Eye Of The Beholder: Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) is held by corporate captors under the gaze of Hannah Geist, and (below) Syd meets with Dr. Abendroth (Malcolm McDowell).
How immersed in your dad’s filmmaking aesthetic were you while growing up? A bit, but not a lot. I mean, it was definitely part of my life and I would go on set sometimes, even when I was a kid, but not to a huge degree. There was film everywhere but I wasn’t engaged in it and I wasn’t interested in being a film- maker until later in life. I was more of a nerdy book guy than a film guy.
If not filmmaking, then what? I was really interested in being an author for a while. From a pretty early age, I wanted to write novels and I was work- ing on visual art and I was playing in a band, so those were all things that I was interested in. I got into film because I was too creatively scattered and film seemed like a meta art that could collect various interests.
Your dad has said that he’d be an entomologist if he wasn’t doing film. I actually was a huge bug geek. I guess that probably came from my dad while growing up. I had pet praying mantises as a kid, which, interestingly, are the only insect that will get to know you. They will eat out of your hand and drink water droplets off your fingers; they become familiar with you and start to recognize you, it’s really interesting. Yeah, so I like bugs and I like technology too.
Was there a specific event that made you say, “Wait a minute... maybe I do want to make movies?” It wasn’t a very specific event, it was just a long pe- riod of driving myself crazy by trying to do too much, but at the same time I was kind of reach- ing. You know, I was 24 and I was kind of at the point in my life where I felt like I had to start focusing on something or I would never be able to put enough time into it to get really good in a way that was sat- isfying to me.
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What did your old man have to say about it? He was into it; he’s never pushed me into film and he’s never steered me away from it. My parents were pretty open to whatever I wanted to do.
Did he have any advice for you? No, not immediately.
In terms of horror, what sort of stuff do you like? Everything to a certain extent but I’m not specifically a hor- ror fan. I like horror a lot but there are people who love horror specifically and that’s very much at the core of who they are. I have a huge appreciation for horror but it’s not as central to what I’m into. I will watch horror films and play video games and read books and stuff. I went through a really heavy zombie video game phase for a while. I liked the zombie apocalypse fantasy, it’s a pretty good one, but I kind of just consume whatever is interesting to me and whatever is good, and I guess I don’t have a very specific taste.
Were there any films that specifically influenced the style of Antiviral? Initially, we were looking at Romanian new wave films be- cause I thought it would be really cool to have this sort of naturalistic take on it; do the sci-fi horror thing but structure it in a very naturalistic sort of way. And also Dogtooth, by Giorgos Lanthimos, a Greek filmmaker. That and his next film, Alps, but especially Dogtooth. So, we were looking at those films, and the first day of shooting I think it became obvious that it wasn’t going to be anything like that. We were picturing very long takes from very wide angles and letting things play out quite a lot. Then once we started shooting, it really felt more like a noir and it demanded a bit more of a stylized feel to it, and it felt wrong to fight that because it just kind of took on its own life, really. So, we decided just to roll with that and to not worry too much about the style.
If you look at what Karim did in Hobo with a Shotgun, it’s almost the opposite of the colour palette that you’re using