Besides a special engagement of Life of Pi in 3D, SIFF this week is showing the documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters (at the SIFF Film Center on Seattle Center campus, through November 29), which illustrates a different kind of wizardry. If it’s not a documentary with that much heft (everyone in it is reasonably agreeable to the notion that Crewdson’s art is fine, indeed), it’s at least interesting to see someone working with the facts of the physical world, instead of pixels, primarily.
Brief Encounters mostly trails Crewdson around as he set designs his photographs–the process is similar to a movie shoot, beginning with location scouting scouting, the acquisition of permits (sometimes), casting locals, and art directing the set. But it’s all for perhaps 40 or 50 frames of the same shot. You get a little resumé of his childhood, his discovery of photography, that time he was in The Speedies, and, without much context, you also get the thoughts of authors Russell Banks and Rick Moody.
With its unquestioning gaze, the documentary comes to feel like a promotional video for Crewdson’s collection “Beneath the Roses.” Only one person dares to quibble with his visions: the shopkeeper in a small town who wants to shovel his snowy walk so no customers slip and fall. Art demands otherwise. Much time is spent in small towns, chronicling not the lives of the inhabitants so much as their evocation of Crewdson’s inner disquiet, calmed by having given the transient and unordered a frame.
A little goes a long way, when everything is a psychodrama. At its best, Crewdson’s photography can be a masterful still nature sleight-of-hand, a subversion of the tendency to privilege naturalism as real, or a surrealist glimpse of a working-poor scene. In more mundane moments, it’s an ad for Six Feet Under.
Opening November 30 at SIFF Uptown is the Irish horror film Citadel, starring Welsh actor Aneurin Barnard as a young man terrorized by agoraphobia and packs of feral children in hoodies who lurch around a tenement block like pint-sized zombies. (I guess not everyone thinks Shameless is funny.)
Writer-director Ciarán Foy is drawing upon his own experience with agoraphobia, after being randomly attacked, and these scenes–conveying a heart-pounding disorientation–are gripping. But the movie can’t decide if it’s a thriller, a social parable, or a bloody slash-fest. It’s also hampered by the fact that Barnard looks very much like a strung-out Frodo with bedhead, and by James Cosmo’s irascible, profane priest feeling drawn from a number of graphic novels. Still, if you have a needle or hoodie phobia, this is the horror film for you.
Advance DVD screeners of The Woman went out in barf bags. You can't knock that for showmanship.
If you’re looking for a well-made, well-acted exploitation-horror movie engineered by someone absolutely intent on repulsing and unnerving you, get thee to the AMCs at Pacific Place and Southcenter this weekend to see The Woman, cult director Lucky McKee’s newest feature. Whether that statement’s a recommendation or condemnation rests squarely in the eyes of the beholder; such is the nature of the strange and frequently repugnant beast to which McKee’s given birth.
The Woman follows the saga of Chris Cleek (Sean Bridgers), a lawyer who kidnaps a wild-eyed feral woman (Pollyanna MacIntosh) wandering the woods around his home. Cleek imprisons the woman in his cellar, ostensibly to program/civilize her, and he enlists his family to help. Soon things take a really deranged turn, thanks in large part to the base impulses that surface in some of the woman’s captors.
McKee’s movie has touched nerves, and then some, in the last four months. The Woman‘s first Sundance screening reputedly inspired vomiting and fainting spells from audience members, and one Sundance filmgoer vaulted into an on-camera screed against the movie that’s damn near gone viral. Such controversy ain’t new, of course (people fainted–and nurses were stationed–in theaters during the 1931 Frankenstein‘s original release, folks). But the fetid aroma of forbidden cinematic fruit hasn’t been this overpowering in a good few years.
So is the movie at the center of this torrent of hubbub any good? Well, yes and no.
Technically and visually, The Woman‘s made at a level way beyond your average grotty grindhouse feature. McKee actually takes care to build suspense and atmosphere at first, unfolding the movie’s first third at a deliberate pace that gradually adds layers of uneasiness while Cleek’s ugly side surfaces. The director also elicits a couple of genuinely great performances from Angela Bettis as Cleek’s worn-down and abused wife; and from Bridgers, whose psychotic Ward-Cleaver earnestness suggests Will Ferrell gone seriously depraved. As sick as The Woman sometimes gets, McKee’s no misogynist: he’s much more concerned with exposing the sickness living in his male characters than he is with extracting titillation from the suffering of his female subjects.
That said, McKee sells his characters short with a screenplay that sketches out their motivations and backgrounds far too vaguely. The director hurtles unpleasant things at the camera with childish impulsiveness, and the movie’s absurd final act loses its shit like a tourist in Mexico battling Montezuma’s Revenge. Lucky McKee’s new movie ain’t dull for a split-second, but when a genre flick presents these kinds of provocative ideas without thinking them through to the end, it can’t help but feel like a missed opportunity; a movie that could’ve been as truly great as it is unsettling.
The Woman also plays The Grand Illusion November 25.
Even horror and exploitation movies–once immune to the petty shifts in economic and social climes–are taking it in the metaphoric shorts nowadays. I blame a combination of the crummy economy, and a paucity of product worth a damn.
Happily, three local theaters are offering prime cuts of bizarre cinema this weekend, and if you’re in the mood for a strange cinematic cocktail during these summer days, seek the enclosed recommendations out.
One of these theaters, amazingly enough, is AMC’s Pacific Place Cinema in the heart of downtown Seattle. But sure enough, amidst the salvo of tentpole superhero epics and chick flicks inhabiting said multiplex is Phase 7, an odd–and very entertaining–hybrid of disease-fear horror and jet-black humor. It screens at midnight tonight, 10 p.m. on Wednesday July 20, and once more at midnight next Friday, July 22nd.
Daniel Hendler and Jazmin Stuart play Coco and Pipi, a young married couple living in a new apartment with a typically goofy gaggle of neighbors. Early on, a pandemic–earmarked by paranoia, violent behavior, and icky mucous-laden death–throws all of Buenos Aires into abject chaos. The couple’s building winds up in government quarantine, and Coco finds himself reluctantly aligning with his complex’s most ostensibly paranoid survivalist neighbor Horacio (Yayo Guridi) as any semblance of social order flushes down the crapper.
Entertainment upstarts The Collective and top horror-movie website Bloody-Disgusting.com are distributing Phase 7 to AMC theaters around the country for a limited run, and it’s definitely too unusual for mainstream palates. It straddles a line that would likely doom it in a larger release: The movie’s subtitled, too gruesome for the Kate-Hudson-meet-cute set, yet too subtle and slow-burning for the teenage ADHD audiences targeted by most horror filmmakers. But it’s a funny and suspenseful shaggy dog of a view.
Promotional materials compare it to Shaun of the Dead and the Spanish cult horror flick, [rec]; both valid reference points. Hendler’s layabout hero Coco is a Latin kin to Simon Pegg’s slacker zombie-killer, and Phase 7 somehow steers [rec]’s realm of disease fear into a really warped comedy of manners. There’s a great comedic chemistry between Guridi’s stolid machismo and Hendler’s lazy charm, and Pan’s Labyrinth character actor Federico Luppi pops up, hilariously, as the building’s most charming and eccentric old duffer. I don’t know how it’ll play with a more general audience, but in its own offhand way Phase 7 offers belly laughs as deep as Shaun of the Dead if you’re in the right (wrong?) frame of mind.
Hobo with a Shotgun, by contrast, serves up a concept so high-concept (title tells all, folks) that it’d take a frontal lobotomy not to get it. The unimpeachably awesome Rutger Hauer assays the title role; playing an embittered and nameless homeless gent who rids the streets of pedophiles, hoodlums, and other miscellaneous scumbags. Yours Truly hasn’t yet seen this open love letter to that venerated exploitation sub-genre, the Death Wish-style revenge flick. But the trailer (and reviews so far) promise the kind of sublime balance between yocks and heartfelt homage that made Black Dynamite a SIFF 2009 Golden Space Needle winner. Hobo with a Shotgun begins a run at everyone’s favorite food-and-film stop, the Central Cinema, tonight, July 15.
If you want to see a satisfying example of vintage exploitation, though, get thee to the Grand Illusion this weekend and/or next for their late show. The U-District theater is screening Tourist Trap, a 1979 horror flick that stands as one of that decade’s overlooked gems.
Former western hero Chuck Connors plays a kindly old guy who runs a dilapidated wax museum off the beaten path. A group of reckless teenagers stumbles into this odd place; and much psychokinetic mayhem ensues. Tourist Trap overcomes its formulaic pedigree (think Carrie uneasily meeting The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) with disorienting and taut direction by David Schmoeller, a patina of gritty menace steeped in its decade of origin, and some of the most unsettling mannequins you’ll ever see committed to film.
It scared the willies outta me as a wee lad back in the day, and the movie’s small but fervent cult includes none other than Stephen King (who loudly sings the film’s praises in his book, Danse Macabre). If that’s not the most resounding of endorsements, you’ve stumbled into the wrong SunBreak B-movie evangelist’s post by mistake, Bucky.
Most Likely to Direct a Surreal Meta-High-School Movie: Director Joseph Kahn. Photo/collage by Tony Kay.
Director Joseph Kahn has been working in music video for twenty years, directing big-time efforts like U2’s “Elevation” clip and Britney Spears’ “Toxic,” among others. But he’s managed to combine that experience with his love of 1980s and ’90s pop cinema to create one of SIFF 2011’s left-field surprises, Detention.
Kahn’s sophomore feature enjoyed the last of its enthusiastically-received SIFF screenings on Sunday June 5. The movie follows Riley (Shanley Caswell), a wisecracking Square Peg of a high school girl who deals with her infatuation for slacker dreamboat Clapton (The Kids are Alright’s Josh Hutcherson), even as a masked killer runs around making mincemeat of her classmates.
Very quickly, the movie branches off into a dozen different directions, augmenting a very sharp bird’s-eye view of the little nightmares that comprise adolescence with sardonic humor, a time-travelling stuffed bear, aliens, slasher cliches, and so many meta-movie references that you’ll need to see it a second (and third, and fourth…) time to absorb all of ‘em.
But it’s more than just pastiche. All of those disparate threads intersect by the movie’s end, and Kahn delivers the entire sensory-overloaded package with pinpoint accuracy. By backing up its relentless MTV-stoked pace with a distinctive sensibility (and a heart), Detention just might signal a sea change in music video-influenced moviemaking. As The SunBreak’s own Josh Bis said, “I left feeling won over by something that I probably should have hated,” and I too came out of the screening seriously, mightily impressed.
Not surprisingly, Kahn talks like he films: fast and precise, but with so many interesting tangents and layers that it’s a fun challenge to follow along.
You were saying at last night’s Q&A that Detention was made outside of a major studio’s involvement…
Yeah. Detention is pretty much like me writing a check…I found a few people that invested in it, but it was a weird financing deal to where I had to pay them back; so it wasn’t really like investment as much as it was loans. There was no studio involved; no studio executives. There’s not even a formal producer [on the film]. I mean, I had my music video producers on, but there wasn’t anyone on who’d made movies before, or had a [film production] company or anything like that…. I think it’s about as indie as it could possibly be.
The movie looks incredibly polished. It speaks to your background in commercials and videos. There are a lot of filmmakers who’ve been working in the last twenty years in music videos and commercials, but in a lot of cases they’ll downplay or dismiss that background. You embrace that experience. That’s a relatively new notion.
What I’ve seen in the last twenty years, in terms of the whole transition of music video and commercial directors is, when they finally go into the feature-film world, they always want to prove that they’re “serious filmmakers.” Every fucking single one of them toned down the style, and stopped doing what they do in terms of music videos. They almost want to emulate filmmakers, which I think is really strange…. I think there’s wonderful work being done in videos and advertising; groundbreaking stuff in terms of montage theory and structure, and how audiences process information. You can’t translate it one-to-one, but there’s a lot of stuff you can take that can push the art form a bit more.
To me, Detention really feels like maybe the most seamless absorption of those influences into a standard motion-picture format. In its own crazy-quilt cartoon way, it feels like it’s expanding the art form with those elements; which is almost a first to me.
Wow [laughs]: That’s a great perspective.
But that feeds off of you embracing this background that you’ve had in commercials and music video. That said, could you talk to me about some of the cinematic influences on Detention?
[In] a lot of what’s done in cinema right now, especially mainstream filmmaking, commercials specifically have affected movie-making to the worst. They’ve pulled in all these commercial directors, but what they really wanted was this “Coverage Concept” of filmmaking, where you shoot medium/close-up/wide, shoot a ton of angles, you shoot with multiple-cameras. It’s sort of like the Jerry Bruckheimer style of shooting something. It looks slick, and it’s lit slick, because you can light things from certain sorts of angles and stuff with your cameras. But ultimately, it’s shot for coverage, and then you piece it together in the edit. Producers and studio executives love this style.
That’s actually not what I do, personally, in music videos. It’s harder to do in commercials, because it’s all sort of boarded out by the agency, but when I personally do my music videos, I always try to do a construction that is often blocking-intensive; where people move inside the camera space, and there’s a mise-en-scene to the thing and you can’t really edit around it.
Going to your question, a lot of that is influenced [by] the filmmakers that I loved that were doing pop movies in the eighties…specifically Steven Spielberg; the way he blocks his camera and the actors. Whenever you see a Spielberg film, he always does these long takes–I call them “mise-ettes,” light units of mise-en-scene. If you look at an average film, it’s always, like, one thing happens visually: Someone turns his head, or a person walks up to something. It’s one unit of screen space happening. And Spielberg ties it together; you could have fourteen mise-ettes happening, where one person walks in and suddenly the camera pans; another person walks in–rack focus to his hand, rack focus to someone’s head. It’s like these long layers and planes and things like that.
So Detention, if you look at its main influences, is like this weird fusion of hyper-editing here and there; also constructed with these intricate mise-ettes. That’s heavily influenced off Spielberg, and some Scorsese theories of smash cuts and things like that.
Although Detention has a pretty wicked, jet-black sense of humor, there’s actually a certain amount of sweetness to it, especially at the end. Could you speak a little about that?
Well, even though I have a pretty jaded sense of humor, I’m not a jaded person. I have a lot of hope for humanity. Also, as I get older, I’m not one of those people that looks at the younger generation and goes, “They’re all screwed up, and nothing’s ever gonna happen.” […] What’s really interesting is that I feel like, having done music videos and pop videos for the last twenty years, I’ve seen how kids today are so much more integrated than ever before; the idea that white kids love rap music, and black kids love rock music, and there’s fusion things…. It’s just such an interesting, integrated perspective of the world. I see nothing but positivity.
There are always gonna be missteps and things like that. But we elected a black president. That’s an incredible statement. So from my standpoint, humanity’s only getting better and better. I feel like maybe, in the 21st century, we are really seeing the emergence of this really sweet new culture where everybody is really, really getting along; and I like it. So I can’t make a high school movie and lie and say, “Everyone’s fucked up.” I don’t see it that way. I truly like the kids today.
It’s interesting that you talk about that duality. In Detention, you see a lot of the pains of high school and the pains of not fitting in that we all felt. But there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
There’s no question in my mind that everyone shares the pain of growing up. And I felt it was really important to put a universal message out there that, no matter how hard it is, it’s just high school. Not that your problems aren’t big, but…if you notice in the movie, it’s like every problem that happens to everybody is, like, the worst problem ever. So you have titles [in the movie] like “The Terrible Ultimatum of Clapton Davis,” “The Lonely Ballad of Billy Nolan.” In high school, everything is just so magnified, ’cause you’re experiencing all these things for the first time. And that’s really where it comes in for me. It’s like, can these kids really experience all these things, and how the hell do you survive that when the emotions are so powerful?
The visual language of all the horror scenes is quite effective. Are you a horror movie fan?
Yeah, especially from the eighties. One of the ways that I learned how to do filmmaking was reading Fangoria magazine…. When you saw all the blood and guts and effects [in the magazine], they would break it down and show you behind-the-scenes. You’d see there was a logical construction to all this stuff, how the illusion was made. And if you think about horror movies for a filmmaker, on a certain level, if you study [the genre], it’s a very clean way of saying, “How do I achieve a [goal]?” which is to scare somebody, or to make them think that someone died…. You reverse-engineer that stuff, and you start becoming a filmmaker, because you realize that one shot must lead to the next. You have master shots, you have close-ups; how do you arrange that stuff? Then that opens doors to very specific filmmakers like Hitchcock….
So as far as Detention goes, what’s the exhibition trajectory like? Is this your first film festival screening?
This is my second one; I had one in Austin [at South by Southwest]. The weird thing is, every time I screen the movie, it seems to get stronger and stronger reactions. I don’t know if it’s like a wine that’s aging–I haven’t done anything new to it since Austin–but this [Seattle screening] is one of the strongest screenings that I’ve ever seen. I can’t figure it out, except that maybe it’s because people in the Pacific Northwest are just so damned smart [laughs]. They got every reference. I’ve never seen anything like it.
It’s a high-school movie, so it’s going to skew towards that demographic. But I think it’s distinctive enough, and smart enough, and there’s enough going on, to where you don’t have to be a kid to enjoy it.
Yeah, it was a tricky balance, too, since we have this big time-travel thing and all these references to the ’90s…. The reality is, if you’re a nineteen-year-old kid, a lot of those ’90s references may not really register. Then if you’re older, a lot of the new lingo that the kids know may not really register, either. So it was a weird balance of trying to hit the older and younger target [simultaneously]. Maybe the sweet spot might be someone around 25 that doesn’t hate people who are 18; and that’s a tough one [laughs]!
The retro poster for The Whisperer in Darkness. Courtesy HPLHS
The name of H.P. Lovecraft looms large in horror literature, but the road to adapting the early-twentieth-century author’s weld of gothic horror and science fiction to the screen is littered with crummy movies.
Ironic, then, that a ragtag troupe of independent California filmmakers have succeeded in capturing Lovecraft’s distinctive brand of all-encompassing cosmic terror–where so many others have failed–on a dime, and shot on video, no less.
Director/co-writer Sean Branney, co-writer/actor Andrew Leman, and cinematographer/editor Dave Robertson all hit SIFF in support of their first full-length feature, The Whisperer in Darkness.
The grandly old-school horror flick follows the ill-fated adventures of Miskatonic University professor Albert Wilmarth (Matt Foyer) as he journeys to the remote Vermont farmlands to investigate rumors of strange beings roaming the countryside. Wilmarth soon discovers that those strange beings, a mythological race of aliens known as the Mi-Go, may be much more than fabrications of folklore.
Branney and company have stayed true to the vision of their revered source material on two fronts. One, they’ve crafted an impressive period piece, evocative of something that could’ve readily been playing in theaters in the early 1930s (when Lovecraft was still alive); and two, they’ve tapped into the mounting dread and creepy ambiance endemic in the author’s best work with their interpretation of Whisperer. It’s a deliciously atmospheric movie, and a rich contrast to the more graphic horror features that have populated SIFF 2011’s Midnight Adrenaline series.
Talking to these three horror-nerd amigos proves to be a kick. This is their second time working on a filmed Lovecraft adaptation together (the first, the excellent silent version of The Call of Cthulhu, can be seen on Hulu), and they’ve got the easy camaraderie of brothers-in-arms.
They’re great characters, too: Branney serving as the ostensible leading man in our conversation with his rich baritone; Leman, with his owlish features and wide eyes, the endearingly-dotty mad scientist; and the soft-spoken Robertson, the stoutly-built nuts-and-bolts guy you want on your side in an onscreen brawl.
Plus, they know their stuff: When I bring up the location of one of Whisperer‘s cave exteriors (California’s historic Bronson Caves, the original Batcave and a popular site for horror and sci-fi film sets over the decades), they light up like Christmas trees. We reach, Whisperer in Darkness creators: We reach.
Why did you choose to adapt Lovecraft’s Whisperer in Darkness as your first full-blown feature?
Sean Branney: When we made our last film, The Call of Cthulhu, it was a bigger success than any of us ever really anticipated, and that was a terrific surprise. Not long after we released it around the world, we realized we wanted to make another film, and…after making a silent film, we were eager to make a film with sync sound. We made a very long short–or a very short feature, depending on how you want to make that determination–[and] we wanted to do something with sound; a feature film. So with those…as sort of the driving decisions in terms of the form, we started thinking through other Lovecraft stories; and very early on in the process, settled on The Whisperer in Darkness.
Andrew Leman: It’s long been one of our favorite stories. The Mi-Go are…very fascinating villain[s]. Sound is an integral part of that story–the sound of the wax cylinder, the sound that they [the Mi-Go] make–so it seemed like a natural fit. And it’s also a story that has not been previously made into a movie, so we felt we had a clear shot at bringing our own ideas to it without being encumbered by previous adaptations.
Welcome to our nightmare: Dave Robertson, Andrew Leman, and Sean Branney (left to right)
Call of Cthulhu and Whisperer in Darkness were both shot on video…one thing that really impressed me about both movies is that they don’t look shot on video. You’ve done a very good job of making them look of-the-time. How was that accomplished, technically?
Dave Robertson: It’s less complicated than you think. It really starts in the camera itself. It’s a lighting process, really. Modern movies don’t really light that way, anymore: [We used] very direct-source lighting. And that’s the way both movies were lit, really…. It’s very much the way I like to light, anyway, so it really suited me.
Call of Cthulhu was a bit different from Whisperer. Call of Cthulhu did have some filter processing that made it look like a distressed film. Whisperer didn’t, as much. Whisperer was more native, in-camera. We didn’t do much to change the image imposed, other than turn it black-and-white. It was actually shot in color.
AL: We also shot Call of Cthulhu on standard definition, and we shot Whisperer in high-definition video. We sort of invented the Mythoscope process. We originally invented it as kind of a funny name; and then it actually turned into a very serious technique for taking standard definition video, which Call of Cthulhu was shot in, and trying to make it seem as much like old film as we could. Mythoscope is sort of the whole package of how we shoot video in color and try to make it look like an old black-and-white film.
There’s a very careful crafting of atmosphere in both of these movies. What are some of the other challenges involved in mounting a period piece on peanuts? And what about elements or things you’ve had to resist in terms of plot or structure, to maintain that period atmosphere?
SB: How to make a period picture on a low budget is really, first and foremost, the producer’s challenge. Andrew and I did the screenplay together, and in writing it, we told the story we wanted to tell. Then we had to take off our screenwriter hats and put on our producers’ hats and go, “Arrrg! How are we going to do this?”
DR: I’m glad you did that [laughs]…
SB: Well, David perhaps screamed louder than the rest of us. And one of the things was: We had to find period vehicles, so we needed a plane, we needed a train, we needed a car, we needed a 1930s New England university…and it became about trying to invest the time into figuring out the solution. Where are we going to find the types of locations that we need so we can pull this off, and do it within the budget that we have? And when you have limited means, it forces you to be creative. It forces you to find solutions where, if we had a five-million-dollar budget, we could just go [claps hands] “Buy one! Rent one!” And when you can’t do that, it forces you to go, “Okay, let’s think through a way that we can achieve what it is we’re going for.”
DR: That’s really true, and I think the way we’ve done it is pretty counterintuitive, actually. Most people [who] are doing low-budget movies would write what they know they can do. These guys consistently write what we know we can’t do. But what’s interesting about that is that we don’t ever approach it like we can’t do it. We say, “What is the solution? How are we gonna get it done?”
AL: I would say, Sean and I have a background as role-playing gamers, and from the time we were in high school, we were writing grandiose scenarios far beyond our abilities as high-school or college students to fabricate. And yet, somehow we managed to figure out ways to fabricate them. So when we approach a screenplay, it’s kind of with the same spirit: I know what I want to do, I’ll figure out how I’m gonna do it later. I also would say that H.P. Lovecraft himself deserves some of the credit because he has fans in the film community. Dave Snyder, who did the special make-up effects for the movie, is such a Lovecraft fan. He really wanted to work on this movie because he loves the material. So we have been lucky to find team members who want to work on this stuff, because they love Lovecraft. It’s not anything to do with us, it’s because Lovecraft himself is a beloved character. And people want to work with Lovecraft [material].
DR: That’s a huge point, because there are so many people who love Lovecraft, and the fan base is so devoted. We’ve gotten so many talented people who’ve helped us on the film that we could’ve never have afforded if we paid them in full–or in some cases, at all [laughs]!
A lot of much more established filmmakers have been royally tripped up when adapting Lovecraft to the screen. There’s a profound lure to making Lovecraft films, but not a lot of people really get it right…what, if anything, have you learned from the missteps of your forebears?
SB: When we look at the source material, [H.P. Lovecraft is] a writer steeped in atmosphere and tone. I think that’s one of the things I personally enjoy about reading his stories. It’s this pervasive sense of creepiness and unease that it brings to you. And just like Poe’s writing, the style is evocative of a certain world…. For me, there are other adaptations that may deal with a Lovecraftian concept, or sometimes only a Lovecraftian title [laughs] where, really, they chuck the Lovecraft out the window; or chuck out a lot of parts of it, and just deal with with plot elements or something like that. Because the atmosphere and tone is part of what I enjoy about the writing, that’s something I actively want to work to keep alive in our adaptations. So it feels like a Lovecraft movie. Yeah, it may be a little verbose; it may be a little wordy. But that’s who he is, and that’s part of what’s seductive about his writing. We try to walk a fine line to not bore the audience, to not make it slow. Both movies very slowly build at kind of a deliberate pace, but then they get going faster and faster. Then suddenly you find yourself in an action movie, but it still feels Lovecraftian.
DR: I think Sean covered it. I cut the movie as well, and it moves at a very deliberate pace: It’s [about] not being afraid to have some scenes that run seven or eight minutes of dialogue. That’s pretty unconventional for modern movies. But in older films, it’s not. They’re…I don’t want to say theatrical, but…they’re a little stagier, the older films. And we really blocked these that way; to have the actors moving the camera, rather than the other way around. In modern films, the camera motivates all the action.
So what’s it been like taking the movie around the world?
SB: That’s been one of the neat things about [doing] this. We don’t have any movie stars: Lovecraft really is our movie star. It’s his name, not Brad Pitt’s, that opens a lot of doors for us. Lovecraft is a very international writer. Andrew and I run the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, and we do a lot of our business overseas; people geting Lovecraft T-shirts and Call of Cthulhu mugs and things like that. We’re shipping all over the world. We had our world premiere in Athens, Greece. It was a packed cinema full of Greek Lovecraft fans! They knew the stories; read them all. They were really excited to see this work. In Amsterdam, it was the same thing. The material has a following, and fortunately the success of Call of Cthulhu has also helped paved the way for us. People go, “Oh, you’re the Call of Cthulhu guys; can’t wait to see what you’re going to do with another Lovecraft story.” It’s been really a lot of fun to share a new picture with audiences and get as enthusiastic a reception as we had here in Seattle at the midnight screening last night.
At the Northwest Film Forum for two more showings (tonight and tomorrow at 5 p.m.) thanks to an extended run, Rubber is the killer tire movie you’ve heard so much about. The conceit is simple: For no reason, a car tire gains awareness, self-mobility, and psychokinetic powers, and then proceeds to stalk and kill everything in its path. But writer-director Quentin Dupieux (aka DJ Mr. Oizo) takes it one step further by turning his horror flick into a commentary on film itself.
Out in the desert, there’s a dozen looky-loos watching the tire through binoculars, complaining that the plot is moving too slowly, cheering on the tire’s kills, shushing other viewers’ incessant comments. And the action going on–cops chasing the tire as it looks for new victims–exists for these voyeurs’ benefit. It’s a movie audience within the movie, making what would otherwise be a slasher joke into an exercise in meta.
In other words, it’s French.
While it often errs on the side of being too cute by half, Rubber certainly has its sly moments, most of which comes from the “acting” of Robert the tire. (In the sequel, he will assuredly be played by James Franco.) Dupieux’s got a natural eye and a talent for perspective, and of course he scores the film well. As the filmmaker makes clear by the end of the tire’s run, this is just the beginning–he’s got Hollywood in his sights.
