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‘Green Room’ director Jeremy Saulnier talks movie violence & feeling the pressure

Jeremy Saulnier Interview for Green Room

Jeremy Saulnier Interview for Green Room

Green Room is easily one of the highlights of this cinema year. The film sees a punk-rock band pitted against an army of neo-Nazi skinheads after an unfortunate incident. Directed by Blue Ruin helmer Jeremy Saulnier, the film is an intense, brutal and bloody battle for survival. With it arriving on home entertainment platforms this week, we highly recommend you give the film a watch if you missed it at the cinema.

We caught up with Saulnier ahead of the release and was coming to the end of a hectic week working on his next project – ‘we’re in the furor of casting and it’s going well.’ We of course wanted to get his insight into Green Room. He shared all about working with Patrick Stewart, his love of the punk movement, and how he handles the pressure of expectations.

Jeremy Saulnier Interview for Green Room

Jeremy Saulnier Interview for Green Room

I read that you’d been sitting on the idea for Green Room for a while, why did you decide that now was the time?

Basically I had come off of Blue Ruin and I was just terrified to enter into the industry. I guess I questioned who I was as a filmmaker and what I wanted to do. I had friends who had experienced a certain amount of success before I did. I watched them take the studio path and engage in development and just kind of flounder for two/three years without making movies. I thought making a film like Green Room would be certainly a risk, but an even bigger risk would be trying to engage too soon in this huge, intimidating system where commerce is largely based on not making movies – just developing. You give away power, you give away control and the momentum I had myself… I didn’t want to just all of a sudden abandon that and put my fate in the hands of others.

I wanted to keep going and I figured that Green Room was this premise that I’d been kicking around for six or eight years prior to making Blue Ruin, but the best thing for me to do was to do something personal. Something that I thought that only I could do. It’s a very esoteric idea that’s hard. The world that we’re exploring in Green Room is a very hardcore punk scene. It was very aggressive. It’s a very hardcore genre flick. I think expectations from me after premiering Blue Ruin at Cannes were set, and I wanted to go against expectations.

Jeremy Saulnier Interview for Green Room

Jeremy Saulnier Interview for Green Room

Why punks, why not some other genre of musicians?

I come from the world in suburban Virginia outside of DC where there was this vibrant hardcore punk scene in the 1990’s. I was part of that scene. I was in bands; my friends were in multiple bands. It was just part of our lives growing up. It was just something dear to me. The aggressive music, the physicality associated with it and the requirement to be a physical presence to fully experience it was huge. It’s a big theme in the movie. The aesthetic of punk and hardcore was just really key to us. It’s what I like visually. It’s like a weird post-apocalyptic-type setting in a contemporary setting, but way cheaper. So I got to do my Mad Max style, but in a more grounded world.

The violence in Green Room is graphic but not indulgent, how did you strike the right balance?

I don’t try actively too hard. It’s just ingrained into how I perceive violence. Real life versus dramatic violence. I just love cinematic violence in terms of the arts and crafts and engineering. Just sculpting prosthetic make-up, effects, pumping blood in tubes in the engineering aspect. I did a lot as a kid. I was just fascinated with movie monsters. Although the choreography and technical photography that goes into the simple act of selling gacks. That’s what I loved as a kid, playing in the background with VHS cameras. But of course I’m struck by real life violence, there’s a certain responsibility I have just to myself. The politics of how do I use violence and blood? Well it has to be used for the narrative. It has to be used just more as an emotional component so that the audience really reacts in a certain way. It has to build tension and heighten the experience, not just satisfy blood-lust.

Jeremy Saulnier Interview for Green Room

Jeremy Saulnier Interview for Green Room

This definitely leaves an impression – I’ve not looked at a box-cutter the same way since – it’s much more effective than a film like Saw which is very gore-heavy.

Those films are not really that bad. I always love a good makeup show and I like action and I do like to see it all unfold. But films with a priority of atmosphere and tension like John Carpenter‘s The Thing – that has some of the best makeup effects ever archived on film. But it’s really the overall aggregate of how the effects compliment the world, and it’s just a contained ensemble piece. It has a certain look and feeling that other films don’t. It’s not a game. A lot of the so called ‘torture porn’ movies… they’re not just how you see violence onscreen physically, it’s also the motivation of the antagonist. They’re often sadistic. They revel in hurting people or toying with them, or destroying them.

In Green Room there’s more of a tragic element in a reluctance to as far as what’s behind the violence. It’s pragmatic, it’s brutal and very graphic, but anyone involved in Green Room could erase the night’s events and just go back to how it was the day before.

Jeremy Saulnier Interview for Green Room

Jeremy Saulnier Interview for Green Room

We spoke with Callum Turner [who plays Tiger in the film] and he was saying that he really didn’t like being in ‘the room.’ He was saying it almost exuded this violence from within the walls. Did you pick up on a similar vibe?

For inside the Green Room? Oh yeah, it was definitely designed to be claustrophobic and just uncomfortable for the out-of-town band. It was certainly lived-in and weathered in a certain way. The second they arrive there it’s a creepy feeling. We made it very tense for the actors. It required a lot of emotional performances and physical output from them. We basically torture them. To do a film like this, which is shot pretty much in continuity once we were inside the sound stage, we achieved a very heightened level of emotion very quickly. To sustain that is very tough and it was very hard for the actors to see their cast members go through so much. We get that very real reactionary level. It was tough on everybody. Also physically they had to also endure a lot of atmosphere – smoke and dust – it really was just hanging in the room. It was dusty and hot and it can get very uncomfortable in many ways, but I think it really helps the performances.

Jeremy Saulnier Interview for Green Room

Jeremy Saulnier Interview for Green Room

This is a very different part for Patrick Stewart, were you surprised when he agreed to do it?

I was. I’m always surprised when anyone agrees to do my movies, I’m so grateful. But having a superstar like Patrick Stewart come on-board was just such a wonderful gesture. It’s hard to find people in the industry of his stature who are still just very adventurous and willing to take a risk on someone relatively new to the film scene. I think it was just perfect timing where he was looking for something new and he was excited to take the risk. A lot of other people when they are at the top of their game have so many choices. I get the feeling that people are, just as actors who have played so many roles, are looking for something new…but what’s in it for them? Patrick was just very willing to… he still wanted to do something new, but it wasn’t about what was in it for him, it was about what could he add to this world.

Jeremy Saulnier Interview for Green Room

Jeremy Saulnier Interview for Green Room

His character Darcy is so important and there’s so much weight behind his presence. But we use that largely off screen. So it was all about balancing how much authority, and I guess influence, he had over all these skinhead underlings. So when he steps on screen it was not about him. His theatrical background and huge star power being able to invisibly melt into this world and being very real. Playing it down. His stature amongst all these other actors helps him be quiet, be subtle. That was really fun for us to go against type. He is the big bad guy of the film, but he is quite polite. The brutality is in that kind of indifference and not a blood-lust. It’s just self-preservation to the extreme.

Blue Ruin and Green Room were both received very well by fans and critics. Are you feeling the pressure for you next project?

Oh always! I was shocked knowing I was going to take a dive towards the hardcore genre with Green Room, I expected to take a hit critically. Some critics, I think when we first premiered Green Room, were a bit disappointed because they wanted that lofty, Jeremy Saulnier ensemble movie, which was expected. I think what was fun about Green Room is that it was charged with something new. I really did utilise my opportunity to further my career. To do something that I genuinely felt that no one else would ever make. I filled a void with both Blue Ruin and Green Room.

Critically I do suffer from a little insecurity and I read a lot of reviews for the films. I of course obsess over the few negative ones (laughs). I’ve gotta learn to stay off of social media now that we’re all so viral. People tag you in negative reviews and it’s just like – ‘what the Hell are you doing?’ There’s always the pressure, creatively it’s fine, but I do think I will have to beef up my confidence level and stay true to what I like and what inspires me, and just see how it goes. I can’t complain – so far, so good.

Green Room is available to own on DVD, Blu-Ray and digital download now. 

Kat Hughes is a UK born film critic and interviewer who has a passion for horror films. An editor for THN, Kat is also a Rotten Tomatoes Approved Critic. She has bylines with Ghouls Magazine, Arrow Video, Film Stories, Certified Forgotten and FILMHOUNDS and has had essays published in home entertainment releases by Vinegar Syndrome and Second Sight. When not writing about horror, Kat hosts micro podcast Movies with Mummy along with her five-year-old daughter.

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