After suffering with bipolar disorder for man years, writer-director Paul Dalio decided to make his first feature film about characters going through similar struggles (less successfully than he did) in the new film TOUCHED WITH FIRE (which went though the festival circuit last year under the title MANIA DAYS). In it, Luke Kirby and Katie Holmes plays a pair of artistically inclined patients who meet in the waiting room of a psychiatric facility and discover they have similar distorted viewed of the world around them. It’s a fascinating journey that sidesteps a lot of the tropes of film about mentally ill people—it avoids sentimentality or looking at these people as little more than eccentrics. It takes them and their condition seriously, and gives a stark portrayal of how severely a person with this condition can swing from manic to depressed, when they decide to stop taking their medication.
I got the chance to sit down with Dalio in Chicago recently, along with his lead actor, Luke Kirby, who plays Marco. The Canadian-born Kirby first entered the film scene with supporting roles in such films as LOST AND DELIRIOUS, HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION, THE GREATEST GAME EVER PLAYED, and SHATTERED GLASS. I first took note of him in the daring HBO drama “Tell Me You Love Me” and then again a few years later in Sarah Polley's moving TAKE THIS WALTZ, opposite Michelle Williams. He’s currently starring in the Sundance series “Rectify” and popped up in HBO’s 2015 mini-series “Show Me A Hero.” Next up for Kirby is Lasse Hallström’s just shot A DOG’S PURPOSE, scheduled for release in early 2017. Please enjoy my chat with Paul Dalio and Luke Kirby…
Capone: I saw this film at SXSW last year as MANIA DAYS, and I didn’t realize this was the same movie when I first heard about it because of the title change. What was the reason you changed it?
Paul Dalio: It started with the distributer who brought it up, like maybe we should change the name. Everyone associated “mania” with beauty, but apparently some people thought it was going to be like a horror film, like people running around a hospital stabbing each other with syringes [laughs].
Capone: It’s too close to “maniac.” I get it.
PD: But then brainstorming a new name was almost like perfect, TOUCHED WITH FIRE, because that book [“Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament” American psychologist Kay Redfield] inspired so much of it from the beginning. When I discovered that book, it changed my whole perception of what it is to have it. Obviously, it’s weaved into the narrative strongly so. It was perfect.
Capone: When you see it in the context of the film, it almost seems obvious that would be the title, because that’s the driving force of the film. When you decided that the subject of this film was going to be something that was this personal, what made you decide to use the framework become this love story, as opposed to maybe something a more clinical?
PD: That’ s exactly why. That’s the exact point. When anyone looks at bipolar, they see it through clinical eyes, which is one of the worst things for the stigma, worst things for people’s shame who have it, and worst things for the adversity of the people who look at it who don’t have it. To frame it as a love story was perfect, because this is a condition of emotional extremes. This is a condition of people who experience emotion that goes outside the boundaries of sanity. If that emotion takes the form of love, which is the most universal human emotion that anyone can relate to that outshines any clinical notion, any description that a doctor might give, then it completely reframes the public’s eye as to what it is.
Capone: At the same time, as audience members, we might get lost in the love story. And it’s the clinical aspects of this that bring everything back into reality at various points, like when the parents or doctors come in. A lot of films that cover this subject are told from an outsider perspective looking at someone with this issue. Was that something you were trying to discourage, looking at it from the outside.
PD: That’s absolutely right. Even looking at it through anyone else’s eyes, looking at someone who’s bipolar, it’s exactly the reason is to have people see it through their eyes to be able to see the beauty that comes with it. The most beloved image of the sky [Starry Night by Van Gogh] was seen through a sanitarium window through Van Gogh’s manic eyes. If they could see that, see what it looks like from there, then when they see some lunatic with crazy bloodshot eyes staring up at the sky, before they might have an adversity to that. “There’s something wrong with this person.”
Film has a powerful ability with all the elements you can control, with sound design and image and music, to be able to transport people into those eyes, and when you have a performance like Luke’s, when they have the ability to embody these people in a human way when you can get into their skin and you can experience them going through this, that was the first and foremost important thing among all these other forms of media and film that look at it through doctors eyes or scared eyes. You see it through their eyes.
Capone: Let’s talk about that building of the character. When you first read this, what do you remember latching onto with this guy? Was fear a factor in choosing this role?
Luke Kirby: Yeah. I think the first time I read it I was like, “Maybe I could have a year or two to prepare, only to be able to rap.”
[Everybody laughs]
LK: But what I found compelling about the character was how defiant he is in the face of his father and other people. It’s so glaring that he’s holding on so dear to something. I didn’t understand what that fight was, but I found it so compelling. There’s something mischievous about that and also audacious, a little perversely audacious. To me, I was like, ”Why can’t he just get help?” So I was really diving in.
PD: In our talks together, we were discovering stuff in you, like the reason why you were compelled to that, which was the cool thing informing the characters. We would go for these two-hour-long walks and just talk about each other. While originally, the character was based on myself, there were elements of the character that were in him, so the character started to reshape itself to take on his elements as well. You can describe how some of the things you were describing to me of how you would break through these walls of stuff before that might remain inside of you.
LK: Yeah, it became very liberating as the journey went on.
Capone: It sounds therapeutic.
LK: I think at times it was. I’m sure at other times it was emotionally crippling [laughs]. But really, getting to spend your day exploring such a range of dynamic emotion and thought is pretty great. It’s like primal therapy. You get to work through some stuff, I’m sure. But it made it a little hard to go to bed at night.
Capone: I always think of acting as sort of embodying somebody else. But it sounded like Paul wanted you to come back to yourself more than go somewhere else. Was that strange pulling it back in?
LK: Yeah, there were definitely times, I don’t know that I expressed this verbally, but because these things have stigma around them, I was a little bit afraid of exploring it. What is it that you’re unleashing, or how far can you go? Is it a safe space to explore? And all that actor-y stuff. It really was a journey of discovery. Paul was there every day being a barometer for authenticating whether or not what we were doing had purchase. If it didn’t, he was very adamant about keeping us going. We got to explore the space a lot. We were very charmed with time, too, to get to do that. We really got to dig in.
PD: The cool thing was because I did have that feeling barometer, they trusted me and they could go with their own intuition into these states, these inspired states that were uninhibited. A lot of it was truthful, and if it wasn’t, I’d give them a tiny bit of “That’s not quite it.” But they were able to, so many times, tap into these truthful elements that were like different textures of the same condition.
LK: Yeah, it’s not something we could do intellectually. You can’t just sit and have a conversation and go and do it. You really do have to give it a crack, and if that doesn’t work, it’s in the body, too.
Capone: Did you have similar conversations with Katie as well?
PD: Yeah, the first thing was getting to know each of them and having them know what each character was like before they went manic, before they went crazy, so they could ground themselves in those characters and then understand what it’s like to be manic, so they understood how each of them would respond. But once each of them knew their character and each of them was able to make the imagination leap to what it would be like to respond to that, it was all inside of them, so they were able to run with that.
The characters were created to activate each other, so once they became the characters, their chemistry was intense, because they embodied something that was very dynamic in terms of them bringing out all of their beauty and all of their horror. They’re brilliant actors, so they could run with it with their imagination. So much of it came from them. Once they let go of their inhibition and they were the character, it was like on fire, and a fire you can’t control, a fire you have to let go of. And like he said, it’s not something intellectual, it’s not something conscious. It’s almost like a shamanistic state that they went in to. They were tapping into deep stuff, when you let go of your control.
Capone: I assume you understand that there will be people who watch this and think, “Why doesn’t he get help? Why doesn’t he stay on his meds?” Although I do understand that idea that the meds very often kill that creative spark that he values so much, but you’re not dismissing that idea, correct? That he does need some degree of help, or something to balance him out at least?
PD: Absolutely not dismissing it, but at the same time, you can’t reach someone who’s going through that and who is dismissing it if you don’t acknowledge the numbness that they feel. If you don’t acknowledge the bliss and the ecstasy and the beauty they experience, because they’ll be like, “You’re lying to me. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t understand.”
LK: And you’re made to feel like a pariah, instead of feeling like all of the stuff you’re going through has value. The idea of getting treatment isn’t to alter the personality. It’s just to… I don’t know what the word is. If it’s “tame” or what, but people aren’t looking for a personality shift.
PD: “Tame” is a good word, actually, and that’s why “fire” is a good word, because it’s like having a fire, you don’t want to extinguish it, but you don't want to let it get out of control and burn down your mind, but to tame or harness it so it sustains and it keeps burning, which is the thing that most people don’t understand. They think that it’s either or. Either you extinguish the fire and don’t have it, or it burns your mind down. Either you’re numb and you don’t have the creativity and you don’t have the love and the passion and the emotion, or you have the emotion that will destroy you.
But what the truth is, and what’s important for people to understand, is there is a magic to it. There is a beauty, there is a fire. And you shouldn’t over medicate, and you shouldn't give that fire up, but there is a way to sustain that fire, to tame that fire, and to prolong it throughout your life so it manifests in meaningful ways that sustains, like having a child, having a lover, having a relationship that could sustain. Creating art that could sustain. Because that can sustain with the mania; it will burn it down to ashes; there’s just no way. There’s no point to passion that leads to no fruit.
Capone: I think I read somewhere that you had—and I’ve heard this called different things by different directors—a “look book,” or something that provided visual cues. Tell me what was in that.
PD: Yeah, so the look book, a lot of it was collages and different images to be able to capture the subjective state of the characters. A lot of which ended up very literally on the screen, in terms of like the fog, the grey/blue fog, actually manifested on the screen. But the important thing about the look book is how to have all the different departments creating and working on the same page in terms of understanding what mania looks like, understanding what depression looks like. You have to be extremely specific.
So you have to have very specific rules as to what lenses you’re going to use when you’re shooting a mania. Are you going to use Steadi cam because it’s more fluid when they’re in love, and what filters are you going to use? All of that stuff has to be described in the look book. The look book was mostly for the creative departments. With Luke, for instance, I just wanted him to go into the character, because I didn’t want him to see it himself, obviously, from the outside. I wanted him to be inside himself. But for the cinematographer, the production designer, you need to have a look book to be able to put everyone on the same page.
Capone: Where did get the idea to do that?
PD: Well, I went to film school.
LK: So you paid for it.
PD: [laughs] You learn that stuff. You have directors who do it and have them. I did take it to maybe an extreme, and I think there’s a reason three production designers turned down the project when the saw the 50-page look book. There was one who was like, “Oh, I love it. I love when directors who are specific.”
Capone: I can’t imagine it wouldn’t help immensely.
PD: That’s the thing, theres some directors who are very loose and open, and they let the different departments do their thing, and there are some directors who are very controlling and specific. And there’s some production designers who just want to let loose and do their thing, and there are some production designers who find it helpful for the director to create specifics. But I don’t stop them from creating new stuff, as long as it’s inline with my stuff. If they have a better idea than mine, then I embrace that.
I am very specific, and to me, I think it started because I was into painting and drawing, and once you start drawing and you get your own fingers on it, you just can’t stop putting your fingers on everything [laughs]. But the people I worked with were extremely talented and creative, and they were able to bring stuff to it that went beyond the stuff that I created, once we were in synch with each other, once we were in the same flow. And it was like riding a manic wave. It was almost like everyone got into this bipolar state, in the spirit of the bipolar to points where I’d be on set and be like, “That doesn’t look manic. Does that look manic to you?”
LK: That’s making movies.
Capone: Gentlemen, hank you so much. Best of luck.
