Director: Linking violence, loss

Tiger (Callum Turner), Pat (Anton Yelchin) and Sam (Alia Shawkat) make up three-quarters of the Ain’t Rights, a punk band that encounters trouble a long way from home in Jeremy Saulnier’s plausible horror film Green Room.
Tiger (Callum Turner), Pat (Anton Yelchin) and Sam (Alia Shawkat) make up three-quarters of the Ain’t Rights, a punk band that encounters trouble a long way from home in Jeremy Saulnier’s plausible horror film Green Room.

The night before I interview writer/director Jeremy Saulnier, I have a nightmare where I'm being pursued by a large man wielding a long blade.

I manage to wrestle it away from him and in a panic, make short, glancing cuts on his arm and neck to ward him off, only to realize to my horror he's going to keep coming after me unless I kill him. Earlier, I had watched Saulnier's excellent new gritty action film, Green Room, for the second time, having been lucky enough to catch it in Toronto last year. The film, about a hard-luck punk band taking a gig at a joint outside Portland, Ore., that turns out to be a white supremacy stronghold, features similarly brutal violence with deeply nihilistic overtones. However, the director of the previously heralded Blue Ruin also fills the frame with clever and realistic storytelling, memorable characters and the inventive use of a roll of duct tape and a sharpie. When I mentioned my nightmare to Saulnier, a slight, absolutely normal looking chap who poured his own punk-band-on-the-road experiences in to the film, he looked genuinely apologetic and said, "Oh, dear. I'm sorry about that."

Q. Let's talk about the violence in your films. Even though there's a lot of it, it never seems gratuitous. It's clear you don't want the audience to exactly enjoy the experience.

A. Yeah, otherwise what's the point? I think the worst thing is when you have on-screen violence and it elicits a shrug. The thing is, I love my characters and I try to humanize everybody and make them relatable to the audience, not only because that's our inroad into the narrative but because it increases the amount of peril that you feel as an audience member. The violence itself just boils down to an intuition about how I think it should be treated on screen that has maximum impact emotionally. It's the coupling of what we see on screen as far as the graphic violence goes and feeling an actual loss and a devastation that's associated with it. I don't want it to go down too easy. I think that's irresponsible. If it goes down really hard and makes people gasp and it's devastating, it's more responsible than if it's nothing but high fives.

Q. You have a fascinating storytelling technique that I really noticed on the second time through. You invoke a kind of visual mystery where we're given one element that seems incongruent, and then you show it in the context of the rest of your story. The opening scene, when the band is waking up in their van in the early morning and we see cornstalks pressed up against the window, only to reveal in an overhead shot that the driver fell asleep and the van swerved into a cornfield. That sort of thing. You set up a series of small mysteries that are revealed in later scenes.

A. When you can tell a story visually, that's my priority. [I want] to let the audience connect the dots and then feel like they're participating in the film. When people have certain questions they'll say, "You know, Jeremy, I felt like maybe I wanted a little more out of this, and I didn't quite understand why this happened or what this person was thinking," and I ask them, "Well, what do you think?" Ninety-nine percent of the time they're 100 percent right. There's certainly things, especially the first viewing, that people might miss but it's my great pleasure to not overexplain and to not give people a blow by blow. To tell a story visually in a very linear way, not with a gimmicky setup payoff but with real fulfilling reveals that keep the audience engaged, that's what I really gravitate toward.

Q. You're right, there's a hugely immersive quality to watching a film built like this. It asks you to connect things for yourself, which makes the audience more involved in the storytelling process. It's also harder to snap out of the spell of the film, which is dangerous, when the films are also high-stakes violent.

A. Audiences are shocked sometimes when they're treated like they can bring something to the table. When they perceive trust in them and not falsely injected character arcs or exposition, I think they feel like this is something special for them. It makes everyone feel smarter because they are that smart. Films are often made for the lowest common denominator and, "Oh, if anyone in the focus group doesn't get exactly what it is, we have to make sure we go back and reshoot some dialogue or add some ADR [automated dialogue replacement] to spell it out," and that's not fun.

Q. You mentioned last night at the Q&A, you were talking about how if you had a higher budget you were afraid you were going to have to, in your word, "normalize the script." In other words, Hollywood-ize it, and give what's expected, as opposed to the thing that's actually more realistic and interesting.

A. I really am annoyed by that, when filmmakers or studios tip the audience off. As far as avoiding notes and normalizing, there's so much filmmaking put through the system that is fear-based because they're scared people won't get it. They're scared people will walk out. They're scared people won't relate to a character unless they have a robust backstory that's highly quote, unquote relatable, tested by three different focus groups in two different markets. It becomes goofy. That fear-driven decision making is dangerous, because when you go soft, you turn off the audience, I think.

Q. With that in mind, it was really interesting that the film has no apparent hierarchy as to who lives and who dies. It's just kind of a free-for-all, I guess. You were talking about writing the script and hating to have to kill off characters. Did you know when you began the scriptwriting process who was going to live?

A. Yeah, I knew going in who was likely going to survive, but I didn't seal that deal. When people were killed it was a shock to me, so I didn't have a death order at all. I just kind of let it happen. It was tough. The hard part was when we actually cast the roles and I saw how great these actors were at portraying them, and they made them so human and so relatable. I had to stick with it, and that's an important discipline, to not ever give in to my own instincts, which would be to soften the blow.

Q. Not to give anything from the ending away, but you offer a very intriguing kind of denouement during the morning after. It's like a weird return to normalcy after a night of utter carnage.

A. I don't like to do formulaic, structured plot endings but I really do like to have fulfilling arcs visually and themes, so there are these little vignettes that we revisit. I like to have these visual expressions of what's happening, not like a sitcom wrap-up but just to tag up and revisit and get that sort of narrative satisfaction. There's an irreverent ending. You don't get traditional satisfaction out of it, but it brings it all full circle visually. That's where the craft and the structure is in this film: Like you're saying, it's these visual setup and payoff elements, themes. I gravitate toward natural curiosity as an audience member, and a storyteller. Let's see what this world is now. What's changed since we first met? How has this night of mayhem affected things? For some it's more than others.

Q. For all I know, you'd love to make a $200 million film next, but is this the sort of level you'd like to stay with, in terms of making films that offer you a lot of control? The danger of going big is that loss of control, which would really be a shame for your work.

A. I look at Steven Soderbergh, who actually can work within the Hollywood system from time to time: Erin Brockovich is a fantastic studio film. The way he can navigate back and forth between bigger scale Hollywood productions and microbudget self-shot DIY style movies, that's a great new thing to have. He helped define new DGA [Directors Guild of America] contracts, because he demanded flexibility, and knowing that there are those options is a great comfort. I don't really have a budget in mind that I want to stay in, but as long as the story is supported by the budget and not when the numbers and the release dates come first. That's the danger zone. As long as I can make films that I can actually helm, I think I'll do any kind of budget. Whether it be $20 million, $100 million, or another half-million dollar movie, I'd be happy to do it.

MovieStyle on 04/29/2016

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