by Jon Partridge
Spring is one of those very special cinematic experiences, something that seems to straddle multiple genres but feel entirely unique. Check out my review if you haven’t already, but trust me when I say watching it blind is a immensely rewarding experience.
Last week I was fortunate enough to get a chance to talk to the directors of Spring, though that singular title does them a disservice: both Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have taken on multiple roles behind the camera to bring their vision to the screen. Read on to learn more about this wonderful creation of theirs.
Note: Spoilers are ahead but hidden; expand to read them if you’ve already seen the movie.
Jon Partridge (JP): Hey, how’s it going?
AM: Hey! You’re speaking with both of us, me and Justin.
JP: Yep! This is Jon, writing for Cinapse. Danielle was great in setting this up today.
Aaron Moorhead (AM): Oh, excellent.
JP: First, congratulations on the film. I only got round to seeing it last weekend but I was at Fantastic Fest when it screened and I heard so much positive buzz; it’s really well done.
AM: Thank you!
Justin Benson (JB): Awesome, thank you very much.
JP: But I guess it would be a little odd to be set up with a press contact who didn’t like it?
AM: We had that happen once with our first movie
JP: Really??
AM: We assembled press for the release and those experiences you have with your first movie when it’s like the first time, you have a screening where they joke awhile and the first time you have an interview with someone who didn’t like your movie, at the time it’s kind of traumatizing but in the long run you’re like, “I’m so glad that happened, that’s hilarious”.
JP: I mean, if you got a a second movie out it that probably means you’re doing something right; if you didn’t really go anywhere it would probably stay with you a little longer.
AM: Yeah yeah, just, we’re filmmakers, we’re sensitive. People say the smallest thing to get off, just have at it. But it was funny this guy that interviewed, do you remember that one? Where he was like, “so when you guys were pitching Resolution, how did you pitch it? Take me back, I can’t believe you guys…”. He was just so angry that is wasn’t like, a splatter horror movie. But the cool thing is I don’t think he ever ran the article. Did that ever turn up?
JB: Er, yeah! Well that’s the thing is, he didn’t– when you were interviewing him I remember him being upset about it and afterwards you were like, “Hey, I think that guy didn’t like our movie” and I was like, “Really, I just thought he was weirdly combative; he didn’t seem like he didn’t like it”. And then he ran the review and it was like, “see, they couldn’t decide if it was drama or horror”. Like oh, OK, that’s what it was!
JP: So I guess this time round it’s more of victory lap at the end, this is one of your last press days?
AM: Er, maybe? I dunno. It’s funny– OK, OK, we probably sold some press for other countries, we’ll probably have something for Australia I’m guessing.
JP: So it’s not goodbye today, there’s a bit more to do?
AM: Yeah, yeah but we like it though.
JB: It’s nice to have the chance to talk to people about the movie after all these experiences.
JP: I guess questions-wise, the first thing I wanted to ask was how you define your partnership. Obviously you both have your credits, but do you tend to assign areas to each other or is there an overlap in most things?
AM: Mostly we overlap in pretty much everything. We both produce and direct, Justin writes but that doesn’t mean I’m locked out of the writing room of course; I have a hand in it the same way I do the cinematography, he’s right over my shoulder, and I’ll do some visual effects and stuff, but, we try not to compartmentalize it. We try to think of ourselves as co-filmmakers rather than co-directors. Like we have one joint skill set that we use to you create to the degree that we can. As much as we can we try to share every credit pretty much.
JP: I think what I was going to get at with that is that with Spring in particular is there anything that ever stood out as a point of disagreement between the two of you? That perhaps one of you had to compromise on?
JB: We don’t ever compromise on anything. So no, not really. We’re friends too so we have a human relationship where we’re going to get disagreements at times so I can’t think of one thing that stands out. I think the one thing would be that I sometimes have a deal with getting writing notes from other people. Not from Aaron, from other people and Aaron gets the baggage from it.
AM: One that stands out that’s kinda funny, except we don’t talk about it because we wanna make it clear that whenever we disagree we have a good answer and it’s not, “Fine, I’ll give you this one if you give me the next one”. That’s pointless. But there is one that’s kinda funny. We were trying to find the location for the scene in the movie where…
(Spoiler Alert)
…we first see she’s a vampire, and she grabs that cat in the alleyway.
And I thought it should be this one alleyway and Justin thought it should be a different alleyway and again it wasn’t a hard choice, just debating the merits of each alleyway. And the whole time we were like “this is going to be so small”. so we were kind of talking it out and walking around trying to figure out which the best one would be and we found ourselves in a third alleyway that both of us liked and we’re both imagining it and like “lock it in”. It was a nice situation where we both had the same idea in our heads about what it to be.
JP: I’m glad you mentioned the location because Italy was a wonderful choice. So often you see directors, more so early in their career, going for something they know, somewhere they grew up. This, you were pushing yourselves quite a bit and it gives the film something really special. If you couldn’t have made Italy happen, would you have tailored it? Did you have a backup plan or did it HAVE to be Italy?
AM: Basically the script was written pretty specifically for a small Mediterranean town, it was written with a mental map of one of the towns on the Amalfi Coast that I went to on a trip to with my family. When I write things I usually write a location that I can describe pretty easily straight out of my brain. It was always written that way but it was a really naïve thing to do because you tell producers you want to make a movie and maybe they’ll just tell you that it’s absolutely impossible; and so we had started at that point to look at, there was some talk about backup plans and some of the stuff that came up was Colombia, and we’d change the mythology –it’s embarrassing, but I’m not sure what the very old culture is in Colombia, I know there are, I can use the Mayan culture as an example– You think of something very old like that, like the Mayans or something. But that change comes with kind of like, “what didn’t we do”, then discussing what you do about a sophisticated cult, but it’s an old school reason once you start getting into Mayans they become unconvincing as a cult, and I think it’s because of the Ancient Aliens thing.
JP: Yeah, I mean the Mayans have been played out a lot in film with the whole cannibalism thing and if you’re looking to go for something subtle, Mayan isn’t the way to go.
AM: Yeah, yeah. So it felt like shallow reasons to think about changing to somewhere like Colombia. We scouted Montenegro and that was very beautiful but it didn’t look anything like Italy. And we looked at I think the Canary Islands and places like that but nothing was quite the right fit. Luckily we found the region of Italy where we got a tax break and rebates so the financials made sense and then we found a really good Italian producer and crew and it all came together. We really experienced.
JP: You just mentioned the finances coming together, the special effects work in the film felt appropriate, restrained in a good way. The effects didn’t take over and were subtly effective. Do you feel like the restricted budget you had actually helped or do you wish you had more leeway? Did you have something bigger in mind?
AM: I think you always want more money, not for yourself but for the production. We actually really liked budget we were able to work with on Spring because it gave us the creative control and it’s very rare that you can actually hang on to that. Because this movie has been described as a very singular movie. For lack of a less pretentious word, like an auteur piece, and so it would have been quite maddening if we’d have gotten money that might have come with a bunch of notes from people that might or might not have been– that’s a real issue and something we’re facing as our films grow. Are we opening ourselves up to making better films that are less our own? We like to keep a small crew and that keeps the accountability high between ourselves. But that said though, you can just look at a part of the movie, some minor technical part and think, “Man, I wish we had more money for that”. All I can really think is, “Man, I wish our crew made a little more money”, that kind of stuff. But I can’t really look at the movie and be, “Darn, we couldn’t accomplish that because we didn’t have the money for it”. Maybe those drone shots could have been done on RED rather than GoPro and that’s like something 1% of filmmakers get to do, so we’re feeling pretty good about it.
JP: With that kind of financial restriction though, how much prep work did it take, did you storyboard the whole film before you got out to Italy? Because one of the things that struck me about Spring is how well it flowed, it was so natural, especially in the way it showed off the relationship. In many films you feel like you’re only getting a partial glimpse of it, or you’re taking a leap. This flowed really well, how much was planned and how much was a little more spontaneous when you were out there?
AM: Well it’s definitely not spontaneous. Spec’ed budget; it’s not micro budget, it’s not huge budget but like, storyboards were one of the things where we really don’t have to. We didn’t storyboard anything on evolution but what we did do is, we very, very, very, very meticulously shortlist things ahead of time. There is a lot of prep work that goes on months ahead and before production. Like our big thing was working with special effects or practical effects companies, to make sure we get accomplished what we want to on set. We had the experience of getting set back and losing a couple of hours because of a lack of communication about the practical effects. They’re also very ambitious effects to pull off at the budget we were looking at. What’s the triangle again; money, time, quality? In this case we had time on our side to really prep everything, to make sure we were going to get everything right. When the clock’s ticking we can accomplish everything we want to accomplish. It’s really cool that you said everything flowed well for you.
JP: Yeah, really well. In a related thing, you mentioned time being on your side, did Lou and Nadia get much time together before filming started? Because they had really nice chemistry together.
AM: There’s a lot to say about it honestly, when we cast them they hadn’t met each other or talked to each other. We basically just said to Lou “Hey, we cast this girl called Nadia”, and so when she came to the US to get her body cast for all the practical effects Lou requested, “Hey, do you mind if I meet Nadia on my own first without you guys?”, and so that night after about 4 or 5 hours they sent us a bunch of pictures of them jumping into a pool together and she was wearing his clothes and stuff. So they were like instant best friends, and a part of our process is we do a lot of rehearsals so we were all in Italy together for two weeks just rehearsing and of course we lived in the same little town so we spent all day and all night together. That said though, they could have probably spent a little time together to get to know each other. They didn’t have to have been best friends or anything like that; they’re just two really incredible actors who could have pulled that off even if they hated each other, but they don’t. Saying there’s an unplaceable chemistry, in a roundabout way it does a disservice to how good actors they are. They weren’t responding to something that was there; they’re just really talented. Day 24 was our last day with them, everybody wants to get out of each others’ face and it’s not like “Let’s hang out even more, guys!”, it’s more like “Let’s go home”. They’re just two really talented people.
JP: Yeah it’s definitely a combination of acting talent, the writing as well, but you can get a sense when there is a little spark or chemistry between actors as people it comes through and it certainly does here.
AM: Yeah, for sure!
JB: Something I never thought of was… an original thought. Something that Aaron and I never bend on is that we always need two or three weeks of rehearsal time with our leads. So me, Aaron, Lou and Nadia rehearsed everything in the movie for a couple of weeks before we started shooting and we’d go to the actual locations and rehearse there. And there is where you find all these little kinds of beats that probably look like accidents; hopefully they look like accidents but they’re all just things worked out ahead of time. But when everyone’s just about to get to Italy and was meeting for the first time, there probably is something to the chemistry in rehearsals and everything feeling fresh and new and exciting and all those little beats stay with you and you’re using those beats from rehearsal on day 24 when nothing’s fresh and no one wants to be around anyone. It’s still what it should be like early on.
Expand for super-spoilery section — You’ve been warned!
JP: With the Louise character though, you trod a fine line with maintaining the likeability with the monster element. Did you set down any hard rules as to how much violence she was allowed to commit; who she was allowed to kill?
JB: I don’t think so, I don’t remember any hard rules. In fact, I think we tried to make her even more violent. I mean, she already killed a guy by ripping his dick off. That’s pretty violent. It’s not really tricky, it’s an easy thing to do; you need to show her as dangerous, that she can kill but you don’t want to do things where the audience loses their empathy for her. The guy that she kills we established very well, no one in our cinematic world is going to mind that the rapist is dead. They’re not going to judge her poorly on that, and simultaneously we’ve established her as being dangerous.
AM: You know, I remember there was a part in the development where I said maybe we needed at some point she should confess to Evan that she killed someone and Justin was like, “It doesn’t change too much in their relationship even though withholding it is a bit of a lie, but also it’s just so not the focus of what is happening.” So not focusing on what was happening would have been that wrong step you go down where you start making it into a thriller or a horror movie where you have to deal with killing someone. We were mindful of it but it wasn’t something we wanted to focus on because we would have lost track of what’s actually important. Also, what’s he actually going to say to that, “You killed someone, and I love you but you’re a monster and you killed someone”?
JP: The other thing about the monster element is that quite often in other films there’s more of a hand wavy, mythological explanation for its existence but you chose to ground it in more in science, what was your reasoning behind that?
JB: It all started with the ambition to create a new monster. If you look at the monsters we use over and over again like vampires and werewolves or even something like Frankenstein, from a modern mindset they only make sense because they’re arranged with the myth. The vampire, it’s immortal because it drinks blood. That makes sense from a cultural standpoint, if you drink someone’s life-force you get to keep living longer. We know that’s not true now, we don’t think like that in modern society. So in developing Louise’s monster it was what would make sense. The idea of someone using their own embryonic stem cells to support their own conception . It’s a woman starting a life seducing men and then you see the conception and the embryonic stem cells which replication infinitely and then she presumably would be more or less immortal. Then the fun monster movie part of it is, in the process of metabolizing these stem cells she can turn into all these things from her evolutionary past, or at least a very simplified view of our understanding of it. But everything she changes into, if you look at your grade school chart of evolution looking at single celled organisms up to man, a lot of those things are in there. Reptilian things, primates, all that stuff.
JP: Another thing to thank science for, giving you information to build a new monster.
JB: Yeah, yeah. Aaron was saying this morning it would be really neat if someone at some point, like if Louise’s monster got named and it becomes a monster myth that gets reused in other monster movies, that would be kind of cool.
JP: I think I’m past my time but wanted to wrap up with one last question. Your next film is Beast, is that going to be a straight up biopic about Aleister Crowley or are you putting a weird spin on it?
AM: Oh yeah, it’s anything but a straight up biopic, calling it a biopic will probably disappoint people. But it is something that by the end of it you will fully understand Aleister Crowley and who he was. But it actually takes place in one week and we chart this ritual that he did. It compresses all his life into this one little moment in time, the point at which he started as this man with a bunch of strange, interesting, archaic and magical ideas but also some really great ideas about personal freedoms that we all agree upon today and chart his descent from that to what the press later called “The Wickedest Man in the World”.
JP: Probably a clever and wise spin on it; he was a well traveled man and you can imagine a budget for a picture spiraling upwards of $50–100 million to chart it all. Do you have anyone in mind for the role?
AM: Oh that’s a secret.
JP: Dang, oh well, I’ll have to wait and see then. [very dejected tone]
AM&JB: [laughs]
JP: OK, well I appreciate your time and I REALLY appreciate Spring, it’s a wonderful film you guys put together there.
AM: Thank you!
JB: Thank you very very much.
Thanks to Aaron and Justin for their time! Spring is available from June 2nd as a Best Buy exclusive and from retailers nationwide from August 11th.