Movies
[Sundance ’12]: ‘V/H/S’ Filmmaker Joe Swanberg Talks ‘Silver Bullets’, ‘You’re Next’, And His New Distribution Model
Joe Swanberg has been a busy guy. Immensely busy. Starting with 2005’s Kissing On The Mouth he’s directed over a dozen films including Hannah Takes The Stairs, Nights And Weekends and last year’s werewolf pic Silver Bullets. He’s also found time to act in films such as A Horrible Way To Die and You’re Next (a movie he’s absolutely hilarious in).
As one of the directors (and actors) of V/H/S – Swanberg is once again stretching his horror wings. I spoke to him recently about his dalliances in the genre, his recent acting roles, and his ideal career trajectory.
In the film, “When a group of misfits is hired by an unknown third party to burglarize a desolate house and acquire a rare VHS tape, they discover more found footage than they bargained for.”
Hit the jump to check out the interview!How did Silver Bullets come about?
“I wanted to use werewolves as a way to talk about actors, basically. So for me it was like, with the werewolf mythology the full moon rises and people turn into werewolves and wreak all this havoc. Then they wake up the next morning not knowing what really happened. I thought it was a nice way to talk about actors who are given a part in a movie where they’re allowed to transform into somebody else and do allowed all these things they wouldn’t normally do. Then when the movie ends they’re just people again with real relationships and real issues. And the choices they’ve made in the film I don’t think are completely separate from the people they have to live with in real life. I thought it would be fun to use werewolves in that way.”
You also act in and direct a segment of V/H/S. It seems like you’re making more and more forays into horror.
“My first involvement was acting in Ti’s segment. I’m friends with Adam and Simon and Roxanne and sort of knew that the movie was being made and Ti asked me to act in his segment. I’ve really been trying to do projects that are outside of the typical “mumblecore” type stuff. So I very loosely threw my hat in the ring with Roxanne and told them if they were interested in a director who wasn’t a horror director doing one of the segments then I’d be up for it. Then through Simon’s persuasion and my involvement with You’re Next it finally came back around that they were willing to take a chance on me.”
Contributing to a found footage horror anthology, what was your ultimate goal?
“I didn’t want to do something that was subverting genre, I wanted to actively try and make something fun and scary.”
And you worked with someone else’s material.
“Simon [Barrett] wrote the script. It was actually the first time I had worked with somebody else’s material. I wasn’t involved in the creation of the script, but it instantly appealed to me. I was reading the script for the first time completely blind, sort of following the twists and turns the way an audience would.”
With Ti West’s segment, did you shoot in continuity?
“For the most part I think we did. As an actor its really helpful, you can know what’s going on at all times without having to gauge your performance on what you think might happen tomorrow. Ti was really adamant that we go through all the same things the characters go through and shoot in the same locations and all that. So we flew to Los Angeles and then we drove two days out to the Grand Canyon, shot a few days there and drove two days back.”
After seeing You’re Next in front of a crowd, that might be a breakout performance for you. Is that something you’ve considered or prepared for?
“Yeah. I’ve always really liked acting. I never thought about it in film school, but ever since I’ve been acting in my own stuff I’ve really liked it. And Adam [Wingard] is the director who has taken this chance on me and given me some of the bigger, meatier roles. So I’m hopeful that it’s something I can keep doing.”
You’re starting a new method of distribution for your films. A subscriber based model. Can you talk a bit about that? On your website it says it’s for your more personal films. Are some films earmarked for the subscription model while others will go the more traditional route?
“Yes. If the distribution model works and it’s something I continue to do year after year I think it’s something that I’ll have to decide which films fit in one mode or the other. What I like about making a lot of films, over the past 2 years I’ve made a lot of stuff, is that I have the freedom to put the films out into the world in different ways. For filmmakers who only make a film every 2 years, it’s a big thing to ask of them because they want their work to be seen by as wide of an audience as possible. But if I make seven films in a year, I put a few out through IFC, I can put four out through this distribution model, I can put one on my website for free. There’s a lot of ways I can get the work out there. I think the next few years for me will be a lot of experimentation.”
You do a lot of films. What do you see as your personal trajectory? What are you building towards?
“I would say all of the films I’ve made so far I would consider film school basically. I’m just trying to make a lot of work and get better as a filmmaker. I think my challenge to myself is to try a lot of things. For a long time I’ve been doing this naturalistic handheld documentary realism type of movie that sort of became known as mumblecore or whatever. But I made five movies in almost the exact same way and, while I was refining the process the whole time, it seemed like it was becoming a trap to keep making movies that way. I don’t want to have a career where I just do one thing for 50 years. With Silver Bullets I pushed myself to do things I haven’t done before like using a score and having a tripod. They’re minor things, but for me they’re big changes. And I’m still trying to do that. I want to the films I make to become part of my education until I become a well rounded filmmaker who can do lots of things. Comedy, Horror, Drama etc…”
“I also want to build a big body of work. I admire filmmakers like Robert Altman, Spike Lee, Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen who make a movie a year, or sometimes more. I think it’s cool because each movie seems to be less important in the context of their whole body of work. That’s the kind of career I would like to have.”
So you think working in the Paul Thomas Anderson mode of making a movie every four or five years puts too much pressure on an individual movie?
“That’s not really how I work. There’s a lot of filmmakers who do work that way that I really like. But I’ve never approached filmmaking in that sort of meticulous highly crafted way. For me the movies are very loose and open. They’re a collaborative effort so my directorial voice isn’t as strong as most filmmakers because I’m into opening up the movies to be shaped by the actors.”
V/H/S premieres at the Sundance Film Festival as part of their Midnight Programming On January 22nd.
Editorials
Five Serial Killer Horror Movies to Watch Before ‘Longlegs’
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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