The Most Brutal Vigilante Comedy Film Ever
How This Director Made the Most Brutal Vigilante Comedy Film Ever
Actor Macon Blair talks about making his directorial debut with the Sundance hit I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore.
By Sam Fragoso Published: Mar 2, 2017
On the eve of President Trump's inauguration, Macon Blair presented his directorial debut to a Sundance audience eager to escape. Opening night in Park City is known for being momentous, festive. Yet, the looming specter of our incoming Commander-in-Chief was unshakable. It was as if everyone was preparing for the world to end tomorrow. Point being: This was not the ideal room for a freshman filmmaker to jumpstart his career.
None of that mattered, however, once Blair's film started to play. Titled I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore, the audience was immediately entranced. Their excitement was audible; the tension, palpable. After years of busting his ass as an actor (and co-writer), Blair's project had come to fruition. Not only that, but it was killing—and it went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at the festival.
I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix
Starring Melanie Lynskey and Elijah Wood, the film revolves around a despondent woman and her eccentric neighbor joining forces to track down who burglarized her home. On the surface, Blair's film is a breezy genre flick replete with bullets and bloodshed—a story of two citizens who take the law into their own hands in the name of justice.
A deeper dive reveals a project more humane. The core of Melanie's character—and, in turn, the film—is a frustration with unkind people. "Everyone is an asshole," she bellows in one scene. Without becoming mean-spirited, Blair crafts a seriocomic quest to discover human decency through inadvertent indecency (shootouts, stabbings). Even when the proceedings are violent, Lynskey's protagonist really just wants people to be better to one another—to be less shitty. A fitting message for these trying times.
When Blair spoke with Esquire.com, he led with gratitude. The film's Netflix release last Friday is beyond anything he imagined. He was also quick to pivot to politics, while opening up about his headspace on set, taking criticism, and why he wouldn't change the film's surprising ending.
Before it happened, Blair had no expectation that he'd be able to make this movie.
I knew that I could make it. I didn't think that anyone else was going to—just by nature of the fact that I told them I could do it—say, "Oh, well I believe you." I was surprised that it got into the festival. I knew the type of movie that I wanted to make, and it made very clear sense to me in my head and it made sense to me on the page, and what we came away with is very close… Obviously, there were some little things we had to shave here and there, but it was pretty much what I wanted to do. I was just surprised that it did what it did, that it got into the festival, that it won. With the release coming up, it's bizarre to think that it's going to be available worldwide, through a scope and reach that I was not really planning on. You think, "Oh, it'll have a little quiet DVD release," or something like that, and a couple people will see it. This is much more expansive than I had anticipated.
But the external validation doesn't make him more confident as a filmmaker.
It feels good because obviously you put all this time and energy into a thing because you want to entertain the people, so when they reply and say, "Oh, we have been entertained. Thumbs up!" Then that feels good, that feels like mission accomplished. Yeah, that was what I wanted it to do, but it doesn't leave me feeling like I am more or less in a position for something good the next time. In other words, it's just as likely as not that the next one that I do, if I do get to do one, will be a stink-bomb. It's all the individual thing. I'm going to put just as much energy into it and try to make it something people will like, but I certainly am not walking around feeling like I've got the world on a string. But I do feel very lucky.
He takes the good reviews with the bad.
I try to live by this piece of advice somebody said: "If you believe them when you get good reviews, then you're obligated to believe them when you get bad reviews." You will definitely get bad reviews at some point, so you can't have it both ways. It would be better if you invert the wording and say, "If you tell them that they're crazy when they give you bad reviews, then you have to also tell them that they're crazy when they give you good reviews." Maybe that's a little more palatable way to say it.
Director Macon Blair accepts the US Dramatic Grand Jury Prize for his film 'i don't feel at home in this world anymore' during the 2017 sundance film festival awards night ceremony
Michael Loccisano//Getty Images
Written in 2015, and shot in 2016, Blair birthed the project with the TV on in the background.
I think as I was writing it, it was just sort of in the background, the TV—not literally as I'm writing, but just in life the TV is on and your phone is on and it seems to be this cascade of examples of shittiness. I'm sure I'm not the only person who is exposed to all of that and starts to feel like things are crumbling. Maybe they are or maybe they are not, but it certainly feels that way. It sort of steeped into how [Melanie Lynsey's] Ruth was going to express herself. Trump's campaign was just starting to ramp up and there were some grim-faced jokes about, boy, if he actually wins, that title's going to be appropriate. Everybody was like, "Dude, he's not gonna win, don't worry about it! It's not going to happen!" I was in a bubble there, I was in a bubble everywhere. Everybody that I work with, my family, the feed. There was a textbook example of that echo chamber where everybody agrees with you. "Yes, this is bad news! This guy is crazy! There's no way he's going to win." Little mentions of things like environmental decay and white supremacy—things that were presented as throwaway gags—feel totally insufficient in the wake of the election. It's all very disturbing.
[Spoiler Alert] Even now, he still wouldn't change the film's surprise ending.
The big sort of binary question was whether or not Elijah [Wood] was going to die. Whether he survives, whether he really did die or whether we were just going to like play a little fake you out, and then suggest that he had survived the stabbing. I definitely got the note that it was too cutesy and too soft and too easy to have him survive in the end. There were definitely some votes to kill him off. I just felt like, no dude. I really wanted the movie to have the feeling of something like Repo Man, where it's crazy and people get shot, and it's berserk, but at the end of the movie you don't come out of the theater feeling punished or super bummed out. There's enough mayhem and craziness in the last fifteen minutes to sort of satisfy its needs as a genre movie. It delivers some splatter and some gore and everything like that, but I just didn't want the emotional tone at the very end when people are walking out of the theater to be a depressed one, to be a mournful one. I wanted it to feel rock and roll and fun. To me there was never an option other than to have him survive, and to suggest that Ruth might be, if not totally turned around, at least a little bit better off than when we first met her.
Jeremy Saulnier on the Punk-Horror \'Green Room\'
Director Jeremy Saulnier—in whose Blue Ruin and Green Room Blair starred—gave him his most valuable piece of advice for his directorial debut.
This was a piece of advice Jeremy [Saulnier] had given me: You spend so much time writing the script trying to figure out how the story's going to go, and you make all those choices in the writing. He was like, "Be careful of when you get on set—under the pressure of everything that's going on—of just changing things willy-nilly to make the shoot day easier. Try and remember that for good choices or bad choices, you made particular choices in the writing of the script and you did those for a certain reason. To the best of your ability try and execute what's on the page rather than just being like, 'Ah! We'll change it!' … Just keep your headspace where it was nine months ago when you wrote it, with the benefit of being alone in your apartment without having to be spending money every moment that the crew is standing around and every moment that you're not shooting. Let all the pressures of production go and try and keep your head in the space where it was when you were actually writing it." I thought that was good advice. In the pursuit of being able to sleep at night, that's what I'm trying to follow.
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