Simon Killer: Interview Corbet & Campos

I’ve been waiting to pick the brains of these boys since I saw Simon Killer six months ago. It premiered at the AFI Film Festival last October and caused quite a stir. It’s unafraid and unforgiving; an Aronofsky-esque anti-hero story.

Brady Corbet plays Simon, a recent college grad that moves to Paris to get over a break up. When he get involves with a prostitute, Victoria (Mati Diop), we begin to see the inner demons that exist in his past and attempt to threaten his future.  It’s a delicious psychological exploration that’s an exciting follow up to Antonio Campos’ debut film Afterschool.

Brady Corbet has been hot on the indie scene for years with movies like Funny Games and Borderline Film’s fellow feature Martha Marcy May Marlene. He’s finally been handed the leading-man-baton and delivers a complex and eerie performance.

But upon meeting the bright blue-eyed kid at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in LA, you’d never guess he’d play a Killer. Campos was equally warm, and I was excited to have a moment to talk script, psyche and the infamous, animalistic ‘moan.’

ATW: You guys knew each other before you even started Simon Killer. How did you meet?

B: Antonio and I were at Sundance, which was when we really spent a lot of time together. He was there for Variety’s Ten Directors to Watch panel, and I was there because I had a short film that I directed that was in competition. We were immediately very fond of one another, a similar sense of humor, similar taste; it sort of blossomed from there.

A: We got to know each other really after watching our films, and then we were speaking to each other like filmmakers and had something to reference.

B: It changed the way we dealt with each other. Then we were kind of trying to find the right thing. It took a few years and we made some other movies. When we were gearing up to do Martha Marcy May Marlene, Antonio came to me with the seeds of what the movie would end up being. We discussed the film a great deal and got each other very excited about it and fleshed out what the narrative structure would be. We both lived in Paris as young men. We shared our experiences about being in a foreign city we had romanticized a lot and what it felt like to be lonely in that environment.

ATW: You all had time to workshop the script in Pigalle before the shoot began.

A: We had a month to workshop the story and improvise.

B: It was pretty fast.

ATW: What were some of those scenes you formed in the rehearsal process?

B: The scene outside the movie theater. Figuring out what the dialogue and banter would be. We’d always know what three or four lines in the scene would be. In the outline it would be like, ‘Simon meets two young women outside a movie theater. He does his best to flirt.’

A: I’ll pull it up.

ATW: Yes, please do! (Luckily Antonio has his lap top nearby)

B: ‘At some point his conversation is interrupted when he runs into a man on the street who gets aggressive with him.’ That dialogue was something specifically that had happened to Antonio. He said ‘there was this thing that happened to me where I was with these two beautiful young women and this guy stopped us and asked for cigarette. Then he asked to shake my hand and he said you have really small hands for a man. Antonio was like great thanks. And he said why is it that you have two girls and I have none. We knew we wanted to get to that line. It became this important thing, the fact that there’s all this male aggression in the film. There’s male aggression that’s being passed like a baton between characters.

ATW: Even between generations.

B: Exactly. [Simon’s] not the only source of violence in the film. There’s this moment where Michael Abiteboul, the guy who plays the cop, takes me in his hands. We discussed that being a moment of transference. He whispers something to me that’s barely audible; don’t make me do this to you again.  It’s an evocative detail.

Campos then pulls up the script on his laptop. He reads a few lines:

A: “She waits for a couple hours. He comes.” “He wakes the next morning. They have lunch together. It’s pleasant.” “She asks to wait outside. They proceed to do blow together….”

ATW: What program is this?

A: [laughing] Um, it’s called text edit!

ATW: I was like wait a second… it’s not Final Draft!

B: It starts with this Jordan Van Der Sloot quote,  “If I had to describe myself as an animal, it would be a snake. However I want to be a lion and I lion I will be, one day."

A [continuing to read from the script]: “Simon goes home to Carlos’s place all alone in the apartment and writes his first email to his girlfriend.”

ATW: So what you actually wrote wasn’t scripted?

B: There are separate files. The opening monologue was totally scripted, some things Antonio scripted by himself, some were scripted from conversations we had together.

Campos shows me another script file on his computer. He and Brady read a few lines in unison.

A&B: “You speak French very well. No, no, no that’s not true.  I studied it in high school but it’s bad. Do you want to make love? How much is that?”

B: This is all exactly what it was.

ATW: One of my favorite scenes is when Simon’s on the phone with his mom. Was that scripted?

A: The Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom? I said to my AD, ok well I know I want a scene where he’s trying to find the [fox] pin and he tries to call his mom. I was trying to write the scene but I came the next day and I said he calls his mom and all he can say is Mom. My AD was like that’s not a scene! But the meat of the scene and design of the scene, that was something that required Brady.

B: And we had the moan!

ATW: What’s the story behind the moan?

B: It started off like this: Antonio was like are you ever by yourself and just make a sound? [Antonio laughs] I was like what kind of a sound? He was like you know when you’re like [Brady does the moan]. So I was like ok, where can this sound come from? This is a character that suffers from very sever anxiety and panic disorder. Or maybe the character is that because I suffer from those things. This is an upper middle class kid who’s spent a lot of time in therapy, which hasn’t done him any good. Some people tap their wrists or are told to scream into a pillow. I thought of it as this thing that would arise when he was trying to calm himself down. It was just supposed to be a scene where I call my mom and cry, but the moan ended up coming up very organically. We hadn’t planned to do it, but it just worked.

ATW: It’s very sexual as well.

B: Totally. Everything is primal. The whole movie was reductive; how do we get things to a place of just their essence, try and strip things of their meaning in a way. It was always trying to find the animal in the character.

ATW: Talking about looking at people from a primal point of view, you shoot a lot from the back. I remember watching the film and thinking I could never get a good look at Simon’s face. I love the non-traditional close-up shots.

A: I like the back of people’s heads. I like seeing people from the back and we really see him for the first time at the end.

B: It always arrives at something; it’s all about tension. It’s for the viewer, to take them on a ride. The best one in the film by far is the one that follows Madi before she gets beat up. She turns into profile and she looks fucking beautiful in the shot and it’s the last time you’ll see her face look like that.

A; In terms of script, as filmmakers you have to think of scripts as images and what does this frame say or does the angle say. What does the position of their body say? Sometimes you come up with a line and that’s what you build the scene around, an image, a sound. The way that you edit a story is just a form of writing.

ATW: This film has the antagonist exist within the protagonist; Simon is both. You drew inspiration from the novel Bar on the Seine and the quote ‘The only thing that could help would be to start your life again from the beginning, right from the cradle."

A: How’d you see that quote?

B: That’s amazing! We almost opened the film with that!

ATW: I just understand your psyche. No, it was in the press release. So do you feel like there’s hope for Simon?

A: No. I envision Simon going and doing the same thing again. Maybe never [SPOILER] killing again but that he’ll do the same thing again to somebody else in the same form. But that’s why we leave the character in the film where we do. I want you to feel that question of whether you think this guy has any hope.

B: You know the musician Sondre Lerche?

A: He did Dan in Real Life music.

ATW: Yes! I saw him play at Largo!

B: He’s my writing partner’s husband. He came to see the film and he’s such a sensitive guy and he was like Do you think it’s perverse that I really think that there’s a little bit of hope at the end of the film? And we kind of like it. We like however people respond.

A: If you believe there’s hope that’s when you usually believe she’s’ [SPOILER] not dead!

B: We’ll do the sequel in 10 years…

ATW: Check back on Simon.

B: …and he’ll be being promoted to the CEO of a major company.

A: He’s successful.

B: He’s very, very successful but in that film we’ll shoot all the scenes in profile, not from behind. The whole film will be tracking shots in profile.

A: And then the camera will end on behind.

Simon Killer 2: I’d see it. Simon Killer is currently in theaters with IFC Films.