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Your new movie Country
of Hotels - in a few words, what is it about?
It’s
about room 508, a mysterious room in an anonymous, decaying hotel,
somewhere in the Midwest of America. Strange and sinister things happen in
this room. People enter, but they never seem to leave; they go mad; they
go missing; they meet unfortunate ends. Always within earshot down the
lonely corridors are the hotel staff, a seemingly nefarious group of
people.
How did the project fall together in the first place?
The writer, David Hauptschein, and I have done many plays together over the
years. I had been nudging David that we should work on a film together. I
would often send David bits of found material, just things that I thought
he would find interesting, because who knows what spark might light the
fire. One of these sparks led to him writing the screenplay. We wanted to
collaborate on a project which would endure longer than the run of a play
and which could be discovered/re-discovered by someone years later.
What can you tell us about Country
of Hotels' screenwriter David Hauptschein, and what was your
collaboration like? David
is the writer and I am the director. But we work in a spirit of continual
collaboration and artistic contamination. We influence each other’s side
of the work, pushing each other to come up with new ideas, suggesting
stuff, constantly trying to up each other’s game. Originally we
discussed making a short film set in a hotel room, but one idea led to
another idea which led to even more ideas and before we knew it was a
feature. David was on set during the shoot and we carried on collaborating
right through the edit and post-production, which took several years. Country
of Hotels is quite a bit on the bizarre to surreal side - so how
easy or hard was it to not (literally) lose your plot telling your story? I
like making work that “bends reality”. Something both David and I
agree on, is that work which is “surreal” has to be anchored in a
concrete, tangible reality. Dreams and hallucinations can be terrifying
because they often depart from what appears to be a consensus reality.
David coined the phrase "kitchen sink surrealism" which we use
to describe the work. It’s a play on the theatrical term “kitchen sink
realism” which was a way to describe a style of stage naturalism which
appeared in the 1950s, whereby gritty and unvarnished real life would be
depicted on stage. You’d go to a play and it would no longer
be
witty, drawing room comedies, instead you’d see a guy shave in a sink or
cook eggs on a kitchen hob whilst scratching his armpit. Kitchen sink surrealism uses this style as a jumping off point for a voyage into the
surreal. The important thing about this voyage, what makes it credible, is
that it takes place in a recognisable consensus reality.
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So a lot of our work was about how we made such strange things appear as if
they were actually happening, concretely. For example, the voice which
talks to Pauly through the heating vent really does have to sound like a
“physical voice” coming out of the device (at least at the start);
it’s not just a voice in Pauly's head - there's something speaking out
of the vent! A lot of focus is placed on the actors who had to make their
performances credible and grounded in a physical and recogniseable
emotional reality. Also I spent a lot of time with our cinematographer
Stefano Slovovich, developing a visual language which gave weight to the
physical reality of the room and the objects in it; the actor's bodies as
well as inanimate objects. When Roger and Brenda were having sex, I wanted
to see the sweat and the visceral meshing of their flesh as their bodies
pressed into each other; when Pauly was lying in bed, shivering, I wanted
to see his toes shivering in macro lensed close-up.
Similarly,
I worked with our editor Peter Allinson and sound designer Ed Rousseau to
create an atmosphere throughout that felt physical, concrete and real, and
then we used that “ground level reality” as a springboard into the
surreal. We spent a lot of time editing the picture to get to that
“higher plane” of the surreal in a way that felt seamless, organic and
credible.
At least to me, Country
of Hotels is at times also wickedly funny - would you at all
agree, and if so, what can you tell us about your movie's brand of humour?
I'm
very pleased to hear you found the film funny. I think that an absurd,
offbeat, black sense of humour is crucial to the success of the film. In
order to enjoy and appreciate the film I think you have to be open to
this.
For
me, there is a great dividing line in film (and theatre) between people
like yourself who have a sense of humour and the absurd; and those who
seem to think that humour isn’t somehow fundamental, or is perhaps of
lesser importance in dramatic art. Almost all the major film directors and
playwrights of the 20th century had a rich vein of humour in the work:
Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Alfred Hitchcock, Fellini, Bergman, Lynch.
It's almost impossible to find someone without it. Yet, I think there is a
huge subset of critics who are totally without humour.
The
way Pauly cleans the glass in Country
of Hotels is funny to me; every
scene in the film has something funny if you are open to it. In this
respect the film is better appreciated with an audience, but that’s very
difficult to achieve these days when the culture is telling you that you
don’t need to leave your living room to experience the world.
Everything
I do in life and art is infused with a sense of humour, often absurd,
black humour. David and I are exactly the same in this regard. Like all
serious artists we have an obsession with toilets and toilet humour. You
will have noticed that toilets are very important in Country
of Hotels,
how they flush, the water level etc. Pauly even eats his dinner sitting on
the toilet, and uses the toilet paper as a napkin.
A
few words about your overall directorial approach to your story at hand? There's
lots to say about this. One of the very obvious, but very important things
I did was work very hard with the cinematographer Stefano Slocovich to
keep telling the story visually. We spent hundreds of hours planning (and
replanning) shots. Given that so much of the film is set in a handful of
locations this was especially important. Cinema is a language. Coming from
theatre and making a "limited location film" I didn't want to
fall into the trap of making a filmed play. Do
talk about Country of
Hotels' key cast, and why exactly these people?
I
like collaborating with people I already know. For me a good cast is made
up of a mix of familiar faces and new faces. There are a number of reasons
for this, some of which are very practical and are about “survival” as
a director as much as they are about art. Filmmaking can be an incredibly
stressful experience. If you are stepping into “enemy territory"
you need a crack team of soldiers with you, whom you can rely on, and who
aren’t going to shoot you in the back of the head when things get tough.
So, it’s always good to have at least a few people on the team who have
your back. Another good reason to have people you know on your team is
that the bond of “trust” between actor and director is something that
is very fundamental and cannot be faked. In my experience actors can only
fully release themselves into the work when they trust the director they
are working with. For example the first scene we shot for Country
of Hotels were those of the standup comedian who appears on the television in
the hotel room. The actor was a guy called Colm Gormley, someone I did
plays with at university and who continues to work as a professional actor
to this day (mostly in the theatre). I knew that he’d be perfect for the
role. The first few takes we used to cover all of the dialogue in the
script. Then, for subsequent takes, I encouraged him
to improvise and he started coming up with crazier and crazier stuff,
surreal trains of thought, about taking himself on a date and making love
to himself. A great deal of these improvisations ended up in the film. The
first set-up in a feature film, helmed by a novice director, can be a very
fraught and nerve-wracking experience. The crew might reasonably be
wondering what the next few weeks are going to be like. But as Colm and I
pushed each other further and further you could feel the energy in the
room changing and the nerves lifting a little. That
said, at least half the cast are actors whom I met through auditions and
recommendations from our executive producer Emily Corcoran (who was
incredibly good at finding people). I’d be delighted to work with any
and all of them again. It’s important to have new people around you as
well, who will challenge you and help pull you in new directions.
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You
of course also have to talk about Country
of Hotels' hotel and especially room 508 - was this actually an
existing location or sets constructed for your movie, and how much
creative input did you have in terms of set design?
The
entire film (except for a few locations shown on the TV playing in the
room) was filmed on sets. They were all built for the film. So we could
remove walls, shoot through walls, shoot from above etc, and it allowed us
much greater control over the lighting. This
kind of thing is really important for a film which takes place mostly
within a couple of locations. We worked very hard to make the space on
camera “breathe”. You can’t really do this if you are using a real
location and you have solid walls. Suddenly the shooting space would start
to feel very cramped and the audience would feel this. And you choice of
shots would become very limited.
Although
I wanted the film to have a “realistic” look, using sets allowed us to
create more of an abstract and “eternal” feel to the setting as well.
The hotel and room 508 is as much a metaphorical space as it is a real
place. The
sets were designed and built by our production designer Mike McLoughlin. I
had a lot of input, but I'm not a designer. He sourced all the materials
and created the look. It's thanks to his art and creativity that we had
such an amazing environment to film.
What
can you tell us about the shoot as such, and the on-set atmosphere? We
filmed in a warehouse in Essex about an hour’s drive out of London,
which our producer Saba Kia found. All the sets were built there by Mike
McgLouhlin who was incredibly inventive with the space we were given. We
didn’t actually have the whole warehouse to ourselves. Just a section of
about 200 square metres on a platform. There were other people using the
rest of the warehouse, which was a clothing storage and repackaging
facility. So, every time we were ready to shoot we would sound a horn and
the warehouse would fall silent. The shoot was 19 days in total. Anything
you can tell us about audience and critical reception of your movie?
If
you go into the film trying to anticipate what the movie will be like, I
think there’s a good chance you’ll be frustrated by the experience. We
deliberately made a film that played on genre conventions but continually
subverted them and. the audience's expectations. If you go in expecting a
straight horror or film which will follow a template set by other films or
dramatic formula, it will be a confounding experience for you.
Any
future projects you'd like to share? David
and I are working on another film project at the moment, turning one of
his plays into a screenplay which we will hopefully film. It is loosely
inspired by the Manson family murders. I’ve also written a screenplay
myself called My Father Was Born on an Island. It’s about a guy in his
late 30s who travels with some friends to the wedding of a very rich
friend on an unnamed island, somewhere off the British mainland. Instead
of making it to the wedding, the friends get lost and end up at a very
strange finishing school, which seems to have existed on the island for
over a century. They repeatedly try to leave, but never seem to manage it.
Little by little the central character begins to discover his own personal
family history is woven into the history of the school. Then some really
extraordinary things happen which I don’t want to go into at this stage.
I hope to make both these films in the next few years! What got you into
filmmaking in the first place, and did you receive any formal training on
the subject?
I’ve
always loved film and acting since I was very little. I saw a double bill
of Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back when I was probably about 6 and I was
hooked. I would spend entire summer holidays in the cinema. Later my
father and uncle ran some video rental shops (in the
days before Blockbuster’s dominance destroyed the independent video
rental market), and so I watched 1000s of films during that period. I also
remember wanting to act at the age of three or four, and so I acted in
plays throughout my time in school whenever I could. I was never a very
gifted actor, but I was enthusiastic enough to always get some kind of
part. This obsession with acting slowly matured into an interest in
directing, and by the time I went to University of Manchester to study
English Literature, this became my main focus. I was still a student when
I saw a play called Trance by David Hauptschein at the Edinburgh
Fringe.
This experience blew my mind and I eventually contacted David a few years
later and we began working together a few years after that.
I’ve
never received any formal training in directing or acting, film or
theatre, or anything like that. I tried to get on various directing
courses when I was younger, but they wouldn’t have me. This turned out
to be quite fortunate as I realised that I’m a bad student and operate
much better as an enthusiast who explores his own obsessions and passions.
I’ve learned a lot from artistic mentors like David Hauptschein and
friends who run a theatre in Milan, Italy called Teatro Della
Contraddizione. Working as collaborators with these people has been my
education.
What can you tell us about your filmwork
prior to Country of
Hotels? Country of
Hotels is my first film really. I made a short film years ago, but
that’s it. How would you describe yourself as a
director? If
you meet me I don't think I come across like someone who could lead a
group across enemy lines and pull off a mission. But oddly, when the time
comes, and I am directing, I feel like I am in my element. On a good day,
my enthusiasm and unwillingness to quit carries us all along. Filmmakers who inspire you?
-
Polanski at a technical level was a significant inspiration for Country of
Hotels. No one has been better at filming that passage between being awake
and being asleep as he did in Rosemary’s Baby and The
Tenant. Also the
way he films the amorphous, shifting interiors of rooms, peepholes etc;
and his appreciation of characters with exotic accents!
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David Lynch is a huge inspiration, but in terms of how his movies
“feel” I try not to copy him.
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Lars Von Trier: A director lacking funds, and complaining they can’t get
their movie made, can watch Dogville and feel slightly ashamed they
didn’t come up with something as inventive and brilliant. That idea
could have been made on a miniscule budget and it still would have worked.
There are brilliant ideas out there which can be made for peanuts.
- And a hundred other directors.
Your
favourite movies?
I
don’t really have any “favourite” movies. There are too many unseen
movies for me to discover and watch. But I can mention some movies I love
which I am always recommending to people:
Scorsese:
Mean Streets and Taxi
Driver. I think Taxi
Driver is one of those rare
films that has a dangerous alchemical power to it. Recently, I recorded a
podcast on the film’s novelisation by a great New York poet called
Richard Elman, where I also talk a lot about the movie’s unusual power.
Bergman:
Almost anything he made. But I would always recommend anyone intimidated
by the idea of Bergman watch the longer TV version of Fanny and Alexander
- hold off on that next “series binge watch” you planned and watch this.
If
you think you like political cinema (and even if you don’t) I urge you
to watch Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
starring Gian Maria Volonte (one of the greatest actors who ever lived).
And Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers. The Italians made the greatest
political cinema in my opinion.
A
great Russian film that no one talks about enough is Larisa Sheptiko’s
The Ascent. This film completely pulls you inside its moral and spiritual
dilemma and projects you out the other side in a transcendent blaze.
Segio
Leone’s The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West and
Once Upon a Time in America are totemic films in my life. I watched all of
them when I was very young (too young in some cases) and had very
different reactions to them. They will be with me until I die, I think.
I
also watch a lot of silent films. I would recommend anyone reading this to
go to as many silent film cinema screenings as they can. Especially if
they have live musical accompaniment. I live in London and we are really
well served by this kind of event; especially by an organisation called
the Kennington Bioscope who show silent films with live piano
accompaniment at the Cinema Museum. That’s an experience you can’t get
in your living room!
One
of the greatest artistic experiences I ever had was seeing Carl Th.
Dreyer’s Passion Jean D’Arc at The Globe Theatre in London with a live
score by Will Gregory and Adrian Utley.
[Dreyer’s
Ordet is also an amazing film. A huge well of inspiration for Lars Von
Trier that film.]
... and of course, films you really
deplore?
I
feel like I have to be very careful to mention any film I “deplore”. I
watch all types of cinema, and I am constantly searching for something
that will surprise me, take me out of myself, blow my mind. As I get older
I find that films which manipulate the audience artificially, but in a
really slick way, can really upset me. Any film which is pornographic in
the way it manipulates my emotions is generally something I despise…
But
it’s also the case that I am an extremely emotional person, and the
older I get the more I find it difficult to watch any films where young
children suffer for some reason, or where parents witness their child’s
suffering or death. So, for example Lars Von Trier is one of the greatest
filmmakers alive, but I can’t watch The House That Jack Built without
feeling extremely agitated and ultimately depressed. The experience of
watching that film feels like having Satan squatting inside your brain for
two and half hours. Breaking the Waves, Dogville and other films he made
are the works of an artist of the first rank in my opinion. Who am I to
say whether The House That Jack Built is good or not - some of it is
clearly amazing. I can’t (re)watch Killing of a Sacred Deer (by Yorgos
Lanthimos) for similar reasons, although I love Dogtooth and The Lobster
(even the second half of that film, which many people seem to object to).
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Your/your movie's website, social media,
whatever else?
You can find me on Twitter at @juliommartino
David Hauptschein has a website:
hauptschein.com
Anything else you're dying to mention and
I have merely forgotten to ask?
One thing: I just want to mention what an amazing job Christos Fanaras did on
the score for Country
of Hotels. This was his first film score and it’s
perfect for the film. It has a very individual and unique voice, very
unlike anything you would normally hear in a “low budget” film. It is
an “electronic score” but almost exclusively played and produced with
analogue (i.e. non-digital) instruments, giving it a very warm familiar/unfamiliar sound.
It is a fundamental part of the film’s identity.
Thanks for the interview!
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