In a medium bedeviled by austerity of concept and craft, the emergence of anything remotely deviant is reason enough to celebrate. With 2024 nearly in the rearview, it behooves us to consider this year's harvest. Unconventional departures from the mid-budget indie aisle (A Different Man, Between the Temples), gonzo micro-budget homebrews (Rap World, Booger), and meme-ified studio tent poles (Juror #2, Megalopolis) have brought the “We are so back” chants from a cautious whisper to, if not a shout, then certainly a hearty cheer. Let pessimists beat the drum about our increasingly-grim American film landscape; for us ever-hopefuls there are always a few rays peeking through the storm clouds.
While the final months of the year often herald a slate of prestige pablum, adventurous moviegoers have a worthy box office incentive arriving this month. For nearly two decades, California-based filmmaking duo Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn (of sunny San Diego and the broody Bay Area, respectively) have brought their signature aesthetic and unique tenor to a filmography of pure cinematic delight. From the outset, as evident in short films like Fun’s Over (2006) and Jazz Christmas (2007), Kalman and Horn eschewed the self-important realism so beloved by their peers. Their keen ears and a self-aware sense of humor offers a perfect tonal foil to the sun-flecked, painterly aesthetic of their major works—expectations rarely associated with chatty, low-budget ensemble comedies.
Your humble correspondent first got hip to—and acquainted with—the nonpareil duo back in 2013, when knighthood was in flower and Brooklyn’s Spectacle Theater hosted Kalman for a special screening of Blondes in the Jungle (2009). Five years later, our favorite West Coast auteurs returned for a three-film showcase of Blondes, Two Plains & a Fancy (2018), and their cult favorite L for Leisure (2014). Suffice to say, I’ve been a fan ever since. When I was invited to participate in a 2019 friends-and-family table read for a mysterious project called Dream Team, I didn’t know what to expect, but the opportunity to see a Kalman and Horn picture in this nascent stage was too promising to pass up.
After a lauded premiere at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, Dream Team is ready for its stateside debut. Initially conceived as an episodic series, the 1997-set potboiler stars Esther Garrel and Dirty Beaches’ Alex Zhang Hungtai as playa-hopping INTERPOL agents hot on the trail of a notorious coral smuggler. And while the film, the cinematic medium, and the world itself may have changed considerably since that fated table read, the filmmakers’ finesse has remained a comforting constant.
I caught up with Kalman and Horn last September while they were in New York finishing post-production on Dream Team—a term that could just as readily describe the artists themselves, an Artemis-and-Apollo-like pair united by a common groove. The resulting conversation—partially conducted at Sharlene’s and supplemented via email—has been edited and condensed for maximum vibe.
Caroline Golum: Can you briefly give us a rundown of the history of Dream Team? I remember the reading at Flies Collective, but between now and this final, post-production phase, a lot happened!
Lev Kalman: Whit, what's the history of Dream Team? Where would you start?
Whitney Horn: All I can think about is drinking coca tea in the Incan ruins in Peru. Damn, I wanted us to sound glamorous, but I don't remember the whole story.
LK: I think I can reconstruct it. We were in Peru showing L for Leisure at a festival. We had an idea for a Silk Stalkings-inspired short called Peruvian Bodies but didn't have a script yet. The festival was in a mall in Lima, so we got bored after a few days and decided to go to Machu Picchu. One of the nights there we drank a bunch of coca tea and wrote a script in one night we thought was brilliant.
WH: Oh yeah, it had aliens in it right? Aliens at a pool party?
LK: Yup! Dream Team is the feature we eventually recovered from that short script.
WH: It still ends at a pool party! I guess aliens became coral. Oh dude—you know what I want to talk about? You know how we were well into shooting Dream Team when we realized where the coral thing came from?
LK: There's this giant mural of a coral reef right outside my bedroom/office window in San Diego.
WH: And it didn't hit us until we were filming a scene of people making out against that wall. We get all our ideas from looking around, but it's funny how we didn't put that together till like four years into it.
LK: Yes, so to clarify, Peruvian Bodies was written in 2015 but we weren't into it enough. We rethought of it as Dream Team, a series of 10-ish minute webisodes, and even pitched that at IFP Week. But by the time that happened, it was 2018 and everyone told us 10-minute webisodes weren't a thing anymore. You were supposed to make a pilot and then sell the IP to some TV channel, and maybe they'd let you have some control over the actual TV show.
WH: We had no interest in that.
LK: Dream Team is those webisodes, but nestled into the shape of an art-film. We started filming in 2019, took a big ol' break for Covid and then shot from 2020 to 2022.
WH: The 2020 shoots sucked because we had to work within Covid restrictions. Not just safety stuff, but like the European travel ban.
LK: And we had to reshoot some pre-pandemic stuff too. In a sense, this film was more like L for Leisure, which was shot over a ton of little shoots rather than one big one. That was definitely planned, but Covid, et cetera, made it even more necessary.
WH: It got better though.
LK: One of our last shoots was in Valle de Guadalupe, Mexican Wine Country, and by then I think we were really firing on all cylinders. Actors have written to us about what a good experience that was, which feels good.
CG: You're here in New York doing the post, and you’re working with a larger crew. Has this post-production process differed from your usual workflow?
LK: The only big difference is that Dream Team is so effects heavy, for us I mean, so we’re getting more used to an iterative process. Like doing passes and temps of FX and color. We’re lucky to be working with a place that isn’t like, “You have this many hours with us,” but instead they’re in it till we’re done.
CG: Color plays a big part in your work, and you both take a very active role in the color correction. How do you convey what you're looking for to the technicians you're collaborating with?
WH: Ever since L for Leisure, color and sound are the things we really like to work with pros on.
LK: For us, color and sound are really part of the creative process.
WH: We couldn’t just hand it to people and be like, “Make it good.”
LK: There’s too many specifics just stuck in our heads. As an example: we were working a scene with a dissolve and Whitney was saying to the colorist, “The sparkles in the rock are remembering the sparkles of the ocean.” Nobody is gonna intuit that from the footage.
CG: I've always thought of you as two halves of the same brain, but there must be both overlap and difference in the creative and collaborative process?
WH: Lev has the skills and I do the labor?
LK: Not even though. Um, we write it all together and produce and direct. I tend to do more of the emailing and stuff like that. Whitney holds the camera and yes, builds stuff. I talk to the actors. I used to do sound too, but since Two Plains & a Fancy we try to have someone else do that.
WH: And I sometimes have an AC now.
LK: Yeah, it’s wild. Whitney had an AC for a lot of Dream Team and I occasionally had an Assistant Director. We had departments!
CG: You've been working together for more than a decade, at relatively the same scale with each film. Was Dream Team a different scale than you're accustomed to?
LK: Two decades now!
WH: Half our lives.
LK: Dream Team was a bit of a step up, a baby step. Not really a bigger budget, but we’re definitely learning stuff, how to work with a few more people.
WH: It’s probably the biggest we’d wanna go, crew-wise. Which is like: a production manager, costumer, sound person, AC, Assistant Director, maybe a PA, a driver.
LK: And that was our absolute maximum—just one shoot had all that. Sometimes it’s just me and Whit.
WH: To be fair, we tend to have a combination AC/Gaffer. We’re lucky with that.
LK: I’m not sure we’re using those terms right.
WH: We’ve learned to scale up and down, which is good.
CG: If money were no object, would that change your working methods very much?
LK: If we had more money, I don’t think the movies would change much.
WH: We’re both really happy with this scale. We’d just pay people more. And pay ourselves, that would be cool.
Lev: Yes, none of it would end up on the screen.
Whit: You know, if we had more money, what I’d really love for our shoots, would be one more day.
Lev: I would love that.
CG: In your body of work, there’s a throughline of what you’ve called “ominous optimism”—this sense of impending doom, where characters spiral out and away from crisis at the end. Not up above, or down into, but away from.
LK: We can talk about “Always Opening Up.”
WH: Mmhm.
LK: Dream Team is structured like it’s a TV show. But one thing that’s always disappointed us about TV shows is that the first episode, or first few if it’s The OC, really feels like there’s this whole new world they’re exploring. But pretty much immediately, they start closing down and you realize you’re stuck with the same circle of characters and ideas and dynamics. Our big goal with Dream Team is that even at the end you’d be like, “Whoa, where is this going?”
WH: Or it can be seasons. Like the X-Files feels like it’s still finding new approaches. But eventually, they all give in to people wanting conclusions, and it loses the feeling of discovery. That’s what’s great about John from Cincinatti: it was canceled after the first season so it just stops.
LK: Not in Dream Team… Actually, thinking about it, I’m realizing in almost all our movies the second-to-last thing we do is suggest the characters will die, and then we keep going after that.
WH: I don’t want conclusions. I mean, are there conclusions in life? I guess you die. But is that really the conclusion?
Dream Team opens this Friday, November 15, at Metrograph. Filmmakers Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn will be in attendance for Q&As throughout the weekend. Their previous films will also screen at Metrograph as part of the series “Retro-Futurism: The Films of Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn” and made available on Metrograph At Home. Two Plains & a Fancy is also available on Tubi.
“Catching Up” is a column that finds filmmakers and artists in the middle of making new work.
