On playing with different mediums

Your latest film Room Temperature is about a family building a haunted house in their home. You’ve mentioned that you used to make home haunts with your family. What do you remember about them?

My grandmother was a taxidermist. When I was growing up, she would give us stuffed wolves, stuffed gila monsters, stuffed birds, bear rugs. I used all of these in our haunted houses. They were pretty silly—we’d blindfold people and put their hands in something and tell them we were feeling eyeballs. The only cool thing was… We had this big walk-in refrigerated locker. I guess you were supposed to put meat in it, but it wasn’t used anymore. I’d open the door and say, “What’s in there? Let’s go look.” Then people would go in, and I’d shut the door and leave them there for a really long time. [laughs]

The film was very much an indie operation; you and [co-director] Zac Farley oversaw everything creatively. Do you have any advice for other filmmakers who are trying to get their indie projects off the ground?

Each of our films was made in a different way. The first one, Like Cattle Towards Glow, was financed through Germany, and it only cost $40,000. You can actually make a film for $40,000, but you have to get a lot of people who really want to do it and do it for basically free. Our second film, Permanent Green Light, was done through grants from the French government. This one was tough because it cost much more than our other films. It took four years to raise the money, and I don’t want to do that again. We want to make our next film inexpensively, so we’re trying to come up with something that we can do easily.

There was another film [at the LA Festival of Movies] called Debut, by this young director named Julian Castronovo. I thought he was a very interesting guy. He made the whole film by himself on his computer for $900. I would encourage people not to get intimidated by this whole thing.

We don’t expect this film to get a big release or anything like that. We’re just going to try to show it at interesting festivals as many times as we can. We were thrilled that [LA Festival of Movies organizers] Micah [Gottlieb] and Sarah [Winshall] wanted it.

At the Los Angeles Festival of Movies Q&A, one of the actors, Charlie Nelson Jacobs, mentioned that his audition process was like nothing he had ever gone through before—he said it involved answering a lot of questions about himself. I’m curious about how exactly you screened the actors and placed everybody in their roles.

The way auditioning worked was, we’d send a questionnaire to prospective performers and they’d film themselves answering the questions just so we could get a sense of who they were. “What do you love to do?” “What are you afraid of?” Stuff to get them to open up a little bit. We like to use people as they are—we don’t try to make them change in some way. We don’t really have a visual idea of the characters before we start casting a film, so we never have actors do extensive line readings. We mostly just sit and talk with them. It’s also about how we vibe, because we work very collaboratively.

You often work with actors who aren’t trained professionally. How do you approach that? Do you give a lot of direction on set, or mostly let them follow their instincts?

We like working with non-actors because they don’t know what they look like when they do anything. They aren’t paying attention to, “How is it going to look if I’m sad, or if I get angry?” They’re just themselves. In rehearsals, we explain what the film and characters are like, and we ask them, “What do you want to do with this?”, and then we might ask them to make adjustments. Once we’re actually shooting, they know what they’re supposed to do. We find the performances very pure. They’re kind of amateurish, but in a beautiful way.

You and Zac are credited as co-directors and co-writers on your various films together. How do you divide up work throughout the creative process?

I mainly do the script, because I’m the writer. We discuss what we want to do with the characters, and then I’ll go home and write, and then I’ll show it to him. He’s a visual person, so sometimes he’ll say, “This is interesting [on the page], but visually it will not be as interesting—can we set this in a different location?”

Other than that, he doesn’t challenge the writing so much. When it comes to directing, he is the director on set—but we’ve discussed everything ahead of time, and we know what’s going to happen, because every other part of the process is completely collaborative, from casting to editing to post-production. It might be too complicated for the DP to have to listen to two people, so Zac takes care of that, and I work on the performances with the actors. Sometimes, he’ll say, “Do you think the performance could be a little more like this?”, and I’ll say, “What do you think about shooting from this angle?”

Has your writing background informed your directing style in any way?

Well, I’ve written all these theater pieces for Gisèlle Vienne, and that’s how I learned to write for a sentient, three-dimensional, solid being that’s going to be speaking the text and moving around. Whatever I know about directing, I learned from theater.

How, in general, do you know when someone is a good collaborator?

It seems like I just fall into collaborations. When I met Gisèlle, I was going to Lyon to do a lecture about my work. She had read my books, and she wrote to me and said, “Do you want to stay a few extra days and try making something together?” And I liked what she sent me. She was working with this musician, Peter Rehberg, whose music I liked, and I said, “Ok, sure, what the fuck?” We made our whole piece in three days. We got along really well.

Usually, when I collaborate, I feel like I’m contributing to somebody else’s vision. I write the text for Gisèlle; I also am a dramaturg with her, but she’s the boss. I did a bunch of performances with Ishmael Houston-Jones in the ’80s in New York, and even though they were very collaborative, it was always Ishmael’s work, you know?

With Zac, it’s different. It’s not my work or his work—it’s our work. My projects with him are the first time I’ve done something like that.

How did you know that Zac specifically would be an ideal collaborator?

We’re totally on the same wavelength—we want the same things, although we have different approaches, which is good. We met through a friend of his who said, “There’s this guy named Zac who likes your work. He seems kind of like he’s at sea. Maybe you guys should meet.” We had a coffee, and I said, “Can I look at your art?” and I really liked it. I don’t know how you can explain these things—we immediately became best friends and started collaborating. We worked on some things that we didn’t end up doing. We were going to do a book about theme parks in Scandinavia—we might still do that one. And we were going to do a live performance with no people in it, in an ice rink—it was more about the machine that cleans the ice. Then the opportunity came up for us to make a film.

Was the book about Scandinavia going to be nonfiction, or was it more like a novel?

What we did was, we rented a car, and we drove up to Scandinavia from Paris, and we spent two and a half weeks driving to every theme park we could find in Scandinavia. We went to maybe 15 theme parks in Norway and Denmark and Sweden, and while we were there, I was writing these fairy tales set in theme parks, slightly inspired by Hans Christian Andersen. We may still put them together and make some kind of book out of them.

You should—that would be so cool. What’s distinct about the theme parks in Scandinavia?

There’s a little more mystical, a little more folksy. There are maybe three or four truly great theme parks there. A lot of them are very old. Our favorite park was in Denmark. It’s called Kungaparken, and what was really great about it is that every single person that worked there was a goth teenager. You’d try to talk to them and they’d be like, “Yeah, yeah.” They weren’t friendly. I don’t know what the owner’s deal was, but it made the whole thing very magical.

You mentioned your hatred for the Frisk movie during your Q&A. Would you ever consider adapting one of your books with Zac?

Oh, no, we wouldn’t want to do that. We’d want to write something specific for us. God Jr., which is kind of my “nice” novel, was optioned for a long time by the people who made Coraline, but that fell by the wayside. People always want to make The Sluts into a film or a play, but they all want to take it off the internet, which is stupid. I mean, it’s about the internet—you can’t.

Yeah, that wouldn’t work. I will say that when I first finished The Sluts, my immediate thought was, “How has this not been made into a movie?” Then I took a second to reflect on it, and I realized you couldn’t adapt it because you never know who’s actually talking or what’s actually happening at any given moment.

Maybe it could be one of those CD-ROM games from the ’90s—you know, when they were very primitive and text based. But I think it’s just not a good idea. My books are really about reading, so I don’t have any desire to have them made into films. If somebody interesting wanted to make one, of course I’d talk to them—but Zac and I don’t want to adapt anything. We want to make our own art.

The books are so much about language—especially when you use internet speak. The first short story from Flunker, “Face Eraser,” comes to mind.

I’ve read it out loud. People think it’s funny, but it’s much more about the page. I used to be really interested in emo; my novel The Marbled Swarm is about emo. There used to be these fascinating emo message boards and chat rooms; everyone talked like that, and it was beautiful. I studied them and stole lines I liked.

When you delve into darker subjects, do you ever find yourself disturbed by your own work during the writing process? If so, how do you deal with that?

No, never. I was disturbed by my brain before I started writing. I was disturbed by what I was thinking and fantasizing about. It scared me and excited me. But when I started writing, I could approach those ideas more formally.

Have you ever gotten messages from fans who write to you with the same obsessive tone as the characters from The Sluts and your other books?

I do, but I always immediately turn the conversation on them, because I’m not interested in that. People will come in as big fans, and I’ll ask them, “Well, what do you do?” And then they’ll say, “I want to be a writer,” and I’ll say, “Tell me more about that,” because I’m much more interested in them. I have this need to be supportive towards people, so I’ll say, “Let’s talk about you.” Then they start opening up about what they’re doing and what they care about. My blog isn’t really about my work at all, so I try to direct people towards other topics. Almost everybody who reads the blog is super interesting and smart and weird. I like for people to get to know each other, so it’s nice when they start talking to each other.

The thing about the blog is that it’s so old-fashioned. It’s from another time—which is what I like about it. Everybody’s doing Substack now, but it seems like that’s mostly about, “I have an interesting brain, and I can make some money off of my interesting brain.” It’s not about interaction.

I was going to ask you about that. With all of the Substack hype, would you ever transfer your blog to Substack?

I don’t want to. I don’t want to make money off it. It gets a large audience—like, shockingly large—so I could put ads on there, but I want it to be this weird free thing that people find. I like that it’s kind of secret—people stumble upon it.

At this point, you’ve done films, you’ve done novels, you’ve done poetry, and you’ve done theater. Is there any medium you haven’t yet explored but would like to?

Nothing realistic. I don’t want to make bigger films or television. I can’t really make visual art; it would be nice to be able to do that, but my GIF novels are probably as close as I can get. Right now I just want to keep making films.

So you’re more excited about screenwriting than prose writing right now?

I’m more excited about filmmaking. Screenwriting is just a teeny bit of it. I’ve written novels my whole life. I wrote 10 novels—that’s a fucking lot of novels. Earlier in my life, I was always experimenting, trying to chase new ideas. Now, I’ve gotten to the point where I know what I can do and what I can’t do. I’ve tried so many forms.

I do want to write more novels—but filmmaking is so exciting and so foreign to me. It’s such a complete challenge, and that’s the kind of thing I really like. I miss feeling like novel-writing was a crazy experiment. With the films, I’m still like, “What can we do? How far can we go with this?”