Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
Writer-director Brad Anderson has had one of the more eclectic and fascinating careers as a filmmaker. Known primarily for he genre work, Anderson's films never take the most obvious route through a horror or science fiction plot. Instead, he tends to aim his sights on the emotional core of any story he's telling. His glorious 2000 work HAPPY ACCIDENTS might be one of the greatest combinations of science fiction and romance ever made, thanks in large part to actors Marisa Tomei and Vincent D'Onofrio. SESSION 9 and THE MACHINIST are two very different kinds of psychological horror. I'm not even sure where his great work TRANNSIBERIAN lands, and maybe that's the point. I just know that it's about as tense a thriller as I saw that year.
Between his feature film work, Anderson has had an impressive streak directing television as well, from "Homicide: Life on the Street," "The Shield," and an episode of "Masters of Horror" to pivotal runs on HBO with "The Wire," "Treme," "and "Boardwalk Empire." But Anderson's greatest TV accomplishment has to be his nine episodes of "Fringe," including the controversial Season 1 finale, which featured the first appearance of Leonard Nimoy as William Bell and ended with a jaw-dropping shot of a fully standing World Trade Center.
His latest film is, again, the very character-driven horror work VANISHING ON 7TH STREET, starring Hayden Christensen, Thandie Newton and John Leguizamo, as possibly the last remaining humans left on the planet, whose population seems to have been erased by a creeping darkness that seems to evaporate the body, leaving behind a pile of clothes and not much else. And while the characters, who spend most of their time held up in a well-lit bar (the darkness doesn't seem to like bright light), do spend some time trying to figure out what caused the extermination, in the end that really doesn't matter as much as survival. As with many of Anderson's films, it isn't so much what happens as what it all means. Discussions of the soul are as common as figuring out how to make the generators last a few more hours.
Anderson has long been one of those guys I've always wanted to direct. Pretty much without fail, I'd loved his films and his approach to telling stories. Perhaps some of the best news about Anderson came to light shortly after this interview, when it was announced that he, his THE MACHINIST star Christian Bale, and MACHINIST writer Scott Kosar would be re-teaming for an adaptation of J.G. Ballard's CONCRETE ISLAND. In the mean time, please enjoy my brief chat with Brad Anderson…
Capone: Hi, Brad.
Brad Anderson: Hey, how are you?
Capone: Good. So let’s just jump right in. Are you in New York right now?
BA: Oh, yeah.
Capone: Okay. While I was watching the film the other day, I realized it’s the type of film you can’t discuss in terms of what happens as much as you want to talk about it in terms of what it all means and represents. Is that a fair assessment?
BA: Yeah, I think that’s a good way to put it. I mean, on the most basic level, it’s kind of a survival story with four characters fighting the encroaching darkness, and the fuels running out on generator, and the lights are going to go out. It’s sort of a ticking-clock survival story, but that’s kind of the more genre trappings of it.
What interested me is kind of like what you said, it works on other levels in terms of these four characters who are searching for some explanation as to what’s happening to the world and what’s happening to them and why they have an advantage that no one else has, and there was sort of the existential questions at the heart of the movie and what made it to be more interesting than just a straight-out genre apocalyptic thriller.
The discussions they have with each other, trying to grasp at some explanation, and the various explanations that they arrive at based on their own beliefs or lack of beliefs and these character’s religious explanations that have more to do with some kind of scientific research. Then Hayden Christensen's character is really more of the nihilist in the group who’s really more about… he doesn’t really care for an explanation one way or the other, he just wants to get out of there.
So they are all confronted with this huge impossibility and trying to figure it out. Of course, we never really settle in on one single explanation. There’s a lot of possibilities, but I think we purposely… Tony [Jaswinski], in the script that he wrote, purposefully tried to keep as many avenues open as possible so that in leaving it unanswered, the discussions would be more about what is at the root of it, and any explanation in some ways is just as valid as the next one.
Capone: I feel like in a more standard-issue genre take on this, there would have been a lot more time spent on figuring out what’s going on or if there was a way to stop it or reverse it. In your version, there are a couple of scenes where it’s talked about, but the idea of settling on a particular explanation never really seems key to any of the characters really.
BA: You’re right. And again, what was good about Tony’s script is that it is very contained. and in some ways story wise or structurally, it’s a fairly kind of straight forward. What’s complicated about it is the big mystery of it you know? It wouldn’t be a movie that could be made in anything other than a small indie. It doesn’t have the big, easy explanation. It doesn’t have many of the conventions of the genre as it should. It’s an idea movie in some ways. It’s like a "Twilight Zone" episode where the characters are stuck as a bar and trying to figure out what the hell is going on. That’s what kind of interested me about it, I think.
Capone: I just realized, we're talking about the film like it’s just a bunch of people sitting around talking for 90 minutes, but it’s not. You have these incredible, suspenseful action sequences, too. You certainly don’t skimp on scaring the crap out of us.
BA: [laughs] Yeah, we’ve got a little of that too. The other thing beyond the kind of theoretical underpinnings of the story, the thing that I was drawn to was the visual storytelling part of it. And in this particular story, “How do you conjure up this threat within the darkness? How to make darkness the threat.” This isn’t a movie in which the monster is lurking in the shadows; it’s really more that the shadows themselves are the monsters. So how to do that both technically with all of the digital effects we did in the movie, and also kind of keep the threat feeling organic.
We didn’t want it to be a monster movie with demonic forces evolving out of the darkness and turning into demons and shit like that. We wanted the darkness to feel a little bit more like a natural phenomena, like a fungus or something. [Laughs] When we were doing those, we were trying to find a look for the shadows. We looked at a lot of natural phenomenon, like ink blots, like the way that lichen grows on a rock. We even looked at these things called “slime molds,” which are like a kind of a gelatinous fungus that grows like a mushroom kind of. We would look at time-lapse videos of that, and it’s fascinating how it would crawl along a wall and branch out. The look of the shadows I think came out of that.
Then we added, of course, figurative shadows, shadow creatures, shadow figures in there, to keep the mystery alive like “What are they? Are they the shadow selves of the people that have already been taken?” You know, just the disturbing idea that all you will leave behind is your shadow on a wall. So, that’s what happens. Now, why and how… [Laughs] I don’t even have the explanation to be honest with you and I don’t think Tony, the writer, does either. Is it the Biblical rapture coming to a head? Is it some black hole that’s burrowing through our planet and sucking people into another galaxy? Is it something more prosaic like a flesh-eating virus? Is it a nuclear or neutron bomb? We were toying with a lot of different things as anyone would. When you are confronted with something that’s inexplicable, you naturally just start grabbing at straws trying to come up with some explanation.
Capone: Right. Being someone who spends an inordinate amount of time in movie theaters, I love the opening sequence with Leguizamo in the projection booth and then coming out into the empty theater. Honestly, I could not stop thinking about getting caught out like that in any of the theaters that I might go to on a regular basis. That’s scary. It’s scary to be in an empty movie theater without the lights on. Was that how it was written, to have him start out in a movie theater?
BA: That's great. Well the script went through various iterations. I mean, at one point it started on a subway train when we were going to do the movie in Brooklyn, and then when we decided we couldn’t do it in Brooklyn. But in Detroit, where they don’t have a subway, we changed it to a movie theater. [Laughs] The script evolved as we got deeper into getting the movie off of the ground, as they always do. But I liked the idea of a movie theater, because it opens on that kind of projector beam light, and what are movies but simply interplay of light and darkness on a screen--shadows really. The idea that the movie opens on a movie, it’s a funny little ironic twist, I think.
Capone: The idea that somebody could be watching this movie in a movie theater, you are instantly setting them up for that little extra level of fear.
BA: Yeah right, you want people to be watching the movie, and they turn to their left and make sure there’s no creepy shadow figure next to them.
Capone: You ended up shooting it in Detroit, because I’m sure that there are huge sections of Detroit that do feel like an abandoned city sometimes. Was that one of the benefits of shooting there?
BA: Oh, God yeah. Sad to say, but when you want to do your usual post-apocalyptic movie, Detroit should probably be the first place you should check out. We were able to get a lot more bang for our buck there. We got to make the city look devoid of people, empty, and kind of wrecked. There are a lot of places in that city that are just like that, and you don’t have to do much. Even beyond that, it’s just a great city visually with all of the amazing buildings. It’s still a city that’s trying to crawl back out of the hole, so it was kind of nice to shoot there; it felt like it made sense for this movie. Then, of course, there’s a practical reason to shoot there, you get a lot of tax rebates.
Capone: Whenever you set any kind of film in more or less a single location, like you do with this bar, you're recalling the great tradition set forth in films like THE PETRIFIED FOREST, where you set up this little family unit, and of course whenever the family splits up, they literally fall apart. There's safety in staying a cohesive family.
BA: That’s funny, I never really thought about that, but you are right; it is like this small group is a bit of a family unit, and really all they have left are each other and they're forced to get along or cooperate with each other to try to survive. Yeah, I think there’s certainly elements of that in it and I think you can get a lot of good drama out of situations where you put a small group of people into a really perilous situation like LIFEBOAT. That was kind of a reference to the Hitchcock film in which these seven or eight people are on the lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic. The whole movie takes place on that one craft. These characters in our movie are kind of like a little ship of light in a sea of darkness. So, it’s a survival story in the most basic way of putting it, but it’s also about the human spirit and overcoming obstacles, but of course in our movie that doesn’t even matter, because they still vanish mostly in the end anyhow. [laughs]
Capone: Well, we don’t want to give that away just yet. We were talking before about your approach to this being different than probably what a lot of other genre directors might have done. With your science fiction and horror works, you very rarely take the direct approach to any of this material. You seem to go more for the psychologically or the emotionally driven stories. Do you like approaching genre material from that tangential angle?
BA: Yeah, I think so. I guess it’s just the way I approach things. The straightforward, obvious explanation or approach just feels too on the nose. I guess, I’m always trying to skew it in some other direction partly because I don’t need to make a studio version of these movies. They're independent films, and partly because of that it’s almost like as an independent filmmaker, you have a bit of an obligation to kind of break down the conventions a little bit and do things a little differently. I’m also not trying to make like an experimental film; you’ve just got to find that balance between the genre and then the more unusual, independent approach, you know? I think this movie, yeah, it has the trappings of a kind of studio apocalyptic thriller, but at the same time there are elements in it, particularly the lack of clear cut resolution at the end that you could never do in a studio movie. They would never allow it.
Capone: I’m a huge "Fringe" fan, and I know that [the episode two weeks ago] you directed, correct?
BA: Yeah, that’s right.
Capone: I don’t think a lot of people realize that you directed that season finally in that first season with the World Trade Center and it was the first Leonard Nimoy episode, too if I’m not mistaken.
BA: That’s right, yeah.
Capone: That must have been incredible. You’ve done a lot of episode of that show, but what was that particular episode like to shoot?
BA: Well the season finale’s are always… All of the different threads are coming together, but you know it’s funny, because when you do those, you don’t get any more time, it’s just a usual episode, but you usually throw so much into it. It was good. It was cool. It was fun and getting Leonard Nimoy to come and set that up that character for the next season was kind of cool. I’ve been doing a bunch of those. Hopefully, we'll get another season. It still remains to be unseen whether they are going to renew it.
Capone: All right, great. Brad, thank you. Thanks.
-- Capone capone@aintitcool.com
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