3 Backyards: Secrets and Insides

Mendelsohn crunches for Sundance.

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Today, Mendelsohn is a teacher himself, an associate professor in the film department of Columbia University, where he recruited many of his students to work on the 3 Backyards crew. "It was invigorating to have my students working around me, because I had to live up to what I teach," he says. "It's been so hard to make this film that I just said, 'No fucking way will I let myself down.' I'm not talking about the quality of the work. I'm saying I didn't let myself down in terms of sticking to my idea of just how strange and specific I wanted my choices to be."

Which brings me back to the suburbs — a terrain Mendelsohn seems intent on mapping, time and again, in all its specific strangeness. "I might have found this anywhere I grew up, but because I grew up in the suburbs, and because I'm a neurotic and a psychopath, I found everything hidden compelling about the suburbs," he allows. "I don't mean that in what I think of as the more conventional sense of, 'Everybody in the suburbs is hiding an affair' or 'Everybody in the suburbs is hiding personal angst.' I literally mean I was constantly interested in what was hidden, in my backyard, behind the hedges. I was always looking for an old foundation underneath the dirt. I was in love with the kind of empty, fenced-in, dirty areas, where there would be one woman's shoe lying unattended, and how did that get there? Those kind of underneath secrets always interested me, and that is at the very core of the stories in 3 Backyards and the way it was shot — the idea of secrets and insides, and of interior versus exterior, both in the characters and literally in the physical spaces. If you have to ask, Am I interested in the suburbs in any way? That is one thing I'm interested in. It's this funny tension between nature and people, and that is 3 Backyards through and through."