One of the highlights of last year’s London Film Festival, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is a thrilling psychodrama, a dark study of a troubled young dancer in a top New York company who becomes dangerously obsessed in her aspiration for perfection when she is offered the difficult dual part of the Swan Queen in the company’s new production of the classical ballet. During rehearsals, Nina (Natalie Portman) delivers a captivating performance as the White Swan but, much to the chagrin of her impresario Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), fails to prove that she has the sensuality and passion to bring the Black Swan to life. Pushed by Leroy, her narcissistic former dancer mother, and Lily (Mila Kunis), the feisty new girl in the company who seems to be out for the starring role, Nina becomes increasingly embroiled into a maze of delusion, lust and violence until fantasy and reality collide in the film’s formidable last act.

Pamela Jahn took part in a round table interview with Darren Aronofsky during the London Film Festival in October 2010 to talk about torturing the audience, the difficulties of making a ballet film and the secret behind Natalie Portman’s remarkable performance.

Q: You’ve talked about Black Swan as a companion piece to your previous film, The Wrestler, in that both stories are set in very competitive worlds. Why did you choose classical ballet?

DA: My sister was a ballet dancer. She got pretty serious about it as a young girl and then went on all about it until she was a late teenager. Back then, I knew nothing about ballet. I would just walk by her room and see all the posters and ballet shoes and that was it. But later I imagined it could be an interesting world, in the same way that everyone said wrestling wasn’t interesting at all, but as soon as we started looking into it properly, we saw that there was actually a whole world to discover. Ballet is an even more complex world than wrestling, the more we looked into it, the more interesting it became. I think this is also part of why people go to movies in general. They want to see something they haven’t seen before.

You do portray this in your films in a way that some people might find difficult to watch though. Do you take pleasure in torturing your audience?

I think people have different notions of what ‘torture’ is. Some people actually really enjoy it and some don’t. It’s a fine line and I just push it as far as I can. With Black Swan, I think it’s probably partly that I’m still trying to annoy my older sister and to get some attention from her (laughs). No, seriously, I don’t really know what it is. I think today it is very hard to create images and ideas that people will remember. There are so many movies out there on TV, on the internet, on your iPod, that as a filmmaker you want to create an experience that lasts, but that usually has to be an intense journey. I want to get people their money’s worth.

The film shows that ballet is very much a closed world that seems to have its own set of rules. Was it difficult to work with a real ballet company?

Yes, very hard. The ballet world couldn’t give a shit about anything other than ballet. They really did not care. Normally when you make a movie every door in the world opens up and people are like, ‘yes, sure, what do you want to see, anything you want to do, come, make a movie’. But the ballet world was not like that at all. It was extremely difficult, and getting dancers was way more complicated than getting wrestlers. Most of the wrestlers didn’t have cell phones and some people where homeless and, still, we could get them to the right place at the right time. But not the dancers. They are just so deep in their own world, they hardly care about anything but ballet. So it took a long time, but slowly and surely we got there.

In your film, the central character, Nina, is pushed to explore her dark side in order to be able to perfectly embody the Black Swan and she does so with a recklessness that threatens to destroy her.

Yes, that’s what the film is about and what Swan Lake is about. The film for us is a take on the ballet, we went back and looked at every detail of it. I’d been thinking about doing something with Dostoewsky’s The Double because I thought it was an interesting topic to explore: when you wake up someone else has taken your place and everything you are is suddenly being taken away from you. That was also something I hadn’t seen out there that much, so I started to pursue that idea. One day I went to see Swan Lake and I was absolutely stunned when I found out that one dancer is actually dancing both the Black Swan and the White Swan. And then suddenly it seemed an even better idea than The Double because they are such distinct characters, one is innocent and pure, the other is passionate and adventurous. So we built this story about the dark side and the light side of personality, battling for sanity.

Natalie Portman perfectly embodies the conflicted Nina, capturing her fear, desperation and exhilaration.

That was my little secret, that there was a lot more complexity in Natalie than most people thought. I think because of her beauty and youthfulness she gets cast as an innocent a lot and not many people have given her an opportunity so far to also show her womanhood. So I was hoping no one else would reveal this before I got the chance to do Black Swan.

Some directors reach that level where, although their movies are not the biggest smash hits at the box office, every actor says yes instantly when they cast for a new project. And it seems you are heading there…

Oh no, I don’t get that. Most actors don’t want to put up with it, it’s too difficult. I wish I could be manipulative. But I am actually very honest with actors and I tell them, ‘this is what it’s going to take to do the job, it’s going to be this type of pain and this type of work, and you’ve really got to do it’, and then most of them go, ‘OK, I don’t think I’m going to be doing that’. So I’ve lost a lot of A-list actors over the years. Looking at the actors I’ve worked with, how many of them are actually in super high demand?

Hugh Jackman?

Yes, true, but it was also an opportunity for him to do something different to what he had done before. And of course Natalie is in high demand too, but not as a lead.

How important is intuition for you in the process of filmmaking?

Intuition comes into play in many different ways. When you are on set and you are actually working, intuition is there all the time. It’s got to be. There is some kind of myth about filmmakers who know exactly what they want and are going for it. That might exist for some people but that’s not how I work. I try to get as many good people and as much good material around at one place on the set, and create an environment that allows freedom, so that the actors can develop things and mistakes can happen. Then I can follow my intuition and get to the right place. I think when you try to force something too much you just squeeze the life out of it. And then suddenly, no matter what you do, it just isn’t real. But if you want to know what it is that pulls me back to a project and why I end up choosing it, it’s often because there is something about it that I connect to and that makes me want to continue all the heavy lifting. We develop a lot of projects in my production company Protozoa and each project is a marathon run. A lot of them won’t make it to the finishing line, and the only reason some make it is because there is something about them and we go back to them and keep nurturing them and trying to figure it out.

You had a lot of trouble getting the money together for The Wrestler because you insisted on casting Mickey Rourke in the lead. Was there ever a point while doing this film where you thought you might not be able to finish it?

Oh yes, two weeks before we started shooting the money fell apart. I mean we were two weeks out, $1,000,000 in, and we realised that the money was a pyramid scheme and didn’t actually exist. So I had to go back to Fox and beg them to get the film made. It was tough. The Wrestler won lots of awards, got tons of recognition and was incredibly well reviewed, but that didn’t help. It’s hard every time… Making independent films in America right now is really, really difficult.

You once said your films don’t get a wider reception because the festival reviews are always so bad. But this seems to have changed now since both The Wrestler and Black Swan received raving reviews after their premieres.

Maybe this means the reviews are now just going to get worse and worse (laughs). With The Wrestler, it was completely unexpected that it turned out to be this big hit. And now Black Swan is doing pretty well too, but I can’t explain why. When we did Requiem for a Dream we did something like $3,000,000 theatrically, but I guess in today’s world, with a film like this, they would have figured out a different way to sell it. I mean, this was before Boys Don’t Cry and other films that then suddenly became Oscar candidates. So I think audience taste and expectations have changed somewhat. But I guess soon I’m going to be too old to make anything hip, and I’ve got to up my game (laughs)… We’ll see.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

After provoking heated debate at festival screenings around the world, A Serbian Film came to the attention of the British public in August, when it was pulled from FrightFest following a decision by the BBFC to cut it by nearly four minutes. UK audiences will now be able to see the film, albeit in its censored form, in theatres this month. The only opportunity to see it uncut was at an invitation-only screening in October, organised by the Raindance Festival to circumvent the BBFC’s ruling. The issues surrounding the censorship of the film have been discussed at length in our blog since FrightFest, but it is worth pointing out that the BBFC’s decision is symptomatic of a general reluctance among certain British institutions to consider film as art. It is because the British censors can only see cinema as entertainment that their understanding of A Serbian Film remained shockingly literal, and that they misconstrued the film as a violent spectacle, instead of seeing it for the denunciation of violence that it very clearly is. It is profoundly worrying and dispiriting to see such levels of cinematic illiteracy among the people entrusted with judging what the adult British public may or may not see.

A Serbian Film centres on Milos, a retired porn star with a wife and son, who struggles to make ends meet. One of his former co-stars introduces him to Vukmir, a mysterious filmmaker with powerful political connections. Vukmir is willing to pay Milos an astronomical fee to star in his new project on the condition that he agrees to shoot the film without seeing the script. Soon Milos is caught in a nightmare that drags him further and further down into the most revolting horrors. A Serbian Film contains extreme imagery and is certainly not for everyone. But those disturbing images and situations are the expression of a deeply felt anger against the moral corruption of authorities and the grotesque, absurd hell to which they subject the people they rule.

Virginie Sélavy talked to director Srdjan Spasojevic about censorship and the true meaning of exploitation and pornography.

VS: How do you feel about the fact that the film had to be released with cuts in Britain?

SS: Of course I cannot be happy about it, but then I can’t be too stubborn, and this is the only way for audiences here to see it.

How was the film received in Serbia?

Serbia is a very specific place, so we had lots of problems there but of a different kind. In Serbia we don’t have ratings, there is no law forbidding anything from being shown in a film and there is no law forbidding anyone from buying a ticket. But it’s a conservative country, and after all those years under a hard communist regime we have a kind of self-censorship. We tried to release the film theatrically in Serbia in February, but no one wanted to have anything to do with it. We couldn’t find any distributor or a theatre willing to screen it. So you don’t need any law for that. But after lots of festival screenings, and great reviews, and some awards, they softened, and we had an uncut theatrical release in September.

How did Serbian audiences react?

It’s the same as in other countries. There were different reactions, because there is no film that is for everyone. Some people liked it, some people hated it. Some people understood it, others didn’t. The biggest problem, especially in Serbia, is that part of the audience doesn’t know how to watch the film. They think that everything they see is something we promote, that I would like to do in my home. They don’t understand even the basic things from the film: you have a good guy and bad guys; the bad guys are doing bad things and the good guy is fighting against them. They don’t understand because the movie language that we use in the film is actually closer to that of Western films than to our own.

I think that was a problem here too, the censors didn’t seem to understand the film. They seemed to think that the violence in the film was meant to entertain and titillate.

Censors don’t try and don’t need to understand a film. It’s about following the rules in a purely bureaucratic manner. They’re not concerned about the meaning of the film, they’re just concerned about formalities. The BBFC ordered 49 cuts, and the problem with the version shown in the UK is that it’s been cut only by removing the shots that they marked, without re-editing, or without adding material to fill the gaps. I think half of these shots could be saved by re-editing them. For some shots, the problem is the meaning, their place and their combination with other images. But if you put them somewhere else, they would be OK. There was a problem with shots that, as they say, involve children in sex and violence. It doesn’t even matter to the censors that the film fights against the bad things that we’re talking about. Of course, it shows a lack of freedom of speech, but it also covers up crime. The film is a statement from the victim, but they’re not allowing us to talk about what happens. It’s not my fault, it’s not the victim’s fault that these things are bad. It’s my testimony and they’re forbidding me from telling it, because it’s too hard to watch. Well, I’m sorry, they should prevent the crime, not censor me. So we’re really not happy about this version, because the cuts were made in that way and the numbers are not justified. Four per cent is a big number. People from the Western world should understand four per cent – would you like your pay to be cut by four per cent? There’d be riots on the street. But for a film from Serbia, it’s like, OK, fine…

The extreme imagery in the film seems to come from anger, and this anger is directed at the state. The violence is committed by the state, essentially, and the authorities are responsible for the most immoral treatment of humans in the film.

Authority in general, yes, because first of all this film is an honest expression of the deepest feelings that we have about our region and the world in general. Concerning our region, the last few decades have been dominated by war and political and moral nightmares. The world in general is sugar-coated in political correctness, but it is actually very rotten under that façade. So we’re talking about problems in the modern world, only they’re set in Serbia. And it’s a struggle against all the corrupt authorities that govern our lives for their own purposes. So yes, there is anger in the film.

In the end, a new director takes over from Vukmir and continues the film, and this shows that what we’ve seen cannot just be attributed to one madman, but is part of a whole system.

Absolutely. Vukmir is just one of them. In a way, Vukmir is an exaggerated representation of all those corrupt authorities. The last scene that you mentioned is a culmination of some of the hard scenes in the film that are literally drawings of our feelings. Extreme scenes, such as the one with the baby, are absolute literal images of how we feel. I never thought, let’s make a shocking film, let’s make it controversial, let’s break the world record. That was never on our mind. We just wanted to express ourselves in the most honest and direct way possible. You’re raped from birth and it doesn’t even stop after your death: that was the point of the ending.

There has been a lot of talk about the violence against women and children in the film.

You cannot fight against that kind of violence if you don’t say anything about it. You will not prevent it if you say, for instance, ‘in this company you have to have 50 per cent of women managers’. Fine, but that will not solve the problem of domestic violence. In Serbia, in some rural parts of the country, we have big domestic violence problems. Women and children are treated like men’s property. Men can do whatever they want with them. Of course there are problems of that type all around the world, but in some regions it’s almost a tradition, and the written law is not helping, because in reality no one does anything about it. We wanted to talk about all the problems we experience. We wanted to face the demons of our time, including violence against women and children. Unfortunately, many people who say they are fighting against those problems and claim to represent women and children find this film too offensive.

At one point, Vukmir explains that ‘victims sell’ as a reason for making the film, and tells Milos he’s not a victim. But in fact Milos is a victim too, right?

Vukmir is a true believer in the things he does and of that society and industry. He is also an exaggerated representation of the new European film order. In Eastern Europe, you cannot get your film financed unless you have a barefoot girl who cries on the streets, or some story about war victims in our region. But of course, you should never go too deep, or show tough scenes, or point out the problems. Just say, it’s a hard life, we experienced war, we don’t have anything to eat, we don’t have any love, any family. And if you do that, you’ll receive $5 million. And that’s the only way you can get your film financed in Eastern Europe. So Vukmir represents that. He believes in this system, but he’s passionate, he’s going all the way, he wants to show a real victim. Also because the Western world has lost feelings, so they’re searching for false ones, they want to buy feelings. It’s like they’ll feel more human if they see victims and feel sorry, ‘oh we’re still human, we can feel sorry’ – but that’s a lie. That’s what Vukmir does, and he really believes that Milos is not a victim because he adores him, he’s his hero. He really believes he’s doing the right thing, that he’s a supporter of our region’s economy.

So it’s also a film about the perception that Western Europe has of Serbia.

Yes, of course. And we’re talking about those problems through the moving picture industry, because I don’t want to start about politics, it’s too complicated and crazy. European film funds and festivals, some of them, are looking for those kinds of films from Eastern Europe because it’s a problematic region with war and suffering. And that’s exploitation. Those films are real exploitation. It’s spiritual pornography.

There was a Serbian film called The Life and Death of a Porno Gang in 2009 that used pornography as a metaphor to talk about Serbia. How do you explain that?

Concerning A Serbian Film, it’s not about looking for a metaphor to present our way of life or my feelings. It came naturally, because after all these wars in Serbia, we have started to experience our lives as pure exploitation. In the kind of job you have to take to feed your family, you’ll end up being viciously exploited by your employer or the rulers. So pornography is used as an image for everyday life, it’s normal. If he did anything else, Milos would still end up with the same kind of problems. Anything in our lives and our culture is pornographic. I think the same thing happened with The Life and Death of a Porno Gang. It was probably the same idea, the same expression of the problems, although the approach and style were different.

The content of the film is so extreme that you expect a lo-fi, trashy kind of film, but it is in fact very well-made and stars famous, well-respected actors. Maybe it is this contrast that has made some people uncomfortable.

It was not the plan to combine those things. For me it was just a natural way to make the film, because that’s the kind of style I like. I was most influenced by American auteurs of the 70s like Friedkin, Peckinpah, Cronenberg, Carpenter, Walter Hill and others. Maybe you’re right, maybe some images are stronger and harder because the style is… nice. That’s a problem, because it’s almost a pattern in filmmaking. If you want to make a violent film, it has to be done in a dirty, documentary style. If you want to go to festivals, you have to have lots of long shots. In art, you’re not supposed to have patterns, and calculations of that kind.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes festival, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new film has the magic of a fairy tale and the simplicity of a folk tale. Wonderfully immersive, slow and dreamy, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives centres loosely around a sick man in rural Thailand and his relatives, alive and dead. His journey towards death is interspersed with episodes that involve a water buffalo, a princess, a talking fish and a monkey ghost. Part of the director’s larger Primitive project, which depicts the north-eastern region of Thailand through a mixture of film and installation, Uncle Boonmee blends spiritual meditation, political references, a ghost story and moments of intense beauty into a mesmerising reverie.

Virginie Sélavy had the pleasure of interviewing Apitchatpong Weerasethakul during the London Film Festival. The director discussed the mix of tones in the film, the references to old Thai cinema and the reasons for his stronger concern with politics in the Primitive project.

VS: Uncle Boonmee seems to be concerned with the crossing of various boundaries, whether between life and death, humans and animals, nature and the human world.

AW: Yes, in fact that’s also true of my other films. They’re about all these borders, life and death, light and darkness, all these things that co-exist.

Why are you interested in that?

I think because I live in Thailand – it’s a place that is so full of contrasts. It’s a very beautiful country but there are many ugly things, like violence. It’s a mixture of progress, because it’s a developing country, and animist and Hindu beliefs within Buddhism, which propels the country in such a strange way. You have people who have all the gadgets, but at the same time they use them in a very primitive way. During the recent protests in Thailand, you had people screaming for their rights and for democracy, but at the same time they used these backwards practices: they asked for the blood of all the protesters, threw it in a bucket, asked for a Brahmin to come and chant and then threw the blood in front of the Prime Minister’s house. And it doesn’t feel strange, it mixes very well! So my film also reflects this co-existence.

Uncle Boonmee seems more openly political than your other films. Why is that?

This film is part of the Primitive project, which is a survey of the north-eastern area where I grew up, and it’s a very politically charged background. In my previous films I focused on my direct experience, something that I know, like love, my parents, my friends. But this film is a portrait of the place, so I felt the need to present this aspect of what happened to the land. The weather is very harsh and people are poor and have to work in other regions. The education system is not well developed, so the people are prone to political manipulation. So this Primitive project has many elements. One of them is an art installation and that’s more focused on politics. Also, the north-east has a big influence on, and is a big factor, in the current political turmoil. But I chose to reflect on the past, which is not so different because the key institutions play the same role now.

There’s a scene in which Uncle Boonmee says that his disease is due to his karma, because he killed too many communists. What does that refer to specifically?

It refers to the time from the 50s to the early 80s when the communists spread into the country from Vietnam to Laos. Laos is a neighbouring country that borders that region and it used to be full of friends and family, but Laos fell apart and many people migrated to Thailand. The idea of communism appealed to poor people and the Thai government’s method of getting rid of this ideology was backed by the Americans. It was very repressive and brutal, so people had to escape into the jungle. You were either on the government’s side or you were with the communist party, and Uncle Boonmee was on the government’s side.

As Boonmee is approaching death he says he can see the future, and this is followed by a series of still images that is very different in style from the rest of the film, and seems more closely concerned with contemporary society and politics. Could you explain the idea behind this sequence and its place in the film?

For me, it’s the place where Uncle Boonmee and I merge, because what he’s talking about is my dream. But my dream is more complicated, so I simplified it. I think it’s a very interesting dream, it’s about the future, but at the same time it has connotations of the present. In a way, we live in a totalitarian regime in Thailand, so I wanted to refer to this moment where the maker and the character merge. And when Uncle Boonmee goes back to the womb in the cave I wanted to take the movie back to its origins, before the image moved, before it became the moving image. At the same time it refers to New Wave filmmakers like Chris Marker and Antonioni. There is a reference to the future, which is what Chris Marker talks about, but it’s the future of the past. It’s the representation of the future but from the past perspective. I’m very interested in these kinds of time shifts.

You’ve said that your film is about the transmigration of souls, and you express your ideas about life and death entirely visually. Was that important to you, that it should be visual rather than verbal?

With this film yes, because you’re supposed to feel this relationship between man and nature, all these things that sometimes you cannot really put into words. The idea was to visualise this, to illuminate it and to open your mind, and for me to respect the audience’s imagination. Uncle Boonmee could be anything, he could be the sunlight… For me, it’s true that when we die we become dust and we integrate into nature. You will die, I will die, but we tend to forget that! But we transform, we don’t disappear, we just transform into another kind of matter.

The film can be very subtle in the way it represents invisible things like beliefs, ghosts and emotions, but it can also be very literal, as in the case of the monkey ghost in the monkey costume. Why this mix of styles?

It is a tribute to the old Thai filmmaking style, and this particular scene was in reference to old television, which was shot in 16mm in the studio, with cheap costumes and a certain kind of lighting. And the larger theme is how this guy, who doesn’t feel like he belongs, has to transform himself and escape the area, maybe like the communists.

Did you invent the monkey ghost or is that something that exists in Thai folklore or mythology?

I invented it, but it’s inspired by folk tales. And also, when I was in elementary school, a friend told me that he saw a big black man with glowing red eyes floating above his bed at night, and he could have been dreaming or he could have lied to me, but the image stuck with me and that’s what I sketched for the designer.

The jungle plays a very important role, much like in your other films, Tropical Malady in particular. Why is that?

It’s because the jungle is home. We tend to forget. Now when I go to the jungle, I get scared because of the sounds, things I don’t know. But it’s our home, our ancestors’ home. And I really believe that in the past people could talk to animals and could know what particular bird sounds meant. But we’ve lost that ability. So I like to take my characters back home. Another thing that is visually or conceptually different from Tropical Malady is that this jungle is artificial, it’s a cinematic jungle. We used the day for night technique, so there’s a fake quality to it, a green and blue tint. I threw my actors into this cinematic jungle that refers to past films.

The sound of the jungle is heard throughout the film, even when it’s not seen on screen, and it feels like the jungle is constantly present. Why did you use that device?

You have to feel the presence of life, the abundance of life, you have to know there’s a bird, there’s an insect that you can’t see, but you know are there. I don’t think my movies work on DVD, so I always say to people, if you’re going to watch them on DVD, at least invest in a surround system! The soundtrack is really part of the design.

The film combines many different tones and styles, and serious spiritual and political concerns are juxtaposed with humorous moments. Was humour an important aspect for you?

Yes, definitely. In all my work, I look for a certain type of humour, uncomfortable humour, awkward humour, where you’re not sure whether you should laugh or feel sad, or maybe you should feel both. It refers to old-style acting that was very popular in the past, the way the actors deliver the lines, which has a certain logic and innocence. But at the same time, from a contemporary perspective, it’s very funny, it’s out of time, and when you’re aware it’s from the past, and it’s gone, it can generate a certain melancholy.

The past seems very important to you.

Yes, especially with this film. It seems like a summary of what I do. The last scene reunites the characters from my first fiction film together. It’s a tribute to the land and to cinema in general.

Were there any specific films from old Thai cinema that influenced you?

No. I could have gone back to the film archive, but with my DOP we decided to work from our memories. We were inspired by a lot of horror films, which were shown on television after 7pm in the 70s and were always filmed in the studio, with that very rigid lighting.

So there’s a tradition of TV horror in Thailand?

Yes, there was horror and also love stories, but as a kid I was attracted to the horror films.

Do you think Uncle Boonmee is a horror film?

Yes, I think it can fit into many genres. In Spain it played in the Sitges Fantastic Film Festival, and it got a prize! When it was put in that context, it made sense. The reaction from people is so diverse. That’s why I think in a way it can be called an open cinema.

Have you been surprised by the reaction from audiences?

Yes and no. Yes in the way that people interpret the film in different ways, and how deeply some people get into it. For example, there’s a guy from Paris who sent me a very beautiful picture of a teenage boy on the beach and he said, ‘this is my son and he died in January’. And when he saw Uncle Boonmee he said he felt at ease, he felt peace. This is better than the Palme d’Or, to realise that your film can do this. At the same time, there are people on the internet who say the film is rubbish, and it’s fascinating for me how you can divide the audience, how one person can be touched deeply and another feel very offended.

Although it has divided opinion, it is probably your most accessible and successful film to date. Why do you think that is?

I think it talks about things that we share, such as our last moments and how we want to connect with our loved ones. The dead wife and son could be a projection of Boonmee, maybe they don’t exist. I think that’s what the audience can feel. And even though there are references to old Thai cinema, we share the river of cinematic history, and old Thai films are influenced by the West. It’s universal but in the past.

Can you tell me more about the book that you adapted for the film?

The book was written by a monk in 1983. It’s a very thin book that was distributed to villagers, you can’t find it in shops. The monk met this guy who came to the temple and who told him this story that he claimed he could remember. There are several cases of people who say they can remember their past lives in Thailand, but it’s not a common thing. I travelled to the area and encountered two more cases, one dead, but his wife told me about it, and one who is still alive. It was really amazing.

The different strands in the film could be interpreted as past lives, but they can also be seen as fairy tales or legends, for instance the story of the princess and the fish. Where did that come from?

It refers to the royal costume drama that used to be on television at the weekend. They still have this sort of thing, but in a different production style, with digital effects. In the old days, it was slower and more innocent. It’s always about the hardships of princes and princesses in relation to a natural landscape, with animals that can talk. But they don’t end up having intercourse!

The film has so many different layers.

Yes, layers like our own mind works, drifting randomly.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m producing two films by other filmmakers and I’m making an art installation and developing a new feature film on the Mekong River. It’s near the same area as Uncle Boonmee. There’s been a recent outbreak of pig disease in the farms in the area and it’s about how people are dealing with it, and how man relates to water.

Place seems very important to you. Does it always start with a place?

Not always, but often. That’s why it’s hard for me to work in the West. I need to feel I have a direct experience of a place.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Splatter is a new three-part mini-series directed by Joe Dante and produced by Roger Corman, starting on the Horror Channel Friday 24 September at 22:55. Episode one will have its UK TV premiere on that date, after which the audience will vote on which character should be killed in the next episode (via the Horror Channel website). This means that the versions of episodes two and three broadcast in the UK may turn out to be completely different from those shown previously on American TV. To understand the mechanics of interactive storytelling, Alex Fitch spoke to director Joe Dante about the series.

Alex Fitch: Splatter is about to premiere in the UK, and it’s interesting that the last time we spoke it was at a screening of your first film, The Movie Orgy, at the Cine-Excess cult cinema festival. While Splatter is very new, it also harks back to your earliest projects…

Joe Dante: True! Home-made, I think is the phrase!

Was that something that attracted you to this project, working with Roger Corman again, doing something that was a tongue-in-cheek love letter to exploitation?

Yeah, it was kind of a goof, really… Roger proposed this idea to me in excited tones over dinner one night and he said: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a series where there’s a bunch of people in a house who are gonna be murdered and the audience gets to choose who dies in the next episode?’ and I said: ‘How would that work?’

He said: ‘The way it would work is that you shoot the first episode and you run it. Then you take the votes the night it runs, you write the next episode based on the votes, you shoot it and premiere it a week later. You do it again for the next episode.’ And I said, ‘Roger, there’s a problem with that!’, which is that you have to keep all these people on retainer for the whole period and you have to shoot, edit, score, transfer and put the thing up in a record amount of time. I think this went back to his days when he used to make movies in two and a half days; he used to make them in that time, but he didn’t edit them in two and a half days!

So I said: ‘Roger, I think what would be more prudent would be to shoot all the possibilities of murders and choose to air the one that the audience would vote for.’ That way you have a whole series that you can run in various places in various times and the audience would have the luxury of choosing different people to die and it would all be covered. He realised that would probably be a better idea, so that’s the way we did it, but it was still done in record time!

This series was first aired in America last year, which led to voting from an audience in one certain direction, but now it’s being shown in the UK.

We made a deal with a company called Netflix, which sends rental DVDs through the post, and they wanted to get into video streaming, to show people that they could show films directly via the internet, without having to post films in boxes back and forth. Ours was their test case to prove that they could stream material successfully to people’s computers, and so they were partners on the series, but when time came to pick up the entire series for redistribution beyond its first screening, they only wanted the three episodes that appeared on their site, the ones the audience voted for – we owned the rights to the rest of them. I think if you go to the Netflix site, you can still see the three episodes that were run, but of course the series is designed so that those three episodes wouldn’t always be the same three that were run if it was aired again.

The British audience may vote in an entirely different way to the American audience, so this new run on the Horror Channel may actually be the premiere of one or two of the episodes.

Totally! I think any new audience is probably going to vote differently because the idea was to fill the programme with unlikable people! It’s a rock star’s funeral and all the mourners are hangers-on and people who basically used him. He’s now come back from the dead and he’s going to get revenge on all of them. It’s based on the idea: ‘which characters do the audience want to see die?’, which I guess is a negative way to approach it if you’re an actor, but it’s sort of a triumph if you get picked, because it proves that you managed to be more odious than the person next to you!

Certainly in the current climate of Z-list celebrity culture and reality TV, it’s all very well that someone gets booted out of the Big Brother house or dumped into a tank full of snakes in the outback, but actually I think a lot of the audience would like to see these characters on TV meet a grisly demise!

(laughs) I’m sure!

How involved were you in the casting of the series? Corey Feldman, for example, who actually is a star of reality TV, plays the lead role of the zombie rock star and seems very much cast against type. I didn’t recognise him until I saw the credits.

I hadn’t worked with him since The ‘Burbs (1989), which was a while ago. He’s obviously gone through a lot of changes, he’s pretty much a completely different person, but he was very eager. He loves make-up, he loves horror and he’s got his own band, so it was great to get him! There wasn’t a lot of money involved, so most of the rest of the cast did it just for the fun of doing it.

Also, I imagine the opportunity to work with you and Roger Corman was very attractive.

I would guess that would put a slight stamp of legitimacy on it! (laughs) But these webisodes are a new thing – there are a lot of these going on right now and it’s an interesting new form of storytelling. I think the webisode idea in itself is going to survive, but the idea of interactive storytelling has its limits. If the audience gets to choose what happens, it becomes very difficult to have a point to the story. You can imagine that if Midnight Cowboy had been interactive, the audience would have voted for them to strike out earlier on and move to Beverly Hills!

Also, many webisode serials I’ve seen online have been very much tied in to TV shows. There was a Battlestar Galactica webisode, but the main series didn’t actually reflect its plotline, in which a major character was revealed to be bisexual, so that can delegitimise the new format.

There’s a new show coming out in the USA this fall called The Event, an NBC series that has some kind of apocalyptic content – it’s hard to tell exactly what it is – and they apparently decided to create a character who only exists on the internet for audiences to consult as to what is going on. It’s a fairly clever idea because I think the networks have now realised that the audience of people who don’t have internet connections is growing smaller and smaller as, frankly, their older audience dies off! Their new audience embraces every technological miracle that comes along…

What were your considerations shooting something that might be primarily seen online? Did it affect the way that you lit and shot it, or did you just treat it like any other filmic project?

You couldn’t shoot it just like any other film, as it has its own unique needs. For example, in the script, there are several different versions of each scene, depending on who is currently still alive! When you shoot the scenes, you have to set them up where you can move one actor out and move another actor in and have them say the lines in that version of the script. So it becomes a kind of assembly line of changing actors. You shoot a master shot and then you shoot all three or five versions of however many characters there are. When you do the close-ups, the cast always have to be on call because even if they’ve been killed off, they have to survive in at least one version.

It frankly can get a little wearying – you can get very easily confused as a director as to where you are in any given scene. When the writer, Richard C Matheson, wrote the original story, he didn’t account for every single possibility of transitions depending on where people were and whether they were existing or not… So it was quite a jigsaw puzzle to edit. It was a solvable problem, but it was not like any other film I’ve ever made, and I don’t think I’ve ever made a film as fast as this one! Even my first picture, which was made in 10 days, was a breeze compared to this, because it was so labour intensive.

I suppose to allow for all the possibilities in the interactive plot, you must have shot the equivalent of seven episodes in total?

Actually 10! There are 10 episodes in all… The first episode is always the same, and then the others vary depending on the audience vote. There are more versions again of the last episode than the middle. The exact details escape me, because I probably never quite understood them anyway!

As there are many episodes that might never be seen when the series is showed in different territories, could you eventually consider a DVD or Blu-ray release that would include every episode?

I think it would be an ideal party DVD. There was an incident supposedly 10 years ago in an interactive project where the audience had buttons on their seats and when they pressed the button, it would tilt the story one way or the other. Apparently there were fist fights because it wasn’t a very democratic audience and people who wanted their way would leap over someone else’s seat and push their button to get their way! So, that’s another reason why I don’t think interactive storytelling has such a terrific future…

Interview by Alex Fitch