Nordling here.
This interview was a long time coming, and I won't bore you with the details, but it should have been posted long before now. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's SPRING is a unique horror romance, a film that I don't think has ever quite been made before. It's beautiful - one of the best love stories I've seen in a while, meshed with some amazing horror imagery and cinematography, and SPRING has more ideas that it flings away into the night than most films can carry on a good day. It was my very favorite film I saw at Fantastic Fest last year, and I was honored to interview Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead about it (and also honored to host the Q&A with them at this year's Houston Alamo Drafthouse Hullabaloo).
Aaron and Justin have a vernacular with each other, a give-and-take that can be intimidating to watch. I imagine it must be that way with directors like the Coens and the Wachowskis; two people so in tune with each other that they finish each other's sandwiches. That can make it... difficult to transcribe in an interview, but being in the same room with them, I can attest that these two are contributing a unique, stellar voice to genre filmmaking. I'm very excited to see what they do with the story of Alistair Crowley.
If you haven't seen SPRING yet, you should probably wait to read this until after you see it, because it dives deep into spoiler territory. Aaron and Justin are like every geek I've ever had a conversation with - they know their stuff, and they could spend hours talking about cinema and their work, and there would never be a dull moment. If you haven't seen SPRING, it's available on iTunes, Amazon Instant, and many other streaming places, but if you're like me, and still loyal to physical media, the DVD/Blu-Ray comes out next week. You should see it, and witness some amazing filmmaking.
Nordling: I adored SPRING, because there’s always a movie, well, this will probably be the movie that I see twice at Fantastic Fest. I don’t remember ever seeing horror and romance straddled this way. It’s not even straddled, it’s meshed. You can’t have one without the other. I want to know the genesis of that. What did you all come up with? And just for record, I haven’t seen Resolution yet. I’m dying to see that movie when I go home, at some point I’ll watch it.
Justin Benson: Oh, that would be really cool to follow it up. They’re interesting companion pieces, for sure.
Aaron Moorhead: Well, I think if we had started out with like, let’s combine horror and romance, that’s like a recipe for total disaster, because then we’re just talking about genre conventions, and that’s pointless. I think, well Justin, I remember when you told me you were writing it, you said “I’m writing a love story. I just want to write a love story about a guy that loves a really old, like someone that loves someone that’s very, very, very old.” And I thought, that sounds really, really cool. And he threw the script at me in my face. And that’s really good.
N: It’s beautiful. Because one of the aspects that I really related to, and I think everybody does, is that when you’re in love with somebody, you embrace all their bullshit. And this is the movie where she’s got an expansive amount of bullshit. But it’s part of it, it’s especially part of stuff because when you fall in love with somebody, you fall in love with, what, first you’re physically attracted, and you know, there’s commonalities that you have. And then you have to fall in love with the stuff that you’re not in common with and stuff you have issues with. And that’s where SPRING, for me, really started getting great. Was the film inspired from relationships in your lives? Or is this just something you always wanted to have?
A: We’re really proud of how realistic that relationship is with those fantastic circumstances. But it’s not really that the relationship itself, I don’t think it’s personal for either one of us, that much we both know about relationships. I probably know less about romantic relationships than anyone in this room, so I hope no one watches this movie and tries to take it as any kind of advice. They’d be going down a terrible road of romance advice.
J: Or farming.
A: But the character, the character of Louise was consciously written as, “Would my female friends who I adore and my mom agree with this, with these things, the things she’s doing?” She’s saying, what do I know about women in my life that I love, what would they do in this situation and what do they like? Whereas it seems like usually in a twentysomething romance (well, in her case it’s probably like a 2000-something romance), but usually these things are, they play like the fantasy of an artist, what the girl’s interests are. And you can be all like sad and mopey and melancholy, and this girl comes and saves you and she’s so perky and nice.
But you know, it’s the Garden State thing. That’s great, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it was fun to take a character like Evan, that despite the fact that he’s been through all this tragedy and all this really horrible stuff, and we understand why he’s abandoning his life, and things are really bad. But despite all that, he’s still going to her and asking her out. And he’s still trying. Every guy I know that’s in a successful relationship with a woman, or a successful marriage, they always have this story of like this point where they were just fucking begging her to stay. Like I was on my knees crying. You know, there was the push and pull in the relationship, there was times when he was, and maybe things got rough in the relationship and he’s just begging. So some of that’s in there.
N: One of the aspects of Evan that I loved in the film is that, I mean anybody, not to get overly personal, but when my father died when I was 17 and in a weird way, it was a very upsetting, sad moment, but also in a weird way it’s a very freeing moment. You realize I can do what I want.
A: Fascinating, actually.
N: Yeah. And that aspect of the film I really related to. Because when he finally gets to Italy, it’s like I’m free, I have no attachment. This is amazing.
A: Well, actually, I kind of took it the other way. I mean, there is the fleeing his life part and everything, and he can just kind of run off and there’s no real consequence. But we kind of took it more as when he gets there, there’s nothing that can really assuage the way he’s feeling. No matter what, you just lost your mom. The job and the police thing is kind of secondary, that was more a logistical thing for him leaving. But no matter what, he lost his mom, he’s in a rut and he can’t get out. So it’s like here in beautiful Rome, take a picture, not for me. Drink. Am I going to go on this road trip? These guys are kind of funny. I’m not going to be really good friends with them, I’m just going to let them go. But the thing that does start stirring him is her.
J: Well, there’s a wonderful moment in the film, really the moment I was completely invested in these guys. He’s driving down the road and sees the Pompeii volcano and breaks out in tears, because it’s beautiful. And that moment for me is like OK, he needs something more, and he doesn’t even know it, really.
A: And he’s surrounded by assholes, too.
J: It’s like him just kind of bumping down the road with these guys, and he’s having a great time, but when he’s alone, he’s alone, you know?
N: What was the inspiration for shooting in Italy? Had you ever been there?
J: Oh, yeah. It’s gorgeous, I know. It’s a beautiful, beautiful country. One of the things that I love about the film, and there is an actual answer to the question. Because you went there, right?
A: Yeah. What was the question?
N: What was the inspiration for Italy?
A: Oh, the inspiration. Oh, the Malta coasts. I’d been there two or three, that’s horrible to say, two or three times, I can’t remember. I’d been to the Malta coasts two times, family vacations with my parents and once actually with a girlfriend at the time. And every time I was there, I didn’t want to leave. Like genuinely, I really was bummed out that I was leaving. So after we made RESOLUTION, we had these dreams of being filmmakers, and we’d have more resources on the next one, I’m saying that the place was inspiring. Like it feels old, right? It feels like there’s a billion stories there. And it would be a reason to go be there for a while.
J: We actually, we talked about, could we just go make this movie if we just had to make another movie? Because it’s like yes, it’s mostly just two people at our house. Like we can have a camera and someone could act and we could just go do it like below the board.
A: Oh, that would have been the worst mistake of our lives if we did that. And thank God for our producer David Lawson making it into a real movie. Because we weren’t about to go do that, that would have been irresponsible. But I think, in the very genesis of it, it was like maybe we can. Maybe we can just go do it if we can’t get like a big movie off the ground or something like that. But so yeah, it was nice to be able to just go make it the right way. And we wouldn’t have made it any differently if we had more money or anything. It’s just what we wanted to do.
J: When we were running around trying to get it made, everyone told us that it would be impossible to go shoot there, because yeah, it’s beautiful and it’s amazing but it’s supposedly supposed to be really expensive to shoot. Supposedly the crews aren’t good and all this stuff. But it was one of the best shoots we had. And a lot of that’s Lawson, Lawson and our Italian crews made it so we could have a very organized, very organized, as easy as a shoot can be. Nothing went wrong. The crew was, they were amazing. And now it’s almost borderline offensive, the amount of people that were like yeah, you can’t do it, it’s impossible, they’re all horrible.
A: You just didn’t look. Did you meet the first Italian person you met and then it happened instantly for you?
J: But you know, like some other people we talked to, they’d be like, “How’s your experience? Don’t go, do not go, it’s horrible.” Well tell us, how did it go? You didn’t go to the film commission? “No, no, we just showed up.” And then they don’t understand why the shoot didn’t go well.
A: Well, we hadn’t met any local producers.
N: It’s kind of interesting. If somebody tells you it’s impossible, you can’t do it, how do you react to that? Because it’s like bullshit, it’s not impossible.
J: Kind of. You don’t want to be like an idiot, and run into a situation that everybody’s warning you against. But we did our damn homework. Because movies are made in Italy all the time. They have a really robust film organization, like how is that impossible?
A: It was like everyone was passionately, don’t do it, don’t do it. And it was to a point where I was like, are we being irresponsible by doing this? Because there’s nowhere else to do this script. There’s nowhere else to tell this story, really. We thought about it a lot. And it’s interesting. But it’s like this, OK, then where should we go shoot? And it’s like, well Jakarta is ready to shoot right now. But is it? Because now everyone, like those places that are supposedly good to shoot, there’s so many people going to go shoot in those places. I don’t know. It’s a weird thing. It’s like it’s almost better if a place has a horrible reputation for being expensive or whatever. They need the business.
J: And then once people start going in, everybody then becomes wise to hey, big budget movies just have a ton of money to throw at you.
A: That’s always a scary thing, though. We weren’t a big budget movie at all, in fact our budget was murderous pretty much. But there is a thing where it’s like American movie directors, you know, there must be money everywhere.
J: And we’re like no, no, no. I feel terrible we have to explain this, but we are, there are little movies in the U.S. and it’s just like that. It’s not big because we happen to come here. It’s very little. It just costs a lot more than plane tickets.
A: Italy itself is really a character in the story, as well. I mean especially Pompeii and everything, the deep past of the story and the deep past of the obvious character. I don’t think you could get away with doing it anywhere else, really.
J: We actually did get to scout like some other places, and some places that we investigated were Montenegro, the Canary Islands, even Colombia.
A: Baltimore.
J: Baltimore, Maryland. Because Dave has connections there. Old, mythic Baltimore.
A: That was it, we would have missed the mythic depth.
J: Maybe got John Waters to be there.
A: We would have missed kind of the classic, mythic depth that Italy has, and the story being so much about the origins of myths and stuff like that. And modern and old and everything. Stories in general, is a little bit about what the movie is. We would have completely missed that. And it’s not like ah, fleeing your life to exotic Montenegro. Which is a beautiful, wonderful place that actually looks a lot like Italy, you know, it would have worked. But you just missed like the common history that everybody has about Italy. Everybody knows Pompeii.
N: Lou Taylor Pucci and Nadia Hilker?
J: Yeah, they’re great.
N: How hard was the casting for SPRING? You hear so many stories when it comes to getting the chemistry right for films like this. And most of the stories that I hear about are like oh, it was right away. What that the same true with this one?
A: It was never a hard decision. It was just finding them. Like once we found them, it was like, “Oh yeah, you guys are those people.” You know, there was always concerns, like, OK, what’s going to happen when they meet? But they were like best friends like that. Like instantly best friends. But again, ultimately there’s, I mean, I’ll let you say it in your own words.
J: Yeah, it’s the thing, when you’re going into it and it’s cast and they meet, people are always like OK, how’s the chemistry? Is this going to be OK? Like how’s the chemistry, how’s the chemistry? And then when the movie’s done, people like they comment on the chemistry and it does, it looks really good and it plays, there’s a thing that plays really well on the screen. But one of the big things we learned about casting for romance in this movie is that you just need two really good actors.
A: Yeah, that’s it.
J: They’re both just really good actors, because you’re not going to fake staying in love.
A: Yeah, even if they had met, and they’re like oh my God, we’re actually soul mates. You know, and this is profound and this is whatever. Well, anybody after spending a month together on a film set, and to do the scheduling, you’re supposed to be meeting on day 30, that’s no longer chemistry. It’s just good performance. They’re just good performers and they-
J: Greet each other well and like they can fill up the spaces and everything.
A: And they’re both amazing. Like Lou, no one needs to say Lou’s a great actor. Have you seen THUBSUCKER? He’s incredible. And Nadia, she’s so special as a performer. Like so special. She’s actually, it’s funny, she’s a lot like Vinnie. You haven’t seen our first movie, RESOUTION. But her and Vinnie have a very similar acting proficiency, this instinctual, special thing. They find these moments that build out from the script. It’s really special.
J: Finding them was like, I think Lou, so here’s what happens to get these things. Because we did our own casting, we didn’t have a casting director in the United States. And so XYZ Films helped us get lists from agencies of people that can fill the role. Do you know how many people can play a 20-something white guy?
N: Gee, I can imagine.
J: We got the longest lists you can imagine. And our stupid way of going about it was, we looked them up, see if they looked like a male model, and if they were we’d cross them off the list. Not that Lou isn’t a beautiful dude, it’s like they were ridiculous. They looked like a Ken doll.
A: You literally get to the point where you hate looking at attractive, you’re just like that person is so boring looking. So boring. I’m sorry, they just are. And I didn’t know, I had no idea there were that many cast members in VAMPIRE DIARIES. Every single, you don’t know who any of these people are. We just get like the thing they most recently been on, and a picture. And it’s like great, that’s a good looking, oh yeah, or you look and it’s like oh, cool, that’s an attractive person. Are they interesting at all?
J: Like to look at?
A: Or do they have anything? And they’re probably all perfectly fine, I don’t know.
J: And then honestly, we have kind of a weird way of vetting them. We Google them, check out what we could, try to find a reel, but there was never a reel. So we find a scene. But the thing that really, really got us the furthest was finding a candid interview. Seeing if they can just go. Instead if they’re like, it was so interesting to work with this fabulous director. I’d be like, turn off. But if they’re like cracking jokes or they seem like a little drunk or something, they just seem like a normal person and they just talk, it’s like alright, let’s look a little further.
A: And Lou was very much like that. He’s very candid.
J: He’s very candid. And you’ve seen that Dan Stevens interview for THE GUEST? Where they say, so were you just beating off men, and he starts giggling? And I’m like, he just got cast immediately in something. Because that shit’s hilarious. He was like this real dude.
A: If he had not cut that joke and we’d seen it, cross off the list. How did you not get that joke? You’re boring. And so that’s kind of that process. It was super frustrating and awful and I believe XYZ Films actually said like hey, take a close look at Lou Taylor Pucci because he’s around, and I’ve heard he’s looking for a sci fi horror romance. I was like really? Who’s looking for that? And he told us when we met him, this is kind of like, I would view this as, I’ve played people who are not children but young. Even in The Evil Dead, he’s an irresponsible young person in that movie, and I view as a coming of age movie for me, in which I’m playing a serious romantic lead, but also still vulnerable, vulnerable and broken, so it’s not like action hero territory. And then he said I notice there’s three sex scenes, and I just want to fuck.
J: He did not say that.
A: And then as for that, so when he came on board we agreed about the movie. He did not say that. (laughs)
A: Oh yeah, He did not say that. (laughs) So we agreed with the movie, once he said yes, and we went, and then we realized because of the nights getting longer and it getting rainier and colder in Italy, we were like, “Oh my God, we have to go make this movie right the hell now.” And we were still finishing up “Bone Storm” for VHS VIRAL, and we were like, “Oh my God, we have to finish ‘Bone Storm’ and then hop on a plane.” And we were not done with “Bone Storm”. “Bone Storm” was a nightmare of not getting done ever. And so that kind of wigged us out. But we were like OK, we’ve got, SPRING, we’ve got to transition smoothly and it can’t just be like two rushed things. But what we did, the problem is that we then had to find our girl, and our girl has to be talented, a talented actor, intelligent because it’s a hard role, beautiful, unplaceable accent, unplaceable looks. Do you know that that’s not every list? That’s nobody.
J: Except one person.
A: Yeah, it’s Nadia Hilker. And yeah, we sent out kind of a code red email to every European director and producer we knew, saying like hey, just send us anyone that kind of fits these qualities. Just send us their names. We just want to see. And Nadia showed up on like two or three lists. And we took a look at her and we were like wow, she’s got a really great look. Besides being like smoking hot, she also looks interesting, you know what I mean? It’s not just Vogue looks.
N: She does have a world weary nature about her. And you can see that.
A: But she’s still super alive.
N: Yeah, exactly.
A: And yeah, so we Skyped with her, and we didn’t cast her right then because we wanted to talk to each other a little bit. We turned off Skype and just looked at each other and were like, yeah. It was like oh good, cool, we got her.
J: That would have to be, if Louise didn’t work the movie’s not going to be there.
A: That’s every single movie we do. It’s casting. Casting is no compromise, it has to go. Because geez, that would suck to have a bunch of bad acting in a movie. I don’t know what I’d do.
J: Cry a lot. Bad movie.
A: Because there’s a lot of power in the script, but you’ve got to have people who can identify that power and be able to push it out there. There are decisions that we all make in the film that just are, probably at the time we were writing it, it didn’t feel like well, let’s make this composition go this way instead of that way. It was just a flow with what you’re writing. But some of the introspection towards the latter half of the film, where, in every other horror film the guy would be running. That chase scene, that’s cliché bullshit.
J: It’s almost exactly what I say when you talk about the third act. It’s pretty cool.
N: And that aspect of the film, well, first of all it’s beautiful. At the same time, I was watching and feeling like there’s some people who just aren’t going to be able to make this leap. Because some audiences are ingrained to see horror films in a certain way, and this is a leap that most people aren’t going to make. But it’s easy for people to make that leap within a relationship, you know? It’s like well, you got to deal with that shit. That’s part of being in a relationship.
A: We did have, when we originally were trying to get the project off the ground, there was push back on the third act not being, basically not being exciting enough or something. And we just wildly disagreed constantly with it. It was kind of, not between each other, but with that prognosis. A script is never perfect, but that third act is the logical progression of the last two.
N: It’s obviously the centerpiece to your film. You wouldn’t want to do it otherwise.
A: I mean, we didn’t want to make that movie, the other one.
J: The central question of the story is are they in love? And going in the third act, we know he is. And then the last question becomes, is she in love? And that’s really the main tension of the story, that’s the main thing we need to answer. But in addition to that, it’s like we’re so proud of that cathedral scene. The cathedral scene really encapsulates the question. And it’s also a bigger question of life. And it’s also that you have to understand that he is in danger. She can’t control her body. Along with everything else, this guy who we’ve grown to really like, he’s very much in danger, and he’s still doing something we probably all do, we’d still all be into that girl if she was like that. I really believe that. I would do battle for her.
A: Like it’s not something, you know what I mean? She didn’t want to transform. He’d be like, let me help you.
N: It reminded me of Cronenberg’s THE FLY - she loves him so much and he is a danger to her. But what are you going to do?
J: But outside the main central question, like is she in love at that point, the thing is it’s tense because we like him a lot, and he’s earned us, and we don’t want anything to happen to him. And she can’t help it, she might kill him. She might stab him in the back with her tail. And that tension is so much more fun, so much more fun, than becoming either, she turns on him entirely and consciously hunts him down, or there’s some organization of women who metabolize from embryonic stem cells. Going after them and they’re on the run or something. Just keeping the story about those two just seems like, again, why would you not do that?
N: Well, the other really great thing that you, you explained the risks, you explain everything really well, and we’re obviously keeping this for the interview, so if you read the interview, hey, you have to watch the film, but that final shot of the film is so fucking perfect because it was really well explained. This is what’s going to happen if she doesn’t love him. It’s going to be fucking Cthulhu on the beach over here. And that final shot, it’s perfect. And I thought that was so wonderful. And again, it’s an ending that most people wouldn’t have. They would have had the whole big fucking thing at the end, and it would have been awful, you know? So I really admire that. It was beautiful.
J: Thank you very much.
N: What’s next?
A: We are rounding out a draft on our next movie, which is about Alistair Crowley.
N: Awesome.
A: We’re making the Alistair Crowley movie.
J: It’s really boring.
A: We’re writing it like a monster, and we’ve been working on it for about a year. And I’m like look, I didn’t write it, so I’m just going to say it’s so fucking good you won’t believe it.
J: It’s really good.
A: It’s so fucking good you won’t even believe it.
N: Is it going to be a bigger film?
A: It’s still contained, it’s still about a central relationship. And this time it’s more of a chamber piece with an ensemble. But it’s about, of course, like one big one. It’s Alistair Crowley. It’s not about like viewing, it’s not about like seeing Alistair Crowley through someone else’s eyes. He is our protagonist, which is pretty exciting.
J: In the same way that SPRING deconstructs romance, and RESOLUTION deconstructs friendship, it deconstructs a man’s relationship with his ego. And also secondarily, but very prominently, his relationship with four very flawed people. And what his ego does to them.
A: See, it’s like Crowley and H.P. Lovecraft and people like that have really interesting stories in their lives. I would love to see that on the screen.
J: Oh yeah, they’re all there.
A: It kind of feels like literally, tonally, this is going to make it probably too high expectations, but the movie, like the way we see it, it totally kind of feels like There Will Be Blood, or Pulp Fiction, or Fight Club, yeah. But it’s also again like wildly weirdly everything. It’s a very, very strange movie. But also, in that RESOLUTION and SPRING have odd ramps into the third act, this third act is insane. Just insane. In a good way, not in a way that you’re like what’s going on, more like, oh my God, that’s the most earned whirlwind of crazy you’ll ever see.
A: It’s dark, dark as hell. Because we have something, I guess we’re in spoiler territory. So we have a happy ending with SPRING, and RESOLUTION had a nebulously dark ending.
J: There’s a scene in it, can I tell a little bit? There’s one of my favorite things in the world where he gets into a pub fight. He gets into a pub fight, he drags out this puritanical guy who’s fighting in front of like all these other like silent Calvinists, just watching, pours liquor on the ground in the shape of a pentagram. He doesn’t believe in Satan, he’s just being a dick. Lights it on fire, lighting him on fire, takes off his coat and beats the guy’s fire out with his coat, screaming “Hail Satan!” It’s so fucking weird. He disrespects the guy so hard by beating the fire that he lit, with his own coat. It’s really, really awesome.
J: And that’s not the craziest scene, it’s just one of my favorite like instant visuals of the movie.
Thanks to Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, David Lawson, Ted Geoghegan, and Drafthouse Films. You should see SPRING as soon as possible.
Nordling, out.
