Fessenden / Profiles
Fessenden bio | "Someone to Watch Award"

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1986

2007

I SELL THE DEAD (2008) press Quiet Earth Oct 28, 2008- Dr. Nathan FEAR ITSELF (2008) press FANGORIA - Michael Gingold FEAR ZONE - Gregory Lamberson MONSTERSANDCRITICS 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, Oct31-Nov 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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Dreaming Alone: The Larry Fessenden Interview by Dr. Nathan, October 28, 2008

QE: The guys at Quiet Earth consider The Last Winter to be your magnum opus. We are wondering what you think of the film two years later. Have you changed your mind or do you still like it?

LF: I am very loyal to my films. You know what they are part of my life and I do put a lot of passion into the making of them. But also it is important to me that they have themes that will outlast even the craftsmanship, so I believe it's an important movie, meaning, ahh, thematically.

QE: I agree with you. Global warming. You don’t think of the movie being two years old, that you were onto this two years ago.

LF: Well, of course the reality is that we wrote this in 2001. But I have been on this topic for a long time. I've always sort of been an environmentalist. And with the global warming, I wrote a book about this in 1991 about how to make films environmentally. It is actually online now: lowimpactfilmingmaking.com -- it's funny to read that -- I'm complaining about global warming then. So it really is a sad reality that this issue’s been out there, the information's been out there, and we continue not to do anything about it.

QE: And you still feel bad about it now?

LF: I feel worse than ever. In fact, the news is that it is going faster than people originally thought. And it’s just unbearable to see that the conversation is at the very beginning right now, in the public sector. In fact, in America we are having these elections and because of the economic crisis and a bunch of crap that they focus on, because there is so much noise in the news, no one is really addressing this as a major topic. And I believe, not to get too political here, but the way out is also positive for the economy for jobs, which is to say, the shift to a green economy -- there is a lot of opportunity there, and it's sort of what's going on in the movie, in The Last Winter, in the argument between the two guys. One guy is essentially wanting to drill our way out…

QE: I thought one guy is Palin the other guy is Obama…

LF: The prescient thing I think is that Abby, the character played by Connie Britten, is really quite like Sarah Palin – she’s very attractive and she’s rather cutthroat as she handles the two men…

QE: …that’s right -- and she’s still pragmatic at the same time

LF: I think she’s oddly the central character, even though perhaps the film doesn’t take full advantage of that. But the idea is that she sees both sides and she’s just hedging her bets.

QE: I think that’s a good move. I don’t think you want to get too complicated – you have a major thrust for the plot, anyway. I’ve seen a lot of movies where guys toss so much stuff in after awhile you don’t know what they’re talking about.

LF: Well, that’s interesting, and I have been accused of that…

QE: I like the single-minded stuff, personally… in The Last Winter you’re allowed to do the slow build, which is one of my favorites.

LF: Yeah, I love that…

QE: Like, there’s no stuff at the beginning to set us up… for a long time you have really no idea what’s going on…

LF: Yes, that’s interesting… There’s the Jaws approach to movies, which we all love, where there’s the attack at the beginning and you know what you’re getting into, but there’s that other approach which I’ve tried in a couple of films, where you think… well, am I in a drama? What am I up to here? And then the slow, creeping decay sets in… and my thought is that this is the way life truly unravels. And then suddenly you notice out there – hey, that’s weird – what’s that guy doing walking around, he just got hit by a car and then slowly you build up from there.

QE: That’s true – we do ignore a lot of foreshadowing, a lot of stuff…

LF: And that’s why global warming is such an interesting topic – it is the stuff of horror because you can basically go day-to-day and you don’t experience it. And yet it’s slowly creeping up on us, and one day we’ll realize, shit, the oceans are dead. (Laughs maniacally)

QE: If they’re not dead already.

LF: Well, exactly… I mean that’s the problem… we could all stop driving tomorrow and there’s a lot of stuff already underway.

QE: One of the things that crossed my mind, in terms of a horror scenario, is that stupendous bundle of little bits of plastic that’s floating in the ocean between Japan and Alaska. That’s really scary to me – plankton are eating it and plastic is getting into the seafood chain.

LF: That’s so intriguing, and it just shows there’s so much opportunity for horror in the things that have happened, and people always say, you know, am I preaching, am I trying to change minds?, well, no, it’s just what I think to be quite horrific right now, and it’s all about self-betrayal. Like, I made a film called Habit which is about a delusional alcoholic who thinks his girlfriend’s a vampire, and there’s a more direct example of a theme that I love, which is the theme of self-betrayal. But, society-wise, that’s where we are. We literally live in denial.

QE: Yes. The ending of The Last Winter I found… interesting. To a certain degree it looks like either a setup for…

LF: (laughs) the sequel?

QE: Yeah… the Really Really Last Winter – it’s tough to do a sequel when you’ve used the word “Last” – but I was interested in the last shot, where Abby comes out of the clinic. The doctor has hung himself, and she walks outside and she’s standing in some water… and I really thought there would be some kind of pullback there, so we can get to see that everything is under water.

LF: Well, the idea is just that – it’s amazing… that location is just a place in Iceland where we were filming anyway, but it looks exactly like the little hospital in Prodou Bay, which is what would have happened… someone would have rescued her and brought her to this little clinic. But, as you say on the news there’s a guy giving a roundup of how bad things are everywhere, and of course, he’s talking in a very jovial fashion, the way they do.

QE: That’s odd, too.

LF: But that’s what happens – it’s on there now – oh, there’s been another hurricane here and there, and it’s like don’t you understand: if you put that all together, there’s something sinister going on.

QE: That’s interesting, because don’t you think to a certain degree that the News has been almost completely fictionalized by the mass media? I watch the news like people watch sitcoms.

LF: Funny, I’m the same way. I’m quite addicted to the news – I watch it on the internet – but basically, it’s just so interesting, because what you’re really watching is the way information is conveyed… you can call it entertainment, you can call it a horror film, it’s just amazing how little substance there is, and how much opinion, and so on. I mean, it’s really where we are. But to finish, you know, the idea of the ending… well, she steps out and instead of the snow landscape we’re accustomed to it’s all turned to water and of course you want that pull-up, but when I was editing I realized just to hold on – it’s so stressful – and then you go to black… it’s sorta like: you all know what’s out there, or, if you don’t, you better think about it.

QE: Our imaginations are better…

LF: Exactly, and you know, all you do is pan up to a CGI shot… of what? You know?

QE: Right… you’d be right back to Planet of the Apes with the Statue of Liberty…

LF: (laughs) If you had that, that would be cool… but, ya know it was done well before…

QE: No kidding… OK, here’s another question. Was there any issues bringing Dominic Monaghan onboard for I Sell The Dead, considering he’s coming from such a hugely-popular TV program?

LF: It was a great experience. My co-producer, Peter Phok, he really had this notion we should try for Dom, and we sent the script to Dom’s representation and they got it to Dom over the course of several months. He really gained an enthusiasm for the script, and he was just finishing up Lost… we ended up waiting for several months just to work with his schedule, and as it turns out, our first night shooting was the night that his last episode broadcast, so he was in a great sort of mood – a chapter had ended in his career, and moving on to our little film. So we were very honored to get him. They were really generous to us, and really stuck with it, and Peter and Glenn, once they realized it was possible, were very enthused.

QE: Is that really part of the challenge you face, as an indie filmmaker… how the heck do you approach and convince people? Is it all script-based?

LF: It really is. It’s very much script-based. We’re lucky that Glass Eye Pix has a bit of a rogue reputation, so I think people become aware of our previous work. In the case of Ron Perlman, of course, he and I worked together on The Last Winter, and we just had a blast, and I was able to convince him to show up for what was a three-day shoot for him. Ron was finished with Hellboy 2, and that was a grueling experience under the maestro, Guillermo Del Toro, and I think he was ready to have a little palate cleaner, and so he just popped in and did our shoot. We had been waiting for him for six more months after our original shoot with Dom, so our shoot was spread out over a year. The beauty is that Dom was dedicated enough to the project that he came back – these are very busy people. So it’s all about having good relations.

QE: No kidding. I haven’t seen Ron in I Sell The Dead yet, but he is great in The Last Winter, which you shot in Iceland. That must have been pretty crazy.

LF: It was a great experience. Iceland is a very cool place and we all walked away after having a really good time… except a little hard on the liver, actually.

QE: I’ve heard good things about Icelandic women…

LF: They’re awesome.. it’s quite a soup over there: a lot of alcohol, beautiful, gorgeous women who either fit into the Broom Hilda blonde category, or the Bjork category, so everything you could hope for… and then the guys are very robust... Vikings… and we were out in the dead of winter in a very remote area filming half the thing, and it was just my style, very Werner Herzog, we were really out there, you know – film or death – with blizzards and blistering sun – it was very good. Wonderful.

QE: Just as an aside, I gotta tell you that I had trouble suspending my disbelief on one funny thing – everyone is talking about the tundra melting, but everything is still under three feet of snow!

LF: But that’s part of my point. You can’t just look at the facts in front of you – there’s actually a greater reality.

QE: But the snow does diminish as the movie progresses, so it does work out…

LF: Which, incidentally, was true up there. I had pictured a pure white film and in fact there were occasions where it was melting. And the day that it rains in the movie. That was scripted, and was supposed to be this appalling weather event – and it rained! That was so freaky, which is why you have such beautiful clouds in that scene. Of course, we had our rain machine – we were prepared – and then it rained, so it really was freaky and that is really happening, and the warming effects the colder areas first, oddly enough. At the equator it’s essentially the same temperature, but in the arctic things start changing faster and more erratically. But that’s a good point and it’s part of the paradox of the film that everyone is basically in fear of freezing to death, but the problem is the warming. This is what makes for a complex film, whether you like it or not.

QE: OK, let’s change direction again – what’s it like working with Angus Scrimm?

LF: Ahh… a dream! Angus came into our world thru James McKenney, who is one of my henchmen, and he’s also a director…I’ve made like, three of his films now, The Off Season, Automatons, and Satan Hates You, and when we were preparing to make The Off Season I was traveling in Alaska to scout for The Last Winter, and I had told Jim, please, if you have imagined Angus Scrimm when you wrote the script, then why not reach out to him, we can make it happen, and Jim had figured out that Angus was going to be on the East Coast to do a Fangoria convention, and so we literally scheduled ourt whole shoot around Angus’s trip to the East Coast and we got him the script and Angus loved it – for one thing, I think it wasn’t the usual cliché horror, it was a much spookier ghost story…. So, he joined our camp and I think he enjoyed the experience. Then Jim hired him for Automatons, which we shot in LA, and some time later we invited him to come east and do two films at once: Satan Hates You and I Sell The Dead. So, he’s just a great team player, and I think he’s had fun with our group, because it’s all about The Love… (laughs) And Angus is joining us tonight… he’s here in Toronto… the great Angus Scrimm will be at our World Premiere.

QE: World Premiere? Hasn’t this been shown?

LF: Absolutely not. This is our World Premiere. This is for us, the big screening. Well, that’s not true, we played at Sitges, but with Angus coming, and Glenn’s Mom, this feels like a World Premiere. That was just a sneak preview.

QE: Great! Can’t wait. I’ve heard you’re going to be producing Jim Kivkles and Nick Damici’s Stakeland, and we’ve heard that it is going to do for bloodsuckers what Mulberry Street did for zombies. Considering we love Mulberry Street we were wondering what was in store for us?

LF: I can honestly tell you were had the scripts in my bag, intending to reads it on the plane – of course, we spent too much time enjoying our in-flight beverages to actually get to it – but the point is, having read the previous draft, look, I just love Mulberry Street and I’ve been trying to work with Jim for quite awhile, even before that, I really admire his approach and I think he shares my interest in the different textures in horror, beyond just the bloodletting and scary bits, there’s an awful lot of heart in Mulberry Street and I think he’s going to bring that to this one. I can only tell you its kind of a kung fu style thing, where there’s a vampire hunter, and this kid he’s mentoring, and they’re traveling the country in kind of a post-apocalyptic scenario. It’s really going to be great – very spare…

QE: Set in the future?

LF: A little bit in the future, but not very far in the future, probably a couple months, when things are really going to shit. But we’re very excited. It’s going to be one of our very low-budget pictures so we’re going to take advantage of Jim’s talents to put a lot of that whatever money we can find on the screen, and we’re also going to have a web component so people can see some stuff on the internet. We’ll be getting underway quite soon with that.

QE: Will you start shooting in November?

LF: Yes, we want to capture some of the seasons before we head right into winter, but the majority of the shoot will be January, and then we’ll be posting in the spring. And, as I say, we may have some web presence as we bring it out.

QE: Do you have a timetable for release?

LF: Not a present, but you can see if we get it finished in the spring… you know, all these films that we’re coming out with, none of them have distribution at first, but each movie has its own life path, and we’ll see what happens.

QE: Just as an aside on that, have you noticed it getting any tougher to raise dough with what’s going on in the economy right now?

LF: Oh, absolutely. It hurts every business. Everybody’s hurting. I will say there is the cliché which so far seems true: that showbiz does OK in a recession, because going to a movie is cheaper than a vacation – it’s cheaper than a lot of things. We’ll see what happens – it’s not pretty. The only good thing about all of this is that the planet may get a little, tiny break when human activity slows down.

QE: That may just be prolonging the inevitable, because sooner later, we’re going to run out…

LF: That’s the truth and that’s why we need to move off of it… there’s a great book called The Long Emergency, which is about the end of oil, the absurdity of suburbs… basically the entire plan that was laid out makes no sense…

QE: It was all based on cheap oil…

LF: Exactly, so we need to re-assess. And the politicians who are dragging their feet are going to become unpopular and go the way of the dinosaurs. And second of all, they’re only harming us. We need to get on with his, and the more pro-active we are as a society, the sooner we’ll be at the head of the game. Canada and America need to wake up to this fact.

QE: Ok, another question. You said you take your inspiration from no-fiction. Was that the inspiration behind I Sell The Dead?

LF: No, that was pure fiction. That’s Glenn. Glenn is a very inspiring character. He has a very wonderful Irish sense of humor and sense of writing and he’s very inspired by everything from Joyce’s Dubliners – that sensibility of the small town – but in actuality there are these things called “gallows speeches”, where people would give confessions and either proclaim their innocence or explain themselves before being sent off to the gallows… and Glenn was very inspired by those, and they’re chronicled in whatever books and so on, and that’s when you say, you know, “humble me, I did indeed rob Mrs. Jones’ corpse, and I did it for this reason”, so there’s some historical truth, but let’s be honest, the fact is I love the genre in many ways and it’s not all seriousness. My own films tend to come from a somber place of the collapse of society, and as I said, of the betraying of the individual, but I also love the artifice of it, and I love the old Hammer films, and I love the Universal films in particular. So when Glenn came up with this – it’s like a warm cozy blanket – it’s why I loved the movies when I was little – you just want to be in that world.

QE: Yes, but you’re a storyteller, as well.

LF: Exactly.

QE: Storyteller is a wonderful occupation…

LF: And I Sell The Dead is also a buddy movie, which I think is essential, because with all this despair and horror that I’m interested in, there’s also the redemptive quality of the human experience which is why we love and work together…

QE: But you point that out in The Last Winter. Things would have been completely different if the drillers and non-drillers had both taken a step back and said there’s something going on here… but then, you wouldn’t have the same story.

LF: I wish we didn’t. I wish I didn’t have to tell that story. It’s our problem in America. It’s so partisan, we’ve lost this sense of coming together. I have a great yearning for that… in fact, my horror is based on why can’t we literally get along. Because there’s a yearning for things to be better. Look, we have a short and brutish life and you wish that you could find camaraderie and that’s really the desire. In fact, I have another script that is a non-horror movie and it’s a much sweeter telling of that same sort of theme.

QE: I agree completely. Our uniqueness as individuals is both our blessing and burden. If you look at our society, you note right away how much energy we use simply communicating with each other.

LF: Well, habit is based on that idea. “We live as we dream alone” is from Heart of Darkness, and I’m interested in that theme because, as you know, you can really never know the other person’s experiences and we’re all locked into our own self-perception, and from there you have the idea of delusional perception and it gets very scary if you start seeing demons and so on. Well, it may not be true objectively but it’s absolutely true to you, so I find that very interesting, and that’s one entry into the horror genre. But the other thing you said reflects more on my approach to making movies, which is the sense of community, and I really believe in building… well, we have a little group of filmmakers and I produce some of their films, and a lot of people work on each other’s things. Glenn, who directed I Sell The Dead is also an effects guy and he’s done a lot of work on the other movies, and it’s the sense of camaraderie that is important. And I believe in putting that out there and building movies that way.

QE: Fantastic. It seems part of that team is Ron Perlman. Is he the DeNiro to your Scorsese? He’s actually damn good. He seems to understand his roles in ways different from the other actors.

LF: He brings so much… but he’s like an old vaudeville guy, he’s an old school dude and I really enjoy that about him. He’s a lotta heart, a lot of crusty, a little bit of bitterness in there… and I can relate to all of it. Look, it has to be said, Ron Perlman is Guillermo’s guy, really. I’m just a side product of my affection for Guillermo Del Toro’s movies with Perlman in them, and Guillermo discovered Ron and brought him to this certain level in his career, although Ron was doing fine without either of us, but anyway I’ve enjoyed my associations. When I asked Ron to do The Last Winter my conceit was, Ron, you’ll get to play a real character – you won’t have a lot of make-up – you’ll bring whatever monster elements, your understanding of those kinds of characters, to a fully normal person, but you’ll show the vulnerability and how there’s a kind of bitterness to the character of Perlman. Sometimes the psychology of these kinds of characters – you reveal that they’re kind of like children, that they’re stubborn and they’re not behaving expansively, and I thought Ron would be able to capture that. It was fun to work with him, you know because you realize there’s one scene after he almost gets killed in the ice water… the vulnerability…

QE: Yes, but I thought it was his relationship with Abby is the telling point, that’s where his vulnerability comes out. He is jealous.

LF: He’s smitten, yeah, and he’s so pissed that this smarmy little prick, Hoffman…

QE: Right. And it’s great that you have him and Hoffman together at the end…

LF: Yes, exactly…

QE: And I’m correct in assuming these guys are killed…

LF: Thank you. You know the movie is totally misunderstood, which is a funny thing to go through life – talk about feeling alone. You know there’s no monster in that film. It’s in Hoffman’s mind. Everybody’s obsessed that I have said global warming is caused by caribou monsters – well, that’s absurd. All I’m saying is that we all live in our own perceptions. Hoffman pictures these monsters, and he’s carried away by one, but he’s really dying. He’s fallen off a cliff and Ron and him die together, and its really how each one interprets death – one guy returns to his childhood memories, and in his way dies peacefully, the other guy is torn to ribbons because he has spent his whole life resisting nature and death. If you fight against the realities of the world, they will crush you. Nature will win out. If you, on the other hand, are attuned to it, you will see demons but you may, in fact, be delivered to the bosom of your own sweet memories. End of story. And I gotta say, people who snark my movie say all that nonsense about monsters and ghosts and bad CGI… it’s like, f*** you, baby, I lost you long ago.

QE: Well, I though it was great because it was so understated. For me the whole thing became crystal clear when the first guy dies and they retrieve the video. That sequence is very revealing because you see that he sees nothing.

LF: Exactly. Thank you. Exactly.

QE: After that it became obvious this was a mind disease and not a physical thing.

LF: Well, I must say it’s incredibly refreshing when people do get it…

QE: It’s always about the storytelling…

LF: Then I think you’ll appreciate the structure of I Sell The Dead, because it’s all about storytelling, which is what comes from Glenn’s Irish traditions – sitting around in a pub. It’s really stories within stories, so I think you’ll get a real kick out of it.

QE: I’m looking forward to it. But in Sell The Dead you act, not direct. Which do you prefer, acting or directing?

LF: That’s a good question. I love acting, but I didn’t pursue it… I found it nerve-wracking and I realized also that I had too many ideas beyond just acting… like I think it’s very important where the camera goes, how the thing is edited…

QE: Why would you find acting nerve-wracking? It seems to me if you know your lines…

LF: You just said it… I don’t trust my brain… once you know your lines…

QE: Do you ever use cue cards?

LF: No, I don’t use cue cards.

QE: No cheating?

LF: I actually believe very strongly – you have to know your lines, backwards. Literally – the Kubrick tradition, you know, he used to torture his actors…

QE: So there’s no ad-libbing when you’re directing… no one is messing around

LF: Not really. No, I write it out.

QE: When someone directs you, do you mess around with them?

LF: No, in fact the funniest thing is, my greatest acting experience was in Habit, where I knew the lines intuitively because I’d written it, and in fact written it in the past, and I sort of knew the character because I’ve lived it, and then to be able to be in the scene with the other actor, and to loosen him up and almost move the… you know, I was the director so I could sorta throw in stuff, and it made for a very organic and loose experience – I think for everyone, and that was fun. But, you know, when you’re on someone else’s set you don’t have quite that kind of liberty. But I do love acting, but I also love art direction and all the other details so I honestly, in the end, I feel like I’m more of a director, because I like to oversee it all.

QE: Can we extrapolate that to saying you basically like the control aspect of it?

LF: It is the control. I really enjoyed my experience with I Sell The Dead. I was actually a producer and an actor, so as a producer I had not so much control, but a lot of influence in how to make Glenn find his way, and that was very rewarding, and then as the actor doing whatever.

QE: And you were both actor and director in Habit.

LF: That’s why I keep referencing it… it’s relatively obscure, I suppose... but it is what got me my initial attention.

QE: Do you spend a lot of your life wandering around film festivals like this?

LF: Actually, I don’t enjoy… flying. So I’m just as happy not going to festivals. It’s always fun, and you meet other filmmakers… speaking of directing, I love the idea of putting together a festival – the curatorship of it, so I very much appreciate how these things unfold, but honestly, it’s just night after night of drinking and wagging the tongue… I can do without it; I’m very happy at home, writing in New York. I have a place in upstate New York where I retreat to and that’s my favorite, just to be out in the country.

QE: Sounds great. Have you ever sat out there and asked yourself about the psychological basis of the appeal of these kinds of stories?

LF: Oh, there’s no question about it. Horror is one of the more enduring genres – compared to what? Well, romance will always be in the stories – but the fact is horror…

QE: as in Freud’s work on the uncanny?

LF: … yes, the uncanny. That’s my favorite word, and that’s what kind of horror I’m interested in…

QE: … where the confusion causes the fear…

LF: … he actually speaks about not being able to orient yourself back home, which is one of my themes – you can never go home. That’s what the uncanny means – that you’re basically disoriented from your home and yourself. All of those are my favorite themes, much more so than an axe through the head…

QE: … the gore…

LF: … the gore is almost a burden. It’s as if you wanted to tell romantic stories of people falling in love and people were like, saying, “where’s the cum shot?” You say, yes, I understand the cum shot, but I want to talk about people’s yearnings…

QE: It ceases to be a story and becomes special effects…

LF: Precisely. Spectacle over other stuff. I’m a theme and atmosphere guy... I can’t understand mysteries, you know. I can never figure out who is the murderer. My brother used to love those things, and I could never figure them out. My wife leans over to me at movies and says it’s obviously the butler and I say what, was I supposed to be figuring that out, cause I was watching how the actor was holding the glass, or, you know, how the fog looked in that scene… I was just enjoying the atmosphere..

QE: that’s uncanny…

LF: Oh yeah, (laughs) look, I think fear is the ruling emotion. It’s all well and good to imagine that people conquer with love, but the real truth is that we’re still the reptile brain, which is guiding our thinking, and there’s much to be afraid of…

QE: Fear… and perhaps greed?

LF: I agree, but I think that is fear. I had this Russian literature teacher and he made the correlation between greed and fear and I loved it. If you’re sitting at the table and you’re just consumptively eating all the lamb chops and whatever, it’s because you feel like you’ll be wanting, or you’ll be without, and so I think greed in its own way, the sense that you must have this, and I think it’s almost fear displaced if you think you need stuff to protect you from the inevitable. That’s why the opposite is this beautiful place of acceptance and all the Zen teachings are about letting go, and accepting and that, to me, is the journey – to see how much you can dispel fear and dispel greed and become a generous person. The truth is, I believe all of that is in us, or can be… that’s what it’s about – you‘re trying to show the appalling things in order to, in a sense, be released from them.

QE: Thanks, Larry… we appreciate your time. And now I release you! Well, after you autograph my Last Winter dvd... link

 

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

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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 s