Sunday News

The horror of being a nice guy

Jeremy Saulnier’s third feature film, Green Room, has won critical acclaim. Graeme Tuckett meets the director, and hell of a good bloke, in New York.

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And he seems like such a nice guy. I arrange to meet Jeremy Saulnier at a small cafe a few miles away from where I live in Brooklyn’s Bushwick. I could make the trip in about 20 minutes in a car or on a bike, but no-one drives here who doesn’t have to. And I’m saving getting on a bike until I trust myself not to get flattened at the first intersecti­on I try to cross.

Brooklyn is a fast-paced, disparate and always busy place. Because of work on the lines, the subway ride to Prospect Park takes me across the river to Manhattan and the hipster kingdom of the East Village before I get to reverse direction and re-enter my home borough via the Brooklyn Bridge.

Like Bushwick, Prospect Park - where Saulnier has lived for nearly 20 years - is a once-tough working class ‘burb, now riding a wave of gentrifica­tion and renovation. The results can be tense, with businesses and households that have existed in these streets for decades being driven out by rising rents and changing fortunes.

The night before I meet Saulnier, I’d been making my way home from a cafe at about 1am, when a group of young men decided they could make better use of my laptop than I could. They may well have been right, but we had a wee dust-up anyway. Very luckily for me, after only a few minutes a police car went past and they split, leaving me to walk home – pretty gingerly – and lie awake staring at the ceiling until well after dawn.

So I’m a bit red-eyed and shaky as I relate this to Saulnier over iced teas and a vegan BLT. And, for a guy who has made a remarkable career so far out of showing some heartstopp­ing violence, he really couldn’t be nicer.

Saulnier is, over brunch at least, one of the mildest, sweetestna­tured men you could ever hope to meet. At 40 years old, he still has the kind of unlined skin and bright, inquiring eyes that could get him ID’d at a bottle store. His hair is combed into a vaguely preppy side-parting, and he answers all of my questions with an unbridled and unselfcons­cious boyish enthusiasm that is utterly disarming.

Saulnier grew up in Washington DC, in a time he describes as being very nearly paradise to be a middle-class kid in America.

‘‘We had bikes, skateboard­s, we could be out until it got dark. There were no cellphones, no contact at all until you got home, but no-one worried. We assumed we were safe. We probably were.

‘‘I was exposed to the horror genre at a very early age. I had some cousins – older than me – and their idea of fun was to take this little 8-year-old kid and force him to watch, like, exploding heads. I can remember it so vividly, the VHS machine and exact scenes they had dubbed to show me. Dawn of The Dead, Nightmare on Elm Street. I knew it was not real, but it affected me. And I think – I guess you would call it a coping mechanism – I started trying to work out how it had all been done.

‘‘And it fed so perfectly into my other love, which was making scale models and dioramas of scenes in miniature. I grew up with GI Joe kits and model airplanes, and I would stage them in the backyard and take photograph­s. So even as an 8-year-old I became obsessed with how to create illusions and special effects in film.

‘‘So when I actually got access to a film camera, I was just off and running.’’ We laugh here about the how the most ineffably un-cool things you can do as a kid so often become the very coolest things only a few years later.

Saulnier’s background – the perfect pre-adolescent film-school he was unintentio­nally putting himself through – reminds me almost note for note of another young film-maker, a decade and a bit earlier, who watched the 1933 King Kong as a very young boy and then spent half the rest of his childhood building and filming models in his mumand dad’s backyard in Pukerua Bay.

Saulnier’s eyes, already bright as a squirrel’s, light up even further. ‘‘Oh man [Peter Jackson’s] Bad Taste was like my favourite film growing up. It was so obviously made by a bunch of friends on the weekends, but it was so f***ing ambitious and made with so much love. That was exactly what we wanted to be doing.’’

Saulnier talks about the ‘‘cooperativ­e’’ of school friends and fellow wannabe film-makers he formed. Blue Ruin and Green Room actor Macon Blair was there, even then. I tell him that ‘‘co-operative’’ is a very serious group-noun to apply to a bunch of 11- and 12-year-olds. He laughs and agrees.

‘‘We were serious kids. Ambitious, and we loved what we were doing. I mean, childhood was a golden age. We were out there in the streets until if got dark every night. Running around with fake guns and using fireworks and bags of fake blood to stage these ... murders. I mean, nowadays the cops would show up and you’d be put in a home. Maybe because it was preColumbi­ne ... everything changed then.’’

We talk about the movies he loved as a kid and Saulnier immediatel­y launches into a rhapsody about the Sunday night ‘‘Creature Feature’’ slot that aired right through the 1970s and 1980s on US television, introducin­g a whole generation of kids to the joys of low-budget, genre horror movies.

And Green Room really does sit proudly in this tradition. It is, at its heart, a story about a bunch of young people who get lost in the woods and find themselves besieged by monsters. But the execution and the writing are so good, it’s maybe not immediatel­y obvious just how much Saulnier is paying homage to those far-off Sunday night shockers.

Having Sir Patrick Stewart, Imogen Poots, and the – late, wonderful – Anton Yelchin in the cast helps, of course.

But Saulnier wouldn’t have got them on board unless his script had a quality that lifted Green Room far above most of the genre.

So we talk for a moment about Saulnier’s ability to write dialogue and character. ‘‘Oh man, when I was making my models as a kid, all I wanted was absolute accuracy. I wanted them perfect. When I write characters, I’m still chasing the same thing. You have to believe in these people just as much – more – than you believe in any of the special effects. So I guess I put a lot of work into making the people as authentic as they can possibly be.’’

It shows. Green Room is one of the best films I’ve seen in months. I have an agreement with Saulnier that we won’t talk about Yelchin and his tragically untimely death until the very end. Saulnier warns me that he still can’t say anything about his friend without choking up. And when the time comes, he does.

It’s a hell of a way to end what has been an enjoyable and illuminati­ng couple of hours. We head back out into a sweltering and unbearably humid Brooklyn afternoon. Right on cue, there’s a crack of thunder and the skies open. Shaking hands, we walk off through a steaming summer downpour. ● Green Room is in cinemas now.

‘ We were serious kids. Ambitious, and we loved what we were doing. I mean, childhood was a golden age.’ JEREMY SAULNIER

 ??  ?? Green Room director Jeremy Saulnier says he was ‘‘exposed to the horror genre at a very early age’’.
Green Room director Jeremy Saulnier says he was ‘‘exposed to the horror genre at a very early age’’.
 ??  ?? Patrick Stewart in Green Room.
Patrick Stewart in Green Room.

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