Of the large handful of films I’ve seen at the Seattle International Film Festival this year, The Automatic Hate is the least likely that I’ll forget anytime soon. It’s an engrossing film that works combines elements of a family drama, a mystery thriller and love story. If I had to give an elevator pitch on the film, I’d say it’s like Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies meets Hitchcock meets “Romeo and Juliet.” It’s about two cousins (played by Adelaide Clemens and Joseph Cross) who learn of their existence while trying to deal both with the secret that has divided their family for a generation and their own attraction to each other.
For a small, independent film, the cast is quite impressive, including Richard Schiff and Ricky Jay as brothers who have been feuding for decades, but are both aware that if the reason for their fighting is revealed, it could further rupture the family.
The Automatic Hate is the second feature film from director Justin Lerner, after his 2010 feature debut Girlfriend, which also deals with the subject of taboo romances, that time pairing a single mother with a man with Down syndrome.
While filmmaker Justin Lerner and screenwriter Katharine O’Brien were in Seattle for its late-May screenings at SIFF, they sat down with the SunBreak to discuss the movie, which they hope to bring back to Seattle in the winter.
Let me first ask about the genesis of the film. Can you please talk a little bit about how it came to be?
Katharine O’Brien: We met when we were interning at the Weinstein Company. We would be reading scripts and talking about the films we liked and didn’t like. We found that we had a lot in common. We started talking about the stories and this topic came up because we were both talking about families and taboo relationships. That’s something that Justin has been interested in.
Justin Lerner: My first feature, Girlfriend, is about a taboo relationship with a man with Down syndrome and a young, single mother, so it’s been a topic that has been on my mind a lot in different scenarios. We started talking about a relationship story between two cousins but because we shared a similar sensibility in the movies that we liked, we thought we should do something like that together. Katharine is very good at mapping out structures of stories and we thought the best way to keep people wanting to see the next scene is to layer in a mystery, not just having two people meet and fall for each other. It’s two people meeting and figuring out that their dads are brothers and something happened in the process and when trying to discover what happened, they accidentally, almost, start developing an attraction to each other. It’s like two things in one, and then you throw in the family dynamic. It was a way to make three movies at once.
KO: And families turned out to be rife fodder for applying the mystery genre because there is so much history there; there are secrets and things buried.
JL: I took a Hitchcock class in college, and the movie Rebecca was always such an interesting movie to me because it’s about someone who isn’t alive in the movie, but drives the entire plot. Let’s just say that us deciding to name Rebecca “Rebecca” in this film is not an accident.
I think the different layers of this film (a love story, mystery, and family drama) drew my interest into the film, but I also love watching Ricky Jay in movies and don’t get to see him nearly enough. I remember being raptured with Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants many years ago. But the cast overall, with Richard Schiff, as well, is just fantastic, especially for a small, independent film. How did you get everyone on board?
JL: Katharine talked about this in an earlier interview, where you have an interesting cast. There are some actors that young people are excited about, like Deborah Ann Woll from “True Blood,” and Adelaide Clemens is on a successful Sundance Channel show called “Rectify.” Joseph Cross pops up in a lot of really cool movies that young people see. But older people are excited that we put Richard Schiff and Ricky Jay in the film: Toby Zeigler from “The West Wing” and the greatest living magician playing brothers. It was a very intentional thing about finding who we could get to play brothers and who could embody what Katharine and I worked so hard on the script on. They are very intellectual; one is all forethought and no action. The other lives in the woods with no rules: eat what you want to eat, punch who you want to punch, fuck who you want to fuck, and give into your base and carnal desires, but he is still very intellectual because they’re from the same family. Putting Ricky in a straw hat, he can still pull of the farmer thing, but when you hear him talk, he’s so intelligent. Part of getting him for the role is that he’s never played this. He was confused why we were offering him this.
KO: That’s why he was intrigued.
JL: While we were writing the character of Josh, he kept popping up in my head so I wrote him a letter telling him that I didn’t have a second choice for that role. We tracked down his manager and he said that Ricky is intrigued as to why you thought of him for a pot growing pig farmer from the woods. He only gets offered parts for gangsters and magicians. I spoke fast, neurotic, New York Jew with him and he realized that I am one of his own. I also basically didn’t take no for an answer. He’s just such a sweet guy.
KO: He’s also suited for the role because he’s a magician, so he’s used to keeping secrets and keeping things hidden. He’s a master at the art of deception. In the film, you can see his face and tell that his character is holding so much back.
JL: He’s so good at that. His face tells a story, but it’s also so enigmatic. We thought, “Who better to hide the secrets that this plot hinges on than the world’s greatest sleight-of-hand magician?”
Richard Schiff, we just offered him the part once we had Ricky on board, because we wanted the brothers to feel like they could be brothers. We’ve been big fans of Richard for years. He’s been a great actor in television, theater, and film. He’s a guy who is game for anything if it’s got a really cool cast and a really cool part. With guys like that, you really have to charm them and not take no for an answer.
I didn’t make the connection with Ricky being such a great magician that he’s uniquely suited for keeping the family secrets, but now that you mention it, I couldn’t see it happening any other way.
JL: We really lucked out with those two. One thing I hate in films is that when there’s a huge family and you know there’s no way that they’re related. So constructing the family was a very important part of this.
KO: I think a lot of people were attracted to the script because we didn’t want to make anybody a villain. We wanted to make everyone have their reasons for how they lived. We tried to put as much as we could into every character. I think that made not just individual, appealing characters, but they also saw that they had a lot to do with each other and could see how they could interact.
JL: Part of the point of the film was to have it so that if you looked through each of the main characters’ eyes, you could make an argument that they are doing the right thing. We wanted to make a morally gray judgment call for every character. I like to say that both sides are right, they just disagree with each other.
KO: There’s enough drama in that. Creating an antagonist is to create resistance, but if you look at the situation, there’s going to be friction there just by people having a different perspective.
JL: I think films have a longer if they let you wrestle with what it ends with. If it ends with a question rather than a statement, I think people will come out of the theater yelling at each other in the restrooms or thinking about it.
I spend way too much time following online, liberal identity politics, where I think a lot of nuanced arguments are lost in favor of a moral absolutism, so I when I watched the film, I didn’t realize how much I was craving thinking about something that I was morally ambiguous about.
KO: I’ve been noticing that in journalism and politics, too: everyone wants to take a stance on everything and to have a fight. I think it’s a bad trend. If you can tell stories and encourage people to think that way, I think it’s a responsibility…
JL: My question is if people want to see movies like that. Do people want to see movies that don’t have clear-cut conclusions or movies where the bad guy gets eviscerated and the good guy triumphs? I’ve never been interested in those movies, those movies where there is a one-dimensional hero and a one-dimensional villain. I think that’s passive movie-going. If you find a character that you’re rooting for and then they do something that is fucked up, that throws the burden back on to you and you have to process that and think about it. It’s nothing new and we’re not inventing that, we just tend to gravitate towards characters that are like that.
At film festivals, people really tend to gravitate towards that, but we hope that there’s a life for those films after that.
KO: The film isn’t enigmatic in the way that audiences are trying to figure out what happened, but it’s the morality that they’re trying to figure out for themselves.
Now that you’ve screened the film a few times, what has been the reaction from audiences?
JL: We’ve screened the film three times at one festival in Austin (SXSW).
KO: I was surprised the first time we had a friend in the audience and he was laughing through a lot of the uncomfortable parts. I didn’t understand because they were heavy parts. He said he’s so uncomfortable and shit’s about to hit the fan and he’s laughing because it’s all going to go down.
JL: It’s like watching an impending car crash.
And laughter is such an involuntary reaction.
JL: I know I keep bringing up Hitchcock, but I think that the suspense elements play really well in a big theater. It gets really silent and uncomfortable, for example, in the big dinner scene. Hitchcock said that a dinner scene isn’t interesting until there’s a ticking bomb underneath the table, and then every bite they eat becomes more intense. Adelaide Clemens and her portrayal of Alexis in that scene is our ticking time bomb.
Finally, I want to ask about what is going to happen to this film after SIFF.
JL: I’m glad you asked that. We just sold the movie to a distributor. It was announced at Cannes. They had seen the movie at SXSW and it was bought by a company called Film Movement. They’re planning on releasing it in the winter. Seattle is one of the cities where we’re hoping to bring it to when it’s released theatrically. It’s unclear right now what cities it will be released in but we do hope that Seattle is one of them. We really do love this city.
