Joe Swanberg Returns: The “Old Punk” Talks Finding Way Back To Directing With 10th SXSW Title ‘The Sun Never Sets,’ A Cyclical Return For Mumblecore & Reasons For Optimism About Film’s Future
After nearly a decade away from SXSW, and from feature directing generally, Joe Swanberg is back this weekend to the festival that launched his career with The Sun Never Sets, a starry dramedy premiering tonight at the Zach Theater, which marks his 10th outing in Austin.
In an interview with Deadline, the filmmaker admits that there was a moment there when he considered retiring from directing, if not from the industry at large. But he’s back in top form with his charming new acquisition title, starring Dakota Fanning, Jake Johnson and Cory Michael Smith as three points in an Alaskan love triangle gone terribly wrong.
Swanberg elected to put his directing career on pause following the conclusion of Easy, a Netflix anthology centered on everyday life in his home city of Chicago. By this point in his career, he’d accomplished more than many filmmakers ever do, as a driving force in the rise of mumblecore, the 2000s indie film movement characterized by improvisational, DIY, slice-of-life work. A writer, director, producer, editor and actor, Swanberg established himself as a name-brand director with films like Nights and Weekends, Drinking Buddies, and Win It All. He extended his influence by championing a string of great works from other exciting indie voices, either as producer or EP — everyone from Alex Ross Perry (Queen of Earth, Golden Exits) to Dustin Guy Defa (Person to Person), the late Lynn Shelton (Sword of Trust) and Josephine Decker (Madeline’s Madeline).
For Swanberg, Easy was “the pinnacle” — a project giving him access to new levels of budget, plus a dream circle of collaborators above and below the line. Going through a divorce while winding the show down, he expected to step back from directing only momentarily, unaware of the ways the world would soon transform, and the film industry along with it, between Covid, a historic double strike and other factors bearing down.
Here, the filmmaker explains how he found his way back to his “most fun, ideal spot” as a creative, reflecting on the evolution in his craft after taking his discipline as a writer to new levels on Easy. He also reflects on his “life-changing” connection to SXSW, reasons for optimism regarding the future of film even amid generally “bizarre” happenings in the industry, BDSM as the new “energy of romance,” mumblecore finding new life among younger generations of filmmakers and viewers, and more.
DEADLINE: The Sun Never Sets is your 10th film to play SXSW. What does the festival mean to you?
JOE SWANBERG: It’s honestly been a very life-changing place for me. I’ve had many indelible days and weeks at the festival where I met people or had premieres that totally changed the course of my life and career. So it’s very difficult to imagine sitting here right now without SXSW. Both Matt Dentler and Janet Pierson championed me in ways that were absolutely huge.
Also, I was always very jealous of the Austin film community, with its roots going back to Linklater and those people. But also just in 2005, when I went there with my first feature, meeting Bryan Poyser and Spencer Parsons. I met Anish Savjani there, who ended up producing a bunch of my features. It’s crazy how pretty much every cycle of my work, big and small, has connected to South By in some way or other.
So I’m very excited to go back. I haven’t been to the festival since 2017. So I’m expecting Austin to be different, I’m expecting South By to be different. But I couldn’t be more stoked to just be there again, have a film there again. I’m really, really looking forward to it.
DEADLINE: What’s your first memory of SXSW?
SWANBERG: Well, honestly, I didn’t even know what to expect. We drove there from Chicago when Kissing on the Mouth premiered there, and as we pulled into Austin after a long two-day road trip, I guess in my mind, I hadn’t really been to Texas before, and I imagined something less metropolitan than Austin already was back then. I was kind of like, “Oh sh*t, this is a real city. Damn.”
I had known about Andrew Bujalski’s work and knew he was going to be there with Mutual Appreciation. So I’d reached out to him beforehand to try and maybe say hi to him. And the Duplass Brothers had already had The Puffy Chair at Sundance. I kind of knew it was small and maybe in the same space.
DEADLINE: What an era for indie film…
SWANBERG: Oh my God, I know. I met Ti West that year. I met David Lowery that year. It’s shocking and so cool.
So almost my immediate impression was being surrounded by great people. We got out there and met a bunch of folks. I was there with three of my collaborators on that first movie, so we were kind of rolling deep. Karina Longworth was there; she wrote one of the first positive reviews of my movie.
I remember getting home to Chicago after that first festival and just being so depressed. I just wanted to be back in Austin during South By. I was like, oh my God, I can’t believe I have to go back to my job and just live my normal life. That was the greatest week I’ve ever had.
DEADLINE: You had a day job at the time?
SWANBERG: Yeah, I was doing web design. I had taught myself HTML in film school because I figured I needed to have something that I could make some money at. My boss was extremely understanding about giving me the week off to go to the festival, and when I got home, I think he could tell my head was still spinning. So I just remember trying to get work done, but wanting to email and follow up with everybody I had met.
DEADLINE: The Sun Never Sets is your first feature as a director in almost a decade. What have you been up to, and what brought you back to directing?
SWANBERG: Coming off of [the Netflix series] Easy, I was just completely spoiled, having just spent four years having the best creative experience of my life. I felt very supported by Netflix; I was making 100% the show I wanted to make. It was the pinnacle.
I kind of knew, coming out of that, that I wanted to take a little bit of time off and catch my breath after a pretty heavy-duty run on that show and other TV directing. I was getting divorced at the time, too, and you know, I have two kids. I just did not want to ghost out and try to sell another show, or suddenly be that guy that got divorced and disappeared.
I thought I’d take a little time off, not expecting that the pandemic and various other things would permanently modify the film industry. So in 2021 I opened a video store here in Chicago and started goofing around with some fun passion projects. Then, I really got excited about producing. I had always wondered about Roger Corman, who had gone through this incredibly prolific period as a director and then stopped directing altogether and just started producing other people’s films. So I thought maybe that was the case. I was like, oh, maybe I had my run. Maybe I’m good on directing and I’ll just take the knowledge that I’ve gained and support younger filmmakers.
So I did do that. I produced a slate of horror films and had various other projects that kept me busy. I think being on set with younger filmmakers was extremely reinvigorating. But it was also showing me on a daily basis, oh man, you’ve got a real skill set. One way to utilize that is to produce for other people, but also, why aren’t you directing your own movies? I didn’t have a good answer to that other than I was tired for a little while after Easy. [Laughs]
That’s not a great reason not to be doing my own stuff, but at the time, the momentum in the film industry shifts fast. I feel like maybe I could’ve immediately moved into something in 2018, but by 2022, I couldn’t just snap my fingers and conjure a show or immediately get actors I wanted. So it took me like a year to adjust to the fact that if I was going to do it, I was probably just going to make another film of my own, working the way I’d been working in the past. But then I got this horror slate going and I was kind of bound to that — I mean, in a fun way. I was excited to be bound to it. But as we started wrapping those movies up at the tail end of 2024, I really had the itch again. I felt very excited and very in the mood to get my own stuff going.
So it was super fun hitting Jake [Johnson] up and re-instigating that collaboration, and just really wanting to get back to it, I was happy to discover once I was back on set that I was really in my most fun, ideal spot. I love working with actors; I love all the components of directing and producing.
So now, it’s going to be the opposite problem. I’m just going to be insanely prolific again. [Laughs] Everybody will be sick of me in two years like, “Dude, why don’t you split the difference? Instead of disappearing for six years and then having five movies at once, maybe something in the middle.”
DEADLINE: So you felt like you lost some momentum after Easy that you needed to recoup?
SWANBERG: For sure. There’s always new filmmakers.
DEADLINE: That’s surprising to hear, because from the outside it seems like you’ve built a community around you who would jump at the chance to get back on set the moment they knew you were making something again.
SWANBERG: Yeah, definitely. I think I could have gotten another $40,000 little movie going at any old time. But again, I was spoiled after Easy. I had had really nice budgets and access to all my favorite actors, so I kind of wanted to be bougie and operate at that prestige level again. [Laughs] I’d gotten a little accustomed to the trappings of working with really great people. So with this film, I was able to pull back a lot of my team from Easy, and just pull in really high-level collaborators, and be stoked.
DEADLINE: Before we get to your new film, I wanted to ask you about your thoughts on the situation with Yale Entertainment, the company behind the slate of horror films you mentioned. I broke the news last year of its founders Jordan Yale Levine and Jordan Beckerman filing for bankruptcy, as well as their debt of $50M+ to creditors, and questions raised by people in their circle with regard to their conduct. Levine and Beckerman confirmed in a statement to Deadline at the time that Yale “became insolvent, unsuccessfully pursued a restructuring plan,” and filed for bankruptcy while denying any “dishonest” activity on their part “in connection with the company, its investors, or its creditors.” Did the headlines around Yale come as a surprise to you?
SWANBERG: I have to admit I’m a little out of the loop. I have had some communication with them since the tail end of 2024, but not a lot, and I was reading your article and learning things I didn’t know. My ex-wife had worked with them on one of her features and we had some friends in common. On my end, they stepped up at a time where I really wanted to get this project going, so I had a very good working relationship with them and found them all to be really cool. But we were one of the projects caught in that collapse at the tail end of that period of time. So it definitely delayed the horror slate and caused issues on my end.
But I feel for them too. I’m sort of on both sides of that line. I don’t think they ever set out to hurt filmmakers or cause problems like that. I think it’s the indie film world: you get caught in a spiral and things happen. At the same time, as an injured party myself, it was extremely frustrating to be almost to the finish line with these movies and then have everything blow up, and we needed to figure out how to put the pieces back together. So it was definitely complicated.
DEADLINE: What happened with those movies?
SWANBERG: They’re going to be on Screambox; they’re going to Cineverse. We’re at the tail end of figuring that out. They will come out this year. It’s looking like actually fairly soon, they’ll start rolling out, and they’ll come out over the course of the year.
DEADLINE: What was the seed of the idea for The Sun Never Sets? How did Alaska come into the picture?
SWANBERG: My producer, Ashleigh Snead, lives in Anchorage. I actually have another feature that I’m in post-production on that I worked with Ashleigh on, and she had a project that was going to go in Anchorage in May or June, and it pushed for actor availability reasons. She called me and was like, “It’s really the perfect time to make a movie here. Do you have anything we can shoot in Alaska a few months from now?” And I was like, “Um?” [Laughs]
The only thing I had, which was similar to what we made, was this idea from 2019, right after I had gotten divorced. I was dating this younger woman and I was like, “I don’t want to get married again; I don’t want to have more kids.” I was toying with this idea about a woman who starts dating two guys, each of whom satisfies a different part of her life. She’s dating this divorced guy with kids. He’s stable, he lives in the city, he’s comfortable. And then she’s dating a much more adventurous guy who has similar interests to her but is very unpredictable and not the kind of guy she can pin down. For a while, it’s perfect because these two guys satisfy both of her needs, and then the whole thing kind of collapses as the guys start to get jealous of each other, and we go from there.
I had never fleshed that idea out; it was just like a soft idea that I had had. And every once in a while I’d be like, “Oh, maybe there’s something there.” When Ashleigh called me out of the blue, I was like, “I always kind of imagined that movie [being] set in Seattle or something like that.” And I was like, “I have one idea we could do in Alaska.”
So I pitched her that, and she was like “Yeah, maybe. That sounds kind of cool.” Then, I started talking to Jake Johnson and telling him not only that idea, but also about a breakup I was going through at the time. He was just laughing at me, about my stupid life, and we pulled these concepts together a little bit. I started taking aspects of the current breakup and aspects of that old idea, and then brought Jake in, brought Dakota in, brought Corey in, and then the movie starts finding itself.
I always cast pretty early in the process, so it started finding itself once I was working with the actors.
DEADLINE: While you’re known for a filmmaking approach revolving around improv, this film has been described as your most tautly constructed to date. What has changed from your beginnings to now, in terms of your general process?
SWANBERG: I would say Easy turned me into a much better writer. The last feature I did, Jake and I shot in the summer of 2015, right before I started Easy, and the literal pace of television meant I needed to get better at constructing because we were doing those episodes in four days each. There was no time to really play on set, so that was a huge influence [here]…
DEADLINE: It’s interesting to hear you talk about your evolution as an artist in your own eyes, as I always thought there was something beautiful and compelling about your early filmmaking approach, even if it was less reliant on a carefully crafted screenplay.
SWANBERG: I mean, I think over the years, I just gained confidence as a writer. Early on, that improv process was based around not really having a writing background and not feeling confident about my outlines and really wanting the actors to come in and help me flesh and shape that stuff out. But by the time I was doing Easy, I was 20 features in and had directed a bunch of TV, and I think for the first time, I was like, oh, okay. I can structure an episode of television, and I can feel confident that the thing that I write is makeable on the schedule.
So then coming into this film, I definitely wrote a lot more than I usually write. I think I had more to say. I think I also understood that we wanted to shoot on 35[mm]. I was kind of like, okay, we’re not just going to roll and roll all day on 35.
Also, Jake is such a good writer. Over the course of our collaboration, he’s turned me into a much better writer because he really has a writer’s DNA. So all of that rubbed off, and then I would say the biggest difference is we shared this outline a lot. Usually, the idea is, the outline is there, and then we’ll use that when we get to set. But we really shaped this outline. We showed it to friends, to other romantic comedy writers. We got feedback; we really worked it on the page. So by the time we were in Anchorage, I felt good about that outline, like I wanted to shoot it, as opposed to using it as a jumping-off point. And the actors felt that way, too.
You know, I always [tell] people, “I’m open to improv. We don’t have to do it exactly the way it’s written.” This was the first time where I really felt everybody was like, “Well, we like it.”
DEADLINE: So you wrote out more of a traditional script for this one?
SWANBERG: Closer. I wrote some dialogue. It kind of resembled the Easy outlines. Those ended up being seven or eight pages per episode and had some dialogue in them. This was probably 55 or 60 pages long, the outline, a lot of prose just describing where the characters are and what’s going on, but quite a bit in traditional script format.
DEADLINE: You’ve mentioned shooting on film, on location in Alaska. Is it important to you to go against the grain in certain ways to preserve creative liberties? It seems like you don’t let things like tax incentives factor into your creative decision-making — and as a result, your film doesn’t look and feel like all the others shot in Vancouver or Atlanta, purely for financial reasons.
SWANBERG: For sure. I don’t even know how I feel about tax incentives as a resident of Illinois. I’m like, why are we giving our money to some of the biggest, most profitable corporations? So that’s definitely not a driving factor for me.
I don’t know. I think I’m sort of an old punk. I’m from the DIY ethos and very much anti-corporate in my thinking. So I’ve always approached every movie wanting to make the best movie possible, and also under the mindset that the commercial factors are solved by making a good movie. If the beginning of your process is about cost savings and fitting into economic models, then you’re kind of fighting a different battle. And I mean, I’m a producer. I understand, if we were to make this film for a studio from the outset, why that studio needs to look at those economic models and trim costs where they can. But as as an independent artist, I feel like my whole goal is to rid myself of that type of thinking and focus on the movie, and then let the chips fall where they fall.
DEADLINE: In recent years, I’ve felt a conspicuous absence in the indie space. I’ve wondered, where is the kind of heartfelt, carefully crafted, character-driven material that you were making, or the Duplass Brothers of the 2010s? Do you feel that absence, as well? And what do you think is behind that, if so?
SWANBERG: I don’t know. It’s hard to say for sure. I do feel like with Easy, I was supported in making an entire series that was that kind of character-driven stuff. But also I do sense that Netflix was a totally different company in 2015 when they bought that show.
DEADLINE: My perception is that some of the energy that used to go into indie film has been diverted to TV for some time now. Granted, some of the best indies I’ve seen in a while have been screening at festivals this year. But I’ve wondered if indie film has been diluted somehow by what’s happening in the broader ecosystem.
SWANBERG: It’s a really good question. I went to the New/Next Festival in Baltimore this year. I used to go to the Maryland Film Festival all the time, which Eric Hatch used to program, and now he’s doing New/Next. I kind of showed up feeling like an old man who was maybe too old to be bumming around a film festival. But I was shocked to discover that the younger filmmakers now are very into that mumblecore stuff. I mean, they were coming up to me and talking about Hannah Takes the Stairs and Nights and Weekends, not Drinking Buddies and Easy. And they’re shooting on MiniDV again as an aesthetic choice. You know, there’s a lot of stuff happening. So I wouldn’t be surprised if that ethos was on its way to a cyclical return and that character-driven stuff might start to make a comeback. I do feel like maybe we were over-served for a while. I turned on HBO and was like, whoah. Like, all the shows on HBO are Duplass, Lena Dunham. Andrew Haigh had Looking at the time. It was a lot of mumblecore people working at high-end prestige TV, and I thought, is there even enough of an audience for all of this stuff? So maybe we went too hard, then had to back off, and now we can ease back in.
DEADLINE: Have you seen a change in the kinds of romantic fare audiences are embracing? Netflix rom-coms and Lifetime movies continue to be popular, but you certainly see less star-driven studio fare in that area.
SWANBERG: I’m noticing BDSM being the energy of romance now with Pillion, Wuthering Heights, and Babygirl. I think actually, BDSM is like the purest version of the consent conversation, where two characters just can talk about it openly on camera. So I think it pushed a lot of romance and relationship stuff into that direction. Maybe there’s room now to bring nuance back into age gaps, complicated power dynamics, and various other things without that being explicitly the text. But i don’t know.
I have a 15-year-old son, so I get to witness burgeoning Gen Z/Gen Alpha relationship things happening, and it’s interesting to me. I think we’ve cycled through a more conservative, less-interested-in-sexual-relationships sort of chapter, and it feels to me that actually, romance and sex are interesting as topics again. [In] a lot of meetings, the erotic thriller comes up as a genre that needs to be brought back into the picture. So maybe we’re at the very cusp of the next wave of that stuff.
DEADLINE: It definitely feels like we’re at the end of something, not just in romance but at an industry level. It’ll be interesting to see what comes next.
SWANBERG: Your guess is as good as mine. I’ve never felt so unmoored from popular culture as I do right now. But the good news is there’s so much out there, including theatrical. I mean, I opened a video store during the pandemic and I’ve been doing programming at my neighborhood movie theater on Monday nights. It’s been really fun. The audience that’s coming out is younger…I mean, pre-pandemic, I was in my late thirties and I was the young guy at the arthouse theater. The audience was me and older, and I was like, oh my god, theatrical’s f*cked because there’s no way they’re going to get a young audience back. And then shockingly, post-pandemic, it’s crazy how young the audience is. They’re coming out for repertory, they’re coming out for new releases. So I’m thrilled. Whatever next wave is coming, I’m extremely optimistic about it. I don’t know where a middle-aged guy like me fits into that, but I’m really excited that the old mumblecore stuff is not getting tossed in the trash heap. They really are inspired by the low budgets, inspired by the collective and collaborative nature of those movies. So I do sense that ethos has retained its allure.
DEADLINE: A decade ago, you delivered a keynote speech at SXSW where you talked about how understanding indie film financially has allowed you to operate more fluidly and successfully on an artistic level. There’s a lot of conversation across the industry about making movies for lower budgets — maybe comedic movies — trying something like horror’s model. But there seems to be resistance at the studio level to anything other than the tentpole. Do you see the sub-$10 or $20M movie as a viable model at this point?
SWANBERG: Oh yeah. I think it’s undeniable that we will see a massive return to middle class filmmaking. No doubt about it. Whether that’s studio-driven or not, I don’t know. But there is so much room in the ecosystem for that, and also, I just think the upside has always been a lot more exciting to me. I do understand the $200 million budget into billion-dollar global product pipeline; I don’t think there’s any reason to not do that if that is still working for them. But that’s like the equivalent of going to Disney World versus going to a dance club: You can only have a couple Disney Worlds spread around the globe, but every city can have 70 dance clubs on any given night to be entertaining and have lights flashing and smoke and fog and whatever else. So I just think we’re in the sifting out of that experience. But honestly, the big multiplexes, which I never thought would be accessible to independent filmmakers, on most nights of the week, are showing repertory now. There’s way more screen space for independent films. So bizarre things are happening. Every time I think I understand where it’s going, I look at my local AMC and I’m like, oh my god, the programming at the AMC is cooler in 2026 than it has ever been my whole life. And I can go see weirder and more interesting movies at weirder times than I can even at the arthouse theaters. So I don’t know what’s up, but I don’t feel in competition with the $200 million movies. I think the audiences are different and I feel personally like there’s a lot more space, actually, right now for indies than there was five or six years ago.
DEADLINE: What’s driving you as a filmmaker at this stage of your life?
SWANBERG: Excitingly, the answer is passion again. I thought maybe I was retired or something, that I would have some foot in the industry. But I’m back directing movies because I love it. And I think it’s making the movies better, it’s making my experience on set better, and I’m just going to try to keep that rolling. Making this film was a total pleasure. I mean, I just really had the best time. I just think the actors are so good, and it got me completely fired up to make more stuff and tell stories again. So going into South By, I cannot wait to share the movie with an audience. That’ll be a thrill, for the first time in 10 years, to sit in a room and watch a new movie with people. Coming out of the festival, I’ll just be looking to make stuff that I really care about, and I feel like ultimately, my place either in the indie landscape or in the more mainstream industry is going to be fueled by making films I love, rather than trying to play the game.
