It feels like you just let the camera roll on the kids and let them improvise, but what kind of direction did you actually have to give all the first-time child actors?

Samantha Quan was the acting coach for the kids. And she told me that, no matter what, they still needed to learn their lines and go into the scene with that direction. And then blocking was very different. You couldn’t just tell them what to do. You actually had to get up [gets up and goes across the room] and go like this: “Watch me! Okay? Watch me. You’re gonna go like this, okay? One, two, three.” The minute I tried to go too improvisational, they would run in a different direction. It was also the summer that Deadpool came out, so Christopher [Rivera] would not stop with Deadpool. He’d be like, “Deadpool lives in here!” and we’re like, “No, Christopher, Deadpool doesn’t live in there!” [Laughter] There’s only so much freedom that you can give them. I mean, Brooklynn [Prince] is obviously incredibly talented–they all are, but she’s even on a whole other level–at being able to improvise if we needed her to. She’s a prodigy. She can do whatever.

And you cast Bria Vinaite, who plays her mom, from Instagram. Were you like, “I’m gonna find the mom from–”

No! We were actually out to some pop stars. Back in 2011, we wanted to cast a former Mouseketeer. We were considering all those big names that you can imagine. But then, I found Bria’s Instagram by accident, and I swear to god, it was just because someone had re-posted [one of her posts]. I was looking at Instagram for inspiration, and slang. Especially since Tangerine, social media has helped out so much. You can find music, you can be inspired for characters. But I found Bria’s, and it must have been–she’s a weed advocate, as, you know, I am too. So I probably was just following a weed thing, and that came up. And she just made me laugh, and I was like, She’s so fresh and so different. This character is going through so much for her kid, and I think the audience is going to be just pulled out of it constantly if we see somebody recognizable.

So when I called my producers and financiers and said, “I want to try Bria,” there was silence on the other line for half a second. I could tell that they were just like, “We really want somebody with box office draw,” and I’m just like, “Yeah, but this will make a better movie, and we have Willem, so let’s just try this, please.” My past films had success with first-timers. So they allowed me to do it. Bria had the physicality (obviously), she had the freshness about her, she had this real wit and self-deprecating thing going on, and you could tell she was confident. She was willing to make fun of herself. She came down and she read with the kids, and within minutes, I knew that she was good. She had to go through an intensive four-week workshop leading up to production, and Samantha Quan took her under her wing, and I’m so proud of her. She really did it.

I understand you also cast locals in Florida?

Carmen Cuba was our big Hollywood casting director, and she got us Willem Dafoe and Caleb [Landry Jones]. Then you have our local casting company, CROWDshot, and there was a woman there by the name of Patti Wiley. She had actually grown up in motels herself, in Tampa, I think. So she knew what to look for, and she did some of our street casting for all the background action. The woman getting booted out of the motel [in the movie] is a resident. She’s a single mom with four kids at one of those motels. And then, I was street casting. I found Valeria Cotto at Target.

I really wanted to ask you about the ending, which, without giving anything away, is such a shift from the rest of the movie, in terms of artistic choices. How did that come together? Was it always planned, or did you only find it in editing?

The [plot point] was always planned but the music came later. My co-screenwriter suggested it while we were in post-production. I’m the editor, and instead of doing any sort of assemble or rough cut, I go right to a fine cut. There were fine cuts of all the scenes, and near the ¾ mark is where we started shuffling things around. It was getting scary, and I thought the ending needed something more.

Can you explain those different kinds of edits?

You start with an assemble, and sometimes the editor doesn’t even do an assemble, it’s the assistant editor. They go in with all the script notes and the script supervisor’s notes, and they string together the movie. Sometimes the director’s already specified which takes they prefer of different scenes, so sometimes an assistant editor can give you a whole movie in an assemble. Then the editor sits down and makes it into a rough cut, and then they start screening it for people. Eventually, they get to a fine cut, which means it’s one cut away from the final cut or the locked cut. For me, I jump right to fine, because I only have to please myself, and I know one scene will dictate the next. If I complete one scene entirely and even build all the audio tracks and figure out exactly how it will sound and feel, then it helps me with the next scene, because obviously it’s all about flow. So yeah, that’s my technique. Every scene is done and completed before I move onto the next. I know that’s weird.

So it’s totally linear? You don’t jump around?

Yeah. Later on, though, my assistant and I printed out little thumbs of every scene. I still have it on my wall.

Whoa! It’s so good to know that there are different ways that you can approach it.

Yeah, isn’t it? I understand that there has to be some order, especially on big studio films, in order to be efficient, but if you always stick to that same way of making [movies]…It’s interesting to see when filmmakers think outside of the box and have their own methods.

I’ve kind of been taken aback by how polarizing that [scene] is. I didn’t know it was going to be divisive. Look on Twitter. Some people are like, “BEST ENDING EVER!” and some people are like, “ENDING. RUINED. FILM.” That’s why I say it’s up to the audience’s interpretation, because I think even my co-screenwriter interprets it slightly different than I do.

I feel as if it’s a moment in which the audience is now completely immersed into the senses of a child, where they’re using that same sense of imagination that Moonee has been using all along throughout the film to make the best of what she had. Instead of being able to go to the Animal Kingdom, she literally goes 10 feet behind the motel where there’s a cow pasture and she has her own safari. She goes to the haunted house that is the abandoned condos. So yes, it’s a tragic, inevitable ending. But at that moment, I’m allowing the audience to escape with her in their heads. That’s how I see it, you know? We get to escape with them to a magical place in which they won’t be harmed or separated.

And then some people say, “Oh, it looks like a YouTube video.” Well, no shit! We had to shoot it on the iPhone to shoot that [location]. I transferred all of the iPhone to film, and back to digital. I have a 35 millimeter strip of the iPhone footage. So that’s a geeky thing that no one will care about. [Laughs]