LA GRANDE — The 15th annual Eastern Oregon Film Festival will feature “The Green Flash” from directors Jodi Cash and Ethan Payne. This is a [heavily] abbreviated interview with Cash. You can find the full interview online at goeasternoregon.com/now_playing.

Go: Y’all are co-directors, so, I’d like to ask: Have you worked together on projects before? Is this the first project you worked on together? How did the partnership come to be?

Cash: Well, that’s a good question. This is not the only project that we’ve worked on together, but in a funny way, it was the first. This documentary grew out of a story that I wrote and Ethan photographed in 2016 for a publication in the south called “The Bitter Southerner.” And the story featured Steve Lamb and a couple of other people who do appear in the documentary, some who don’t. And when we went and wrote and shot that story, we thought, “this feels like there’s something so much bigger there. We should go back and do a film.”

Go: So y’all started out working together not in the documentary medium. You were working in print. And so do you have a background in documentary, or is your background in journalism?

Cash: My background was in print journalism and online journalism. So this is actually my first film, and Ethan and I have begun a couple of other projects that we’re excited about.

Go: And so I guess with your respective backgrounds, how does that translate into your division of labor when working on a project together?

Cash: To me, I think it’s pretty easy and natural for us to stay in each of our lanes. All of the shooting, aside from shoots when Jake, our co DP, was present, everything visually was Ethan’s work. And I think that I brought a focus on the story and to, you know, being the person asking questions. But at the same time, we would always talk about those things before and afterwards and what worked and what didn’t or what we were excited about, especially when it came to interviews.

We were very much in conversation about what the story was, what we thought it was, how it was developing. So it’s very collaborative, but at the same time, I don’t ever feel like my toes were ever stepped on.

Eastern Oregon

Film Festival

The Eastern Oregon Film Festival is Oct. 17-19 in La Grande. For more information or to purchase festival passes, visit eofilmfest.com.