Sam and David Cutler-Kreutz Talk Oscar-Contending “Trapped”
Anyone who has a sibling knows it can be tough to get along with them. Not many people can envision themselves working with a sibling in a professional manner, but David and Sam Cutler-Kreutz are different. They’re clearly doing something right, as the brothers were nominated for an Oscar for their short film, A Lien. With their newest short, Trapped, the two are on a path to potentially be two-time Oscar-nominated filmmakers. David and Sam, though, are still just kid brothers who share a love for film.
“Sam and I certainly never expected to work together,” David admits. “We both had totally our own careers that went in different directions. Slowly, though, we found our way back to working together and realized it followed a similar path to what we did as kids.”
“I’m the older of us,” Sam says. “Not by much, like two years, but as a kid, there’s a very clear delineation between youngest and oldest. I think working together has definitely closed that gap in some interesting ways.”
courtesy of Sam and David Cutler-Kreutz
“Not that the gap is ever that large,” Sam quickly adds. “I think working together required us to be intentional about our relationship in a way that maybe we wouldn’t have quite been without it. In another context, it’s easy with family because it’s like, they’re my family, that’s just how they are. We have to come up with a way to work that feels good and positive. Not that it was particularly difficult. It just requires you to think about it actively in a way that oftentimes in relationships with your family, you’re just sort of like, well, that’s just how it goes.”
“It’s a real joy. A lot of filmmaking and making art in general requires a lot of trust with your collaborators,” continues Sam. “It requires a lack of ego. That space of writing is one that, especially in a partnership, requires a very specific space to be created. A very specific kind of safe space. We have this saying, all ideas are considered, but none are considered sacred. That ethos is one that we really believe in.”
The brothers’ previous short film, A Lien, was nominated for Best Live Action Short Film at the 97th Academy Awards. David and Sam will forever have the “Oscar-nominated” phrase attached to their names. They say it’s surreal and special to be sharing it, but that they feel no added pressure from this distinction.
“Every day, we’re just learning and trying to get better,” says David. “For us just to be there and to have people resonate with the film has felt like honor of that nomination.”
“I think the pressure thing is interesting,” offers Sam. “Nobody puts more pressure on us than we do. I think what the Oscar nomination does is put focus on us, but I don’t think it puts any more pressure than we’ve already put on ourselves. We set high expectations for ourselves, and that’s why the films are as good as they are. We’re our own baseline setters, in some ways more than an external force. We’re running this long marathon of a career and the Oscar nomination is almost like someone waving a big banner as we run by and it’s like, oh, great, we’re doing good. It’s a nice milestone more than it’s like someone nipping at us to go faster.”
Their newest film, Trapped, had its world premiere at the 2024 SXSW Festival, where it picked up the Special Jury Prize. The film follows a high school janitor, Joaquin (Javier Molina), as he cleans after hours. Along with him is his young son, who he couldn’t find childcare for. While going about his routine, Joaquin comes across a group of teenage boys in the gym setting up their senior prank. He’s presented with a choice that will alter the course of his night and, potentially, his life.
courtesy of Trapped
“So much of what Trapped talks about is power and privilege in schools,” explains David. “It’s something that felt like it was a dinner table issue for us. Our mom was a teacher. It was something that we talked about in the evenings. Sam and I were running around in diapers around the school. We really got a lot of those different perspectives from our childhood.”
“As a filmmaker, you’re always trying to find ways to gauge your personal experience and the art you’re making,” Sam says. “Take A Lien, our film from last year nominated at the Oscars. Neither of us is doing the green card process, but we’re trying to figure out how the films we’re making are in some ways connected to the life we have. Authenticity is kind of a silly word for it, but it’s more like an emotional authenticity than verisimilitude.”
“Trapped didn’t come about by us saying, oh, our mom was a teacher, we want to make the story about our mom,” Sam goes on. “It grew out almost completely from the other direction. It even came from a notecard that said something like, a person in the dark finds something. A little esoteric, a little floaty. Kind of a bad idea, but if you can put in the right cooking space, you can start to build out around it. All of a sudden, you’re thinking about your childhood and all the scenes kind of come together.”
Throughout the short, Joaquin is faced with a series of choices. He brought his kid to work knowing his boss wouldn’t be happy. He has to decide what he’s going to do with the teens and their prank, and faces many other choices in the taut thriller that is Trapped. Remarkably, though, the brothers waited until the edits to make one of the choices for Joaquin’s character. While they won’t say which choice it is, they will talk about the way the film took shape within the edit.
courtesy of Trapped
“As young filmmakers, it’s an incredible tool in our arsenal to be like, hey, this isn’t working for various reasons, we don’t know why it’s not working, but something’s wrong,” describes Sam. “You’re going through it with a fine-tooth comb, like, what’s the problem? We found that one choice was a problem. Parts of the film weren’t working because of this choice. Once you identify what the problem is, it’s easier to be like, well, fuck, what do we do now?”
“I think we identified it close to a year after shooting,” continues Sam. “We can’t just go reshoot it. That’s not an option. All the money’s been spent already. We have to go back and start to comb through all the footage. How can we take the footage we do have and try to fiddle around with it so it all works?”
“It was a really rewarding experience. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be hard, but it’s going to work. Going forward, as filmmakers, knowing that this tool’s in your toolbelt is like really, really cool,” finishes Sam.
“We knew coming in, even from the script stage, that something wasn’t working,” David elaborates. “We said, well, we have this filming window, let’s just do it. We can’t figure out what’s wrong. We gotta make something and I’m glad we did it that way. I’m glad we did wait to try and find the answer, because I don’t know if we would have found the answer until we started to put it together. When the problem shows up, it’s usually never where the actual problem is. Usually the problem was earlier on and it rears its head somewhere later on in the piece.”
courtesy of Trapped
Another problem the brothers had to solve was related to the prank at the heart of Trapped. The senior boys decide they’re going to fill the entire gym with loaded rat traps. Think back to your high school gymnasium. Now picture the floor covered in traps. As filmmakers, it would be unsafe and exhausting to actually go through with this prank in setting up all these traps, but Sam and David needed to find a way to make it look like the gym was full of rat traps.
“How do we fill a gymnasium with rat traps? That’s untenable,” laughs Sam. “Being the ingenious and stubborn people that we are, and we’re like, we’re going to figure this out somehow, so we went to a gymnasium.”
“When we calculated how many traps we’d need, it was 30,000,” interjects David.
“That was quickly impossible,” Sam smiles. “You weigh a rat trap and it weighs half a pound. Multiply times 30,000. A tractor trailer full of rat traps is basically the entire budget, but this goes to back to a core philosophy for the two of us for our films — if you can solve the hardest problem of the short, like identify what it is, what’s the crux of your short from a production perspective, you know the rest of the pieces will fall into place around it.”
“We spent a long time, like six months almost, doing some R&D, testing out other objects that would be cheaper, lighter, more sustainable that could look like a rat trap,” continues Sam. “What ends up working best after doing a bunch of testing was basically a three dimensional paper box. A five sided piece of paper we could fold into a little box that would sit up.We did a high-res photograph of the top and sides of the rat trap and made an invitation-size piece of paper that we got commercially printed. 5,000 of these things.”
“We also got a thousand rat traps,” admits Sam. “Its a lot, but it was not nearly enough to fill a gymnasium. Those were the ones for the close-ups. Everything else beyond the camera focus is these paper boxes. We had everybody at some point folding and placing traps throughout the film. The whole cast and crew was super, super game to help us do it.”
As for what happened to the actual traps used in the film? The brothers made sure those didn’t go to waste. They dismantled the springing action of the trap and had them screen printed as mementos for the cast, crew, and as handouts for film festivals. After their festival run, Sam and David have about fifty traps left and one thing is for certain, if they get to the Oscars again, you can be sure to see those rat traps on the red carpet.
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