2015 Sundance Trading Card Series: #9. Matt Sobel (Take Me to the River)

Lavallee: Name me three of your favorite “2014 discoveries”…
Matt Sobel: The Windup Bird Chronicle, Borges, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Robyn

Lavallee: They say “write what you know” but here the notion of “shoot where you know” applies. Could you outline the decisions to film in the surroundings (Nebraskan scape, family dwellings) that you are familiar with.
Sobel: From the beginning, tone and atmosphere were so much more important to me than plot. Plots pass through my system pretty quickly, but a film that makes me feel something specific and different is unforgettable. This farm has a very particular, almost hypnotic vibe. The throbbing sound of cicadas, the sun that leaves almost no shade to hide in, I’ve never been in a place that felt like this one. I looked all over for a more cost effective option to double as Nebraska, but I couldn’t find it.

Lavallee: Could you discuss the genesis of Take Me to the River and the reasoning/significance behind the film’s title.
Sobel: I was interested in equating coming-of-age with a type of baptism (hence the title) but more specifically, a reverse baptism. Becoming an adult, as I see it, is more of a muddying than a cleansing.

Lavallee: Film history is stacked in generous dinner table affirmations/conflict bliss. Could you underline the visual strategy employed for what on paper appears to be a charged scene/sequence.
Sobel: I wanted to shoot these very tense and sometimes excruciating scenes in the exact the opposite way you’d expect, as if it were a child’s coloring book. The idea was to create a dissonance between these welcoming pastoral scenes and the insidious behavior happening in them. Uncanny is something both familiar and strange at the same time.