THE LAST WINTER (2006-07) press HOLLYWOOD REPORTER Sept 6, 2006 - Greg Goldstein CINEMASCOPE Dec 2006 - Adam Nayman FANGORIA, August 2007 - Don Kaye THE NEW YORK SUN Sept 14, 2007 - Steve Dollar THE REELER Sept 17, 2007 - S.T. VanAirsdale RAY PRIVETT BLOG Sept 19, 2007 INDIEWIRE INTERVIEW Sept 19, 2007 L.A. WEEKLY Sept 19, by Judith Lewis FILMMAKER Sept 18, 2007 by Damon Smith SHOCK TIL YOU DROP 2007 by Edward Douglas IFC NEWS 2007 by Aaron Hillis ENTERTAINMENT INSIDERS Sept 9, 2007- Adam Barnick FEAR ZONE 2007 by Joseph Fusco THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR 2007 by Jeremiah Kipp PHILADELPHIA CITY PAPER 2007 by Sam Adams WENDIGO (2002) press TIME OUT NY, Feb 7-14 -Maitland McDonagh NEW YORK MAGAZINE, Feb 18, 2002 -Ben Kaplan FANGORIA, January 2002 -Steve Puchalski FILMMAKER, January 2002 -Travis Crawford HABIT (1997-98) press VILLAGE VOICE, June 10, 1997 -Amy Taubin BACKSTAGE WEST, May 1, 1997 -Jamie Painter L.A. WEEKLY, October 31-November 6, 1997 -Hazel-Dawn Dumpert TIME OUT New York, November 13-20, 1997 -Andrew Johnston CUPS, October 97 -Alexander Laurence FANGORIA, November 97 -Steve Puchalski ALBANY TIMES UNION, April 17, 1998 -Amy Biancolli VENT MAGAZINE May 1998 -Don Philbricht GUERRILLA FILMMAKER Winter 99 -Bruno Derlin

 

 

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No Road Home
by Adam Barnick

PART 1
The work of American director Larry Fessenden, like life in general, resists simplification and being grouped into a single category. His previous hand-crafted independent films No Telling, Habit, and Wendigo are often dubbed his ‘trilogy of horror’ but are so much more than simple scare or monster pictures, with the intention of existing, as described by their director, as "B-movies with A-movie themes." Said films emphasize character over special effects, naturalism over melodrama, earned emotions as well as essential scares, and are always filled with food for thought. "Socially conscious" would be a label that would fit, if we had a real reason to place one on them. His newest film The Last Winter continues this tradition albeit on a much larger scale, and the result is a deeply felt, emotional, and certainly scary tale about the ultimate loss happening under our noses while we argue: the destruction of the environment and the last semblance of stability and balance we claim to have in our world.

EI: Can you give us a synopsis of the film for the uninitiated?

Larry Fessenden: The Last Winter takes place in Alaska, where a small advanced team is set up in a remote station to prepare for bringing in the rigs to drill for oil in ANWR (the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge); something begins to go awry, and it’s very unclear what it is. But there’s an environmentalist who begins sounding the alarm who seems to believe it’s associated with climate change; and the story begins to veer out of control, into an apocalyptic nightmare.

There are many links in this film to your previous film Wendigo. Were you originally thinking of directing a straight follow-up to that film, or was it more of an interest in continuing some of the themes from that film, like man vs. nature, and not respecting the land?

Very simply and practically, there was a clause in the contract I had (to distribute Wendigo) with Ed Pressman’s company that said IF they want a sequel, it had to be delivered by a certain time and we’d be paid such-and-such an amount. So I thought, as an exercise, I would conceive of what my idea of a sequel to Wendigo would be. It turned out to have nothing to do with the family (featured in that film,) that family had been so shattered, it didn’t seem appropriate(to return to them). I realized thematically you could take the idea of this nature-spirit, and just all those strange soup of themes- we translated it into what might be called a strange sequel.

Are there still plans for the Wendigo animated series?

I’m very fond of this animated series, we’ve written nine treatments, three scripts, and done a little teaser; I just haven’t been able to give it the attention that’s needed to launch an animated show yet. It’s much more geared towards kids; There’s more humor, it would also be more environmentally educational for kids, which is a beautiful thing.
This film had more direct references to the Algernon Blackwood (Wendigo) story – the shoes left behind, being carried away at great speeds, Defago Express..
The feet on fire..

Yeah!!

That’s my favorite one.

THAT is what I caught on my second viewing. That and the striking image of footsteps in the snow that suddenly stop. It was a great symbol of everything mankind’s doing…eventually our ‘imprints’ will stop because we won’t survive the backlash.

There’s a book out now called The World Without Us, which proposes what happens to the infrastructures we’ve built, and the trash, etc. if we disappeared. When I wrote Wendigo, it was based on my childhood experience, a number of things from my youth tied together. And I wasn’t really paying attention to the actual Blackwood story. I read it maybe just before production, and I realized the mood that Blackwood creates, and the power of his story- I wanted to revisit when we decided to get back into the Wendigo business. I took what is very metaphoric and beautifully abstract in Blackwood’s thing and I made it very literal. Whether that’s the right thing to do, is another matter. For example- the characters in the story scream ‘my feet of fire!’ which is so eerie and bizarre in his story…I wanted to create something that IS that bizarre- so I conceived that when Motor’s(Kevin Corrigan) hangar gets blown up, for whatever bizarre reason, his feet catch fire.

You’ve set up a moment that could rationalize it, I feel. As a child the Wendigo tale and creature is an intriguing image visually, and an interesting story, but you may not necessarily be thinking of environmental issues at that age..what appealed back then versus now?

It was very much an image planted in my head by my teacher, of this “deer man” which was sort of his concept of it- he doesn’t remember telling the story, which is funny because I did catch up to him and tell him how it influenced me. But in any case, it was my own research into the Wendigo myth, which is Ojibwe-and not Blackwoods’ invention-he borrowed it from these tribal legends. When I did the research, I saw that in tribal vernacular, it has to do with rapaciousness, and consumption and cannibalism, and an Earth out of balance, which is my favorite theme. That’s what I think is going astray in the world, so it serves as my interests, as you say, as an adult. But, I still just like monsters(laughs) and I’ve never been able to depict it closer to what I’ve imagined in my childhood telling.

In Habit you’re using vampirism to explore loneliness and perception, in Wendigo you explore how a child interprets violence and how we all make sense of the world through myth. In this film’s writing, did you start with a certain theme that sparked the need to explore it through genre?

In terms of embracing a horror trope, I often start with that- I’m using the Alien model, though it’s often compared to The Thing because it’s a snow movie. In terms of the actual theme, it was more about people’s inability to communicate. When they have their own sort of worldview. Which, when you look at it, is what Habit is about. That’s about two drinking buddies, and when one of them cries out for help, the other guy isn’t there for him…I guess I’m just obsessed with the idea that people don’t communicate and all the reasons for that, and the psychology of individuals; and how profound it is that we’re all living in a subjective world.
We have our upbringing, so we believe our own mythological tropes- and that’s how we make decisions and respond to reality. That’s why it’s hard to convince a conservative that global warming is happening; they think this is a conspiracy of the Left to combat corporatism. Of course the irony is that it serves that as well; which is why the Left is doubly passionate, they feel there’s a weakness in the argument- if you’re destroying the world, surely you still can’t defend this rampant capitalism! And so the corporate mind, the conservative mind is going to say- wait a minute, I don’t want to be painted into this corner- I can’t accept your premise that the world is going to shit. So that’s a very dangerous situation; that you can’t discuss encroaching danger.

The genre element is more the remote lab/station, the tradition of movies that I’m dealing with is more like The Edge, with Anthony Hopkins; one guy has knowledge, one guy is out of place, these two guys are marooned together in the woods and they have to survive. There’s a movie called Dersu Uzala by Kurosawa, where similarly one guy knows how to deal with the land and the other doesn’t; so they’re more these sort of survivor movies, and the whole idea of your mindset being your resourcefulness in a time of crisis. And of course I’m very fond of the Shakelton story, which is not directly related. But the idea of surviving and leadership issues is what I was exploring.

The more I deal with The Last Winter, just the more confusing the ‘horror’ label is. I would hope that people can accept something outside(it).

Just saying ‘horror’ can be kind of a box.

Yeah, more and more of a box too! The reviewers are desperately pairing me up with Val Lewton now, because he’s the only guy in the horror canon that made clearly subtle films. I’m very honored to be compared with him because he’s a classic; still, it’s confusing, I don’t really claim to make horror films, that’s just- they ARE horror films...or what are they otherwise?

“Films with horrific elements.”

Yeah, whatever! (laughs) I’ve actually resisted it. Even (the upcoming film Larry produced) I Sell The Dead, we couldn’t pigeonhole in two words what that movie is for a (Dead's lead actor)Dominic Monaghan article, for Entertainment Weekly. I wrote this fun little sentence, ‘it’s a horror romp with boisterous this-and-that’, and their response was "No, please, TWO words! Is it a comedy or a horror film?" It’s really tiresome. A lot of the great movies out there defied genre, that’s why we love them.

They touch on whatever they need to touch on to tell their story.

What about painting; is it a landscape, or is it a still life? What is Guernica? A horse painting? It’s not helpful, it’s just so they can put you on the special section of Moviefone.

Is it an attempt to understand the work or an easy way to NOT have to think about it?

I don’t know. It’s restricting.

In the times you’ve written your scripts with a collaborator, has your process been varied? Do you prefer collaborating to solo writing?

Solo I enjoy, but I have my limitations. I’ve enjoyed my partnerships. Basically when they’re ultimately going to be my films, I need to have the control. I wrote No Telling with my wife; who was my partner/buddy back then, Beck Underwood. In the case of Robert Leaver, my new writing partner..he was paid, that was the deal where I was the ‘boss.’

Directing the writing?

Yeah, and similarly with Beck, I continued to tinker with the script; but our collaboration was immensely important to the story, and she and I wrote another script (Hector Dodges) which I continue to tinker with. So I enjoy writing with other people. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say there are a lot of disgruntled writers in film, because (the process) does continue on. But we’ve had good times; Robert and I are working again on something. Beck had a lot to do with talking about Habit initially, she was involved in rethinking it. (Habit was created as a video feature in the early 80’s when Fessenden was a student and reenvisioned in 1997)

Was this originally intended as a smaller-scale picture? I know in the grand scheme of things it’s still a “low budget” film but it’s a much bigger production (costing roughly ten times what Wendigo cost) than you’ve done before.

It’s funny, I’ve read a couple of reviews now- I’m doing this interview in the time when I’ve had reviews(the film had been released the previous day)-so I’m reflecting in a different way about one’s movie because now it’s being reacted to. One thing I observe is that it’s called a low-budget movie. Of course I felt honored to have THIS amount of money to play with, we had a crane most of the days, and dollies, and helicopters In truth, we were still stressing and straining with our time; if the CGI is something that can be criticized, I assure you we used up our CGI budget. (laughs) So the fact is there were a quite a bit of restrictions in the grand scheme of things..though I felt very grateful for the money we had- it seemed ‘lavish.’

But had you intended originally a budget closer to Wendigo’s?

I suppose, but if you make a movie to shoot in Alaska…

Can’t really do a grassroots indie in that climate.

Yeah, and you start fantasizing you’re gonna have Ron Perlman in it, you’re having to look at a certain level of budget. I think if someone would really asked me even back then, I’d say it would have been my biggest film. So it probably came in about where we needed to, and I don’t think it was indulgent at 5 million. I mean, people make intimate dramas at that cost, and this was extremely ambitious.

How did Iceland become involved, in terms of the location and financing?

We went to Alaska, and realized it was implausible to shoot in the real ANWR-I don’t even think it’s allowed. I know there are oil drillers there, but a film crew is just as destructive as any oil crew. So we weren’t even thinking about that once we thought about it clearly. We looked at Canada, and then Iceland came up because Jeff Levy-Hinte, my producer, knows Joni Sighvattson, who’s an Icelandic producer who works out of Hollywood now. Joni got involved, and it became a bigger production. And Iceland has financial incentives; so it became the right idea to shoot there.

Tell me about your cast.

We were writing with kind of a “Gene Hackman archetype” as our(lead character) Pollack; and a few other names were floating around when I started working with a casting agent; I saw Hellboy, and was just enamored of Ron; he carries that picture. Often he’s in an ensemble picture and I hadn’t thought of him as the lead. But Hellboy brought him back to mind. I just loved the blend of machismo and vulnerability he brought to that character, even under all that makeup. I started really gunning for Ron. I hadn’t thought of James LeGros, but he came up as we were thinking of what kind of interesting leading man we could find; I was very entranced by a few of his recent features. When he said he would do it I was thrilled. He’s a very interesting actor but not in any way overexposed.

Connie Britton’s character was a difficult search. I became aware of Connie and really liked her from the reels that were made available to me, and then as we had conversations, it got more and more interesting. She seemed to really respond to the movie. Kevin Corrigan I’ve always loved, I’ve known him from the old days, even though he doesn’t remember it (laughs). Native talents are always difficult to cast, it was an amazing thing to find Joanne Shenandoah, she’s an Emmy-winning singer/songwriter- was a thrill to have her. Jaime Harrold is a great character actor, so you know- in a movie like this your selections are VERY important- I felt very fortunate working with (casting director) Laura Rosenthal.

Has your process of working with your actors varied over the years?

I was never formally trained in acting but my approach to acting has been very intuitive, I don’t always know the formal language- I prefer the Hitchcock model of hiding in the closet naked, and then they open the door and really show surprise on their face! (laughs) These are the kind of tricks you end up using. And of course I’ve worked with kids, which requires a certain way of speaking.

Ultimately I try to work with candor and empathy. And because people know I’ve acted, at least they know I understand where they are. I try to give them a space to be creative because I know even a powerful movie star is still intimidated by the process, or should be; Olivier said if you don’t have stage fright, you shouldn’t be doing it anymore, and I believe that to a degree –the actor’s a vulnerable person and you have to treat them as someone you’re trying to coax into a journey. Let them be themselves, which is to say their character, and let them make their choices. It’s a great process.

You mentioned Hitchcock at a recent Q+A in terms of pre-designing the shots; one of the things I enjoyed the most about this was instead of letting the camera tapdance to ‘create interest’, often you found the best place to put it and left it there and let the actors tell the story.

I love an engaged, moving camera when that’s appropriate. I love Scorsese, his fast edits, that’s passionately crafted but it 100% makes sense. There’s never a sense he’s rescuing himself from something; it’s just his exuberance. I’ve taken a little more of a restrained approach, because I’ve been reacting a bit against the chaos of film language; it’s been so hysterical that I think it’s kind of effective to slow things down and not to be cutting constantly. Certain scenes I’m taking my time, and letting those scenes play out. That’s always been my aesthetic.

I grew up on the 30’s and 40’s movies (where shots were) framed head-to-toe, you enjoy seeing the actor fully and his body language. My co –writer Robby was always reminding me “remember the close-ups, Larry!” And I’m not a close-ups guy. Hopefully there are enough to engage the audience in my films, but I’m interested in the landscape; a person in their context is what interests me. I’m interested in the whole thing; all my films have very specific environments. Habit is the city, Last Winter is this Alaskan wilderness, Wendigo is this upstate environment. To me that’s also what I’m making films about. I’m not only interested in the human drama; I’m interested in the human drama in the larger context.

In this picture, it’s most strongly represented; you HAVE to show them interacting in their environment. Do you rigidly plan out the visual setups ahead of time or discover them on the day?

A little of both- I always storyboard in my mind, make shot lists, but I felt a great deal of simpatico with this crew, and this cast. We were able to do some spontaneous work; plus, we’d run out of time and would have to make a quick decision. The example I use where they’re all standing (in the environment) talking, at various distances/plains, and the crew kept saying “We’re talking a lot of time on the master, we haven’t done any of the close-ups.” And I said “no, this is all we’re doing. We do this right, we get to go home.” And we got it. That’s my favorite scene. (laughs)

I like that you had to burn the house down, so to speak, to have Pollack and Hoffman, the two distinct points of view, to not be distracted, to have an ATTEMPT to have a conversation/communication. You have to take everything away and put them in this white void. (the film’s two leads venture off for help after an accident destroys most of their shelter.)

I love that idea, yeah! I really appreciate that –to me, the structure of the film, it’s the journey of the film, and I was very excited by the idea that halfway through the movie it breaks off into this other thing. I’m intrigued that some people think that the tension is relieved there, or are disappointed when it changes; I’m just saying you make your commitments to it, and you go with it. But I very deliberately wanted that structural break. Something you’ve become accustomed to is no longer there, that’s certainly one of the themes of the movie. As you say, it was great to isolate them.

Two people and their consciences, even their political leanings have been removed- what they talk about shouldn’t even BE a political issue. And even then, Pollack can’t totally let his guard down.

No he can’t do it, he tries to.. And that’s what I call the partisan impasse- something has happened in this country where it’s expected you have to choose a side, and that defines you and to cross that side is to betray everything that you are. It’s very tribal, very North and South. It’s funny, we’re supposed to be a global society, and even within our country the tension of choosing sides dominates.

We think even less of outside our borders, we’re too busy butting heads.

It’s true- there’s accusations that people are terrorists that support “green politics.” It’s really disappointing.

You were speaking about a strict genre box and its responses; few would think of this as a scary element, but it’s true that the fact that we still can’t communicate or agree up to now is horrifying. I just thought of it occurring in Wendigo as well, the fact that the mother thinks of the upstate locals as an “other” causes a lot of the problems when she needs help and they’re happy TO help, but she can’t see it.

Exactly. In that movie I’m criticizing her mindset. She can’t distinguish in her mind between the “boogeyman” and the nice hunter who’s more that willing to help. And he then brushes it off.. “Whatever, city people.” That is ultimately the theme of my films; the sad, tragic and potentially horrific fact that we can’t communicate.

While the environment crumbles down around us.

Yeah! While our lives are crumbling, in one way or another. Each film has some sort of texture for that. LINK PART 1

 

PART 2
EI: What’s really hit me lately is how much loss of control factors in as a primal fear in this. Especially with Ron Perlman’s character. He’s obsessed with it. From his bladder to his team. (laughs) His jealous streak with Abby(Connie Britton) shacking up with James LeGros- at first I thought this was a basic love triangle, and then I began to think she and Pollack may not have had anything between them, but in his mind there was something. Just another thing slipping out of his grasp.

Larry Fessenden: I just did the commentary for the DVD and pointed that out.

I’m not sure they were ever sleeping together!

I don’t think they were, I talked about it with Ron, and I don’t think he felt Pollack had either. One of the additional potential tragedies of his character is that-and also it’s an insight into her-I imagine that she kind of used him, and titillated him, and he was able to promote her and help her get up the ladder without ever consummating something. He sort of has that hurt- That scene where she says she feels she has Hoffman where she needs him, well..is she sort of conniving? I do feel there’s more things to think about in those ‘relationships.’

Speaking in a sense of degrees of control, your next project or projects: do you have one planned that you’d like to create on this ‘bigger level’ again, or would you prefer one that’s like a ‘Habit-style’ production with a few people, a couple of cameras and lights?

I’m hoping to go to Mexico and make an absolutely no-budget movie. It’s odd that this is the first time in my experience that I have three different things worth pursuing, but the budget range is enormous within those choices. I love the idea of working no-budget again, but I haven’t really BEEN spoiled. Last Winter was just what it was, and I found there to be some pitfalls with that, and I’d love to have the so-called freedom.
Have you ever considered directing science fiction? It’s another area outside the ‘normal’ world that can be used to comment back on ourselves.

I think horror’s still more my vibe-I’m so lame with genre labels that I barely know how to answer the question-(laughs) One thing I’m very interested in is the uncanny; maybe you’d consider that sci-fi . The idea of an alternate reality that maybe you’re able to tune into or not.

In general horror narratives, if the artists have developed them and done their jobs, we mourn the loss of the characters. In this film there’s such a heavy melancholy I’ve taken from it each viewing, are you generally getting that kind of reaction from viewers? It is entertaining and it is suspenseful, but I thought of it and realized the other character whose passing I mourn in the film is our planet.

I’m obsessed with death, that’s just something in my nature. I take the global warming idea very seriously, as this deeply sad thing. Looking at a potential death. Now I don’t believe the planet will die, but will become increasingly hostile to us, to our little zone in which we survive comfortably. And if you watch these (documentary) films like “Living With The Dinosaurs”, you get an incredible sense of history, the expanse of history. Here is a period where the Brontosaurus thrived, and then the weather changed and they died off, and then the Velociraptors came in, and you just see the scope of history.

Who’s to say there’s this period of history where “the humans flourished, and they built cities and made movies, and then something happened, and they became nomads and wore fur again.” You’re just amazed, the scope of history is so broad and I think we’re so narcissistic and engaged in everyday concerns with bills, our jobs and our fantasy lives that we forget that history can turn on us; and so with the weather and the planet. So it’s a sadness for ourselves! People say I’m a tree hugger, that would be the accusation. Well, no, I romanticize a society that we imagine we’re living in, a stable society where there’s the notion of progress and we can work through our political differences.

You also have more of a true sense of history, not even present cultural or brief American history; of the scope of the planet and our impact.

This is why the discussion is so impossible; if somebody believes people are only as old as the Bible you can’t even have this conversation- “What do you mean, dinosaurs?” “Whatever, you’re right, forget it, we can’t have this conversation.”

That’s a problem! And of course my movies are about that, they’re about religions, and these mythologies we buy into, we cling to them and start living our lives based on them; these false gods, I’m obsessed with the whole idea of the false god.

It’s funny, when I made No Telling, I was suggesting (in it) that science was this false god and there was more than that; there was the empathy to the land, and the kindness to the creatures, and a harmony in the world, and invasive science had to be kept in check..it’s interesting how your allegiance can shift! Now I would say please, let’s rely on science- let’s take science seriously. I’m not gonna villianize science anymore, we have these bigger problems now; we need to actually take counsel with science. So you see the little shifts in one’s focus as you get older and more specifically as the political and cultural life changes.
I believe movies should respond to that. Hopefully they’re philosophical enough that they remain timely. Not just the work that’s all today’s news, but that hopefully have a resonance; it is about global warming but it’s about much bigger things, of which global warming is an example of.

Respect for the earth was important 1000 years ago too.

Exactly. Jared Diamond wrote a book called Collapse. That’s about a number of complete obliterations of society, like Easter Island- how could all these people have flourished and then vanished? The fact is that this could collapse. And what I’m saying ultimately is it’s very difficult for people to perceive their own death. This is precious, this tiny time on earth. I’m not going to spend it fighting and bitching and moaning, and that’s sort of what my horror movies are about. Appreciate this, and be full of care for what is dear to you, and think about the repercussions of what you’re doing. So that’s where my horror comes from. And it’s fairly pansy, but it’s deeply felt. (laughs)

Can you tell me about working with Jeff Grace, your composer? It's one of the most emotionally stirring scores I've ever heard in this type of film, if I have to put it in a type (laughs)

Jeff Grace is a young guy, he mentored with Howard Shore, worked on the Lord of the Rings movies and Spider and other films so he’s been a serious member of the film community. Peter Phok, a producer on many of our films, discovered him and brought him to Ti West for The Roost. He did an amazing job there. Ti was good enough to bless him working on my stuff, which is good, to share the wealth(laughs). He did Ti’s other film Trigger Man; he did Liberty Kid, which is a non-horror film, and composed a lot of Salsa for that.

What’s remarkable about Jeff is he’s a consummate musician, and he knows excellent musicians. So he can access different genres without it feeling false, because he goes to those other musicians who play those other genres. He’s done remarkable work. The simplicity of the main Last Winter theme, 'Footsteps', is why it’s so strong. There are some composers who would feel the need to overwhelm you with the material but Jeff has the confidence to be very spare.

My impression in the film was that that piece, showing up about 30-40 minutes in, was the first piece of pure composition in the film.

Oh, absolutely. There is one other one before that.. And Anton Sanko did great work for me, he did the soundscape; which I think of as almost the emotional track that people are on, the psychological track. Each of them did some things..Anton did some things that were quite musical too, it was great to work with them both. I am a bit of a collagist so it made sense that they would bleed together.

For someone who’s interested in seeing the film- Without restricting it to one thing, since this is so layered-but I want to ask if there's something in particular you like seeing people take from the experience of this film.

You answered that saying you came away with a feeling of deep dread and melancholy, and I would want to infuse that artistically in the sense that that’s the mood I’m trying to convey. I really think in the end film is about mood, and color, more than dialogue and even acting. Of course that’s very important, but to me I think a film can sit in your mind, like this 'object'. Even though it’s a two hour time-based medium, it sort of sits there, and the colors sit there with you; and I would hope this would sit there as a sort of a white movie with black and a little yellow, a spot of rust color.. And that’s just what it is.(laughs) And yes, there’s that feeling of melancholy; as for what you would do with that emotion, yes I would hope you would go out, and join Greenpeace and march in the streets and demand our government do something to save our ass. But that’s secondary, it’s not propaganda. It’s an art piece.

That environmental awareness website featured on Glass Eye Pix’s site, Running out of Road is one you compiled, right?

On the activist topic, I do have a running site (www.runningoutofroad.com) which is global warming news. It tries to be a fairly easy summary of what global warming is, what the issues are, there’s pages and pages of solutions, there’s a little bit of writing by some people, I try to update it every day with this column which is just one more alarmist article from the mainstream press- but if you look at them one after the other, you see this pattern of alarmism, and then 'do-nothingism'. It’s kind of gut-wrenching. I was interested in this stuff in the early 1990’s, wrote a book on it (Low Impact Filmmaking, detailing how film shoots can reduce waste and ease their strain on the environments they shoot in) and I read the book recently; it says very urgently that we must address this problem. And it’s very heartbreaking to see 17 years later, to know that it’s still like “well, there’s some debate” and it’s been on the cover of Time a few times, but then so has Angelina Jolie.

There’s this sense of stasis in our culture. Even with the Iraq war, it’s unbelievable: it’s always “six more months.” No one wants to solve any problems so we’re gonna “six more months” it until the end of time. That’s the problem with global warming. And most of all, there’s so much that can be done right away- that’s what the site encourages.

I do believe individuals can make a difference, doesn’t mean changing your bulbs will solve the problem- but it’ll be a movement, and then the corporations will see those bulbs are selling better, these are small movements but consumer does rule in a capitalist society, and until we change the capitalism, let’s use it and support the right things. Gotta do something. You can’t just be a fool and pretend it’s not happening.
The real reason government needs to be involved is we need to set up systems so people can do that. Part of the problem is there’s no education- I myself am still confused… “Can you recycle those plastic things that salad comes in or not?” I’ve been reading about this for two decades, why don’t we all know about that? Everything’s unorganized.

With most solutions as you know, first has to come admitting there’s a problem, defining of the problem, and the beginning of understanding and finding a solution. We’re not even really through step one- THAT’s a problem. LINK PART 2

 

Fessenden bio | "Someone to Watch Award" | The Last Winter press | top

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This Is The Way The World Ends: an Interview with The Last Winter Writer/Director Larry Fessenden
By Jeremiah Kipp

After completing a trilogy of independent horror films that used the archetypes of the vampire (Habit), the werewolf (Wendigo), and Frankenstein’s monster (No Telling), filmmaker Larry Fessenden widens his scope in the global warming parable The Last Winter. Set against the backdrop of wide open Alaskan snow country, an oil drilling expedition has been stalled by ecological scientist Hoffman (James Le Gros) in response to the erratic temperature shifts and melting permafrost. The bigwigs send in aggressive team leader Pollack (Ron Perlman) to resume production immediately. As tension grows between the environmentalist and the company man, an eerie paranormal force seems to monitor them. Soon, members of their party believe there’s “something out there” in the increasingly chaotic wind and storms, and it’s unclear whether it’s avenging phantoms rising up out of the ground or that their isolation has led to a maniacal cabin fever.

The mood of slow creeping dread builds to apocalyptic proportions. Hoffman and Pollack eventually form an uneasy alliance to work together to save themselves and their team from whatever force besieges them, and the film ultimately reveals itself as a grand scale tragedy where Hoffman, the sensitive man of philosophy and science, and Pollack, a bold and confident man of action, reach a terrible impasse as the world collapses around them. The specters Fessenden creates, which at the climax resemble powerful and impassive beasts, are ultimately stand-ins for the real-life nightmare of global warming. The hard-hitting resolution appeals to the conscience of the viewer, as does Fessenden’s lingering mood of introspective melancholy.

Jeremiah Kipp: How did you conceive of The Last Winter?
Larry Fessenden: I always say my films are mosaics of ideas, with a number of elements that come together. I originally imagined a Muslim and a white guy stuck out in the middle of nowhere with some forced interdependency between them, just to show the humanity beyond the labels. And then I had a long-standing preoccupation with global warming, and with the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR)—which is constantly being disputed in Congress as to whether they can drill oil there. In addition, I was disappointed the snow melted while I was making Wendigo, and wanted to go to somewhere far north where I would have guaranteed snow for the duration of the shoot. I had a lot of other ideas and was curious to see if I could develop them with someone else, so I invited Robert Leaver to be a co-writer on the project. I had known him for a couple of years, and found him to be a great dynamic spirit. We would meet and talk. He would take vigorous notes of the day’s work. I would critique them, there was a back and forth. This was right after 9/11, so we were in a specific mood: very tenuous, despairing, fraught with angst, and determined to make sense of the future.

JK: What was your relationship to the landscape, which one of the characters describes as “pure white nothingness”?
LF: Robbie and I imagined Alaskan pine forests being threatened by the oil companies—but when my producer Jeff Levy-Hinte and I did our location scouting up in Alaska, we saw this vast, barren white landscape. That’s what inspired my sense of claustrophobic horror, that oxymoron of feeling claustrophobia in great open spaces. I found it as frightening and desolate as any moonscape. When we flew in this tiny airplane over ANWR, it was just endless white. Mind you, in the summer it is beautiful, with a diverse ecosystem and subtle in its colors. That’s where the caribou roam, and fish are flowing in the streams. It is in fact a rich environment. “Pure white nothingness” is a direct quote from a senator with his own asinine criteria of what defines beauty, and therefore what is worth protecting. This is an essential place in that it is literally unaltered by humans.
We ultimately filmed in Iceland as opposed to Alaska or Canada, which were the logical places to look. Alaska has no film infrastructure to speak of, and Canada was not as flat or as snowy as I envisioned. The one great thing about our Canadian scout is we actually got onto an oil rig and were able to soak in the atmosphere. The workers were wonderful and welcoming and we got a lot of Super-8mm footage of the rigs that I wasn’t quite able to incorporate into the movie. But they were great people. This wouldn’t have happened in Prudhoe Bay in Alaska. The oil companies up there were paranoid and secretive like they know they’re doing something wrong. We were there two days into the Iraq war and they were all gung-ho in the hotel where we stayed. It was Fox news in the mess hall 24/7 there. I guess that’s why we chose Iceland.

JK: Nature seems to be as important a character as Pollack and Hoffman.
LF: Some filmmakers are intrigued by human interaction. I am interested in human activity against a larger context, against the backdrop of nature. I do feel in our current reality, where human arrogance has discounted nature and is perhaps only now waking up to the repercussions, this is becoming a more viable theme. Nature is making our lives more difficult with more erratic storms, more blistering heat and vicious cold, drought, flooding, and so on. Environmentalism has always been not about protecting the planet, but about protecting the circumstances in which people, plants and animals can flourish. We are talking about making a sustainable future for people. The Iraq war and the terrorist threat can come and go, but if we lose the hospitality of nature, we are lost as a species. If you think about in most films, from Lord of the Rings to Gone With the Wind, no matter how devastating the slaughter, there’s always some character who wanders off and looks at the sunrise as the new day begins. Renewal is possible. Nature is constant. Well, what if you didn’t have that assurance? When you don’t have that replenishing of spirit, you’ve lost all that humankind has shared throughout history.

JK: One could assume you side with Hoffman’s arguments against Pollack. How do you go about giving dimension to the other side?
LF: I understand Pollack’s psychology, and relate to certain things like his enthusiasm, his impatience. As a filmmaker, I am very impatient with union rules when you want to get the job done. You don’t want to hear about 12 hour days or meal penalties. Imagine translating that to some nudging environmentalist telling you not to do this and that. Pollack is a wonderful character. But in the end, we can see that he makes decisions that are not thought out; he is reactionary. He’s in a great American tradition that has run its course. We need to rethink how we approach problems. On the other hand there’s Hoffman, who seems to have the knowledge or the inkling but not the authority. Hoffman says in many scenes the same thing: “I think there’s something wrong. I’m not sure quite what.” We all laughed about these redundancies in the script. But that’s part of my point: Language doesn’t have much impact in real life. These are the problems with global warming, because nothing can be scientifically proven beyond a doubt. People aren’t feeling it day to day, though maybe that’s changing. But for Hoffman, this frustration leads to a melancholy, and his musings about monsters.

JK: What did Ron Perlman and James Le Gros bring to their roles?
LF: I saw Hellboy while I was thinking about casting The Last Winter, and Ron brought humanity, humor and gruffness to the red giant. These were qualities I wanted in Pollack. When he showed up for our movie, it was such smooth sailing. There was a great exchange of ideas. He challenged me on some things; not about the character but about the script and certain redundancies. I told him I wanted those waves of communication that don’t work, and you can’t just say something once because it never gets through. Ron is at a stage in his career now where he has played the beasts and the monsters — I think he was happy to just play a real character, without makeup. As for Hoffman, well, in every movie I make, there’s always a character that might have been played by myself, and the actor doing him becomes self-conscious. Le Gros kept teasing me: “I know you could do it better,” but of course I couldn’t—he brought great subtlety to the part that I wouldn’t have done. He’s also a smart collaborator when you’re actually talking about the script with him. After chatting recently, he told me that every role he does is based on another person. Hoffman was based on a friend of his. It’s a very specific performance. I like that because Hoffman is not Le Gros. He’s in a different zone.

JK: Can you describe your use of monsters as metaphor in The Last Winter?
LF: In all my films I am exploring the tension between reality and perception. It’s possible that I didn’t push the spectral qualities of the monster element far enough [in The Last Winter] because some people still take it all so literally. They look at the creature as an explanation, as though I were suggesting that global warming is perpetrated by mean looking deer creatures. Honestly, I can’t help these people. My hope is that audiences see these elusive phantoms as a manifestation within Hoffman’s mind. The world is collapsing because of CO2 pollution that has been created from years of industry, and characters perceive phantoms coming out of the ground. In my earlier film, Habit, the main character is a confused, despairing alcoholic who is losing his mind, and slowly comes to believe his girlfriend is a vampire. You could say my movies are ultimately about how we create an alternate storyline to the reality that is actually happening. It is like imagining there is a God by your side during your darkest moments. It’s that human desire to create myths to make sense of an arbitrary world.

Fessenden and I also briefly touched base on a few topics related to environmentally sound film and video production. His book, Low Impact Filmmaking, is a guide for filmmakers and producers to “have access to environmentally conscientious and money saving resources that offer a way to reverse the trend toward waste in the motion picture production business”. - JK

Environmentally Sound Moviemaking
Environmentally Sound Filmmaking is feasible and necessary. In all walks of life there has got to be a change. Practically speaking on a film shoot, it requires a Production Assistant (PA) with the right personality to oversee that whole aspect of the production. In general, independent filmmaking is a stressful, rushed and imperfect enterprise and the first thing to go is the planning and protocol essential to low impact approach.

Saving Paper
Print all scripts double sided. Recycle old schedules and scripts when printing “sides”. If people aren’t using their sides or call sheets, don’t print them.

Craft Service
Craft service and catering is where the most difference can be made. The greatest offense is bottled water. Ten years ago there was no such thing. Each production can come up with a solution. On a recent film I produced, I Sell the Dead, we had a water cooler on set and encouraged people to refill their bottles. Eventually we provided cast and crew with sports bottles to refill.

Set Construction
The wood for The Last Winter set was all purchased by a country club and every last splinter was reused. When you live on island and have to import every two by four, you come to treat it as a valuable commodity. Meanwhile in NY, you can find enough wood to build a whole set in any construction site dumpster.

Waste
Filmmaking is wasteful by definition because it is impermanent and systems take time to perfect. Plenty of people in the arts want to participate in helping the world but people are not informed. What is recyclable anyway? That’s why you need to designate a PA to oversee the environmental efforts.

Low Impact Filmmaking
I wrote a book on the topic in 1992. It’s dated now, but sadly, the topic is more urgent than ever. Please visit www.lowimpactfilmmaking.com

LINK

 

Fessenden bio | "Someone to Watch Award" | The Last Winter press | top

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Something in the Air
In the horror films of Larry Fessenden, what you can’t see will kill you
By JUDITH LEWIS
Wednesday, September 19, 2007 - 3:15 pm


It was 2001, a few weeks after hijackers flew planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. The Bush administration had withdrawn its campaign pledge to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. U.S. delegates had walked out of international climate-treaty talks at Kyoto. And horror auteur Larry Fessenden began to notice something strange about the weather.

“In New York and New England, you could see it in the leaves,” he says. “They used to give us this glorious display of color in the autumn. But they didn’t seem to be doing that anymore. It was happening because the nights weren’t getting cold enough but the light was still dying; they just turned brown and fell off.”

Then came the hurricanes, the tornadoes ripping through the Midwest, the reports of melting glaciers and thawing permafrost. “The Inuit call it Ugianaqtuq,” he says. “OOG-gi-a-nak-took — ‘like a familiar friend acting strangely.’ What happens when storms are raging, when you don’t know when the harvest season is anymore, when you can’t turn to nature for rejuvenation? What happens when you can’t trust the weather?”

The mainstream media, in their boneheaded quest for balance, had failed him; the political world was in denial. So Fessenden, a “middle-aged angry guy” (he’s 44), decided to address this surging catastrophe by doing the thing he does best: He made a horror movie. With the Uggianaqtuq as the monster.

“Horror for me has always had a cautionary tenor,” says Fessenden by phone from his home in New York. It’s a week before the opening weekend of The Brave One, the Jodie Foster vigilante movie in which Fessenden plays the Foster character’s first kill. But Fesssenden is far better known — in some rarefied circles, revered — for his idiosyncratically creepy ghost stories about reality gone awry: stories that depart from other horror movies in their philosophical underpinnings, and a view on the world that implicates humans in their own monster fantasies.

“All my favorite stories — Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example — are about our place in the spheres, and how arrogance will be our downfall,” Fessenden says. “How can we be just going about our business and driving our SUVs when there are all these dire warnings about our future? What do I say to my 7-year-old son when he talks about wanting to have his own children?”

Indeed, you may find yourself leaving the theater after Fessenden’s new film, The Last Winter (which opens this weekend), and staring, as I did, into the horror flick playing itself out on Wilshire Boulevard, with its parade of Range Rovers, Escalades and Armadas locked in traffic purgatory and its lines of buildings powered by carbon-huffing coal plants. You may look at all this and think: I see dead people. Because if you’re thinking clearly, you actually do. “We’re smokers who can’t quit while the cancer’s spreading,” is how Fesssenden puts it. “I take it personally.”Although Fessenden set The Last Winter on the souring tundra of Alaska, he shot the film in Iceland with an Icelandic crew, including director of photography Magni Águstsson, whom he credits with giving him “my best D.P. experience ever. They know how to jump off their Skidoos and catch just the right light,” Fessenden says of the crew, who all had their own stories of climate strangeness to tell. The film tells the claustrophobic story of an oil-company crew sitting out a preternaturally warm winter as they wait for equipment that may never arrive. Their leader, Ed Pollock (Hellboy’s Ron Perlman), pitches the work as partly God’s will and partly a relief from U.S. dependence on foreign oil. But the environmental scientist James Hoffman (James LeGros), whom the oil company has hired to monitor the project’s impact, has another theory: The site where the company has chosen to drill has already been battered by strange weather; it’s too fragile to take the strain. When events take a dark turn, as they do almost immediately — even a pickup football game in the Arctic evening seems to bode ill — these two opposing forces, bigger than the men themselves, battle not just for the Earth, but for an earth-mother-ish beauty named Abby (Connie Britton).

Fessenden admits that he’s “interested in archetypes, almost to the point of cliché,” and his two central characters — the ego-driven pro-industry cowboy and the sensitive land-wise scientist, a sort of modern-day Daniel Boone — are almost mythic stand-ins for the contemporary forces warring to rule the land, one in deep denial and the other so connected to the Earth he thinks it can fight back. Caught between them is young Maxwell (Zach Gilford), whose father has sent him up to come of age on the oil fields. Terrorized, starving and prone to long, barefoot walks into the frozen night, Maxwell offers the most bone-chilling explanation for Uggianaqtuk: Ghosts are emerging from the oil as we pull it from the Earth.

“We’re grave robbers!” a panicked Maxwell mutters when Hoffman tries to settle him down with a hot dinner. “They’re coming out of the ground . . . ghosts! What is oil anyway, but fossils — plants and animals from whatever million years ago?”

This is the product of Fessenden’s own singular imagination. “When you really research what oil is, that’s what you find,” he says, “that it’s truly crushed living matter. It’s dead animals! It’s so titillating, that theme, it’s so evocative to think that oil is a ghost haunting us!

“We’re burning dead animals to build our cities. There’s got to be a payback.”But does the payback come from the Earth itself, or from the way we feel about what we’re doing to it? A theme that runs through all of Fessenden’s movies is that we can never be sure whether the beast that haunts us comes from the external world or from our own telltale hearts. In his 1997 film Habit, the dark, unpredictable Anna may be a vampire or simply the screen on which her lover, Sam (Fessenden), projects his alcoholic demons; in Wendigo (2003), a deer hunter named Otis turns cop-killer just before the shadow of a vengeful buck runs his car into a ditch. Did the creature really exist, or did Otis’ conscience finally catch up with him?

“My brand of horror is about not really understanding reality,” Fessenden says. “That’s what I find intriguing, and that’s the source of horror in my films. We don’t know what’s true. Our morality and our religions cloud our interpretation of reality, because we have a need to perceive reality through mythological filters. We create demons and gods and religion as a way of categorizing an existential reality that we don’t know how to live with.”

The inhabitants of The Last Winter’s deteriorating landscape have their own demons and gods to explain their eruptions of nosebleeds and paranoia. But the most persuasive of those theories suggests that, in our deepest collective unconscious, we know we’re destroying our home.

“I think we have a collective guilt about how we’re treating the Earth,” Fessenden says. “What if that guilt started manifesting itself in this dark north of the Arctic, where you imagine you could see things with the northern lights to help you? What if the guilt and horror we feel over what we’ve done to the planet starts to consume us?”

Worse, perhaps, what if it doesn’t? Fessenden, the rare New York City native with a long-standing affinity for nature, becomes mildly apoplectic when you start talking to him about climate-change deniers, including “you know, that awful guy, Björn-what’s-his-fuck” (he means Lomborg, the Danish political scientist whose books Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It! attempt to argue that our carbon-coated atmosphere isn’t really so big a problem).

“These people are criminals,” he spits. “Criminals. If people were being raped in the streets and people were insisting it wasn’t happening, we’d be outraged; we’d put them away for good. But in this perverted society, we can sit in a building while people burn it to the ground and continue sipping our cocktails. I’m telling you, there’s nothing more frightening than that.”

Mark Fessenden’s words: The Last Winter will not be the last horror movie to feature a climate in chaos. “World events are going to start us down this path of telling these stories about how scarcity and the weather have become prominent elements in our daily lives,” he predicts. “As we start to face what we’ve done with our bad planning and selfish behavior, we’re going to experience a horror we never imagined.
“And suddenly,” he concludes, “an ax murderer is going to seem very quaint.” LINK

Fessenden bio | "Someone to Watch Award" | The Last Winter press | top

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LARRY FESSENDEN on THE LAST WINTER
By Aaron Hillis
IFC News

The future of modern American horror can look mighty grim when considering how little originality there is to all the remakes of far-better films (listen up, Rob Zombie) and how little suspense there's been in the hopefully waning trend of torture porn. So thank goodness we have actor-producer-director Larry Fessenden ("Habit," "Wendigo"), whose smart and unconventional take on indie horror tackles larger human issues in ways that draw easy comparisons to George Romero, John Carpenter and Larry Cohen. His latest is "The Last Winter," an arctic frightmare set in Northern Alaska in which an oil company advance team (including Ron Perlman, James LeGros and Kevin Corrigan) find themselves slowly being offed by an ambiguous creature that could just be the environment itself. Think "The Thing" meets "The 11th Hour" and you'll realize that Fessenden may have found the best way to address the global warming issue in a film — by scaring the crap out of us. I sat down with Fessenden to talk about the film, climates both environmental and political, and other terrifying topics. [WARNING: Minor spoilers follow!]

I've been waiting for a new Fessenden film for a few years now. Where have you been?
No one wants to make my movies, so it just takes forever. It's tough. I wrote this in 2001 when "Wendigo" was coming out. It took a year to really get it going, to get Jeff [Levy-Hinte] enthused and willing to produce again. Then we traveled to Alaska and made more adjustments to the script while we looked for money. It took a year to look for money, [another] year to realize we weren't getting it from the mini-majors, and then we had to wait for the season. Once you're between $3-5 million, you have to get it from somewhere. [Execs] sort of liked my script, they thought it was admirable, but it's a "tweenie": in between genres, nobody knows what it is. The whole business model of making a horror film is that it's going to deliver the kind of gore and extremism the fans are expecting. It's funny, there's a cliché in Hollywood: We all want to make the next "Rosemary's Baby," but they don't, really. They want to make the next "Saw"; that's what they're looking for. And global warming, does it get any more dreary than that? [laughs]

Why do you feel the need to include social or more universal issues in the form of a horror film?
I can't help myself. I love the horror genre so I'm inclined to write scary films filled with dread, and the things I find dreadful are where we find ourselves as a society and as individuals. You know, "Habit" isn't really a critique of anything but addiction and self-deception, so I don't know if that's considered social commentary; that's just what comes out. As for global warming, I consider it an extremely potent symbol of our failings as an entire species, that we've come to the point where we're destroying ourselves and unwilling to do anything about it. I find that fascinating — that is horror. So it's really the same theme as "Habit," [which] was once going to be called "Denial," and denial is what's certainly in play with global warming. To me, it's all really the same theory, and it's all very personal. Self-destruction is something I've been experimenting with my whole life. [laughs]

Besides scaring your audience shitless, are you hoping that your genre approach to environmental issues will transcend the preaching to the choir of "An Inconvenient Truth" or "The 11th Hour"?
Basically, my films are about conveying an emotion. In this case, it's dread and deep, deep sadness coming from the feeling of not being able to go home. That's a theme in the movie; it's even visually tagged in the end when Hoffman is being dragged away to his doom. His last memory is as a kid, almost making it to [his front] door. The centerpiece of the movie is that sadness: if we change the planet irrevocably, we can't go home. We can't return to the fall leaves in New England if they're now palm trees. So, there's something emotional about it, and that's what interests me. I mean, I would like people to change their light bulbs to compact fluorescents, but I'm just trying to express my feelings of fear and sadness about a train wreck that seems to be happening in slow motion.

Do you live green?
I'm extremely aware of green, and I'm a complete hypocrite like so many people. I drive to the country on the weekends, end of story. However, I drive a hybrid. I don't buy water bottles. I try to avoid that. The irony is that I've been using compact fluorescents for 15 years, so I've probably contributed something to my carbon footprint. I'm a vegetarian — or [at least] I eat fish, I'm a pescetarian — and I think it's a huge contribution because I love meat. I used to suck the marrow out of bones, but factory farming is atrocious, and I'm going to take a stand. That was a personal sacrifice of some merit to me. I could still sit down to a T-bone right now. [laughs] Whatever, I do my best. There are things you can do, and I have a whole website about it: runningoutofroad.com. I make the effort. But I don't want to be a propagandist in my films.

How did you come up with how "The Last Winter"'s entity would look? Did you ever attempt to make the creature more ambiguous, or had you always intended it to be wendigo-like?
In the writing, if you read the script, it's constantly saying you can't quite see it. It's just a blur. It was fun to work with CGI this time because I'd have the ability to deliberately make it transparent. Maybe I lost my focus, but it became more corporeal than I had written it to be. But that's because there's a part of me that loves to see the monster. The more blurry it got, I was like, "C'mon guys, let's make it a little clearer." It's a shortcoming, but at the same time, to me, the monster is in the mind of [LeGros' character] Hoffman and each character as they cross the line into this sense of dread about what they've done to the planet. They anthropomorphize this dread and it looks like this weird caribou thing.

I don't mind seeing it. It's brief enough, and it grew out of the original wendigo creature, which you'll see in mythologies and comic books and so on. I'm particularly drawn to the wendigo with antlers, which is sometimes how it's depicted. Oddly enough, it's also depicted as an abominable snowman. He fights Spider-Man in a comic, and he looks like a goofy, white ape. I love it because there's this sort of side mythology that is in the public imagination, but not completely. And it's by no means owned; there's no one depiction that's definitive, which is part of its charm. It's very elusive in body. Mine always has antlers, and we basically varied it from the one in ["Wendigo"] to something more caribou-like because now we're in the North. It's just nutty.

How do you think the film will go over when most American horror films today have been going in a direction of envelope-pushing gore?
Well, as you know, there are a lot of articles saying that that movement has come and gone. I think historically it will be relevant that, in an age of torture, that's what our horror movies were about. So I don't condemn the "movement," so to speak. But it's not what interests me. I'm interested in another type of horror, which is the idea of self-betrayal, all the issues of reality and imagination and how they interact. Mythology, if you will; the more metaphysical elements of horrors. As far as how I'll do with it, people pay a lot of lip service, that they wish that horror had other textures besides extreme gore. We'll see if it's true. I have a different kind of a gore — an Al Gore vibe. Hopefully, it'll go over. I don't calculate what my movies will be in terms of the marketplace, because then I'd just pack it up and become a plumber, which might be more fun anyway. [laughs]

I'm just jaded by the genre today. For every "The Last Winter," there's a half-dozen subpar efforts.
Listen, it's because the studios are involved, it's about the bottom line, and if they're taking risks, it's in other genres. Look at this slew of remakes. It's almost boring to complain about it, but it's stupefying, the amount of unique, original films that come out compared to the staggering quantity of remakes. That doesn't mean you can't do well with a remake — I thought "Dawn of the Dead" was very cool, and forgive me if I can't list all the others that were successful. But in general, I get this feeling of deep cynicism in the marketplace. What the fuck, do we really need the sequel of a remake? It's also devastating because you get great film directors who have made some strange nugget, and then they're immediately brought to Hollywood and forced to make a remake, instead of "We like you because your movie was a smash hit coming out of nowhere, and now what else do you have to offer?" No, no, there's none of that. It's right back to the cookie cutter.

Is that the main reason you're supporting some of these up-and-comers by producing their smaller films through your production company, Glass Eye Pix?
Absolutely. I believe in the original voice, the unique voice in the movies. I believe you can do stuff cheaply and make a good show of it. Now, look at my guys: Ti West, he made two movies with me, and the first thing that happens is he makes a sequel to "Cabin Fever." Mind you, that came organically out of meeting Eli Roth, so be it. Still, that's not what Hollywood wanted him to do. They didn't want him to write an original script, which he had done, and he was trying to find the money and eventually came to me, and made a second small feature for me. Douglas Buck, another auteur if you will, his lot in life was to make the "Sisters" remake. It's a unique film, and thereby it's fine that it exists and so on, but why not his own original movie, you know?

There's one particularly dazzling scene in "The Last Winter" — a single, unedited take with four characters, two snowmobiles and a measured, Antonioni-like choreography against a snowy backdrop so edgeless that it looks like a soundstage — which made me think: Why isn't there more artfulness in horror films today? Why aren't even the slasher flicks looking to Argento and Bava for inspiration?
It's such a cliché to even say it, but it's the MTV-inspired style of filmmaking, where you have the 45-degree shutter, or what we might call the "Private Ryan" look. It's used in "300" as well. Anyway, it sort of stylizes everything, but to me, it fetishizes the horror. It makes it an object. You can't wait for the next kill. That's why I think "torture porn" is an appropriate term because, in porn, you're waiting for the next cumshot, and you're going to get it in about 12 minutes. Or, in the movies I get, it's every six minutes. [laughs] But that's the point, you're just waiting for that. To reduce horror to the body count and the next kill — Is the stake going to go through the heart, or maybe the eyes will be gouged out first? — it just becomes this sort of clinical, ADD-objectifying of the experience. So you're never really in the moment, experiencing it, and so the agenda is [artless] by definition. Any number of us would think, why aren't there really great sexy movies, where the sex is treated in this more erotic way? It's weird, sex and violence are categorized in our culture so that they're these things you peer in at. They're not integrated into the story the way life is.

Could a change in the sociopolitical climate pave the way for more challenging, artful horror films?
It's a really puritanical country. There's something screwed up about the country, and I'll tell you what. The country is a certain way which leads to our sociopolitical climate. The way we think as a culture is why we can have such bozos saying complete mistruths and have people buy it. "Support the troops!" Excuse me, "support the troops" means blindly following some clown in the White House who is sending our boys and girls into battle for no reason. How is that supporting the troops? And yet it works. You kind of think: "I guess I don't support the troops because I'm not for the war." This is madness. So what's happened to our culture that we can do that? I think it has more to do with advertising, the pummeling of subtlety, the erasure of magic realism — which is a quality in films I admire, like a Buñuel film where things are literally absurd, where you're not quite sure what the truth is. Americans don't like that. They like it clear and simple, short and sweet, and so I believe this has happened through a culture that is all about immediate satisfaction, upheld because of the corporate agenda to advertise consumer goods. We're just in a pickle, and I don't know how we're going to get out it. That's why the movement that I prefer is the progressive movement, as opposed to the liberal movement, because "liberal" has been turned into a dirty word. I like the notion of progressiveness because we need to progress here into a mindset. Maybe we should all take a powder, slow down, ponder the lilies — that's what Jesus the Lord said, and everyone thinks he's the cat's pajamas. LINK

 

Fessenden bio | "Someone to Watch Award" | The Last Winter press | top

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indieWIRE INTERVIEW | "The Last Winter" Director Larry Fessenden
by indieWIRE (September 18, 2007)

Director Larry Fessenden's thriller "The Last Winter" is set in the Arctic tundra of Northern Alaska where an advanced team working for a petroleum exploration company is engaged in a massive project to exploit the oil resources of the pristine land. After one crewmember is found dead, a disorientation slowly claims the sanity of the other members of the team as each of them succumbs to an unknowable fear. Actor/director/writer/producer Fessenden won the "Someone to Watch" Award at the 1997 Independent Spirit Awards for "Habit," which he starred and directed. He has continued to pick up nominations and awards at other festivals, including the Austin Film Festival and the Maverick Award at the 2001 Woodstock Film Festival for "Wendigo." IFC First Take opens "The Last Winter" on Wednesday, September 19 in limited release.

What initially attracted you to filmmaking, and how has that interest evolved during your career?
I had an interest in acting from an early age and did a lot of school plays from grade school to high school. By the end of high school I had become engrossed in all the other aspects of production besides acting: the writing, directing, building sets, the music, lighting and promotion. Round about then I got a super 8 camera and began filming friends and landscapes, simple things, but I became engrossed with the way the camera tells the story by interacting with the subject. I made an hour-long film in 1979 and some shorts in the early eighties. The films were very crafted, existential slices of life; among other things I thought I invented the jump-cut. I found a particular affinity for camerawork and editing (and none for lighting). At New York University I made full length movies in video, which offered an amazing freedom, having sync sound and electronic editing. I made two features in video and had a regular public access TV show. My approach to story has remained consistent throughout: searching for mythic themes in everyday life.

Are there other aspects of filmmaking that you would still like to explore?
I have been involved in all aspects of filmmaking, I would like to do all of them better.

How did the idea for "The Last Winter" come about?
I tend to read non-fiction primarily, One Christmas my brother said he had a present that cost $12.95 and it will be the best present of the day. He was right. It was a book by Alfred Lansing about the adventure of Shakleton and how he lead his shipwrecked men to safety through canny leadership in the bitter cold of the Antarctic. My fascination with that story of leadership and morale melded with a desire to sequalize "Wendigo"... shoot in the snow and deal with global warming in a story. Ultimately I wanted to show how an individual's worldview affects how he or she deals with reality.

Please elaborate a bit on your approach to making the film.
I hired a friend, Robert Leaver to write the script with me. I would relay on my ideas and concepts and we would riff from there. We had a back and forth and the writing was fruitful. The next installment was when producer Jeff Levy-Hinte took me to Alaska to scout the real locations. This changed a lot and brought an authenticity in the script. Our goal for the film was that it work on its own terms and reach as wide an audience as possible. We did not design the film for the marketplace--clearly!

How did the financing and casting for the film come together?
We started by going to the mini majors with the script in 2003, and most were positive but wouldn't commit to what they described as a "tweeny." Eventually Jeff started looking for equity money and tiling together a deal with the Icelandic Film Commission and Katapult foreign Sales. Jeff is a ruthless and shrewd hands-on producer and he kept the budget down by challenging every decision from the size of the nails used to build the set to the kind of hard-drives we used to build the effects.

We cast the film with Laura Rosenthal and her team and this was a very good experience. I had seen Ron Perlman in "Hellboy" and responded to the pathos he brought to that tough character. I was very excited to use James Le Gros who is consistently good in movies and deserved more screen-time. Connie also, hadn't had enough movie exposure I thought. And Kevin Corigan is an old favorite from the neighborhood. Joanne Shanendoah was a remarkable find. All the cast; it was great to see the script come alive.

What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in either developing the project or making and securing distribution?
Every step making this movie was a challenge, from finding the locations to casting to securing the money. Then on a creative level, finishing the film took a while, doing special effects with a tiled together team, getting the music and mix right as the money dwindled, and agreeing on the final edit. We premiered at Toronto and I wanted to do trims and finesse the mix after I saw it. Selling a movie while you're re-cutting can cause confusion and might have lowered the heat on the film. We had the high-profile John Sloss of Cinetic representing the film, but there was no biding war. In October, Ryan Werner from IFC came up to me during the Woodstock Film Festival and said he had been haunted by the film, and from then on I worked to get IFC to buy it. The top dog Jonathan Sehring had long been supportive of my work; my earlier films play regularly on the channel. Eventually, prevailing over a few counter offers, IFC made the deal.

Who are some of the creative influences that have had the biggest impact on you?
I have always stubbornly attempted to draw from life and non-fiction when building a story. I have never sought to imitate a film or sequence in my own work. At the same time, I have absorbed a great deal of media since I was a kid, and always experienced movies very acutely, and imitate them instinctively. I watched black and white films from the '30s and '40s on TV when I was little. I loved horror movie most of all, but eventually hooked in to the Warner Brothers films starring James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. New York City in the '70s had great revival houses, and you could see all the old movies projected: Fred Astaire, Cary Grant, Bette Davis, Hitchcock.

The revival houses also played recent films, so I was able to see "Midnight Cowboy," "Eraserhead," "Mean Streets," "Night of the Living Dead," "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "A Clockwork Orange" and hundreds of others in the theater. Eventually I got old enough to see first run movies: I saw "Taxi Driver," "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" and "The Shining" the first week they came out. It was an awesome time for movies in New York City. And so I am influenced by Scorsese, Polanski, Hitchcock, Kubrick. With these filmmakers I feel a kinship of purpose and style. As a New York kid I went to museums and was very influenced by David, Caravaggio, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper, DeChirico and more recently, Andy Goldsworthy. I spent a lot of time at the Museum of Natural History, and once helped mold dinosaur bones. I went to Cape Cod in the Summer. I was always afraid of the dark. Maybe it was childhood itself that influenced me most.

What other genres or stories would like to explore as a filmmaker, and what is your next project?
I think of every film as my last, so I try to bring all genres into every one. Every time I try to stray from horror, I am drawn back to it by my natural bleak outlook. For the first time, I have three projects developing at once, maybe a forth. Only one of them isn't scary.

What is your definition of "independent film," and has that changed at all since you first started working?
Independent film is a broad term stretching many budget ranges. My main observation about Indie film is that low-budget productions have become more regimented and officious, and everywhere there is more self-awareness about the venues and visibility a film can achieve. We live in a capitalist, goal-oriented society and that mind-set has permeated the arts.

What are your interests outside of film?
The future of the planet, the political circus, trees, nature, the uncanny, growing food, cooking, alternative energy, monsters, movies and music.

What general advice would you impart to emerging filmmakers?
Don't spend a lot of money on your first films. Take your time, this is an art-form. Explore and discover. Do every job. Learn to edit so you know how to shoot. Have something to say. Have LIVE events and screenings, you can project on that wall right there. Or set up 15 TVs in a bar and show your feature film. That's what we used to do.

Please share an achievement from your career so far that you are most proud of.
Sticking to it.

LINK

 

Fessenden bio | "Someone to Watch Award" | The Last Winter press | top

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WINTER CHILL
By Damon Smith

In 2005 indie director Larry Fessenden was troubled by the state of the world—specifically, by our leaders’ callow response to the threat of global warming. So he did what he does best: He made a horror movie. The Last Winter, about a skeleton crew of oil-dredge workers afflicted by madness and other disturbing phenomena in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, revisits some of the tropes in Fessenden’s spooky 2001 feature Wendigo, including a fearsome, shape-shifting deer-spirit. The film was overlooked when it premiered at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival, later acquired by IFC First Take (releases September 19), and recently earned enthusiastic comparisons to John Carpenter’s The Thing as well as the socially conscious art-horror of George Romero and David Cronenberg.

Macabre and disquieting, Fessenden’s films have always had an existential bent, dealing with loneliness, spiritual isolation, and psychological affliction. Anyone familiar with his decade-in-the-making horror trilogy (No Telling, Habit, Wendigo) knows he’s handcrafted a tradition of chilling films more reliant on anomie and flesh-creeping atmosphere than bodily mutilation. Winner of a 1997 “Someone to Watch” Independent Spirit Award for Habit, his melancholic, AIDS-haunted twist on urban vampirism, Fessenden likes to work in the realm of myth and lore, updating creaky old stories (Frankenstein and Algernon Blackwood tales, for instance) to reflect contemporary anxieties about everything from rogue science to romantic disillusionment. So the impulse to grapple with climate change suits him, and given the film’s subtle, harrowing mix of eco-consciousness and claustrophobic dread, The Last Winter could bring Fessenden his widest audience yet.

As the film opens, bullheaded foreman Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman) arrives at a remote base station operated by North Industries ready to begin drilling. Almost immediately, he locks horns with James Hoffman (James LeGros), an activist hired by North to do the environmental impact assessment. He’s concerned that erratic temperatures are causing the permafrost to melt, making the ice roads unusable. Pollack is undaunted. As the camp is plagued by unseen forces Hoffman begins to suspect there may be something — sour gas? enraged fossil-fuel spirits? — emanating from the warming tundra. The excellent cast is rounded out by Connie Britton and Zach Gilford (of Friday Night Lights fame), Kevin Corrigan (Superbad), Jamie Harrold, Joanne Shenandoah and Pato Hoffman.

Apart from helming psychological horror movies, Fessenden is an actor (The Brave One, Broken Flowers), producer (Ilya Chaiken’s upcoming Liberty Kid), and passionate advocate for sustainable living. In 2006, he launched a Web site dedicated to educating the public about global warming, and has even written a how-to book on carbon-neutral film production. All the more reason to take seriously the green politics of The Last Winter, a shrewdly paced thriller whose Gore-y, apocalyptic finale makes An Inconvenient Truth look downright cheery.

Filmmaker spoke with Fessenden about monsters, the politics of global warming and the pleasures of filming in Iceland.

When you began work on the script in 2001, did you know this film was going to have a strong environmentalist current?
Fessenden: It was designed to be about global warming, and the setting was the controversy over drilling in ANWR [Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] and our obsession with oil. So yes, in a way, that was the context in which the characters were going to act.

Filmmaker:Did you and co-writer Robert Leaver want it to have an Arctic setting, specifically?
Fessenden: Yeah. When Fargo came out I remember being jealous and delighted by how beautiful that was as a snow film. And I liked A Simple Plan, too. So for as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with making a snow film. With Wendigo, which was filmed in upstate New York, we had good snow coverage and to most eyes it’s a successfully snowy movie. But at the end of the shoot the snow melted and disappeared. So I wanted to make a movie where it was truly cold, and that brought to mind northern Alaska. I went there when I was a kid. The way I work is these elements all come together into some kind of strange soup: I wanted to make a snow movie, I was interested in the global-warming problem and the drilling in ANWR and so on.

Filmmaker: The Last Winter seems to synthesize a lot of themes — nature’s vengeance, for instance — that you first explored in Wendigo. Was that a conscious decision?
Fessenden: My deal with Ed Pressman at ContentFilm — they took on Wendigo for distribution — was that I would have a sequel. And I wanted to show up with something if they ever followed through on their contract. Of course, they didn’t, which was fine, because I was able to have more control over the project. Initially, I thought, well, what would a sequel look like? And of course I didn’t really sequelize it in terms of the family or anything — I just took the premise and the themes and expanded on them, took them elsewhere.

Filmmaker: One of the things I admire about your work is the subtle use of special effects, especially since these are genre movies.
Fessenden: It’s something I’m always fighting in myself. When I was a kid, I was very impatient with movies like mine. I’d have been driven mad by it because I wanted to see the monster as soon as possible. But I have conflicting agendas as I make films. My producer, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, was always encouraging me to think again about the monster, to make sure not to overstate it, so it was really a process. I showed the movie at the Toronto Film Festival. It was the first time I’d seen it with an audience and with the effects finished. And I actually pared down some of the creature effects. So it’s a combination of my love for the monster and the knowledge that the less you see of it, and the more elusive it is, the more you really convey how monsters exist in our lives — which is to say, on the periphery or in our troubled imagination.

Filmmaker: At the heart of the film is the conflict between Hoffman and Pollack, which is a swatch, I guess, of a larger political discussion we’ve been having in the U.S. Pollack is blustery, brutish, and determined to do things “North’s way,” to “stay the course” regardless of the consequences. He reminded me a bit of Dubya, of that mentality, of pushing ahead regardless of what the evidence coming back at you is.

Fessenden: In 2001 I was already infuriated with Bush. More to the point is the mindset of the people who want to drill in ANWR and who want to pursue oil at the expense of alternative fuels. I wanted to show the partisan impasse, and how the premises of your mindset really determine how you try to solve problems. I have a great affection for Pollack as well, and I think that’s important. He has this gung-ho spirit that we associate with America and he gets the job done. But there’s a point at which that mindset runs its course and maybe his solutions are no longer viable in the modern world. The best leaders are able to bring people together and see their common goals.

Filmmaker: Pollock is also quite a vulnerable figure, almost childlike at times.
Fessenden: I think Perlman does such a great job showing that with sympathy and humor. But then you realize people [like Pollack] are leading our country, our expeditions, and they’re really just like kids. They aren’t able to listen, they’re stubborn, and they’re going to contradict what the advice is just for the sake of being in charge. One of my favorite scenes is when they’re discussing how they have to leave the station after the plane crash. Everything that Hoffman suggests, Pollack is opposed to, just to be the guy who came up with the solution. I feel that’s very well drawn, and you see it everywhere, even in the schoolyard. We all have a little Pollack in us.

Filmmaker: Hoffman’s journals, which we’re privy to in LeGros’s voiceover, are an important element in the film. It’s where he surmises that these weather disturbances have a supernatural cause, yet he never voices that fear to others.
Fessenden: Maxwell proposes something Hoffman has thought of himself. He says, “What if they’re ghosts? Oil is ghosts.” There’s a great moment in LeGros’s performance where he twitches and goes, well no, and you realize he’s denying his own inkling. To me, it’s very subtle and it really works in that scene. [Gilford and LeGros] are both really good. I also like the theme in the film that when you start to see the beasts, you’re doomed. I’m not proposing that they’re there, but that you’re crossing into a frame of mind which leaves you vulnerable to madness and to this sense of dread which is everybody’s undoing.

Filmmaker: Pollack is the only one who never sees what everyone else sees.
Fessenden: Well, speaking of Bush [Laughs]. I think it’s a mindset. Ultimately my films are about the psychology of people, and the level of self-delusion is what interests me.

Filmmaker: At one point, both Abby and Pollack accuse Hoffman of wishy-washy alarmism, which seemed to encapsulate some of the broader attitudes people have typically had toward environmentalists over the years.
Fessenden: It’s a deep irony that we’re supposed to prove global warming beyond a shadow of a doubt, and yet we had absolutely no proof whatsoever that Saddam was up to anything. The argument is, you have to have proof before we’re going to pull up our tent. Proof of what? The future? I don’t have it. But I think we have some questions. And whatever happened to caution? Whereas, somehow, preemptively going into another country makes perfect sense to the same mindset. We’re in a pickle.

Filmmaker: Did anything unplanned happen during filming in Iceland, weatherwise?
Fessenden: We did have a terrible blizzard that shut us down for a day. We had one scene where it rains, which was supposed to be a complete anomaly. We had our rain trucks ready and everything—then it rained that day, and even the Icelandics were weirded out. Honestly, everyone talked about global warming. But some days it was blistering hot, in terms of a pitiless sun shining down on us. There was vigorous activity day to day out there. You put this beautiful 35mm camera up on a skimobile and off you go with six guys following on another skimobile, and that would be your shoot.

Filmmaker: You and cinematographer G. Magni Agustsson really utilized the arctic landscape, which added so much to the film’s visual and tonal environment.
Fessenden: The whole way the movie was produced by Jeffrey-Levy Hinte was really smart. It was fun to be solving problems and getting the most out of our budget. We built that set up there—it’s just a shell, there’s nothing inside. Jeff figured out that we’d have to do our aerial shots the first day, before we built our base camp where the actors and the food would be housed. Wonderfully simple solutions like that. We had this incredible helicopter pilot and his right-hand man who could do these amazing maneuvers. We were shooting helicopter to airplane [at one point]. It was all crazy and quite dangerous. But it was done intelligently and everyone knew what they were doing. I love the whole Icelandic vibe. Everyone did different jobs and pitched in. If a car got stuck in the snow, it wasn’t the end of the world, just something you deal with and move on. I found them to be robust, which I think is great. The spirit was very high.

Filmmaker: Was Werner Herzog aware that you used footage from Lessons of Darkness?
Fessenden: I was in Toronto and he must have been showing Rescue Dawn. It was a year ago, so I’m not that far behind the masters, taking a year to get my film out! Anyway, I saw him in the street and stopped him and was almost speechless. I just said, “I love your work.” But I like to say that me and Herzog collaborated. [Laughs] His documentary about the Kuwait fires is very powerful, so I was really excited to be able to snatch that footage, to even know that it was possible. We made the inquiry and they said [lapsing into full-blown Herzog imitation], ‘It’s available for a price, you know,’ and then you deal with Herzog’s brother, who’s also crazy.

Filmmaker: Do you find it hard writing for horror audiences considering that you’re not giving them the gory stuff most fans are clamoring for?
Fessenden: It’s terrible to admit, but I don’t really think about the audience in that regard. I want to convey my ideas because I’m convinced they’re interesting, or even fun. I’m actually a B-movie maker, I always say. If I wanted to explore these things in a more intellectual way, I’m sure I’d make dramas that would be all over The New York Times. I love monsters and the fun of that, and I have a deep relationship to dread and fear. If that isn’t the horror genre, I don’t know what is. I can’t worry about the gore guys. They’ve got plenty to entertain themselves with.

Filmmaker: Do you have any models for your brand of socially conscientious filmmaking?
Fessenden: No. [Laughs] Costa-Gavras maybe, but all that is political. By chance, I’ve made two movies about environmental issues and I can honestly say that is quite rare. There is a tradition in some horror movies of the revenge of the beasts — with frogs and God knows what — but my model is much more traditional. I’m influenced by Scorsese’s movies and Roman Polanski, who has that subtle sense of dread in his films.

Filmmaker: How do you think people will respond to The Last Winter?
Fessenden: I’ve really carved a very strange place for myself — the pursuit of the uncanny. I really think the uncanny is what we live every day, and to express that is so cool. The axe murder in an absolutely shocking and horrifying event, but it only happens to a few of us. We can obsess on it, and that’s fine, but what’s intriguing is the peculiarity you live with every day. The little nicks and cuts, as opposed to the huge axe murder—those are things that we do to ourselves and we’re doing right now. There is no more symbolic feature in our lives than the fact that we are ignoring this thing that is killing us. It’s just madness. LINK

 

Fessenden bio | "Someone to Watch Award" | The Last Winter press | top

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It's been ten years since Larry Fessenden made his urban vampire film Habit, a movie that's been kept alive thanks to the amount of airtime available on cable television, but since then, he's continued his career as one of New York's maverick indie film stalwarts, producing and appearing in some of the scarier independent horror films of the last few years. (He also appears in a studio movie from time to time, as he did in Jodie Foster's The Brave One.)

His new movie The Last Winter takes on the larger topic of global warming in an Arctic horror tale that stars Ron Perlman as an oil worker who refuses to stop drilling despite the deaths and disappearances plaguing his crew and warnings by an environmentalist, played by James Le Gros, that the damages being done to the land are unleashing spirits bent on revenge. It's a surprisingly bigger budget film than what we've seen from Fessenden in the past, but a lot of his sensibilities are retained.

ShockTillYouDrop.com had a rare chance for an extended conversation with the eclectic New York filmmaker about his latest movie and other things going on in his world and ours.

ShockTillYouDrop.com: It's been five years since you made "Wendigo" and there's definitely some references to that in this movie, so is this part 4 of your "trilogy of horror"?
Larry Fessenden: Yeah, I'm moving on, but the irony in a way is "The Last Winter" is sort of a distillation of the other three. I mean, I see it that way, as having elements from the other three movies, the echo message of "No Telling" and the sort of subjective madness of "Habit" and then of course the Wendigo presence, the revenging spirit presence from "Wendigo." To be honest, it was written first as an attempt to try to make a sequel of some sort to "Wendigo." It was in our contract with Ed Pressman's company Content Film, so we thought, "Sure, what would a sequel look like?" Not really using the same characters or setting, but just the same thematic, vengeful comeuppance themes.

Shock: Because of the location, you get more into global warming, which is a hot topic right now.
Fessenden: Yeah, hot topic indeed!

Shock: You actually wrote this years ago, but it must be fortuitous that it's being released now.
Fessenden: Well, you know I've been interested in global warming and all sorts of environmental elements since the ‘90s when I read a book called "Silent Spring" and I first started reading more and more and a book called, "The End of Nature" started to present this idea of global warming and then Al Gore's first book "Earth in the Balance", so I've always been interested. I even wrote a book called "Low Impact Filmmaking" which was a little thing to help people make some good choices on the set. In that book, written in 1990, I have a paragraph talking about global warming, so it's sad because I'm speaking with great urgency about something that hasn't been dealt with for 17 years now. (chuckles)

Shock: At least this will reach another audience who might not go see a documentary on the subject.
Fessenden:Yeah, and similarly maybe the global warming crowd would come to a horror film which they might not do otherwise, so it's good for everyone.

Shock: You worked with a new writer on this. Is this the first one you've collaborated with another writer on?
Fessenden: My first movie "No Telling" I wrote with Beth Underwood who is my wife now, and in the past I had, so it's not a big deal. The fact is that "Habit" was my own story to tell so I did write that. I give the primary credit to myself, but I had written with a couple of other writers over the years. That story I've been telling for a long time. "Wendigo", I just wrote very fast and very much on my own and so it was sole credit. This is my first time working with Robert Lieber and it was a great collaboration. I knew him as a friend, and I knew that he was interested in writing screenplays. He's written a couple of his own that hadn't been produced and I just felt his energy would be a great way to fuse my ideas and just have somebody to talk to about the project.

Shock: What was the process like? Was it a matter or you had something already written and then you brought him in?
Fessenden: I didn't have anything written, but I had a strong idea of what I wanted it to be and we would sit for a couple of hours every other day and we talk things through, every detail, like what are the names of the characters and what are the nature of characters, and then he would go off and write stuff down and then feed it back to me. Then I could critique it as if it was sort of a fresh thing. It was a really great process. I had hired him, so I was still the boss, and I could direct the story in a way that was true to my thinking. Which is important, because when I direct the film, I have to understand it. So worked for me naturally, you get this strange feeling when the movie goes off and gets made. I think Robbie had his own issues of separation and you know, loss of control, but in the end I think we're both happy with it.

Shock: Would you do another movie with Robbie in this way?
Fessenden: In fact, we're talking about writing another movie together, which would be a non-horror movie and that will be a fun project. Once again, Robbie just has a very robust imagination, and it plays well with mine. I have just very specific things that interest me, so it works together.

Shock: However it worked out, I think it worked really well. Did this movie have a bigger budget that you normally work with?
Fessenden: No, it was much bigger. It was my first in 35 mm, and of course we had to go to Iceland to film, so there's a lot of just practical things that raised the budget, and then we had a crane everyday.The crew was actually the same size as "Wendigo" but as I say, in a whole different environment, so it was much more expensive. I don't know… it cost ten times as much as the last movie.

Shock: How are Icelandic crews to work with as far as shooting up there?
Fessenden: I loved the crew. They were a very robust group and everybody shares in all the tasks. It's not as delineated as American crews, who are very conscience of the union rules, even when their not making a union film. They sort of have been trained that way in their thinking, whereas in Iceland, everybody sort of pitched in. It's an interesting community. They all know each other from childhood, so there's old rivalries and old affections that play out in this arena of filmmaking. Everybody knew the DP who was actually a very young guy, who was like 26 I think, and it just was a lot of affection and warmth on the set and I work best that way. We have a really have a fun time on the set, even though we're telling a somber story, and Ron Perlman was a gas and we all had a lot of laughs. I like to run a ship that way, because it keeps the morale up and you actually get more out of people.

Shock: The DP did a really great job with the look of the film. Do have any sort of film school up in Iceland?
Fessenden: Well, I don't know if they have a film school actually, but I think Magni (the DP) went to England and did a lot of commercials throughout Europe and even in America, but more specifically they have a great film community and of course, Clint Eastwood shot both his war movies there, the recent Batman, the whole beginning scene. They are constantly hosting Hollywood films and a lot of independent, Hal Hartley made a movie there called "No Such Thing" and they have their own filmmakers, so it's a great film community actually.

Shock: I was going to ask you if you did any research into global warming but you answered that before with all those books. Did you go back and reread some of them for this?
Fessenden: It's a good question actually. The research element of this movie was my producer--which was awesome and not everyone would have done this--he financed a trip, he and I went to Alaska. We went to Prudhoe Bay, which is the very tippy-top of Alaska where the oil pipeline starts, and very few people go there, citizens I should say. There's a lot of oil guys there and every now and again, an environmentalist will go through on their way to the pristine landscape called Anwar. It was just a very unusual trip and there I learned that the landscape Robbie and I had written about was not accurate. We had beautiful pine trees and all this, because it was Alaska, but in fact it was a very flat landscape, which is why they want to drill up there. It really affected the script and I learned a lot about oil drilling and actually more about that stuff and sour gas and a lot of the things, even ice roads. Everything in the movie was sort of revised once we got up there. You can read about stuff all you want, but until you're actually there, you don't soak it in. It was a great trip and really affected the script, and of course I researched global warming and what might happen and so on. In the film, all that stuff is happening basically…

Shock: Right, except for that giant creature…
Fessenden: No, that's happening, too!!! You just don't see it yet!

Shock: You found that out as part of your research.
Fessenden: Yeah, exactly. You can't imagine, but they're just wandering around the plains out there. (laughs)

Shock: James Le Gros' environmentalist is a very interesting character, and the relationship between him and Ron Perlman is also interesting, having this love triangle amidst all of the deaths and strange occurences. Can you talk about how that developed?
Fessenden: Well, that came out of me and Robbie's--I have no idea who thought of it--but we just knew that we wanted that element because it would really eat away at Ron Perlman. It's funny. I never in my mind was sure that Perlman had actually had a relationship with her. He clearly always pined away for her and I pictured that Abby, played by Connie Britton, had somewhat climbed through the corporate structure by kind of leading him on. I don't know if any of that comes through, and most people just assume they had an affair in the past, and that's fine, but I think I was trying to point out that Abby, who's kind of a neutral character--she's kind of on both guys' sides—that she was also kind of an operator and an opportunist and maybe had used Perlman's affections to get where she was. You can tell he has a tremendous soft spot for her. But in any case, the triangle is at least an emotional one. I also wanted to say that in a way we're all, as the everyman citizen, hearing about global warming. We're kind of in Abby's position. We kind of believe Perlman's take, which is that progress is essential and you must go forward and be bold and we were certainly hearing the other side, which is the concerns. The movie's kind of like "Where's she going to land?" and she pretty much stays on Perlman's side until things get really bad and then she seems to kind of come to the belief that maybe Hoffman is right. The movie plays on the fact that Hoffman can't quite define what's wrong, which of course the way that the global warming deniers, if you will, play on the fact that you can't predict the future, so that's a very important element in the national debate. It's also on a personal level what happens when you're not quite sure that something's wrong, and you're not sure, like I'm trying to express anxiety here, I think we should look into this. It's easy to dismiss that and say, "Well, you're a coward or a fool."

Shock: I just saw the global warming documentary "The 11th Hour" which deals with that a lot.
Fessenden: The first half of the trailer, you're absolutely horrified and the second half the music changes, and it's like, "And this is what you can do." Even Al Gore's movie didn't really have a solution. (laughs) I think it's good that Leo's turned that corner…I didn't see the movie yet.

Shock: He does a good job, but it's very deep, though you might appreciate it having read all of those books.
Fessenden: I'd probably recognize half the characters.

Shock: Probably. I personally think that most people won't have any idea what they're talking about, including myself half the time.
Fessenden: Well that's interesting. Then you have to ask, "Was it a good movie?" in terms of…do you personally believe that global warming is happening? I think these movies are great. It's important for people to get with the program.

Shock: As far as Ron Perlman, I thought that was great casting. He hasn't appeared in that many movies, although he does have the background doing horror movies for Guillermo del Toro. What made you think of him?
Fessenden: Well, I'd have to admit, it was seeing "Hellboy." I mean I've known Perlman from all the way back, he's in "Cronos", "The City of Lost Children." I remember him of course from the Alien movie he's in, and I was aware of "Beauty and the Beast" which was on TV. So Perlman, he's a movie star that you're aware of, but I saw "Hellboy", and I just thought he was immensely charming and sympathetic even as a gruff character and even as obviously this grotesque red creature, and I thought that's the vibe I want for Pollack. I want him to be sort of repellent and robust and a blowhard, but I want him to be kind of like a kid underneath and show his other side. I really thought Perlman would deliver that, plus it's a nice reference to the genre. Look, here's our ge