Jere­my Saulnier: ​‘The moti­va­tions for the vio­lence are all very practical’

After writ­ing and direct­ing the self-financed, lo-fi revenge thriller Blue Ruin in 2013, Jere­my Saulnier has turned his craft to the genre-inflect­ed siege thriller Green Room, which pits out-of-their-depth punk rock­ers against drug-deal­ing Neo Nazis. We spoke to him about how the film came together.

“Blue Ruin com­plete­ly changed the hori­zon. I was doing cor­po­rate videos pri­or to that movie. Going all in, tak­ing a gam­ble on that movie paid off in ways I nev­er expect­ed. Also, get­ting in to the Director’s Fort­night [at Cannes], to launch that movie on that inter­na­tion­al plat­form – I had access to inter­na­tion­al financ­ing com­pa­nies and for­eign sales agents. I would nev­er call myself an auteur, but to be labelled that was trans­for­ma­tive, espe­cial­ly after com­ing off Mur­der Par­ty in 2007, which was a fun, cul­ty, self-ref­er­en­tial gonzo com­e­dy. After Blue Ruin I was over­whelmed by the atten­tion I got from the indus­try that I had been seek­ing for almost two decades. It was just a mat­ter of instant access – that stage where you get this VIP access card, and you’re also hav­ing high-lev­el meet­ings, you’re approached by agents and man­agers, and when you have a con­ver­sa­tion, peo­ple lis­ten to you. That’s huge.

“With Blue Ruin, we tried tra­di­tion­al meth­ods of financ­ing with a lot of the same peo­ple I’m talk­ing to now, and the answer was just, ​‘There’s just not enough there. You can’t do it with that actor, leave alone the direc­tor on the director’s chair.’ So it’s just been hard to adapt to a world where peo­ple lis­ten to you, are seek­ing you for oth­er jobs, and hav­ing the folk for our dis­tri­b­u­tion – so I think I may even­tu­al­ly have retreat­ed from that, and Green Room was my answer. I’m not quite going to get sucked into the stu­dio yet, I’m not going to try and be too lofty, I’m going to regress a bit emo­tion­al­ly, and make a very hard­core genre flick that’s for my for­mer self and the friends that I grew up mak­ing movies with who taught me cam­era tech­niques, and intro­duced me to direc­tors like ear­ly Peter Jack­son and Mar­tin Scors­ese. I had to look back, feel safe, and make a film for a core genre audi­ence. I also had to sur­prise myself, because I think there was a cer­tain amount of expec­ta­tion com­ing after Blue Ruin that I want­ed to sub­vert in this movie. By hav­ing full access to what some would call high­er taste lev­el stuff and say­ing, ​‘No, I’ll be true.’

“Green Room was a title I had five or six years before Blue Ruin, so the log­i­cal pro­gres­sion of my films should have been Mur­der Par­ty, Green Room and then Blue Ruin, but because Blue Ruin was designed from the script lev­el to be some­thing I could con­trol with access to sparse loca­tions, resources and actors, it came before Green Room as a neces­si­ty. I had access to [actor] Macon Blair, and an old rusty blue Bon­neville, and my par­ents’ house, and Macon’s cousin’s prop­er­ty, and I put that togeth­er. I do things very prac­ti­cal­ly, and I think I’m proud to be fol­low­ing a tra­jec­to­ry that’s fun to track for being a lit­tle unex­pect­ed. So with the next movie I’m not going to do some­thing that’s like Green Room at all.

“I think Green Room is a hybrid, tonal­ly, of my first two films. You know, Blue Ruin being stark and very deep emo­tion­al­ly, and Mur­der Par­ty being a lot more fun, irrev­er­ent and goofy. This one is ground­ed – it’s seri­ous, but it has that sort of excite­ment lev­el and a lit­tle bit more enjoy­a­bil­i­ty. I wouldn’t say it lacks emo­tion­al depth, but just it’s very much buried under the surface.

“I knew this was going to be a bru­tal film, that it was going to be a make-up show. I love and respect that art, as far as the action chore­og­ra­phy and cin­e­mat­ic vio­lence and prac­ti­cal make­up effects, so I knew this could cer­tain­ly dip into hor­ror ter­ri­to­ry. The way I approached this was: I’m mak­ing a war film. It’s about this real, very human con­flict. The moti­va­tions for the vio­lence, they’re all very prac­ti­cal. As bru­tal as they are, no-one here is sadis­tic, they’re just pre­serv­ing them­selves, pro­tect­ing their inter­ests. The moti­va­tion for the vio­lence, I think, sets up the tone. From here it is just a straight-up bat­tle, and it is not a tor­ture ses­sion. All the par­ties involved would have avoid­ed this con­flict if they could have. But it’s about one act of vio­lence lead­ing to a whole night of car­nage. That was the inspi­ra­tion. That’s all I’m doing.”