Q&A: Gemma Laurence and Kyle James Wright Discuss the Making of ‘Watchdog: the Short Film’
COMBINING HOPEFUL LYRICS AND A MUSIC VIDEO INSPIRED BY CRIME FILMS — musician Gemma Laurence and director Kyle James Wright have created a beautiful depiction of newfound trust with Watchdog: The Short Film.
The Brooklyn-based artist has labeled her fun sound as sapphic folk, and her music is reminiscent of queer artists such as Adrianne Lenker and Tomberlin. “Watchdog” was inspired by her time holed up in a snowy cabin in Vermont and is the final single to be released before her upcoming album, Lavender.
“It’s about that moment when you’re developing feelings for somebody but simultaneously scanning the horizon for threats, looking for any reason that they might leave,” Laurence describes.
Creating the short film was a learning experience for Laurence and Wright. Using 1970s mafia films as inspiration, Wright created a beautiful queer love story that represents trust in its own way. “As a filmmaker, I seek to pair seemingly contradictory elements that comment on each other with strange fluency,” Wright explains. “It was in thinking about this and ‘Watchdog’ that I realized why I love crime movies. The genre necessitates vulnerability from the hardened.”
Read below to learn more about the collaboration between Laurence and Wright, and keep an eye out for Laurence’s album Lavender, releasing on Nov. 4.
LUNA: Hi Gemma and Kyle! How long have you been making music/filmmaking?
LAURENCE: I’ve been playing music for as long as I can remember. As soon as I learned the language to express myself using the guitar, I started writing and haven’t stopped.
WRIGHT: I like to think I’ve been doing this since I was a kid, though that’s probably not totally accurate. I actually audio engineered a small demo session for Gemma in this tiny student-run basement studio when we were in college. We first connected over music, but it wasn’t until years later when my focus shifted towards film that we started talking about making a short for one of her songs.
LUNA: What were the best and worst parts of creating this short film?
LAURENCE: It was such a wonderful experience being a part of this film and working on set with Kyle, who is such a dear friend of mine and a brilliant director. We had such a talented cast and crew behind this film. I honestly can’t think of any bad things to say about the process. I just felt honored to be there and grateful for such a great team around the project.
WRIGHT: The best parts of it for me were two-fold. Developing the story with my co-writer Devin McGrath-Conwell was hugely rewarding. We’d never done anything like this before and it was a blast to delve deep into genre territory and find fun ways to explore the ideas that interest us in that space. On the directoral side, I got really lucky with my crew. All those guys rallied so tightly around the concept and I’m so proud of what we accomplished. The short has a unique sense of place and time and I think that’s a credit to all the folks behind the camera. The cast were so much fun to work with, as well. The way they inhabited these characters was a true pleasure to be a party to and to help build. Everyone put so much into it.
The most difficult aspect of making Watchdog, on the other hand, was striking a balance between short film and music video. The mechanics are sometimes a little unwieldy when pieced together. We knew we wanted a break in the music at some point so that we could spend more time with these characters and weave in moments that were grounded in the world as opposed to acting primarily as a visualizer for the song the entire time. Pacing ended up being a bit of a conundrum, but I think we struck an effective balance that flows well enough with the music that it gets you hooked, builds tension, and then pays off pretty spectacularly when the final chorus comes in. I’m really glad that we took tonal risks with the genres we were operating in.
LAURENCE: I’ll add that Kyle and his team in post did a fantastic job editing the film. My jaw dropped when he sent me the first cut. They worked so hard on this and the final product is insane.
LUNA: Can you talk about the process of writing this song?
LAURENCE: “Watchdog” was born out of a solo trip I took in January 2021 into the Green Mountains of Vermont. I pretty much hadn’t left my house for a year (in Maine) and I was itching for adventure. I had plans to record an album and I had seven songs written. I knew I wanted one more song to tie the record together so I took this trip as a solo writers retreat. I brought my dog, Scout, with me and we stayed in this tiny wood stove-heated cabin in the snowy foothills of the Green Mountains. Scout is such a sweet dog, but she’s also very anxious. Every day and night she’d sleep by the door of the cabin so that every time I got up to leave, she’d be startled awake. It suddenly felt a lot like a metaphor for my relationships. I wrote a little melody on banjo and then the whole song came together with the hook: “My watchdog heart is sleeping by the backdoor with one eye open waiting for you to go.”
LUNA: Tell me a bit about what “Watchdog” means to you.
LAURENCE: “Watchdog" is a song about trust and learning how to trust again after you’ve had your heart broken time and time again. The song is about that initial moment when you meet someone new and you're falling for them but you’re also scanning the horizon for signs they might leave. But despite everything, you still want to let them in. It's a song rooted in this fear of loss, and it’s about learning how to come to terms with that.
LUNA: How did you decide “Watchdog” would be one of the main singles off your album, and what made you choose it as the one to make a music video for?
LAURENCE: “Watchdog” is definitely one of my favorite songs off the album so it was always in the running to be one of the main singles. I love the imagery and I loved how much we leaned into the alt-country twang during the recording process, incorporating pedal steel and these Johnny Cash–style backing vocals and drums. Ironically, I never really had plans to make a music video for it. Kyle came to me interested in making a music video, and we were thinking about doing something pretty subdued and artistic for one of the slower songs on the album. But after he listened to the album, he came to me with a wildly different idea.
WRIGHT: Yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking through different ways to approach some of my favorite songs off the album. A lot of what I was seeing for songs like “Adrienne,” “Morningside Heights,” and “San Francisco” was more contemporary and abstract. In the case of “Adrienne,” I became really interested in organic life and overgrowth reclaiming elements of built environments. Things like tree roots driving cracks through concrete and other images of ecdysis and metamorphosis portrayed in more impressionistic ways. I think I’d still love to make one of those more somber and atmospheric videos, but these images of long-point collar clad cutthroat women packed into smoke-filled backrooms started hitting me right around the same time I began to gravitate towards “Watchdog.” Gemma’s lyrics on the track are so expressive and contain a lot of narrative opportunity. It all coalesced around this idea of how to best represent the trust issues at the song’s core, and the premise of approaching this as a ’70s era crime movie was something that really resonated with me.
LUNA: Can you talk a bit about how this music video was a formative project for you?
LAURENCE: I’d never worked on a film set before so it was an incredibly cool experience seeing my song come to life and getting to be a part of that process. I got to see the making of a music video/short film as the artist but also as an actor, and [was] behind the scenes making the score with Charlie Dahlke, Kyle Wright, and my wonderful bandmates Francesca Pastore, Joanna Quinn, and Nell Sather. It was one of the largest scale creative projects I’ve ever personally been involved in, and [it] felt so wildly different from anything else I’d done before.
WRIGHT: Much of my work has been in supporting other directors and creatives to accomplish their visions, which I’m really grateful for. You can learn so much watching other people work, but I think there’s no substitute for being at the helm of something to supplement that growth. That’s when you learn where your real blind spots are. I thought I had strong suits going into this that I learned were actually areas I needed to develop significantly. Again, I’m indebted to the crew for supporting me through waters I didn’t always have experience navigating.
LUNA: Can you describe the collaborative process behind this music video?
LAURENCE: It was so wonderful working with Kyle and his co-writer and co-producer (and our dear friend) Devin McGrath-Conwell on this project — both people truly poured so much time and energy into this film and it shows.
WRIGHT: We spent a good deal of time with the script and then used that to create visual materials that allowed us to talk about the look and feel in detail. We did it in a way that was very indie, but we spent almost four months prepping on the side while juggling our day jobs. By the time we put the cast together and got to rehearse, we’d already been talking about it for quite some time and I think we were able to trust everyone with their own little piece and also trust the concept. It’s unique to get so much time to prep and rehearse something of this size.
It’s also worth mentioning that we went back in after we locked the cut and did a whole score from the ground up with Gemma, her band, and Charlie Dahlke (who engineered and produced the album). That was such an unusual but really natural way to approach the score, and it ended up being a fun way to tie the music back into the piece because it’s Gemma and her band that are lending those lush period-inspired tonalities to the soundtrack.
LUNA: Were there any artists, songs, films, etc. that inspired the song and/or music video?
LAURENCE: My producer, Charlie, is a big fan of Andrew Sarlo and looked to his work with Adrianne Lenker, Big Thief, and Courtney Marie Andrews as inspiration when it came to recording and mixing “Watchdog.” But the song also has this kinda nostalgic old school country vibe to it, reminiscent of Emmylou Harris or Patsy Cline.
WRIGHT: The whole concept is a reimagining of prominent ’70s crime movies that were shot in New York. Films like Mean Streets (1973) and Across 110th Street (1972) were big references, though we looked at some more zany stuff as well to help find the boundaries of what we were going for. We wanted Watchdog to be in conversation with some of those more established works, though, because the characters at the center stand out as such a counterpoint to some of the male-donimated ensembles of that era.
LUNA: Kyle, I really love this description for your love of crime movies: “One theme always remains central: trust, and the consequences of violating it.” Can you talk about how you explored this in the making of your short film?
WRIGHT: I’m fascinated with how jealousy affects people and their relationships. There’s something about a love triangle that really brings this to the surface, how insecurity and competition and heightened emotions or feelings for another person can muddle into a cocktail that’s potent and sometimes completely consuming. For me, that percolated up pretty early as the dramatic vehicle through which to explore the trust that exists between these women. The characters flowed from there. We wanted to feel out where their trust for each other would hold and where it would break, and jealousy and fear were two big emotional forces behind finding those moments and injecting some weight into the levity of the camp we were simultaneously chasing after.
LUNA: Is there anything else either of you would like to share about this piece or any other creative projects you’re working on?
WRIGHT: We’re really excited to finally be sharing this and it’s always so much fun to hear about people's experiences watching it. A lot of love and time go into things like this, so it’s always great to get to celebrate a project being out in the world. I’m trying to be present for that right now and am also looking forward to Gemma’s album release on Nov. 4.
LAURENCE: Yes, the album release! My sophomore record, Lavender, is out on Better Company Records next week. I’m incredibly excited to put that out into the world after spending so much time on it. After that… we’ll see!
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