Grief And Fun: Jennifer Reeder Knives And Skin
Looking back at a career in shorts and her second feature
From the IFC Films press kit for the theatrical release of Knives And Skin, 2019.
Jennifer Reeder interviewed by Ray Pride, film editor of Newcity, January 2019
Knives and Skin was on your mind for a long time.
It started in 2012 as a group of scenes, some visual ideas, maybe even as early as 2010. I wanted to make a series of short films around adults having a breakdown, at the worst, most wrong time. We're a culture of people breaking down, but somehow manage, for the most part, not to break down at inopportune times. So I had a series that I didn't know how to craft into a feature film, and I ended up making a bunch of short films including A Million Miles Away (2015), which went to Sundance. That experience helped me understand that people were at least interested in watching films about adults having breakdowns at the most wrong moment! Those short films about adults breaking down were also related to adult coming-of-age, or the idea that coming-of-age is a lifelong process, and that we evolve as adults. We certainly evolve as parents. And also, that in society, we don't put enough stock into what teenagers themselves know from both experience and observation.
So I made these short films, A Million Miles Away, Blood Below the Skin and Crystal Lake.. Each with teenagers with agency, and adults in crisis. But they were tests, too, testing out scenes, testing out moments between characters to see if I could sustain these themes and ideas at feature length. The goal of so many people is to make a feature-length film, but that's not always mine. My goal is to tell a good story with good characters, and sometimes that's five minutes and sometimes it's fifteen, sometimes it's thirty. Right now? It's an hour and forty-five minutes! So it's been a long time coming. While writing I made other short films, and I directed my first feature, Signature Move, which I didn't write. So, I often had to stop and step back, and life things happened and became part of the process, too. So after all that, it was a year ago that I was finalizing what became the shooting script.
Compared to your dozens of earlier films, with each piece building on each other, short-by-short, festival-by-festival, you were more of a director-for-hire on Signature Move. In Knives and Skin, you’re capturing the voice established across all those shorts, but what lessons did you take from that first feature?
Signature Move gave me a real idea, over many, many days, of how to direct, how to be a better director, how to direct actors better, and especially, how to direct adults. Signature Move has no teenagers! I love working with teenagers, so that was a different moment. It's a comedy, but not a dark comedy. The wrestling scenes in Signature Move were awesome to direct, because they were choreographed action sequences. These large-scale action scenes gave me an idea of how to shoot the football game scene in Knives and Skin, which is not quite an action sequence, but still a larger spectacle.
And pacing yourself working over a longer schedule.
Yes, how to pace myself over a seventeen, eighteen, twenty-five-day shoot, yeah. It's not like I couldn't, like I was not able to handle, by any means, these 12-hour days, but I think you have to wake up every moment and reset, to think of it as a new day so that you come fresh to the set. What you have to keep in mind is what you've shot prior to that, plus all of what you still have to shoot. I don't mean this in terms of continuity, because there are lots of people on set keeping track of continuity, but making sure that at the end of the day, the emotional texture or temperature of the whole film is making sense. That's the job of the director.
It's different from saying, “Oh, we’ve got a weekend, we'll make a short.”
Oh, 100 percent, yes. And there are many more people involved behind the camera. It’s very important to me to keep the set calm and fun. You want people to want to come back to work! They're getting paid, certainly, but it's also really important to me, because Chicago is a small town and word-of-mouth travels fast. If you're a director whose set is no fun, no one is going to come back. They might but they might not work as hard if they don't understand your set is a fun set.
So why grief?
Grief is the most complicated emotion. In both real life and in movies, it's one that has not been explored to the fullest. For instance, in too many films women, well, grieving people, and specifically grieving women, women in grief are shown just falling to their knees and sobbing uncontrollably. Or they just retreat from life altogether.
But in real life? I'm fascinated by stories of people in the immediate moments of grief. For instance, when a spouse dies, they're reluctant to call an emergency responder right away. Instead, they maybe sit or sleep with the dead body of their spouse for an extended period of time, maybe not days, which to me is neither disgusting nor morbid. It's very unexpected, but it’s also maybe the most honest kind of response. I'm also fascinated with stories of parents who have lost children, particularly if they don't respond in the way that people imagine is “realistic” and then immediately become a suspect in that death.
Grief is just like desire. Grief is extremely personal, and grief is really eccentric. There are a lot of films that explore the complication of desire and the precision of desire. I don't know many films that are meant to entertain which also explore the precision and the complication of grief. I want to explore human connections and grief and trauma and coping.
How does this reflect your experience as the mother of three sons?
I was thinking about grief long before I became a mom. I didn't make films about grief before I became a mom, but I was interested in grief before then. When I became a mom, at first I didn't think that any of the content of my films had changed at all. I don’t think it's uncommon for mom artists or mom novelists or mom filmmakers to get questions that maybe the dads don't get, things like “How has motherhood changed your process?” or whatever.
So, at first I would say, “Oh, it hasn't, it hasn’t changed at all.” But then I realized that maybe the first film, the first significant film that I made after becoming a mother, was about a missing child! I mean, that would be the most obvious connection for someone to make, that that would be my greatest fear, an unspeakable kind of fear. But I didn't put those things together; it was just a real instinct to make those films, to make this. Knives and Skin is about a missing child and a grieving mother. And there are lots of odd moms in the film. And it’s also very much about the complications of motherhood and the very specific way the mothers in this film deal with their situation.
When did you add the teen chorus to Knives and Skin? The power of the young voices, a cappella, carries so much emotion. The pop songs are generationally inappropriate for these kids, even if they had had a big brother or a big sister who loved these songs. They’re torn out of time. But their voices, in chorus, transform the once-brash pop songs into their own music, while also reflecting the youth of the music teacher. She's infusing them with the haunted melodies of her own sort-of-Gothic teenage years, which now becomes a moving shared experience.
That's a totally accurate read. It also is part of my autobiography. The songs, or the groups, from my teenage years are included in Knives and Skin, and my shorts have included choral arranging of 1980s pop songs. In 2012, I did a film where characters sing an a cappella duet of Foreigner's “I've Been Waiting for a Girl Like You.” That's more rock than some of the progressive alt that’s in this film. I made a short where a woman sings a very bad rendition, also a cappella, of “Sweet Child of Mine,” which in a lullaby form is a heartbreaking song. So many of the songs that I'm drawn to from that era, when you break them down lyrically, just have a lot of pathos. The songs also have a great, infectious beat, whether meant for fast dancing or slow dancing. But I'm drawn to the lyrics of a song that can carry the content of a scene, or the narrative thrust of a group of scenes. When I made A Million Miles Away in 2014, part of the experimentation was trying to see if I could get away with a choral rearrangement of a hard-hitting rock anthem. The title of A Million Miles Away is from a Plimsouls song featured in Martha Coolidge’s Valley Girl which is one of my most favorite teen films of all time, so there was also that nod to that moment in that film.
Jenne Lennon, who has done all of the choral arranging for me the past several years, made a lamentation version of “You've Got Another Thing Comin’” by Judas Priest. In its original form, it’s obviously, yeah, a total hard-hitting macho rock anthem. In this lamentation version? It’s this self-esteem boosting, pathos-jammed, beautiful track. I liked the history of that band: the lead singer, who, perhaps when he wrote that song or was singing that song in leather with spikes also knew, “I am gay, I am HIV positive, you know I am the lead singer of this really macho band but I have these secrets and ‘You've Got Another Thing Comin’.” So it was both the song itself but this interesting provenance. That song plays out in its entirety. It's a three-and-a-half minute song in a twenty-seven-minute short. What I found was that audiences were immediately emotionally affected by that scene, by this group of twenty-three actual teenage girls who had not a lot of film experience, but could all genuinely sing, who were not a choir prior to me casting them as singers. This was a transformative moment for me as a director, to say that this risk I took will pay off, it does exactly what I wanted it to do, which was have a genuine emotional effect on an audience. I tend to obsess over ideas until I feel instinctually that they've been exhausted. Maybe not unlike other people, there are ideas that I will continue to poke at through many, many films. Even small lines of dialogue appear in multiple films or names of characters appear in multiple films! It's like a tic in my brain or an itch on the roof of my mouth. I just have to keep noodling away at that, poking away. I feel like I'm just getting started with musical elements in films, not that I want to build up to writing an opera or something that could be considered a full musical, but I certainly am not done with having people sing.
It’s a shared experience that steps outside the constructed narrative.
Yes.
Are there influences on Knives And Skin simmering under the surface?
The comparison I heard most often, not just to Knives And Skin, even in the script phase, and even earlier in the shorts, is an easy comparison to David Lynch, and specifically ”Twin Peaks.” I don't mind that comparison.
Something about trauma.
Yeah, absolutely. His films have a specific power and art direction and have very stylized dialogue. Characters often deliver an awkward line at the most awkward moment. This makes for beautiful, odd, memorable moments. David Lynch certainly also deals with surrealism. He was influenced by art.
I didn't go to film school, I went to art school. I was always making films, but alongside painters and sculptors and photographers. I totally understand that comparison and I think it's valid and embrace it because I appreciate him so much. But I would also say there’s some Catherine Breillat as well as the double Todds, Todd Solondz and Todd Haynes. After I saw Safe when it came out in theaters, I feel like there is a little Carol White in every single female character that I have written and I have no shame admitting that. Knives and Skin has a scene that's a direct ode to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman. This is not the first time I've had a character make a meatloaf!
So, there are my film godparents. So far no one has made a connection that's inaccurate. I also loved the first Pitch Perfect, a great coming-of-age story that involves music and female friendship as survival strategy. It's like super-pop and sugary but I proudly own that DVD. So far there have not been any deeply offensive comparisons.
In Knives And Skin, a lot of dialogue bites and the actresses bite down hard, in the best possible way. These characters are definitely impatient, pissed-off women.
I love difficult women both in real life and in films. I even love cruelty as a character trait. One of the first films I remember seeing as a kid was Hitchcock's Rebecca, and being obsessed with Mrs. Danvers, who is so cruel to the second Mrs. de Winter! And this ever-present Rebecca who we never see, but we figure out eventually what happened to her. I liked this kind of love triangle between these three women, one of whom was so deeply cruel, one of whom is a ghost, basically, and the other one, the wide-eyed innocent. There has also been that kind of influence of trying to find out which of my characters is the cruel one, which one is the ghost, and which one is the one who, just simply, is deeply likable, maybe even to a fault. She’s so likable that you hate her by the end! I love the way that you know certain female characters are just mean. Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar is a favorite. I brought that up as a Christmas movie on social media. Someone was asking, what are your favorite Christmas movies? Morvern Callar! I've shown her movie to my students and it’s really polarizing, mostly to male students.
Morvern is cold from the get-go.
She’s unrelenting. But I still love her. I still root for her when she's walking away at the end. I'm rooting for her. I couldn't wrap my head around the idea that she was a made-up character, she just seemed so believable and so real in her kind of cruelty. But again, it's grief. She's grieving and grief is eccentric. Other scenes are influential. I wouldn't say that I'm the biggest Paul Thomas Anderson fan, but I have always loved that scene in Magnolia where everybody sings together and there is a moment like that in Knives And Skin. That's a moment in that film that some people love and some people hate. I thought it was odd and risky and beautiful and poetic and dumb, even. Not because everybody can sing like Aimee Mann, but it’s just this heartbreaking beautiful moment where we get to sit and stop and try to remember everybody in the ensemble cast, everybody's storyline, and understand that their hearts are all connected. I find that scene masterful. And I suppose like anybody else, at some point I was going to steal it for myself.
The production design by Adri Siriwatt, and cinematography by Chris Rejano are bold and brash, but your editing, again by Mike Olenick, has its own signature pacing.
Yeah, the pacing. When I was 17, I went to work at a movie theater in Columbus, Ohio, where I grew up, the art-house. They just were hiring, I didn't even know that I wanted to be a filmmaker. So I replaced all the films that I thought that I liked with a whole 'nother catalogue of films based on what this theater showed. And there was never a moment where I didn't understand what I was looking at. I was drawn to these characters and to the pacing and to a sense of artfulness and a cinematography that I hadn't seen in many American films. I couldn't articulate that at the time, I was 17 and a ballet dancer, a very classical ballet dancer. “Swan Lake” or “The Nutcracker” or “Giselle,” ballets based on music, the story follows the music, the steps follow the music, the pacing follows the music. I think of the way that I work with my editor as more than just getting the scene established and onto the next scene, working a little more musically. This happened where we cut a couple of scenes together and then Nick Zinner, composing the score, would send us little test tracks that were just him messing around. He hadn't seen any scenes, he hadn't seen any footage. We would put the scene and the music together; we'll just slug it in there and see what happens. It was kind of incredible to watch and hear the edit change when the music changed. I'm not musical whatsoever but I like to think that my dance background has influenced how I direct and how I like scenes to play out and how I edit. I see so many films by even very young European directors and that sense of lyricism is there and they’re not being afraid to test the pace.
There’s so much character to each family’s domestic spaces.
Oh, that's there, for sure. I feel confident in my ability to write compelling dialogue. But I would much rather show an audience a character's space and let the audience begin to formulate who they think that person is based on that private space, their living space, and the things they choose to surround themselves with. The art direction, even when I was making a short for five dollars, art direction and the interior spaces were deeply important. What’s inside the frame, moving things out, moving certain things in, so that a poster behind the character, or books behind the character are the color of a pillow behind the character's head, and so on. All these details have meaning. With this one, it was no different. Our amazing production designer, Adri Siriwatt, worked closely with me to make sure that the interiors were characters as well. Even the interiors of the cars are art-directed with precision.
The story moves briskly, with only a few gestures toward backstory. The familiar parts of the high school movie provide genre scaffolding, and you start with the highest stakes. The emotions are real and the characters hurt and ache. The women are strong. Carolyn's injury comes when she explicitly denies consent.
I wanted to make a film where the story was about a missing girl, a gravely injured, missing girl. But at the end of the day, it's still a feminist portrayal, a take on the teen horror film that involves a missing girl whose body seems to reanimate, for lack of a better word, based on the grief of the entire town. Carolyn is both a zombie and a ghost, but I have never seen a zombie or a ghost portrayed this way.
There's a brutal disconnect. Carolyn is “the girl” but how everyone looked toward and beyond her threads through the story: everyone’s projecting onto her, mostly for the worst. Carolyn is pale, her glasses are pale, the pom-poms on her band hat are white, her jacket is paler than robin’s-egg blue, she arrives in white light. You give us a walking ghost from the get-go.
Even in casting, I wanted her to be small and pale, blonde, not unremarkable, but in a sense of what those things represent in American teen culture. A blonde, blue-eyed teenager in a marching-band uniform. That gives you a very specific idea of who that girl is, what her age is. Obviously, there are marching bands all over the country; it also feels deeply Midwestern to me. We knew going in, I wanted pale, softer colors, not bold ones. I wanted her to be like a doll. It felt real delicate when I was writing it and then shooting it and cutting it and then judging the balance of how much of Carolyn to put in, not injured, how much to put in after she is injured. We shot a lot of footage of her that in theory takes place before the film starts, but we use it not as a memory. It's a parallel harmony that's happening in the film. It felt important that, because we see Carolyn injured so quickly into the film, that at some point we realize that percentage-wise, there is more footage of her not injured than there is of her injured. That was a very specific determination.
I always knew in my brain what I wanted Carolyn Harper to look like, even that kind of generic name, Carolyn Harper, nothing against “Carolyn” or “Harper,” but that also just felt like “Laura Palmer,” there is something emblematic in her name as well.
The opening feels emblematically modern. The self-possession of Carolyn in that scene is quietly searing. There is so much agency and so much anger, she offers him every chance to back off, but she plays it as aggravated banter instead of the crankiness in the heat of the moment. She doesn't want to say it in a way that flirts, but in a way maybe she is flirting? Every single thing she says and the way it is performed is an elemental battle of wills. She announces her agency about sex plainly.
I wanted to make her not the virgin, but sort of the pretty girl who is maybe a nerd, like a band nerd, who has agency over her sexuality. She has led this boy to the quarry to have sex on her terms, and because we tell girls how to deal with consent, but, still not boys, he doesn't know when to stop. He understands and respects her right up to the moment that she decides that she wants to go home and that she doesn't want to follow through. And he has that line that I don't mean to garner any kind of empathy or sympathy, where he says, “You promised, you know.”
And she’s saying, yeah, I promised that five minutes ago and now I'm done.
Yes. She says, I changed my mind. And then he gets to call her a slut, and leaves her there. I didn't want to leave him as a one-dimensional douchebag. I mean, he’s like a two-and-a-half-dimensional douchebag! He has a transformation throughout the film and he also later in the film has to deal with another person while not understanding borders and will and consent. That felt important, the transfer of will and consent and sex and grief, all of these complicated things within one scene. I wanted these beats of control to go back-and-forth, back-and-forth. That's how I write, and the characters in so many of the scenes in this film and in the shorts, it's a volley of control back-and-forth, subtle, but a volley of control, nonetheless.