Blue Ruin: Vibing Out With Macon Blair

I got the opportunity to ring up Mr. Blair the other week to talk about Blue Ruin, the true grit of making an indie and yes, Aliens and Alien3. I actually first saw the film via U-Verse and had been looking for it in theaters for a while. My jaw dropped after Act I wrapped up, having no clue what was to follow. 

J: Once I saw Blue Ruin, I love how it had a biting, piercing Southern-Gothic punch to it. Being a big fan Jeff Nichols, Shotgun Stories, Billy Bob Thornton and Sling Blade there's a special place in my heart for this kind of filmmaking. 

M: Yeah, me too. Shotgun Stories gets brought up a lot and Jeremy had actually never seen it and it got brought up so much during the scriptwriting phase then he felt like "well shit, now I can't watch because I'll be influenced one way or the other." He deliberately avoided it, but yeah I love that movie.  

J: Same, and don't get me wrong, Shotgun Stories is a great movie, but Blue Ruin went above and beyond in my opinion because its screenplay was so tight from beginning to finish. It made its point within the first 15 to 20 minutes and cut right to the stuff. But going back to where you are from, I know you and Jeremy have grown up in this kind of universe together – storytelling, filmmaking, writing – how have you brought your roots into your acting today? And not just with Blue Ruin, but with any work you do. 

M: Wow, that's interesting. My family is from North Carolina and all over the place so I have a real affinity for southern literature, but we grew up in Alexandria which people would consider more DC. We grew up in the suburbs. And actually where Sam lives in the movie, that's Jeremy's house – where he grew up. That's his parent's house. That's kind of what our neighborhood looked like. That whole vibe was a result of practicality. My cousins lived in Charlottesville so we could get their property where the final battle takes place and we sort of incorporated available resources into the story, Jeremy did. That was sort of built out of pragmatism. And as far as how we incorporated that vibe into the acting… to be honest it never really crossed my mind because the story was about talking this character through each decision he made in the script. Any kind of regional flair, tone or vibe that comes with that, that arises from the locations that we shot in. The sound design of the bugs in the trees, all of that was a design of environment that Jeremy built very meticulously. 

J: It's interesting you say that – and I'll stop going back to Southern Gothic I promise – but I can hear these heat bugs throughout the film, especially towards the end at nighttime. That's something that is very rare and I feel like people who have a real grasp on this genre of filmmaking, they're the only ones who are going to incorporate it. I was really happy to see this. It may be a small aspect of the movie, but it makes a big point. 

M: Part of it was that they were just there while we were filming. And if they hadn't been there it would have been something that Jeremy would have gone out of his way to incorporate. 

J: I know you and Jeremy are childhood friends; when did you meet each other? 

M: Well actually, he was friends with my little brother first and I was friends with his little sister so we were kind of aware of each other from like kindergarten on up, but we started making movies together (which was sort of the basis of our friendship) when we started hanging out when he was in sixth grade and I was in seventh grade. And it was a big group of us – like six guys and a couple girls in the neighborhood – that's what we did with our spare time was make all these movies together. We all relocated to New York after school, and Jeremy and a bunch of others went to school in New York. And then the whole crew started making short films, bit commercials and we did our first feature together. But over time people have house payments and they have kids and one by one you know…and we are still tight with all of these people. It SOUNDS like all of the press has made it seem like a two-man show, but in fact it was a big squad of guys. And a couple of them actually worked on Blue Ruin – the guy I kill in the bathroom at the beginning he's one of the guys we came up with and Chris Sharp, the lead in Jeremy's first movie Murder Party, was an associate producer on this one. So everyone is kind of connected in some way or another, but the way things get written about it makes it sound like it's only Jeremy and me and that's actually not the case. 

J: That's awesome. The fact that you guys are that close is pretty rare. 

M: We feel very lucky for it. 

J: And it's also really cool that this group, you and everybody else, can shift from producer to actor to writer – it's this round-robin of talent. 

M: That's kind of how it started. We started making the movies together and had sort of a vague understanding of "a Director does this" and "a Producer does that." If I was acting then I'd be in the scene and then I'd get behind the camera and Jeremy would be acting and everyone kind of did all jobs at once. This is how things have continued to go. Everyone has been wearing as many hats as possible – part of that is necessity and part of it is because we don't have a lot of money to spend and it is how we have always kind of done things.

J: What was your immediate reaction when you read the first fifteen to twenty pages of the script?

M: Originally, we had been talking about this beach-bum character for a while and it was going to be more of a comedy. And Jeremy thought we should differentiate ourselves from what we had done before. And this was going to be a little bit starker. And I said "I feel like you got the wrong guy for this lead" and he said when you read the script it will make more sense. The guy is not a movie badass. He's hesitant and making all these mistakes, ones that typical movie heroes don't make. This guy is kind of fumbling all over the place, and that's kind of the point. I was also fearful because it was such a different thing than we had done before and I knew that Jeremy and his wife had invested so much into it (prior to the Kickstarter we did). I did have a period of "I really don't want to fuck this up." But we spent many months in pre-production and when it came time to shoot I felt like we couldn't have done any more prep, even though we still had some nerves.

J: It intrigued me that this was the end of other action movies. And this was the beginning, and now we are like "crap, what do I do?" 

M: We couldn't afford fireballs and car chases, so we wanted a character who the audience would be like "that's what I would do man. I would go to the fucking hospital." 

J: One thing I also noticed in the credit sequence was the score – it was by Brooke and Will Blair. Any relation to you? 

M:,Yep, those are my little brothers. They live in Philadelphia; they're both musicians; they've been in a bunch of different bands and they are kind of shifting into film scoring now. They have done all the scoring for Jeremy's feature before this one and his short film before that. I thought they did a great job – glad to hear you enjoyed it. I am hoping a soundtrack/score will get to iTunes soon. 

J: Environment is always a huge character in stories, if not the biggest character. You shifted from the beach to rural to suburbia back to rural. I love this changed in environmental tone. How many different locations did you guys film? 

M: For a small, independent movie we kind of did things the wrong way in a couple of instances and that was one of them. The logic would be when you have no money is to put the crew in one place and keep them there, but Jeremy went in the opposite direction and was like "no, we are going to move around so we can get all of these environments." And we wanted to archive the locations that were important to us. Like the beach stuff, that's part of the Delaware shore and Jeremy and I would go here as kids. That whole boardwalk area is like our summer childhood memory. A lot of filming in these locations was sheer practicality. 

J: I think that this film being so economically produced is what makes it so well done and gives it that grit that you can almost smell coming off the screen. Do you think independently produced films give a story more character? Compared to the large summer blockbuster. 

M: I don' think that is 100% the case. Every movie is a result of many different factors – one being dumb luck. There are just as many small movies that don't work as larger movies that don't work. Blue Ruin was so close to falling apart. If we would've had two more days of rain we would have lost our crew and would have wrapped shooting. We kind of got lucky, but there is something about the personal nature of a small movie. 

J: I read your piece in the New York Times so I had to ask… how big a fan are you of Aliens?

M: (laughs) That was one of the first movies Jeremy and I bonded over, but we also were inspired by other films as well. Aliens is a masterpiece. 

J: Aliens is just a damn good sequel. 

M: Yeah, because they reset to where it is a totally different movie. It makes perfect sense and is totally a balls-to-the-wall action movie vs. a slow-burn thriller. They fit together perfectly. I like the other ones too, but I don't think the subsequent Alien movies fit as well as the first two. 

J: Not so much with Alien: Resurrection, but with Alien3 there's so much behind that movie in terms of production hell, script rewrites, no script at all, bringing David Fincher onboard for his first real feature. He saved that movie in my opinion. All in all, I think it's a good movie. 

M: I do too. It took me a while and they make some bold narrative choices in that movie that I was surprised he [Fincher] got away with as a first time director. And the setup was amazing, but the third act is where it started to kind of fall apart for me. The CG was not that great and it's hard when you have the real-world effects from the first two. It has that video game quality that didn't quite work. But I do like David Fincher so…

J: What are some of your favorite scripted films? If you stripped them down to a story level. 

M: As far as things I had wished I had written… Chinatown, Rushmore and I think also Zodiac because it took so much compiling of data and reporting. I couldn't imagine being given all of that data and having to make a watchable movie.