Ben Robins chats with filmmakers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead…
In the last 6 years, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have pretty much turned genre on its head, taking a deeper, more heady twist on everything from movie-monsters to ancient mythology. Their latest, the critically acclaimed and Arrow Video-backed The Endless is quite possibly their trippiest to date too, acting as a sort of side-quel to their debut Resolution, and starring the filmmakers themselves as two brothers who get caught up in a U.F.O. death-cult, with ties to something even more sinister and supernaturally inclined.
Flickering Myth caught up with the pair at the BFI London Film Festival:
One thing that always comes up when discussing your movies is how Lovecraftian they often feel – what’s your relationship with his work?
AARON MOORHEAD: When we first started making movies, we were compared to Lovecraft a lot. But when those early movies were written, we didn’t know who H.P. Lovecraft was, we’d only heard the name. So we had to do our research, and we realised we had a lot in common and that’s because the people that we did read growing up – Stephen King, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Alex Garland – they all have a lot to do with Lovecraft in a lot of weird little ways.
This time of course, we steered right into it; it has the haunted geology similarity; it has the idea of trying to scientifically rationalise what’s happening in a way that would make sense to you if you saw it; and that cosmic fear. If he weren’t an introvert and a racist, we’d probably hang out, if he were still alive today. [laughs] I don’t know if it came to us naturally, or if the people we read, read him.
JUSTIN BENSON: I was raised Atheist, and by people who were highly skeptical of everything, so I can’t be thrilled by writing a haunted house story because I don’t believe in ghosts. To me it’s not a logical thing, it just doesn’t quite compute when you start thinking it through. But I want to believe in the otherworldly when I’m writing, so I find a way to do that – and what you land on is those Lovecraftian ideas of something so old that it’s influenced mythology and culture. If I can give myself the thrill of somewhat believing in it in the story, and I can be frightened by it, then hopefully I’m also frightening the audience.
You’re both credited as directors, but separately as writer and cinematographer – is that how your operate when making films? How does your partnership work, and how do you get the ball rolling on a project?
AM: If we could remove the labels and just be “co-filmmakers”, we’d just do that. It’s very, very hands on on every side of it. It starts differently every time. For The Endless, we realised we were taking too many meetings and not actually making movies. The meetings were all for like, big stuff, and they all sucked. Or if they were our own stuff that were really big, they were busy waiting on casting or financing or something annoying like that. And we realised we just needed to go make a movie. We realised we wanted to be in it, almost no matter what, so it could be self-reliant. We wouldn’t need to beg an actor to hang out with us.
Did being in front of the camera this time change the way you operate? The Endless felt more naturalistic than Spring in particular.
JB: I would say The Endless is probably a bit more tonally consistent, than our other films. Broadly in our filmmaking, our philosophy is that if you can make these characters into actual human beings – they’re using levity, they’re having effective drama – then when you get to the existential scary stuff it has that much more of an impact. You feel like you’re watching real characters and not just archetypes.
When you’re working with actors you have to upload so much information to them, there is always some minutiae that you’ll never be able to communicate – small things like the slight difference in delivery of a joke, or the level of drama in a dramatic scene – since we know everything about this movie, we were able to keep everything.
Everything we do is heavily, heavily prepared; we shoot almost the exact script, which we work on for a very long time, and then we go and rehearse with every actor for several months ahead of time. The only difference being in front of the camera is that it makes certain things easier; it makes directing other actors easier because you’re closer to them, and you’re in the scene with them, so it’s quicker and easier to communicate adjustments.
AM: Trying to make our movies feel naturalistic is something we work really, really hard on, with a lot of preparation. I don’t like saying this because I like being viewed as an artist but, there’s very little jazz. There’s a little bit, but a lot of it is being extremely precise in terms of planning and execution, but in a way that’s supposed to look like it just kinda happened.
How did you develop the cult in the movie? Were there any real-world cults you based it on?
AM: The movie isn’t really about cults. It doesn’t have anything cohesive to say about cults; it’s more about the broad ideas of anti-authoritarianism, and a cult is a good way to talk about that. But about half-way through it stops being about a cult at all, and becomes about something much bigger, and much more supernatural. That said, we did do research, and it’s based on an amalgam of Heaven’s Gate, Jonestown, David Koresh, some of the cults you can find on Netflix documentaries, Wikipedia and all of that. But we didn’t do that much more research than like, a high-schooler who’s interested in cults.
We wanted to take the archetype of a cult, and find out what could actually make you convinced to join it, then turn that on you and make it about something completely different. The cult ultimately ends up being a bit of a red herring, and just a tool to talk about something both bigger and smaller; bigger being the supernatural thing, and the smaller being the authoritarian relationship in the brotherhood.
JB: With this movie, going into esoteric psychology about cults would’ve been doing it a disservice, because we’re playing with an audience’s expectations about what they know about cults. If we know it, they’ll probably know it, if we go too deep, they may not, and then we’re playing with an expectation they’re not even aware of.
AM: The working title of the film was ‘Conformity’, and we changed it when we realised that wasn’t what the movie was actually about. It was almost about anti-conformity.
When dealing with the more supernatural aspects of the film, particularly in its second half, were there set rules and mythologies you created?
JB: There’s very, very definite, solid rules to everything, and there’s a very deep mythology. What we had to choose was what to say out loud and what not to say out loud. What to show and what not to show. Usually when you’re explaining mythology that people don’t know, for most audience members to walk away with it, you have to show and tell a lot. It is a very meticulously constructed thing.
The inspiration for this movie was our first movie, Resolution – they share the same antagonist, this unseen, ancient antagonist, and there were certain components to that antagonist in Resolution that we talked about, but they don’t really come across on-screen. But in The Endless you get it more explicitly.
AM: If you’re gonna make a vampire movie, everybody already knows when you say or imply vampire, you already know all the rules, and you don’t have to spend any of your movie setting it up. You can spend the rest of the movie on plot, and hopefully character. Or they’ll use character archetypes, because everybody already knows the high-school jock, the priest who’s lost his faith etc.; and you don’t have to spend any time establishing their character because you already know it. So you can spend all your time on plot or mythology.
What we try really hard to do is have characters you don’t know and mythology you don’t know, and we spend all the time revealing that via character. It’s a weird thing to do in the construction of a story and a script. Luckily he [Benson] is a genius and he’s able to balance all of that, but it’s a really delicate act. And in doing so, our movies can’t really be wildly re-edited to be a different movie, it just won’t work. So the script is the movie that you see.
How did the two of you first meet and develop your partnership?
JB: We were interns at a commercial production company in Los Angeles, but I was on a year off before I started Medical School. Aaron had just come up from Florida, and we bonded over Stephen King, and Zack Snyder’s 300 [laughs]. And then we just started working together more and more on like spec ad commercials (commercials that you make for free so that people will one day hire you to direct a commercial), music videos, short films, stuff like that. We never had any success at those things. So we saved up a bunch of money and I wrote a script which fit that amount of money, and we went off and made Resolution.
We paid money to send a DVD to film festivals, almost everyone said no, and then one day a programmer at Tribeca Film Festival called us up and really wanted to try and program our world premiere. Months went by and it got into the film festival, so we were happy, but then you get the feeling that sort of, people don’t have a whole lot of faith in it. And then it premiered, got really good reviews, sold to a distributor and we had a little bit of a career going. I didn’t have to go Medical School, Aaron didn’t have to go back to Florida and work at a Hooters [laughs]… and it’s all been working out ever since.
AM: And now the world has one less doctor. But everybody knows we need more indie drama filmmakers. [laughs]
What advice would you pass on to first time filmmakers?
AM: Justin wrote Resolution in the middle of 2010, and we shot it in May 2011, we edited it through the course of the year, it premiered at Tribeca in April 2012, and then it came out in theatres in 2013, hit Netflix about 6 months later, and that all happened as fast as it could. This is the fastest possible scenario – 3 years is as fast as it can go. So start right now. Don’t wait for anything else, start right now.
JB: We as a culture, tend to think of filmmaking like lightning in a bottle – people have it, then they don’t. You think of a lot of great directors in the 70s who had it, then sort of disappeared. And that’s a mystery, and I’m not even gonna try to answer why that is. But I think it gives the misconception that filmmaking isn’t a thing that’s entirely driven by persistence and determination, which it is. It’s like every single other trade – the more you do it, the better you get at it. It’s not: get lucky, get lucky, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. It’s more: work hard, keep doing it, keep doing it, and each time hopefully you get a little better. And I think that’s something that often gets forgotten. It’s determination, and understanding that there is going to be non-stop rejection all the time, and that you just push through that and you just keep making stuff no matter what. I think anyone who does that is probably going to have success, and even if you don’t have the success that you think you want right now, you will never have regrets. You’ll be free of that. It’ll be the most satisfying thing you ever do, whether or not it takes off.
Assume talent doesn’t exist, assume luck doesn’t exist, assume skill does but you can work on that, and all it needs is hard work.
AM: My vaguest piece of advice is the phrase find your voice. Which is so obvious, but before I met Justin I didn’t know that I hadn’t found my voice. I didn’t know that I was making movies that were kind of like other movies. And the only way that we were able to get our careers started was by making Resolution, which is just so weird. It’s not an arthouse film, but it’s definitely an almost anti-cinema kind of film, and only because it was different, and because it had a voice no one had heard, it was successful. We go on the festival circuit and we see movies that reference or imitate other movies and they can really pump-up the festival – but then those movies go away, and no one talks about them again because they didn’t really have a voice, they just kind of hit people at that moment. What you really want to say in your movies, and how you want to tell them is hard to develop, and will always continue to develop, but that’s the big one.
THE ENDLESS is released by Arrow Films in Cinemas, and via Arrow Video on Digital HD on 29th June. THE ENDLESS will also be released on DVD & Blu-ray via Arrow Video on 2nd July.
Ben Robins / @BMLRobins
