Interview: ‘Green Room’ Director Jeremy Saulnier

Samuel Kaufman ’19 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer

After premiering at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival in the Directors’ Fortnight section of the festival, Jeremy Saulnier’s third movie Green Room has been getting rave reviews (read Emertainment’s review of the film here). The film is a horror/action/thriller about a punk band who, after accidentally witnessing a murder in a neo-Nazi club, are forced to fight for their lives against the owners of the bar. Emertainment Monthly was given the opportunity to sit down in a roundtable interview with Saulnier, who wrote and directed the film.

Do you prefer to write your own stuff and be behind your own projects?

Jeremy Saulnier: I never even thought I was a writer. I just was not breaking through, and I needed to generate material so I could direct it. So I kind of write by necessity. But I’ve fallen in love with the process, so now it’s my favorite part. It’s real creative problem solving. It’s not hampered by any other constraints or personalities. It’s just great to just get it out there on a page. I’m very lucky so far… Green Room is a tough one to make, but it’s unfiltered. It’s not normalized. For better or worse, it’s a pure vision. And that’s very hard to come by. It’s kind of a battle for control and intellectual property, not because I want to be a tyrant, but because I really trust that no matter what the vision is, if it’s singular, it will stand out. It might get panned or it might get embraced, but it’s the anomaly. It’s not normalized and filtered and made to hit every formula there is.

[Green Room] is technically a horror, but it doesn’t really adhere to any genre. How did you clear your head of that when you were sitting down to write?

JS: I approached it as a war movie. It’s like a battle film… It’s a war film between civilians and soldiers, and that was fun.

EM: Did you build the set yourselves?

JS: We had to build the entire venue from scratch. It’s the biggest set I’ve ever had the pleasure of shooting in. We were originally looking for a location… and just didn’t find it. When we bit the bullet and actually built it, it became the only solution because when I wrote it, the layout of [everything] was already pre-determined. If we didn’t adhere to the diagram that I had in my head, it would disrupt the entire script. To re-translate it to a new environment would be disastrous. It was built and textured from scratch.

Was that something you knew going into the writing process, that you wanted the film to be contained within this one setting?

JS: Not necessarily that I wanted to, I knew it had to be. The whole concept was just “a siege film during a live concert in the backstage holding area” so I set myself up for that from the beginning. Whenever possible, I tried to get a bit of fresh air in the lush environments of the Oregon coast to contrast the intense claustrophobia within the green room. I had done a similar thing in my first movie, Murder Party, and I promised I wouldn’t do it again… It’s hard because it’s a lot of technical work and coverage to maintain continuity over the course of [the movie]. The story [takes place] primarily over the course of 16 hours, but to do that over 30 days is really difficult. It takes a lot of endurance and emotional investment from the actors because it’s so intense. I put them through the wringer.

I heard that you did a ton of coverage of the dialogue in the green room. How did you keep that high tension with the actors?

JS: The great thing was that the actors were so invested, that they were their own caretakers, and they preserved the integrity and the emotional groundedness and the heightened level of physicality from take to take. We would definitely track it. Often times we would go back and check takes for continuity. When you’re in one room, if you have someone get killed and the body drops, wherever they drop, you just bought into that [position] for the rest of the movie. And it has lots of impacts that you don’t see coming, that you have to deal with and be flexible. The good thing was we got to do a lot of work chronologically once we were inside. Once we got in the green room, it was really fun to take it step by step.

EM: When I was watching the movie, I was struck with how realistic the character’s decisions were. They were not action stars but they are also not stupid. Can you talk about how you went about striking that balance?

JS: I really enjoy actual humans on screen, and so I really was governed by what I thought they would do. Even Reece, the drummer, he [knows jiu jitsu], and I thought “I know people like that”. But it doesn’t save the day. Even the one badass is so far out of his depth, that you are forced to accept that this is not gonna end well. There’s a part in the movie where there’s a new layer of the concert venue established, and in a “real” movie, it would lead to an escape. But in this movie, the air conditioning ducts are actually 6 inches, as they should be to code. So it’s just a dead end! That’s so fun to be like “This is an actual dead end! Fuck this!” That’s what’s gonna happen, there’s not a convenient air shaft that can fit a whole person in it. I love that. But then you also write yourself into a corner. The characters had to stay grounded, and I just felt it was my duty to inhabit each character to stay true to what their motivation was and what their tolerance level was. I would leave them with no real options, so the only option would be to just somehow, keep going. And that might involve them dying. That was fun because when the audience really inhabits the character, and they feel so exposed and so vulnerable, and when you find that you don’t have convenient narrative slips here and there to satisfy my intentions as a writer, all of a sudden you are without that safety blanket, and you feel very off the road map, and it gets real terrifying. I let people die as they would, I didn’t intend for anyone to die, it just happened that way. It’s very sad.

EM: When you were writing, did you have an objective? Did you know who was gonna live and who was gonna die?

JS: I certainly had the overall arc in mind, but all the nitty-gritty stuff in between, I really had no clue. I didn’t allow myself to know who would survive and I certainly didn’t know when they would die. There’s a rapid-fire sequence in the film where a lot of people die, and that was traumatic to write, and traumatic to shoot.

The film really focuses on two very distinct demographics of people — the punks and the skinheads. Why did you choose to write about these super-specific demographics?

JS: I was a part of the hardcore punk scene back in the 1990s in Washington DC, and I just think it’s a really cool world to explore. I didn’t want to get too into the ideology, but I really wanted to harness the energy and exploit the aesthetic of it all. It’s very visually rich and raw. It was just a way to sort of archive my experience in that scene, and in the 1990s there were lots of Nazi skinheads at shows, and they were a little scary to me, of course. It was a vibrant, positive scene, but a few people with ill intentions can really cause a lot of trouble. The skinhead element was important not so much because of their Nazi ideology, that’s kind of besides the point for this film, it’s really because they are separate, and they are pseudo-soldiers.

[What is your] desert island band?

JS: It’s Black Sabbath. They’ve got a good diversity of blues, and metal, and some folk once and awhile.

EM: You’ve said before in interviews that if you are going to have violence, it has to be real, and have an emotional impact, which the violence in Green Room definitely does. Can you talk about how you achieved that?

JS: I basically targeted a very talented special effects make-up team, Prosthetic Renaissance. When I see bad effects, it tears me out of the narrative. It’s part of the whole grounded nature of trying to be authentic to the hardcore punk scene, having the characters be emotionally vulnerable and real and relatable, and having the onscreen violence be utterly impeachable as far as the realism. That’s exciting to me, and it’s a necessity. The violence is portrayed in a way that’s really engineered to intensify the experience. As long as [the violence] has an emotional toll and an impact, and a narrative purpose, I feel it’s very responsibly done.

At this point you’re definitely an indie success story, I was gonna ask if you have any tips in general?

JS: My advice is keep with your day job, keep close to the film industry, own real estate, and then make your move. I self funded both my movies after I had bought either an apartment or a house. I could not break in. The only way I could break in was on my own terms, with my own money. It was because I could not translate these ideas, and pitch them to financiers or producers. It’s about being realistic and diversifying, but stay close. What I would do was do corporate videos and commercials, and I would lose my mojo completely, and then I would jump off, and take a crew position as a cinematographer. I would be with directors, I would be on sets, but it wasn’t a year long investment, it was a six week investment. I could just learn from them, and then bide my time. The discipline isn’t when to make a movie, it’s when not to make a movie.

I came out of film school when it was very technically oriented, and that’s what saved me. I could write, direct, shoot, and edit my own movies. I think I broke through because I had the ability to actually make films by myself.

My advice is just don’t stop. That’s the only thing that’s actually true. I have a lot more talented friends that have dropped out of the filmmaking business. I am alone and I am considered a success, just because I hung on for almost two decades. You don’t have to win, you just have to stay on the track. It’s daunting, it takes a lot of endurance. In the end, you can prepare, you can make really good movies, but you also need good fortune. I lucked out by getting into Director’s Fortnight at Cannes. Because of Director’s Fortnight championing my movie, my access card to the industry was granted.

EM: Both Blue Ruin and Green Room are about characters dealing with intense circumstances in worlds where they do not belong. You are known for breaking into Hollywood. Is that you projecting onto your characters?

JS: Oh, I’m sure. I certainly feel out of my depth. I feel in command of my craft, but I’ll be out of my depth for a long time. Every new movie I make I’m out of my depth. I’m just trying to earn enough credit so I can make one stinker and then keep making more movies.

This interview has been condensed from its original form. Green Room opens in theatres on April 15th.