Alistair Banks Griffin

IONCINEMA.com’s “IONCINEPHILE of the Month” puts the spotlight on an emerging filmmaker from the world of cinema. With the Cannes Film Festival being the primo destination for launching international film careers, we are taking this opportunity to present a filmmaker who’ll have the fortune of presenting his feature film debut in the Director’s Fortnight section. This April/May we profile Alistair Banks Griffin and his debut film, Two Gates of Sleep. Click here to view Alistair’s top ten films of all time (as of April 2010).

Eric Lavallee: During your childhood…what films were important to you?
Alistair Banks Griffin: The earliest recollection I have was of Gilliam’s Time Bandits, which was a fantastic and dark film to show a young boy at the time. I remember always hoping that every film would be like this. Years later, my father took me to see the The Adventures of Baron Munchausen for my birthday and I somehow made the connection between the two films and it was then I had the first notion of what a director was.

Lavallee: During your formative years what films and filmmakers inspired you?
Griffin: In high-school I was very into films like Naked Lunch, A Clockwork Orange, Lawrence of Arabia and Wild At Heart. I definitely was seeking a certain epic strangeness in cinema. I was equally obsessed with surrealist and expressionist artists Max Ernst, Duchamp, Kirchner, Schiele and El Greco. Later in college, I got really excited by Stan Brackage, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jodorowsky, Clouzot, Malick, The Maysles, Gus Van Sant, Haneke, Matthew Barney, Dusan Makavejev…

Lavallee: At what point did you know you wanted to become a filmmaker?
Griffin: I began my creative endeavours in music in grade school and went on to art school with the intention of pursuing painting. For a final high school humanities project I became very interested in the etchings Gustave Dore illustrated for Dante’s Inferno and decided to make an animated film of a section of the poem inspired by these plates. Going through the entire process of editing, doing voice over work and scoring it was exhilarating. At art school, I become frustrated with the limitations of my own talent as a painter and shifted more towards conceptual work with video and eventually began making experimental narrative shorts inspired greatly by Gus Van Sant’s student work (who had also been a student at RISD) and others such as Svankmajer and Antonioni.

I was hired directly out of school to work for the video sculpture artist Tony Oursler in NYC and ran his studio for several years. He gave me a great introduction to the art world and having access to so many resources in his studio allowed me to keep experimenting and developing ideas. Then, by chance, I went on to apprentice under the TV director John Patterson on episodes of the US television shows Carnivale and The Sopranos and this was my first real experience on a major set. It was during this time that I began writing. I finished a few screenplays and began the process of looking for producers in New York.

Lavallee: What is the genesis behind Two Gates of Sleep?
Banks Griffin: The idea for Two Gates of Sleep came from an experience during childhood. On the weekends, my family would leave New Orleans and go up to a very remote and unique part of the Southern Mississippi backwoods where the swamp and forest came together. Another family of several young boys being raised by their father lived up the road in a very isolated ancient house raising fighting cocks and making moonshine alcohol (no, I am not making that up) and living off of their hunting and fishing. I would very rarely get to interact with them but when we did, I could always sense they had this heavy desire to express themselves and that they were all very intelligent but did not have the verbal capacity of someone in normal society to do so. I had very little concept of what their lives could be like and my imagination would run wild. Years later, I was introduced to Faulkner’s writing and realized he had been observing the very same type of people and expressing these incredible internalizations that I had always suspected. I was always fascinated by Faulkner’s subtle way of connecting his work back to classicism and it was around this time I started sketching out the beginnings of the story that TOGS eventually became.

I was lucky enough to connect with Josh Mond, Sean Durkin and Antonio Campos when they had their film Aftershool at New York Film Festival and I had my short, Gauge there. We all seemed to share some deeply strong sensibilities about cinema in general. They came on board and introduced me to another producer they had worked with prior, Andrew F. Renzi. We received a very generous grant from Cinereach and from that moment it was a matter of only a couple of months before we were all off into preproduction.

Lavallee: What kind of characteristics/features were you looking for your main characters/during the casting process?
Griffin: I think a certain mix of stoicism and delicateness was what I had specifically in mind. I had met Brady Corbet in the early days of the project and he immediately epitomized what I was looking for and we set out crafting the role around him. Casting the other roles was a bit arduous. We had a amazing casting director, Susan Shopmaker, who put some great people in front of us and we were very lucky to connect with David Call and Karen Young late in the process. I think the most crucial thing to look for in during casting is for the actor to be able to be able to listen to notes, make adjustments and come at each take with something a bit different each time.

Lavallee: How did you prep for the performances (was there a rehearsal process?) and how did you prep for each scene?
Griffin: Unfortunately, we didn’t have much rehearsal time during the 18 days of principal photography. I was very interested in creating stylized performances by channeling certain aspects of a sort of deconstructionist method. On set, we were constantly trying to restrain all body movements and facial expressions. There is very little dialogue in the film and it is a normal reaction for an actor to emote more to compensate for this. By restricting that reaction, something far more interesting and mysterious came out. I was also very interested in using the environment to create difficult physical scenarios to essentially make the actors move away from the artifice of acting and into a place of actual struggle. There was very little story-boarding, the cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes and I spent most of preproduction walking through the environment and created an extensive shot-list together. The film was written for actual locations that I knew I had access to so I was able to work with that confidence.

Lavallee: What ideas did you have for the style of the film? What inspirations (other films, location, paintings etc…) did you draw upon for the look/style, aesthetics of the film?
Griffin: From the beginning, I wanted to craft the film as a sort of Memento mori piece. I was very interested in Vanitas paintings from the 16th and 17th century. These paintings were crafted usually as still life and meant as a reminder of the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death. The Ars moriendi (Art Of Dying) was also a point of interest. I was looking at a lot of Thomas Struth’s photography of forests, these insanely wide, large format shots where virtually everything looks in focus and deeply rich in detail. I was also looking at a lot of Shelby Lee Adam’s Appalachia photos and Alec Soth’s work. In terms of color, James Whistler’s paintings were essential and Tarkovsky’s Stalker was looked at thoroughly. I really wanted an essence of the long tracking moves and muted colors that happen once the travellers move out of the sepia world of the city and into the Zone. The color palate and decay of that part of Southern Mississippi is not far from that world he crafted. Paul Schader’s thesis text Transcendental Style In Film became something of an road map for me in terms of the themes and style I wanted to experiment with. Although you tend to throw a lot of things out the window as you are working it is really fascinating to go back and look at these things once you are finished to see how close or far away you got from them in the process.

Lavallee: Can you discuss the collaborative process you had with Cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes?
Griffin: Lipes is well on his way to becoming one of the best cinematographers of his generation and has incredible intensity to the way he works. He refuses to ever walk away from a set up with a bad shot. In preproduction we worked extensively to craft as many scenes that we could in single shots and shot-listed as much of the movie as we could, and on set, tried to recreate these setups and make adjustments. Because we were shooting a bit later in the spring then intended it was much harder to get as much of the overcast as we wanted so many of the days were built around magic hour. There was a great deal of give and take and ultimately the end result was a very specific hybrid of both our styles.

Lavallee: Can you discuss the collaborative process you had with Production Designer Kris Moran?
Griffin: Kris had done all of this insanely great work over the years specifically with Wes Anderson and I really knew that I would need someone with maximalist tendencies on this film as we had very sparse resources. We went over a good deal of reference images from about 1910 to 1970 and asked only that nothing in the film was later than 1985 and this went for costumes as well. We discussed that we never wanted the audience to get a solid grounding on exactly what time period this was all taking place in. All she really asked for was a pickup truck and then she was flying around Mississippi putting it all together. The hero house we found for the family to live in was this incredible cabin that had been given to a confederate soldier as payment for fighting in the Civil War. It hadn’t been touched in over 40 years or so and was completely dangerous. Kris and (Art Director) William Logan got big eyes for about two seconds then shrugged. We left them there, and two days later we came back and they had run telephone poles under this place and buttressed the floors and it looked as though the family had never left since the war. It was incredible.

Lavallee: Can you discuss the collaborative process you had with composers Saunder Jurriaans & Daniel Bensi?
Banks Griffin: I have collaborated with Saunder and Danny for many years on all of my projects and we have a very tight shorthand for creatively speaking to one another. I tend to get something temp in of existing music to cut to and then try to explain why it isn’t exactly right and they go off and do their thing and its pretty amazing as they both play on the upwards of ten different instruments. We listened to a lot of Arvo Part and Gavin Bryars during this time. A great deal of the music they make as the band Priestbird has also influenced much of what I do. I had originally thought there was going to be very little music but when the first pieces came in from them, I realized we really had to go for this enormous, epic score. It was a huge challenge with this sort of thing not to indicate towards any particular feeling or specifically move towards any sentimentality.

Two Gates of Sleep receives its world premiere in the Director’s Fortnight section at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. Look for it during the Fall film festival season.