Whether it’s Martha Marcy May Marlene or Sound of My Voice or this year’s The Wolfpack, we’ve seen a number of films at Sundance deal with communes and closed communities, but few bring the level of danger found in Partisan. The directorial debut of Ariel Kleiman (Sundance jury winner for the short Deeper Than Yesterday) is a patiently unfolding drama that displays the lengths one will go to provide shelter and community, and what happens if you step out of bounds, I remarked earlier this year.
I had the chance to speak with Kleiman over the phone this week to discuss his directorial debut. We talked about his point-of-view, improvisations, tone, the influx of recent cult movies, casting Vincent Cassel, the production design, and much more. Check out the full conversation below.
The point of the view is mostly with Jeremy Chabriel’s character. Can you talk about how early in the process you decided to come into the story though that character rather than Vincent Cassel?
You know, actually it wasn’t something we sought or discussed too much, but as soon as Sarah [Cyngler] and I started writing the script it just kind of always became the story from Alexander’s point of view. It was a very kind of instinctual thing for us and it was something we were quite passionate about keeping. We thought that was the way we wanted to tell this story.
The script is quite specific, but did you have room for finding new ideas on set?
Yeah, we put a lot of effort into the script. We wrote it for two or two and half years. But the thing about the script is that it’s just a piece of paper. It’s very fake, ultimately. I feel like you’re on set and actors need to deliver the dialogue for it to become a living, breathing thing. In that process you discover that maybe the kids are not going to be able to deliver the dialogue right way and you have to throw the pages out very quickly and just get the essence of what we wrote, but more in an improvisational way. That definitely happened quite a bit. Then again, there are scenes that are maybe beat by beat exactly the screenplay. It was a real mixture.
There’s a lot of tones that you capture that perhaps couldn’t possibly even be written in the script — almost a surreal nature to what’s going on. The karaoke scene is fantastic and you have a lot of breathing room to take in the environment. Can you talk about the balance of surreal, but still believable?
Yeah, well I guess tone is a thing I find it possible to articulate. I feel like a tone could only be filmed. It’s something that really drives me when I make my films, especially this film. It’s very tonally driven. The best I could describe is from the start I saw the film as a tragedy. The story of the film is a tragedy, so I knew the whole movie from the start had to be soaked in a sort of dread. On the other hand, it’s quite important to me it was filmed with warmth and love and kind of genuine emotions. It was also important to me that the film be set in an impressionistic world to let the audience know this is not a literal story and it’s not intended to be understood literally. On the other hand, I wanted the performances to be grounded within that and for the emotions to feel more human and truthful.
In recent years there has been an influx of cult-related films like Martha Marcy May Marlene, Faults, and The Sound of My Voice. What do you think about these relationships portrayed and community. All of these films it’s more about the tone than plot developments. What do you think about this attraction to the material that drives a filmmaker?
Yeah, it’s a great question. I’m not sure if I’m smart enough to answer it. The best way I could describe is that we live in a bit of a scary time at the moment. Everything feels a little scary and potentially people are looking for things to hold on to or to band together in certain ways, certain tribes. It gives people a certain comfort, but there’s certainly something going around in the air.
My experience at Sundance, I believe I saw this right after The Wolfpack, and there’s this strange link to the themes of both films. Did you see it at Sundance or catch up with it?
I saw it like two weeks ago actually — here in Melbourne.
It’s not a cult, strictly speaking, but it depicts a closed community with a patriarchal figure that can be quite demanding. I was curious what you thought of the film.
Well, I thought there were feelings and themes and emotions in that film that were kind of exactly what Sarah and I were discussing when we first sat down to write Partisan. For us, we were never interested in writing a movie that explores cults, really. We were more interested in writing a movie about a flawed group of parents who in their own way are trying to do their best to protect their kids, but are unfortunately raising them through their deepest insecurities and hatred and fears. Those feelings came across very strongly to me. I just felt a lot of sadness and empathy for the parents in that film, even though they had created that situation. That’s something that was important to me also in Partisan.
Vincent Cassel has such a commanding presence and I was reading you met him only initially on Skype and then right before shooting in person. Can you talk about his presence first meeting him in real-life and then how it evolved?
Yeah, initially we met just because geographical reasons — I was in Australia and he was in France — so we got to know each other initially on Skype. I think early on we clicked. We both like to joke around. We don’t take ourselves or filmmaking too seriously. We bonded on that level. When he got to Melbourne we had a week before the shoot so I just did my best to do all my preparation before he got to Melbourne. So in the week before the shoot I was just basically acting as his chauffeur. I just kind of drove him around Melbourne and we hung out. To me that’s of great importance in my previous films, just getting to know the actors as humans so that once we get on set and we start bringing it to life, we already have an understanding or trust or base to work from. So that week before we started shooting was really great. The thing about Vincent is that he’s very different from the roles he plays. He’s more lighthearted and cheeky. Once he gets on set you just feel the energy change and the whole crew are suddenly on and everyone’s on and it feels electric. It was quite special to watch.
Did he spend time with Jeremy beforehand as well or just you?
Yeah, in that week, Jeremy and Vincent hung out quite a bit. Again, they bonded very quickly. They are both French, which I think really helped. Vincent is just so good with kids. He’s so playful and fun that it did not take very long for the kids to bond with him at all.
The two production companies behind this movie, Animal Kingdom, who helped make It Follows and Short Term 12, and Warp Films, who did Snowtown, how did they come aboard?
Yeah, it all started with Warp Films Australia. At the time they were just in pre-production on Snowtown and I guess they connected with my films. Justin Kurzel, I loved his music videos. I thought he was one of the most exciting directors at the time coming out of Australia. So the fact that they worked with him, I was really excited by. We started to work together from the start and they commissioned the screenplay and then Animal Kingdom came on a bit later, a couple of years down the line when we needed a bit more financing to get the movie made. We sent them the script and they really, really connected with it. I went over to New York and met them and we all kind of got along great and they really backed the movie.
The production design in the film is great. It feels very lived-in and not spare. How did you come across the location and was any of the stuff in the environment there previously or was it all your creation?
Well, from the start one of the biggest credits of the design goes to my co-writer, Sarah, because she went on to co-design the production and the costumes. So we actually in writing together we started the preparation of visualizing the compound that Gregori creates. It was fun to write because it’s such a strange case where the lead character has essentially built this world from scratch. So a lot of detail on the look of the compound was actually in the screenplay then in the end, the way we brought it to life was we found an abandoned building in Melbourne. It wasn’t so much abandoned, actually. It was just unused. It used to be a an old boy’s home for delinquent boys that had recently been bought by a winery. It was a very odd property. This winery basically didn’t touch this building in the courtyard since back in the day. The only thing they used it for was the occasional wedding photography. If someone wanted their wedding photos to be against textured, distressed walls. They would just shoot photos in there, otherwise it was unused. It was a very rare building in Melbourne to find an enclosed courtyard like that. That was very important to us, obviously, that it would feel closed off from the outside world. We went about basically designing and bringing this compound to life. It was just a shell, so we designed it all. It was a lot of time designing it through Gregori’s eyes.
This film is very effective in the ways it uses violence. It never feels exploitative, all of it is very brief and for a reason. Do your sensibilities align more with that in your favorite films?
In this case, with the violence, it was very much inspired by the characters and inspired by their perspective and the fact that he is a young boy and doesn’t understand the ramifications of what he’s doing so it felt right to me that we portray it in non-sensationalist way too. We portray it in a very mundane, matter-of-fact way and I guess we only see glimpses of the violence and the ramifications of his acts because he only sees glimpses. It’s only at the end when he starts to comprehend or watch the results of his actions that we the audience do too. Otherwise, in general my favorite films growing up were what I felt were incredibly enigmatic and mysterious. The unsaid was way more powerful than anything that could be shown because it leaves the audience to kind of fill in the gaps in a much more profound way. That’s the kind of cinema I love.
Partisan opens in limited release and on VOD on Friday, October 2nd.