Sins Of The Father

THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME I Tom Holland leads an all-star ensemble in a Southern Gothic crime saga.

From Simon Killer to Christine, director Antonio Campos is no stranger to depicting the dark heart of humanity on screen. But his new film, The Devil All The Time, may just be his bleakest yet. “As a filmmaker, you don’t try and overanalyse why you’re telling the stories you’ve been telling, but at some point you look back and you go, ‘Wow, this seems to be a trend!’” chuckles Campos who, on the phone at least, is far warmer than his chilling films might lead you to believe.

“Complicated people are interesting to spend time with, and to see if you can empathise with them,” Campos explains. “But part of the writing process here was coming to the conclusion that you can’t empathise with some people, that there is a certain evil in the world.”

Faithfully adapted from Donald Ray Pollock’s award-winning 2011 novel of the same name, The Devil All The Time is an intergenerational drama set in Southern Ohio, West Virginia and, notably, the remote township of Knockemstiff in the mid-20th Century. Over the years it variously follows a devout WW2 veteran (Bill Skarsgård), his atheist son (Tom Holland), a corrupt local sheriff (Sebastian Stan), a pair of peripatetic serial killers (Jason Clarke and Riley Keough), a predatory preacher (Robert Pattinson) and several unfortunate innocents caught in a vortex of violence and depravity.

Embracing a sprawling, novelistic approach to its storytelling, The Devil All The Time is the kind of film that rarely got released in cinemas even before Covid struck, which partly explains why Netflix were the ones to back Campos’ vision. “It’s definitely challenging getting anything made that doesn’t fit

into a traditional structure,” admits Campos, who started work on the film in 2012 after being handed the book by music-supervisor-turned-producer Randall Poster. Alongside his brother Paulo, Campos spent years honing the film’s ambitious multi-stranded screenplay. “The nature of this film is such that every character is almost a lead in their own part of the story,” Campos says, pointing out that such stories are de rigueur on TV, but rarely attempted on film. “In television, you see that people are more excited by things like that, that are unexpected.”

Of course, enlisting a cast that includes Spider-Man, Batman and the Winter Soldier couldn’t have hurt when it came to convincing the money men. “We’re creating our own cinematic universe – the Knockemstiff Cinematic Universe,” laughs Campos who concedes that “at this point it’s hard to not cast someone who has been in a comic-book movie”. But The Devil All The Time has been so long in the making that Holland hadn’t even swung into action as Spidey when he signed on to play a character a world away from Peter Parker. “No-one had seen [Tom] as Spider-Man yet, and Rob came on way, way before Batman,” Campos says. As for Sebastian Stan – who replaced his Marvel pal Chris Evans in preproduction due to scheduling issues – Campos didn’t initially identify him as the Winter Soldier, “Because he looks so different from Bucky!”

In addition to a trio of superheroes, the film stars a bonafide horror icon in Pennywise performer Bill Skarsgård, whose Willard Russell is the focus of the film’s opening chapter and serves as an entry point to the film’s Southern Gothic world. “He’s a poor man who grew up during the Depression in West Virginia,” Skarsgård explains, talking to Teasers from Sweden, where he was due to film Robert Eggers’ The Northman before the pandemic held up production for four months and counting. “At 17 or 18 Willard decided to go fight in the South Pacific, and got completely traumatised by the things he experienced there. So we meet him when he’s trying to find stability, and like a lot of people he finds some sort of comfort in religion when there’s nothing else that can explain the things that are happening to you.”

Willard’s actions in the name of God have repercussions that echo throughout the rest of the story, not least on his son Arvin, played by Michael Banks Repeta at age nine and Tom Holland as an adolescent. Despite not sharing any scenes together in front of the camera, Holland and Skarsgård were the first to arrive on set in Alabama (which doubled for Ohio) where they developed their father/son relationship behind the scenes. “Part of the story is Arvin trying to come to terms with what his dad did to him,” Skarsgård teases. “Although we don’t have any scenes together, my character is so important to who Arvin later becomes, so we did readthroughs before the shoot, where Tom read the scenes of young Arvin. So we got to do those scenes together, even though we don’t have any scenes in the movie.”

Beyond mastering a flawless Southern Ohio accent (no easy feat as a Swede), for Skarsgård the most nerve-wracking day was when the book’s author visited the set. Though not involved in the screenplay, Pollock did give his seal of approval by agreeing to serve as the film’s omnipresent narrator. “I met Don a year into working on the adaptation,” recalls Campos, who was immediately struck by Pollock’s Knockemstiff twang. “I heard his voice and was like, ‘Damn, that’s one of the best voices I’ve ever heard!’ The way our narrator functions is similar to the narrator in Barry Lyndon, where he’s an authorial voice – he knows everything, so he has a sense of humour about it because he sees so far ahead. There was no more of an authentic voice that you could inject into this story than Don’s.” JF

‘LIKE A LOT OF PEOPLE HE FINDS SOME SORT OF COMFORT IN RELIGION’

BILL SKARSGÅRD

ETA | 16 SEPTEMBER / THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME STREAMS ON NETFLIX FROM NEXT MONTH.