Of all the films I caught at Fantasia this year I am still haunted by Black Eyed Susan (Which I reviewed here). The film was the return of indie director Scooter McCrae (Shatter Dead) who after two decades, was back with another bleak transgressive vision that was philosophically dense as it is shocking. While his previous efforts were shot on Betacam SP tape, and MiniDV, Susan is shot on 16mm and produced by the fearless boutique distro Vinegar Syndrome.
The story of Susan follows Derek (Damian Maffei) who is going through a bit of a rough patch at the moment. The alcoholic was recently separated from his wife due to some domestic abuse issues and when he’s not driving his uber, he’s living in it. When we catch up to him his longtime friend Alan just died of an apparent suicide, and it’s at this funeral he is recruited by another long time friend Gilbert (Marc Romeo) for Alan’s recently vacated position, to assist with testing a state of the art sex doll “Black Eyed Susan” (Yvonne Emilie Thälker). The hook of the doll is that it bleeds and bruises like a real woman when struck, hence the name of the film and it’s the name of a flower as well.
While Susan’s use is described as more for BDSM and “therapeutic” by Gilbert, McCrae doesn’t give the audience a pass and digs a bit deeper into the implications that would have on the human psyche, once that violence is able to be inflicted with impunity.
The day after the film’s world premiere at Fantasia I got to dig into the film with not only Scooter, but his two leads, Yvonne Emilie Thälker who plays Susan, and Damian Maffei who plays Derek in the film. Like the film it was a rather dense discussion about not only some of the challenges Scooter faced shooting on 16mm, but how the cast dealt with some of the rather heavy themes and intense situations. It was a fascinating discussion that really gave me a glimpse into crafting this descent into the darkest pockets of the human condition.
So first off I am a big fan of Vinegar Syndrome, how did they come to this project and were they always there or at what point in production did they come in?
Scooter McCrae: It’s an interesting question, because I’m not sure that they were always involved as a producer. Justin A. Martell, Aimee Kuge, Maureen McCrae and Seager Dixon are kind of the really, the producing force, and Not The Funeral Home. So at a certain point, Vinegar Syndrome came in, and I’m not sure where exactly that happened after Justin (Martell) committed to putting his money in. With Vinegar syndrome came the proviso that if they were going to be involved, we have to shoot on film. Because that came a little later in the game and when they did things changed.
Now suddenly the budget had to be stretched. The nice thing about it was that Vinegar Syndrome said, we’ll pay for the film, we’ll pay for the processing, we’ll pay for the transfers. So it didn’t eat into our main budget. So in the end, they kind of came around the backend, of being, of being a producing partner on it, but it didn’t originate with them. This is no way me putting down their good taste. ‘Cause obviously they had very good taste in the end.
So that was sort of the impetus for you to shoot on film?
Scooter McCrae: Yeah, they (Vinegar Syndrome) bought that incredible pain in the ass into the already a pain in the ass project, even if we shot it digitally. But I have to say in the end, despite my reticence, when I saw DCP up on the screen last night, I was kind of like, holy shit, yeah, this looks pretty amazing. They were right. It was kind of mind blowing to see how good it looked.
I love the look of it, and I think it says a lot that even though the film is a sci-fi film about sex robots, it has that sort of warm organicness to it. How does that medium influence you as a filmmaker? Did that change how you approached the film?
I have a love of film grain that borders on psychotic. So first thing I did was I talked to the DP and we did some tests to see how many stops we can push it to, to exaggerate the grain. We ended up only going one stop. We pushed the film one stop because at a certain point everyone else stepped in and said, ’okay, come on, please. You can’t go that far’.
But in terms of how it affects the process, if I’d shot it digitally, I would’ve shot with multiple cameras to make things easier on the actors. So that we could get a closeup and a medium and a wide, you know, over the course of a shorter period of time. But on film, we were only able to shoot with one camera at a time, so that meant that these poor, wonderful people had to do everything over and over again endlessly, until we got every shot we needed. Plus of course, every 10 minutes of the film, you have to change the magazine. So there’s a little downtime there.
The best thing of all, when you’re shooting is when you’re getting the perfect take and everything is going wonderfully and then you hear that sound and you realize the camera’s out and the film ran out in the middle of a take. But as you see, the end result was despite all the pain in the assness of it this was worth it.
As actors, what was your first reaction upon getting this script? ’cause it couldn’t have been an easy read.
Yvonne Emilie Thälker: When I first heard about the concept, I was kind of turned off of it. I think my initial reaction was, ‘a movie about him hitting this woman robot written by a man’. I was, I was just like, uggggh…. Which I think is a reaction a lot of people would have. I personally don’t have any of that (abuse) in my history. But it’s still something I’m sensitive to and aware of as a trope in media, for the past century of movie making, and go back even farther, to just art making in general, the way women are treated. I was hesitant, but I was still intrigued. So I read the whole script and I was like, ‘oh’, I felt like the script for me, the way I interpret it, had a moral core to it that I agreed with.
I was like,’yes, this is an uncomfortable scene’, but it’s, it’s written to be uncomfortable. At times it’s written to challenge. But I felt like, ‘okay, this, this does actually align with my moral values ultimately?’ and I felt like the message, or multiple messages were actually good messages. I was like, yeah, it’s gonna be a wild ride to film this, but I’m in, and I’m okay with challenging myself when it comes to making art.
Damian Maffei: Derek is a troubled guy, but he’s a human being and a man, and he makes excuses. He kind of twiddles around owning up to, to things in his past and doesn’t wanna talk about it. But he’s got a lot of problems, a lot of complexities to him from an acting perspective, or a thematic perspective. It was a no brainer for me. The darker and deeper and more complicated things get, the more fun. He’s all messed up. You know?
I mean, as soon as I read this script I did something which I’ve never done before, is I read it right again, after I read it the first time. Because it usually sits and then like two weeks later I’m like, ‘oh, oh, I have the ax’, right? But this, I was like, I gotta read it right again. And then when I was done, it was like 3:30am in the morning and I was like, I gotta do the thing.
Scooter, it’s been a few years since your last film, what was it about this story in particular that brought you back to the director’s chair?
Scooter McCrae: I guess I love science fiction and I hate seeing what science fiction has become, which is, I mean to say spaceships and ray guns, which I think would be giving it too much credit. I think most of the science fiction I see is written by fucking morons who have no idea, and have never read science fiction, who have no idea what science fiction is.
They say, ‘oh, I’ve got an idea. I’m just gonna say something about time travel, and now I add an alien or something to it’, and science fiction is about sociological exploration. It’s about looking at what’s going on in the world now and saying what’s gonna come next? And it’s not even about the science itself, that’s always the McGuffin, it’s really about how people react to it. It’s about the human condition filtered through what could possibly happen next.
So with that in mind, Black Eyed Susan felt like a really natural extension of what I’d like to see in movies, those kinds of psychological explorations of science and ethics.
Yvonne and Damian, the performances here are both fearless and powerful. What conversations did you have to have with each other, because some of the more intimate scenes that are jarring and felt very real? As someone who personally survived domestic violence growing up, these situations felt more authentic, than exploitative.
Scooter McCrae: Thank you for sharing your own, personal history with that and I appreciate you mentioning it.
Damian Maffei: I don’t think we talked about that stuff too much. We talked about cats and other things, it’s much easier to do. I don’t have a cat. I loved hearing about the cats. I was like, anybody wanna talk about my dog? Seager did.
A big piece of that and, a big help to that is getting to know one another, getting comfortable with one another, getting to trust one another. I feel that that is very helpful. When you’re doing fight scenes in movies or, like murdering people, getting to know that person, going out, hanging out with them, makes it much easier. You know, it’s that chemistry.
Yvonne Emilie Thälker: Yeah. That’s actually pretty much it. Like, we actually didn’t have a ton of conversations about the more intimate scenes or the violence scenes.
Our first scenes together were not that intimate. I don’t know if Scooter planned it this way or it might have just been the script and how our shooting schedule was, but we worked up to the more intimate scenes. So, I think there was a trust that was building as we were just doing our more conversational stuff or the hitting stuff, which I mean, frankly, that was easy ’cause I wasn’t actually being hit. Then we worked up to the scenes that were more intimate and more, just difficult in that way. So there was a trust that built up there.
And also I think part of this comfort, the lack of a need to really to thoroughly discuss things with my co stars, was that Scooter and Aimee picked some really great people for me to work with. That made me feel comfortable. I didn’t feel threatened, I didn’t feel unsafe. I kind of felt like we were all on the same page. It was like, okay, yeah, he’s gonna be sticking his fingers in my mouth. And that’s weird. And we’re both acknowledging that it’s weird, but we’ll get through it. We’ll do it. It’s fine.
I just felt trust in everybody I was working with.
Scooter, what sort of drew to these transgressive themes as a director that had you exploring these dark sort of depths of the human psyche? It’s a dark exploration that some may get on and after five minutes tap out to be honest.
Scooter McCrae: I mean, I gotta tell you, I ain’t getting any younger.
So, when I sit down to write, it’s a chore. So I need to make sure that what I’m writing is actually meaningful to me and actually has some kind of place in my own personal existence. So, you know the idea of being almost 60 years old, and sitting down to write about some teenagers being chased around in an old dark house by someone with an ax, I think that’s fine, but I think that’s for the youngsters. Again, I don’t have any kind of history, that of any that the characters in the movie have, thank goodness. But, as someone with a vivid imagination, I know from other people I’ve dealt with and things that I’ve seen in my life that I was able to extrapolate certain things, and just figure them out because they’re just common to the human condition.
I hate saying it this way, but it was a fun exercise in some ways to do that. To live through these characters who are not me, and kind of try their skin on for a while and see what it was like. Which is why I think in some ways even what would be considered the nastiest character, I think, generates some sympathy. I was always trying to find the human side of even Alan in the opening scene. There’s a playfulness to him, you know, he’s not all gloom and darkness, even though he is beating the shit out of Susan, basically.
And to me that’s important because as you point out, like the opening scene is the litmus test. I feel like that’s why it’s there. It’s like, let me put the worst, nastiest thing up front. That way, if someone doesn’t wanna spend 80 minutes with this movie, get up and leave now. You know, I don’t want to trick you into seeing something that you don’t want to see. Or in the case of some people it may be triggering, you know there are going to be people out there that are very quick to be like, I’ve had something bad happen to me in my life, this is not something I wanna watch. That’s your, that’s your warning to leave or stay.
Finally, it’s a dense and rather dark film, what do you hope someone leaves with when the lights go up?
Damian Maffei: Yeah. You know, obviously a terrible fear of AI and the future and sex dolls. I hope they walk away thinking about it for a while, you know, before it becomes reality and then people are like, like, I remember that movie.
Scooter McCrae:I would say that, if anyone, anyone watching the movie, if they think about it at all after they’ve seen it, is a testament to the fact that there’s something in there. Just because I feel like most modern movies that I see, I walk away thinking more about, what I’ll be having for dinner or, what my plans are for tomorrow, or did I remember to do the laundry? So thinking about the movie at all after the fact and, and hopefully genuflecting.
I’ve said this before, but wondering, have I ever been that person that could relate to any of those characters. Like, I would hope that someone would come out going like, yeah, I feel like I know who that person is. I’ve been that person at some point. Even if I didn’t act out on it, I might have had those thoughts at some point and hopefully didn’t act on them, but found a way around it.
Yvonne Emilie Thälker: I’m hoping that people come away with exactly that. I think it’s important to have media like this that kind of challenges the everyday guy who thinks like, I could never be that type of person.
Scooter McCrae: We are all capable of any of that stuff.
Yvonne Emilie Thälker:Sometimes I engage with media that is challenging me in terms of racism, in terms of being a white person and I generally think of myself as not a racist person. But then sometimes a piece of media will kind of challenge me to be like, ‘hey, you know, you’re, you’re still capable of doing these things and you probably do things that you don’t even realize?’ So I think I can’t relate to, coming away from the movie in terms of like the male toxic masculinity perspective. But I can relate to it in terms of we’re not always the permanent white-hatted good guy in life.
We’re all capable of veering into, you know, even if it’s just a little bit, and then, and you know, it doesn’t make you a villain, necessarily. But it’s important to think about these things. So I’m hoping that, as well as questioning the role of AI and the future of AI, and, um, how can we use it in an ethical way instead of the direction that we are currently on.
