Every Day is Halloween: Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley on ROOM TEMPERATURE
The directing duo discuss their terrifying and hilarious new psychodrama, ROOM TEMPERATURE
Photo taken by Estelle Hanania, courtesy Dennis Cooper’s blog.
Legendary novelist Dennis Cooper (The Sluts, Closer, The Marbled Swarm) had always been influenced by cinema, but could never find a way into directing. Yet upon meeting acclaimed visual artist Zac Farley, a film duo was instantly formed. The writer had finally managed to translate his queer, transgressive sensibility to the moving image under the collaboration of Farley, a rigorous formalist who could always find new things to do with the camera.
Their previous collaborations, Like Cattle Towards Glow and Permanent Green Light, earned them fans, but their newest feature, Room Temperature, represents what can only be described as a major breakthrough. Set in the Southern California desert, we hone in on an isolated family led by a patriarch who has a near dangerous obsession with pulling off a home haunt in time for Halloween. As his mission nears the October 31st date, things get more and more disturbing. This probably makes the film sound strictly like a horror film, and while it is very scary, the duo will be sure to note they see it as a dark comedy first.
BLEEDING EDGE was lucky enough to chat with both Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley ahead of the film’s Canadian premiere on Wednesday, September 24th.
Bleeding Edge: The first question I can ask is, how did you two first meet, and when did you click and realize you wanted to be artistic collaborators?
ZF: We first met twelve or fourteen years ago, something like that. I had known Dennis' work for years before that; I was a devotee of his literature. But as soon as we met, we started working on projects together. We started working on a book about theme parks where Dennis would adopt these fairy tales. We had these fairy tales where the rides became characters. I made these photographs and videos of some of the rides. We still haven't finished that book, but at some point, we started making films. The first one was an experiment, like, can we do something with a script that Dennis had written years earlier? And gradually it turned into this. It's kind of addictive, making films.
DC: This [first] film, it was like a porn film, but it was like an anti-porn, well maybe not anti-porn, but it wasn't sexy. It was sort of weird. Anyway, no one would touch it. But this producer in Germany somehow heard about it and said he'd like to look at it. I should mention this guy actually did a lot of Bruce LaBruce’s films. And he, for some reason, liked it, and so we made this next weird film. It was $40,000, so it was really shoestring. But it was so much fun, and people liked it, so we started making actual films.
Both of you started out in other mediums, like visual art and literature. Was there something you each felt was missing from your own artistic pursuits that made you want to turn to cinema?
ZF: I was always really interested and excited about film. When I was young, I thought I'd like to make films. But every film school was super hands-on, and the way a lot of filmmaking is taught just didn't seem like it would appeal to me. So I went to art school for that reason, but I always worked with video and film in my practice. I was always in the visual art field, but really interested in video and film. And I guess you could say that our films might be a little bit closer to whatever people refer to as video art than some people refer to as film in certain ways.
DC: When I was a teenager, I was really obsessed with experimental film. It was the late 60s and my friends and I would go watch Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton, and all those guys, because they had a series in L.A.. So I really wanted to make films, in addition to writing, when I was really young. But then I went to a film class in college and realized I had no talent for it. So, it had always been this kind of dream. So I met Zach, and he has a visual sense that I don't have. And since we worked so well together, it was just like, oh, I can finally make films?
And what were the origins of Room Temperature specifically? What were you two thinking about and kicking around at the time?
DC: We both are obsessed with home haunts. I used to make them as a kid, so I had a really lifelong obsession, and Zach had a pretty lifelong obsession too. We find them really fascinating because of how both amateurish and ambitious they are, also how much they fail. They're kind of like outsider art. People who make them are really inventive, but it's not like a school kind of art. They try to find new ways to make you feel disoriented or have fun or get you scared so we were just really interested in that form.
You brought it up that you were interested in home haunts as a kid, so I mean, maybe this is a weird word to use in relation to this film, which is so dark, but does any kind of nostalgia animate it in a certain way?
DC: No, I hate nostalgia, it’s my enemy. Not nostalgia. No, like I said, it's a really vital form. I mean, in Los Angeles, there are hundreds of them every Halloween. We usually go to LA every Halloween and see 30 or 40 of them. The home haunts I’d make in my parents' basement were really terrible. So I don't have any nostalgia for that. No, it's really about the form.
ZF: I grew up in France, so I didn't have Halloween as a kid. I never even dressed up, so my interest in it actually came much later. I got excited by it when in the U.S., it's the ideal form of collaboration because oftentimes the kind of people who get together and make these home haunts, they're strange bedfellows in a way. Some of them are more interested in the acting and theater aspect of it. Some of them are architecture geeks who are just really excited about reconfiguring the confines of the garage to become a maze. Some of them are really into animatronics. One of the things that excites me about them is that there are all these mistakes or in-between things happening. It’s like when one person is putting on this really sincere theater play, but it's happening in the middle of an avant-garde structure. I come at it from these places that have the potential to reveal themselves or to fail.
Dennis mentioned he's from Southern California, and you originally grew up in France, and that's an interesting tension. I think I was looking at another interview you two did for this film, and you were saying that you'd initially conceived of doing the film in France, but just realized it had to be very culturally specific. And I mean, did the cultural specificity go to the extent of like, we have to get just the actual Southern California desert itself. Like you couldn’t just Wes Anderson-style shoot in Spain and simulate it there. It had to be very specific, I assume?
DC: We were going to make it in France initially because I really liked the idea that the people around the family would have absolutely no idea what they were doing and think they were completely insane. That interested me, but then it was just not possible, since nobody there knows what home haunts are, no one would give us any money, because no one understood what we were trying to do. We did it in Southern California basically because we know a lot of people there, we already had a producer there, and it would be much, much easier because we didn’t have a lot of money, and we could reach out to people we knew. Many of the people in the movie are artists, or visual artists, students at the art school, or the children of artists. And the desert was the setting because we had to rent a house for two months and dig a swamp in the backyard, and it wasn’t easy to find, so the desert was affordable. There we could find this weird house, and it ended up being a lucky thing because having them live in the desert worked really well. But also because we could do it without people bothering us. We could make as much noise as we wanted. So really, the decision about the desert was actually just a practical one that worked out really fortuitously.
ZF: The place where we shot, like the high desert, I had the opportunity to spend a bunch of time there when I was younger. And it's fascinating because it's really spread out, but there's also a sense of community there that's based on survival. Because if your electricity runs out, you could die within hours. There are all these weird characters from survivalists, and also just like extreme drug-washed-out people. It just seemed like the right place for the kind of film that we were making.
Did that setting help in terms of creating the images of the film and expanding your vision?
ZF: Oh yeah. I mean, that's the way that we work in general. We write out this script, but it’s always a pretty imprecise map. Then, when we start casting, we adapt it to fit with the people we want to work with, and then when we figure out where it's going to happen, that all becomes really, really generative throughout the process. And sometimes something to fight with. I remember shooting in full sun, which is something that's not by itself appealing, but being forced to do it, like being a little bit uncomfortable, actually ends up being really, really productive.
You brought up that a lot of the cast of the film are artists, and you said partly it's because those are the people you know in Southern California. But did you also just find them more appealing to work with than regular actors? I know Dennis is a big fan of Robert Bresson, who always used non-actors. And I'm just curious if you two find non-actors just genuinely easier to work with than professionals?
DC: We've only worked with non-actors. I mean, actually, Ange [Dargent], who plays Extra, he's been making films since he was a kid. But that's pretty much it, and he's not a traditional actor. We like the idea of people who don't know how to look sad, they don't know how to look angry, they don't know what they look like when they're being emotional, or when they're thinking, or when they're whatever. Whereas actors are trained to know what that's going to look like. So non-actors are really open and raw material. And it's fun to work with non-actors and these people we know. Some of them we knew already, and some of them were just in our world. And you build the character with them. We don't do traditional auditions; rather, we talk with them for an hour. We have them do a few line readings, but it's mostly just like, who are they? And it's like we can work with this and that. And then you just fine-tune who they are, because all the people in the films are basically being themselves, they're just fine-tuned. Like, oh, bring this up a little bit. Keep that away. Don't do that thing you do, but this thing you do is really fascinating. It’s really great, because it makes that part of the film as vital and creative as editing it or writing it or anything, working with the actors or the non-actors. It's very collaborative, and the performers feel very into the material and into the project because they're actually bringing a lot themselves. We're saying like, this scene, you're supposed to look sad, so what do you think? And then they'll do it, and it'll be like, they made it up, not us, not us, saying that you have to have your head turned this way or you have to have a tear coming out of your eye. And we don't use score, because we don't like music manipulating the viewer.
ZF: There is a score.
DC: Yeah, but I mean, the music in the films always has to be heard by the characters. There's nothing that only the viewer hears. So you get these performances that are like if they're sad, they're sad the way they are in real life. You don't have this score going like, this is the sad moment. This is the tense moment, you know? So it's nice because the performances are really real and pure in a certain way. And the viewer just sees that.
How do you feel your filmmaking ambitions have grown in the time since your collaboration began?
ZF: With every new project, we always try to set ourselves up with something that seems like it's a little bit more than just barely out of reach. I think that we're both really interested in learning how to achieve some kind of project that seems like it's impossible. That's how we stay engaged with the work over the long periods of time that it takes us to put these projects together. And yeah, this one was a real jump. I mean, we shot it in a different place than we're used to. In our other films, the performances are actually very sincere, but they're very flat. They're very kind of like one-to-one. It's like there's no kind of composition. In this film, all of the performers are actually building characters and acting in a way that I think we've never really dealt with before, and this is the first time we've made a film that has any camera movement, like we just hadn't worked with camera movements up until that point. We set ourselves up with all these challenges and tried to figure out how we want to go about them. I do think the films are really evolving, and our ambitions definitely are.
DC: That's the way I write books. I always start from scratch, and I always try to do something new with all my novels. Each one is me trying to do something where I don't know if I can do it. And then working really, really hard to try to pull it off. And our films are actually about that. I mean, the film's about this father's ambition for his haunted house, which is just an impossible ambition, and then ends up being a shitty haunted house that's not scary. The last one was about a guy who wanted to use his death as the ultimate magic trick, and that didn’t work either. We’re interested in overreach, ambition, and then the inevitable failure that comes with it. What do you do when things fail? How do you make it work anyway?
And I guess maybe this will be my last question, but we have Derek McCormick doing the Q&A for the screening next week. I know he's a friend of both of yours, and you did an afterward for his book Castle Faggot. Could you say a little bit about how you feel Derek is kind of a kindred spirit of yours?
ZF: I'm just like a huge fan, basically. I think he's one of the greatest writers there is. He's been influential to the way I think about literature and art.
DC: Yeah, I've known him for a long time. Well, I mean, we only met like two or three times, but he wrote to me when he did his first book, he sent it to me because he liked my books, so I’ve been following him. I published two of his books with an imprint that I had for a while. I've always thought he was great. I think Castle Faggot is one of the greatest novels ever in the world. He's very funny, he's very clever, and he gets it. I think he really gets what we're doing., I think there’s a strong aesthetic connection between Derek and what we're trying to do that makes him a really good person to draw things out of us. He’s kind of a weird genius, Derek.
BLEEDING EDGE will be hosting the Canadian premiere of Room Temperature on Wednesday, September 24th at The Paradise Theatre. Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley will be joining us in person for a Q&A afterwards.
Tickets are still on sale, as we recommend using promo code BLEEDINGEDGE10 for a discount.