Oscar Winning Director Chris Landreth Discusses Reaction to The Spine
National Film Board, CORE Copperheart Entertainment Short
Jun 23, 2009
Oscar-winning animator Chris Landreth ("Ryan") returns with his latest surreal short, "The Spine" a study in destructive co-dependency.
In Part #1 of this exclusive interview, the director discussed how the film came together and the reaction he was hoping to get from audiences. Now Landreth talks about Angela – the Greek Chorus – and offers insights into the film's ground-breaking animation style.
S101: With Mary, you justify her need for a child, but it’s a very selfish one. One reaction I had was: she'd make a terrible mother! Is that something you were going for?
“No. As you see Mary in her youth, if she were able to have kids at the age of 27 or 28, what kind of paths would she have taken: she would have grown, she would have become flexible in the experience of having kids. But because of the tragic turn her life took . . .”
And what about Angela?
“I don’t know if you’ve read any Philip Roth, but Angela fills the same role as Nathan in Roth’s American Pastoral, which is great. She’s a Greek Chorus: her job is to observe and to figure out the back-story of Dan and Mary. In the film, you’re never sure if this is actually true or if it’s Angela filling in the blanks.”
Does Angela stand in for you in “The Spine”?
“Yeah, she does.”
What inspired you visually, for this film?
“A lot of things I was trying out in "Ryan" I wanted to try here. “Ryan” is a fairly straightforward account of Ryan Larkin whereas this story is a bit more complicated and relies on figuring out the psychology of these people. And one thing that I’ve been into was altering characters’ appearances to reflect their psychology and their back-stories.
“I’m trying to develop a visual short-hand. If you were doing it live-action, you’d have to show it through dialogue or exposition which can be clunky and melodramatic.”
Or relying on your actors–
“Even then, there’s only so far you can go. Whereas if I showed Dan with flaps of skin hanging off his forehead, you’re able to show more information than you could even if you had a really great actor, like Gordon Pinsent.”
Who influenced that concept?
“(surrealist painter) Francis Bacon. He could do realism, but he chose not to. He chose to alter that realism and to twist his subjects. In his self-portraits, you’d see these deformed faces that unmistakably were him, or his friends. But you’d know there was a twisted element to their psychology: he was literally showing how he saw people’s emotional states.
“He was a really f****d up guy. He was a psychopath, a mean-spirited, sadistic prick, and he knew it, and he knew how to get that down onto a canvas.”
Visually, “The Spine” reminded me of Picasso, especially Guernica –
“Oh yeah. I talked about Guernica a lot in regards to this film. I don’t know if you’ve read Joseph Campbell–“
Hero of a Thousand Faces.
“Yeah. He has a 4-volume book on mythology and in the last volume, he spends about 20 pages on Guernica, going into all these archetypes and subconscious imagery that Picasso was touching on.
"I don’t know if I’ve bought into everything Campbell wrote, but I think he was right about Picasso getting into collective dream states, distorting faces and putting horns on them.”
How did all that impact “The Spine”?
“I certainly wasn’t trying to do anything like, ‘If I put a flap on Dan, then I’m touching on this particular archetype.’ Designing a character like Dan was a pretty impulsive thing; same with Ryan. What does Ryan look like? I was trying not to over-think, or even think, it out.”
Short-circuiting the inner critic? Because that’s one big issue with any creative person is getting past your insecurities and create. How do you do that?
“Stop the internal censor? That’s really tough. I have a lot more success drawing than writing. I’m always second-guessing and censoring myself when I write.”
“I’ve heard the expression ‘Write drunk, edit sober.’ That’s what I do: don’t try to edit while you’re writing. For me, that takes a lot of effort, not editing while I’m writing.”
Do you take that dictum literally, or how do you get to that place?
“(laughs) If I don’t take it literally, whatever I write I think it’s horrible. When I just write, it comes out pretty horrible as well, but there’s usually something there I can use.”
When did you feel yourself getting off-track with “The Spine” and how did you get back on?
“That’s a good question. During the scriptwriting process, that was the relatively easy part. When you’re getting into the storyboard, adding the visuals, that’s when you see where you’ve gone off the rails. That’s often a case of just pacing, things go by too fast and people don’t get it or it’s too slow and you’re over-explaining.
“One habit I have is putting in tons of voice-over. Voice-over works when you’re figuring out your story. It acts as scaffolding.
“Thank God I had good creative producers like Steve Hoban and Marcy Page. When you’re a director, you fall in love with stuff that may not serve the film. I fell in love with the voice-over, the words were so eloquent, so poetic, let’s leave it in! Steve said, ‘Come on, man, you really don’t need it.’
“For instance, that one scene where there’s a picture of Dan and Mary with Brian Mulroney: I had Angela doing a voice-over: ‘You were lost. Then you realized you really didn’t like that picture of you and Mary posing with Brian Mulroney’ just as he’s about to destroy it. But I didn’t need it.”
(In Part #3 of this interview, Chris Landreth discusses his creative philosophies and his plans for "The Spine.")
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