Going Sane: The Rise and Fall of the Center for Feeling Therapy is a new documentary short from filmmaker Joey Izzo. The short looks at the Los Angeles therapy collective of the 1970s and its utopian promise before devolving into a business-minded cult built on control and abuse.
Gabriel Patay served as director of photography on the project, and says he met Joey Izzo through mutual producing friends Adam Ridley and Jordan Londe.
"I was instantly a huge fan of Joey's experimental Sundance short film You've Never Been Completely Honest when I saw it," says Patay. "I loved his use of unconventional techniques, such as using animation and actors in a documentary format."
During prep, the pair realized they were aligned in their love and pursuit to push documentary films in ways that challenge and express complicated feelings beyond just straight journalistic expression.
"My background in cinematography has included a wide kaleidoscope of flavors – (from) highly-stylized work to raw grit," shares Patay. "However, a common through-line is to try and maintain a sense of authenticity, sincerity, and to establish a specific perspective or visual identity of a story."
To help maintain the anonymity of the participants in Going Sane, the production created scenes with actors who would lip sync audio clips of the interviewed cult members.
"This creates an interesting emotional response as a viewer that's balancing the performances and the emotions expressed in the audio," says Patay. "One great example of this is the short scene that shows a desperate phone call between a woman in the cult and her child, where we used the real audio document as actor, Kate Adams, acted out this brief gut-wrenching moment."
Going in, the production team knew they would need to incorporate quite a bit of low-resolution archival video alongside newly-shot footage.
"We wanted our footage to not have the common polish or sheen seen in a lot of well-financed documentaries these days," Patay explains. "Our goal was to kind of blur the lines between an archival artifact and a vintage production, including imperfect camera operating, like you might find if you were trying to catch real moments, as well as the feel of manual but intentional zooming of the lens."
Footage was shot using a S16 crop sensor with the Canon C500 and an 8-64mm Canon zoom lens. The idea, shares Patay, was to use a lens that closely resembled the type of lenses commonly used for making TV documentaries in the late '70s, and with a much greater depth of field similar to Super 16 film.
Izzo and Adam Ridley edited the project.