Suf­jan Stevens and Ange­lo De Augus­tine on their movie inspirations

Suf­jan Stevens has his biopic all planned out. ​“Who would direct? Yor­gos Lan­thi­mos. And who would play me? Don­ald Glover. Duh!” The revered Amer­i­can song­writer is jok­ing, but the truth is a film chart­ing his rise to folk star­dom (and sub­se­quent veer away from that sta­tus) wouldn’t be the first time that he and the movies have overlapped.

In 2017, he com­posed songs for Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, under­lin­ing the film’s most emo­tive moments with his sig­na­ture brand of melod­ic melan­choly. Before that, his music had been a bench­mark of mid-’00s indie dra­mas and teen TV, with songs fea­tured promi­nent­ly in Lit­tle Miss Sun­shine, The OC and every­thing in between. Cin­e­ma even report­ed­ly played a part in the cre­ation of one of his most adven­tur­ous releas­es: in a 2011 pro­file The Observ­er detailed a ​“sen­so­ry over­load” suf­fered dur­ing a screen­ing of Wes Anderson’s Fan­tas­tic Mr Fox that informed the fried-synapse feel­ing of Stevens’ 2010 album ​‘The Age of Adz’.

This week sees the release of a record that takes Stevens’ rela­tion­ship with cin­e­ma to anoth­er lev­el. ​“It kind of hap­pened hap­haz­ard­ly,” the 46-year-old says of ​‘A Beginner’s Mind’, a con­cept album made in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Cal­i­forn­ian artist Ange­lo De Augus­tine. Every song takes a dif­fer­ent film as its cat­a­lyst, and the ref­er­ences are joy­ous­ly eclec­tic: tracks inspired by hor­rors like George A Romero’s Night of the Liv­ing Dead and Hell­rais­er III (‘You Give Death A Bad Name’ and ​‘The Pil­lar of Souls’ respec­tive­ly) sit along­side ​“wan­der­ing inter­pre­ta­tions” of the Bette Davis clas­sic All About Eve (‘Lady Mac­beth in Chains’) and Wim Wen­ders’ art­house sta­ple Wings of Desire (‘Reach Out’). There’s even a nod to a direct-to-video cheer­leader com­e­dy: ​“Bring It On Again may not be clas­si­fied as high art, but there’s still some­thing in it. I don’t care what any­one says!” insists De Augus­tine of the film that formed the basis for enchant­i­ng late-album high­light ​‘Fic­tion­al California’.

Writ­ten dur­ing a month-long retreat in Upstate New York, in which they watched films by night and wrote songs by day, Stevens and De Augus­tine have described the record as a ​“ram­bling philo­soph­i­cal inquiry” that uses ​“plot-points, scene sum­maries and lead­ing char­ac­ters [to ask]: ​‘What does it mean to be human in a bro­ken world?’” But how did it come togeth­er, why is it ded­i­cat­ed to Jonathan Demme, how did one song end up draw­ing par­al­lels between Mad Max and the police bru­tal­i­ty that saw the world rise up in 2020, and what has Stevens got against the Mar­vel Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse? We spoke to the pair to find out. (Yor­gos, if you’re read­ing, Suf­jan is wait­ing on your call…)

LWLies: Did you set out to make an album inspired by movies or did the con­cept kind of present itself to you as you start­ed to work together?

De Augus­tine: It was [1981 Lawrence Olivi­er movie] Clash of the Titans that start­ed it. We were work­ing togeth­er and I told [Stevens that] it was my favourite movie from my child­hood. He told me he loved it too. So we watched it, then the next day inte­grat­ed some of its themes into a song.

Stevens: That was how it began, almost by acci­dent. From there, there was a lot of inter­pret­ing and appro­pri­at­ing ideas from films and their emo­tion­al envi­ron­ments, then dis­re­gard­ing the orig­i­nal text and source mate­r­i­al to just run with a few par­tic­u­lars. We’d iden­ti­fy some­thing – a theme or con­cept or some­thing that a char­ac­ter might be feel­ing – then appro­pri­ate that into our own per­son­al, emo­tion­al narratives.

There’s such a diverse mix of movies ref­er­enced on the album. Is that reflec­tive of your own tastes in cin­e­ma? Have you both got pret­ty eclec­tic sen­si­bil­i­ties when it comes to film?

AD: Oh, def­i­nite­ly – espe­cial­ly so after mak­ing this album. We watched a lot of films. Suf­jan turned me onto the Evil Dead series. I’d nev­er watched any of those real ​’80s movies. We watched every sin­gle Hell­rais­er. After we fin­ished the first, it was like, ​‘Okay, we got­ta get to Hell­rais­er 5 at least!’

SS: I’m a hor­ror film fanat­ic. I’m kind of a junky for any­thing sci­ence fic­tion or hor­ror. I’ve always been that way, whether it’s high brow or low brow. I love 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris and all the Tarkovsky stuff – but I also love zom­bie movies. I’m a typ­i­cal Amer­i­can in that I’m a mas­sive con­sumer of film. I have a real aver­sion to super­hero stuff – it just gets on my nerves – but oth­er than that, I’ll watch anything.

What gets on your nerves about super­hero movies?

SS: I just feel like they’ve lost the plot. They want it all ways. They want it to be fun­ny and campy but they [also] want it to be death­ly seri­ous and apoc­a­lyp­tic. They lack focus, too. All those films have gone through so much cor­po­rate edit­ing and so many direc­tors that there’s a lack of con­gru­en­cy to them that just leaves you feel­ing like, ​‘How can I care about this? It’s just branding!’

There’s a track on the album, ​‘Mur­der and Crime’, that’s inspired by Mad Max. What’s your rela­tion­ship with that series of films?

AD: What’s dis­turb­ing about [the orig­i­nal] Mad Max is that he los­es his child in that film. When it came to the song, I thought about that in terms of the larg­er world: peo­ple being tak­en from us and there not being any jus­tice for it. That was some­thing that was real­ly on my mind at that time. We end­ed up draw­ing a par­al­lel between that film and what was going on with peo­ple of colour being mur­dered in our country.

SS: The Mad Max films are so vio­lent and over the top, almost in a comedic way. They’re so extreme, and that’s what makes them watch­able. But when you stand back and assess it you realise it’s real­ly ter­ri­fy­ing and reflec­tive of a poten­tial­ly dev­as­tat­ing future that we could be head­ing towards. Those films are ful­ly entrenched in the apoc­a­lyp­tic envi­ron­ment they cre­ate, and the direc­tor is real­ly com­mit­ted to that real­i­ty. Fury Road is a per­fect movie in my opin­ion. Dis­trust in gov­ern­ment, lone­li­ness, dis­en­chant­ment, racial inequity: it’s all built into that film, and built into the sys­tems we live in today. It speaks to a dis­ease in our cul­ture that’s here and now.

The title track has some pret­ty heavy allu­sions to Point Break. What was it about that film that felt so ripe for explor­ing musically?

SS: I love that film! I can’t think of a film that’s more testos­terone-dri­ven, yet it’s direct­ed by a woman, Kathryn Bigelow, who’s phe­nom­e­nal. That film is ridicu­lous. It cre­ates such an envi­ron­ment of height­ened real­i­ty. It explored tox­ic mas­culin­i­ty before it was real­ly a phrase we recognised.

AD: I grew up out­side LA, and there’s lots about that movie that real­ly does exist. There’s a real tan­gi­ble dark­ness and hedo­nis­tic pur­suit of dan­ger and mon­ey and atten­tion that does exist to some degree in LA. It’s inher­ent. We were talk­ing about our dys­func­tion as a coun­try ear­li­er – I think this city has a dys­func­tion that’s unique to it, that Point Break just total­ly gets.

The album is ded­i­cat­ed to Jonathan Demme, and there’s a song on it inspired by The Silence of the Lambs. Is he some­one either of you had ever met?

SS: I knew Jonathan a lit­tle bit. I only met him briefly; he’d seen a few of my shows and brought his fam­i­ly. What I love about his work is how diverse it is. He wasn’t afraid of genre. He wasn’t afraid of remakes. He wasn’t afraid to try new things – every film was dif­fer­ent. He was so full of won­der and want­i­ng to under­stand the human con­di­tion. He had a per­spec­tive on beau­ty and empa­thy that I real­ly admired. I recent­ly watched Rachel Get­ting Mar­ried and was blown away by what was going on in every sin­gle scene: the mul­ti­plic­i­ty of char­ac­ters and activ­i­ties and behav­iours and dys­func­tions and reac­tions… I don’t know how he was able to cul­ti­vate all that.

AD: That song began when I woke up one morn­ing and start­ed to write on the ukulele. I’d been imag­in­ing this sit­u­a­tion where the char­ac­ter [Buf­fa­lo Bill] could have a con­ver­sa­tion with the direc­tor. What would be said between the two of them? Would the con­ver­sa­tion be one-sided because they’re both liv­ing in sep­a­rate planes of exis­tence? Or could that bar­ri­er be bro­ken and an under­stand­ing be achieved? I think [The Silence of the Lambs] is about want­i­ng to be loved for who you are. We seek guid­ance all the time for what pur­pose our lives hold, and that movie can be help­ful for under­stand­ing some of those things.

Cin­e­ma has always had a pres­ence in your songs, Suf­jan. Is writ­ing an album of songs inspired by movies a nat­ur­al con­tin­u­a­tion of the way you’ve often looked to films for inspiration?

SS: I think that’s fair. Even when writ­ing con­fes­sion­al folk songs, there’s still an under­stand­ing for me that it’s the­atre – I’m tak­ing on per­sonas, and even if I’m singing auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal­ly, I still feel like there’s a char­ac­ter with­in me ush­er­ing in that nar­ra­tive. It’s like organ­is­ing ele­ments and cre­at­ing scenes and edit­ing. That’s what cin­e­ma is.

That rela­tion­ship goes both ways. In addi­tion to the music you wrote for Call Me by Your Name, your songs are reg­u­lar­ly placed with­in TV shows and movies. Do you have any favourite – or per­haps least favourite – uses of your music?

SS: To be hon­est, I very rarely watch movies or TV shows if I know my music is in it. The way it usu­al­ly works is I get a descrip­tion of the scene and a solic­i­ta­tion from the direc­tor for why they wan­na use the song. If I feel they’re doing jus­tice to the scene and that my song speaks to them then I just trust their vision. I’m pret­ty demo­c­ra­t­ic about it. After that, if I know my song is gonna appear in a film or TV show I turn it off so it doesn’t make me uncom­fort­able! With [Call Me by Your Name], I had so much admi­ra­tion for Luca’s work because his films are infused with song and he’s just a real schol­ar of music. But I had to watch that film a lot, in all these dif­fer­ent screen­ings, and every time my music came on, I’d either run to the bath­room or slouch in my seat ​’cos I was kind of embarrassed.

Suf­jan Stevens and Ange­lo De Augustine’s ​‘A Beginner’s Mind’ is released on Fri­day Sep­tem­ber 24.