Premiering in the ACID sidebar of this year’s Cannes was Lucio Castro’s Drunken Noodles, a luscious, micro-scale and micro-budget exploration of queer intimacy. Over the course of its 82 minutes Castro’s film tumbles backwards in reverse chronological order through a hazy world of hand stitched erotic tapestries, anonymous hook-ups and bucolic landscapes as his lead Laith Khalifeh searches for connection, weaving between the city and the tranquil escape of upstate New York.
Following his film After This Death (2025), which recently premiered at the 75th Berlin Film Festival, Castro re-teamed with cinematographer Barton Cortright, who also serves as a producer on the film, to craft Drunken Noodles on a much smaller scale. If you’ve been paying attention to the current wave of independent films emerging from New York you may have recognized Cortright’s name in the credits as he’s slowly become synonymous with the sorts of inventive, personal and transgressive films sprouting from the indie scene which have become essential counterprogramming to the work currently produced in the US.
With a wide list of credits ranging from Ricky D’Ambrose’s The Cathedral (2021), Graham Swon’s An Evening Song (for three voices) (2023), Eugene Kotlyarenko’s The Code (2024) and Peter Vack’s www.RachelOrmont.com (2024), Cortright has demonstrated a great dexterity moving between projects both maximalist and lowkey. Cortright returned to Cannes this year with Drunken Noodles following the selection of Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (2023), which he also shot, in the 2023 edition of Director’s Fortnight. Over the course of this interview we discussed his working relationship with Castro, the current state of indie cinema and the challenges of micro budget filmmaking.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Matthew Chan: You seem to be more hands-on with this film as opposed to other things you’ve worked on as a producer in addition to being the DP. So I’m curious as to how you got involved in this project?
Barton Cortright: I did a movie with Lucio called After This Death (2025), like two years ago in the fall. I had seen his first movie, End of the Century (2019) going into shooting that film and really liked his sensibility. I really liked that he really liked movies and had an interesting and diverse and wide gamut of movies that he liked and referenced and we just got along well and I think I really understood the visual language that he was after and he responded really well to all of my ideas and so we made that movie.
And then that movie was in post for a long time and Lucio had had some other projects in development and I think he was a little frustrated. He just wanted to make something. So, you know, he was texting or emailing me and he was like:
Hey, I just want to make this movie with absolutely no resources and we’ll shoot it really quickly, we’ll use my apartment in New York and we’ll use a friend’s house upstate and we’ll do it in like a month.
And I was like, okay, great. And I was like, where’s the script?
And he was like, oh, I haven’t written it yet.
And I was like, okay.
He had hit me up like two months before we were going to shoot, but like a few weeks later he sent me the script. and I really liked it. Lucio’s work is largely nonlinear, his first movie is nonlinear, After This Death the script was nonlinear but in the edit became linear and this movie is nonlinear, which I really like. I really liked the themes in the movie and the characters and you know I was excited for how Lucio wanted to shoot it, so we did it really quickly with a limited crew.
The film was shot on digital but has a rather filmic look and I wanted to know how you set about achieving that?
I really like vintage lenses, I kind of struggle with movies that are shot, you know, hyper sharp or with really new lenses. Sometimes it kind of takes me out of it because they have more of a commercial look to them.
I used Zeiss Super Speeds, which are lenses that I use on a lot of movies. On Lucio’s previous movie, we used Ari Signature Primes, which are like a newer set of lenses but have a little bit more character, but anyway, after After This Death he was interested in a more filmic look a little bit more rough around the edges. So we used the Super Speeds, we used some light filtration, we used Black Satin filters, and then our great colorist Joseph Mastantuono at Nice Dissolve he did a little bit of halation stuff and highlights to kind of give it that film bloom and I think he added a little bit of grain not that much honestly to not emulate film but give it a less digital look.
The film is broken up into four different segments between the apartment, the exteriors of the city and the house in the country. I was curious as to how you and Lucio planned on visually distinguishing each segment because there’s a lot more natural light once you move out of the city.
I did probably less lighting in this feature than maybe any feature I’ve shot, maybe second to The Code, because it had such limited resources. I mean we shot this movie in seven days, it never felt rushed to us because we had like great shorthand but we weren’t doing a ton of lighting.
We shot in this area of Williamsburg really close to the water that’s weirdly like a ghost town and kind of just embraced that element and then the apartment that we shot in was Lucio’s and at night it has all these great, weird lights on buildings that kind of wash into the apartment and we really liked that. I think it works too stylistically because, you know, in New York he’s kind of, I don’t want to say he’s at a low point, but he’s like alone, so upstate is more romantic. It was nice to have that be a little bit more warm and naturalistic.
The biggest shift visually is probably the, I kind of don’t even know what to call it, the dance sequence in the woods with the fawn. It was kind of funny because Lucio’s main reference was Kenneth Anger’s Rabbit’s Moon (1972), a film I love too, which is outside but it’s in a studio and it’s kind of very lit, but I tried to keep a basic approach and just have a heightened night style.
Apart from Kenneth Anger I’m curious as to what other visual references you had?
Again, I think it just comes back to After This Death. Lucio had a lot of more modern references for that movie. He really liked Angela Schanelec, and this movie called The Strange Little Cat (2013), and then Martín Rejtman, the guy who did Two Shots Fired (2014). It was a lot of newer filmmakers, with a style that’s a little hard to describe. We also talked about La Dolce Vita (1960) and La Notte (1961) and Antonioni and stuff like that.
We sat down and Lucio had a lot of random scenes from different movies that he liked, none of them we were replicating exactly but it was just for him to put me into the kind of visual language and tone he was after. And I think the tone and style of After This Death just carried over into this movie.
It seems like you and Lucio had more of an intuitive working relationship and I’m curious if you see this as being different from how you’ve worked with others in the past?
Every relationship with every director is very different. I really try to be a bit of a chameleon and adapt to however the director wants to work and sometimes the director comes in and they know exactly what they want but they want me to help them and add a little bit to it. Sometimes they are like: these are the rules, this is the specific nature but you know there’s a handful of directors who I feel like it’s just kind of like a true 50-50 collaboration where we really get along well. For me with Lucio we work really well together and have a very similar sensibility.
With my friend Graham Swon, who I’ve known for like 15 years, we have had so many conversations about movies and have the same kind of aesthetics and end up landing on the same kind of things. And then, you know, working with someone like Ricky D’Ambrose or Joanna Arnow who have their own style, I kind of enter that world. I can still help a little bit but I’m not bringing as many ideas to the table as with someone like Lucio. I would say not in a bad way or anything, and as a cinematographer I love that every relationship is so different.
I’m curious about your background as well because you mentioned you’re self taught. How did you get your start?
I was an only child so I watched a lot of movies, and then in high school I had a really great film professor who was an experimental filmmaker and he blew my mind because he showed things like Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Paul Sharits, Owen Land, but also things like 8½ (1963) and you know a lot of like Polanski and Truffaut and Bergman. Seeing all that kind of stuff as a teenager is kind of a crazy experience.
I was working in theater in high school and I applied to a lot of different colleges but I ended up going to Carnegie Mellon to study theatrical lighting design which is what I was doing at the time, which you know is a great experience and I don’t regret it at all but I kind of kept going with my film education. I had listened to a commentary track of Jim Jarmusch and he said that he watched on average about a movie a day. So I was like, okay, I didn’t want to be a director, but I just liked movies, I don’t think cinematography had necessarily clicked per se, but I was like, okay, I’m gonna watch a movie a day, you know, on average. So basically through college, I was doing that and I was just consuming tons and tons and tons of movies and then I befriended some directors at a local college and I ended up shooting their short films. I was kind of always doing cinematography and lighting too on the side.
I worked in New York City for a couple years doing theater stuff but I had an opportunity to shoot a feature in 2013 and watching that movie back was more fulfilling to me than any of the 30 or 40 maybe theater productions I’d worked on. I just didn’t feel great about the work. At the time I was doing projections for a theater which is like creating fake backgrounds and it was very silly, just basically cheap digital scenery. I kind of slowly transitioned into shooting. I basically bought a DSLR off Craigslist, took every job I could find and got a lot of lucky breaks.
If you think about the current state of indie filmmaking, especially in New York, you’re usually the common denominator in a lot of these buzzier films.
So I’m just curious as to whether you can give me a temperature check of the state of things for independent filmmaking and where you think things are trending towards?
Especially because on your podcast Lensed you speak to a lot of cinematographers of smaller films, so you seem very invested in newer independent movies on the fringes of the mainstream.
It’s a weird time right now. This industry has high highs and low lows.
To me in a weird way because I go to so much repertory cinema see rep screenings sold out, it gives me so much hope for independent filmmaking because there’s a lot of people out there who want to see this stuff. At the same time it’s so hard to get movies made, and funding indie movies is like, I don’t even know what you do. You can’t get production companies or studios or anyone to fund them. So all these filmmakers have to somehow find small amounts of money and do it, and it’s not easy. It was funny, I was talking to Graham Swon recently about this and we were discussing how directors in the 20s or 30s or 40s even had so many opportunities to direct things just because they were in the studio system and the great directors directed dozens of movies before they were able to make the movies that you know them for.
It’s so sad nowadays that it’s so hard to get movies made you have to really really really really want it. And when I speak to younger cinematographers I try to emphasize that there’s no shortcuts in this industry, you have to be at it for a while and it can be very demoralizing and depressing and you have to find what it is that you’re passionate about and make a lot of personal sacrifices.
It’s such a saturated market with festivals and it’s so hard to break through but you know at the same time it’s so easy to make stuff now. Lucio is a professor at NYU and he always tells his students to just make the movie for like 20 grand. His first feature was made for 20 grand, find some smart people and just go make the movie.
I do think there’s this weird thing in film school where you see a lot of people so concerned with raising the money, you know, getting the 20 grand to make a five minute short film.
I think what opened my eyes recently was a talk by Tyler Taormina (Director of Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point) where he basically said a lot of indie filmmaking is just a question of how many crimes you get away with and how many permits you can violate.
I guess you’re more familiar with this sort of guerrilla playbook so I’m curious if you have any insight on making movies on a micro scale and micro budget?
I’ve done movies back to back that were these tiny micro budget New York movies and then like two or three million dollar movies and there’s pros and cons to both honestly. In a way, making a movie with very little resources, the stakes are really low, you don’t have that many people. On a big set, you have to disperse all this information with all these people and if you want to change directions you have to move them cattle and some percent of people aren’t as checked in. But when you’re working on a small independent movie, micro budget thing, everyone’s there for the right reasons.
It was funny, I had my gaffer friend come and help me gaff for two of the nights for this movie upstate and he was like: wow the set was so quiet, like it’s so different because everyone was just so focused and because everyone was there because they wanted to do the project. And I feel like you kind of lose that mentality. I mean it’s hard because we all have to make money and we all have to survive but there are a lot of people who get in this industry as a job not as much because they love movies and those people end up being on a lot of the bigger sets. The beauty to a lot of the smaller sets is that a lot of people really have passion for it and it’s not so much about did we take lunch at the correct time and are we following all of these exact guides and rules and things.
A lot of people probably think I’m crazy because a lot of the movies I’ve shot I’ve had like a one person crew. You know, for The Cathedral and Joanna Arnow’s movie I had one person. I also had one person for Lucio’s movie and sometimes I had zero people, I only had a gaffer for two or three days. You know you can do a lot with a little and if you become really good at doing a lot with a little it’s a lot easier, and it’s better to master being able to use as few resources as possible and being able to really make stuff look good with nothing in my opinion.
I think film school teaches you this whole thing of like you need all these different people in all these roles but I don’t think you really need that especially when you’re starting out because you’re not going to find people who are actually good and care to do all of those roles anyway. Having like five or six people who you really like and who are really good and smart can be much better than having like 30 people who aren’t as engaged.
I mean, again, what’s great about the time we’re living in is the barrier to entry is so low. A lot of cinematographers and directors even kind of get obsessed with all this technical stuff and like what camera and what lenses and I’ve just always kind of been against that. I mean for a long time I just owned a RED camera which everyone laughed at. But you know I shot a lot of movies on the RED, I shot The Cathedral on a RED, I shot The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed on a RED and you know I don’t think anybody said this movie isn’t good because it was shot on a RED. No one cared, no one asked me what camera we shot on, you know, none of that stuff a lot of people get hung up on, none of these technicalities really matter.