Fear in a Cold Climate: An Interview with Larry Fessenden

My baby don’t care for shows,
My baby don’t care for clothes,
My baby just cares for me.

Nina Simone’s throaty, caressing ballad, with its soft percussion and piano back-up, belongs in some smoky jazz club. It’s startling to hear it in the vast, snowy Alaskan night, especially at a point where we expect something quite different – something that will do the dramatic work that, say, the driving theme in Jaws did for that film’s first moonlight swim. Exactly ten minutes into Larry Fessenden’s eco-horror parable on global warming, The Last Winter, a sequence commences, lasting nearly two and a half patient minutes, that’s rooted in horror movie conventions but which produces a more complex, unsettling result than the monsters we’re supposed to see.

Fessenden provides a conventional enough set-up. North Oil’s advance team intends to re-open a decades-old drilling site inside Alaska’s remote eastern wild-life refuge. Project boss Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman) – the film opens with a view from his small plane crossing the tundra – brings orders to step up the pace, clashing with Jim Hoffman (James Le Gros), an environmental expert contracted by North Oil whom he expects to rubber-stamp his plans. Ten minutes in, we see the camp from above again, now through the eyes of something large, something able to sweep gracefully through the air at great heights yet spy in each window at the crew. This long arcing shot comes up behind one of the crew, who’s back outside staring into the night, then twists around to share his view. Here is where the piano flourish runs seamlessly into distant thundering, as ghostly caribou stampede across the black horizon. Here is where we were supposed to see monsters.

Instead, Fessenden has replaced that standard gambit with a longing and sadness familiar to anyone who’s ever looked into warmly-lit houses from a cold, dark street. The New York City-based filmmaker says such “disconnection” lies at the heart of Earth’s ecological crisis. This is the undertow that’s moved within any Fessenden movie since his first videos from the late 70s. Gruesome disaster ensues in The Last Winter – death by freezing, fire and ravenous crows – but Fessenden is most interested in how a “reinvigorated” horror genre can serve the reconnection that environmental ends require. Indeed, his upsetting of horror’s cinematic conventions is as important as the more overt environmental arguments his characters may make on-screen.

The Last Winter’s US DVD release on May 20th as a Blockbuster Exclusive (for sale with lots of extras everywhere else on July 22) comes almost two years after its premier at Toronto International Film Festival in September 2006. After another edit, the film opened theatrically in New York City last September. Since then it’s continued to screen in limited release in the US and at festivals. In February, it traveled four hours northwest of New York City to Syracuse where it screened as part of a Native American film festival organized by Grammy-winning Native American singer Joanne Shenandoah, who also plays the Inuit cook-nurse Dawn Russell in the film and lives near Syracuse.

Shenandoah’s experience on a Fessenden shoot illuminates his attention to environmental issues large and small. Though set in Alaska, The Last Winter was eventually mostly shot in Iceland. Speaking before the Syracuse screening, Shenandoah said the month-long location shoot there during March 2005 was rough – she’d never been separated so long from family, the conditions were harsh, the hours exhausting and the subject matter grueling, particularly the scene where she goes mad.

“Larry let me sage the set twice,” she recalled of the ritual burning of sage branches for purification. “He was willing to stop production. I saged the set to lift the spirits of those who were there.”

On a larger scale, Fessenden launched RunningOutofRoad.com, on the same day The Last Winter premiered in Toronto. This extensive ecology-themed website suggests the depth of Fessenden’s long-standing commitment to environmentalism. Sixteen years ago, he also published 'Low Impact Filmmaking', a guide for filmmakers that details ecologically sound production practices and uses his film No Telling (1991) as a case example.

Released in Europe as The Frankenstein Complex – but too edgy for theaters in the US, where it’s only available on DVD – that film explored the arrogance of unchecked animal experimentation against a backdrop of toxic pesticide manufacturers’ profit-driven and equally arrogant contamination of rural farmland. Fessenden also starred in Habit (1997), his riff on vampirism in society set largely in his own Lower East Side with forays to Long Island and Central Park. Wendigo (2001) completed the decade-long “horror trilogy” with another upstate tale, this one about an angry deer god that attacks a transgressing vacationer from the city but spares – for now – his artifact-carrying son.

All around, this should be a good year for Fessenden. In late March Image Comics released The Last Winter as a graphic novel based on the film’s storyboards. Fessenden has acting roles in several forthcoming films produced through Scareflix, the ultra low-budget division of his Glass Eye Pix, including Glenn McQuaid’s I Sell the Dead (with Ron Perlman and Dominic Monaghan) and Graham Reznick’s I Can See You. He’s also a producer for, and has a part in, Kelly Reichardt’s new road trip movie, Wendy and Lucy, which premiers at Cannes this month.

Though he’s back at work shooting now, Fessenden spoke by phone in early April from Mexico, a few days before announcements that he’s also directing the ninth episode of NBC’s summer TV anthology series, Fear Itself, which starts airing Thursdays at 10 PM in the US on June 5th. Here’s part of our conversation:

NKR: In the graphic novel’s notes you say you had trouble getting funding for the film because people called it a “tweenie” – it didn’t really fit any genre. You counter that “horror is not a genre, it’s reality.” I’m interested in how you restrain yourself. The first time I saw the film, some people I watched it with said, “Where’s the monsters?” You refrain from showing them until very late, when a monster snatches Hoffman and he visits – envisions – his home. I presume he’s dying when he flashes back to his home as a little boy.

LF: Oh I’m so glad you said that! To me, that’s the centerpiece of the film. Even my producer, who’s wonderfully sensitive to my vision, challenged me on that. The whole movie’s about, you can never go home. And comparing that old old cliché to the desperately sad reality as we alter our planet and home of course just means we can never return to our youth – the memories, the seasons. The monster is really just a vision. There’s also the distinction between how the monster appears to Hoffman – indeed, it takes him away, but also delivers him. Through his memory he does go home, and he’s a child running back to his mom. A moment later you see these same weird creatures tearing Pollack to pieces. If you fight nature – if you fight death – it will come as a terrifying experience. I’m trying to observe this world view that has affected these two characters throughout their entire decision-making and their response to the environmental collapse. That’s really the whole movie – it’s a very simple conceit!

NKR: As we live, so we die.

LF: Thank you so much, that’s exactly my sentiment.

NKR: That sequence is stunning. Very, very moving. If you had all those monsters in the beginning, there wouldn’t be a clear space to do that sequence.

LF: Well it’s not really a monster movie though I obviously have enough affection for monsters that I put them in my films. Serious audiences are completely befuddled when these weird CGI creatures show up. It's just a phantom, a phantasm. Monsters are a manifestation of fears so, to me, it makes sense to see them eventually. It’s just sort of a magical realism approach to what has clearly been laid out as the real horror, which is that people can’t agree and that things are happening which we can’t even define.

NKR: This theme that you can’t go home again shows up in previous movies. In Habit, Sam goes back to his father’s apartment after his father has died and that’s where he meets his end.

LF: Exactly.

NKR: I notice things happen when people leave the city and go back to nature in your movies.

LF: I guess even in Habit there’s some epiphany when they go to the beach and – I mean, yeah. Certainly Wendigo is about the cultural differences. The catalyst is that they take a weekend away. That’s very personal – that was how I experienced life. I did grow up in the city and my parents gave me a great sense of nature. The funny thing is I’m not really a naturalist. I don’t camp and all that. I have a great affection for the rural life which I think is being left behind. And you know, the depiction of life from movies in the 40s, where you would go out to the country and have this cozy life. Underneath that are real tensions between the sophisticated types and people who really live off the land. I’m interested in all those tensions and certainly Wendigo is about that.

NKR: In No Telling, one character says farmers either die of cancer or suicide.

LF: You know, that is a real statistic. I’m reading a book about pesticides even now. It’s just an unbelievable legacy of deceit – to get these farmers onto pesticides – in Will Allen’s 'The War on Bugs'. A hundred and fifty years of propaganda that has taken farmers’ instincts and old traditions and put them on their heads. Now when we talk about traditional farming, believe it or not, that refers to using fertilizers and pesticides. That was the true perversion of American industrial society. I am no fool. I wouldn’t want to live out in the wilderness and fight saber tooth tigers, but there’s a balance we’ve kicked over. That is the great melancholy I’m always trying to address in a genre that usually expects horror. This alienation is the horror.

NKR: For many years the film that frightened me most was The Shining. Actually, the look on Jack Nicholson’s face frightened me the most.

LF: Oh that’s wonderful.

NKR: Until I came across the movie 28 Days Later – when the Cillian Murphy character dreams that the people he’s been traveling with have left him. I don’t think anywhere in film I’ve seen such complete loneliness…

LF: I don’t mean to interrupt but I just enthusiastically agree – again this is a horror film, 28 Days Later, that captures all these other essential emotions making it far more resonant. So when the drop of blood falls into the father’s eye, it’s so unbearably sad! Of course it’s terrifying when the zombies are coming, and that’s so beautifully done– re-imagining zombies as fast-moving creatures – but it’s the moments of poignancy that make that movie stand out.

NKR: Your films do have that sadness. While you say you want to reinvigorate the clichés of horror, but you’re very restrained in using them.

LF: Some people think I’m not restrained when I do eventually show the monster. If you live a life of paranoia, as I do – eventually you can get used to being afraid – the thing fear is that moment when someone says, “Well, actually you do now have the incurable disease.” Or, “You know what, that little knock on the door that you’ve always been afraid someone’s breaking in? They’re actually coming in now.” I want to say, look! There it is. This is what it feels like when it actually happens. You could spend your life fearing death, but then there’s one day it’s actually going to come. It’s interesting to try to cross over to that side. Whereas, you know, most horror films, the opening scene you’re already there and that’s why they’re scary. There are different approaches to the genre.

NKR: Your films often contain old fashioned implements or artifacts of religion that have lost their connection for people. I thinking of the carved deer antler in Wendigo, of course, the amulet in Habit, and in No Telling
the old veterinary tools – things that people have lost connection with.

LF: I feel so strongly that we’re living in a world of false spirituality. It’s just absolutely a slap in the face of a spiritual life. Obviously it’s clear from my films that I find more in nature to revere than in the human-centric religions that we have to endure everyday, that somehow lead us in a charge to war, to scape-goat the gays and the blacks and the immigrants – all of this – in the name of religion, is such an insult to anything tender and compassionate and reverential. Most of all, if you want to talk about something greater than ourselves, and then to just go prattling on about the pettiness of human interaction, is to me the greatest affront. So yes – in Wendigo the kid has these little idols. I love to speak about how we infuse things with meaning and there’s something about old objects – I just want to remind people of the potency of objects.

NKR: In Habit Sam’s friend Nick tells him that “vampirism is all around us” in modern society.

LF: I certainly believe that. The centerpiece in that film is indeed that conversation. It’s fairly straightforward to say that we live in a vampiric society. But what’s really happening in that scene is those two friends, those drinking buddies, aren’t connecting. We spoke about loneliness earlier. Sam is alone. Because what he’s proposing is preposterous, he’s rejected by his friend. That is the true loneliness, when you realize you live in a completely subjective world with your fears and your desires and your sadness. And friendship is so precious, not to be taken for granted and may be not even real. So that’s why that movie is rather bleak! [laughs] Not the fact that – after all, it’s a suicide film, about a drunk and just the endless loneliness and the Joseph Conrad quote, “We live as we dream, alone.”

NKR: In Habit, everybody except you among the principal characters, it’s the first time they’ve made a movie?

LF: That’s true. Of course it was a no budget, low budget film that we made over a long period of time, say forty-five days altogether. We had just seven people in the crew, including the costume girl. It was literally four or five of us going out. The actors were mainly involved in theater pieces and local East Village artists. The vampire I got from a backstage casting call. I always tell a story that it was the very first envelope that I opened and I handed it to my producer and said, “Look, Dayton, we’ve found the vampire.” I continue to believe in her. It’s her first movie and her last movie. She’s a social worker and a mom. I see her every now and again and we catch up.

NKR: You have a particular approach that you call low impact filmmaking. How has that evolved and what do you run into when you work with other people?

LF: The biggest disappointment is how hard it is to have an environmentally responsible set. It’s confounding how difficult it is to even get people to put their cans and bottles in separate bags from the rest of their garbage. I don’t mean to be so detail-oriented, but you really notice it when people feel they’re busy and doing important things, like making movies, and they just haven’t got the time to preserve the world that gives them life [laughs] Always a disappointment and always a challenge. But I mentioned the idea of compassion – I like to create an environment where the actors can really experiment and be honest. Because I work with clichés and archetypes, my scheme is to bring a new candor to those archetypes, so they’re refreshed in the viewer’s experience. And to do that you need to make the actors comfortable and in fact find new truths. So I believe very strongly in a relaxed set. All my movies are on very heavy themes. We all have a lot of laughs when we’re working. Because I’ve acted I know it’s very, very terrifying to be honest, to offer yourself. Joanne was a singer and a performer so she did understand how to come to set and be prepared. I like working with non-actors and first actors – I like to make them comfortable and draw them out.

NKR: Joanne Shenandoah did say she had some great speeches about the environment that got cut and that she’d encouraged you to consider Native Alaskan throat singers for the score. I wonder if you were avoiding making the film “too Indian” and opting for something more universal.

LF: Obviously I wrote those scenes with my partner Robbie Leaver because I feel passionately about those themes, but I’m also sensitive to people’s tolerance for being lectured that just brings out the eye-roll in people. I’m not at all shy. Everybody knows that I feel passionately about these issues. I just want to make the strongest movie I can. I do advise everyone to purchase the DVD – I put all Joanne’s scenes in the Extras. For one thing she handled them well. And they’re difficult. It’s hard to have a scene where someone’s saying, “The whales don’t come near the shore anymore.” Dawn has more dignity just doing what she does. When she cooks and she’s a nurse, she seems commanding. And that in a way speaks volumes more. I had a more Native-themed score in my film Wendigo. I was very shy to try it again and this movie seems to me about a more global collapse. I deliberately wanted to use, if you will, Anglo-Saxon, romantic style music, in the end, because I wanted it to be about the white man’s glory collapsing.

NKR: Then there’s that Nina Simone track the first night, when the camera goes all around the station and looks in the windows.

LF: Everybody was like, uh, don’t you want scary music there? And again, my instinct is, it’s not about scary, folks. There’s so many other emotions that happen in those moments of horror – it’s more mysterious and melancholy. Of course Nina Simone was great political singer and gutsy, musically and politically, and I’m so honored and actually pleased to have her in my film and then just the piano solo there, it’s so robust. It brings up such a specific kind of emotion, contrasted with the voyeurism and then the strange threat of the snow flurries – to me, the most interesting thing is trying to get all those juxtapositions happening at once. That is a rich brew.

NKR: You said you identified with an actor’s fear because you’ve acted. Was there a reason you played Sam in Habit yourself?

LF: am very lucky to get called now and again by casting agents to play hoodlums and bums. I’m stalking Jody Foster in The Brave One. When I was little I wanted to be an actor. I think I just became in tune with all the other elements in filmmaking. You can only do so much. Plus I have a healthy fear of acting – I find it such a vulnerable place to go. To answer your question about Habit, this character I did know, inside and out. When I auditioned other guys I realized that. Even the writing. I had deliberately used, in the language, my own little sarcasms and little mannerisms. I suddenly realized, am I gonna try to direct this poor guy to just be like me? Because I understand why this character would say this particular line. It’s just gonna be so laborious to explain that.

NKR: On your website you suggest people read David Skal’s cultural history of horror films, 'The Monster Show'. It’s pretty absorbing.

LR: My favorite book. It’s so essential! It sets up the whole premise, which I certainly speak about, about how horror movies come in waves that reflect cultural anxieties. Frankenstein and the much more peculiar film called Freaks – when the veterans from World War I were returning, they were all mangled and had one arm and no eye and the culture was trying to digest that. So these very disturbing black and white films came out that had deformed people. And more familiar is Godzilla, which expresses the anxieties of the atomic age. I would argue that it’s very appropriate that torture porn, the typical phrase used for movies like Saw and Hostel, is an absolute reflection of where we are with our country seeming to advocate torture and almost a break-down of morality. My tiny little sliver of offerings would also historically be one of probably many movies that express an idea about climate change. So it’s such an essential genre. Even the tackiest films reflect our anxieties. Certainly the complete bursting open of morality and structure in the 60s horror movies reflected the times. Vietnam was completely a lost innocence. Movies like Texas Chain Saw Massacre, I Stood on Your Grave – even Night of the Living Dead – are movies of total despair. Everybody dies, including the hero. Nothing had honor or a redeemable end. Fear is the grand motivator and the Republican Party certainly knows that.

NKR: What are you working on now?

LR: I’ve written a script for Hollywood. They’re courting me – it’s not worth telling because I don’t know if it’ll happen. So I have one foot in that door. I’ve also been doing a lot of producing, which is to say mentoring new talent. I’m acting and producing in a movie called I Sell the Dead, which is a very sweet old-fashioned horror movie in the British tradition where they’re grave-robbers in the 18th century. I love the genre and all the different flavors and I can’t make all these movies so I like to be involved in getting them set up and on their way. It’s nice to see other talents blossoming. I’m writing a couple of scripts. It’s just unclear if this Hollywood thing catches on and if not, I will continue my low budget enterprises. I’m in San Miguel, which is a little green road town outside Mexico City. Really just a personal journey with my wife and kid, just to give him a perspective on life besides growing up in New York City. And it’s been an excellent way for me to do some writing and some reflecting before I get back to the States.

NKR: I wonder if there’s anything that you wish journalists would ask or pay attention to?

LF: The only thing that I would wish from journalists is that they should not just speak about likes and dislikes but try to understand unusual films rather than just giving a grade. The best reviews I’ve gotten have been the thoughtful ones.

*******

The Last Winter out on DVD
Stateside on May 20th

Fessenden’s past work is available at GlassEyePix.com. Nancy Keefe Rhodes is a member of the Women Film Critics Circle in the US and one of FilmSlash’s founders. Reach her at nancykeeferhodes@gmail.com.

5 .18.08