One of the standouts at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival is Josephine Decker and Zefrey Throwell’s docu-art hybrid, Flames. Filmed over five years, Flames is an extraordinarily intimate portrait of Decker and Throwell’s real-life romantic relationship. The artist pair (Decker a filmmaker and actress, and Throwell a performance artist) enlisted the help of superstar cinematographer Ashley Connor to document their love affair from its passionate, sex-fueled start through to its unraveling.

We caught up with Decker and Throwell the day after the film’s World Premiere at Tribeca. What follows is our interview with the former flames. We talked to them about the film’s first public screening, if they consider the project to be narrative or documentary, what it was like shooting the sex scenes, and more.

The Culture Files: How did the screening go last night?

Zefrey Throwell: Phew. Big. I would say, Frederick Boyer, he moderated after and Josephine and I, I think had, I won’t speak for you, but I had a preconceived notion of how it would go, and man, by the time I got up there, I was like wahhh… okay everybody, you saw everything, you know.

Josephine Decker: The Q&A was so much fun. I think the most fun part of making the entire movie might have been doing that Q&A. Well, you…he had more fun making the movie.

ZT: We had sex in the movie. Come on.

JD: But the Q&A…

ZT: Love that Q&A.

JD: Part of it also for me. I’ve done a lot of Q&As for my own films now, usually you get up there and you have to talk about this film and often you don’t know how you feel about it. Like you’re also sharing it with an audience for the first time. It’s like you feel exposed no matter what you’re showing. But this one, it’s so much far beyond that in terms of what’s exposed. Also, I think because Zefrey had final cut; I don’t know. I just felt like I could actually be myself during the Q&A in a way that it’s very rare that I get to actually be myself. More myself probably because we dated for a while and then we hated each other and kept making this movie for a really long time, so we really saw a lot of sides of each other. And, so it’s really nice to get to stand up in front of an audience with somebody you’ve said everything to. I’ve said everything to Zefrey. I think it comes across really well in front of people. I know how to be myself with this man. It was exciting. And people laughed. They were really with the film. They went with it the whole way. I think some people cried. It was cool.

TCF: In the catalog for Tribeca it says the film is a narrative.

ZT: Yeah.

TCF: When we spoke before, you said it was a documentary. The film is going to HotDocs, that’s a documentary film festival. So, what is it?

ZT: I will flip the script on you and ask why you feel the need to categorize it? We as a culture now are past that idea. Right? Alternative facts have taken over the entire government, right? So why are filmmakers held to this idea that one is true and one is fiction? And there is no way where the twain shall meet. This between us is an ever-evolving fiction that is based on reality of a fiction that is based on reality of a fiction that never happened that really did it happen. I was there and I saw it but it didn’t happen that way, right?

JD: Yeah, and it’s also interesting because sometimes I see Q&As with these fiction filmmakers and someone will ask, “Was any of this autobiographical?” And they will be like, “Definitely not, no, I’d never write about myself.” I’m like, “Are you kidding? Then where are these characters coming from? They are coming out of your mind onto the page.” So, there’s some version of that person that you have to embody to then create them enough that they can go to the written form. I often feel like fictions are weird documents of the insides of the filmmakers’ minds. In a way, I thought it was narrative because I knew things that were often restaged or things that didn’t happen that we kind of manipulated but then…actually when I watched it last night it really came across as a documentary more than I had ever. When I saw all the rough cuts, you know because somehow sharing that much of who we are in front of an audience I started to realize, oh this is really real in a way that fiction films just aren’t. So now I’m embracing…the docu-art hybrid, that it’s a documentary.

ZT: Jo had said that’s 90% me on the screen and I was like, that’s impossible. There’s only 100% us, always. Although Donald Trump, right, likes to say 1000%. You’re like, okay 10x you, who the hell are you?

I mean, you’ve been in love, right?

TCF: Yeah…

ZT: The thing flickers constantly and this is why humans are so obsessed with it, right? If it was a constant, no one would care. In trying to grasp that thing we then push it away. I think that we really attempted to just catch a shadow of what that love means. There are parts I feel where the film works and parts where I don’t, but overall, I think it’s about Josephine and Zefrey in love. And in hate, and in romance.

TCF: Josephine, you had also been doing the mumblecore films. What was the timeline?

JD: All those films that I acted in that Joe (Swanberg) made were before this, actually. I acted in three of his films in the summer of 2010, then we started shooting in the fall of 2011. But I definitely think it informed at least my understanding that you could make a movie this way. That you could just put a camera in a room and potentially you’re making a feature film. I don’t think anyone thought you could make a feature film that way. That’s changed now.

TCF: You came into the project already from being an actress. How did that feel going into this? And to Zefrey, knowing that she had acted in other films and your work was more performance art, which I guess is also a form of acting. Did you think you could trust her as being authentic?

ZT: That’s a good question, right? Performance art, people say it like it’s a dirty word. One of the things I like about performance is that it’s live, you get one shot and it better be good. And this is pretty much the opposite of filmmaking almost all the time. Filmmaking is about, “Let’s try it again, can you be a little more angry this time, but not that angry.” So that hotness for performance, where it’s “Motherf@cker, did you see that?” That is the feeling that I really had hoped to bring to our film, right. That it could feel electric and that it could feel dangerous. Like not only physically dangerous but emotionally dangerous sometimes. Did I feel like I could trust her and that she was honest? Yes. I mean she’s a brilliant woman, brilliant storyteller, filmmaker. Smart, funny, hot, right? The whole package. And I fell for her all the way. Yeah, that kind of beautiful naïve love. Where you’re like, trust? Of course, I trust her all the way. That’s really the Sally whistling in the dark, isn’t it?

JD: Yeah, and I guess what’d I say is I still don’t know if I could call myself an actress, especially at the time. I had not trained as an actor. I got those parts in Joe’s movies because I met him on the film festival circuit as a director showing my short and music video. So more what I think I learned from Joe was like how to be in a room with a camera that was turned towards me. Usually, I was in a room with a camera turned towards someone else pretending that the camera wasn’t there. My acting was more like how to be natural on the other side.

TCF: When you were thinking about the project, did you watch other films or did you just ask Ashley (the cinematographer) to come over and turn the camera on? What kind of direction did you give Ashley in terms of how to film?

ZT: You mean, what were the influences, or did we sit down and talk about how this should look?

TCF: How should it look?

ZT: One of the things that I love about Ashley Connor, she’s my favorite DP in the entire world, is that she immediately intuits the vision. You’re talking just like this and by the time 20 minutes are up, she’s like, “I got it.” And then we translate, the whole film, most of it is shot like this close, it’s super intimate. And this is right, the feeling of being at the lover’s neck and she got that with no kind of explicit instructions. We would give her bumpers on the bowling lane. Like, “Over here, or over here.” But a lot of times she would be like, “What about up here?”

JD: Yeah, so basically we didn’t really have a sit-down. Also, we didn’t really have enough time at first because we made a short about two and a half weeks before it was going to premiere at MoMA so we were furiously just jumping into making it.

TCF: I have to ask about the sex scene, obviously. How difficult were those to film? And, did you call up Ashley and be like, “I think we are going to have sex tonight, come on over.” How did that all work?

ZT: We were having a lot of sex, right, it was the beginning of the relationship. Not that hard, so to speak.

Yeah, I was saying earlier that I have a problem getting an erection while they are filming me. We would start having some kind of intimacy and then they would come in, Ashley would come in and film. So in that way, it was difficult. The camera does change things. I try to be myself as much as I can but then you get into that meta hole, like ‘what’s the real me?’ Right, is the real me going to be quiet right now or are we going to talk, you know.

JD: It was funny because it was really shocking to even watch those sex scenes after the fact in the editing room, but eventually I became kind of dulled to them. It wasn’t so shocking anymore but I was like, “Why did I agree to be in all those really explicit sex scenes?” It was partly because the initiation of the project was this incident that like his condom came off the very first time we had sex, we had to deal with the day after pill situation, and when we reenacted that we made it very realistic and the sex felt really natural. I think I knew I was going into that and wanted to tell that story and so from there, it was like I guess…Obviously, it’s not that once you shoot one sex scene, you’ve shot them all. But it established a dynamic between us with sex being part of the storytelling and so then it made it a lot easier to shoot these other sex scenes. Weirdly, I don’t remember it being very uncomfortable. I really trusted Ashley. We had just been in the woods shooting Butter on the Latch the summer before. And so I had been like steeped in her and having no electricity in the Mendocino Woodlands, so I think we knew each other’s bodies already kind of intimately and that makes it a little easier to know the other things you do with your bodies.

ZT: One of the things we talked about was that we really wanted to portray love as it is. Which a lot of times is laughing in the middle of sex. It’s not these passionate scenes of the male chest swelling and the woman with the big O. It’s more like dorks, right? Sweaty dorks with bacne.

TCF: I wanted to ask about the title. Was that your first choice? How did you arrive at the title?

JD: We went through a lot of back and forth. I think Zefrey sent like 30 options, then I sent like 10 options, and then we had our producer and editor sending options. I really wanted to call it “In Flames” or “Up in Flames” because that felt more realistic to my experience of the relationship, but he wanted Flames, which is also a very good title.

ZT: We wanted to call it “You, Me and Ashley,” right? I don’t know man, that might have been a better title, honestly.

JD: I did want to call it “Art Therapy,” which I think would have been really interesting, but then we thought no one in their lives would ever see it if it was called “Art Therapy.”

ZT: Yeah, definitely don’t watch that.

TCF: Will there be a sequel?

ZT: Yes, we’re starting tonight and we would like you to film it.

Flames is screening in the Viewpoints section of the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival. The festival runs through Sunday, April 30, 2017.