A NOTE FROM THE DIRECTOR

Our film, “Resentment,” began with a visit to an old friend for a casual drink and a chat — a chat that took an ugly turn. As I rehashed my usual complaints about life, marriage and art-making, my friend responded by going on the attack. He recalled to me all my worst actions, describing my entire life as an exercise in avoiding facing what they implied. He held up a dark mirror and demanded I acknowledge the image there as mine.

And I sat there and took it. That’s what interested me, as a writer: why did I take it? What stopped me from defending myself or just walking out? I wrote up our encounter, and the mystery of why one man would let another man beat him up emotionally like that led me to the romantic and artistic rivalries at the heart of “Resentment.” That, in turn, led me to the film’s play-like structure of three equal acts over a single night in a single space: the cocktail bar owned and managed by the woman who is the apex of that triangular relationship.

My challenge as a director was to make that world cinematic. “Resentment” is a very talky film, and I looked back to talky films I have loved — from “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” to “sex, lies, and videotape” to “Before Midnight” — for inspiration on how to keep the audience engaged visually without distracting them from the emotional conflict.

The first goal was to make the world feel real. We cast “Resentment” with a view to making everyone a real person, someone you might meet in such a bar — we didn’t want a glossy Hollywood feel. That led us to our lead actress in particular, who does not have the body type you typically see dancing on a bar in a movie, but who you might well see in an actual burlesque act. The bar was meticulously designed to feel lived in and real, and populated with a diverse array of actual liquor bottles. And we captured footage of various Brooklyn neighborhoods to embed our fictional cocktail bar in the larger real world of an ever-gentrifying borough.

We gave each act of “Resentment” a distinctive look, not just in terms of lighting and the use of extras to reflect different times of day, but in terms of the language of camera movement, the goal being for each act to feel almost like a different film. Mike Nichols once said that every interaction between two characters is either a seduction, a negotiation or a fight. There are elements of each in all three acts of “Resentment,” but from the camera’s perspective we wanted Act I to feel like an interrogation, Act II like a boxing match, and Act III like a dance.

In the end, even in the talkiest of films, the most important moments are frequently ones of silence and of stillness, and I think that’s true of “Resentment” as well. But of course, because “Resentment” takes place mostly in a cocktail bar, there isn’t a whole lot of actual silence — there’s always music playing. We worked hard to put together an affordable playlist that gave character to the bar and to its owner, subtly underscoring the action and reflecting it lyrically without ever feeling unrealistic. After the look of the bar itself, I think the music we chose does the most to create the world of “Resentment.”

It’s a world I hope audiences believe in, and are glad to have visited, even though — or perhaps because — it’s bound to take them places that are disturbing and that make them uncomfortable.