Last October, I spoke with Jim Mickle about We Are What We Are, a subversive cannibal thriller, but this year he’s back with something bigger, bolder and all around better: Cold in July. While a truly remarkable film in its own right, Jim’s journey to make the film – a process that lasted nearly a decade – is equally intriguing. Read on to find out how he landed Michael C. Hall in the lead role, avoiding cliches in 2014, homaging films of the 80s, a potential sequel of sorts, and how to really make a genre movie pop.
Before we hop in let me just tell you how much I liked this film. Just awesome, awesome work. I really enjoyed it.
Jim Mickle: Thank you very much.
It’s currently sitting around my top 10 of the year and I’ve seen 80 new films, so—
JM: Thank you very much, that’s awesome.
Yeah, really good work. So let’s talk about the movie itself. I love how the most minute moments of chance really alter the course of the characters in this story. So much so that their paths are irrevocably altered by these roadblocks or realizations that they or we never expected. I’m wondering, isn’t this structure-less structure much closer to real life than everything just going according to plan?
JM: (laughs) Yeah, I think it is. I love that too. I remember there is a moment early on— there’s a scene where they find something in the trunk of a Nova. There’s a moment when Don comes up and he kicks it and the trunk just pops open somehow. I remember at some point the financiers were saying, “Why? That feels stupid, it’s dumb— he just kicks it.” And I said, “That’s exactly what this movie is about.” The entire movie is built on these near miss things that don’t miss, and it’s a little bit of a fantasy of what if all of these things did happen, they did catch, these near misses and accidents— if all of these things did go that way— the chain reaction or the butterfly effect of that.
You said that one of the things that intrigued you about the project was kind of the same thing that made others nervous about it— and that is that it didn’t really adhere to formula. For me, that’s why the movie is so alluring. Because we truly never know where it’s going to go next. Can you talk about subverting expectations and leading the audience into these new uncharted territories?
JM: Yeah. That’s what I loved from the book. I think audiences want that and I think people are afraid to do that. I think a movie like this, if doesn’t work, the financiers get dinged by their boss. If it doesn’t have a guy with a cape or whatever, they go into all of these specific things that just work in this territory. You know, the beauty of it, it was written in 1989, 25 years ago, I think it was a much less commercial time in a weird way for storytelling. If you look at the movies in the 80’s— I used to look at them and laugh and said they’re all terrible— but if you go back and look at those thrillers, narratively there is so much more ambition than the stuff that they do now. Now you get one idea, one concept, and then let’s see how we can milk that one concept for a franchise of movies. These are awesome movies. These are movies that are sort of free to be themselves. The fact that I felt a little longing for a genre that floated away or dissolved away and wanted to bring all of those things back. It felt both familiar yet completely unexpected.
That’s really why it works so well, you find just the right balance between them. Let’s talk about Michael C. Hall in this. He finds this perfect nook between some of the more iconic characters that he’s played on premium television and then something else entirely new. He’s able to play both that nervous spirit and some of the more violent tendencies in this one character. So why was he for you the right casting choice for this project?
JM: He’s an amazing actor. Amazing, amazing actor. It took me a while to accept him as Dexter because I was such a lover of Six Feet Under.
Me too.
JM: You don’t often see actors like that who are able to go so fluidly into a character and create a living breathing human being that it feels wrong when they go and do something else. It’s amazing. Yet there’s these roles that you see him in, Gamer and a couple things, that are not amazing movies at all but he is so committed and he is so god-damned good at it— and he completely creates it, it seems like a new actor that you’ve never seen before. And I love the idea that he’s really spent 14 years playing these two characters and yet still has had these amazing characters in him that he was finally able to have a chance to play. So, that was a lot of fun. That was a lot of fun. I always wanted Dane’s character to be a little bit of an anonymous everyman and the fact that you could get somebody like Michael to comes off of Dexter and really jump into a completely different look and a completely different feel was the perfect fit.
I also got the sense of Robert DeNiro from Cape Fear in that first iteration that we see from Sam Shepard’s character. Were there any films— I know you were talking about the noir, pulpy films of the 80s— that you were in particular willingly homaging?
JM: Yeah, I think elements of a lot of things. Night of the Hunter being a huge one. I have a poster of that. I had a great mondo poster of that on the wall in the hotel where we were shooting. That was kind of a great reminder. So that, you know, Cape Fear, moments of Clute, Blood Simple, Lost Highway. I have a giant stack of DVDs here on my shelf I’m going to look at. Roadhouse, you know, Patrick Swayze. It was a big mix of stuff. I usually don’t like to say we’re making “this” movie and use no one example, but we used moments from a lot of different stuff. There will be a lot of screen-grabs and stuff. Sometimes for the cutting of a scene or the camera movements of a scene. In Blood Simple when Emmet Walsh was going down the hallway with the gun towards the bedroom — that’s almost shot for shot what we’re doing in the beginning when Michael’s coming down the hallway. It’s a love of that stuff and also hopefully it rekindles those movies in a way without trying to ape any of those movies.
Obviously this is a big step forward from some of your earlier projects, both in terms of the performers you’re working with, the production value, story and scale. Do you find it more of a challenge working on this bigger material or do you think it comes naturally to you? Do you want to keep scaling up or is this kind of the right size project for you?
JM: I think we have to scale up. I think just for sustainability’s sake. It’s a bittersweet thing, because in a lot of ways there’s no better experience than Stake Land which was half a million bucks— and a lot of people worked on that for free just for the love of movies— and that’s something that worked out kind of beautifully— but at the same time it’s not sustainable. Once you start getting higher up, once you start dealing with unions, once you get into these things you sort of have to take these big steps, you can’t just take baby steps anymore. There were moments when I really felt like we hit a ceiling. There was a moment one time we were shooting the bottles and the jars and the cans. He’s firing all six shots of the gun— we couldn’t afford to go through all of the blanks that quickly so I had to tell him at some point, “Tim, do you mind shooting every other shot and then faking the one in between, and I’ll add digitally another shot in there?” It’s that kind of stuff we can’t keep playing with obviously. It does come naturally, partly because the movie has been in our lives for years. We’ve read the book and adapted it that long ago. It’s been around in our lives so long so it was easy to be sort of obsessed and know every nook and cranny of the story and the characters. We were finally mature enough and confident enough to be able to do it. I think had we done it as just one movie it would have been a very different movie— it would have been less risky, stylistically it wouldn’t have been as interesting. We probably would have done it a lot more straight forward and I think by doing that a lot of the fun of making the movie and making the movie that feels like other movies— all of the meta things that I think work about this probably wouldn’t have been in this version— we would have been more inclined to play it close to the vest.
Speaking of that, while there is no cannibalism going on Cold in July is still an irrevocably dark film. What draws you to such dark dark material?
JM: (laughs) I don’t know. I don’t know. I grew up loving horror movies and that was what influenced me forever. It’s funny, Sam would show up on the set— and he would see the moonlight that we used was this specific color of aqua blue, and it had a little green to it, and the effect of that was that camera looks blue but on set it actually looks green— so the nighttime he would always show up and say, “Oh man, we’re making a Carpenter movie— you’ve got that green light going again.” I don’t know if it’s the pessimism of the world, a pessimism of humans, of humanity. In life, I am about as carefree and as happy and go-lucky as can be. I find that I have to step back and look at the movies we’ve done and they’re just, you know, I’m sure to some people they’re scary.
Sure, but in a good way.
JM: Somebody two days ago, who I think had trouble looking at me in the eye, said “This movie is totally dark and really violent and bloody,” and I thought, “Really? wow, ok.”
So, I’m wondering, at the end of this story it kind of turns to this idea of, “Well, life goes on” with Dane kind of just like crawling back into bed. Have you thought of what’s in store for the characters next, and more importantly do you think that somebody like Dane can go back to a normal life?
JM: Yeah, that was the big question and for me the answer was “No” but it wasn’t a black and white one. Michael and I were talking the other day, we had shot that really early on. We shot that scene and the other day he was saying like, “Man, had we actually shot that at the end of the movie, I wonder if I would have played that differently.” And then he went, “No, actually, I would have probably tried to convey something— and the whole idea of trying to control a blank feeling is where it needs to be.” Which I agree with. He can’t come home and look like Johnny Cash. He can’t come in dressed in all black, struttin’ in with cowboy boots. He’s still got to have an element of his gawkiness, he still has to have the duck boots and he still has to come in. He’s done it now and I think probably realizes this wasn’t the best thing. Had I not done what I did on my journey, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself, because I didn’t do it, but now that I’ve done it, I also don’t know if I can live with myself— but I have to. I think that’s the real interesting message to send about this guy. It doesn’t solve everything but at least now he knows that he’s been tested.
Last we spoke you said you were going to take a breather once you wrapped up everything on Cold In July. Are you still in that stage or did you line up something new?
JM: Yes. I’m thinking about a couple movies right now, trying to see what would work next. They’re wildly, wildly different from each other and what we’ve done before, so that’s cool. And then the most concrete thing is we’re developing a TV series with the Sundance channel.
Oh, very cool.
JM: It’s based on Joe’s work, Joe Lansdale’s work. An ongoing series he has that actually Jim Bob, Don Johnson’s character, is in.
The same character from this?
JM: Same character.
That’s awesome.
JM: Yeah, I talked to Don and he said he’d do the series. We still have to figure out how to make all of that work. But he’s like a character that floats in and out of these series. Same with Michael’s character, floats in and out.
Very cool.
JM: Same world, late 80’s. Partners in crime kind of a thing. We’re writing pilots right now.
That sounds fantastic. I would love to see that. Any movies that you’re working on as well?
JM: Yes, we’ve had a couple sticks that I’d been kicking around before that we’re sort of getting back into and rewriting now. Those have been good. They’re challenging. They’re challenging in their own way and hopefully holds its own, does make some noise and helps gets those things off of the ground. And then a couple very interesting scripts I’ve read and fallen hard for. But seeing what that whole process is like.
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