Carpe Noctem Interviews - Volume 2

by Carnell, Thom

  I am so tired of the Freddy Krueger kind of thing where someone always has a snappy line. I remember when I was growing up to films where you were still not sleeping nights two weeks after seeing them. No one’s doing that anymore and I think it’s because they soft pedal the whole thing and they’re making excuses for what they’re trying to do.

  Right and that’s very cowardly. That’s what I believe. I mean, come on, face the whole thing. Face the real thing. And that’s how I intended Aftermath to be. I just wanted to do something that was straight to your heart, straight to your mind, and made no concessions to the public. This is a very serious subject. I’m so scared of this myself that I wanted to make a film that was so scary for people that they would not forget it.

  I’m going to ask you something that you’re probably sick of answering, but I just want to get it out and answered and then we can move on. Financing for Aftermath… that had to have been bitch.

  Yeah. Well, when you’re doing a short film, especially when you’re doing a 35mm, it’s always a bitch. [laughs] I know that in the US, student films and people who are trying to start in this business, they tend to use 16mm to do their films, but it doesn’t happen that way in Spain. They just start off with 35mm. It’s probably cheaper here, but… There is one difference of course and that’s that the negative stock is twice as long so you have twice as many meters to develop in the laboratory and everything tends to get more expensive. In terms of getting the money, I was very lucky. I had a couple of friends who believed in me. They’ve always been friends of mine so they knew I wanted to make something. Also, my family supported me even though they hated the script. I handed the script to my mother… [laughs]

  Oh, no! [laughs] Oh, god…

  She said, “You’re fucking crazy!” She said, “Go ahead and do whatever you want if that’s going to make you feel better, but I’m telling you that this film is not going to make you break into the industry.” In a way, she was right. In another way, it was a film that got me a job as at least a Production Manager and I’m doing commercials at this moment. So, it’s a double-edged sword. But, the money finally came and it wasn’t that expensive. It was about $50,000 US. If you judge the result, that’s not a lot.

  It just conjures images of the first time you showed the film to your parents.

  You know, my father never read the script before and they’re like sixty something years old. So, I invited them to the first screening. I was running late with the film print under my arm and they showed the movie in Sitges, an international fantasy film festival that takes place in October every year. So, they showed the film and my parents just couldn’t believe it.

  I bet.

  They just said, “Jesus Christ, that is way over the top” in terms of violence and cruelty, in terms of everything.

  I’m imagining the looks between them. “This is your fault!”

  [laughs] There was a big screening of several short films and mine was last. So, we had this humongous two hour screening. Right after the two hours, Aftermath started. I remember my father had a little paper there with all of the shorts that they were showing listed. Every time one would finish, he would turn on the lighter and scratch the name off of the next one. “Okay, we’re coming…” [laughs] I have to say though that my parents are very understanding. They know me very well. They knew that this film was a reflection of my own fears, but, on the other hand, they separated the subject from the way it was made. They said, “Son, if you were to choose some other subject…” I probably chose the wrong showcase to develop my skills.

  [laughs] Okay, I want to talk a little bit about the film. Do you consider Aftermath a gore or horror film? If not, what is your perception of it?

  Well, I don’t think that Aftermath is gore, at all. I think that it’s more of a horror film. If it’s considered to be gore, it’s because of the graphic stuff, but that was not my intention. Gore films are the films that take a humorous angle.

  Like a Peter Jackson film?

  Yeah, I would consider that gore. It’s more for the festivity of it. In this case, of course it’s very graphic maybe even more so than any average gore film, but it’s used in another way. The intentions are very different. This was the only way for me to show the real thing. If you are in an autopsy room you are going to see a lot of gore. So, I tried to show that more as a documentary.

  The funny thing is, as I mentioned in my initial letter to you, I worked in the funeral industry and assisted on autopsies. Something I think your film captured was that there are isolated moments of beauty even in a scene of such viciousness. And you captured it; the blood swirling down the drain, the gleam of the metal, etc. There are these moments that are just so beautiful to the eye and yet they’re framed by this atrocious setting. I think you hit it so squarely on the head and it’s why I feel that Aftermath is such an important film.

  I couldn’t write this film before watching an autopsy. I just didn’t know how to start. I knew I wanted to make a film about death and about manipulation. In this case, I asked myself, “What does an autopsy look like? How is it done?” So, what I did was I interviewed a forensic surgeon and then she invited me to see three autopsies. I saw them and took notes of everything I was seeing. I remember I had brought my notebook and even my handwriting was shaky because that was the first time I was confronting my own fears and I was just three feet away from the bodies. Everything that I saw affected me so much that I translated it onto the screen. In a way, all of this environment, all of this fear was poetic and yet also dirty and cruel. For me, I considered it like a big mass and that’s how I understood the film and the script. It was a ritual performed when we come to the end.

  You managed to capture such an air of austerity in Aftermath. The atmosphere is almost church-like. And from your choice of music to the flashes of different imagery – which would then fade to black – it was all so impressive.

  One of the things I had very clear in my mind was the pacing. I wanted this to be very slow. I wanted this to be contemplative. At the same time, I wanted to place the audience into a corner of this room and tie them up. Let them see everything without being able to interfere with anything. It was a voyeuristic trip into the inferno of human nature. My look on this film was very distant and very cold and that’s the only way it could be.

  I agree, although I think that, towards the end, the viewer is pulled in. They are watching everything that is going on and yet, when the climax of the film comes you can’t sit there passively. You’re almost a participant in everything. And I think that shift is so subtle that the viewer doesn’t even realize that they are feeling that until it’s too late.

  Yeah, it’s building up. It’s the type of film that you either take it or you get up and leave.

  My wife got up and left. [laughs]

  Right. [laughs] If you’re there for the whole show, then you’re going to be very disturbed.

  Speaking of the mass aspect, what music did you use in the film?

  Requiem by Mozart and also Verdi’s Requiem. In fact, I was writing and doing the storyboards for the movie while I was listening to this music. For me, it sets the tone and sets the pacing of the shots. That’s why I ended up, of course, using it. It was, for me, exactly the music that I wanted because it had this death element in it and also the religious content, which, if you’re talking about death, it’s a subject that you, sooner or later, end up with. It just brought a very interesting atmosphere to the whole story.

  Did the hospital where you shot have any idea the kind of film you were making?

  No. [Laughs]

  Good for you.

  It was the same place where I watched the autopsies. I asked the doctor, before the script was written, “Do you think there is any chance of shooting here?” She said, “Well, it’s never been done before, but you can ask the management.” So, I didn’t ask the management yet. I started to write the script based on that location and then, right after that, I started to do the storyboards
based on the location without even having permission yet. [laughs] So, I took a chance there. I wrote a report that had all the details of the production and I had an interview with the management. I showed up with a tie and suit and everything. So, they said ok, but I never, never showed them the script because they never asked for it.

  Good plan.

  If they had, I don’t know what I would have done.

  Have they seen the film since its completion?

  The film is everywhere, so, they probably have seen it.

  Don’t ever get sick in that hospital now. Management’s going to put you in some awful place.

  [laughs] I had a very bad time with my production managers. They knew that I had one location. So, I went ahead with the production, and then, three days before we were to shoot the rape scene, my production managers said to me, “If you’re not going to tell the hospital about the film, where are you going to do it?” I said, “No, you cannot do this because, first of all, I’m Executive Producer of this film. Second, I got this location by myself, so I’m responsible for it. And third, shut the fuck up.” Come on, they’re going to fuck my film at this stage? No way. What I said was, “Ok, you want to be out of this? Ok. Write down on a piece of paper that you are going to exclude yourself from any responsibility and I’ll sign it. If anything happens, I’m going to be responsible. Just shut the fuck up.” So, we went ahead with the film. I was very, very scared.

  I want to ask you about DDT, the special FX company. Where did you find these guys? Their work is amazing.

  Yeah, these people have been working for maybe six or seven years in the commercial industry. I knew them because of a friend of mine. So, I showed them the project and they were, at that time, twenty-five years old. [Laughs] I asked them to read the script and they said they would like to do it. “We’ve never done this before, whole bodies, the construction of human bodies. We want to do this all the way. We’d like to use the best products.” So, they bought Skin-flex and they had it shipped to them from the US. DDT is a company that is still working these days. They’ve been doing many features along with commercials. In fact, I happened to produce a short film for one of the guys who wanted to direct. I did that as compensation for the work that they did for me.

  In the Special Edition, there is a scene of a videotape documenting you filming the climax of the film.

  That wasn’t supposed to be shot. [laughs] I found out about that later.

  What was amazing to me was that upon calling ‘Cut’ your actor jumps up and races away and almost appears to be getting ill. Did any of your other actors have a difficult time filming? I mean your main actor had to be going through hell.

  My main actor, Pep Tosar, is a great guy. In fact, we became friends after this. He had a very bad time because he was going through the same kind of fears that I did. So, in this regard, he chose to do this film because of that. He wanted to exorcize his own fears. Of course, that scene you saw shot on video, that was on the seventh day, the last day. He was very fed up with the whole situation, not because of the film production, but because of the subject. It was getting to him.

  I imagine that you can’t be that close to that mind set for too long.

  No. Not at all. We were in a basement with no windows. We almost spent twelve hours every day down there without seeing the light. We were on these floors, under these lights, and we in this set where, hours before, they were chopping people up. So, in fact, he was on top of a dummy, but on a real table which had been used before. So, it was kind of sick. Everything time I think about it, I’d rather not think about it very much. [laughs] Of course, he jumped off the table and went ahead and he took this whiskey bottle and drank half of it. That was the bottle that is shown in one of the shots after that. So, Pep Tosar asked me to please shoot only one take of each scene. In fact, I had staged forty shots of the whole scene. We were never able to shoot them because of the time limitations and also because of the actor. I decided to choose four different angles. I took my chances because I had one take for each one. I was there directing him on how he should fuck a corpse for four times. I had him all on top of that thing for about one minute-one minute and a half each. The shot that you saw was the last shot. The guy who shot this video, Raul Almanzan, which was the editor of this film, was there doing the Making Of… And then, I asked him not to shoot anything, but he did anyway. [laughs] But, it was great because we had a very good document there.

  I wanted to ask you something about the rape scene, did you use the rape of the corpse in Aftermath as a metaphor for the figurative rape of the corpses being autopsied that you saw while researching the film?

  If I understand your question, do I consider the rape scene some kind of extension of this manipulation?

  Was it used as a metaphor for what you saw happening to the bodies?

  Yeah, well, you’re right on the spot. The second half of the film, for me, is the same as the first half. Even though the first half is considered to be scientific or more accepted professionally, the second is fiction, but is, of course, metaphor. It’s the same manipulation, the same loneliness and the same fucked up world that we are living in. There are also many, many things there because for me sex and death are very much related and I think they are for everyone.

  I agree. What is it the French call the moment right after orgasm? Le petit mort… the Little Death.

  Right. It’s like those things are mixed together, but it’s taking the manipulation to the very limit of human understanding.

  The interesting thing that I noticed while watching the film was as the camera would linger on the face of girl, she had this innate look of sadness, even though she was dead. However, while the rape scene was going on, and the camera would pass by her face, she looked somehow sadder. And even though I know her face didn’t change, because she was an artificial body, the situation happening around her somehow brought a more sad look to her face.

  You’re right. The thing that we did with the cinematography was making it darker and more metallic every time. That was one thing Christopher Baffa [Aftermath’s Director of Photography] and I talked about before shooting the movie. Of course, one of my intentions was to make the character of the girl to be alive, to make this character feel something. Even though it was a dummy, even though it was a dead character, I wanted her to be alive, to feel that humiliation, and the audience to feel that with her. The rape scene is framed, except for the wide shot, in a way that we never see the forensic surgeon very much. It’s just bits and pieces here and there. So, I tried to frame only face shots for her, only for the dead bodies. You never see the whole faces of the forensic surgeons and if you do, they’re covered with this mask. I tried to take away all humanity from these characters. So, in other words, make the alive dead and the dead alive.

  I think you totally succeeded in that. I mean, I’ve taken care of literally thousands of people and each one is distinctly different. People say, “Oh, it’s just a shell that’s left.” I don’t buy that for a second. I think a portion of that person is still there and that’s why I was so struck with the way that you were framing shots and the look on this girl’s face.

  Thank you. I mean that’s the biggest compliment that I could ever hear because that was what I tried to do. When I saw the real autopsies, and I looked into these eyes, I had the worst nightmares of my life. The dead look a very, very particular way. These eyes you never forget. When I saw the first body, I immediately started thinking about this guy’s life.

  It’s so funny that you should say that. When I was attending mortuary college, I was pulled aside by one of the instructors because I would do the exact same thing. I would start to wonder about some woman lying there, “What was your sixteenth birthday like? What was the birth of your children like?” He took me aside and said, “You just can’t go there because you’ll be a basket case within a year.”

  I know. You have to remain distant.

  And I think you, as a filmmaker, it’s even m
ore of a danger because you have to be so in tune with sympathy and empathy and putting yourself into another person’s position.

  The Aftermath story is really a fictional story. I knew it was completely unreal. There is no attachment to a real life. So, I was relaxed in this sense. If we were to talk about or even shoot real people, which occurred to me, then I would have never been able to ever make this film. It’s too much. I needed to use special fx for this.

  I’d like you to comment on your effective use of silence in your film. Even though I understand that the film was recorded digitally on 24 tracks, there’s no dialogue.

  Well, because I thought that in the world of the dead, there are no words. It’s so lonely, so empty, that there is no place for words. I think a look is sometimes worth a thousand words like they say. In this case, I think it helped me very much. On the other hand, I never needed to use dialogue with these characters.

  I think it would have cheapened it if you had someone go off on this big exposition of why he was doing this and why he was doing that. I think it’s better to have the audience fill in the blanks themselves.

  I agree. On the other hand, I wanted to do a kind of direction that could be used anywhere in the world. A universal subject with a universal language. I’ve been very, very happy with this, because I’ve always been able to speak about the film without any subtitles, and that’s great.

  You had said that the making of Aftermath and the writing of it was a means for you to come to terms with your own feelings regarding death and dying. Now that the film has been made, do you feel that you have a more even keel on that topic?