Last week we spent some time with the incandescent stars of Martha Marcy May Marlene. Now that we've heard from the people who brought Martha's characters to life, why don't we see what those who created those characters and that world have to say? Round-table with director Sean Durkin and producers Josh Mond and Antonio Campos after the jump.Can you talk a little bit about your discovery of Elizabeth?
SEAN DURKIN: Yeah. Yeah, she is. Um, open casting, our casting director brought her in, and we wanted an unknown, and she was the best person. With a character like this it’s hard to say; it was totally fleshed-out in the script but how someone’s gonna interpret it is always tricky, especially this role, ‘cause it’s so silent. So you start with what you don’t want, and you don’t necessarily know what you do want, but when you see something and you feel it you have to follow that, and she was the only person that I saw that I felt it from. I just sort of knew after the first audition.
How many people did you see?
DURKIN: Maybe 50.
Were you worried that the Olsen name would give people entirely different preconceptions as to what this film was about?
DURKIN: No, because I just knew how good she was and I just knew that at the end of the day I would pick the best actor, and she was the best actor for it. Once people see it, that’s all that matters.
Do you know anyone who was actually in a cult?
DURKIN: I do, yeah. A friend of ours, all three of ours, was in a group. We were friends with her for a couple years and didn’t know anything about it, and then she heard that I was writing a script and she told Josh about what had happened, and she said that she wanted to help and share her experience. Then Antonio and I sat down with her for the first time, and she shared everything she could remember, and a lot of it was blocked out, and then six months later we met again and she recalled more. The film’s not based on her at all, but understanding the methods of manipulation and the confusion that she experienced getting out and the paranoia—all those things come from her story.
When you brought John Hawkes on board with the project, had he already been receiving attention for Winter’s Bone?
DURKIN: It was out, but I can’t remember if—
ANTONIO CAMPOS: It had just come out, I think. That was the summer it released, so it had gotten attention. But we all knew John Hawkes—not personally, but we knew his work, like Deadwood and everything else he’s done.
What was your biggest challenge in shooting?
DURKIN: You know, I think making a movie is just really hard. How do you keep going? You have to dig every day and find that drive and that discipline and focus and maintain that, not just through production but through post and screenings and festivals and press. It’s ongoing.
It also seems like the timeframe between casting and release was pretty short. Did you guys feel rushed during the production, or were you working like a well-oiled machine?
CAMPOS: We were working like a well-oiled machine, but Sean had been working on the script for a while, and so by the time we went into production Sean had already sort of lived out the story and so many different variations of it that, in that sense, he was so ready to go and just tell the story. The fact is we’ve been working together for so long and we work with the same people over and over again, so there’s a shorthand that allows us to move very quickly and for us to figure things out in a way that allows for that.
How did John and Elizabeth research cults? Did they meet with your friend?
DURKIN: It was never about a cult. The movie was never a cult movie; we never used the word “cult”—it’s not in the film, it’s not in the script, and we never talked about it that way. All it is, is about a girl who goes through these specific circumstances. “Cult” is a word you use later to talk about it, to encapsulate what it is, but there was no need. For Lizzie it was there on the page, and then her interpretation just focused on that, and if she needed anything we would talk about it. Sometimes she wanted to hear a story that I knew from life that correlated with a scene in the film so she could understand it in a different way, but generally not. And John just approached it in that knowing what he didn’t want it to be and what I didn’t want it to be was some clearly evil, over-the-top cult leader. Even using the word “cult leader”—we never did that.
You mentioned in the production notes that there are a whole lot of cult scripts out there at the moment, which surprised me. You don’t hear much about that now.
DURKIN: Cult scripts? Do you mean—
CAMPOS: Scripts about cults.
DURKIN: Are there? Did I say that?
CAMPOS: I don’t know. [LAUGHTER] I do remember John Hawkes saying that yesterday. I do remember that yesterday John said every year there’s a Manson project that comes around that he’s asked to be involved with in some way that he turns down.
Let’s talk about the aesthetic of the film for a second. I found it to be really self-assured and really impressive for a feature debut, and I just wanted to know what your aesthetic touchstones are as far as other directors who might have informed that.
DURKIN: Well, there are definitely directors who influence you but you try to just focus on the material and do, like, the look of the film specifically was very much like, it wasn’t necessarily “Oh, this looks good, let’s do that.” You’re very much trying to find your own thing. So we knew a couple basic principles, which were we wanted the film to be weathered and worn in, so we had to figure out how to create that look. So Jody had an idea for underexposing and making the blacks milky, and we tested that, and that became the look we wanted to create. From there it was, you know, how do you shoot scenes to create tension? Is tension created in this scene by holding a long shot, whether in a dolly or being still? Is tension created by cutting back and forth between people? It was really more about just looking at each point in the script and seeing what was best.
Together, as Borderline Films, you’ve also done Afterschool and you produce each other’s shorts. I was really interested in hearing more about how you work together as a production company: does it function as a collective? Is it a delineated system where you take turns helming?
CAMPOS: It’s very organic. The first projects we did, coming out of film school, the first film we made I was going to try to direct and Josh and I had co-written based on a script that he had started with somebody else, and Sean and Josh were going to produce. So we had set up the dynamic there, and then after that the short film—Buy it Now—got traction and won a prize at Cannes. That sort of made it… it was natural that I would go from there to directing a feature, and once Afterschool was done I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next but Sean had been developing Martha and Sean knew what he wanted to do next, so it was very natural for us to say “Okay, let’s go and try to get this made.” Basically, there’s no pitching or trying to sell each other, no “This is my turn, this is my turn.” It’s like, “This is a film that I want to make; let’s start working on it,” and whosever idea it is, they develop it.
JOSH MOND: And in between the writing we try to get commercials and music videos to support each other so the other one can write and work on the material. While one of them was in the Cannes Residency program, or in the Sundance Lab, we all had to figure out how to pay our rent. But we also had another film in between the two, which was Two Gates of Sleep, which we shot in Mississippi and were producers on as well, which went to Cannes in 2010. But, yes, it’s a very organic kind of thing and we were talking earlier about kind of keeping film school going and we had to figure out a way to sustain ourselves so we could continue to learn and educate ourselves and get to working.
How do you think going to film school and being in that environment, as opposed to teaching yourselves, has helped you—or, more to the point, has influenced your style and what catches your interest?
MOND: Well, for me I’ve been working in the business since I was like 13, and I worked for a director when I was really young, and I really got a lot of work ethic from him—he made really small movies—but going to film school and meeting people that are our collaborators now was the best part of film school and also allowed me to open up my mind to other types of filmmaking, and I think I learned a lot more about European films and international films and films from the ’60s and the ‘70s, which I think heavily influenced all three of us. All three of us kind of grew up on movies, and I think they were more mainstream American films, but I think what we try to do is we try to apply this new kind of filmmaking that’s progressive to us that we’ve seen internationally, trying to do something different but with the same kind of accessibility.
DURKIN: Exactly. I mean, we sort of founded our company on this idea that—commercial films and art house films are separate but we don’t want that to apply. It doesn’t have to be like that. We grew up on The Goonies and Back To The Future, these great adventures that formed the basis of our creativity and excitement. Those films live in your subconscious and they make it in. We’re also influenced by art house films, but we have that love for entertainment too.
Martha Marcy May Marlene is in theatres now.
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