MCN LAFF Profile: Derek Sieg

Derek Sieg
Swedish Auto

Orson Welles used to say that quiet people made him nervous. "I like someone that isn't afraid to speak his mind and engage in conversation," was the legendary filmmaker's stance.

Welles would have loved Derek Sieg.

Sieg, the writer-director of Swedish Auto that has its world premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival Tuesday, initially projects a quiet reserve. However, once engaged, he easily shifts gears and enjoys the banter involved in talking about his film.

"I was at the New York Film Academy for a couple of years," says the Virginia native. "It didn't have much of a film program but it did have equipment. So, I made a lot of shorts and one formed the seed that became Swedish Auto. It was about a street cleaner and a violinist. He sees her every night on his route and she follows him in the mornings when she goes to work. Neither is aware of this fact."

Whereas this element was the raison d'etre of the short, in the feature its significance has become less central and more poetic. The street cleaner became an auto mechanic who finds it difficult to engage socially and emotionally and his serendipitous relationship with a waitress who slowly sheds his protective cocoon. Sieg says that people that have seen the film have been struck by its ability to convey a quality of loneliness. Yearning is perhaps a more apt description but he suggests that a sense of isolation crept into the feature script as a result of living in downtown Los Angeles during its writing.

"I really had no sense of how cut off the downtown area is at night," he recalls. "I just assumed it was like other cities when I moved here three years ago. It was a bit strange to take walks at night and not see a sole in the street and it probably helped my writing process to be working in what felt like a bubble.

Sieg says when he sat down to write he wasn't quite sure what the story was or what characters would emerge. Characters simply appeared as he went along and it seemed natural to set the action in Charlottesville, Va., where he grew up. Carter (played in the film by Lukas Haas) became an auto mechanic in a Swedish motor works shop owned and operated by a black man and his son and a waitress in a nearby diner evolved out of a single scene and just kept popping up as he proceeded.

The filmmaker says he initially tears through a story, excited to learn where it will lead. His first draft of Swedish Auto was done in three of four days while rewrites went on for months. He says that he not only visualizes the film, he can hear the music and setting it in Charlottesville made that process much easier.

He can't quite pinpoint why he decided on Volvos and Saabs other than a predilection for things slightly out of the groove. He'd never owned either car but quickly learned that Volvo owners have a chauvinistic pride about their vehicles. In fact, one investor insisted that the car Carter decides to retool be a Volvo rather than a Saab and provided the 1967 coupe used in the film. Sieg raised close to $1 million from Charlottesville residents and additional services including free lodging in local houses for cast and crew.

"I probably would have made the movie for 50 cents but I was lucky my producer Tyler Davidson had his feet on the ground," says Sieg. "He was very realistic and I needed that dose of reality. I probably would have started with just enough to shoot it, but he wouldn't allow me to get caught in that trap and made sure we were covered for processing and post-production and a bit for promotion."

The filmmaker isn't quite sure what to expect Tuesday evening. He's simply trying to keep busy and not think about it and, of course, the more one avoids anything, the more it intrudes upon one's thoughts. He'd hoped to show the film in Virginia to test the waters but the timing didn't quite work. That screening will probably take place next month.