I
T’S RARE THAT A 28-YEAR-OLD FILMMAKER WOULD BE GIVEN A RETROSPECTIVE AT A MAJOR FILM FESTIVAL. Then again, you’d be hard-pressed to find a 28-year-old filmmaker that has a style that’s as unique, and a filmography as large, as Adam Wingard. This year’s FanTasia film festival in Montreal featured Medicated Monsters: A Spotlight on Filmmaker Adam Wingard, which was comprised of
three of his shorts and three of his features, including his artfully constructed debut full-length, the drug- addled ghost story Pop Skull (2007), and his latest, a take on the serial killer subgenre, A Horrible Way to Die. Side-stepping both Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer’s cold-blooded lack of conscience and the faux re- alism of Man Bites Dog, Wingard immerses the viewer in a dream-like haze, slowly unravelling the story in fragments, which are presented out of chronological order, before dropping a twist ending that even hardened cinephiles won’t see coming.
“At first I wanted to do a movie that really puts
you in the passenger’s seat with the serial killer,” he explains. “But then I realized that there’s no way that you can really know what it’s like to kill some- body or what a serial killer acts like after they’ve just murdered somebody because there’s no way that would ever be filmed in a real way in reality, so there’s no reference point to it. ... So we took a totally dif- ferent approach, where it was more about the before and after as opposed to the moment of.” Written by Simon Barrett
(Dead Birds), AHWtD fea- tures A.J. Bowen (The House of the Devil) as Gar- rick Turrell, a notorious mass murderer with a rabid following who has recently escaped from prison. The subject of a manhunt, Turrell sets out to track down his former girlfriend, Sarah (Amy Seimetz: Bitter Feast), who put him behind bars. Now a recovering alcoholic, Sarah attends AA meetings as she quietly laments being duped by Turrell’s affable charms while they were together. There, she meets Kevin (Joe Swanberg), a fellow addict who proves to be a romantic distraction from her haunted past.
RM 24 C I N E M A C A B R E “You could almost say the horror elements are
an abstraction of what the characters are going through,” offers Wingard. “At its core, it’s about trust, infidelity and addiction.” Specifically, Wingard refers to the film as “mum-
blecore,” a cinema vérité movement that’s risen to prominence in the past decade, and which counts Swanberg– a filmmaker in his own right with more than ten features to his credit, some shot by Wingard – as one of its most prolific purveyors. For Wingard, the term typifies movies that present “a gritty and more stylistically realistic take on characters than a nor- mal, conventional approach would.” How that plays out in AHWtD is exemplified by scenes that fade in and out of one another, handheld camerawork that fre- quently roams uncom- fortably close to the actors’
faces, and occasionally the fuzzy glow of out-of-focus Christ- mas lights floating as if super-im- posed atop of the film’s m o s t
intimate sequences. The effect, which is further amplified by a dour score and a gloomy visual palette, is downright surreal. As Turrell crosses the dreary Midwest landscape, racking up grisly mur- ders in his wake, it feels as if we are helplessly drifting through the story’s smudgy timeline. Wingard says his choices are often inspired by one of his favourite filmmakers, Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, the original Pulse). “He picks a genre first and then he figures out
how he’s going to do his version of that genre. I feel like I’m trying to avoid doing the modern horror filmmaker thing, which is to do the Ti West thing where you do more throwback stuff. It’s great when people like Ti do it, but I feel like there are a lot of people who are trying to do that and failing.” Considering the sheer amount of projects
Wingard has been involved with over the past two years, the blurred reality may just be mirroring his own current mental state. With a date-rape anthol- ogy film What Fun We Were Having currently play- ing festivals, several shorts under his belt and three more projects (including home-invasion slasher You’re Next) on deck, Wingard admits his rigorous schedule hasn’t been easy. “To be honest, it pretty much shatters your per-
sonal life and destroys all of your relationships, but I don’t think it’s going to be like this forever,” he says with a laugh. “I just know that I have to keep going and take every single opportunity I can so that I can get to a place where I can slow down. ... You’ve gotta keep making stuff until you’ve got that pool in your backyard and three films set up.”
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72