Interview with Noah Bashore on ‘Walter, Grace & the Submarine’

I don’t think I’ve recommended any film more over the past year or so than Walter, Grace & the Submarine, a super-indie film from first-time filmmaker Noah Bashore. 

Walter, Grace is a mumblecore romance set basically in Bashore’s (and my) backyard, Grand Rapids, Michigan. The city’s recognizable landmarks — the Blue Bridge, the lime bikes downtown that people only pretend to ride, the weird sculpture thing downtown — make up the scenic backdrop for Walter (Kyle Patrick) and Grace’s (Jessie Carl) two-week romantic escapade before the latter leaves town for Portland, Oregon. And while it’s one of the first films I’ve seen that intentionally makes use of Grand Rapids as a location rather than hiding it, what’s more impressive is the way it feels like Grand Rapids in its serious unseriousness, particular themes around post-evangelicalism and queer identity, and its meta-art about art. Those from West Michigan will know exactly what I mean. 

But you don’t need to be from West Michigan to enjoy Walter, Grace. It’s a deeply touching story of love-regret or lost love in a very particular place, and its specificity ironically makes it a story to which anyone can relate. You’ve been on the same coffee-shop date. You have fallen in love while strolling through the city. You have traversed the same and most random conversation threads while intoxicated in infatuation. You’ve met a person you could have fallen in love with (and maybe did). But for whatever reason, you couldn’t end up together. You’ve made friendships that spark life into deep loneliness. Bashore, much like Before Sunrise or one of my personal favorites, Comrades, Almost a Love Story, captures this. 

Neither Walter nor Grace wants anything serious because their time together has a non-negotiable expiration date, and still they find each other too compelling to resist and their time together becomes magical. One way their courtship embraces its fantasticality is by simply forgetting about almost every other person in the city; for the running time of the film, just like the two goldfish on Grace’s shelf, it’s a city of two because sometimes that’s what love feels like: a world of your own.

Bashore showed up to our interview — the first of what will be many in his artistic career — in the X-iconic Celine Song T-shirt from Girls on Top, eager to talk about the craft he loves. It’s no wonder either. Song’s Past Lives shares a lot with the star-crossed lovers of Walter, Grace. But even if Walter and Grace can’t end up together, their love is indefatigable and finds a way to translate into something more platonic. 

The film ends with a sonic and spoken word meditation on love and friendship from songwriter and composer ings. Maybe some people will be turned off by the exercise, but I found it so authentic that it was irresistible. Participating in that meditation in a mostly full theater with three of my best friends will always be one of my most treasured filmgoing experiences.

The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Read my full review from the film’s local premiere at the 2024 Grand Rapids Film Festival here on the site.

Joshua Polanski: I will be honest with you. I watched your screener and I went with the assumption that if I didn’t like it, I wasn’t going to review it. I didn’t want to hurt a super indie film. 

Noah Bashore: No kidding. 

JP: So, I liked it and I wrote my review. Congratulations!

NB: Cool. I’m glad you liked it. Truly, this is my first rodeo. I only really have made shitty student shorts when I went to Central Michigan University and Kendall [College] here in town. 

JP: How long were you at Kendall? 

NB: I was at Kendall for three semesters. My family didn’t have a ton of money growing up, so not a nepo baby. So it was like, “Ooh, this is a lot of money. I don’t think I can do this anymore.” 

JP: Well, maybe that’s where we’ll start. The thing that caught me off-guard right away is that your first few shots are very controlled and measured. They are long and patient. I think it’s also something that’s reflected in the score. I’ve seen a lot of films from first-time filmmakers, and one thing I’ve noticed is sometimes they tend to be over-scored and over-edited. This is not that. It’s very measured. It doesn’t feel like a first-time filmmaker’s film. 

I want to know how you arrived at that style, and why did you opt for this measured approach over something more stylized?

NB: I’m really glad that connected with you because that was really intentional. 

So, I went to Kendall, like I said, and while I was there, I was a student projectionist at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (UICA) here in town and my entire life I was always a big movie person. I loved Spider-Man. I loved Star Wars. And I liked indie movies — (500) Days Of Summer, Fox Searchlight type stuff — because of my older sister Chelsea. 

But when I was at the UICA, I had my first thorough exposure to what actual independent cinema looks like and feels like for real outside of just Oscar stuff. One that really connected with me while I was there as a student projectionist was Jim Cummings’ Thunder Road. Super-duper recommend. It’s a really good movie. That movie has a lot of long, lingering takes. I know usually the point of reference here might be, like, Alfonso Cuarón and Children of Men or whatever with these lingering, long shots of conversations that environmentally [do a lot of the] world-building. 

Whereas with Jim’s thing, it’s huge, long takes on this cop being a dummy because they didn’t have the time to get a shit-ton of coverage. They just treated it like theater: Cummings, the writer-director, learned all the lines and they blasted through everything. These longer takes [inform] the stylistic choice I’m trying to go for because that’s the stuff that I enjoy but also because we were just so restricted in what we were actually able to get. They were convenient.

JP: That makes sense from a filmmaking perspective. I do think that some of it strikes me as a preference of one thing over another. 

Continue reading at the Midwest Film Journal.