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This week we continue with the In Conversation series with writer/producer Samantha Swan and director Christopher Comrie about their film The Devil’s Tail. This portion of the conversation takes us to questions about the likeability of characters and its place in movies, Chris’ strengths as a director and reality TV. Missed the first part? Check it out here.

C: Probably my most significant quality – my best quality – as a director is that I know what good acting is. If you know what good acting is and you can see it in the audition then it just lessens your load. It’s a constant thing in all of our work that I am so aware of eye candy and ear candy, the flash that will excite people and go ‘This is a great movie,’ or ‘This is a great play,’ and there’s always a crisis of confidence usually just before opening night were I go, ‘I really should pull out the stops there and really draw attention to people with how flashy this is,’ because you try to make it seamless. The point is for me that when you walk in to see a movie or a play and the lights go down, the first things that happen draw you in and, ideally, you forget entirely that you ware watching a play or a movie. And you are completely absorbed by the story like on an organic, cellular level in your stomach, in your guts. You don’t judge it or anything, you’re just involved with the people in these situations. That’s the hard thing to do, that’s the brass ring and anything that distracts from that like ‘Oh! Crazy whip-pan,’ or ‘Wild editing effect,’ or ‘MTV globbo’ this sort of stuff, it all makes people go ‘Hell man that was really cool and flashy,’ but it keeps distracting you and popping you out of the story and I always have to ditch it at the last minute.

S: Also I would argue that the current feature film-going audience, in English language anyway, they don’t need us for that. They’ve got plenty of other people to do that. I think that there’s a real lack of films being made – the kind of films made by John Sayles for example. I mean we make no secret of the fact that we will happily take our heroes and our inspiration from everywhere, because we do. Obviously we’re taking a lead from the book of John Sayles and John Cassevetes – to be actor oriented, to be performance oriented, to be honest, to try and go for something that’s not all filler dude and douchebag dialogue.

C: To hopefully never be boring.

S: Yes, of course. Number one rule: keep the audience awake. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable goal.

C: (laughs)

S: “Don’t let the ass go numb” I think is perfectly fair. Like I said, it’s not that I can’t write in the lingo of my generation. It’s not like I can’t have guys calling each other fags and stuff like that. There’s some of that in the movie, you saw that, in the way these guys are talking and wrestling and drinking and smoking and everything else. But I am personally really resentful when I go to a film and I feel it is filled with “filler” dialogue. You know, dialogue that really is dude and douchebag filler dialogue where nothing is being said. I resent it. I resent the hell out of it. I’m not a genre snob, it doesn’t matter to me if it’s a Friday the 13th remake or a John Sayles movie. I want them all to be good. So I am extremely resentful when I feel like I’m being condescended to or pandered to. I don’t want to do that to anyone else.

C: Question number three. I think we’re on number three now, right?

T: Yes.

S: But I just wanted to say, I hope I didn’t ramble too much or put you off too much with my answer that I didn’t want to play Katie for personal reasons. I wasn’t trying to deflect you with that. It’s ultimately just not very interesting.

C: Sam also specializes in doing something very difficult as an actor which is playing really vulnerable parts. I think actors find it hard to be vulnerable because it’s a scary place to be up there. Many people have commented on a number of her different roles, ‘Wow, I would never be able to expose myself like that.’ Sometimes it’s pretty scary. I know that can sounds really pretentious and stuff but if it’s your ass up there that’s 30 feet high and wide and whatever, it can be very cringe inducing. It’s different from being in a play where you enter some weird hypnotic state and then it’s over and people can describe it to you but you have no record of it. You saw the movie, she has to go to some pretty scary places.

T: It’s true, but there’s noting I respect more as a viewer than watching a brave performance. There are a few actors today, many from Hollywood, which I would consider to be very brave performers. They are very few and far between. I think though that The Devil’s Tail produces some very visceral reactions in people – at least it did for me. So, no, you didn’t deflect my question, Sam. I asked because I suspected there were some personal undertones in the character.

: What I think is funny is that whether it’s people that we know or people that we don’t know that are reacting to our work, for the most part, people love our stuff. They really respond to it. They say, ‘Oh my God I laughed so hard and then in this scene I was shocked, I was crying,’ I was amazed I could do both things in one movie…

C: We want to give people and emotional workout.

S: Yeah! And they really, really respond. But there’s always one, whether it’s someone that we know or someone that we don’t know, that has a negative reaction. They say, ‘You know, I don’t like these people and I didn’t like the story,’ but then once they get talking about it, it still ends up being a compliment for us because in fact what they end up saying is, ‘I didn’t like the way that made me feel in that moment,’ and I think ‘Yeah! You’re not supposed to feel good when you’re watching two people that you like do mean things to each other,’ or whatever it is. So although it’s a backhanded compliment, because obviously it’s pleasant when people like your stuff and say that they like it and feel that they like it, but it’s still a compliment. They’re telling us that we achieved what we set out to achieve. I also think it’s a really curious thing that only in North America so people say things like, ‘I didn’t like those characters.’ That only ever happens in North America. It doesn’t happen in Europe, it doesn’t happen anywhere else. Likeability of characters is not the prism through which work is received or criticized elsewhere. It’s a curious thing and I have a theory that it is maybe Hollywood filmmaking that is the cause of that. I’m not really sure.

C: Well in Hollywood generally each scene is supposed to accomplish on thing. They’re learning a Hitchcockian way of doing it. Everything thematically in terms of how it’s lit and it’s shot, should be putting across this one point simple storytelling. And people like their characters straight forward. This is the good guy and this is the bad guy. This is the caring mother, this is the rebellious son, that sort of thing. If anyone other than the lead character has an arc, it’s confusing to people. All the key characters in this movie start out one way and then they just reveal more sides of themselves – it just became inevitable in the writing.

S: And obviously there’s always something that’s going on under the surface. A couple of guys wrestling in a Cenoté or talking about hunting or talking about drinking or whatever and then there’s the subtext where we’re really dealing with class consciousness. We’re really dealing with poverty.

C: Well, your character comes in and gets sympathy right off the bat and then next thing you know something else is happening and people are going, ‘What the hell? How could she do that?’ and then you change that again. The same thing with Pete. I think people are with Pete a long way until a certain point and then we test their affection for a hero.

T: It’s refreshing to see that you made them so real.

S: And people are killing reality everywhere.

C: Reality TV. People are queuing very strongly to specific two-dimensional, one-dimensional roles.

S: That’s the irony of so-called reality TV.

C: I think they sit them down and say, ‘You’re the crazy bitch and you can not deviate from that.’

S: But they do and nothing could be less natural, ironically for people who are not performers, than living your life on camera. It’s called reality TV but these people are performing constantly for effect and they’re told what to do.

C: They’re probably the least interesting human beings on the planet.

S: And there is the death of long form drama.

C: What I was going to say about this whole thing with the, ‘I don’t like it,’ was that you asked me one day, ‘Why do you think those people didn’t like it?’ And I said, ‘I’ll tell you how you make everybody like it.’ I gave you, ‘This could happen and this could happen, and if we wanted to make everyone like it and sell this thing really fast, I would’ve had this plot point, this plot point, this plot point; everything would’ve been happy with all the loose ends tied up. Nobody would have deviated from their basic character outline –

S: So there would have been no conflict!

C: … just desserts given out everywhere exactly the way that you wanted them.’ And there was this long pause and Sam said, ‘I absolutely HATE everything you just said.’ I said, ‘Yeah, me too!’

Come back next Wednesday for TFS’ In Conversation with Christopher Comrie and Samantha Swan.