November (film)
Encyclopedia
November is a 2004 psychological thriller
film first screened at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival
. It stars Courteney Cox
as Sophie, a photographer whose life begins to unravel following a traumatic incident on November 7 that involved her boyfriend, played by James LeGros
. The film co-stars Michael Ealy
, Nora Dunn
, Anne Archer
, Nick Offerman
, and Matthew Carey
.
The low-budget independent film
was directed by Greg Harrison
, written by Benjamin Brand
and Harrison, and produced by Danielle Renfrew
and Gary Winick
. Sony Pictures Classics
released it to theaters in the United States on July 22, 2005, and while its award-winning digital video
photography was praised, many reviews criticised the film's story for being too ambiguous and derivative of other pictures. Critics have compared it to the work of film-makers such as David Lynch
and M. Night Shyamalan
.
Sophie sinks into a deep depression
, and cannot bring herself to erase Hugh's voice from their apartment's answering machine. She consults her psychiatrist
, Dr. Fayn (Dunn), about persistent headaches that she has been suffering from since his death. She tells Dr. Fayn that the headaches started to occur before the incident at the convenience store, and that she had been having an affair with a co-worker, Jesse (Ealy). After Hugh's death Sophie has dinner with her mother, Carol Jacobs (Archer), who accidentally knocks a glass over.
During a college photography class that she teaches, Sophie sets up a slide projector for the students to showcase their best photographs. One slide in the slide show depicts the exterior of the convenience store on the evening of November 7. Sophie contacts Officer Roberts (Offerman), the head of the investigation into the shootings at the convenience store, who is as puzzled as she is as to who is responsible for the photos. Sophie's headaches continue, and she begins to hear strange noises coming from within her apartment building and mysterious voices on the phone. Later, Officer Roberts discovers that the photo of the convenience store was paid for with Sophie's credit card
.
The film presents two more different versions of these events, and Sophie must figure out which is real before she loses grip on her sanity, and her life. The second version suggests that Sophie was present at the shootings and was only spared because the shooter ran out of bullets, and the third suggests both Sophie and Hugh were killed. In the words of Cox, her character "goes through three phases. First there's denial. Then she feels guilty and sad about the situation. Then she has to learn to accept it." According to Greg Harrison, the events in the film were Sophie's memories as she and Hugh lay dying on the floor of the convenience store: "Each movement of this memory was her process of coming to terms with the terrible trauma, which was that she was killed for absolutely no reason, and it was some random act of violence she couldn’t confront". He added he felt November was "open-ended" enough that he hoped viewers would "come up with the most beautiful stories themselves that are very different from how I saw it."
(2000), which Greg Harrison had directed. Brand, Renfrew and Harrison were friends, and were living in their hometown of San Francisco developing separate projects at "mini-major" studios which, according to Renfrew, were "wallowing in development hell
". Brand then read a newspaper story about a shooting during the robbery of a store, in which the robber had hidden the body of the proprietor behind the counter and then taken the proprietor's place at the counter as customers came in. Inspired by the story and its setting, as well as experiences in his own life (he had once been a teacher of photography at the Academy of the Arts), Brand wrote a screenplay and presented it to Renfrew and Harrison. They were both impressed; Harrison said it was "fascinating ... kind of an abstract exercise in narrative, which I thought was exciting and bold".
Brand and Harrison worked through several drafts of the script over the following six months. Harrison, who cited the "terrible, terrible" experience of coping with the death of a close friend as one of his personal inspirations for the film, focused their efforts on inserting a more profound element of emotion into the script; in his words they were "trying to express the subjective experience of trauma". Once they and Renfrew were satisfied with their work, the group began pitching the project to various production companies. Renfrew consciously chose to avoid taking the project to major Hollywood studios such as 20th Century Fox
or Warner Bros.
; instead, she opted for "smaller companies who were interested in doing something off of center". A breakthrough was achieved after a meeting with director Gary Winick
, who had established a company in New York City
called InDigEnt. The company specialised in backing low-budget films shot on digital video such as Personal Velocity
(2002), Tadpole
(2002) and Pieces of April
(2003). Greg Harrison's debut film Groove had impressed executives at the company, and John Sloss of Cinetic Media said, "November is exactly the kind of sharp and invigorating material that has made InDigEnt what it is".
Before the development of the film, Harrison had cast actress Courteney Cox in a Garry Trudeau
-scripted ensemble film being developed at Fox Searchlight. Cox was a comic actress
widely known for her role on the television sitcom Friends
and had participated in only a handful of more serious productions. While the Garry Trudeau project was intended as a comedy, Harrison said he felt Cox was "very capable of drama and was very willing and wanted to transcend her comedic persona" when they had first met. The project did not enter production, but when Harrison began casting for November, Cox became a prime candidate for the lead role. He offered her the part without an audition: "Courteney's biggest challenge is redefining herself ... I knew I could bring something out of her that people haven't seen before", he said. Cox, who said she is more similar to her character in November than her Friends character, Monica Geller
, said, "I wanted to make November because it's fascinating, confusing, ambiguous, eerie and makes you think. There aren't that many movies where you leave the theater and want to talk about them". She added, "it was trying to take you through a woman's experience of tragedy and through all the stages. I loved that".
, and the film's production costs did not allow the entire production team to relocate to northern California for the duration for the shoot. The film-makers were forced to shoot in Los Angeles, but Renfrew later expressed no regret in their decision: "We wanted the story to take place in an anonymous urban area. And I think we were successful in doing that".
Production finally began on May 19, 2003, and took place on Cox's days off from her Friends shooting schedule. Renfrew's home in Los Angeles stood in for the apartment of Cox's character in the film. The budget did not allow the luxury of trailers, but with some persuading, neighbouring apartments were converted into staging areas. For her role Cox donned glasses with thick frames, and had her hair cut by seven inches and a grey streak dyed into it. Harrison said, "She's seen in the fashion world as glamorous, a pop icon from Friends, so how to dress her down, and also make her body feel different. I had her wear those clothes around the house to feel like a different person".
The film's cinematographer was Nancy Schreiber, who had never before shot a film on Mini-DV. Harrison intended the shifts between chapters of the film—and Sophie's emotions—to be signalled visually, and he instructed Schreiber to employ different colour casts accordingly. For the opening robbery scenes (which recur throughout the film), Schreiber purchased two Panasonic AG-DVX100
cameras with white balance and color temperature
controls. She used them with lighting gels and sodium street lamps
that surrounded the real-life convenience store where the crew was shooting to make the image appear green. A similar process was used in the second movement of the narrative, which was bathed in orange to represent Sophie's despair, while white expressed "acceptance" in the film's third and final act. To help achieve a blue colour cast for the first phase of the film ("denial"), Schreiber surrounded the shooting locations with machines that pumped smoke across the set. Cinematographer and Sundance Film Festival
judge Frederick Elmes commented of Schreiber's work, "She lit it and used colors in a way that the camera responded. And I don't think that's the kind of thing you do by accident. That's completely designed".
Harrison applauded the speed of Mini-DV for allowing such a short shoot: "We could shoot with multiple cameras at times, which helped us in our schedule". He also cited the advantages Mini-DV had in post-production, estimating that 75%–80% of the visual and sound design processing had been performed on desktop computers. November was shot in fifteen days on a budget of $150,000, and post-production
costs were the same – a typical production model for films produced by InDiGent. Of the tight schedule and production costs, Harrison said, "I don't recommend shooting a movie that way and I don't want to do it again to be honest. It's really, really taxing".
Once shooting had wrapped, Harrison entered the editing room and constructed the film over the course of eighteen weeks, occasionally consulting colleagues such as Sarah Flack
(editor of The Limey
(1999) and Lost in Translation
(2003)). Harrison, who had started out in the film industry as an editor, noted the strong involvement of key creative personnel throughout the pre-production, production and post-production stages, and called it "kind of a more holistic approach to post-production". He described the experience of editing the film alone (for the most part) as "brutal" and "exhausting", but he said he was satisfied with his work nonetheless. When asked about the film's seventy-three-minute running time, Renfrew said that Harrison "let the story and the film dictate the length as opposed to trying to force it to be any particular length".
's Todd McCarthy wrote that the film was "a stylistic tour de force dedicated more to constructing a cinematic puzzle than to providing dramatic satisfaction". Producers were reluctant to sell the picture to a distributor quickly, and Roger Friedman of Fox News commented that they "may have overplayed their hand in juggling offers". The film was eventually sold later that year to Sony Pictures Classics, which had handled Groove. After the Sundance screening Harrison returned to the editing room to make final tweaks to the film. That year, Courteney Cox became pregnant with her first child, and producers realised she would be unavailable to promote the film until after she gave birth. After some deliberation, it was decided that the film would not be released to theaters until the following summer. However, it was screened outside the United States at the Oslo International Film Festival on November 20, 2004.
Danielle Renfrew was nominated for the Producers Award at the 2005 Independent Spirit Awards
—the ceremony for which was held in February 2005—in part for her work on November. On April 26, 2005 the film was screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival
, whose organisers described it as a "homage to the mindbending thrillers of David Lynch
... Inspired by the perception-versus-reality mindgames of Mulholland Drive
and the eerie psychological aesthetic of Nicolas Roeg
's Don't Look Now
". Audience response at its screening at the festival was generally positive, but critic Brandon Judell dismissed the film as "highly irritating and nonsensical," while Joanne Bealy said it was "a Mulholland Drive / David Lynch copycat ... even at 88 minutes, it was too long for me." The film made subsequent appearances at the Seattle International Film Festival
(on May 31, 2005) and the Los Angeles Film Festival
(on June 22, 2005).
Critical reviews of November upon its eventual United States release were lukewarm. Greg Bellavia of Film Threat
described the film as "Run Lola Run
meets Pi
with a splash of Seven
... As a thriller it seems awfully familiar and has trouble establishing a voice all its own", but added "Harrison and company manage to create one of the strangest romantic films out there and for their attempt at the offbeat deserve to be recognized." The New York Daily News
was more negative in its summary of the film, labelling it a "convoluted and unsatisfying psychological drama." Mark Holcomb, reviewing for The Village Voice
, said the film was "less compelling the more apparent its solution becomes. But before the foregone conclusion surfaces about halfway through, its disparate, unnerving components are mesmerizing." F. X. Feeney of the Los Angeles Times
wrote, "it never becomes a mystery, like, say, Mulholland Drive, or even The Sixth Sense
(despite the gimmicky magnitude of its final reveal)", while the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
called it "a low-watt reworking of M. Night Shyamalan
and David Lynch."
Scott Tobias wrote, "with each successive trip back to the scene, things only become murkier and less compelling, lost in pretentious symbolism and obvious visual signposts"; Michael Sragow
of Baltimore Sun made a similar criticism, saying, "Benjamin Brand's script is a puzzle without a satisfying solution." Chicago Sun-Times
critic Roger Ebert
, who drew comparisons between the film's narrative and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
's five stages of dying model
, argued "answers would be beside the point. Any other explanation, for example a speech by the psychiatrist or the cop explaining exactly what has really happened, would be contrivance. Better to allow November to descend into confusion and despair ... [it] does not bargain and does not explain." A review in Entertainment Weekly
identified the film as "an homage to the work of David Hockney
: Just as Hockney assembles smaller, overlapped Polaroids that don't necessarily make sense into a big picture that does".
Marc Mohan of The Oregonian
dismissed the film as "a post-Memento, mess-with-your-head thriller that thinks it's much cleverer than it is", but commented that Courteney Cox "doesn't embarrass herself" in her role, while The Hollywood Reporter
felt that she was "as convincing as she could possibly be." Mark Holcomb, however, said Cox's demeanor "suggests impatience rather than depression," and F. X. Feeney thought "Cox’s performance is too muted to vitally illuminate this woman’s agony". Others such as Walter Addiego (San Francisco Chronicle
) believed the film was a conscious decision on Cox's part to "establish movie credibility after the megasuccess of Friends".
Most praise in reviews was directed towards cinematographer Nancy Schreiber's work on the film. Scott Tobias said the film "makes the most of its visual limitations;" Marc Savlov of the Austin Chronicle
commented that it was "soaked to its noirish
core in some fine cinematography." Kirk Honeycutt proclaimed Schreiber "the movie's real heroine, as she dramatically meshes the real with the surreal, creating different looks and emotions for each segment through light and color," while Jack Mathews wrote, "I suspect that it was her work—perhaps alone—that changed "November's" fate from a direct-to-video release to a brief first run in theaters."
In its first weekend of release in the United States, November grossed $21,813 at eight theatres, and it debuted at number sixty-three on the box office chart. It peaked at number fifty-nine in its second weekend (aided by its expansion into nine more theatres) and generated $192,186 in ticket sales over twelve weeks. It was originally slated to enter wide release
in late summer, but Sony Pictures Classics
chose to expand the film into no more than 27 theatres (in its sixth week).
Psychological thriller
Psychological thriller is a specific sub-genre of the broad ranged thriller with heavy focus on characters. However, it often incorporates elements from the mystery and drama genre, along with the typical traits of the thriller genre...
film first screened at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival
Sundance Film Festival
The Sundance Film Festival is a film festival that takes place annually in Utah, in the United States. It is the largest independent cinema festival in the United States. Held in January in Park City, Salt Lake City, and Ogden, as well as at the Sundance Resort, the festival is a showcase for new...
. It stars Courteney Cox
Courteney Cox
Courteney Bass Cox is an American actress, she is best known for her roles as Monica Geller on the NBC sitcom Friends, Gale Weathers in the horror series Scream and as Jules Cobb in the ABC sitcom Cougar Town, for which she earned her first Golden Globe nomination....
as Sophie, a photographer whose life begins to unravel following a traumatic incident on November 7 that involved her boyfriend, played by James LeGros
James LeGros
James LeGros is an American film and television actor. He is known as a star of independent films with a diversified body of work in the early to mid 1990s.-Personal life:...
. The film co-stars Michael Ealy
Michael Ealy
Michael Brown , professionally known as Michael Ealy, is an American actor.-Personal life:Ealy was born in Silver Spring, Maryland. He attended Springbrook High School and the University of Maryland, College Park.-Career:...
, Nora Dunn
Nora Dunn
Nora Eloise Dunn is an American actress and comedian, perhaps best known for her work on NBC's Saturday Night Live.-Early life:...
, Anne Archer
Anne Archer
Anne Archer is an American actress who has performed in feature films, television, and stage and was named Miss Golden Globe in 1971. Among her best known roles is that of Beth Gallagher in the 1987 movie Fatal Attraction, for which she received a nomination for an Academy Award.-Career:Archer's...
, Nick Offerman
Nick Offerman
Nick Offerman is an American actor best known for his role as Ron Swanson in the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation. He is also a skilled woodworker.-Early life and career:...
, and Matthew Carey
Matthew Carey
Matthew Carey is an American film and television actor who has appeared in films such as The Banger Sisters , November , Old School and a 1997 remake of the television sitcom Leave It to Beaver. He also had a recurring role in the first season of the television series 24 in 2001.- External links :...
.
The low-budget independent film
Independent film
An independent film, or indie film, is a professional film production resulting in a feature film that is produced mostly or completely outside of the major film studio system. In addition to being produced and distributed by independent entertainment companies, independent films are also produced...
was directed by Greg Harrison
Greg Harrison
Greg Harrison is an American film director and editor.He graduated from Michigan State University.He has directed films such as Groove and November , both of which were produced by Danielle Renfrew....
, written by Benjamin Brand
Benjamin Brand
Benjamin Brand is a film screenwriter who worked as an assistant to producer Danielle Renfrew on Groove , and who later wrote November , which was produced by Renfrew.-External links:...
and Harrison, and produced by Danielle Renfrew
Danielle Renfrew
Danielle Renfrew is a film producer who has produced films such as Groove and November , both of which were directed by Greg Harrison.-External links:...
and Gary Winick
Gary Winick
Gary Winick was an American film director and producer who directed films such as Tadpole and 13 Going on 30...
. Sony Pictures Classics
Sony Pictures Classics
Sony Pictures Classics is an art-house film division of Sony Pictures Entertainment founded in December 1991 that distributes, produces and acquires specialty films from the United States and around the world. Its co-presidents are Michael Barker and Tom Bernard...
released it to theaters in the United States on July 22, 2005, and while its award-winning digital video
Digital video
Digital video is a type of digital recording system that works by using a digital rather than an analog video signal.The terms camera, video camera, and camcorder are used interchangeably in this article.- History :...
photography was praised, many reviews criticised the film's story for being too ambiguous and derivative of other pictures. Critics have compared it to the work of film-makers such as David Lynch
David Lynch
David Keith Lynch is an American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style, which has been dubbed "Lynchian", and which is characterized by its dream imagery and meticulous sound...
and M. Night Shyamalan
M. Night Shyamalan
Manoj Nelliyattu Shyamalan,known professionally as M. Night Shyamalan, is an Indian-born American screenwriter, film director, and producer known for making movies with contemporary supernatural plots that climax with a twist ending. He is also known for filming his movies in and around...
.
Plot
On the evening of November 7, photographer Sophie Jacobs (Cox) and her attorney boyfriend Hugh (LeGros) go to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. As they travel home afterward, Sophie develops a craving for "something sweet" and stops their car at a convenience store. While Hugh is in the store buying some chocolate for Sophie, an armed man (Carey) arrives and holds up the store, shooting the store clerk, his son, and Hugh dead. He runs away as Sophie arrives.Sophie sinks into a deep depression
Clinical depression
Major depressive disorder is a mental disorder characterized by an all-encompassing low mood accompanied by low self-esteem, and by loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities...
, and cannot bring herself to erase Hugh's voice from their apartment's answering machine. She consults her psychiatrist
Psychiatry
Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities...
, Dr. Fayn (Dunn), about persistent headaches that she has been suffering from since his death. She tells Dr. Fayn that the headaches started to occur before the incident at the convenience store, and that she had been having an affair with a co-worker, Jesse (Ealy). After Hugh's death Sophie has dinner with her mother, Carol Jacobs (Archer), who accidentally knocks a glass over.
During a college photography class that she teaches, Sophie sets up a slide projector for the students to showcase their best photographs. One slide in the slide show depicts the exterior of the convenience store on the evening of November 7. Sophie contacts Officer Roberts (Offerman), the head of the investigation into the shootings at the convenience store, who is as puzzled as she is as to who is responsible for the photos. Sophie's headaches continue, and she begins to hear strange noises coming from within her apartment building and mysterious voices on the phone. Later, Officer Roberts discovers that the photo of the convenience store was paid for with Sophie's credit card
Credit card
A credit card is a small plastic card issued to users as a system of payment. It allows its holder to buy goods and services based on the holder's promise to pay for these goods and services...
.
The film presents two more different versions of these events, and Sophie must figure out which is real before she loses grip on her sanity, and her life. The second version suggests that Sophie was present at the shootings and was only spared because the shooter ran out of bullets, and the third suggests both Sophie and Hugh were killed. In the words of Cox, her character "goes through three phases. First there's denial. Then she feels guilty and sad about the situation. Then she has to learn to accept it." According to Greg Harrison, the events in the film were Sophie's memories as she and Hugh lay dying on the floor of the convenience store: "Each movement of this memory was her process of coming to terms with the terrible trauma, which was that she was killed for absolutely no reason, and it was some random act of violence she couldn’t confront". He added he felt November was "open-ended" enough that he hoped viewers would "come up with the most beautiful stories themselves that are very different from how I saw it."
Development
The film's original script was written by Benjamin Brand, who had written and sold several unproduced screenplays to studios. Brand had served as an assistant to producer Danielle Renfrew on the film GrooveGroove (film)
Groove is a movie released in the year 2000; it portrays one night in the San Francisco underground rave scene. Through a single email, the word spreads that a huge rave is going to take place in an abandoned warehouse...
(2000), which Greg Harrison had directed. Brand, Renfrew and Harrison were friends, and were living in their hometown of San Francisco developing separate projects at "mini-major" studios which, according to Renfrew, were "wallowing in development hell
Development hell
In the jargon of the media-industry, "development hell" is a period during which a film or other project is trapped in development...
". Brand then read a newspaper story about a shooting during the robbery of a store, in which the robber had hidden the body of the proprietor behind the counter and then taken the proprietor's place at the counter as customers came in. Inspired by the story and its setting, as well as experiences in his own life (he had once been a teacher of photography at the Academy of the Arts), Brand wrote a screenplay and presented it to Renfrew and Harrison. They were both impressed; Harrison said it was "fascinating ... kind of an abstract exercise in narrative, which I thought was exciting and bold".
Brand and Harrison worked through several drafts of the script over the following six months. Harrison, who cited the "terrible, terrible" experience of coping with the death of a close friend as one of his personal inspirations for the film, focused their efforts on inserting a more profound element of emotion into the script; in his words they were "trying to express the subjective experience of trauma". Once they and Renfrew were satisfied with their work, the group began pitching the project to various production companies. Renfrew consciously chose to avoid taking the project to major Hollywood studios such as 20th Century Fox
20th Century Fox
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation — also known as 20th Century Fox, or simply 20th or Fox — is one of the six major American film studios...
or Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...
; instead, she opted for "smaller companies who were interested in doing something off of center". A breakthrough was achieved after a meeting with director Gary Winick
Gary Winick
Gary Winick was an American film director and producer who directed films such as Tadpole and 13 Going on 30...
, who had established a company in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
called InDigEnt. The company specialised in backing low-budget films shot on digital video such as Personal Velocity
Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
Personal Velocity: Three Portraits is a 2002 American independent film written and directed by Rebecca Miller.- Plot :Personal Velocity is a tale of three women who have reached a turning point in their lives. Delia is a spirited, working-class woman from a small town in New York state who leaves...
(2002), Tadpole
Tadpole (film)
Tadpole is a 2002 American romantic comedy film directed by Gary Winick and written by Heather McGowan and Niels Mueller. It stars Sigourney Weaver, Bebe Neuwirth, Aaron Stanford, John Ritter, Robert Iler, and Kate Mara.-Plot:...
(2002) and Pieces of April
Pieces of April
Pieces of April is a 2003 American comedy-drama film written and directed by Peter Hedges. The film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival.- Plot :...
(2003). Greg Harrison's debut film Groove had impressed executives at the company, and John Sloss of Cinetic Media said, "November is exactly the kind of sharp and invigorating material that has made InDigEnt what it is".
Before the development of the film, Harrison had cast actress Courteney Cox in a Garry Trudeau
Garry Trudeau
Garretson Beekman "Garry" Trudeau is an American cartoonist, best known for the Doonesbury comic strip.-Background and education:...
-scripted ensemble film being developed at Fox Searchlight. Cox was a comic actress
Comedy
Comedy , as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse or work generally intended to amuse by creating laughter, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in...
widely known for her role on the television sitcom Friends
Friends
Friends is an American sitcom created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman, which aired on NBC from September 22, 1994 to May 6, 2004. The series revolves around a group of friends in Manhattan. The series was produced by Bright/Kauffman/Crane Productions, in association with Warner Bros. Television...
and had participated in only a handful of more serious productions. While the Garry Trudeau project was intended as a comedy, Harrison said he felt Cox was "very capable of drama and was very willing and wanted to transcend her comedic persona" when they had first met. The project did not enter production, but when Harrison began casting for November, Cox became a prime candidate for the lead role. He offered her the part without an audition: "Courteney's biggest challenge is redefining herself ... I knew I could bring something out of her that people haven't seen before", he said. Cox, who said she is more similar to her character in November than her Friends character, Monica Geller
Monica Geller
Monica E. Geller Bing is a fictional character on the popular US television sitcom Friends, portrayed by Courteney Cox. Monica is known as the "Mother Hen" of the group and her Greenwich Village apartment was one of the group's main gathering places. She was also known for her obsessive personality...
, said, "I wanted to make November because it's fascinating, confusing, ambiguous, eerie and makes you think. There aren't that many movies where you leave the theater and want to talk about them". She added, "it was trying to take you through a woman's experience of tragedy and through all the stages. I loved that".
Production
Harrison, Brand and Renfrew intended the film to be set and shot in San Francisco, but problems arose with their proposal. Cox had a commitment to Friends, which was in production in Los AngelesLos Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
, and the film's production costs did not allow the entire production team to relocate to northern California for the duration for the shoot. The film-makers were forced to shoot in Los Angeles, but Renfrew later expressed no regret in their decision: "We wanted the story to take place in an anonymous urban area. And I think we were successful in doing that".
Production finally began on May 19, 2003, and took place on Cox's days off from her Friends shooting schedule. Renfrew's home in Los Angeles stood in for the apartment of Cox's character in the film. The budget did not allow the luxury of trailers, but with some persuading, neighbouring apartments were converted into staging areas. For her role Cox donned glasses with thick frames, and had her hair cut by seven inches and a grey streak dyed into it. Harrison said, "She's seen in the fashion world as glamorous, a pop icon from Friends, so how to dress her down, and also make her body feel different. I had her wear those clothes around the house to feel like a different person".
The film's cinematographer was Nancy Schreiber, who had never before shot a film on Mini-DV. Harrison intended the shifts between chapters of the film—and Sophie's emotions—to be signalled visually, and he instructed Schreiber to employ different colour casts accordingly. For the opening robbery scenes (which recur throughout the film), Schreiber purchased two Panasonic AG-DVX100
Panasonic AG-DVX100
The Panasonic AG-DVX100 was the first affordable digital progressive scan camcorder.The camera is popular among television studios and is popular with independent film makers because of its many film-emulating features and has a large following. Currently the latest and last revision is the DVX102B...
cameras with white balance and color temperature
Color temperature
Color temperature is a characteristic of visible light that has important applications in lighting, photography, videography, publishing, manufacturing, astrophysics, and other fields. The color temperature of a light source is the temperature of an ideal black-body radiator that radiates light of...
controls. She used them with lighting gels and sodium street lamps
Sodium vapor lamp
A sodium vapor lamp is a gas discharge lamp that uses sodium in an excited state to produce light. There are two varieties of such lamps: low pressure and high pressure...
that surrounded the real-life convenience store where the crew was shooting to make the image appear green. A similar process was used in the second movement of the narrative, which was bathed in orange to represent Sophie's despair, while white expressed "acceptance" in the film's third and final act. To help achieve a blue colour cast for the first phase of the film ("denial"), Schreiber surrounded the shooting locations with machines that pumped smoke across the set. Cinematographer and Sundance Film Festival
Sundance Film Festival
The Sundance Film Festival is a film festival that takes place annually in Utah, in the United States. It is the largest independent cinema festival in the United States. Held in January in Park City, Salt Lake City, and Ogden, as well as at the Sundance Resort, the festival is a showcase for new...
judge Frederick Elmes commented of Schreiber's work, "She lit it and used colors in a way that the camera responded. And I don't think that's the kind of thing you do by accident. That's completely designed".
Harrison applauded the speed of Mini-DV for allowing such a short shoot: "We could shoot with multiple cameras at times, which helped us in our schedule". He also cited the advantages Mini-DV had in post-production, estimating that 75%–80% of the visual and sound design processing had been performed on desktop computers. November was shot in fifteen days on a budget of $150,000, and post-production
Post-production
Post-production is part of filmmaking and the video production process. It occurs in the making of motion pictures, television programs, radio programs, advertising, audio recordings, photography, and digital art...
costs were the same – a typical production model for films produced by InDiGent. Of the tight schedule and production costs, Harrison said, "I don't recommend shooting a movie that way and I don't want to do it again to be honest. It's really, really taxing".
Once shooting had wrapped, Harrison entered the editing room and constructed the film over the course of eighteen weeks, occasionally consulting colleagues such as Sarah Flack
Sarah Flack
Sarah Flack is an American film editor. She is notable for collaborating extensively with American independent film directors Steven Soderbergh and Sofia Coppola .Flack's work on Lost in Translation won her the BAFTA Award for Best Editing...
(editor of The Limey
The Limey
The Limey is a 1999 American crime film, directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Lem Dobbs. The film features Terence Stamp, Lesley Ann Warren, Luis Guzmán, Peter Fonda and Barry Newman.Filming locations included Big Sur and L.A.-Plot:...
(1999) and Lost in Translation
Lost in Translation (film)
Lost in Translation is a 2003 American film written and directed by Sofia Coppola; her second feature film after The Virgin Suicides and it stars Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson...
(2003)). Harrison, who had started out in the film industry as an editor, noted the strong involvement of key creative personnel throughout the pre-production, production and post-production stages, and called it "kind of a more holistic approach to post-production". He described the experience of editing the film alone (for the most part) as "brutal" and "exhausting", but he said he was satisfied with his work nonetheless. When asked about the film's seventy-three-minute running time, Renfrew said that Harrison "let the story and the film dictate the length as opposed to trying to force it to be any particular length".
Promotion and reception
November was included in the Official Selection at the Sundance Film Festival, and received its first public screening there on January 18, 2004. For her work on the film, the festival's Excellence in Cinematography Award went to Nancy Schreiber, who said it was "quite a shock, since it was on mini-dv and we were up against films shot on film". Reviews were generally positive; Guylaine Cadorette said the film was "sure to garner buzz" outside of the fest, while VarietyVariety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...
's Todd McCarthy wrote that the film was "a stylistic tour de force dedicated more to constructing a cinematic puzzle than to providing dramatic satisfaction". Producers were reluctant to sell the picture to a distributor quickly, and Roger Friedman of Fox News commented that they "may have overplayed their hand in juggling offers". The film was eventually sold later that year to Sony Pictures Classics, which had handled Groove. After the Sundance screening Harrison returned to the editing room to make final tweaks to the film. That year, Courteney Cox became pregnant with her first child, and producers realised she would be unavailable to promote the film until after she gave birth. After some deliberation, it was decided that the film would not be released to theaters until the following summer. However, it was screened outside the United States at the Oslo International Film Festival on November 20, 2004.
Danielle Renfrew was nominated for the Producers Award at the 2005 Independent Spirit Awards
Independent Spirit Awards
The Independent Spirit Awards , founded in 1984, are awards dedicated to independent filmmakers. Winners were typically presented with acrylic glass pyramids containing suspended shoestrings representing the paltry budgets of independent films. In 1986, the event was renamed the Independent Spirit...
—the ceremony for which was held in February 2005—in part for her work on November. On April 26, 2005 the film was screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival
San Francisco International Film Festival
San Francisco International Film Festival is the oldest continuously running film festival in the Americas. Organized by the San Francisco Film Society, the International is held each spring for two weeks, presenting an average of 150 films from over 50 countries...
, whose organisers described it as a "homage to the mindbending thrillers of David Lynch
David Lynch
David Keith Lynch is an American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style, which has been dubbed "Lynchian", and which is characterized by its dream imagery and meticulous sound...
... Inspired by the perception-versus-reality mindgames of Mulholland Drive
Mulholland Drive (film)
Mulholland Drive is a 2001 American neo-noir psychological thriller written and directed by David Lynch, starring Justin Theroux, Naomi Watts, and Laura Harring. The surrealist film was highly acclaimed by many critics and earned Lynch the Prix de la mise en scène at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival...
and the eerie psychological aesthetic of Nicolas Roeg
Nicolas Roeg
Nicolas Jack Roeg, CBE, BSC is an English film director and cinematographer.-Life and career:Roeg was born in London, the son of Mabel Gertrude and Jack Nicolas Roeg...
's Don't Look Now
Don't Look Now
Don't Look Now is a 1973 thriller film directed by Nicolas Roeg. Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland star as a married couple whose lives become complicated after meeting two elderly sisters in Venice, one of whom claims to be clairvoyant and informs them that their recently deceased daughter is...
". Audience response at its screening at the festival was generally positive, but critic Brandon Judell dismissed the film as "highly irritating and nonsensical," while Joanne Bealy said it was "a Mulholland Drive / David Lynch copycat ... even at 88 minutes, it was too long for me." The film made subsequent appearances at the Seattle International Film Festival
Seattle International Film Festival
The Seattle International Film Festival , held annually in Seattle, Washington since 1976, is among the top film festivals in North America. Audiences have grown steadily; the 2006 festival had 160,000 attendees...
(on May 31, 2005) and the Los Angeles Film Festival
Los Angeles Film Festival
The Los Angeles Film Festival, presented by the Los Angeles Times is an event held annually in June in downtown Los Angeles, California. The Los Angeles Film Festival began as the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival in 1995. The first LAIFF took place over the course of five days in a single...
(on June 22, 2005).
Critical reviews of November upon its eventual United States release were lukewarm. Greg Bellavia of Film Threat
Film Threat
Film Threat is a former print magazine and, now, webzine which focuses primarily on independent film, although it also reviews DVDs of mainstream films and Hollywood movies in theaters. It first appeared as a photocopied zine in 1985, created by Wayne State University students Chris Gore and André...
described the film as "Run Lola Run
Run Lola Run
Run Lola Run is a 1998 German crime thriller film written and directed by Tom Tykwer and starring Franka Potente as Lola and Moritz Bleibtreu as Manni. The story follows a woman who needs to obtain 100,000 German marks in 20 minutes to save her boyfriend's life...
meets Pi
Pi (film)
Pi, also titled ,WorldCat gives the title as [Pi] and provides a note which states, "Title is the mathematical symbol for Pi." . Amazon gives the title as Pi with no notation concerning the math symbol . is a 1998 American psychological thriller film written and directed by Darren Aronofsky...
with a splash of Seven
Seven (film)
Seven is a 1995 American thriller film, which also contains horror and neo-noir elements, directed by David Fincher and written by Andrew Kevin Walker. It was distributed by New Line Cinema and stars Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow, R...
... As a thriller it seems awfully familiar and has trouble establishing a voice all its own", but added "Harrison and company manage to create one of the strangest romantic films out there and for their attempt at the offbeat deserve to be recognized." The New York Daily News
New York Daily News
The Daily News of New York City is the fourth most widely circulated daily newspaper in the United States with a daily circulation of 605,677, as of November 1, 2011....
was more negative in its summary of the film, labelling it a "convoluted and unsatisfying psychological drama." Mark Holcomb, reviewing for The Village Voice
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...
, said the film was "less compelling the more apparent its solution becomes. But before the foregone conclusion surfaces about halfway through, its disparate, unnerving components are mesmerizing." F. X. Feeney of the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
wrote, "it never becomes a mystery, like, say, Mulholland Drive, or even The Sixth Sense
The Sixth Sense
The Sixth Sense is a 1999 American psychological thriller film written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. The film tells the story of Cole Sear , a troubled, isolated boy who is able to see and talk to the dead, and an equally troubled child psychologist who tries to help him...
(despite the gimmicky magnitude of its final reveal)", while the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is an online newspaper and former print newspaper covering Seattle, Washington, United States, and the surrounding metropolitan area...
called it "a low-watt reworking of M. Night Shyamalan
M. Night Shyamalan
Manoj Nelliyattu Shyamalan,known professionally as M. Night Shyamalan, is an Indian-born American screenwriter, film director, and producer known for making movies with contemporary supernatural plots that climax with a twist ending. He is also known for filming his movies in and around...
and David Lynch."
Scott Tobias wrote, "with each successive trip back to the scene, things only become murkier and less compelling, lost in pretentious symbolism and obvious visual signposts"; Michael Sragow
Michael Sragow
Michael Sragow is a film critic and columnist who has written for The Baltimore Sun, The New Times, The New Yorker , The Atlantic and salon.com...
of Baltimore Sun made a similar criticism, saying, "Benjamin Brand's script is a puzzle without a satisfying solution." Chicago Sun-Times
Chicago Sun-Times
The Chicago Sun-Times is an American daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois. It is the flagship paper of the Sun-Times Media Group.-History:The Chicago Sun-Times is the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the city...
critic Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
, who drew comparisons between the film's narrative and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, M.D. was a Swiss American psychiatrist, a pioneer in Near-death studies and the author of the groundbreaking book On Death and Dying , where she first discussed what is now known as the Kübler-Ross model.She is a 2007 inductee into the American National Women's Hall of Fame...
's five stages of dying model
Kübler-Ross model
The Kübler-Ross model, commonly known as The Five Stages of Grief, was first introduced by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying....
, argued "answers would be beside the point. Any other explanation, for example a speech by the psychiatrist or the cop explaining exactly what has really happened, would be contrivance. Better to allow November to descend into confusion and despair ... [it] does not bargain and does not explain." A review in Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
identified the film as "an homage to the work of David Hockney
David Hockney
David Hockney, CH, RA, is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, who is based in Bridlington, Yorkshire and Kensington, London....
: Just as Hockney assembles smaller, overlapped Polaroids that don't necessarily make sense into a big picture that does".
Marc Mohan of The Oregonian
The Oregonian
The Oregonian is the major daily newspaper in Portland, Oregon, owned by Advance Publications. It is the oldest continuously published newspaper on the U.S. west coast, founded as a weekly by Thomas J. Dryer on December 4, 1850...
dismissed the film as "a post-Memento, mess-with-your-head thriller that thinks it's much cleverer than it is", but commented that Courteney Cox "doesn't embarrass herself" in her role, while The Hollywood Reporter
The Hollywood Reporter
Formerly a daily trade magazine, The Hollywood Reporter re-launched in late 2010 as a unique hybrid publication serving the entertainment industry and a consumer audience...
felt that she was "as convincing as she could possibly be." Mark Holcomb, however, said Cox's demeanor "suggests impatience rather than depression," and F. X. Feeney thought "Cox’s performance is too muted to vitally illuminate this woman’s agony". Others such as Walter Addiego (San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle
thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...
) believed the film was a conscious decision on Cox's part to "establish movie credibility after the megasuccess of Friends".
Most praise in reviews was directed towards cinematographer Nancy Schreiber's work on the film. Scott Tobias said the film "makes the most of its visual limitations;" Marc Savlov of the Austin Chronicle
Austin Chronicle
The Austin Chronicle is an alternative weekly, tabloid-style newspaper published every Thursday in Austin, Texas, United States. The paper is distributed through free news-stands, often at local eateries or coffee houses frequented by its targeted demographic...
commented that it was "soaked to its noirish
Film noir
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...
core in some fine cinematography." Kirk Honeycutt proclaimed Schreiber "the movie's real heroine, as she dramatically meshes the real with the surreal, creating different looks and emotions for each segment through light and color," while Jack Mathews wrote, "I suspect that it was her work—perhaps alone—that changed "November's" fate from a direct-to-video release to a brief first run in theaters."
In its first weekend of release in the United States, November grossed $21,813 at eight theatres, and it debuted at number sixty-three on the box office chart. It peaked at number fifty-nine in its second weekend (aided by its expansion into nine more theatres) and generated $192,186 in ticket sales over twelve weeks. It was originally slated to enter wide release
Wide release
Wide release is a term in the American motion picture industry for a motion picture that is playing nationally . Specifically, a movie is considered to be in wide release when it is on 600 screens or more in the United States and Canada.In the US, films holding an NC-17 rating almost never have a...
in late summer, but Sony Pictures Classics
Sony Pictures Classics
Sony Pictures Classics is an art-house film division of Sony Pictures Entertainment founded in December 1991 that distributes, produces and acquires specialty films from the United States and around the world. Its co-presidents are Michael Barker and Tom Bernard...
chose to expand the film into no more than 27 theatres (in its sixth week).