Paula González-Nasser has already confirmed herself to be one of many high location scouts for indie movies akin to Eliza Hittman’s “By no means Not often Typically At all times” and beloved TV sequence like “Excessive Upkeep” and “Search Social gathering.” Now, González-Nasser is popping her experiences on set right into a meta directorial debut with “The Scout.”
González-Nasser writes and directs the indie, which was funded by Fifth Flooring Photos, a neighborhood of filmmakers that collaborate on one another’s options. González-Nasser together with Ryan Martin Brown and Mathew Romanski are listed as producers.
“The Scout” facilities on Sofia (Mimi Davila), who works as a location scout for a community TV present that shoots in New York Metropolis. The synopsis reads: “It’s her job to seek out the properties, companies, and exteriors the place the soon-to-be-shot present will happen. This implies a day by day journey into the personal areas and lives of quite a few metropolis residents, photographing their properties and briefly getting into the material of their lives. Over the course of a day crammed with these encounters, Sofia performs witness to moments of curiosity, vulnerability, and quiet pressure, till her work takes a sudden, private flip.” Sarah Herrman, Otmara Marrero, Matt Barats, Rutanya Alda, Max Rosen, and Ikechukwu Ufomadu co-star. “The Scout” premieres on the 2025 Tribeca Pageant.
González-Nasser informed IndieWire that producing a trio of movies in the summertime of 2021 is what helped propel her to make her function debut. (She produced quick movies “Weapons and Their Names” and “Prep,” in addition to function “Free Time.”)
“Whereas I really cherished working as a location scout, it was a really demanding and difficult job, which made my day by day life and schedule extremely unpredictable. I used to be struggling to maintain my inventive facet tasks afloat and I knew that making an attempt to do each was unmanageable for me,” González-Nasser mentioned. “The itch of needing to make one thing of my very own grew.”
She defined how ultimately she “fell again in love with making film with my buddies” and the way the “The Scout” took place as a fusion of this ardour and her “humorous, attention-grabbing, and typically scary” experiences trying to find movie areas. She began journaling about these moments, notably throughout her time working for “Excessive Upkeep” location supervisor Julie Sage. Ultimately, she began to see how Sage would construct a “lovely relationship with the situation proprietor (if all goes effectively, after all)” as terrific materials for a function.
She mentioned, “Someplace alongside the method of making an attempt to jot down different concepts, I got here again to these journal entries, and thought it will be attention-grabbing to make one thing out of these. I cherished the idea of all these strangers in New York Metropolis being linked collectively by this central character that floats out and in of their lives, and I used to be additionally within the affect having all these interactions in a day takes on an individual. There’s an emotional burden to the job that individuals don’t actually take into consideration, and it creates an attention-grabbing dichotomy — this scout having to tackle a lot from these different folks by means of the job, however by no means having any time to course of her personal life as a result of of the job.”
And it wasn’t simply the premise of “Excessive Upkeep” that impressed the attitude of “The Scout”: The sequence additionally helped hone González-Nasser’s personal directing fashion and tone for the script. “Engaged on tasks like ‘Search Social gathering’ and ‘Excessive Upkeep’ specifically knowledgeable my directing fashion tremendously, as a result of I’ve at all times considered myself and the tales I need to write as extra dramatic-leaning, however I typically discover myself remodeling scenes in rewrites to include extra situational humor,” she mentioned. “I really like engaged on comedy tasks as a result of typically instances the actors are comedians, and so they perceive timing so effectively — methods to make the most of a protracted pause, or methods to preserve a scene alive after many takes.”
“The Scout” can be totally a New York movie, and its debut at Tribeca is the right match for the function, in accordance with González-Nasser. “Tribeca actually champions New York tales, and I really feel lucky that this movie will likely be skilled for the primary time right here within the metropolis,” she mentioned. “We made the movie with and thru our whole New York neighborhood, so to have the ability to share it with them right here is so significant. It’s a movie not nearly New York Metropolis areas however extra so the idiosyncratic and sophisticated those that inhabit these areas. Each New Yorker is aware of that feeling of strolling down a block they’ve been on a whole bunch of instances earlier than and folks’s properties and imagining what the lives of these strangers are like. On the threat of coming off cheekily, the movie actually grew to become a capsule of the experiences I’ve had right here within the final decade, attending to cross that threshold and meet all types of people that proceed to encourage me and my work.”
“The Scout” premieres at Tribeca as a gross sales title with Cinetic. Try the primary look beneath.