The inspiration for the Oscar-nominated short film The Singers struck filmmaker Sam A. Davis at a moment all too relatable for most — during one final scroll through social media before falling asleep. He had been reading a 19th-century short story called “The Singers,” by Russian author Ivan Turgenev, that chronicles a night at a rural pub and the patrons who inhabit it, before he picked up his phone, on which he encountered a video of subway busker Mike Young singing “Unchained Melody.” The two pieces of media felt connected, and a possible project began to percolate. “I have a lot of late-night ideas,” Davis says, “but this one felt different.”
That idea became his version of The Singers, a modern American fable that transports viewers to an ordinary night at a cramped, dimly lit bar where a surprising sing-off erupts between patrons. Inspired by both Turgenev’s and Young’s stories, Davis set out to find more hidden talents through social media to fill out his chorus. “I don’t think I would’ve made the film if it weren’t for the idea of that really unconventional approach, where we used social media and the algorithm to make something impossibly human,” says Davis. Over a year and a half with casting director Natalie Lin, the filmmaking team began to find the voices that would shape the story at the heart of The Singers. “The idea of keeping it really open-ended and letting each of these guys be ingredients who brought their own lived experience and personalities contributed to the film’s open-ended framework,” Davis explains.
Once they had their ensemble, the filmmakers descended on La Habra Moose Lodge, a dive bar about 40 minutes outside of Los Angeles, with an outline for the film. Davis — who shot and edited the Academy Award–winning documentary short Period. End of Sentence. — could then follow the stories he found in his cast members as they improvised. “We would just kind of follow our hearts the way you do in documentary, where we would try different things and do long takes, most of which was unusable. But then all of a sudden something would sort of click, and we would just build and try to press the gas in those moments and build around them,” recalls Davis. “Every time we started to doubt and think, ‘God, this is a disaster,’ some little blip of magic would happen, and then we would start to build around that.”
Here, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker reflects on curating his striking ensemble, gaining their trust as collaborators, and crafting a“love letter to underdogs” with The Singers.
Mike Young in The Singers.
The spark for the film came from seeing a video of Mike Young performing. How did you approach filling out the rest of your ensemble?
Sam A. Davis: We wanted a variety of voices, and we wanted people who could sing. But more than that, we wanted people who had a lot of depth and who were enchanting in their personality and who wore their years and their life experience on their faces in a specific way that felt just really human and really unlike pop artists, the people we listen to on the radio.
It was just a year and a half of scrolling and training the algorithm and working with my casting director, Natalie Lin, to kind of help wrangle some of these guys. It was a lot of DMing and spamming people and being ignored. A lot of them thought they were being scammed or something. Just like in documentaries, there was a trust-building process, where you have to commit the time to get to know people. It was a long, cumbersome process. With a lot of time and obviously help from social media, we were able to curate a really unlikely group of guys.
Speaking of that trust, what was the initial pitch you made to your eventual cast members to get them on board?
Davis: I would ask them to come and play themselves, and said, “You won’t have any lines.” In my experience, working with first-time actors can be really wonderful and [produce] this hybrid of what you get in documentary, where there’s this rawness and spontaneity. Having an actor, a first-time actor, learn and recite lines that I wrote is just counterintuitive, I think. We just tell them, “I love your story. I love your personality. You’re one of one and the type of person we want to have in this film. Will you come to LA and be in a film and play yourself? And I promise it’ll be fun. And I think it’s going to be really special.” And some of them went for it, and some of them didn’t. We had a couple people back out at the last second, which was really, really troublesome, but we rolled with the punches. It’s what you get when you try to make a film with this much intentional chaos and risk.
Sam A. Davis behind the scenes of The Singers.
The humanity of the film can be felt in the way you shot it and where it was shot. What was the process behind the look and feel of the film?
Davis: The bar was a Moose Lodge in La Habra about 40 minutes outside of LA. It had this built-in sort of lodge-y, Americana, middle-of-America vibe, and we had to take down copious amounts of moose paraphernalia off the walls because it was just everywhere you looked. And then we removed TV screens and … karaoke things and stuff like that. Because those kind of broke the spell for us, and we wanted to take it back into a fable-esque sort of ambiguity, like it could be any time, anywhere.
We were always going to shoot on film, for a couple of reasons. I think, one, obviously, just the nostalgia and magic that comes with celluloid. But also, the movie is a love letter to underdogs and to these unsung talents. It’s a reminder that you never know who you’re sitting next to, or a vehicle for just general compassion and curiosity about other people.
I liked the idea of shooting on film, especially because these guys have never been done justice for the most part. They’ve been shot on phones, and that’s how I discovered them, on social media. It’s such an act of love to say, “I’m going to film you on … 35mm film — gloriously, really carefully — and project you 10-feet tall, and you’re going to have the moment that you deserve.” It was that, and then, more formally, wanting to see if I could smash all the things I love about documentary. All the chaos and spontaneity in the casting and the way that the story flows. The faces that you see. That’s all very raw in documentary, but could we frame that within something that feels extremely, classically cinematic and refined and intentional? What would that feel like? That was sort of the challenge.
Was there a particular moment during the shoot when you realized you were on the right track?
Davis: Just walking onto the set was so magical. All these faces we had curated from all over the world are sitting around talking, getting to know each other in real life in a meta way. It was a 100-degree weekend, and everyone’s in winter coats, and the fire is burning. Anytime we weren’t rolling, someone would hop up on the piano and start playing, and guys would be singing along. It was just this really sort of weird and jovial atmosphere. I think when you walked in there, there was a sense that it was going to work on some level. I was so impressed and moved by how all of the guys showed up with no experience and managed to deliver. I think we walked away not knowing exactly how it would turn out because there was no script … but feeling pretty confident that there was a lot of magic in there.
You went back to the La Habra Moose Lodge the morning the Oscar nominations were announced. What was it like to experience the news of the nomination there?
Davis: We called the bar, and we were like, “Hey, would you open up at 4 in the morning for us?” And they’re like, “What?” But they did. It was really nice to have some of our team back there, especially because of the way it panned out. On the way there, I was mostly anxious about my poker face and how to not be a total downer in front of all these people if we didn’t get nominated. But it was a really beautiful, full-circle celebration we got to have there.
The Singers is now streaming on Netflix.
