Rebecca Gransden

Rebecca Gransden lives on an island. She is published at Tangerine Press, Ligeia, Expat, BRUISER, and Fugitives & Futurists, among others. Her books include anemogram., Sea of Glass, Creepy Sheen, and Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group.

TEX GRESHAM on film with Rebecca Gransden

TEX GRESHAM on film with Rebecca Gransden

January 25, 2022  ·  Interviews & Reviews

What film, or films, made the first deep impression on you?

This might come as a shock, but I think watching E.T. as a kid rewired my brain, changed my DNA, shaped my life's path. I would rewind the ending over and over and just bawl my eyes out as the ship made a rainbow across the sky. I wasn't just sad—it was joy as well. And I didn't understand how I could have two feelings at the same time, and how this movie could do that to me. 

Very often film is one of the ways we first come into contact with a world outside that of our direct experience. Which films introduced you to areas of life away from the familiar circumstances you grew up in?

I remember my dad showing me Sling Blade when it first came out. I was like ten or so. But it blew my mind. Wasn't until I rewatched it earlier this year that I realized how much that movie affected me and shaped my human understanding. I'd never seen life like that, but it felt so familiar to where I grew up.

What films first felt transgressive to you? Do you remember being secretive about any films you watched growing up?

Gummo was one of the first films that felt really transgressive to me. I grew up watching movies like Freaked (1993), Stay Tuned (1992), UHF, Robin Hood: Men In Tights, etc.—which are commercial, but they're weird as hell and therefore transgressive to a young mind. It wasn't until high school that I got into Korine, Waters, Troma Films, Oldboy, Freddy Got Fingered… things like that. I was very much into cinema trash when I was in high school.

In terms of being secretive about watching films growing up, I never really felt the need to be secretive because my family was very much into watching movies. I was pretty much allowed to watch anything—when I could. My dad introduced me to John Waters.

Are there any films that define your formative years?

Terminator 2, Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, the Indiana Jones series, The Blob, Tremors, Jurassic Park. I grew up with the big blockbusters and those definitely shaped my love of entertainment and film. 

Can you talk about the influence film has had on your writing?

All my writing I see as scenes—the shots, people acting them out, the pacing. Without films, I don't think I could write. I see a story as a cinematic arc that ends unfinished. I try to have the same plot-based conceit of a film, but then make it less about the plot and more about the people shackled to the plot. I feel like I've noticed this in Don DeLillo's writing—a huge influence on me. He is cinematically driven and often shapes his novels around a plot conceit and then completely ignores that plot. I dunno... Maybe I'm just describing writing in general hahaha

Do you use film as a prompt or direct motivation for your writing?

Both. Sometimes I take scenes/ideas from movies and expand or adapt. Sometimes I put movies on and just let it play in the background and let the sounds and rhythms of the movie make waves in my brain.

What directors, film movements, or particular actors have been an influence?

Paul Thomas Anderson is easily my biggest influence. The Safdie Brothers a close second. Harmony Korine a not-so-far third. But they all present characters and situations—albiet in different constructions—that I think people aren't used to seeing. They gently force us to acknowledge existences we tend to shy away from in productive ways. 

Have you ever made a film? If so, has the process of doing that had an influence on your writing?

I've made numerous short films—never a feature. I've only scripted maybe one of those shorts. It used to be spontaneous, improv, random things that were cobbled together in the edit. This ended up being how I write too—allow for spontaneity and then adapt it in the edit. Make it work, because if my mind wants me to do it, then there's clearly something I need to explore.

I, of course, have a micro-budget feature I'd love to film/direct—a nasty little one-location thing about a guy at a party where no one thinks he's funny and all he wants to do is make one person laugh. Awkward, anxiety-inducing nightmare kind of movie. I'd do it tomorrow if I had the money and people.

Are there films you associate with a particular time in your life, or a specific writing project?

I watched Being There and Pee Wee's Big Adventure a lot while writing my screenplay, Fix Daddy. Inherent Vice and Gilliam's Brazil were on repeat while I wrote Sunflower. Paul Thomas Anderson films got me through a pretty bad emotional breakdown I had in my mid/late-twenties. I like to put on 90s action films while editing because they put me in a good mood and who the hell likes editing things?

Thinking about the places you’ve lived, are there any environments that are cinematic? Have you lived anywhere that has been regularly depicted onscreen? If so, has this had an influence on your perception of the place, or how you’ve depicted it in any of your writings?

California is infinitely cinematic. I used to work at a golf course and watch the sunrise every morning and that felt cinematic beyond anything. But I've never felt that anywhere I lived has been regularly depicted. I like to see places as anti-cinematic and show that aspect. Taking a place like Disneyland—constructed to be a magically cinematic place—and making it not at all like itself. More claustrophobic and grimey and unglamourous. Taking Hollywood and stripping it of the domestic tourism aspects. I probably answered this question totally wrong... Sorry.

Are there films you regularly return to, and do you know why?

Speed is something I rewatch pretty regularly—because it's probably the greatest action movie of all time (tied with Die Hard with a Vengeance). Unforgiven, because it's such a weird western. I've been watching Once Upon A Time In Hollywood a lot lately. I watch the Lone Wolf & Cub film series way too much. Frances Ha always puts me in a good mood. Saving Private Ryan is my most shameful guilty pleasure. I'm embarrassed to share it here, but... Oh well.

Do you have any lines of film dialogue you regularly use in your daily life?

I saw a lot of random lines from the documentary American Movie—things either Mark Borchardt or Uncle Bill says. "I don't have any dreams anymore" and "That's senseless." 

Are there individual scenes that stay with you?

The "No Blinking/Processing" scene from The Master. One might say it's...masterful... sorry. The "give him the gun" jail scene in Unforgiven. The opening meta-scene of La Ronde is absolutely beautiful. But ask me this tomorrow and it'll change. My mind always runs through scenes I love nearly constantly—and there's a lot.

What films have roused a visceral reaction in you?

Uncut Gems—that was the last movie I saw in theaters. I never make audible noises in theaters, but so many times during that movie I found myself saying shit and oh god and stuff like that. And the ending had me jaw-dropped silent and I sat that way until the credits ended. A few other films are: Good Time, Umberto D., Naked Lunch, Kiarostami's Close-Up, Saint Maud (2019), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and The Tree of Life. I'm having more visceral reactions to films as I get older. I cry a lot more now and I really enjoy it.

Are there films that are reliable for inspiring your creativity?

Gummo (yes, again), Magnolia, A Scanner Darkly, Birdman, Adaptation—and the list goes on and on. But those are some main ones.

Which of your writings would adapt most successfully to film?

Either my forthcoming novel Sunflower or a couple of short stories—“Lovebird,” “Violent Candy,” and “Hollywood & Vine.” Apart from “Lovebird” which is published at X-R-A-Y, all of these are unreleased and will be in my collection from Tolsun Books in 2023.

Can you give some film recommendations for those who have liked your writing?

Herzog's Stroszek is a masterpiece. Then there's The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), Safe (1995), He Got Game (1998), Buzzard (2014), Tangerine (2015), Possessor (2020), Eastern Promises (2007), Fallen Angels (1995), Network (1976), Zola (2021), Hard Eight (1996)—and have I mentioned Gummo?

Robin Zlotnick

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ROBERT KLOSS on film with Rebecca Gransden

ROBERT KLOSS on film with Rebecca Gransden

January 11, 2022  ·  Interviews & Reviews

Can you talk about the influence film has had on your writing?

A lot of my writing is me trying to translate aspects of film to my work. Various shots, sounds, atmosphere. Using film as a basis, rather than say using reality as a basis, or other books as a basis, means starting with another artist’s aestheticized version of the world. What I see in my mind when writing then is framed, lighted, shot, so on, like certain scenes or moments from films I admire. Then I try to translate it. The silences, black and white faces, gusting wind of Antonioni or Kurosawa, for instance. 

The impossibility of it is sometimes frustrating, almost painfully so. But the impossibility of it is also why I allow myself to do it—the failed translation allows it become something closer to my own.  

What directors, film movements, or particular actors have been an influence?

Filmmakers who are particularly good at sliding between reality and dream have shaped my writing: Wong Kar-wai, Carl TH Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, David Lynch, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Andrei Tarkovsky, Werner Herzog, Paul Thomas Anderson. There are others I’m leaving out, but those have been the big ones over the years. 

Are there films that are reliable for inspiring your creativity?

I don’t think so. I wish I could count on tapping into something whenever I need a burst. But I need things to happen more organically, more surprisingly. I can’t impose upon a film in that way or impose upon my process in that way. It has to emerge. 

Have you ever made a film? If so, has the process of doing that had an influence on your writing?

I have not. For a long while I wanted to, really wanted to, because film seemed to embody more closely what I wanted to achieve in writing. At one time I think I could have done it. My brain now works so differently than it used to. I’m not sure if it’s aging or what. It takes me so long to muddle through. Things don’t occur to me like they used to. I can’t see them as clearly. It takes me so long to get anywhere. I have to fail, fail, fail, fail before something takes hold. There’s no vision, no certainty, no direction. 

Can you give some film recommendations for those who have liked your writing?

I’ll give a list of some films that I admire that I haven’t mentioned. Mostly recent favorites. Most anything else by these directors would work as well.   

Zama (Martel), High Life (Denis), Personal Shopper (Assayas), Decasia (Morrison), The Wolf House (Leon and Cocina), Horse Money (Costa), The White Ribbon (Haneke), The Favourite (Lanthimos), The Lighthouse (Eggers)

Robin Zlotnick

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SEAN KILPATRICK on film with Rebecca Gransden

SEAN KILPATRICK on film with Rebecca Gransden

December 28, 2021  ·  Interviews & Reviews
What film, or films, made a deep impression on you as a youth? Which films felt transgressive back then? Were you secretive about watching them? Would you say any of these films defined your formative years? Can you talk about the influence film has had on your writing?By some superannuated lapse in parental bargaining, a ten-year-old-me was allowed to view Reservoir Dogs and Menace II Society. Using an online source, I’d already printed both scripts on half-pages with a nineties printer. One particularly sadistic week of basketball camp and I felt nowhere ingratiated with the world outside my VHS player. To compound the problem, I’d recently learned how to jizz. Expanding one’s taste from that list of homages, the influences of these influences (beholding From Dusk Till Dawn in a theater) cemented the era. Gnostic steroid demon gunmen flipping through stylized ballets (John Woo) and iconic machine slashers endlessly stalking girls were refined into the grunge of Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer and Confessions of a Serial Killer back to back. Strange Days was social commentary (though this film, of course, is something hard to process nowadays: far beyond message, style over message) and SFW philosophy. Midnight Express and Little Odessa ripped people’s tongues out, showing how process should commence. Love and a 45, Judgement Night, and Coldblooded proved the influence of influenced influencers could also influence (particularly Leary’s performance). In one glorious, preadolescent swill, I downed local hero Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy, Bava’s Demons, Van Bebber’s Deadbeat at Dawn, and Giovinazzo’s Combat Shock, retro sleaze masterpieces, and continued slurping Welles’s beautifully manic take on The Trial, and the cold brutality of Haneke’s Funny Games, funk atop craft.Very often film is one of the ways we first come into contact with a world outside that of our direct experience. Which films introduced you to areas of life away from the familiar circumstances you grew up in?The industrial ghettoes that sparked David Lynch’s genius were a relatable surrounding, but how far he took that inspiration into a separate creative world felt integral. Richard Linklater is the complete opposite of my purview, but is undeniably iconic and inspiring, especially back when. The international canon filled in the rest of the planet with all I cared to view of it. Finding Angel Dust at Blockbuster, the work of Tarkovsky, the exciting, riveting Kurosawa, (a hell of a snow day home from school watching) The Dollars Trilogy and the exhilarating The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, the claustrophobic Polanski classics, and for tropical tourism: Cannibal Holocaust and Make Them Die Slowly. The Forbidden Zone in place of fables.Do you use film as a prompt or direct motivation for your writing? What directors, film movements, or particular actors have been an influence? Have you ever made a film?I saw the two best meta cinema on cinema masterworks of the nineties quite young: Living in Oblivion and In the Soup (seconded by Contempt and Day for Night). I decided to pursue script writing and attended this cheap workshop downtown Detroit ran by a minor production assistant from one Spike Lee film. He wrote the word “weak” on my teenage script, which I appreciate, but he followed that up with zero useful advice. Though his spit on the page was perhaps relevant preparation for writing (had had that before, and daily now — my own), he’d have done better taking a shotgun to my lap in that regard. All of Kinski (chiefly what Herzog unlocked), Terrence Stamp in Fellini’s Toby Dammit, alongside the end of Imamura’s The Pornographers — actors going sublime and achieving a moment beyond presence. Lately, what Mickey Reece and Joel Potrykus manage to wrought against these artless times almost lets me experience optimism. I tried, and meagerly try, to make films, the hardest undertaking of an art form possible.Are there films you associate with a particular time in your life, or a specific writing project?Detroit is shit for art. But once there was an abandoned grade school in the Cass Corridor, pre-gentrification, called The Burton Theater: matinees amid the ruin, shock art projects decorating (everyone hates those now), plastic bags spider-webbed throughout the building, attached to a urinal handle so that the whole building shivered like an entity when you flushed). I saw Trash Humpers, a cut of Häxan (I’d only dug the Burroughs version) with accompaniment by the band Wolf Eyes in an auditorium sans air conditioning — seeing the screen through a heat haze mirage. Crispin Glover came and presented his wild films, standing stock still in a tiny destroyed closet between showings, addressing each fan in one on one sessions (I stammered with unexpected fear through mine, not realizing he’d deign an individual conference with everyone). Right about then, just as I saved up to join (what was, to me, a very pricey inner-sanctum membership), the yuppie boomer landlord (who gleefully rode atop toy trains) evicted the programmers and took over, switching the schedule to tripe such as Love, Actually during Christmastime. A local source of inspiration appropriately cut short at its height.Thinking about the places you’ve lived, are there any environments that are cinematic? Have you lived anywhere that has been regularly depicted onscreen? If so, has this had an influence on your perception of the place, or how you’ve depicted it in any of your writings?Jarmusch’s longshot landscapes met with People Under the Stairs and Fresh, Tetsuo: Iron Man and all the blasted hellscapes of Mad Max wannabes make me homesick. My old car is briefly featured in 8 Mile, sorry to say. Leaving Las Vegas evokes hopeless alcoholic dads punching the wall next to our child heads. But writers are supposed to be overly erect about the working class because utilitarianism is this country’s shiniest lie. (Many of today’s unintentional autogynephiles (re: all millennial men) could use some physical abuse, I admit.)Are there films you regularly return to, and do you know why?There is a type of film enjoyed on first viewing, but you brushed by it without dwelling, only to realize later the level of supreme art that went momentarily underappreciated. I often return to Kill List in awe, Kontroll (saw when released, holds up amazingly), Miracle Mile (describe this film to someone beat for beat, almost as mesmerizing as watching it), Branded to Kill (flawless, beautiful), and especially The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which I saw young enough to relish, to be broken further into film by, in fact, yet it took seeing it on a big screen, and many, many wonderful times over (it truly gets better with each viewing, grows in you) to comprehend the insane confluence of intensity captured on camera (dinner scene, etc.). Do you have any lines of film dialogue you regularly use in your daily life? Are there individual scenes that stay with you?The Coen brothers demand reenactment. I feel ran over deep into the beach like in Mike Hodge’s Pulp. I perform How to Get Ahead in Advertising aloud each night. I am nearly always issuing coffin mumbles from the end of The Vanishing. The depraved eighties overkill set pieces in An American Werewolf in London, Invasion USA, and Action Jackson are my manifesto.What films have roused a visceral reaction in you?The rowdy turns in The Caller had at me. Attack the Gas Station rallies the viewer. Pretty Persuasion and Dirty Pictures predicting the cultural future are eloquent. Alan Clarke and his influence on The War Zone and Nil by Mouth, Henry Becque-esque reality cruelty gets my goat. The expansive The Telephone Box shit my shit out, the bottleneck tightness of The Guilty as well. Wake in Fright is ultra real, the film of our age, a millennial sludge trap ouroboros. Killing the nude woman with pop guns in Munich seems far more perverse than the filmmaker knew, a demonic scene. Rec 2 is the most vicious roller coaster jump scare experience I’ve had in a theater. Putney Swope is the foremost American comedy. Green Knight had me viscerally verklempt about how much potential it wasted. People at the theater were pulling their seats up in a rage, screeching far scarier noises than this weak millennial take on the legend could muster (I sense the director, so technically gifted, has never been hurt, one notch too abstract, but close, Black Death did the heavy montage literary ending better). The Grey is a more classic, but far greater disguised genre thing really about accepting death. When The Grey pissed stupid people off, I agreed with it, not them.  Are there films that are reliable for inspiring your creativity? When a genre subverts itself well: Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, a secret treat. Upgrade is the best action film comment on millennials. Seeing Riley Stearns’s work, and others like Resolution and Luz released in the last few years, is heartening. There will always be a Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, The Corndog Man, Baxter, Habit, Underground, La Haine, The Ugly, The Cell, Seven (films that had no business being so good), sneaking way above every decade’s typical crap (we gotta hunt for them harder now). Maxx, Aeon Flux, and Ren and Stimpy formed my first artistic sensibilities. I Never Left the White Room back to The Last House on Dead End Street (and Watkins’s nonsensical, hyper-retro art pornos), the bottomless, pointless sadism of The House on the Edge of the Park and Hitch-Hike — perfecto.Which of your writings would adapt most successfully to film?Marat / Sade would be the only path to trying. Nobody’s gonna build me a Deadwood set. All for naught and just about impossible. Can you give some film recommendations for those who have liked your writing?My genealogy could start with tracking down the legendary Salo at fourteen, then later seeing Possession after realizing relationships aren’t nice. Man Bites Dog was formative, along with The Hitcher (throat slit Eric Red’s gnostic demon killers: this, Cohen and Tate and Near Dark) and von Trier. Bertrand Blier’s early work was huge to me, and the pinku genre, including The Embryo Hunts in Secret. Miike’s dozen absurd masterpieces after high school, Angel Heart before. Peter Greenaway and the uncanny ending of Twentynine Palms, both ideal, but closer to scope of potential for me might be something approaching an Alan Resnick short, maybe The Signal (2007) if I got lottery lucky. The Eric Wareheim video for that Tobacco song is one of the best shorts I’ve seen (and the superb videos for Liars’s “Plaster Casts of Everything” (innovative rear projection), Rone’s “Bye Bye Macadam” (with its Joe Frank-esque electrical cult worship) Lorn’s “Acid Rain”, Jonathan Bree’s “You’re So Cool”, Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Sticky Drama” (demented Salute Your Shorts), Liam Lynch, the Feral House zeitgeist of Longmont Potion Castle and Francis E. Dec’s Worldwide Gangster Computer God, the abstruse oddities Charles Carroll is up to, glad that Sam Hyde prospers), ditto the simplistic, impeccable bit Cronenberg did (“they sense the threat”) for his book release (he should stick to film). Pig was a recent masterpiece of refinement, a classical tour de force that I’m incapable of, but appreciate (am a Vampire’s Kiss guy). I’d reach for the genius of Killing of a Sacred Deer, paced to Little Murders, cut like Chinese Roulette, Hal Hartley blocking, as ferine as Kite, Aster’s short C’est La Vie acted by the girls of a Walerian Borowczyk flick (trauma of Blind Beast, Lady in a Cage, Onibaba, or the sensuality of Survey Map of a Paradise Lost and In the Realm of the Senses), writing with a Sword of Doom ability to clear a room, but falling flat once Mifune challenges — most likely I’d end up with Trailer Town. I’m okay with that.
Robin Zlotnick

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B.R. YEAGER on film with Rebecca Gransden

B.R. YEAGER on film with Rebecca Gransden

December 14, 2021  ·  Interviews & Reviews

What film, or films, made the first deep impression on you?

The first films I truly loved were incredibly basic, because I was a kid. And I was a blockbuster kid. I was obsessed with Aliens, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, etc. And I still love those movies, even though they’ve long been replaced as my favorites. But I think the biggest mark they left on me was a love of grandiose scope and spectacle. There’s plenty to critique about those films with regard to emotional or intellectual complexity, but in terms of presenting a spectacular, grandiose vision they’re pretty impeccable. So they’re still a big inspiration—I’m often trying to marry emotional complexity and realism to a grand, mythic scale.

What films first felt transgressive to you? Do you remember being secretive about any films you watched growing up?

I’m not sure about transgressive, but the first film I encountered where I realized I was watching something supremely different was probably Welcome to the Dollhouse, which I saw not too long after it came out. I think it triggered my initial understanding of independent film, that there was such a thing as independent film, and that independent film was substantially different from what I was used to seeing. I remember thinking why does it look like that? Both the film quality and the actors—why does everyone look so fucked up? (i.e. like real people). Like I said, at the time my favorite films were the big blockbusters, so this was incredibly jarring. I kind of reeled from it at first, but it was so well done, so well-written and funny, I warmed up to it, and it’s become one of my favorites since.

There’s this film that no one has heard of that was extremely formative for me, called Slaughter of the Innocents. I first saw it on TV, late at night, when I was nine or ten. I had seen commercials for it, and knew it was about child murder, and that fact alone was so upsetting to me, but also incredibly compelling. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It felt so crazy that there was this film called Slaughter of the Innocents that revolved around child killing—I had to see what it was all about.

It centers on this FBI agent who specializes in child murders. But the twist is that he’s been training his eleven-year-old computer-whiz son to be a forensics investigator. So this eleven year old kid is helping his father solve these grisly child murders, and no one around him bats an eye—not his mother, not the other FBI agents, no one. It’s treated as though it’s the most normal thing in the world. So the whole thing feels like a goofy kids’ movie like The Goonies or Home Alone that’s been folded into this bleak film about child murder. It’s absolutely bonkers. But revisiting it now, I can see how that aspect spoke to me at such a young age. It had many of the trappings of what I loved as a child—these kid adventure movies—paired with this terrifying story that felt very real and immediate. This was 1993, so it was the tail end of the satanic panic, the height of stranger danger, and there are all these stories about child abduction and sexual abuse and murder on the news and on talk shows. Slaughter of the Innocents is full-on pulling from all these anxieties, and as a child it felt so real. Watching it now, it’s goofy and campy, but at the time it felt intensely relevant and powerful.

I’m also now able to appreciate it as an incredibly non-traditional first brush with dark and transgressive themes in art. Most people’s first exposure is something generally recognized as a classic—Silence of the Lambs or Twin Peaks or something like that. For me it was this bizarre D-list rip off of Silence of the Lambs and Twin Peaks. But unlike most D-list ‘90s films that no one has ever heard of, Slaughter of the Innocents still kind of slaps. The acting, writing and direction isn’t terrible. It has a beautiful and eerie vibe. The entire thing feels as though it exists within a world that’s ending but no one realizes it yet—and if there’s one through-line between all my books it’s my attempt at trying to capture that feeling. So despite its obscurity it had a pretty enormous impact.

Can you talk about the influence film has had on your writing?

I’m influenced by film in a fairly unique way. I’d love to know if this happens with anyone else. Essentially: I watch a lot of good stuff but I also watch a lot of garbage. Sometimes I just want sound and image in front of me, and I’m pretty easily entertained. And often I find so much inspiration in the dumbest shit. I’ll be watching something like Detective Pikachu, and there might be a little visual gag, or an offhand remark played as a joke—and I’ll think “What if we took that gag seriously, and played it out to its most logical conclusion?” That sometimes becomes the foundation for a scene, or a character, or an entire story.

Earlier this year when my wife and I were dealing with the side effects from our second vax dose, we threw on the Shrek movies. And no joke, a brief gag in Shrek 2 ended up inspiring the premise for my next novel. The novel will in no way read like something inspired by Shrek 2—it’s this quiet, mournful drama—but I’m almost completely certain that if I hadn’t been watching Shrek 2 I never would have gotten this idea.

I think the way this works is that “good” or “serious” films (however you want to qualify that) tend to be fully realized artistic visions. They’re already taking their premises seriously and playing them out to their most logical conclusions. At the same time, they’re also giving you less to build with. Like, there’s not really anything I would try to change or improve upon with something like The Piano Teacher. There could be structural elements I borrow from great art, but less so with regard to content.

But “bad” movies (or silly movies, or generally unserious movies, or lowest common denominator movies—however you want to define them) can be rich in unrealized potential. There are materials within that can be scavenged and improved upon and built into something radically different from how they were originally conceived and presented. I find that weed helps.

My friend John Trefry who runs Inside the Castle was talking about this too, that engaging with garbage forces you to bring more of yourself to the table in order to appreciate it than a classic piece of art does. It can require a more active engagement (again, weed helps). What you end up enjoying or being inspired by will inevitably be more personal, and have more to do with your own perspective rather than the creator’s.

What directors, film movements, or particular actors have been an influence?

I’m going to use John Carpenter not just because his films have had an enormous impact on me, but he also serves as a great counterexample to some stagnation I currently see within the horror genre. One thing that’s fascinating about Carpenter is that, ultimately, he wanted to make Westerns. But he didn’t have the necessary resources, so he adapted his vision into something completely new, while still holding onto that root inspiration. You can see traces of Westerns throughout his filmography, in the cinematic and narrative languages he uses, but you’d never mistake his work for John Ford’s. Most importantly, he didn’t just go and make a shoddy knock off of a John Ford film. He created something new.

Something I kind of loathe right now, specifically within the horror genre, is the overwhelming obsession with nostalgia. I see a lot of directors and writers content to ape what came before them. And I’m sure much of it is done out of genuine love (just as much of it is done as a cynical cash grab). But regardless of intention, strictly rehashing what came before leads only to stagnation. It signifies a misunderstanding of what made the films of the 70s/80s/90s/whenever special: they brought something new to the table, and reflected something about the time and culture in which they were created.

You can’t just photocopy magic and expect the outcome to be magical. You need to do something different with it; if not something new, then something personal and sincere, something beyond “I like this.” Like, I tried watching Fear Street 1994 and got maybe five minutes into it. “Oh, we’re doing Scream? We’re just going to do a bad version of Scream?” And I shut it off. I’m not interested in watching a bad version of something good that came before. 

So John Carpenter’s filmography is just a persistent lesson in how you can take something old and beloved and transform it into something completely unrecognizable, yet equally as powerful.

Have you ever made a film? If so, has the process of doing that had an influence on your writing?

The past couple years I’ve been collaborating with this filmmaker Nick Verdi.

I acted in his short film Angel of the Night, and co-wrote his debut feature Cockazoid. It’s really forced me to learn how to develop and communicate my ideas in a quick and concise fashion—something I’ve never been good at. Writing obviously tends to be a solitary endeavor—you’re communicating your ideas to yourself in your head and on the page, and then you refine those ideas over an extended period of time until they’re ready for someone else to take a look. And this can take years. But filmmaking needs to be quick—especially run-and-gun, beg-borrow-steal no-budget filmmaking—so if you have an idea, you need to be able to communicate it efficiently. You can’t just wait for inspiration to come, because there's a schedule you need to adhere to. You really have to get in there and problem-solve and make shit work. So that’s been a welcome challenge. It’s forced me to learn how to refine my ideas faster.

Thinking about the places you’ve lived, are there any environments that are cinematic? Have you lived anywhere that has been regularly depicted onscreen? If so, has this had an influence on your perception of the place, or how you’ve depicted it in any of your writings?

I’ve lived in Western Massachusetts my entire life, and maybe it’s just a bias but I’ve always found the area (and New England in general) to be extremely evocative and cinematic. Funny enough, the newest season of Dexter was just shot here (including a diner that’s a two minute drive from my apartment). But yeah, I think part of it is the juxtaposition—vast woodlands and hills abutting rotting factories and strip malls. Cities built on the sides of mountains. There are these insanely wealthy towns with tiny hidden nooks where they keep all the low-income housing, far from sight. Also the architecture—some of the buildings here are hundreds of years old. Same with the cemeteries. The past and the future seem to be constantly scraping up against each other. It’s a dynamic, conflicted landscape.

Are there films you regularly return to, and do you know why?

Hands down my favorite film is Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And here everything collides: it’s a wholly unique blockbuster on a grand scale, with astounding vision and spectacle, and it’s also a little trashy. There’s really no universe where Keanu Reeves should be in this movie, but I love that performance; he fits the character better than people give him credit for. There are also parts in the later acts that kind of fall apart and make no sense, but it doesn’t really matter. It becomes part of the film's overall character. It’s gorgeous and dark and silly and bloody and horny, and there’s this powerful romantic emotion running beneath it all. The ending knocks the wind out of me, always.

I just admire the hell out of it. And it consciously represents an end of something. Coppola made it specifically because he foresaw that big-budget films that rely on elaborate costumes, sets, and practical (in-camera!) effects were on their way out. As a result, he pulled techniques from the entire history of filmmaking. It’s a culmination of the form. He believed this would be the last opportunity to make a film at this scale the traditional way. And he was right! You couldn’t make Bram Stoker’s Dracula today. And that’s terrible. What a loss.

Which of your writings would adapt most successfully to film?

I’m going to go the opposite direction and give one that I think is pretty much unfilmable: Amygdalatropolis. Content aside, the vast majority of it takes place on online imageboards, and I can’t really think of anything less cinematic than that. I know some filmmakers have done desktop films, but as far as I can tell those still primarily rely on webcam footage, and I’m honestly a bit skeptical of how much life the form has.

I’d be very curious to see how someone would interpret Negative Space. I have a very distinct vision in my head of what that would look like, but the nature of literature is that every reader creates their own vision from the text. You can never know what your story looks like inside another person’s head, so a film adaptation would be the closest you could come to actually observing that.

Can you give some film recommendations for those who have liked your writing?

River’s EdgeThe GateThe Doom GenerationBenny’s VideoKairo

Robin Zlotnick

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JULIET ESCORIA on film with Rebecca Gransden

JULIET ESCORIA on film with Rebecca Gransden

November 30, 2021  ·  Interviews & Reviews

What film, or films, made the first deep impression on you?

I remember watching Beetlejuice over and over as a kid. I got nightmares from things that kids aren’t supposed to get nightmares from, like The Care Bears movie, but for some reason this movie didn’t bother me? Explains my goth roots.

What films first felt transgressive to you? Do you remember being secretive about any films you watched growing up?

I wasn’t allowed to watch rated R movies for a long time (except my parents did let me watch The Shining and The Exorcist in junior high). When Pulp Fiction came out, a lot of the boys in my class—it was all boys—watched it and were talking about how cool it was and I was so jealous, Pulp Fiction seemed so cool and mature to me.

I also remember my parents having a recorded copy of Body Heat on VHS and I was under the impression that this was something they didn’t want me to know about because it was dirty.

Are there any films that define your formative years?

SLC Punk is a silly little movie but I have a lot of affection for it. The party scenes feel true-to-life, and when I was in my teens/early 20s it was really relatable to me. (Fun fact: writer Chiara Barzini appears in this movie.)

The Virgin Suicides made a big impact on me for a lot of reasons—its dreaminess, the images, the portrayal of teen girlhood, and the subject matter of suicide. 

I saw Donnie Darko when I was around 20 and it kinda blew my mind. I remember being like Wow, movies can do this! and wanting to talk about it with my friends but I didn’t have any artsy friends at the time and nobody cared.

Do you use film as a prompt or direct motivation for your writing?

Not entirely, but at one point during the writing of Juliet the Maniac I got this strange idea that I needed to match it with the color palette of East of Eden? This doesn’t even make sense. I don’t think it even made sense to me at the time. I was feeling lost in the manuscript when this happened. 

What directors, film movements, or particular actors have been an influence?

I want to use this question to talk about how much I love Riley Keough. I love Riley Keough! She’s amazing in everything I’ve seen her in. I love her voice. She’s hot. I have a big crush on her.

American Honey (with Riley Keough)—there are some scenes in Juliet the Maniac that take place in a van. I watched that movie and tried to get the van scenes to at least resemble the van scenes in American Honey. That movie got the milieu of “fucked up youths in a van for long periods” thing down perfectly.

Have you ever made a film? If so, has the process of doing that had an influence on your writing?

Yes, I made a bunch of short films directly related to my first two books. I don’t really think they had an influence—mostly I just found it exciting to work in a different medium. Writing is my favorite artistic medium and I find it to be the most… spiritual? in that you can directly inhabit another person’s mind and thoughts… but there are still limitations to it. There are certain things you can only do with film. It felt fun and freeing to be able to work with images and, especially, music. I’d like it if you could force people to listen to a soundtrack to your book. 

Are there films you associate with a particular time in your life, or a specific writing project?

I watched Drugstore Cowboy about a hundred times when I was dating this junky who was very bad for me. (Referring to him as a junky seems harsh but also accurate.) He’s dead now. Bad memories. 

Another dead boyfriend (different dead boyfriend) memory are the movies of Jim Jarmusch. I still don’t like Jim Jarmusch movies, excepting the zombie one. I liked the zombie one.

Thinking about the places you’ve lived, are there any environments that are cinematic? Have you lived anywhere that has been regularly depicted onscreen? If so, has this had an influence on your perception of the place, or how you’ve depicted it in any of your writings?

All three places where I’ve lived as an adult were cinematic. I grew up in Del Mar, CA, which is sandstone bluffs, blue ocean, bent Torrey pines, and that soft golden light that is distinctive to Southern California. The beach in front of the house where I grew up has always felt creepy to me, which I tried to portray in this movie and the corresponding story. It has a lagoon that gets misty and just looks vaguely ominous.

West Virginia, where I live now, is so beautiful that it feels aggressive. I regularly feel distracted while driving to work by the aggressively beautiful mountains and trees and rivers and sky. I have some stories in my new, not yet published collection that feature me writing about this aggressive beauty. It makes me kinda sad that movies set in WV are generally filmed in Georgia, rather than on location. I wish WV would get a decent airport and give out tax credits so they could be filmed here. Seems like a missed opportunity. 

And New York, where I went to grad school… I think the way it’s depicted in movies, books, and music is a big reason why I wanted to go to school there in the first place. I’ve tried to not write about it too much because it’s been covered so many times, but I also didn’t want to shy away from it either. When I had a story that I really wanted to write that absolutely needed to be set in New York, I let it be set in New York. 

Are there films you regularly return to, and do you know why?

I feel the need to watch Gangs of New York about once a year. I’m not even sure why. I guess because there are so many good characters, and it feels so ambitious in terms of scale. Goodfellas and Taxi Driver are other Scorsese movies I feel the need to watch fairly regularly.

The aforementioned The Virgin Suicides is another one. I’ve watched Once Upon a Time in Hollywood four times and could watch it again (fuck the haters for this movie, you all are losers). It’s pretty much a perfect movie, from the editing to the acting. I am also really into anything related to the women of the Manson family—not Charlie, he’s boring, but the women—and anything that could be described as California Noir. 

Under the Silver Lake is another recent “California Noir”ish movie I could watch again.

And David Lynch movies, of course: Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, and Wild at Heart are movies I could watch over and over. 

I loved Midsommar (again, fuck the haters, you’re boring) and feel like that movie was kinda made for me, with the imagery and the weird nature/pagan shit and the woman character getting the upper hand in the end.

I saw Ganja & Hess for the first and so far only time last year but it really hit me hard. Like the other movies, I think a lot of it has to do with imagery/general aesthetic.

What films have roused a visceral reaction in you?

Waves was the most recent one. It gave me a stomach ache, big time.

Can you give some film recommendations for those who have liked your writing?

All of the ones under the “films I regularly return to” section, plus Good Time, The Neon Demon, The Witch Who Came from the Sea, Ordet, The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, The Hunger, American Honey, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely… I could go on but that’s a decent list. 

This series has not much to do with my writing, but I want to recommend Small Axe. That series was amazing and it got less recognition than it deserved.

Robin Zlotnick

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DERICK DUPRÉ on film with Rebecca Gransden

DERICK DUPRÉ on film with Rebecca Gransden

November 23, 2021  ·  Interviews & Reviews

What film, or films, made the first deep impression on you?

The first movie I bought that didn’t suck was Godard’s Breathless. I was eighteen and deeply into Joan of Arc and other stuff from the Kinsellaverse. I’d read somewhere that they were inspired by his work, so I thought I’d check him out. I went to a nearby Borders and browsed the racks. It was a crappy old edition where the special features were like, “Scene Access” and “Interactive Menus.” I loved it. Then I had the age 18-20 insufferably-into-Godard phase. I remember sort of bragging to my parents’ friends that I had a copy of Masculin-Féminin, and they were like, “What - why? Him? Really?” I get it now. But that was the jump off.

Can you talk about the influence film has had on your writing?

I’ve never written a treatment, nor a screenplay, but usually a first draft of something new will have a sort of treatmentary vibe. Just image after image w/ very little in the way of character or plot. The final draft tends to look like that, too. 

Do you use film as a prompt or direct motivation for your writing?

Sometimes I’ll just write down notes on the thing I’m watching and maybe later transcribe them and alter them enough so they don’t completely resemble the source material.  One thing I published a while back was just prompts for opening scenes of imaginary movies. I’ve thought about going back and expanding it, but that seems like a bit too much of Levé pastiche.

Have you ever made a film? If so, has the process of doing that had an influence on your writing?

I helped make a short film once. I just did the camera work but apparently I wasn’t bad. The film ended up in a gallery. If it had any influence on my writing, it would be that I quit altogether and start working on lo-fi art projects. 

Are there films you associate with a particular time in your life, or a specific writing project

The first story I published was written during an intense period of Marx Brothers and spliffs. I’d been laid off from a state job, had a decent severance, and spent a month getting high and watching torrented movies. I’d never seen the earlier Marx Brothers stuff, so it seemed fresh, and it still is. I think some of that unpredictable humor comes through in the story. It also reminds me of a more productive era of writing, which I can look back on with a small fondness.

Thinking about the places you’ve lived, are there any environments that are cinematic? Have you lived anywhere that has been regularly depicted onscreen? If so, has this had an influence on your perception of the place, or how you’ve depicted it in any of your writings?

Any place can be cinematic if you know where to look, but the most superficially cinematic would probably be my current environment of southern Arizona. The rock formations, the wildlife, the historic buildings, the denizens, the many-layered hues of enchantment, etc. I lived in New Orleans for a while and there were always film crews everywhere due to Louisiana’s film tax credit, and to some filmmakers’ unfortunate penchant for ruin porn. I just watched Angel Heart the other day and felt briefly nostalgic for walking down Royal Street. 

Are there individual scenes that stay with you?

I’ll return to certain scenes more often than I do whole movies, maybe because of dwindling attention span or general cognitive decline. The first processing session in The Master. The duel in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. The suicidal penguin in Encounters at the End of the World. The opening scene of Werckmeister Harmonies. Pretty much any scene from Beau Travail. The final scene of Wanda. The doctor’s house call in A Woman Under the Influence, and so on. 

What films have roused a visceral reaction in you? 

I remember becoming fully, inexplicably overwhelmed with emotion when I first watched Cries and Whispers, at perhaps too young an age, when the Chopin mazurka in A minor comes on. It was kind of like the episode of Seinfeld where Jerry finds himself crying and says, “What is this salty discharge?” But now I go hunting for that feeling.

Robin Zlotnick

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MICHAEL SEYMOUR BLAKE on film with Rebecca Gransden

MICHAEL SEYMOUR BLAKE on film with Rebecca Gransden

November 16, 2021  ·  Interviews & Reviews

What film, or films, made the first deep impression on you?

Hi. I’m overwhelmed with the amount of responses I have to almost all of these questions. I’m terrible with stuff like dates and technical details etc. and I forget important chunks of information all the time, only to blurt things out weeks later during a conversation with an unrelated person who is probably in the middle of talking about their day. In other words, I will forget to mention movies that live in my heart. I will forget super critical moments. I’m gonna answer this stuff with whatever randomly popped in my head at the time, mostly sticking to my younger years. In no particular order. Random. Incomplete. 

Here we go...

An early favorite was 1967’s The Jungle Book (Wolfgang Reitherman). Thing is, I was super young so all I have is the vague impression of how important it was to me. I loved Baloo and wanted to be his best friend.

Next is something I respected and deeply feared, and that is 1987’s The Gate (Tibor Takács). I almost didn’t include it here because it was only years later when I realized how much of an impact it had on me. I remember seeing it at my braver-than-I-was friend's house for the first time and thinking it was “sickkk!” but also having to close my eyes a lot. I lost a lot of sleep because of this thing. As a kid I often felt isolated and terrified, and The Gate played on my fears of being left alone without knowing who to trust. It was my first major exposure to horror movies, which still fascinate me to this day. Much love for The Gate. “YOU’VE BEEN BAAAAAAAAAAD!”

The NeverEnding Story (1984, Wolfgang Petersen) — This movie disturbed and fascinated me in a different way than The Gate. Where The Gate felt more domestic in its horror, The NeverEnding Story haunted me in a more cosmic, existential way. It wasn’t until I was a little older that I could watch and appreciate it without my heart racing and my stomach going sour. Gmork is still one of the most frightening creatures ever. I associate this movie with being at my grandma’s house because I think I was there the first time I saw it.

The Last Dragon (1985, Michael Schultz). This may have been the first martial arts movie I ever saw. They used to play it all the time on tv and I was enthralled. I probably watched this whole thing conservatively forty times as a kid. This is also one of the movies I just assume everyone has seen and I’m usually surprised to meet someone who hasn’t even at least heard of it.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie (1990, Steve Barron). At the time it felt super edgy and dangerous. Gritty. But somehow it didn’t feel like an “adult” movie. I viewed it as a “cool older kid” movie. I was 7 or 8. 

Turtles leveled up my appreciation for cinema. To this day it fills me with joy when I watch it. My favorite turtle was Mikey, but my favorite scene — the scene that blew my mind — was when April O'Neil was writing and sketching in her diary. It lent a gravitas to the whole experience. I remember listening to her voice, her tone solemn and serious, and just being enraptured. I thought  “This is the real stuff!” I wished so much I was one of those turtles. I wanted someone like April to care about me enough to put it in her diary. 

But as much as I loved it, I didn’t quite think about it in an adult way. I took its existence for granted. 

Then a few years later I saw Mel Gibson’s 1995 epic, Braveheart. 

Braveheart is the first movie I had what I’d call an “adult love” for. I wore those VHS tapes (yes, it was long enough for two tapes) out. Couldn’t get enough of it — the gruff aesthetic, the epic battles, the just-over-my-head political intrigue. Stephen (David O'Hara) was my favorite character. I was so stressed that he was gonna die during my first watch. I remember thinking “He’s like me!” (meaning a real weirdo). I loved his introductory line delivery of “Stephen is my name!” I believe this is also the first time I saw the main character in a movie die. Not positive on that. The ending always made me intensely depressed. Sometimes I’d just stop it while he was in the cell so I could pretend he got away.

Unlike the movies I loved before it, I thought of Braveheart as an impressive film rather than just some awesome thing that existed. I didn’t have the vocabulary to express it (hell, I still kinda don’t), but I was very aware of the cinematography, the acting, the dialogue, the music, the choreography of the fights. It was a revelation. Still, I never lost that magic of living within the world on the screen. Corny as it sounds, I still watch movies with that wide-eyed sense of wonder. 

I could keep going… but let’s pull back for now. A ton of other movies are popping in my head. Dances With Wolves was another huge one. Also a bunch of other Disney films.

Very often film is one of the ways we first come into contact with a world outside that of our direct experience. Which films introduced you to areas of life away from the familiar circumstances you grew up in?

How apropos! Dances With Wolves (1990, Kevin Costner). I did not plan this.

Dances With Wolves was the first movie that directly exposed me to a different way of life. I have no idea if it’s seen as problematic now or whatever, but back then it helped reinforce my interest in different cultures and peoples. It also filled me with deep sadness and anger. I wanted to be a part of that Sioux tribe. I wanted that strong community. 

Few years ago in Arizona I met a young Navajo man, had to be in his late teens. I struck up a convo with him and he starts telling me about his favorite movie and then he goes, “The movie’s called Dances WIth Wolves, have you ever heard of it?”

What films first felt transgressive to you? Do you remember being secretive about any films you watched growing up?

Transgressive shit: Akira (1988, Katsuhiro Ôtomo). Saw this on a bootleg VHS (I think. Could have been legit) at a friend’s place when I was too young. I’m terrible with age shit, but I was between 11 and 13. I had no idea cartoons could do what Akira did. I didn’t understand much of what was going on, but the movie felt important. And it was.

Secretive shit: I thought hard about this one. I mean, Akira maybe had elements of  “I shouldn’t be watching this,” but describing it as something I was “secretive” about feels inaccurate. I can’t think of any movie I felt secretive about. It ain’t really in my personality. I like to show people who I am and what I like and just really hope they don’t think I suck. I never got into overly sexual movies or anything like that to be embarrassed of. I dunno… can’t come up with much for you here. 

Sort of related, I remember showing my mom and her then boyfriend a scene from Romero’s Day of the Dead because they were watching this show with mild violence and commenting how fucked up it was. I said, “You wanna see fucked up?” 

After the scene was over (it involved zombies pulling someone apart in gory detail) they just stood there grimacing. Then my mom whispered, “You’re fucked up.”

I did feel slightly embarrassed once when I told someone how I wept during The Notebook.

Are there any films that define your formative years?

I googled “formative years” and it defined them as ages “0-8.” I will keep it strictly within those parameters. I also already mentioned a few formative years shit in the “deep impressions” section. There’s a ton of crossover in this entire interview. I could write in exhausting (and frankly, boring) detail about another bazillion movies here. 

Moonwalker (1988, Jerry Kramer & Colin Chilvers) — Michael Jackson was a hero to me. In Moonwalker he turns into a rabbit, a car, a laser-blastin’ robot and a spaceship. I watched this so much. I’d bring it with me to people's houses and stuff. I remember wishing I could put a mask on and transform into an animal. I felt I was in danger all the time, and fantasizing about transforming into cool shit to either evade or fight would-be attackers made me feel temporarily powerful. I wanted to know the Michael Jackson in this film. I also wanted to be him. He was so caring, brave, strong… and THOSE MOVES!

The Land Before Time (1988, Don Bluth) — I’m drawn to ensemble casts. I’m drawn to epic journeys that build or reinforce relationships. Dinosaurs are cool. This movie had me exploring the woods in search of the Great Valley with a few real or imaginary pals. I felt like part of the tribe whenever I watched it. 

Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984) and Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) — I had a stuffed Gizmo that I took everywhere with me until I lost it (devastating). My friend and I would pretend we were gremlins, or we were taking care of gremlins. There’s a gremlin named Stripe in the first one and there’s one named Mohawk in the second, but we referred to both of them as one character we called  “Spike.” I don’t know why. I’d always pretend “Spike” was actually a good guy through some strange plot twists when we played. I soooooo wished Gizmo was real. I wanted to be Billy because he had a cool secret pet, and that made him special. 

My Girl (1991, Howard Zieff) — Being exceptionally afraid of death and having a hyper-aware sense of the fragility of human health at a young age made this movie hit me like a Louisville Slugger to the guts. It ain’t like I never saw death on screen before, it just never felt so close to home. It gave me a sickly feeling about being human/mortal. Most of my friends viewed Thomas’ demise as something sucky but ultimately distant from them. Not me. I’d look at people and think, “Any of us could die at any time.” It didn’t make me appreciate life more, I just felt unsafe and a little desperate. Also I had a mini-crush on Vada. Also I identified with Vada… so I kind of had a crush on myself. 

The 1990 It miniseries felt like a movie so I’m including it here. Another ensemble cast with a focus on relationships. Saw both episodes at a friend’s house. And when I say “saw” I mean I watched maybe 45% of each episode. I tried to force myself to watch because I was really invested in the story. I just wasn’t brave enough. I kept hiding in other rooms or collecting myself outside. (Yeah, it was so terrifying to me that I chose to be alone outside rather than even hear a sound from that series.) It was around this time I became more consciously aware of how much horror impacted me in comparison to others. Like, no one else was running out of the house every ten minutes. The way It made each character see things others didn’t cut right to my damn soul.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is worth repeating. It was possibly the biggest movie of my “formative years.” 

Some quick ones:

Disney movies (anything I could get my hands on). The Little Mermaid (1989), Bambi (1941), Dumbo (1941), etc. etc. Those films were there for me when my mother was deeply depressed and I was afraid and confused. Forever grateful for that.

Star Wars original trilogy (1977-1983, George Lucas). I was born into a Star Wars family (well, a few people on my mom’s side). Always took these films for granted, like they were a relative or something. Just part of my life from the start. It’s difficult to coherently explain what they meant to me because of this, but these were a major part of my formative years.

The Muppet Movie (1979, James Frawley) — although my appreciation definitely grew as I got older, it was still a big one.

The Secret of NIMH (1982, Don Bluth).

Back to the Future (1985, Robert Zemeckis). 

Batman (1989, Tim Burton).

Home Alone (1990, Chris Columbus).

An American Tail (1986, Don Bluth).

Can you talk about the influence film has had on your writing or art?

I can't because nothing specifically comes to mind. I’m terrible at talking about art shit.

What directors, film movements, or particular actors have been an influence?

John Carpenter.

Akira Kurosawa. 

Anthony Hopkins. 

Toshiro Mifune.

Hayao Miyazaki.

Steven Spielberg.

Johnny Depp.

Jackie Chan.

Winona Ryder.

Ruth Gordon.

John Woo.

I could go on and on. Some of those don’t have as much influence now, but others still do. These are all fairly older picks.

Have you ever made a film? If so, has the process of doing that had an influence on your writing?

I made two very short, very ridiculous movies. It’s hard work, even if the project is just for fun. You need everyone on board and committed… and it’s hard getting people to stay committed when things get uncomfortable. 

It’s had no discernible influence on my writing, but it reinforced something I already knew: judge people by their actions, not their words. You can tell me “I’m in!” but when things get uncomfortable, I’ll see where you’re truly at. 

(I’m only using the actions/words thing in the context of creating art together. I’m sure there are exceptions). 

Are there films you associate with a particular time in your life, or a specific writing or art project?

A ton of the movies I already mentioned fall into this category. I'll toss a few more in. Let’s get in and get out quickly and incompletely like a bad police investigation.

Jurassic Park (1993, Steven Spielberg). 10 years old. Coolest visuals I’d ever seen. I gave the dinosaurs dialogue (after the tenth time of watching with pure reverence). Pretending to be velociraptors with my friend Jer. 

The Matrix (1999, Lilly Wachowski, Lana Wachowski — at the time known as “The Wachowski brothers”). 16 years old? In a toxic, destructive relationship. Me at my most misfit. Knew zero about the movie and saw it on opening night. Partner had a panic attack during it. I adored it. Reminds me of a period where I was called a freak and regularly had shit thrown at me in school etc. 

Seven Samurai (1954, Akira Kurosawa). 12th grade. More purposely (as opposed to just random suggestions) exploring movies outside of my comfort zone. Being nervous about the future. Realizing just how many incredible films there were out in the world. Secretly feeling cool that I “discovered” Kurosawa’s movies even though 99.9% of my friends didn’t give a shit. 

Dollars/Man With No Name trilogy (1964-1966, Sergio Leone). Just out of high school. Starting to delve into westerns (in part thanks to Mr. Kurosawa). Bought the box set based on a hunch that I'd enjoy it. Went to a houseparty right after purchasing and took the set inside with me. Frequently visited the set (left on a table in the living room) throughout the night with a sense of excitement. Watched with a like-minded weirdo pal, then pretended to be gunslingers at a few parties — hats, fake guns, cigars and all. People weren’t that amused. Went grocery shopping as gunslingers and staged western standoffs in the aisles. Really indulged in acting like a (harmless) moron during this time. To this day when I’m around other weirdos I get carried away.

Thinking about the places you’ve lived, are there any environments that are cinematic? Have you lived anywhere that has been regularly depicted onscreen? If so, has this had an influence on your perception of the place, or how you’ve depicted it in any of your writings or artworks?

Grew up on Long Island and frequently visited NYC before moving to it. So for sure. But oddly enough I don’t often think about film history when walking around and stuff. I might be too close to it or something. As far as cinematic environments go, I lived in a shitty tiny trailer for a while after my family was scammed and the house we were about to inherit from my grandma got ruined. So it was just some piece of shit trailer next to a destroyed house. Kind of cinematic. 

Are there films you regularly return to, and do you know why?

I don’t often rewatch movies because there’s always something else I want to see. That said, Romero’s Dawn of the Dead is one I’ll revisit often. It’s my all-time favorite movie. I love the ensemble cast and siege narrative. I love how it feels loose and lived in. It’s an old friend of mine. 

There’s a handful of others. Burton’s Pee-wee’s Big Adventure rewards repeat viewings. It makes me think about watching it at my friend’s house and feeling warm and cozy and laughing our asses off (except for the Large Marge scene). 

Do you have any lines of film dialogue you regularly use in your daily life?

Tons, but I don’t necessarily use them in witty ways. Like… I’ll just randomly say them. Here’s a handful:

“Good morning Mr. Breakfast!” — Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985, Tim Burton).

“I need your clothes, your boots and your [insert thing I am asking for].” — Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991, James Cameron).

“My cat can eat a whole watermelon!” — Rubin & Ed (1991, Trent Harris).

“HEY! Fuck youuuuu.” — Session 9 (2001, Brad Anderson). I don’t particularly love this movie, but that line delivery is too great

“EVERYONNEEEE!” — Léon: The Professional (1994,  Luc Besson). 

“Who’s the baddest?” — The Last Dragon (1985, Michael Schultz).

“I just felt like running!” — Forrest Gump (1994, Robert Zemeckis). 

“Heellooooooo!” —  Mrs. Doubtfire (1993, Chris Columbus).

“FOR.EV.ER.” — The Sandlot (1993, David M. Evans). 

Here’s a recent one (often yelled to someone from another room):  “Mind the doors!” — Death Line (1972, Gary Sherman).

Are there individual scenes that stay with you?

There are a great number of scenes forever living in my mind. I’ll stick to older stuff:

The Brave Little Toaster (1987, Jerry Rees) — The junkyard scene. Cars are being killed while reminiscing about their lives. Fuckin’ brutal even now.

The Bodyguard (1992, Mick Jackson) — Seeing Costner jump out the window into the snow has always stuck with me. I remember it looking really gorgeous and badass. No clue if that scene plays out the way I have it in my mind. Also… hearing Whitney Houston curse! OMG! 

Ghostbusters (1984, Ivan Reitman) — Library ghost. When I first saw that I think I inadvertently yelped. (This was also a formative years movie.)

Clash of the Titans (1981, Desmond Davis) — the battle with Medusa, Bubo the owl, the witches, the monsters, the stop-motion animation… everything. This whole movie is one giant scene in my head. (Another formative years movie.)

Bride of Boogedy (1987, Oz Scott) — Dad from the series (Richard Masur) floating around while possessed by Mr. Boogedy. This really frightened me. Any guardian figure who becomes possessed gets right to the core of me. Possibly some psychological shit going on here.

The Shining (1980, Stanley Kubrick) — bathroom scene. You know the one. Don’t make me describe it. 

Pet Sematary (1989,  Mary Lambert) — Zelda scene… you know the one. Don’t make me describe it. 

A Better Tomorrow (1986, John Woo) — Mark pouring a drink over his ruined leg. 

Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986, Brian Gibson) — Walked in my friend’s living room and I see this terrifying reverend asking to be let inside a house. I run away. Come back just in time to see the tequila worm scene which, combined with the out of context scene before it, was one of the most disturbing things I’d ever seen. 

Troll 2 (1990, Claudio Fragasso) — I wake up in the middle of the night and turn on the tv. I see a kid transforming into a gooey plant thing and then being eaten. For a long time it was just some random clip that frightened me so badly I wouldn't eat for part of the following day. Back then it wasn’t easy to just look up movies. I think I even had to post on some forum a few years later to figure out what it was. One of my favorite movies. I introduced no less than 20 people to this.  

Ugh… there’s so many. I have to make myself stop…

… The Omen “It’s all for you, Damien!” Suspiria mirror flash. The whole hospital segment of Hard Boiled.

Here’s one fairly recent watch for you: To Sleep with Anger (1990, Charles Burnett) — Hattie’s (Ethel Ayler) first appearance. That big explosion of bright white hair. 

What films have roused a visceral reaction in you?

Shitloads. I’m a visceralass person.

The Blob (1988, Chuck Russell) — There’s something super vicious about the kills in this movie that make my palms sweat. The movie theater sequence still gets my fight/flight response going.

Home Alone (1990, Chris Columbus) — Still makes me grit my teeth. Specifically the nail in foot scene. NOOOOOOPPPEEEE.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper) — Especially the famous hammer bash and the meat hook hanging.

In the Mouth of Madness (1994, John Carpenter) — “Today’s mommy’s day!” First saw that scene in my friend’s dimly-lit bedroom and felt my soul trying to escape my body. 

Saving Private Ryan (1998, Steven Spielberg) — The slow knifing scene turned my mouth and throat into an alien desert landscape. 

Don’t Look Now (1973, Nicolas Roeg) — The ending sequence has to be one of the most memorable endings of all time. It’s shocking, weird, brutal, creepy, and beautiful. 

Threads (1984, Mick Jackson) — Absolutely devastating. 

Which of your writings or artworks would adapt most successfully to film?

No idea. How bout you tell me and we work on something together.

Can you give some film recommendations for those who have liked your writing and art?

I didn’t even mention Die Hard, Labyrinth, Beverly Hills Cop, Indiana Jones, Beetlejuice, RoboCop, The Nightmare Before Christmas, etc. etc. … so many huge gaps. 

Here’s my recommendation for people who like my art:

Ratatoing (2007, Michelle Gabriel). Not to be confused with Ratatouille (2007, Brad Bird & Jan Pinkava).

Robin Zlotnick

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AUTUMN CHRISTIAN on film with REBECCA GRANSDEN

AUTUMN CHRISTIAN on film with REBECCA GRANSDEN

November 2, 2021  ·  Interviews & Reviews

Quiet like a bomb waiting for its lit fuse, Autumn Christian has steadily accrued a series of intrepid releases. Nominally designed to satisfy certain genre cravings, Christian’s writing transcends any label simply by being uncommonly good. Her work is strange and provocative, endlessly imaginative, full-blown addicted to ideas, and fearless. For any insight into a mind this committed to creative freedom, the natural starting point is to visit the environment Christian grew up in.

‘I was born in Oklahoma City, but my parents moved to Fort Worth when I was a toddler so my dad could pursue a career in video games. One of my first memories is walking behind the undeveloped land behind my house, full of rocks and dirt, and hearing the hiss of a rattlesnake.

‘I thought most of America looked like the suburbs of DFW. It seemed normal to grow up on a cul-de-sac full of kids and mothers that stayed home, attend Methodist church every Sunday, and go to Chili's or Olive Garden afterward in a black velvet dress.

‘But my grandparents were also dairy farmers who lived on a farm in Kingfisher, just outside of Oklahoma City. I spent a lot of weekends milking cows, climbing into granaries, bottle feeding calves, and digging holes so I could fill them with mud and climb into them wearing my bathing suit. The characters in John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath talk exactly like a lot of the rural Oklahomans I know. 

‘Spending so much time in rural Oklahoma, and then at my Dad's work, surrounded by game developers, engineers, and (at the time) cutting edge tech, has brought a strange dichotomy to my writing. Southern gothic mixed with sci-fi. Video games and the brutal reality of farm life. I'm always trying to merge the high and low. The primitive and the future. To show how they're interrelated.’

The open blue skies above the grasslands of Oklahoma suggest space, while psychological claustrophobia permeates Christian’s fiction. With a surrealistic touch, duality is addressed in innovative ways. Conjoined twins, the mechanistic view of human existence, and the indifference of the natural world, are explored in all their depths and ambiguities. It’s this interfacing of elements that brings an electric quality to Christian’s writing. Raw despondency contrasts with cool systematisation, biological processes become confused, and wildness confronts an accelerating technologized world. These concerns are reflected in pivotal films from childhood years.

‘The first film that really embedded itself into my consciousness was the Miyazaki film Princess Mononoke. I saw it when I was 9 years old with my Dad at the Angelika Theater in Dallas. It was one of the few times I had alone time with my Dad, as by then my parents were divorced. I had never seen a movie with such intensity. I can vividly remember San spitting out the blood of the wolf, her mouth ringed with red as her earrings flashed. It was probably a little too adult for a nine year old, but I was transfixed by it.

‘Then there was The Matrix. I found it in a bin in Best Buy when I was around ten years old, and the description entranced me. At the time I'd never seen a film that dealt with themes of reality and consciousness. It set my brain spinning off into thinking about who we are as human beings, and how our warped perception influences who we are. Rewatching The Matrix now, it definitely has moments of cheese, and Big Blockbuster silliness with its action scenes and tacked on romance. But at the time it seemed perfect.

‘I mostly watched movies with my Dad and my brother, so we ended up watching a lot of Asian martial arts and horror. Tale of Two Sisters, a Korean horror film, was probably my favorite of these. It's a fragmented film, full of confusing madness and vivid imagery, and to this day I still don't completely understand it. Although I don't have a sister, the claustrophobia of the home, feeling trapped as ordinary spaces become horrible, and the split personality of the step-mother all were reminiscent of experiences I had.

Another major film was Blade Runner. I was living with my aunt at the time, after dropping out of college. I had this huge collection of books I had to leave behind, and I'd only managed to bring some of my Philip K. Dick novels with me. She got me Blade Runner to watch back when Netflix still mailed in DVDs. It was comforting in its human warmth juxtaposed with the coldness of the cyberpunk city. Its slow burn still never managed to feel boring. Although it's a beautiful movie I know the particulars of the moment also made me attached to it. I've probably watched Blade Runner more than any other movie. I don't often rewatch movies, it's difficult enough to get me to sit still long enough to watch one these days, but Blade Runner is a dark comfort I can return to time and time again.’

Blade Runner’s poignant exploration of Artificial Intelligence and the ramifications it has for human consciousness points the way towards the central themes of Christian’s fiction. Common to the stories is a sense of human capacity being insufficient to get to grips with interloping forces, whether those forces are from a man-made, natural, or internal source. These sources are often oblique and difficult to pin down, as is the compulsion to write itself.

‘I've been writing fiction pretty much as long as I can remember being able to read. I always considered myself a “writer.” It wasn't a choice I could remember making, and in many ways it never seemed like I had any other choice. Books were a huge part of my life as they allowed me to access worlds that weren't mine, in quiet privacy. To retreat from the world without anyone knowing where I went. 

But cinema, with the exception of video games, is the closest we can get to a full body story experience. It was common for my dad, brother, and I to go to the movies on a weekend and I remember walking out the exit in a daze, nearly in tears, overwhelmed by the intensity of what I'd seen. I wanted to create stories that made people feel like that.’

When queried on films that have had a direct influence on her writing, Christian offers up examples that glory in hyper-stylised representations of violence. ‘The double feature of Planet Terror and Death Proof. The spattered, colored violence of Planet Terror, Rose McGowan with a machine gun leg, combined with the stretched out, cool romanticism of Death Proof only interrupted by spattered bursts of action.’ The choices reflect a time when  cinema twisted sensationalist spectacle and turbocharged exploitation into art. ‘The movie Oldboy with its strange intensity, evocative oddness, and unrepentant violence. The violent melancholy of the protagonist eating a live squid lives rent-free in my head.’ Films synonymous with an iconic visual sensibility also dominate. ‘Sin City, with its beautiful darkness and entangled narrative from multiple perspectives, and Akira, with its nightmare cityscapes and intense, overwhelming horror of being stuck with a power you don't understand in a rapidly changing body.’

Key to Christian’s relationship with film is living through a time of transition for the medium.

‘Cinema has had a huge impact on a writer's writing in general. Compare anything that people write now compared to before television. It's leaner. Sharper. We all now share a sort of visual shorthand, and no longer feel the need to spend pages in loving, lush descriptions of things that we've all seen on a screen. We can instead focus on short, punchy, provocative moments. We can choose to pick words that directly hack into the reader's brains.

‘I grew up in the 90s, right before television started to get really good. I watched a lot of episodic, forgettable shows before I was introduced to shows like Firefly, Dexter, and 6 Feet Under in my late teens. It was then that I realized narration could evolve into something that felt so real, it was like it curled around my brain. It wasn't just something to have on in the background while I was doing something. It forced my attention. Narration is a constantly evolving process, and as our culture develops, we get better at understanding and creating it.’

This is fiction that knows where fear lies — it’s not with riding the ghost train but with the guy who pulls the lever to start the ride. It’s him who we repeat rumours about, who walks in his own mythology, who steals kids. Christian’s characters often deal with mental anguish, many of the stories addressing emotional distress and neglect. 

‘I think trauma is at the center of many stories, because trauma is centered so much within the human experience. Although it's a much more recent movie, the grief that permeates Hereditary is one of the most vivid and unflinching perspectives I've ever seen.’

Her characters are flawed, struggling at times, but also defiant. The seductive power in the transgression of boundaries is acknowledged, as is the fascination with figures that embrace extremes of human behavior. The sunshine man, who makes an appearance in “Sunshine, Sunshine” — a story featured in Christian’s collection Ecstatic Inferno (Fungasm Press, 2015) — stands out as particularly memorable, and yet he makes a hauntingly brief appearance. Christian’s poeticism infects the grit of her narratives with an emotional intensity that is at times heartbreakingly lyrical, and at others menacingly bleak. 

‘I have always been intrigued by dark, powerful villains and antiheroes. Men who may or may not be alien, almost Lovecraftian, larger than life, and sometimes stunning in their cruelty. I think of Hannibal in Silence of The Lambs (and Hannibal in the series), Randall Flagg in The Stand (although he's scarier in the books), Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, Bobby Axelor in the show Billions, and Dexter Morgan in Dexter.’

With categorisation increasingly moot, if it ever was a concrete construct, and cross-pollination across all mediums common, Christian is reflective about the place of her own writing.

‘I'm usually considered a horror or sci-fi author, but when a story comes to me I don't pay attention to genre. I have always been interested in the merging of highbrow and lowbrow art. Genre and literary. I want to feed someone broccoli that goes down like chocolate. Have them get a taste of Faulkner or Dostoevsky, but it reads like Stephanie Meyer. Or, for a film equivalent, you sit down to a fun movie like Legally Blonde and find that it's actually a fairly intelligent piece of art about our ideas of perception, attractiveness, social clout, and how we form friendships. 

‘I don't care so much about being seen as intellectual as I am about transferring ideas like metaphysical viruses. Some people think style or characters or deep meanings are the most important things, but above all, I think a story needs to be engaging. If it isn't engaging that means something isn't working correctly. It's a difficult trick to pull off, to merge fun with deepness, but one that I'm fascinated by. I want to generate ideas that people can't tear their eyeballs away from.’

Imbued with loaded and vivid imagery, Christian’s fiction is inherently cinematic and almost demands to be adapted for film or television. Forefront in her mind as best placed is a 2019 CLASH Books release. 

‘Of all my books that I'd like to be adapted, it'd have to be Girl Like A Bomb. I can see it either being a terrible or a brilliant movie, depending on how the director handled the sex scenes. I feel like the book itself rides the line between B thriller and cult classic, cheesiness and beauty, so that makes sense to me.’

Undermine the algorithm:

‘If any fans of my writing are reading this, I'd recommend these 3 movies:

‘The Handmaiden, an adaptation of the novel Fingersmith, by Korean director Park Chan-Wook. It's an erotic psychological thriller without a wasted moment. I found it incredibly moving, provocative, and romantic.

‘Antichrist from Lars Von Trier. Intense, melancholy, peaceful, and excruciating all at once. One woman's descent into madness, back into the crucible of nature.

‘The Cronenberg film, Existenz, which combines tech, hallucinatory realities, and mind-warping provocative horror.’

Robin Zlotnick

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GARY J. SHIPLEY on film with REBECCA GRANSDEN

GARY J. SHIPLEY on film with REBECCA GRANSDEN

October 19, 2021  ·  Interviews & Reviews

Rebecca Gransden: Your work explores extremity. Extremity of violence yes, and also conceptual extremity, extremity in language use, of idea. I instinctually back away from inquiry into direct influence, seeing it as reductive, although I have noticed trends among artists. To some, influence is a question of attraction to work reflective of, or in kinship with, their work, and to others influence exists as an energising feedback loop. With that in mind, how do you view extremity in cinema and, by extension, its relationship with and influence on your writing?

Gary J. Shipley: Yes, “conceptual extremity” and “extremity in language” are very much the focus for me. The violence is often a means to reinforce, or probe, or otherwise explain, what for me is a conceptual or linguistic problem. In The Unyielding, for instance, the body horror is always permeated by the abstract in order to establish and sustain the immovable wife’s paradoxical being. With extremity in cinema, I suppose I’m invariably trying to see into/through/around it in the same way. But often when films are described as extreme, that’s not my experience: I mean, who are these people still so ripe for shock and umbrage? Nekromantik segues into The Wizard of Oz into The Golden Glove into Sir Henry at Rawlinson End into Angst into My Dinner With Andre into The Poughkeepsie Tapes into Swoon into She’s Allergic to Cats into I Stand Alone and who’s to say who’s going too far, and who fucking cares to listen? Losing your virginity to a warm turd might be considered a trifle immoderate, but then there’s always Sade-the-philosopher at work in the background. I think the notion of extremity in the arts is mostly overblown and outmoded anyway. It’s nothing we’re not daydreaming about in the shower, or somebody somewhere isn’t doing in their bedroom or basement, nothing some poor sod isn’t enduring, or someone else getting off on. What about that video of a puppy being fed to a snake, the footage of industrial farming, the Dog Meat Festival in Yulin…? Violence and extreme cruelty are everywhere, nothing new; it’s the way we gloss over them that’s often extreme to me, and repellent, and potentially dangerous (and therefore interesting).

RG: Repetition and simulation feature prominently in Terminal Park, where you utilise the reenactment of an iconic scene from cinema history, a scene that has been the subject of reinterpretation multiple times and ways. Could you expand upon this choice and your intentions with regard to artistic discourse when it comes to the mutation of meaning inherent in exploration of this kind?

GJS: The Psycho shower scene’s ubiquity and theoretical baggage were essential, with so many useful resources to draw on. Aside from all the Hitchcock plums, you’ll no doubt spot a fair few others as well: Funeral Parade of Roses, Dogville, Body Double… Anyway, I’m clearly playing with some well-trodden ideas in Baudrillard and Deleuze. As Norwegian artist Nikolas Berg puts it in the book, albeit borderline delirious at this point: “Copying feeds on itself and once started can never be finished; and as all moments already exist so too do all copies, and there are perfect copies and less than perfect copies, each again copied regardless of fidelity to their originals, and so the space for original creation shrinks and grows at the same time: to zero on one level and to everything that could ever possibly exist on the other. […] But difference on this model is decay, and it has a long history, and is heading in only one direction: outward and outward to the moment of (self-referential) rupture.” I’d already written my book on Baudrillard, Stratagem of the Corpse: Dying With Baudrillard, when I wrote Terminal Park, so I had his body of work acting as a kind of lens. But then I’ve also long enjoyed exploring films with the same narrative core: Wages of Fear/Sorcerer, Le Feu Follet/Oslo, August 31st, all the many takes on Crime and Punishment, from Fear to the brilliant Norte: The End of History, etc. I remember when reading HHhH how when Binet lists all the different film versions there have been about Operation Anthropoid (the events surrounding the assassination of Heydrich), I’d already seen them all. Not that I’d done anything with it. Just for the joy of comparing the different approaches, you know. And then I got the film adaptation of that, so there was another one. There’s Synecdoche, New York as well, which is a film I admire and probably played a part on some level. And The Exterminating Angel, which is always lurking somewhere. I’m also fascinated by the kind of paranoid pattern building that, while respectful of the facts, imposes some speculative and warped order – the kind you see in, to take a recent example, Under the Silver Lake. 

RG: There is forensic clarity to your writing, an observational quality that can be as repellent as it is fascinating. When it comes to form, how much of your style is a consequence of natural aptitude and how much calculated to serve your intention for the text?

GJS: Form is crucial to my work, has been from the start. My first book, Theoretical Animals, depicts a world of abstracted cannibalism and cannibalises itself as it does so. This autocannibalisation involves the second half of the book having the exact same letters as the first half, with each section from the second half rearranging the same letters as its corresponding section in the first half. Or Necrology (written with Kenji Siratori) where the structure mirrors a torture method used by Etruscan pirates. With Terminal Park, one of the most obvious formal influences is the extreme shift in focus (from the fission apocalypse to the “PsychoBarn”) that occurs approximately one third in, as it does in Psycho. And like the film, we move from the exterior to the interior. The other books I’ve written that have been most formally influenced by cinema would be 30 Fake Beheadings and You With Your Memory are Dead. With the former, it all started when Rauan Klassnik put the germ in my head (with his idea that I review some unseen films for a magazine he was co-editing) and I couldn’t get it out. But I needed the films to be rooted in the existing reality of the unreal, and so the concocted films, I felt, had to be sequels. And what better way to reinforce the violence of the encounter than by inventing sequels for films that actively militated against that possibility. The book draws on decapitation theory and the post-cephalic nature of the cinematic experience, so it came as no real surprise that documenting the viewer (and his escalating absence to himself) quickly became as important as documenting the invented film itself. And the two fed on each other. “Antichrist 2” was the first in this decollative sequence, but the viewer demanded more and more cuts, and being obliging I obliged. YWYMAD is the result of watching Begotten on a loop for two weeks: ekphrastic writing as ritual, if you like. Warewolff! would be another example of my attempting to marry language-play and formal concept. If we think in terms of invisible forms (à la Kevin Jackson), even the title of W sucked more energy than maybe it should have. To briefly explain: in Finnegans Wake, “warewolff!” (beware wolf) is what the Floras or the Maggies shout to Glug (or Shem), who is the wolf of which we should beware. Glugg fails to see what is hidden (cannot guess the colour of Issy/Izod’s knickers) so becomes hidden, is sent into exile. He is akin to the devil, is self-absorbed and self-absorbing (“he make peace in his preaches and play with esteem”), can only answer the riddle if he can see himself in his entirety (Shem/Glugg and Shaun/Chuff) but cannot bear to do it, is ugly and foul-mouthed, the banished “bold bad bleak boy of the storybooks,” and a language tutor to boot, making it only fitting that when he sneaks back for revenge it is through language that he is revealed: a mocking bard (“mocking birde to micking barde”). Then there’s then all the D&G stuff about becoming-wolf: located at the edge but not outside society, a multiplicity, a hole, a formless form… Anyway, given how perfectly all this aligns with the “creature” in/as the book, it soon became the only title I could imagine.    

RG: Your work investigates destruction, whether this is bodily, symbolic, or cultural. With the focus on collapse, and a disintegrating force, your writing often has a desensitising effect. Do you actively use desensitisation for its own sake or do you view your work as in dialogue with it? With this in mind are there examples of desensitisation in cinema that resonate with you or your work?

GJS: That desensitising effect is less a conscious technique and more an honest reflection of where I’m writing from: a felt distance, an unwillingness to participate in so many of the prevalent fabrications of identity. Destruction is not the issue for me, only suffering. And from here to the meaninglessness of suffering (and of meaning itself), and therein a possibility for meaning as esoteric and fervid as it is ruinous. The first film that comes to mind is Peeping Tom, where the desensitisation is itself deeply felt. It’s also there in the work of Lars von Trier and Yorgos Lanthamos, for example. And in Spoorloos, Funny Games, The White Ribbon, and on and on. If you want a film that might just destroy you a little bit (even with everything they had to leave out), try the short Detainment. 

RG: As a secular form of Apocalypticism has taken hold in culture, end of the world tropes are more than cliché, but normalised. Do you consider your work to be in dialogue with this trend? Are there examples of apocalyptic cinema you see as particularly successful in reflecting this?

GJS: As I make clear in Terminal Park, the apocalypse is a disclosure, a revealing of something formerly hidden. And while this harps back to its religious origins, it is still present in the secularised versions you mention, and in the best examples of apocalyptic art, literature and film. It is this end as revelation that I find interesting. Not the tired notion of environmental and societal collapse exposing the best and worst of human nature (which is only a faux reveal, I mean who didn’t know this already?) that is the focus of so much mainstream work, but a true reveal of something truly hidden: a seismic shock, a jolt, a complete and utter mindfuck. I also don’t think you can get away from the salvationist implications of this gap.   

RG: One area of your work that is especially striking is your representation of the body. Whether objectified, idolised, annihilated, or deconstructed, the body glistens in all its glory. Your work acknowledges the seduction of transgressing fleshly boundaries. Do you take inspiration from body horror in cinema?

GJS: It’s there, of course, along with those from literature and art. And sometimes it’s direct, but more frequently the influence is oblique. There are the usual, I guess, scenes/images that set up home in your head and never leave: the nefarious matter, the stuffs and blobs, the mergings, augmentations and depletions, and the usual cinematic touchstones (Lynch, Cronenberg, Carpenter…), and those scenes implanted in me (and many others) for good, from films as various as Possession, Bug, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, The Human Centipede, Un Chen Andalou, Fiend Without a Face, Blood of the Beasts, and on and on. And I wonder if I ever really escaped those Nightmare on Elm Street films that I lapped up as a kid? Or the Hellraiser, Exorcist, Omen, Evil Dead, Alien franchises? And here comes Udo Kier choking on whore blood and scissoring off a human head. Outside of cinema, Francis Bacon’s the master, and Lispector’s cockroach is my kind of madeleine. And yes, my daydreams are the kind where Charters and Caldicott turn up in Trash Humpers bleating about sandwich fillings, checking cricket scores, vigorously shagging refuse.  

RG: Part of what makes your work compelling to read is the sense of being pulled in a certain direction, only to encounter a series of wild juxtapositions. As soon as there is philosophical underpinning, there is a turn to the visceral and experiential, and the alienating and cerebral is punctuated by stark and searing images, often captured in one sentence. Your use of imagery is vivid and electric. Do you see an equivalent in cinema? Does the structure of film have any bearing on your style?

GJS: Cinematic techniques definitely seep in. They’ve doubtless permeated my experience of the world so thoroughly they’d be hard to escape. But then it’s also worth remembering that a lot of these techniques were already there in literature, so it’s in no way exclusively cinematic. I suppose you’re referencing jump cuts or rack focusing, or montage, double/multiple exposures, whatever, which are all over the place. The challenge is to do it without them looking like clunky/inferior versions of their cinematic cousins.

RG: Returning to Terminal Park, I see the glacial intellectualism that characterises some conceptual art, directly invoked by the strange and initially abstruse reenactment that takes centre stage for some sections. Do you make a clear distinction between the use of conceptual art inside the narrative and the narrative itself as a form of conceptual art, or are these lines blurred, non-existent, or for the reader to decide?

GJS: The hope is that they become blurred. Lynch, like Tarkovsky and others before him, wanted to make paintings that moved (which of course he did quite literally in his early shorts), and we see the narrational and visual freedom this affords him; but it’s also there in the detached and sombre weirdness of Roy Andersson’s films, in which everything feels so staged and abiotic that the movement itself becomes a kind of aberration. And then there are the less integrated uses, seen recently in films such as Velvet Buzzsaw, Paint, or The Burnt Orange Heresy. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that there are many ways that writing and art can intersect. For instance, Serial Kitsch (an epic poem I made from the appropriated words of serial killers) was one way of attempting this, and “The Mutant” (which merged the cerebral and abstract practice of creating a work of conceptual art with the artist’s brain cancer) was another. Actually, the novel I’ve just finished revolves around three uncharacteristically dark paintings by René Magritte, so on it goes.  

RG: From its origins cinema has illuminated by illusion. What place does art and artifice have in your work? In a time of immense media and information saturation and film as a medium grapples with its context, do you see the density of your work as a response to or reflection of this shift?

GJS: It is central, inescapable. It puts me in mind of Baudrillard’s quip about AI, how because it lacks artifice it therefore lacks intelligence. Or as Lisa Robertson puts it: “artifice is the soul.” Works of realism that are supposedly free of artifice, as if that amounts to some badge of honour, that’s where the contrivance is. Which in itself needn’t be a bad thing, although it all too frequently is. The prodigiously trite as authentic lived experience is quite the gilded shit right now.    

RG: Returning to destruction and decay, is it necessary for the screen itself to break down?  Should celluloid self-destruct?

GJS: The screen breaks down all the time, it’s the default. The hard thing is to see the screen. And once you’ve seen it, to stop seeing it. 

RG: If you could give some recommendations for films that would be enjoyed by those who are fans of your writing that would be great. 

GJS: I watch 1-2 films a day, most days, have done for a lot of years now, so if I may I’ll pick in no order from the films rewatched in the last month or so that these fans, if you can ever reach such recherché phenomena, might well enjoy:

A Dark Song, Simon Killer, Tony, Saint Maud, Escape From Tomorrow, The Shout, La femme infidèle, Le Boucher, The Transfiguration, The Night Eats the World, L’humanité, Twentynine Palms, Downloading Nancy, My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To, These are the Damned, Uzak, Personal Shopper, Most Beautiful Island, Upstream Color, I Blame Society, Apartment Zero, Possessor, Burning, In the Earth, Alphaville, Bad Timing, Providence…

Robin Zlotnick

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ZAC SMITH on Normal Life with REBECCA GRANSDEN

ZAC SMITH on Normal Life with REBECCA GRANSDEN

October 7, 2021  ·  Interviews & Reviews

What is an ordinary day? With our days increasingly under analysis, it’s a reasonable question. Everything is Totally Fine arrives at an opportune time. Zac Smith’s stories are permeated with seemingly mundane events, actions familiar to the everyday, the stuff that makes up life. And life is strange. What do we feel when we think of ordinary days? Nostalgia? Longing? Resentment? Relief? As Zac Smith sat down to write these stories, maybe he had some of these in mind, or perhaps he wanted to forget about them. His ordinary days gave rise to a collection of stories, something he didn’t know he was doing at first. It’s this sense of serendipity, arbitrariness, and absurdity that trails his words. With that in mind, here is Zac Smith’s ordinary day.

start the day right

Rebecca Gransden: What happens when you get up in the morning?

Zac Smith: Currently I wake up around 5:45 to do chicken chores and let out one or both of my dogs. The chicken chores involve cleaning and refilling their water thing, unlocking the door to the henhouse, and cleaning the poop out from where they sleep. Usually I try to go back to bed for a little bit after this, but sometimes my toddler wakes up and I can’t go back to bed.

RG: What happens after that?

ZS: I cook breakfast and brew coffee. Breakfasts I cook include: scrambled eggs and toast, omelets and toast, egg sandwiches with tempeh bacon and avocado, biscuits and veggie sausage gravy, scrambled tofu with peppers and onions, savory oatmeal bowls, and oatmeal with banana and pecans. I think my mornings are pretty normal.

RG: What happens at lunchtime?

ZS: I cook lunch and we eat lunch. Lunches I cook include: hummus sandwiches, mac and cheese with lima beans and bbq tofu, black beans and rice with fried plantains, some kind of grain or pasta salad(s), shitty fajitas with tofu, quesadillas, and avocado toast with feta. Sometimes my kid helps me cook - today we made a vegetable soup with dumplings. Then, when work allows, I hang out with my kid while my wife gets some alone time to work or rest. We usually read books together or play with magnetic building tiles or toy animals. 

RG: What happens in your afternoons?

ZS: Things I like to do in the afternoons that aren’t “going to work” include taking my toddler to a playground, going for walks or hikes, playing at home with my toddler (e.g. building an obstacle course), and cooking with my toddler (e.g. baking cookies). Sometimes in the evening I take time to play my guitar alone. More recently we’ve been checking for chicken eggs in the afternoons, as well.

RG: Do you travel to and from anywhere? What is that journey like?

ZS: I have been working from home since February 2020. For a long time the only places we would go were nature areas. Last fall, I started taking my toddler to places like coffee shops or small/outdoor stores/markets. Usually, on Sundays, we spend the morning driving ~20 minutes out to a nature area, then a coffee shop, then a small market. I’m laughing at myself saying I do the same things in different ways and places. We’ve only recently done some longer trips, because of the pandemic - we spent the day in Portland, ME to see some family and a few days in Upstate New York to see old friends. My kid seems to enjoy road trips and our friends were supportive of spending a lot of time in parks and playgrounds just hanging out. But most of what we do around our home is like a 2-10 minute drive.

intermission: where Zac Smith explains why Everything is Totally Fine

RG: How long did it take to write the book?

ZS: The oldest piece in the book was originally written in mid-2018, and the most recent story was written in May 2021. The earliest ones weren’t written with the idea of including them in a book, and then when it all started taking shape, I rewrote them in various ways to make them better fit the tone or to include self-referential (self=book) content.  When working on it as a book, I wanted not to have too many of the pieces previously published online, since I think that in general the only people who will read it have also read one or more stories by me online, and I want them to feel like it wasn’t a waste of money to buy the book. In terms of getting the book published, there were/are only a few presses I really liked and felt like sending it to: Soft Skull, Tyrant, Future Tense, House of Vlad, and Muumuu House. I received kind and personalized rejections from Yuka at Soft Skull (who’s now at Graywolf) and Kevin at Future Tense, was ignored by Giancarlo (which was fine/expected, based on what I know about how he responded to book pitches; he was nice and supportive when I originally reached out to him), and accepted by House of Vlad. I didn’t have any expectation about publishing it via Muumuu House since I assume Tao gets a lot of unsolicited book pitches and he hadn’t published a book via Muumuu House in ten years, but we had been emailing about stuff/writing and then he offered to publish it, which surprised and excited me. I felt bad about pulling it from House of Vlad but Brian seemed ok with it and hadn’t started working on editing it really by then, so it felt like I hadn’t wasted too much of his time. Muumuu House is/was consistently one of my favorite places and I admire Tao’s editorial vision, and he has been very excited about and supportive of the book.

RG: I’d love to know how you chose to compile the collection—the order of the pieces, the selection of segments, etc. It’s a cohesive collection. Were the individual pieces conceived as part of a larger work, or did that take shape over time?

ZS: I’m glad it reads as cohesive. The book was originally going to be much shorter and published online as part of a collaborative project with Giacomo Pope, but then we didn’t feel confident we’d get more people to contribute like we wanted, so we took our respective collections and reworked them for books—his poems mostly ended up in his Chainsaw Poems & Other Poems and mine became Everything is Totally Fine. The original working title was Everything is Totally Fucked and Giacomo claims to have proposed that title as a joke based on what I wanted to write, when describing it to him, and then I just used it unironically. That seed was something like seven stories, and when I decided to make a book out of it, I started writing more specifically to fill it out and let the themes/ideas naturally develop from there. It went through a few drafts where I would try to flesh it out with previously-written-but-unedited stories, print to line edit everything, then categorize the stories based on certain things about them, and then figure out which categories made sense and thus which stories should be cut. I think this was an effective process and helped me feel like I wasn’t including any stories that wouldn’t make sense in the full book context. Also, around this time, Mike Andrelczyk would send writing prompts consisting of 3-4 unrelated photographs in a group chat we’re in together, and I would try to write something really quickly based on those, and then later I scrolled through the group chat to edit and add them in. There are probably close to 20 stories that I wrote for the book which aren’t in the final version, which seems like a good number relative to the size of the final collection.

In terms of sequencing, I realized I had about 2x as many first-person stories as third-person stories, so I divided the book into thirds, with the middle section being the third-person stories. Once I decided to do that, it helped guide me in terms of writing additional stories and experimenting with ways in which the narration is framed or “revealed,” which was fun for me, and it helped the sequencing. For sequencing in general, I tried to make sure I didn’t have many stories that were overly similar right next to each other, and to break up lengths a little bit. The last third I think has the longest pieces and is less cohesive, while the first section has some of the shortest pieces and is more thematically cohesive, which I think is funny in terms of naming the sections and maybe gives a little bit of an arc to the collection.

I want to note, too, that around when I started sending the book out to places, I traded manuscripts with Crow Jonah Norlander and he gave me some good suggestions in terms of copyedits but also a desire to see a certain type of story in a certain place, so I reworked an older piece for that because it seemed like a good idea, and he gave me some insight on some of the categories of story and that helped me when later writing more stories. I also got very nice and similar feedback from Graham Irvin, who gave some good suggestions specifically about doing call-backs or making certain stories more referential to being in a collection, which I thought was good, and I tried to do sometimes in a way that made me laugh. Alan Good provided copyedits and suggestions for ten stories in exchange for sending him some vinyl records, which was fun, and I recommend hiring him for copyediting. When finalizing the book, Tao recommended replacing four stories and asked me to write new ones for him to look at, so I sent him a mix of things I wrote over some two-week period and things that I had originally cut from earlier drafts, and then we finalized everything. We’ve finished the copyedits and are waiting on potential blurbs before finishing the cover and printing them, as of August 5, 2021.

the end of the day approaches

RG: When do you eat in your day? Your book features foodstuffs—pizza, yogurt, cookies—in sometimes antagonistic scenarios. Is this coincidental, or are you in a secret war with food?

ZS: I think about food a lot and eat a lot of food, partly because I do all the cooking in my family, and partly because of how eating/going out to eat was a big part of my family dynamic as a child. I like that you thought of the food being in antagonistic scenarios in my book - I think my relationship with food is unhealthy, in general. But I also think food is funny. Most food seems really dumb, but I also like food and have a lot of both good and bad memories associated with food. And I usually feel really interested when I read stories where people eat food - what they eat, how much they eat, when they eat it, etc.

RG: If you stay in one place in your day, what is that place like and what is your opinion of it?

ZS: I spend most of my time at home. I like where I live. It feels open and airy and we have a nice yard now to do things in, like raise chickens and garden and run around. Our neighborhood is pretty quiet and we are close to nature, although I feel like I don’t take advantage of nature as much as I’d like to. I spend a lot of time in our small office doing work for my job. I think I would enjoy never looking at a computer again.

RG: Is there anywhere in your day you make a special effort to travel to just to write? Do you have a routine when it comes to your writing? Does having a routine, or lack of one, influence your writing?

Where do you usually write?

ZS: I haven’t really prioritized writing lately, so no, I don’t think so. Usually I do my best writing on a laptop in a place that’s not my office, like sitting on my bed. I don’t have a routine. I’m unsure how this affects my writing. I think maybe having a lack of routine means I take long breaks between projects and so my writing is demarcated into periods or larger ideas, instead of a continuous flow of writing.

RG: Do you relax? If so, what does that look like?

ZS: I feel like I am often trying to relax because of some baseline level of anxiety. I usually try to relax by lying down on a couch, bed, or hammock. I enjoy taking naps in my bed whenever possible. I think I might simply be a lazy person who doesn’t want to do anything. I think I also relax by quietly doing chores.

RG: How is your evening and/or night?

ZS: My evenings usually involve putting my toddler to bed, locking up the chickens, and going to bed. The bedtime thing can be very stressful, but it’s also very nice and, I think, grounding/connecting. When I do bedtime, I usually end up singing 4-5 indie rock songs while holding my kid’s hand and lying in bed. After, sometimes, I watch a movie with my wife, or drive out to do chores, like going to a hardware store that’s ~20 minutes away. At night I usually read in bed.

RG: Does boredom influence your writing?

ZS: I think so. I think I started writing to alleviate boredom. I’m unsure how frequently I experience boredom, now, because of technology and my daily responsibilities. I want to be bored more. I think some of the stories in my book are about boredom and anxiety, though. I try to make an effort to pay attention to what’s happening around me when I am in public so I can see things that I could write about, which I think means I try to not preventatively stave off boredom when I’m in public, but I’m not very good at it.

RG: Have you noticed if you are more likely to have ideas for your writing at a particular time or place? Is there a type of circumstance that is conducive to bringing on ideas?

Do any ideas arrive in dreams?

ZS: I’m not sure. I think maybe I think of stories most often while walking my dogs. I think I’ve dreamt about story ideas before but they usually don’t make any sense when I think about them later. One time, recently, I was falling asleep and thought of a good story idea, so I got out of bed to write it and email it to myself, but it didn’t end up in the book.

 

Everything Is Totally Fine is due out from Muumuu House on January 18, 2022, and is available for preorder.

Robin Zlotnick

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