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| Vulcanizadora |
“I never really think too much about what I'm going to write about,” says Joel Potrykus.
We’re talking about Vulcanizadora, due to open in US cinemas this week. It’s been a big hit at festivals like Tribeca and Fantasia, but it’s one of those films that people are wary of talking about because it hinges on a huge surprise which no-one wants to spoil. Joel and I knew from the outset that that would make the interview difficult. Still, it’s a special piece of work, and there’s a great deal that we want to discuss. We do so as carefully as possible.
“I never sit down and say ‘I'm going to write a story about this,’ or ‘two guys doing this,’” he continues. “I think usually what happens to me is I watch a movie and I start to get ideas. And with this one, I was watching Gus Van Sant's Gerry. I kind of misinterpreted what it was about, and I just felt like my version of what I thought that film was going to be needed to be made. And so I started to think about what two characters this story would be about. And then once I realised that it was two characters that I wanted to revisit from a film I made ten years ago, it was really easy to write, and it was probably the easiest thing and the quickest thing I've ever written.
“Being a relatively new father myself, it all started to flow out, mostly in just dialogue. Just me writing ideas for dialogue and then structuring it together with something that would separate the story into two halves. When I was writing it, I called it Part One, Part Two. And I never had broken a story into two. It was just a cool experiment for me to try and write something a little bit different.”
He’s a relatively new father, but his son was old enough and capable enough to have a role in the film himself.
“He was five at the time we shot. He was four when we were preparing him, my wife and I, for the film,” he says. “We definitely did not force him to do that or make him feel pressured to do it. We just talked about how mom and dad were going to make this really big movie soon – ‘and it would be great, little buddy, if you could be in it.’ And it took a while, but he really got into it and made the experience somehow even more personal than I could have planned from the start.”
Did he understand the idea of what a film is, and the process involved?
“He does. He's been on all my sets since he was born – mostly short films –so, yeah, he knows there’s a lot of standing around, and all the gear and how many people there are. I was just nervous. You can rehearse a kid, forever, and he can do great, but then once there's 20 people staring at him and a camera pointed at his face, you never know what's going to happen. But yeah, he'd been around so many sets that he knew what he was in for.”
The audience, by contrast, is plunged right into the thick of this film, which starts when its events are already well underway.
“I didn't want to see [the characters] talking about going on a trip or why they were going on the trip,” he explains. “I was just trying to think, ‘Where's the latest place I could start?’ I mean, there's not a whole lot in that first 10 minutes that's crucial, other than building the characters, but I wanted to just jump right into it. And again, also, that opening shot is stolen from the movie, Gerry. So I wanted to start with my declaration of where the inspiration for this came from.”
I observe that that first section of the film gives us a chance to think about life and how the characters value and relate to it. A lot of the stuff that they're doing in the woods is really childhood stuff. Did it come from his own experience of things that were fun to do as a kid?
“I think so, yeah. I mean, for sure, a lot of that was written as we were walking around the woods, me and Josh [Burge], the actor, thinking ‘What could we do here? What could we do there?’ But every single kid that I know in Michigan, where I'm from, that was usually their first experience with dirty magazines, finding them in somebody's hunting blind out in the woods. That is absolutely a common thread that runs with my friends.
“As kids, my friends and I never shot bottle rockets at each other because it was too dangerous, but surprisingly, as I grew into an adult, I found that to be a fun thing. That was happening in our twenties, shooting bottle rockets at each other on the 4th of July. So, yes, all of this is taken – unfortunately or fortunately – from previous experiences as a kid or a fully functioning adult.”
Later, after we’ve had the chance to get to know the characters, there is a moment of violence that the film hinges on. Directors are always looking for new ways to sensitise audiences to violence. Here, a lot of that's about the acting, and also the image that we see directly afterwards.
“I knew why they were going to go out into the woods,” he says. “That was always the big crux of the film. But how they were going to play that out, I wasn't sure. My group and I just talked a lot together, about what seemed to make the most sense to those two characters, how they would decide to do it. But also, showing the audience something that I'd never seen before in a movie was really important. Something that felt a little more visceral. I mean, when I watch the film with certain crowds, some people are giggling through it, and I'm really surprised. But that's the whole experiment with this movie – never leading the audience through any kind of certain tone. They don't know if they're supposed to laugh or cringe or scream, whatever it is.
“Growing up in the Eighties, firecrackers and fireworks were this really dangerous taboo thing. I cannot remember what soap opera it was, but I remember seeing some kid blowing his fingers off from an M-80 firework, and that really burned into my brain. It still kind of feels dangerous whenever somebody brings out a big firework. And so I thought, what is the most dangerous thing you could do with that? Again, I just wanted to give the audience an image that maybe they hadn't seen before in a movie that felt organic to these two characters.”
We talk about the additional impact that scene has because of its location, and also how the men seem compromised even at the pivotal moment in their lives as one of them talks about the sea when really it’s a lake, not a real sea; a limited thing.
“It is just a little tiny line that was important for me,” he says. “Derek says, ‘There it is, the ocean.’ It's the lake. I mean, it's a little bit weird because it's a great lake, so it is huge. It does look like an ocean when you're there. You can't see the other side of it or anything. But, yeah, it's about these unrealised life dreams and hopes. This is as close as that character ever gets to seeing the ocean.
“Josh, and I definitely did not want to make some kind of masculine crisis film or anything like that. I don't consciously think about it too much, but I would say that I'm just a person more riddled with fear and anxiety than hope and joy every day, so it comes out naturally when I start writing. I think like most writers or painters or whoever it is, you're just trying to get out feelings so you feel better through the process. And for me, it's talking about the things that are not always the things that make you happy, but rather, exorcising the demons through art or whatever. I don't think about it too much, but it just comes out. That's what I want to talk about.”
The film is beautiful to look at, I say, particularly when we get to the water and there's so much brightness. It feels like the forest is what they have to go through to realise themselves in that brighter space. He nods, and is quick to credit cinematographer Adam J Minnick.
“Adam and I, we've been making movies since high school. We're both from Michigan. We're just surrounded by forests. So this is our second movie that we've made in a forest, but the first feature film we shot on 16 millimeter. We've been trying to do that forever, to shoot on film, but we've never had enough money to do it. This is the first one that I was dead set on getting a few more dollars for so we could shoot on film. Because every movie I make, I say ‘This is my last one. I'm never going to make another movie.’ So when I was getting ready to make this, I was like, ‘This is our last film together, so let's finally shoot on film.’
“We looked at Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy a lot when we were getting ready to make this, just to see how her and her cinematographer shot the forest and how that would contrast when it opens up into a whole different space. It's the same area in Michigan, which is very cool. It's dunes. So you get the trees and the forest, and then all of a sudden it immediately turns to white sand everywhere. We knew that that would add a visual change in the film and that maybe people would go ‘Oh, this is going to be a good ending for them. They're going to a beautiful place by the water.’ And then we wanted to narratively turn that around for them.”
The scenes in the forest feel quite improvisational, but did shooting on film make that difficult, because of the additional cost?
“Since I was playing Derek, there was a lot of improvisation,” he says. “You know, shooting on film the way I typically shoot is really cost effective because I don't shoot traditional coverage. There's no wide, then medium, then close up. Something Adam and I try to always do, every time we approach a scene, is ask ‘How can we get this in one shot? If we can't get it in one shot, can we get it in two? And if we can't get it in two, can we get it in three?’ And so, for the most part, especially the early scenes, we knew we could get everything in one shot.
“To me, aesthetically, every time you cut, you're kind of reminding the audience in a little tiny way, whether they know it or not, that they're watching a movie. The longer you can go without cutting, the longer the audience is cast under your spell, and makes it feel like time is unfolding for real in front of them. So that really lends well to shooting on film and then casting yourself – me – as the guy that's going to do the most talking, because I don't have to do another take thinking ‘Oh, this actor isn't getting it right. We’ve got to work through this now.’
“I'm trusting Adam. I would just look at him, and if everything was composed well and in focus and exposed properly, then we moved on, because I was confident about my performance. And again, I'm leading basically the first half of the movie, so I did have a lot of room to just improvise. We had a lot of dialogue I would fully come up with. As we were walking to get the shot, someone would say, ‘Oh, my friends used to bury dead fish out in the woods.’ Like, that's it. That's what Derek's going to talk about in the scene. That is so perfectly, weirdly Michigan. So there was a lot of room for me to improvise, at least dialogues rather than big story beats.”
I tell him that I think that adds to the feeling of intimacy, especially with the camera always up close during those early scenes.
“The way we went into it was there's a lot of really tight close-ups, and then there's a lot of really wide shots. As silly as it sounds, Adam and I like, everybody who works on these movies, are musicians, Josh included. Every movie we make, we're trying to make what a Pixies album sounds like, which is quiet and stripped down and minimal and then kind of big and boomy in the chorus. So that was the idea, that the wide shots were going to be our verses and our nice slow relax and then the close-ups were going to be the big punchy chorus. I mean, no one's ever going to put that together, but as far as the way it feels rhythmically, that's what we're going for. I'm not a big fan of medium shots. I like it really wide or really close, and we pushed it a little bit more on this one. I'm happy with that now.”
The music that accompanies the film is quite something in itself, with dramatic tonal shifts.
“I like to keep people off balance with heavy metal and then opera.” he says. “This is not a comedy. This is not a drama. This is what I see as a tragedy, so I want the music to feel really big and emotional. And heavy metal and opera are kind of the same thing. I mean, it's somebody belting at the top of their lungs about something big. The music is really loud and large. So I wanted to do my own version of slow cinema, but have big, big music on there to contrast it. I mean, a lot of filmmakers use opera for that reason, but I just like to put in music that I know would excite me if I saw a movie. I don't think enough filmmakers use heavy metal. It immediately catches me if I'm watching a movie that uses heavy metal. So most of that is written into the script. Then I got to figure out how to place it in the edit.”
Unusual as it is, the film has attracted a lot of praise, and has won several film festival awards, but Joel says he has a simpler method of gauging success.
“All I know is what I read on Letterboxd. That's how I gauge if this film is connecting or not. So the festival it plays at and the awards it wins really don't impact me at all.”
So is it really his last film, or is there going to be another one?
“Yeah, it is absolutely my...” he begins, and then hesitates. “Maybe I have one more. Because the worst part is you get a good idea and then all of a sudden it's like you’ve got to start the whole stressful, anxiety ridden experience of making another movie again. But I do have a good idea. And it just makes me upset that I have a good idea because I need a break. But I am really eager to make this. To make one more. Maybe just one more and then I'll definitely be done.”
