Interviews
[Interview] Director Alejandro Amenabar and Star Ethan Hawke Reflect on ‘Regression’
It’s been fifteen years since writer/director Alejandro Amenabar terrified audiences across the globe with his gothic ghost story The Others. The prolific filmmaker has found success in several other genres, as he’s responsible for such gems as The Sea Inside and Abra Los Ohos (Open Your Eyes), a.k.a. the original Vanilla Sky, but after all those years, something called him back to the darker side of cinema. Now, with his new film Regression, Amenabar takes on the task of telling the tragic tale of a young girl named Angela Gray (Emma Watson), who was abused by those close to her in an ongoing series of satanic rituals. With police officer Bruce Kenner (Ethan Hawke) on the case, and Professor Kenneth Raines providing help to the victims through regressive therapy, the truth is bound to surface. However, the facts are uncovered, the results turn out to be even more outrageous than anything anyone involved in these horrendous acts could have ever imagined.
“Right after my last period movie I wanted to try a horror movie, and I thought about the devil, and why not try to explore the world of satanic cults?” Amenabar inquired. “I started to read a couple of books, but I couldn’t find an interesting approach, something that made the movie sort of special so I put it aside for awhile. Then, I read about satanic ritual abuse, and the psychological techniques that were used in the ’80s and ’90s, which is something I never heard about. So, I thought that would allow me to make a movie about the devil, but secretly a movie about our mind, and how our mind shifts and plays with us, and that’s something that always interested me”.
As for star Ethan Hawke, his initial interest in the project was less about the world of the occult, and more about the man behind the camera. “I have a lot of respect for Alejandro Amenabar, I took him incredibly seriously” Hawke explains. “I didn’t really understand the script or the character, and I went to meet with him to tell him so, and he was such a compelling person, and the desire to make the movie seemed so sincere and interesting to me that I decided just to take a chance on him”.
Not only does Hawke hold a certain appreciation for Amenabar’s work, but the Sinister star also possesses an affinity for filmmakers that emerge from different cultures than his own.
“I like anything about working with directors from other parts of the world” Hawke says excitedly. “I got to work with Alfonso Cuaron when I did Great Expectations, Jean-Francois Richet when I did Assault on Precinct 13, and Pawel Pawlikowski when I did The Woman in the Fifth. I love working with different filmmakers; filmmakers that come from a different education, because I tend to learn more. You know, people who grow up in the U.S. kind of have a one-film vocabulary, and people who grow up in other countries have a different film vocabulary and they live differently, and they think about images differently, and they think about performances differently, and it’s fun to be a part of it”.
2016 seems to be the year of the devil, with films like The Witch, February, and The Devil’s Candy coming out, and even a TV show titled Lucifer airing on Fox. All of the films, each having to do with Satan, deal with the darker aspects of religion in their own ways. For Amenabar, Regression was about “portraying the world of the occult and about the rituals”, as he drew inspiration from books like Making Monsters, Satan’s Sirens and Satanic Panic, exploring and researching as much as he could about the followers and their forbidden religion.
Regression seems to fit right in with the year’s new trend, but popular horror sub-genres come and go, as Amenabar explains. “Sometimes in terms of horror, we go like in waves, so there’s been zombies, and after that there were vampires, and I think it’s about the devil again”. However, according to Amenabar, he simply sought to personify his own vision, and just happened to capitalize on a flourishing angle. “In my case, like I said, I was just trying to find the proper approach, and I thought it was right for me”.
Still, coincidental as it may be, it’s admittedly a pretty exciting time for horror, as it seems to be delving more and more into the taboo subject that made so many ’70s films so memorable. Amenabar’s new film, however, plays more on the engaging, tension-ridden aspects of the decade’s thrillers, pulling from movies like All the President’s Men, Marathon Man, just as much as he does from The Exorcist. “We wanted to get some of the style and the flavor from hose American thrillers from the ’70s,” says Amenabar. “We wanted to keep some of the gravitas or the seriousness of those movies”.
To Ethan Hawke, the film is less about religion, and more about the curious actions that people take once real fear sets in. His character Bruce starts out the film as a logic-based non believer, but as the case carries on, and he begins to suspect that members of the cult he’s investigating may be following him, he turns to the ancient artifacts of the bible and the crucifix as a way to cope with his concerns.
“I think what Alejandro’s saying is it’s not the idea of religion necessarily, but everybody, people start getting superstitious and they’re scared to get superstitious” Hawke emphasized. “I don’t think it’s religion that’s oriented in any kind of real faith, or pure exploration of his inner life, but more based in superstition. And I think that’s what Alejandro was most interested in trying to say at that moment in the movie”.
Through the film, Hawke and Amenabar collaborate to set out on an expedition to find what drives people to religion, and how everyone, whether religious or not, comes to believe their own superstitions and personally-based theories.
“I think that in general people like to be right, and one of the things that’s most interesting to me about the movie is that people, we all want to be right all the time, and even though sometimes this truth starts lining up that we might be wrong, but we still persist in not wanting to let go of the idea that we’re right” Hawke comments. “It becomes very important to us to stick that ground, and I think one of Bruce’s problems in this movie is, he thinks he’s right about Angela, and he starts being blind to certain facts because of his own desire to prove himself right”.
It’s always harder for people to see themselves as clearly as they can others, but as the film suggests, part of this self-serving bias is due to the iffy nature of psychotherapy, which is still to this day, and will always be, mostly based on theories. While Officer Kenner approaches the case through files and interviews, his partner Professor Raines tackles the issues through his own process, as he uncovers locked away memories of the victims through hypnotherapy.
Therapists, although seeking to help their patients, can sometimes point them in the wrong direction, especially because the mind is such a fragile thing. As Amenabar says, “One thing for sure is I would never submit myself to hypnotic therapy. I’m afraid of what I could find there”.
The process of how the mind interprets inspiration, coercion, and submission is a fascinating, endless journey of self-exploration. People often think of the factors that influence the mind as merely being interactions with other people, but in actuality, people are affected by every daily correspondence we encounter, whether that be with friends, family, or even the movies we watch for fun. Although shy to be a patient of hypnotherapy himself, Amenabar doesn’t deny the fact that the act of sitting down to watch a movie is just as much hypnosis as any session with phototherapy or use of a metronome. In an interesting way, his movie seeks to hypnotize the audience just as much as it seeks to explore the effects of hypnotherapy.
“Well the idea was something that has to do with movies, that also has something to do with hypnosis” says Amenabar. “People sit down in a theater and start watching the movie, and even we as filmmakers, we use that expression, we try to hypnotize them. So like that process, exploring it or portraying it in the movie itself, the process of hypnotizing, the images you see in the movie, you can see what is my approach to that”.
Was Angela abused by satanic cults? Is Professor Kenneth Raines extracting memories that ought not to be tampered with? Is Officer Bruce Kenner being stalked by the same cults that have tortured Angela for so long? Find all of the answers to this terrifying exploration of satanism and psychotherapy when Regression hits theaters on February 5th, 2016.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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