REVENGERS ASSEMBLE
Eighties throwback thriller Cold in July boasts mullets and mayhem as two fathers band together to help themselves to a slice of vengeance. Total Film talks to the director and cast of this year’s Drive...
Ijoked that this was a movie ABOUT a guy who decided to grow a moustache. He maybe had some misgivings whether he could pull the moustache off, but by the end of the movie he was like, ‘Yeah, I can wear a moustache’.”
Michael C. Hall is laughing, but the erstwhile Dexter from the hit TV show tells us plenty in jest. First off, Cold In July is a revenge-thriller that, among other things, explores masculinity and man’s brutish instincts. Second, it’s set in the ’80s and a bit of hair on the upper lip was de rigueur for the East Texan cowpokes inhabiting this superior genre movie. As, of course, was a mullet.
“I put on the mullet and the mid-’80s clothes – it’s 1989 but don’t think any of his clothes are newer than four years old – and went from there,” explains Hall, a chameleon actor who’s fashioned some astonishing transformations over his career, from playing gay son David Fisher in HBO’s
Six Feet Under to English teacher David Kammerer in last year’s beat poet biopic, Kill Your Darlings.
Director Jim Mickle also remembers the mullet as key. “I’ve always admired Michael’s ability to shape shift,” he says. “It’s not just Channing Tatum changing up his shoes. Michael completely inhabits characters and roles. He had all these ideas. He said, ‘You know what, this guy might be thinking
>> about growing a mullet.’ And he came in and he only had
‘i want to do for those sleazy southern thrillers what Drive did for ’80s LA noir…’ jim mickle
this little bit of hair and a little bit of a moustache, as he’d only had a couple of weeks. He just looked so ridiculous, but he was so committed. It was exactly what I wanted.”
Cold In July cements Mickle’s growing reputation as one of the most interesting genre directors working today. We Are What We Are,
Stake Land and Mulberry St are all midnight movies with peculiar intelligence, unexpected thrills and distinctive flavour. Cold In July is the same but different.
Based on Joe R. Lansdale’s novel, it’s the story of Richard Dane, an inordinately ordinary guy who, in fright, shoots an intruder in his house. His actions are excused by the law but he is nonetheless torn up by guilt and horror, and is far from blame-free in the eyes of the victim’s fresh-out-of-jail father, Russel (a convincingly hardass Sam Shepard). Beginning as a game of cat-and-mouse, Cold In
July then corkscrews from one startling scenario to the next, with the duo forging an uneasy partnership and enlisting the help of sleazy, charming gumshoe Jim Bob (Don Johnson, bringing all of his legend to the larger-than-life character).
Mickle’s movie is a slow-burn character study but it also combines elements of the western, thriller, noir and action movie, with the trio’s zigzagging journey proving entirely unpredictable yet wholly organic. Furthermore,
Cold In July is a tasty throwback to the genre movies of the ’80s, not just in its fashions and production design but in its practical effects, shooting style and synth score spiked by hair-rock anthems. “I went back to movies like Blood Simple, Road
House and Red Rock West, and I watched all these great new John Carpenter Blu-rays,” explains Mickle. “Watching those, I fell back in love with them and it reminded me of when I first discovered those films, seeing these great filmmakers doing things that were familiar but with their own twist on it. There was an ambition to those movies that doesn’t exist now. Look at John Carpenter’s The Thing. It’s a great movie. A lot of people were using these B-movies as a way to elevate things. Compare it to popular genre filmmaking now, which is a joke.”
Mickle feels it’s the influx of remastered Blu-rays that perhaps accounts for ’80s filmmaking – often dismissed as glossy and empty – suddenly being treated with a newfound respect. In the past three or four years, movies like the
Maniac remake, The House Of The Devil and You’re Next have tapped into the ’80s vibe, and then, of course, there’s Nicolas Winding Refn’s sumptuous love letter to the era, Drive.
“Drive was a big influence,” nods Mickle. “My sister [ Beth Mickle] production designed
Drive and Nic Refn has given me a lot of great advice over the years. I actually pitched this movie as ‘I want to do for those sleazy southern thrillers what Drive did for ’80s LA noir…’”
Which brings us to Don Johnson. After all, if you’re going to resurrect the garish ghosts of the decade du look, who better to haunt the party than Miami Vice’s very own ‘Sonny’ Crockett? Approached by Mickle to play
a “used car salesman” type of PI who enters the action halfway into the movie, he loved the script and wanted the chance to work with Hall and his old friend Shepard. He also ‘got’ the character right away.
“I’ve known a lot of characters – literally ‘characters’ – like Jim Bob throughout my life,” he grins. “I actually went out and bought all the clothes [ the loud shirts and lizard-skin boots could be described as snake-oil chic] myself. I showed them to the costumer and she was very happy with my input. I do a lot of work to prepare for a role, a lot of exercises to prepare for the emotional and psychological aspects. The character starts to appear to me.”
Johnson mixed it up from take to take and adlibbed freely, though he was careful to “stay within the intent of the scene”. He found the effectively staged shootouts easy to handle (“as you can imagine, I’m comfortable with action!”) and compares working with Mickle to working with Tarantino, for whom he played vicious slave owner Big Daddy in Django Unchained: “Both have a great film sense, film knowledge and instinct,” he says.
Shepard also enjoyed working with Mickle, and rates him highly. Which, given he’s been appearing in movies for more than 40 years and is himself a writer/director who’s considered one of the great American playwrights of our time, is quite a commendation. Even more so when you consider he has zero tolerance for bullshit.
“Most scripts aren’t worth a shit,” he starts, “and the ones that aren’t very good are invariably written by committee. Sometimes they’re written by producers, or producers’ wives or girlfriends. And inevitably they get worse as the project develops. You’re handed some changes and go, ‘Oh, don’t do that’, and all of their changes are based on audience appeal, which is exactly the wrong way to go about writing.”
With Cold In July, it was different. “I thought it was a well done script,” he states. “I liked that it was uncompromising. It wasn’t trying to have any happy endings; it really served the material. Jim’s a very honest filmmaker. He might be ‘genre bending’ but he’s not fucking around. I admire him. Jeff Nichols [ Shepard appears in Mud] works very much the same – he invents his own scripts and shoots his own stuff. These two guys are
auteurs, as it used to be called. And that’s really missing in the film industry now.”
Shepard’s character is a man of few words, locked with resentment and loaded with anger. In the early parts of the movie he stalks Richard Dane in a manner that would turn Max Cady’s blood cold, but any Cape Fear comparisons disappear as Cold In July squirms this way and writhes that way whenever you least expect it. But perhaps what most impresses is that it never loses a sense of its characters’ psychological turmoil as the narrative bends to the various genre tropes. More than anything else, Mickle’s movie is an exploration of the damage wreaked by violence and vengeance. Like the recently released Blue Ruin, another expert genre film with surprises and layers, it determines to examine the emotional fallout.
Hall agrees. “I don’t get the impression that Richard Dane is not going to be haunted by the ghosts of this experience,” he says. “I would not say that this movie is advocating vigilante justice. It’s certainly violent but I don’t think it suggests that these things don’t have repercussions and ramifications.”
And yet it was the film’s serious intent and fully dimensional characters that meant it took seven years to find funding. Mickle wanted to make it after his debut, Mulberry St, but it wasn’t until his We Are What We Are remake scored a hit by actually improving on the Mexican original, that the money fell into place.
“People said, ‘I don’t get it – it’s too characterdriven but it’s not character-driven enough to be an art film’, or ‘It’s not fast paced enough that we can throw Mark Wahlberg in it and blow shit up and make it for $60m’,” sighs the director. “Exactly! That’s what makes it so great! Finally, when we had some interest, it was all about casting. So I was like, ‘What’s the budget we can have to just make it with our favourite actors?’”
That budget was a few million bucks but it came without strings attached. “There was no Big Brother looking down, pinching pennies to justify their jobs,” Hall wryly notes. “You’re really left alone.” And so it was that he could play Richard with all of his anguish and internal injury. “I gravitate towards roles that are characterised by preoccupation, or secretkeeping, or complexity,” he says. “Dexter is decisive in his way and a man of action, but he certainly is complicated and conflicted and preoccupied.” Pausing, he considers the extent of the overlap and then pinpoints a major difference. “Given that I’ve been playing someone who kills without any qualms, I liked rebooting my internalised relationship to murder by playing someone who kills someone without wanting to or even meaning to,” he smiles.
With a film like this, festivals are vital to securing distribution. Deals for Cold In July’s funding were struck at Sundance 2013, when
We Are What We Are played to rapturous feedback, and the finished film then premiered at Sundance 2014 – again to excited responses.
“It’s the best platform because you can start with the best eyes on it… and it validates it in a way,” shrugs Mickle. But it never gets any easier. “It’s the same right now. I have a really interesting horror film I want to do next but it’s period, and nobody wants to make a period film, and it’s very creepy and slow-burn, but nobody wants that unless it’s found-footage. It’s very frustrating.”
Roll on Sundance 2015, where investors hopefully await. Audiences want and need filmmakers like Jim Mickle and movies like
Cold In July, whatever the suits in their committees might think. TF
Cold In July opens on 27 June.