AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL TULLY

After we premiered the trailer last week for Septien, timed to its debut at Sundance, I decided to twiddle my sac for a few days before speaking with the movie’s writer/director/weird beard lead Michael Tully. I was semi-curious to see how Park City’s critics would respond to this fence swing at horror dramedy with a gnarled Tennessee-ian stick. In a brief mention late Thursday, Manohla Dargis forewent laying a stroke-inducing hicky on the film for a complimentary peck on the cheek, calling it, “amusingly eccentric.” Nice and all. But leaving it at that is like slipping on gardening gloves and typing up Deliverance‘s pig-sodomy sequence: “Lurid, dears readers, if a trifle disturbing.”

Septien has a disarming three-act structure that lures the viewer into a beginning of bucolic Southern rainshowers and the calm, seasonal hypnotism of insects droning. Cinematographer Jeremy Saulnier (Puttty Hill) shot the hell out of this thing on 16mm, and the colors and shadows pop and set like god and the devil stealing and perusing a single, melting box of crayons over 80 minutes. Something’s not right with the main characters, an isolated trio of brothers, one of whom, an unlikely athlete named Cornelius (Tully), has just returned to the family farm after nearly two decades adrift. His elder siblings, a gruff, chubby artist named Amos (actor/painter Onur Tukel) and Ezra (actor Robert Longstreet), a man whose mommy issues manifest in OCD-cleaning seshes and spats of estrogen, sleepwalk an invisible line of vulnerability and anger. Any traditional familial comfort in three grown brothers reuniting for beers and reminiscing is scrubbed away by Cornelius’s detachment, suggesting that he’s tranferred the cynical affection reserved for parents (their’s are mysteriously dead and/or absent) to these two losers, whose life purpose seems to depend upon his return, thus validating their existence by completing a melancholic bond.

By the film’s halfway point, the plot and the viewer have waded out into a still madness, but due to the biting and crudely enlightened undercurrent of humor and a musical interlude, one is at a loss for gauging how far. Tully understands the way an absurd atrocity committed in bumfuck years ago can avoid resolution until it’s eerily grandfathered into the landscape, like an old tire in a yard turned makeshift home to a feral kitten or a docile rattlesnake. Or home to a mentally-stunted man named Wilbur who records video nature essays atop a trampoline.

Vice: Did you feel a need to regrow the beard back in time for Sundance? If you did, you could have conducted all of your interviews in character. And why did your character need a beard of that magnitude anyhow?
Michael Tully: Let me address that last question first. Yes, of course. The only reason I grew that beard for the film was to show off. It had nothing to do with his character. The same goes for the sports hustling. Which is why I like to refer to Septien as the most asinine vanity project in the history of independent cinema. As for Sundance, I’ve been shaving daily to separate myself from the bearded weirdo on screen.

No regrets then.
Well, when I learned that our Sundance Selects party was a ping-pong competition pitting the five participating movies against one another, I wished it was back in full-effect. And for the record, whoever scheduled the ping-pong party must not have been thinking about our movie. I had to bail after handily winning the coin toss for beer pong in order to attend our world premiere. Or maybe the other teams had seen Septien and decided to band together and pay somebody off?

Wait, aren’t you thinking about doing a ping-pong film next? Man, there’s a genre deep in the shitter…
Yeah. My dream project is a 1980s comedy/drama called Ping-Pong Summer, which I describe as “Wild Style meets The Karate Kid meets Better Off Dead.” Since it’s a period piece, I feel like we need a chunkier production budget and I’ve yet to come up with the ducats to make that happen…

Let’s talk more about that in a minute. Your character in Septien reminded me of the universal small town “GOAT” who excelled naturally at athletics in high school but ended up a fuck up and—all spoilers aside—was more than OK with that. And your film has a moderate appreciation for the hustles and bets that develop around amateur playing fields. What was the attraction for you in melding a small town sports mythos with 80s horror? Especially, in the first act where Cornelius is presented ambiguously. Initially, I couldn’t tell if he was more on the wavelength of a Billy Hoyle or a Michael Myers…
I honestly don’t know where all this stuff came from. I had a feeling that I wouldn’t have the courage to make another movie after this one and I wanted to stuff Septien with all of the tones and genres and influences that I find tastiest. In a narrative sense… the goal was for the story to unfold naturally but mysteriously. It isn’t until the midway point—the zoom in, hold, then dolly out on Cornelius at the ice cream stand—that I wanted the gravity of his pain to begin to slowly creep in. But the hope in doing this wasn’t to alienate the audience or falsely manipulate them. It was to simply make a fun movie that had an injection of humor throughout. Not that anyone would ever watch this movie twice, but if they do, the first act takes on a different meaning once you understand the depth of Cornelius’s pain. And hopefully the humor remains on subsequent viewings as well. As for the overall pot-of-gumbo tone, it was a personal experiment. I wanted to see if an overriding sincerity and commitment to this story would be able to make the more divergent influences feel genuinely unified.

Your eldest brother in the film, Ezra, is a fucking trip. Going in, I didn’t expect your film to be so sexually perverse. At points, it was eerie, because Ezra muttered like 15 pseudo-comforting things that my mom said to me growing up in the South, and later when I came back from university. Things like, “I was worried sick!” and the scene where Ezra encourages his friend to drink all the wine he wants because, “when you drink you’re a sweetheart, when [Cornelius] drinks he gets mean.” What experiences do you and (actor/cowriter) Robert Longstreet have with Southern moms? And you live in Brooklyn, so tell us your relation to Nashville where the film was shot.
Robert’s from North Carolina. I am from Mt. Airy, Maryland. I haven’t met Robert’s mother, but I think she’s Southern. While I wouldn’t call my mother a “Southern” mother, per se, I did lift some lines of dialogue from my own personal upbringing, or at least my memory of my upbringing (“Why are you so angry and negative all the time? Don’t you realize how unattractive that is?”). Mothers are mothers. So they will be until the end of time.

I currently live in Brooklyn, but as I said, my bloodstream is swimming in a small town. When I teamed up with Brooke Bernard and Ryan Zacarias from Nomadic Independence Pictures, we decided to shoot this movie in their home base of Nashville. And I was relieved to find that the outskirts of the city—particularly Whites Creek, where we shot—had the exact same look and feel as where I’m from in Frederick County, Maryland. I hope people don’t read this movie as a city hipster playing dress up, because the fact is I’m just a small town country boy at heart.

Oh yeah, it’s not like like a redneck Wah Do Dem, it’s so far beyond that. At Sundance this year, the breakout actress seemed to be Brit Marling, and actor-wise, Robert Longstreet was near the top. He had four well-received films at the fest (yours, Take Shelter, The Oregonian, and Catechism Cataclysm). What makes Longstreet a cool collaborator and what does he bring as an actor?
As an actor, Robert Longstreet has that rare, inexplicable gift that makes me want to watch him do anything on screen. Not many people have that knack. Having said that, it’s Robert’s energy and enthusiasm as a regular ol’ person that makes anyone who meets him want to work with him. As a one-two punch—artist and individual—he really can’t be topped. If the 2011 Sundance Film Festival is the coming out party we’ve been waiting for, I will be very, very proud.

Three filmmakers came to my mind watching Septien: Jeff Nichols, for the isolated rural brother dynamic that reminded me of Shotgun Stories. Outside of the fact that Rachel Korine costars, the VHS experimentation and, particularly, the badass tennis scene reminded of Harmony’s Trash Humpers and Gummo, respectively. And then the depth of feeling you captured in nature and humble settings—from the insects to porch door rain—evoked early David Green evoking Malick. Do you consider these guys direct influences?
I hope I ain’t jackin’ those fools beats, but I have no shame in saying that I admire the shit out of Misters Nichols, Korine, and Green. It’s funny, though, because the literal references and inspirations for this particular film came from older places, titles like Spirit of the Beehive, Night of the Hunter, Nashville, Bad Ronald, Let’s Scare Jessica To Death, and so forth. But, of course, I love those guys’ movies and they undoubtedly had some kind of impact on the type of film I wanted to make this time around.

What was Green’s reaction?
As a friend, he has a boundless enthusiasm. The morning after he watched the first cut of Septien, he sent me an email that I still have. I won’t quote him verbatim, but I do love his description of the movie: “Greaser’s Palace meets Raising Arizona meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and he made me feel confident that the editor, Marc Vives, and I were on the right track.

How important is it to you as a filmmaker to create new images and new tones? Writing for Hammer to Nail, you probably watch as many indie films as anyone I know. I sensed a palpable urgency with Septien, almost a frustration, to lead by example but shake others off your damn path at the same time. If I can associate you with the current indie movement in the South, do you consciously want to destroy the line between the stigma of “indie chore” and “brain dead studio” efforts? Septien runs on a creative mood-pendulum momentum, the end goal maybe being to revitalize the viewer.
I think you’re right in saying that this film was driven from a bit of frustration playing the “critic” role for the past several years. Seeing too many filmmakers playing it safe, not testing themselves or aiming for a tone that they hadn’t necessarily achieved before began to bother me to some degree. As for Septien, I personally reside in a weird place between art and entertainment, so part of the challenge with this film was to make something that felt artistic but didn’t have its head up its ass. I’ve been through the festival marathon so many times recently. So, I had a hunch that making a film that was funny and moved relatively quickly would be much appreciated by all those cranky nerds in the darkness.

Well, I laughed at the scene where you stole gasoline and proceeded to hop into the forest and huff it like a little bitch. Were you worried the scene in question veered too close to your real life?
Not a funny question, jerk. I actually never got into gas huffing… but I hear it is an effective way to get obliterated.

Easy. Were you drinking real 40 oz’s when the camera was rolling? What label do you prefer and when did you pound your first one?
OE 800… that’s my brand. Since I’m not an actor, I guess I can’t be a method actor, but when it comes to scenes like that, I believe in doing the do. I think we did six takes where I swigged profusely from a fresh 40 each time. By the end of that set-up, I was tipsy, but there was more work to be done so I swallowed my buzz and moved onto the next scene. Which I guess leads into the film’s magic hour vomit shot, which was done on a different day. But that too was real. Only I didn’t vomit from drinking Olde English. It was from chugging half a gallon of milk and slamming a mustard packet. One of my few regrets with the finished film is that I didn’t kill the whole gallon. I wish I had projectiled farther.

Where did you find the film’s jigsaw puzzle, and how imperative was it to hunt down the perfect one? It’s weirdly instrumental to the story and the color palette.
That puzzle is the puzzle I used to do growing up. The exact same puzzle. I used to have a Zen-like routine where I listened to my rap cassettes over and over and over again while doing this very puzzle. And when we came up with the screenplay’s rather outlandish idea, I started thinking about inserting my own personal childhood objects into the story to see if they might add any subconscious depth to the proceedings.

Whose eyes or what “force” do we see the story through? And did you guys consider this? The film would lose most of its humor if we were experiencing it from the perspective of one of the brothers.
Our only conscious consideration was to make sure we didn’t get too perspective heavy with our camera and storytelling. You know, like during production I kept referring to the film as a 1980s made-for-TV movie-of-the-week. And yeah, to see the story through one character’s eyes is a different movie than the one we wanted to make.

My favorite shot might be the arty dissolve from a gnarly commode to a landscape dotted with a port-o-potty. What’s yours?
My favorite shot might very well be the last shot of the rainstorm scene, when the door blows open and the rocking chair blows over? That moment was not manipulated by us in any way, shape, or form. It was really important to me that we have a Southern summer thunderstorm in the film, and the movie gods smiled down on us on the third to last day of the shoot and allowed that to happen. It was one of those moments when I could say, “Well, at least we know that shot is gonna be in this movie.” It’s good to have those.

Though now that I’ve watched the movie with an actual crowd, it’s hard to deny the power of the basketball trick-shot, which I made on the first take, I’ll have you know.

Piece of cake. You were snagged in credit card debt from your last movie. I wondered if that fucked with your creativity before you decided to take the plunge again.
I told myself I wasn’t going to make another movie until my credit cards were paid off from my previous two movies (Silver Jew; Cocaine Angel). That happened in the fall of 2009. It’s funny, because once that happened, my creative juices did start flowing again and I felt ready to jump back into the ring. But with Septien, I didn’t learn my lesson and ended up taking the suicidal… idiotic… moronic credit card debt plunge yet again. I just knew that this movie wouldn’t happen any other way. And I gotta give credit to my executive producers Andrew Krucoff and Mr. Longstreet. They wrote me hearty checks with the full understanding they’d never see one dollar back.

What advice do you have for the kids today when it comes to Hollywood dreams versus Mastercard nightmares?
OK. Dear kids: The only advice I have for you is to stick to your guns and make what you want to make. Only then will you be rewarded. And even if you aren’t rewarded, you’ll still feel proud of yourself for having gotten off your ass and taken the plunge. That’s what matters the most anyway.

So, Septien already made its money back, the rest is dessert. What can you further tell us about your next one, Ping-Pong Summer?
It will definitely need to be shot in Ocean City, Maryland. The town is like a magical time warp and it will be easier to recreate the 1980s since it still pretty much is the 80s there. The only rub is that my fantasy is to have a legit mid-80s hip-hop soundtrack, but music rights clearances with that era of music are virtually impossible. So, as a backup—and potentially even more exciting—I’m considering asking the best modern hip-hop artists with an old-school bent to recreate that era for the PPS soundtrack, kind of like Top Shelf 8/8.88.

Septien is currently available nationwide on demand via Sundance Selects and IFC Films.

HUNTER STEPHENSON