Richard A. Curnutte, Jr. is the Editor of The Film Journal. He has studied English and Film at Ohio University and The Ohio State University. He is a founding member of the Central Ohio Film Critics Association and a member of the Online Film Critics Association. 

Andrew Repasky McElhinney has established himself as one of the most vital and eclectic American filmmakers working today. I talked with him at length about his films and about the art of filmmaking. 

Rick Curnutte: A Chronicle of Corpses reimagines the horror film as a kind of collective, metaphysical journey through the hell of repression. In what ways did you balance the characters' personal crisis with more immediate choices of style and form? 

Andrew Repasky McElhinney: I do not think there is a balance because construction is more organic that that.
     Most good horror films are metaphoric. What works well in symbolic drama are metaphors that speak the unspoken. In A Chronicle of Corpses the characters are already are the living dead or living like the dead and the plot of the movie is a fantasy that attaches meaning, however temporal and fatalistic, to the character's emotional ennui. The (acting) style is therefore minimal, "deadening" and the form (long takes) is the best way to capture that stasis and make the tension of that stasis palatable for the audience. 
 

R.C.: Quite often it is the horror film that manages to best explore such issues as isolation and emotional turmoil. Many horror auteurs (Tourneur, Browning, Romero) have utilized the genre, with its conventions and its unique signifiers, and crafted elegant (and often cynical) ruminations on the human condition. A Chronicle of Corpses is artful, but lacking the cynical trickery of most contemporary horror pictures. It both embraces and rejects the conventions of the horror film, often all at once. What drew you to the horror genre in the first place? Was it your intention to subvert conventions, or did the material simply lend itself to that approach? 

A.R.M.: I like the horror genre because it is disreputable and anything is permissible. As long as you fulfill certain genre expectations -- or actively don't go in the direction of those expectations -- you have a "horror film." A Chronicle of Corpses appears to both "embrace and reject conventions" because the movie is ultimately interpretive, impressionistic -- an open text. It is not up for the film (or the film's director) to decide how or what the picture is finally, but for the viewer to work with, and become part of, the text and interface with it in his or her own way. 
 

R.C.: So do you think that the director's primary function should be an artistic, or formal, one? That he should paint the picture and let the viewer make his/her own story out of it? 

A.R.M.: A director's duty is to synthesize all the creative/non-creative elements into a cohesive vision which includes first and foremost finding the (film's) emotional continuity while balancing the commercial responsibilities of filmmaking with the goal of making the best film ever. 
 

R.C.: Not many directors seem to be conscious of building a body of work. And I'm not even talking about Hollywood hacks. I'm talking about the majority of contemporary filmmakers, most of whom lack any distinctive vision or style and are content to merely tell stories. I personally respond much more to the cinema's visual aspects than its narrative ones. As you are one of the few modern American directors crafting a distinctive (though certainly eclectic) body of work, I wonder if you favor form over content. 

A.R.M.: I too respond to a film's visuals and mood much more than I do a film's story or characters. It's all a (wonderful) illusion anyway and I'd personally rather dream around or through a plot than follow it. 
     That said, I think content should ALWAYS dictate form and style. Form and style without a rooted context is pretty empty. And that is what we see a lot of today. One must be true to your characters in their context if you hope to be interesting and give people something worth chewing on. 
     I didn't really think about "the body of work issue" until Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye. Bataille was my third feature in seven years and with Bataille critics started to compare the films not to other filmmaker's works (which I find unimaginative, lazy and a huge disservice to everybody) but to each other. That was very edifying and about the same time, I too started to think of my features as (the start of) my body of work. 
     Between Corpses and Bataille there was a project (Flowers of Evil) that didn't get made. I wanted to make Flowers of Evil more than anything in the world. It was the first time I ever had a project that I said I was going to do and then didn't. I learned a lot from this. It reiterated how precious the privilege of making a film is and what responsibilities that holds when you are granted that privilege. I realized that there are certain films I'm going to direct and certain ones I'm not; that it is organic, and that it is a process. I've learned to have faith and to "trust the process." 
     After Corpses and Bataille I knew I didn't want to do anything with explicit violence and/or explicit sex. I worried about being "the Prince of Darkness" - I love horror films but it is not the genre I want to always work in. I like porn too but don't want to direct pornographic films my whole career either. 
     The question, "What's next?" also has to do with where I am as a human being. I shot Bataille in the middle of a very long, hard break up with one of the cameramen and grieving for Flowers of Evil, which didn't happen because of the cost (1.5 M). It was a scary, horrible, bleak place. Months latter, when I was cutting Bataille, I was able to move past my broken heart. I fell in love with one of the Bataille actresses. She taught me, or told me - I really think you can only teach yourself -- not to be so afraid of all the "weather." I started to understand Bataille as the same project in my canon as Flowers of Evil would have been - it's emotionally about the same things - but outwardly different in form and made on a different (smaller) scale. 
     So by the time Bataille was finished, I was in the mood for love and knew that doing some sort of Romance with comedy was next. When the source material for Feature Number 4 (now shooting) found me back in March 2004, I knew within the hour that it was what I had been seeking. The text is about issues that are important to me (race, class, gender/sexual identity) but the issues are presented in a new, exciting and different ways. The text is a romantic drawling room comedy from 1931 that my actors are performing in modern dress with the subtext of the dialogue reexamined. Visually, No. 4 was immediately thrilling because I saw that the best way to capture the text was by using techniques I had shied away from (i.e. handheld DV 'scope) in the past. It's first person cinema -- a romantic whirligig of intrigue. 
 

R.C.: For most people today, "porn movie" means big-breasted blondes, plotless fucking, artless excess. Many forget (or, more likely, refuse to acknowledge) that before video robbed the genre of much of its artistic merits, porn films were often artful, important forms of sexual expression. Behind the Green Door, Deep Throat, Insatiable, Sensations, The Devil in Miss Jones, Autobiography of a Flea, the works of Wakefield Poole...these are some of the 1970s-era's most exciting, refreshing films, and they've seemingly been forgotten in the timeline of cinema. You chose to use video, the medium many feel destroyed porn, to recapture the spirit of that, all the while taking it a step further. Story of the Eye is easily the most artful "porn" film I've ever seen, though to call it that almost seems to doom it from the get-go. Do you think it's possible for contemporary audiences, especially in America (where sex is treated as a sin, not a sacrament), to comprehend such a film without throwing up their arms in pious outrage? 

A.R.M.: It is possible for some and impossible for others -- that is one of the more Rorschach-like points of the picture. "If you are limited, then El Topo is limited." What frustrates me, as one of the Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye's creators, is that percentage that is outraged but will take no responsibility for their role in that outrage. Like sexual intercourse, Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye requires partners. As I've said, I believe that all films should be open texts that are only completed when viewed and synthesized. All my films require is that the audience members are as open and honest as the movie is. After that point, "like/dislike" has very little importance. I find almost anything acceptable so long as it facilities a dialogue and discussion. 
 

R.C.: Story of the Eye features unsimulated sex between its principal actors. There is masturbation; gay, lesbian and straight sex; oral sex; self-mutilation; murder...the film, while minimalist from a narrative standpoint, has a formal intensity in its mise-en-scene and an almost primal application of making love vs. fucking. The two homosexual love scenes are, if not always tender, certainly enjoyable to their participants. When the brat hetero character is brought into the sexual loop late in the game, the until-now gorgeous surroundings have fallen into degradation and decay. Bataille once said, "Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it." Does this tie in, in any way, with the deconstruction of the white heterosexual male's sexual dominance that Story of the Eye seems to project? 

A.R.M.: Yes.
 

      (McElhinney didn't feel the need to elaborate, so we moved on.) 
 

R.C.: We've spoken at length in private about the use of color in cinema. I've made the connection to many of my colleagues between Story of the Eye and Orson Welles' The Immortal Story, which many believe (myself included) to be the greatest color film ever made. Now, to clarify, the connection I make is not in the form of comparative criticism, which I agree is the arena of lazy intellectualism. Rather, I feel that there is a loose connection of the formal elements of the two films. Story of the Eye is, by no means, a film that owes its existence to Welles. It is wholly of its own importance. Having said that, the ghost of Welles' masterpiece hangs over any film that strives to so sublimely utilize the color and shape of things. Can you talk a bit, at length perhaps, about the formal design of Story of the Eye? 

A.R.M.: I think you can (cyclically) sum up American cinema with four movies - The Birth of a Nation, Citizen Kane, The Chelsea Girls and Star Wars -- so all films made after 1977 owe debts (both good and bad) to Griffith, Welles, Warhol and Lucas. 
     Orson Welles was a great director not just because of his skill with actors, sense of composition, etc. but because of his use of sound, which I imagine he learned from his days in radio. Welles understood that sound proceeds image and that if you fill the ear with information your images are free to play. 
     Black and White Cinematography is about using shadow play to contrast the characters with their environment. Color cinematography is about illustrating the emotions of a scene via hues. The difference is the difference between expressionism (black and white) and neo-expressionism (color).
     Bataille had a very specific color design for each of the five chapters. The birth scene was stripped of all warmth to make it as clinical as possible, the Top Hat Dance Scene was shot as lushly as possible, the male sex scene was pushed into overexposure in post to highlight the contrast of the black-on-white sexmaking, the third chapter with the lesbian scene is shot in deep blue and red hues (a combination of water and vagina) and the final sequence, in the townhouse, was all natural light separating this part of the film from the lush, "dreamy" first part. 
 

R.C.: So few directors know how to use sound to enhance their imagery. George Romero told me that some people quite obviously forget that films are partly a "radio show". He said that, especially when he was cutting his films himself, he would listen to the film intently and fill in the dead spaces, where he had not utilized the audio tracks sufficiently. Is your sound design organically linked to what you capture while you're shooting, or do you orchestrate your soundtrack (music and ambient sounds) in post? 

A.R.M.: Romero's right and very smart to fill in the gaps. Though silence can be very effective. I wish A Chronicle of Corpses had more silence. My favorite part of Night of the Living Dead is when they're in the farmhouse listening to the TV news reports. Of course I am thinking of the radio broadcasts in Marguerite Duras' Nathalie Granger or the space hums and drones in David Lynch's Dune as well. 
     As Orson Welles understood from his days with The Mercury Theater On The Air palling around with Bernard Hermann -- once you provide the audience with all the information they need to know auditorially your images are free to play. With radio, the eye creates, with film the camera suggests. Of course that which we imagine will always be better than that which we see so I see the trick as leaving one's filmic text open or fragmented enough so that it only becomes whole once the spectator process it after seeing the film. 
     I'm very interested in "filmed radio" which is a term J. Hoberman used in The Village Voice with regard to Lars von Tier's awesome Dogville. Again the sound design of that film is so epic that it allows such an intimate and minimal visual aesthetic. I think this contrast propels the film as much as the performances. 
     With regards to Bataille, we shot it like a silent film but did let the camera capture ambient sounds. When directing scenes that do not have dialogue I like to call out the action to the actors as we shoot. But this meant much of this guide track wasn't useable in post. Anyway, I cut the picture silent, then listened to what was on the sound track, chopped out all my directing and filtered what was left into the sound design. 
     With Bataille I had the great advantage of Paul David Bergel's scoring the film (subsequently he's done new music for silent films like Blood and Sand or The Student of Prague for Alpha Classics). Then I turned the whole thing over to the sound designer Rick Henderson (of City of Horns). Rick took the music, wrote some of his own, and used what was left of the location sound. Together we talked about the soundscape we wished to create. It's was Rick's concept of echoing each chapter of the movie during the staircase sequence which was a wonderful, brilliant idea that illustrated (via sound) the continuity of the movie in a way I am very proud of. 
      Finally, I bought all this raw, assembled material into the mix studio. Michael Jordan (the mixer on Magdalen, A Chronicle of Corpses and Bataille) and I mixed the shit out of the movie for close to two weeks -- riding levels, tweaking things here and there, etc. It was great fun! I felt like I was conducting a symphony while doing the Bataille sound mix.
     I'm not crazy about all the chat in films today. I really wish I had been working during the silent era... at UFA of course.
 

R.C.: I agree about the chattiness of modern films. It seems like so much of contemporary cinema has become screenplay-driven. Writers seem to be becoming the big stars in Hollywood, and, obviously, American "independent" films (a term about as meaningless as "alternative" music) are swarming with writer-directors. But those writer-directors seem to be, for the most part, writers who want to direct their scripts, not the other way around. When I think of really adventurous American filmmakers, I think of those who are doing interesting things from a formal standpoint: Gus Van Sant with Elephant and Gerry; Vincent Gallo with Buffalo 66 and The Brown Bunny; Richard Linklater (whose body of work consistently surprises and delights me, and whose Before Sunset is marvelous from a formal perspective). While I don't necessarily think the trend is specific to America, Americans do seem to be less embracing of adventurous, idiosyncratic filmmaking styles. Is the American director working in a cultural vacuum? 

A.R.M.: I am a director who can write but I feel no need to write everything I direct. A film's script is never done. It should evolve as the film making process progresses.
     The Magdalen screenplay was overhauled in rehearsal, much of it by Alix D. Smith who played the title role. A Chronicle of Corpses was pretty set by the time we went into rehearsal (which I'm not sure was a good thing in the end) but Kevin Mitchell Martin who plays Mr. Elliot was actually so in tune with my style for that film and understood his character so deftly that he improv-ed his monologue ("I feel so hungry to remember . . .") right before the woods tracking shot where his character disappears. I wrote Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye by committee as we went along and for my fourth feature, which is shooting now, we're using the text of a 1931 play word for word but re-examining the subtext so the play feels "mine" or "ours" as much as if I or we had written it.
     Van Sant's remake of Psycho, which is amusing if not almost totally a conceptual work, is a great examination of authorship. It's clearly "his" but with very little of him in it. Andy Warhol, another great inquisitor of authorship as it relates to commerce and identity would have just looooved the Van Sant Psycho remake. A dream project of mine is to remake Warhol's Empire in color 16mm.
     A good, solid script is essential for any film but of course it's all up for grabs in the editing room. I've been told that one writes a film thrice, once when you write it, once when you shoot it and the third time when you edit it. I also think the sound mix counts as the fourth time as you then chose the context of the words and sounds -- which is what really matters as presentation is everything. 
     I blame film schools and Andrew Sarris for the prevalence of writers who direct. There is this concept inherent in the auteur theory, especially as it is (mis-?) understood from 1968 onwards, that to really be the director/author of a film you have to write or co-write it, which I think is complete crap. As Orson Welles said, contributors make contributions but only a director can make a picture. Of course then look at Val Lewton or David O Selznick or Jerry Bruckheimer who are clearly the authors of their films even thought they are (most of the time) neither the writer or the director.
     I would love to do more scripts that I didn't write because it frees you up to dream images and hopefully gives you a solid foundation on which to hang them. That said, I would be cranky if I was just handed a script that couldn't evolve with (credited or uncredited) contributions.
     I feel very divorced from my peer American film directors and, really, the industry as a whole. I'm so disappointed in what my peers do. I do think modern American film directors work in a vacuum, smothered in movie love rather than movie history, ignorant of innovation past, present or future, and afraid of risk because god forbid it might hurt box office or marketing! (Ah for a revisit of the American film culture of the late 60s and early 70s when no one knew what was going to "sell"!) And of course no one reads now and few go to the Theater which is why films are so derivative and inbreed. I think it's a stupid idea to play it safe because people eat what's in front of them which why it is great when Tom Cruise does Eyes Wide Shut or Bruce Willis does Twelve Monkeys or Julia Roberts does Closer. I wish Drew Carey would do a serious role. I think it's excessive to stack the deck the way Hollywood and Indiewood do, one "commercial" element should be more than enough for the cautious money men and women -- the fact that everything has to be as smooth as cream cheese is just silly and sad and safe.
     I love challenge and I think audiences, despite what the corporations that own the entertainment industry think, like a challenge too. People need to think and do. I feel a responsibility to always try to break new ground. All directors should. If I didn't, I don't think I would want to make movies. I see too many filmmakers who are making the same films over and over again. It makes me very sad. I hope that when and if I run out of new things to do that I'll have the grace to retire and go direct opera. 
 

R.C.: True, but I think many contemporary critics romanticize the past, without acknowledging that there was as much drivel in the 70s as there is today. It's all about distance and perspective, in my opinion. For every Altman, Friedkin and Ashby, there's an Avildson, Attenborough and Jewison. But critics will rewrite history just as the populace will, I suppose. 

A.R.M: Yes, you're right, there has always been crap, but I'd rather watch drivel from another era because it's historical interest will often augment even the least interesting work into something worth considering and (re?) contextualizing.