Room Temperature is the latest film collaboration by Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley. It focuses on a family-run, amateur haunted house and was shot on location in Southern California. The film recently screened at San Francisco’s Frameline film festival, and before that at Los Angeles Festival of Movies. It will soon show in Europe. Although the concept of co-directing a film is unusual, the rapport between Cooper and Farley is natural… as evidenced by how they often finish each other’s thoughts in this QA with Jack Skelley. And this reflects in the quietly supernatural vibe of Room Temperature, which is spare and cool, but with deep emotional undercurrents.
Jack: Can you describe the division of labor between the two of you? Dennis, one would assume that you’re responsible for the script and Zac is more responsible for directing camera angles, blocking, and those kinds of things. Is that true?
Dennis: I’m not completely responsible for the text. I do the vast majority of that work, but everything is in consultation with Zac. He has lots of ideas that I can’t implement textually because I’m not as visually inclined as he is. But we talk about everything. And we’re so in sync about what we want that I trust him. Occasionally, I do question some visual decisions, but on the set, Zac is directing and I’m mostly there working with the actors and conferring with Zac. But as it’s being written, I’m basically the guy at the computer.
Zac: The films are complete collaborations. We decide what we want to do and how to do it together. Neither Dennis nor I are classically trained filmmakers, so I guess neither one of us really knows how other directors make their films, but our collaborations feel both more complex and fluid than one does words and the other makes images. But yes, Dennis is a writer, a really great one, so I know better than to mess with his intuitions on that front. But we make all the decisions together. We do the casting together, for example.
Dennis: And decisions about choosing locations are all completely mutual. But he is stronger in that area. So it divides up a little bit, but it’s always a back-and-forth.
Jack: How often do these decisions happen on the set, in real time?
Dennis: Oh, quite a lot.
Zac: The goal on set is to be really attuned and responsive to what’s going on. We plan meticulously ahead of time so that we can feel free to react to a change in circumstances outside our control and to embrace happy accidents. There’s nothing more thrilling than something unexpected happening on set that supersedes our expectations, and to a certain extent we bet on and hope for happy accidents as part of the process. Both Dennis and I are particularly excited with working with the performers. Because we’re working mostly with non-professional actors, we cast people for what they can bring to the projects and welcome their own senses of intuition and insights into their characters. The film is really the result of a collaboration with the cast and crew that participated in bringing it to life.
Dennis: When we’re shooting, it’s very common that a line we thought would work isn’t working. So we’ll cut the line or change the words. The same is true with the visuals: Yes, the films are storyboarded. But on set, we’ll realize a scene will be better if we change the POV.
Jack: It was very interesting to compare the screenplay with the final product. A lot of dialog was cut. Now, having two directors is fairly unusual, right? Are there any models for this sort of dual relationship?
Dennis: Well, there are the Coen brothers, Straub-Huillet, the Wachowskis … It’s not completely unprecedented. There’s never any confusion about that: We know what the other is capable of, and often one of us will back off and let the other person do what they need to do.
Jack: Both of you are based in Paris, while Room Temperature was filmed in Southern California. It seems like a lot of effort to pick-up and relocate from your home base to California to do this.
Dennis: We just set up camp at my Los Angeles apartment. We have the advantage of knowing a lot of people in Los Angeles. All kinds of friends to lean on. Our casting director Erin Cassidy and our main on-the-ground producer Luka Fisher for example, were based there.
Zac: We made our two previous films in France, which was wonderful in that we could finance them in part with public grants. But to be eligible the films have to be shot in majority in the French language. Early on, we tried making Room Temperature in France, but it quickly became clear that this had to be shot in the United States and in English. Home-haunts unfortunately don’t yet exist in France, and while we had always envisioned Permanent Green Light (our previous film) as a French film, we wrote this one in a way where translating it into French would have done real damage. It was a challenge to shoot the film in the United States, but it was absolutely the right thing to do and we got to collaborate with some incredibly talented people.
Jack: The collaboration between you is unusual and often feels seamless: The dialog is lean and punctuated by pregnant pauses. So is the visual framing with its own kinds of pauses. There are long, wide shots and slow pans. In this way, the film says more by saying less. Thoughts?
Dennis: We have a really strong sense of the rhythm we want the film to have and how that will work. The dialogue is spare, but it has a lot of weight on its shoulders and the visuals are as important as the dialogue. Some of our favorite filmmakers such as James Benning make films with almost no dialogue to provide breathing room. Our films are poetic and formally surprising, but they provide time for the audience to settle-in to the pacing and commune with the characters.
Zac: In a way, the rhythm and the pacing act as the glue that allows us to have sometimes wildly divergent tones coexist in the film. In a weird way while the film can feel somewhat slow at times, it’s actually incredibly dense.
Dennis: This approach worked well with our Southern California desert location. It’s shot in the middle of nowhere with a family who is very isolated. They don’t have cameras or cell phones or computers, as far as we know. Not even a car. They live in a very closed-off world. So having all that space and silence reinforces the emptiness of the world they live in.
Jack: Let’s talk about the differences between writing on the page and screenwriting: Writing on the page depends on the reader to provide some interpretation of the text’s dialog and imagery, while film, being more concrete and visual, presents the image more straightforwardly and the viewer is a less “active” participant in the experience as a work of art. Do you agree with how I pose this?
Dennis: Yes, that’s obviously the way I think about writing. The novels don’t create such a solid world that the readers feel like they’re just an observer, right? They participate. And what’s interesting about film is it’s the exact opposite. Because the film is very solid, it does take all the responsibility. We try to open that up, so that the film is obviously a carefully made object, but at the same time it feels very translucent. It’s not so locked down that the audience is casually observing. They have to pay a lot of attention. We just saw the new Wes Anderson film. I love his films, but they are the most extremely fascistically visualized films. There’s no way our films are so completely locked up. But I feel a certain kinship with what he does. We do angle for images and shots that are very highly composed. So it’s weird.
Jack: What is the origin of Room Temperature’s setting of a family-made haunted house? Dennis, knowing your obsession with neighborhood haunted houses, it must come from you. You even make Halloween pilgrimages to Southern California to visit many haunted houses.
Dennis: Both of us are massive fans of them, and we think of it as an art form. On the surface level it’s just a family having fun and trying to do something cool and make their haunted house better than the neighbors’. But they put so much effort into something that is always a failure on some level… because they don’t have enough funds or because it’s just them and their kids playing with the concept of a haunted house. I love the amateurism of that. All of our films so far have been about people who can’t achieve what they want to achieve. We tried to capture that in this case using the setting of a haunted house whose aspirations are higher than the family’s imaginations and budget can realize.
Zac: Yeah. It’s a shared fantasy that the characters have. But it’s also the individual fantasy of each family member. One kid will be really into the acting and theatrical part of it, while another member of the family will be into the architecture and fog machines. In terms of narrative structure, home-haunts are daring and experimental by default. You enter the first room and there’s a pretty classic introduction video explaining the premise of the haunt, but then you go walk into the second room and somebody was obviously just really obsessed with the animatronic ghoul they saw at the Halloween store, so they bought five and decided to operate them out of synch, and it doesn’t really fit with the surface logic of the haunted house, but the conflagration of the two is really generative. The visitor going through this haunted house can project narrative meaning onto something that wasn’t necessarily built to accommodate it, at least not in any literal way, and that creates the kind of openness that we’re seeking to have in our films. Haunted houses are like films in that they use acting, writing, music, architecture… In Room Temperature the house is a setting and a character, but it’s also a kind of analog for the film.
Jack: In fact, there’s much discussion among the characters about whether the haunted house is succeeding. One of the first lines in the film is an outside character asking, “What’s wrong with your house!”
Dennis: Then he says, “I’m not against it.”
Jack This seems like a statement on not just the artistic abilities of the families. It’s an observation that can extend to the father character, who is like the creative director. And there’s definitely something very “wrong” with him. Now, in addition to haunted houses, you two share an obsession with theme parks. Symbolically, thematically, what connects these two art forms?
Dennis: In a dark ride, the experience is out of your control. The car is devising your pace and each passenger sees exactly the same thing. Whereas in a haunted house you can hang around or go look at details that intrigue you. It’s not like everybody’s constantly being propelled forward, but there is a unifying quality that makes it a haunted house. You know, the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland in California is not completely dissimilar. In an earlier version of our script there was a point where people got in a little car and experienced a section of the house that way. It was impractical and overly expensive to realize, but we were very excited by that concept.
Zac: There used to be a haunted house called Mystic Motel that had a ride-through component. It was created by a 14- or 15-year-old kid who was obviously very ambitious and excited about the mechanics of dark rides. He used one of those electrified shopping carts designed for disabled people to navigate giant grocery stores. He had it follow a track in his basement and built a remote-control system so he could decide when it would stop and go, controlling your rhythm.
Dennis: Some of the big cities in Europe, such as London or Amsterdam, have the London Dungeon or the Amsterdam Dungeon. That’s kind of a combo because you walk through it, and it’s obviously much more professional than a family haunted house. For instance, in the Amsterdam Dungeon, at the end you get on a roller coaster that takes you through the final section of experience.
Jack: Dennis, you are familiar with Sabrina Tarasoff’s concept for her “Beyond Baroque” walk-through haunted house – in the “Made in L.A. 2020” biennial at the Huntington Museum in Los Angeles. It focused on your writing and mine and others from 1980s Los Angeles. And originally it was to be a dark ride. Sabrina wanted something close to what you were saying, Zac, where you get in a little car that follows a track. And later, she and I wrote a piece for your blog, Dennis, about theme parks where we discuss Disney’s invention of the Omnimover: a shell-like, encased ride vehicle that directs your experience. This is unlike, say, dark rides such as Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride where you can look all around. The Omnimover points and targets your vision and experience.
Dennis: The Haunted Mansion uses those, right?
Jack: Yes. They are named Doom Buggies. Now Disney and other theme parks have more sophisticated versions of this. I don’t know where I’m going with this question: I just want to use the word “Omnimover!”
Zac: It’s a really good word.
Jack: So, what are your feelings in retrospect about making Room Temperature?
Dennis: It was an absolute and utter joy to make. Yes, it was exhausting. Sometimes on the set you were going until 5 o’clock in the morning. And it was often freezing cold. But we’re both very happy with the film. It’s not unlike what we hoped it would be when we wrote it. And the editing was a joy.
Zac: Every time Dennis and I start a project, we set the level of ambition to a high point which we may or may not be able to achieve. This was much more ambitious than our previous films. And it was harder to produce for those reasons. But I think we managed to do what we set out to do.
Jack: Another exciting yet subdued component of Room Temperature is the music. It is even more spare than the dialog. It appears only in very rare scenes. Who is the composer?
Dennis: The music is by Puce Mary. In fact, the only pieces of music in Room Temperature are the sounds of the haunted house, created by Puce Mary, plus one song the character Andre (played by Charlie Nelson Jacobs) sings as part of the action. There is no music in the film other than that one song, the haunted house soundscapes by Puce Mary, and the end credits music.
Zac: Dennis and I have been huge fans and admirers of Puce Mary forever. We have seen her perform live several times. She was our first collaborator on this film. She started drafting pieces of music – including the ghost sounds – maybe six years before we shot a single image. The song performed by Andre in the middle of the film is written and composed by Chris Olsen, who plays Paul the janitor. And the end credits music is a piece titled “Angel Shaving (L.A.S.E.R.)” by 7038634357, a really brilliant musician.
Dennis: It’s important to our films that we don’t use music unless the characters hear the music as part of the action. That’s why there’s not a lot of music in them. It’s not because we don’t like music. We just believe scores are often manipulative. We are not going to dress-up the experience to make it more dramatic or sad or weird than it actually is for the characters.
Jack: This certainly fits the vibe of the film. What’s next? Is there another collaboration in the works?
Dennis: We are writing our next film right now. We have a meeting about it tomorrow.
Jack: Yeah?
Dennis: Yeah, and it’s good!