This is the full transcript of an interview used in part for an Empire magazine feature. We were, appropriately enough, speaking on the phone between Yorkshire and Los Angeles. Sean was, he was pleased to confirm, ‘less than half a mile’ from Donut Time.

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Everyone’s talking about this having been shot on an iPhone, but it’s such a great and unusual film, the phone is actually not that interesting in the grand scheme of it. How does something like Tangerine come to exist at all?

The story actually came from my co-screenwriter, Chris Bergoch, and myself. We both lived very close to the intersection of Santa Monica and Highland, and being new to Los Angeles I soon realised it was an area we had never really seen on film or television, and that there were a million stories that could be told there. It’s an infamous intersection known for being an unofficial red light district. Every time you pass it there’s always some sort of drama going down there. So I wanted to tell a story about that, and Marc and Jay Duplass offered me the opportunity to make a micro-budget film. I didn’t really want to do that again, but while I wasn’t getting any bigger-budget projects I decided to take their offer. I sold them on the idea of shooting at the intersection – we didn’t even have a script or a plot at the time. 

I’m guessing you, Chris , Marc and Jay were not already exactly plugged in to the trans hooker community?

Ha, no, not at all. Once we got our green light, we went about doing obsessive research. Chris and I being cis-gender white males, we’re obviously from completely outside of that world. We had to spend a tremendous amount of time finding collaborators, and we eventually found them in Maya and Kiki, plus all of their friends. They were invaluable in the fleshing out process. It took us about three months to figure out the script, and that came from Kiki, because Kiki was the one who pitched us the idea of the woman scorned and the search from the cis-gendered woman who’s involved in the affair.

The film feels very improvised. Was that the case?

It was scripted more than you might think. We had a scriptment, and that was around 70 pages long, so sometimes we would have very fleshed out scenes – every word, especially with the Armenian stuff. Then there were other scenes that were just a paragraph, and that allowed me to shoot that stuff slightly more documentary style. I’m very influenced by British realist filmmaking. One of the ideas was that we’d have a convergence of all our characters at Donut Time at the end, and that was very influenced by Mike Leigh.

What drew you to the Armenian community?

There were a few reasons for using an Armenian community, the most blatant one being that I love Karren Karagulian and I’ve used him now five times and he’s a wonderful underrated actor. When I went into this I told him I wasn’t sure how to fit him into it, and he said that every other cab driver in LA is Armenian and there was a huge Armenian population. So it was pretty easy to figure out. I didn’t know this until I started doing my research, but transpohobia is even more extreme than most places in the world in Armenia. To the point where it’s very brave of our actors to do this film, because they could lose fans over there. Our Armenian cast are all quite well known. Alla Tumanian has been working for decades; she’s like the Sophia Loren of Armenia. Arsen Grigoryan hosts The Voice in Armenia. He’s probably the biggest celebrity in the film! They believed in the film enough and understood that the issues were important, but even some of their own representatives were advising them not to do it. We’re not even sure it’ll be able to play the Golden Apricot festival.

Were you thinking about contrasting the strong sense of family you get from the Armenian community with Maya and Kiki’s more improvised ‘found’ family?

Definitely, and we also wanted a parallel story of infidelity, another aspect of family. Chris pitched to me that the film should take place on Christmas Eve, and I think he was coming from a place of thinking of famous Los Angeles films that take place on Christmas Eve, like Die Hard. But it was profound for me because I think you always associate the holidays with family, and for these characters, trans women of colour who come from poverty, they usually do not have family because they’ve been rejected and ostracised. Their only family is usually each other. So that was the reason to have the other family, to demonstrate that other families have other issues going on too.

Is Donut Time a real place, or based on somewhere particular?

Donut Time is real. So much so that I told my producers that I wouldn’t do the film if we couldn’t shoot there. It’s such a landmark. It’s a mom-and-pop small business. I think there are a couple of branches throughout southern California. But it’s a family-owned shop and it’s been around for years. It’s one of those locations that’s always been a hub for people on the streets. We were granted permission, extremely generously, to shoot there for very little money, but one of the caveats was that we could never interfere with their business. We weren’t allowed to get in the way of their customers or anything like that. But we realised quite quickly that we were the least of their problems! There’s always chaos going on there.

What’s your process of working with people who have never acted before?

I’ve used first-time actors a lot. In this case Kiki had studied drama in high school, and I found out that Maya is an aspiring entertainer, although her focus has been more on music. They’d both done shows either walking a catwalk or performing in a club. So this came pretty naturally to them, and then the iPhone made it even easier. It made it so that their confidence level was on the same level as James Ransone, from day one. That was a benefit of the iPhone that I didn’t see coming.

Was filming with the phone actually helpful? I spoke to Pablo Larcuen after he’d made Hooked Up with the iPhone 4S, and he’d actually had a terrible time with it. It didn’t make his life easy.

It isn’t quite as simple as going out with a phone and making a movie, but at the same time we didn’t use a lot of equipment at all. It’s the iPhone, and then it’s an app on the iPhone, which is obviously invisible. We had the 5S. It was before the 6 came out and it was a major jump in quality between the 5 and the 5S. I think they’ve figured out a lot of problems since the 4S. And I’m excited about the 6. But I don’t think I’ll shoot my next film on an iPhone…

What’s the app you mentioned?

The app is called FiLMiC Pro, which allows you to lock aperture and focus and shoot 24 frames per second, and the compression rate is a higher quality. It changes the way that your phone captures video.

Then we had this wonderful anamorphic adaptor, created by Moondog Labs, which I found through their kickstarter campaign. They created an adaptor that fits over the lens and allows you to shoot true ‘scope. That was what really sold the whole idea for me, because I knew we could elevate it to a cinematic level. 

Then of course we did a lot of post-production work. We coloured it in the way any other film would be coloured, for example. Post-production was very simple. Once the raw footage was off the phone and onto the computers it was literally just like any other piece of media to work with. But if you’d seen us shooting from across the street, the only giveaway that we were a film production was our sound. That was done the traditional way. Even though it was only one guy, we still had all the sound gear you’d expect, like a boom pole and a sound cart and a mixer. Sometimes we’d have to hide him around a corner because we wanted our footprint to be as tiny as possible. We also had a stabiliser, Tiffen’s Steadicam Smoothee, which is a little grip, but it fits in your hand. If you’d seen us shooting you’d have thought we were just playing around with our friends, making a home video.

Are you allowed to say what the film actually cost to make?

It ended up about $100,000. Films as cheap as this usually require you to stay indoors with a lot of dialogue, whereas this film needed to constantly move through LA. So the first thing we did was look into how we could cut costs with the camera. We could have gone down the road of using a DSLR, the Canon 5D or the Sony, but that would have increased our crew members by 3, which we wouldn’t have been able to afford. And by that point I was excited enough about the iPhone. I thought we could make something very unique. I love Dogme; I love The Idiots. It’s all about the content; not about how you’re capturing the content. You could easily make a $1000 found footage movie with the iPhone, but that wasn’t what we were going for. Creep cost Marc and Jay almost nothing. And being a genre film they probably sold it for a lot more!

Did you shoot with just a single phone?

We bought three iPhones but never used more than two at a time. We were stuck with the iPhone lens so we couldn’t change the focal length. Now, a year and a half later, I think you can, but when we shot we were stuck with this extremely wide angle, which is equivalent to about a 23mm lens – so it’s not fish-eye, but it’s wide. So if we’d had three on set we ran the risk of capturing another camera on camera. We even ran that risk with two, so near the end of the shoot we were often down to shooting with one camera. If you have the means you should always try to shoot on film. But I can imagine doing a television project with the iPhone. If we’d shot the film today it would look very different. You can use stabilising effects now… you can shoot on drones…

What’s it like for lighting? 

We used a lot of natural light. We weren’t allowed to change the light in Donut Time, but we had to light the interior of the cabs and some of the long walking shots at the end. During the day we were blessed with the LA sun. But the iPhone is wonderful at night. But low light is low light. We shot for about 22 days, so it was a pretty usual schedule.