David Robert Mitchell: ​‘There’s an ele­ment of mad­ness with­in this movie’

There’s been an expo­nen­tial expan­sion between each new film from genre-inspired icon­o­clast David Robert Mitchell. His first, 2010’s The Myth of the Amer­i­can Sleep­over, is a sweet-natured riff on teen love. 2014’s It Fol­lows revis­its a sim­i­lar teen milieu, only this time bring­ing a stalker/​horror ele­ment to the table. His expan­sive new film, Under the Sil­ver Lake, sends Andrew Garfield on a wacky and wild goose chase around Los Ange­les, and here the direc­tor tells us of his love/​hate rela­tion­ship with the land of cinema.

LWLies: What was your orig­i­nal moti­va­tion for mov­ing to LA?

Mitchell: I left Michi­gan for Tala­has­see to go to Flori­da State for grad school. I made a lot of real­ly great friend­ships there. And the idea was that, well, we need to work, so let’s move to LA. I moved with friends at that time. And yeah, the idea was to make films. I had made some shorts that I was proud of in film school, I was writ­ing my fea­ture scripts, and I moved out there with the naïve idea that I’d be mak­ing fea­tures with­in a year. Though it was a strug­gle for sure. As it is for most people.

How were you sur­viv­ing when you arrived?

I had very lit­tle mon­ey. I was look­ing for any work I could find. I did some PA jobs. I end­ed up work­ing at a post house, and I end­ed up work­ing as a PA there. So I went out there think­ing, I’ll be direct­ing fea­tures in no time, when in fact I was tak­ing people’s cars to get washed. It was a hum­bling expe­ri­ence try­ing to sur­vive in LA. I even­tu­al­ly worked my way up – I became an assis­tant edi­tor, then an edi­tor. I did com­mer­cials and movie trail­ers. That’s how I lived. The peo­ple I worked for were very cool. There was a point where, even­tu­al­ly, I start­ed sav­ing mon­ey to put towards my first fea­ture. That’s a real­ly short­hand ver­sion of it.

Are all the cul­tur­al ref­er­ences in the film things you are per­son­al­ly fond of?

You’d be sur­prised actu­al­ly. I don’t want to go through every­thing. There are some things in the film that come from my own per­son­al knowl­edge. One thing is that I have a love of Nir­vana from when I was young. That is some­thing that’s gen­uine. A lot of the details in the film are things that I know of. Some of the details are impor­tant to me, some just hap­pened to work with­in the film. It’s hard to explain how the film is struc­tured or built.

Have you ever played any of the ​’80s, ​’90s graph­ic adven­ture games? The LucasArts games. There’s a par­tic­u­lar struc­ture to those games and there are ele­ments of the film that draw on that. Mani­ac Man­sion, Zach McCrack­en and the Alien Mind­ben­ders. There’s an odd­ness to the way that items and objects exist with­in the world and you and your char­ac­ter have to work out, do these objects build and equal some­thing? Do they amount to some­thing greater? Or is this toast­er just a toast­er. Can they become some­thing else? There’s an ele­ment of that mad­ness with­in the movie as well.

There’s a theme in the film about lega­cy and being remem­bered in the future. How much does a film­mak­er con­sid­er their own legacy?

I don’t know. The idea is, for me, to cre­ate inter­est­ing films and to push myself and work in dif­fer­ent gen­res. I want to make the films that I think won’t exist with­out me tak­ing the time and ener­gy to make them. Is it about lega­cy? Not real­ly. I want to add things to the world that peo­ple will be inter­est­ed in. I don’t think it mat­ters very much in the long run. I’m here, and if I’m not here, I don’t know that it mat­ters whether peo­ple pay atten­tion to the work I made when I was alive. I also don’t think it mat­ters after I’m gone.

There are a cou­ple of shots in the film in where we see down a toi­let bowl. It’s an inter­est­ing cre­ative choice.

Oh god, it’s a real­ly stu­pid rea­son. Okay, let’s go there. In It Fol­lows, we had a real­ly beau­ti­ful over­head shot of the main char­ac­ter lean­ing out of a car and pick­ing at some flow­ers. I would always say to my cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Mike Gioulakis what a beau­ti­ful shot it was. And I said we’re going to do a sim­i­lar shot in Under the Sil­ver Lake, but it’ll have the oppo­site effect, and we’re going to bring the cam­era down into the toi­let. It was a lit­tle bit of a joke. When we did it, it was one of those things that we thought wouldn’t end up being in the movie. And we got such a kick out of it, maybe irri­tat­ing peo­ple, that we just left it in.

Under the Sil­ver Lake is released 15 March. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.