a pop song, following a I–V–vi–IV structure so prevalent in sentimental pop songs, with our model being something like The 1975 or 80s group Boy Meets Girl.
There is also emo music in the movie. In one scene we use Rainer Maria’s seminal “Tinfoil” along with Kind of Like Spitting’s “B-Side Poetry” in the credits. Such a wild thing that the music that helped me discover myself in high school is music I get to honor in my movie! (Alternative music fans, peep the Smiths, Shelter, and Self Defense Family shirts worn by Ben throughout the film!)
Nigrin: Are there any memorable stories while you made this film or any other info about your film you would like to relay to us?
Seneviratne: We were doing our tech scout the week before shooting, which encompassed driving to all our locations and assessing it for the scene and our technical needs. We wrapped our scout in the middle of the country and had a 6-hour drive ahead of us to the beaches in the south. Our driver Mohommed was playing his favorite song “Low” by Flo-Rida, we were all singing and drinking beer in the back, when a truck clipped our sideview mirror. There was a near altercation between Mohommed and the other driver, but they settled things eventually. We get back in the van and the tone is somber. In an attempt to lighten the mood I was like, “Okay Mohommed, what song do you want to hear that would make you the happiest guy ever right now!” And he just quietly responded, “no music.” And we sat in silence for the remainder of the trip until we got to our hotel. It was the kind of unplanned adventure that can happen while traveling, which we then incorporated almost directly into the movie (with Mohommed playing the driver in the film)!
This fall we’ll be continuing the festival circuit, playing at a drive-in double feature with Starship Troopers, prepping for a theatrical release in New York and Los Angeles for the end of the year, and figuring out our digital distribution and expanding theatrically to other cities in the US. You can follow all the activity on our Instagram @benandsuzannemovie.
Ben and Suzanne, A Reunion in 4 Parts! opens the Fall 2024 New Jersey Film Festival on Friday, September 6. Ben and Suzanne, A Reunion in 4 Parts! Director Shaun Seneviratne will be at the in-person screening to do a Q+A! The film will be Online for 24 Hours and In-Person at 7 PM in Voorhees Hall #105/Rutgers University, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, NJ. Tickets are available for purchase here.
