“I’m done with men.”
Rick Alverson isn’t just offering up a great mantra for our modern age. The Virginia-based filmmaker was, during our email interview, announcing that after making three features centered on broken men and exploring various facets of masculinity, he is ready to expand his purview.
It’s an exciting prospect, both because of how few male filmmakers concern themselves with the lives of women and how much Alverson has grown as an artist since the release of his 2012 feature The Comedy. As fascinating and strangely beautiful as that film, and its 2015 follow-up, Entertainment, were, he’s hit a new high with his latest, The Mountain.
The slow, harrowing film is kind of a road movie, following a stoic, repressed young man (Tye Sheridan) who, after the death of his father, takes a job as an assistant to a psychiatrist (a brilliant Jeff Goldblum) visiting various asylums to perform barbaric lobotomies. Inspired, in part, by the career of physician Walter Freeman II, The Mountain is a devastating allegory for American progress and exceptionalism, while also exploring the damage that men do to themselves and the people pulled into their orbit. Towards the end of the film, Alverson and his co-screenwriters Dustin Guy Defa and Colm O’Leary use a fiery performance by French character actor Denis Lavant (Holy Motors) to take the art world to task for substantiating these myths of male and American greatness.
With The Mountain opening in Portland today, I caught up with Alverson via email to ask about the genesis of the film and the struggles of both making a a period piece and getting such a daring piece of art made in the first place.
MERCURY: What interested you in Walter Freeman and the now debunked work that he did using lobotomies as a treatment method for mental illness?
RICK ALVERSON: It’s a particularly American variation on a European procedure, altered for efficiency and convenience; designed and implemented without a capacity to comprehend its ramifications or the wake of the act itself. As a nation, we’re lunging headlong blind. We’ve been doing it since the country’s inception. But more than anything, it’s the narrative of the act and the lunge that is what we’ve branded and sold to the world. And its departure from the facts on the ground, from the limitations of the world, is the source of much of our problems.
How did this develop as a script, as you started working with Dustin Guy Defa and Colm O’Leary?
Dustin acted as a structural foil and Colm as a poetic fuel.
This is your first film not set in our modern era. How was it for you working on a period piece
As you can imagine, it’s a nightmare! I was really curious about our unimpeded access to history and place through the conduit of narrative and representation, especially in that romanticized time. I wanted to interrupt some of the convenience and intoxication of dramatizing period for entertainment value and the impression of access to the inaccessible.
The story is very reflective of modern culture. Did you always want to present something allegorical to audiences?
To some degree, that post-war era was the genesis of our current chasm between the facts on the ground and the narrative of our exceptionalism, our belief in boundless opportunity and unlimited resources.
For as much justifiable praise as Jeff Goldblum has been getting for his performance, I feel like Tye Sheridan was just as important and impactful, if not more so. You worked with him on Entertainment—did you have him in mind when crafting the character he plays in The Mountain?
It was a natural evolution of our friendship and interest in working against type and expectation. We both became very curious about an inaccessible protagonist, a blank slate where the audience’s avatar for experience encounters the conditions of the world.
Your films are so visually precise. How much of that is mapped out ahead of time, and how much do you allow yourself room to improvise as you’re filming?
If independent cinema has made any contribution, it’s the limitations of the budgets and form that have forced filmmakers to be reflexive and listen to the conditions on set, as opposed to the Hollywood imposition of a wholly preordained vision. Indie film has lost that for a variety of reasons, blanket risk mitigation being the most destructive.
The musical score for this film is entirely modern, rather than referring to the sounds of the ’50s. Can you talk about that decision?
Bobby Donne and Daniel Lopatin and I wanted it to reflect the coming modern age, something that felt futuristic from that vantage but still antiquated. Oscillators, samplers, and analogue synths were source materials as well as repurposed fragments of Joanna Brouk’s incredible flute music from the late ’70s. Something of the coming New Age, with its promise and problems.
In other interviews, you’ve made reference to this being a difficult film to get made. What were the challenges you faced?
Until Vice Studios came aboard, we were pretty marooned. There aren’t a lot of adventurous financiers for a period piece capable of taking the chances and embracing the challenges we wanted to embrace. In some ways, it’s an anti-narrative film asking to be welcomed in the narrative commercial marketplace.
Do you have any sense of what comes next for you?
Horror and comedy.
The Mountain is now playing at Regal Fox Tower 10.