WritTEN & DirectED BY Adrian Delcan
A skilled wildlife foley artist has his methods challenged by a newcomer with an innate understanding of animal behavior.
ABOUT THE FILM
ANIMAL BEHAVIOR won the Audience Award at the 2023 National Film Festival for Talented Youth and Best Actor at the New York City Independent Film Festival. Other festival highlights include the Crested Butte Film Festival, LA Shorts International Film Festival, Anchorage International Film Festival, Waco Independent Film Festival, and PÖFF Shorts (Black Nights Film Festival in Estonia).
ABOUT THE FILMmaker
Adrian Delcan is a filmmaker originally from Southern California. His writing often features blood and broken families. He was a writer on Judas, the latest game by BioShock creator Ken Levine. His debut feature film, Old Man, is completed and will be released in January 2025.
READ OUR INTERVIEW WITH ADRIAN
Welcome to our Short of the Week series. Tell us a bit about yourself and your filmmaking background.
I was a suburb kid; I grew up an hour from Los Angeles in Orange County. Being this close to Hollywood gave my friends and me a lot of motivation. We felt like it was possible to make the kinds of movies we loved. We worked on tons of short films - most of which I would never want anyone to see, and others I still take lessons from. I found out early on that a great script made the process of filmmaking feel a lot freer, so I started focusing on writing. I went to college for film production and then after graduating I got a job as a writer on a Triple A video game. Now, I’ll be releasing my first feature in January 2025.
Making movies has always been my team sport. I love working with passionate and creative people in development, on set, or in the cutting room. It’s a joy I’ve experienced since I was a kid, and it hasn’t changed a bit all these years later.
Tell us about the genesis of Animal Behavior and your motivation for making this film.
I had only made short films until the feature, and coming off a 90-minute project, I was eager to work on something smaller again. I wanted to experiment with all the tools I had learned, and Animal Behavior became the result of those interests. My goal was to create a singular POV, use lots of camera movement and zooms, and to collaborate with the very funny Ben Fiorica (the lead). Ben had never acted before, but he was a good friend and I knew he had great command of his gestures, all of which are very idiosyncratic. I thought his qualities would contribute beautifully to the lonely, strange, and obsessive protagonist I was writing. I redrafted the script many times after conversations with Ben - we talked a great deal about how we could make this guy really pathetic and jealous, much of which we shot but ultimately had to leave out of the final export. The first cut of this was twice the length.
What were some of the main obstacles you experienced when making Animal Behavior and how did you overcome them?
Animal Behavior was my thesis project in college, and the school that I went to had a fantastic production system that all students were required to follow when making their films. It kept us accountable and taught us a lot about industry standard procedures, but it also came with some incredibly frustrating restrictions. To my crew’s surprise, our school didn’t allow us to film inside their foley studio, so we had to build a four-walled set of a foley studio in a stage about fifty-feet from the real one. Luckily, my production designer, Jen Ledbury, was incredible. With the encouragement of the college’s art department, she was able to raise a barn despite very limited resources. Ultimately, I was really happy we got to make our own; it gave us a lot more control over the way it looked on camera and allowed us to design a floorplan around blocking ideas. I admire Jen’s talent and determination, and I’m very proud of the set we created.
Tell us about the journey of getting your film to audiences and some of the festival circuit highlights.
We were fortunate to have several opportunities to screen Animal Behavior in theaters around the world, and it’s been very rewarding to hear the reactions from all these different audiences. It was particularly special to screen the movie downtown at LA Shorts and at NFFTY in Seattle. When I watch it on the big screen I still notice new things Ben and Winston were doing... I’m always grateful for the chance to show it in a theater, but I’m especially excited to finally release it online for a digital audience through Kino Short Film!
What advice or hacks would you give to other short filmmakers?
I think that a carefully designed schedule can be a very creative tool for directors working with limited resources. Further than just being conscious of your cast and crew’s stamina, it’s also a way of preparing your priorities for each sene before walking into the day.
Any film recommendations that we should add to our watchlist?
I’ll recommend some movies that inspired Animal Behavior. While writing, I was thinking a lot about the ending of Denis’s Beau Travail. It’s ridiculous, it’s like coming up for air after ninety minutes underwater.
I really wanted to do something as shocking and poignant, but the ending in Animal Behavior was much darker and I don’t think it could’ve be treated differently.
I’ve thought about how I would adapt this into a feature, and the movie I always come back to is Altman’s 3 Women. I think I would bring the character’s obsession into a realm of identity crisis, like we see in that story.
My DP, Raviteja, and I really wanted to make our movie look dark, with lots and lots of shadows. We studied some interior scenes, lit with one or two practicals, in Coppola’s The Conversation and Wender’s The American Friend. Beyond their beauty, they also feature brilliantly crafted sequences. They don’t feel like they needed to compromise anything for how gorgeous they look.
