{"id":4588,"date":"2014-03-17T00:00:21","date_gmt":"2014-03-17T04:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/?p=4588"},"modified":"2014-03-17T17:20:31","modified_gmt":"2014-03-17T21:20:31","slug":"an-interview-with-matt-rager-as-i-lay-dying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/an-interview-with-matt-rager-as-i-lay-dying\/","title":{"rendered":"An Interview with Matt Rager, writer of ‘As I Lay Dying’ and the upcoming ‘The Sound and The Fury’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nMatt Rager is the co-writer, alongside James Franco, of Franco’s\u00a0As I Lay Dying<\/a>, an adaptation of the Faulkner novel<\/a>. [Ed. note: you can read John D’Amico’s review<\/a> of the film here.] He’s also the sole writer of the pair’s upcoming The Sound and the Fury<\/a>, also based on the Faulkner book<\/a>. Recently, we sat down over banana bread and talked about filmmaking:<\/em>
\n
\nWhat\u2019s your background?<\/b><\/p>\n

I grew up in Bellingham, Washington, which is like an hour and a half north of Seattle, the last real city before the Canadian border. So I was a Northwesterner through and through, then I went to undergrad in Pomona, California, moved out east to New Haven, because my wife\u2014girlfriend at the time\u2014went into the art history program at Yale. I hung out for a couple years in New Haven doing the quasi-Bohemian thing which is, you know, being 23 and pretending to write and not writing. That kind of thing.<\/p>\n

We moved back to the west coast to be close to my parents, I got my master\u2019s at Western Washington and I taught community college at Bellingham for a few years. So I kinda thought that was what I was gonna do, then my wife got a post-doc back in New Haven at the Yale Center for British Arts, so I came back again, then I taught for a year at the University of New Haven, at which point I realized I was getting paid less to teach a full load than the Ph.D. stipend would be back at a place like Yale.<\/p>\n

I luckily got in at Yale, and it just happened to be the year James [Franco] was there. We were kind of the weird outliers; we were the old ones at the time.<\/p>\n

How did the project start?<\/b><\/p>\n

We were in the same classes, and Yale is, as one would expect, still very traditional for the most part in terms of the English lit Ph.D. There\u2019s a lot of scholars of Shakespeare, Milton, Romantic poetry, that sort of thing. I was kind of the outlier because I got in on doing mostly contemporary stuff, media studies, media theory, so I was the only one [doing that] really, and James. I introduced myself through that: \u201cI heard we like the same books.\u201d And we just started talking through that.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s a big fan of the Modernists, right? He did that Hart Crane one, The Broken Tower<\/a>.<\/b><\/p>\n

Yeah, he\u2019s a big fan of the Modernists but he\u2019s also really into experimental contemporary stuff too. He wrote his entrance essay on House of Leaves<\/a>, which is one of my favorite books. We had a lot of overlap there. So we started talking book stuff mostly, and then as far as creative stuff goes we connected on the fiction side more. At the time I was just a wannabe fiction writer, mostly. So we traded stories and did that kind of stuff, and then somewhere along the way he asked, \u201cDo you write scripts?\u201d and I was like \u201cSure,\u201d which meant that I had started a bunch and never finished them. As one does.<\/p>\n

So we started working on a few things. None of those have come to fruition yet\u2014he\u2019s always working on 20 projects at once. In the midst of that, he told me about his plan to do As I Lay Dying. At some point he sent me the script he had written and asked for feedback, and I wrote a long-winded, over-theoretical, probably overwrought response. Didn\u2019t hear about it for a long time, until I was talking to Vince [Jolivette], his producer and best friend, and I asked \u201cDo you know if James ever read my notes?\u201d Because the way it works with him is, he\u2019s just doing so many things, he gets hundreds of emails a day, things get buried.<\/p>\n

Vince was like, \u201cI don\u2019t know, but can you send them to me because we\u2019re dealing with the script right now.\u201d A couple days later, I get a response: \u201cWe really like your notes, do you want to take a stab at it?\u201d And I was like \u201cSure,\u201d not knowing exactly what that means. So I did my revision up, and that\u2019s the one they ended up using.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the difference between yours and the first draft?<\/b><\/p>\n

The main thing was his version was long. Because it\u2019s his favorite book, and he has this very personal connection to it, so he really wanted to do justice to it, which is good, but a lot of that then slid into him wanting to put in everything from the book. My job was more to imagine this as a film, as a more narrative art, and really look at what sort of information do we need, what can we cut, how many of the peripheral characters can we have\u2014that sort of stuff. The big thing was, I obviously love Faulkner, but he\u2019s not my sacred cow, he\u2019s not my guy, so\u2014<\/p>\n

Who is?<\/b><\/p>\n

I just skew more to the contemporary. I love David Foster Wallace, I love Infinite Jest<\/a>. I love Murakami, David Mitchell, those kind of guys.<\/p>\n

Faulkner for me was always more academic, which enabled me to be the one to cut things. \u201cLet\u2019s get rid of these side characters, let\u2019s cut this down, let\u2019s only have 30 seconds of Anse doing this thing…\u201d<\/p>\n

See, that\u2019s interesting to me because, viewing you as a contemporary lit person, the film felt like it wasn\u2019t approached like a period piece. Would you say that\u2019s accurate?<\/b><\/p>\n

I think that\u2019s partially budget constraints. Certainly visually, stylistically, it doesn\u2019t have the traditional markers of that.<\/p>\n

Yeah, like the Redford version of Great Gatsby<\/a> where everything\u2019s slow, all shot in tableaus.<\/b><\/p>\n

Yeah, and one of the things we talked a lot about was what happens with a lot of period pieces and adaptations in general\u2014because they become canonized, they become sanctified in this weird way that doesn\u2019t do justice to what the book actually was like. Which is why I don\u2019t know if I thought the recent Great Gatsby<\/a> remake was totally successful, but it\u2019s clearly trying to get at the sort of effective feel of the novel. That is the thing that everybody loses when they treat it like it\u2019s this piece of sacred literature. No, it\u2019s about people partying, and drunk, and going crazy.<\/p>\n

And we tried to do that with the Faulkner too. Thinking, you know, it\u2019s disjointed and fractured, but it\u2019s also gritty and dour and angsty and weird, and those are all the things you sort of try to prioritize, knowing that there\u2019s no way that you can convey everything from the book. But you try to get what, to you, is the essence of the novel, what you want to convey. And then the question is, how do you even go about conveying that visually in a film versus what it\u2019s doing on the page? Especially because, as everyone notes, what makes Faulkner matter is the language. And you\u2019re never going to be able to fully translate the language, but you want to try and come up with some sort of visual representation of that.<\/p>\n

Faulkner has this very particular sense of time. Time as something mutable, and it\u2019s interesting to see the ways you tried to convert that into cinema.<\/b><\/p>\n

Exactly. Yeah. We\u2019re doing The Sound and the Fury right now, which is even more complicated on the time scale, which is a fun challenge.<\/p>\n

How far along is that?<\/b><\/p>\n

We just wrapped principal photography in January. We\u2019re done. We shot a couple weeks in Mississippi in September, and a couple weeks in LA in January.<\/p>\n

You said you did some fiction writing before\u2014has this begun to jumpstart you?<\/b><\/p>\n

Well it was kind of weird doing the academic stuff and then doing this on the side. Especially with As I Lay Dying, there was this sense that, \u2018oh, that was fun, but you know, it might\u2019ve been a one-off thing\u2019. But now with Sound and Fury, I\u2019m the sole credited writer, and now I have two. Now I have a manager and stuff. There\u2019s some possibilities. It\u2019s in that weird position.<\/p>\n

So you\u2019re doing\u2014I don\u2019t want to give it away\u2014but it\u2019s gonna be the whole\u2026 saga of the family?<\/b><\/p>\n

Yeah, I don\u2019t want to give it away and I don\u2019t want to make any claims before it\u2019s out there, but it\u2019s almost like, we tried to treat it like three short films. Well, not that short. But three discreet sections, because each has not only their own relation to time, but this time we tried to emphasize\u2014well, I didn\u2019t have much say in it, but I\u2019m glad they did it\u2014a different visual style for each section. Color scheme and things like that.<\/p>\n

Whether or not all those details will make it into final cut, we\u2019ll have to see, but that\u2019s what we\u2019re going for.<\/p>\n

You were on set for both of these?<\/b><\/p>\n

For AILD I was actually teaching a class at Yale and studying for my oral, so I was only there for a weekend. But then for S&F I was there for the whole time, which was a lot of fun. It was good because that novel\u2019s even more difficult to parse and also\u2026 I mean James knows S&F well, but he knows AILD like the back of his hand. He essentially has that novel memorized.<\/p>\n

Whereas with S&F, because I did the draft myself, I was the only one who had spent that much time with the book. I wasn\u2019t originally planning to be down there the whole time, but then a couple days before shooting they were having meetings doing the thing where they\u2019re like \u201cWait, where is that in the book?\u201d and trying to go back and realizing it was diffracted in like 9 different places, and saying \u201cMaybe Matt better be here.\u201d Which was fun, it was fun hanging around on set.<\/p>\n

But also I got a chance to do a lot of sort of small-scale rewrites as we were going. Especially in Mississippi, because we found this cool old mansion to work as the Compson house. All the interior house stuff I had tied pretty closely to the novel, but then all of a sudden you have to rearrange things when in the one scene it\u2019s all about them coming up and down the stairs and walking into the kitchen, but actually the kitchen\u2019s over there\u2014<\/i>and you know it\u2019s all those sort of things that are mostly logistical issues, but then actually dictate changes in the script. So yeah, it was fun.<\/p>\n

There are a couple of those in AILD that really struck me\u2014like the \u201cMy mother is a fish\u201d chapter that, in the text is a really complicated roundabout explanation, and in the film, you explain with that image of him trying to lift the fish but it\u2019s too big.<\/b><\/p>\n

Yeah that\u2019s the kind of thing we wrestled with a lot\u2014both in how much can you convey in those singular images thematically, but also plot-wise. Because, as you know, in the novel, there\u2019s this whole long thing where (and this is why you can tell I didn\u2019t mind cutting it\u2014\u201cwhole long thing\u201d) he runs down to the Tulls\u2019, and he\u2019s out in the rain, and he knocks and then they bring him back up, you know, they\u2019re back and forth. As far as the script goes, in a lot of ways my main goal was we just gotta get her [Addie Bundren] dead sooner so they can get on the road. Because even in the book, it doesn\u2019t happen until like page 100, and it\u2019s only a 200 page book. So on the one hand, trimming some of those, but then still trying to keep those sort of iconic lines from the book. Which I think works because the whole thing is that the most iconic lines from the novel are the ones that are so difficult to parse \u2013 these weird standalone chapters and these things that you don\u2019t know quite what to make of, and we didn\u2019t want to over-explain those.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s funny, there are certain elements of the book that I have more of an appreciation for now after having seen actors perform it, and the big one for me is Cash\u2019s list of the 13 steps involved in making a coffin. That\u2019s one of those ones that I knew all the standard interpretations for it, what it said about his character, but I only had a sort of didactic understanding of it.<\/p>\n

Yeah because when you look at it on paper, it\u2019s just a list. No matter how you\u2026<\/b><\/p>\n

Yeah, and when you\u2019re sitting in your intro lit class and they explain it to you, you just sort of go, \u2018ok, that\u2019s kind of cool,\u2019 but I think that\u2019s actually my favorite scene from the movie now. Because I just love Jim\u2019s performance of it so much. And I watched that clip so many times.<\/p>\n

It feels really cinematic, how much he\u2019s trying to hide.<\/b><\/p>\n

Exactly.<\/p>\n

Which is interesting because have you ever taken a look at the screenplay work Faulkner did?<\/b><\/p>\n

I know about his career in Hollywood and all that but I haven\u2019t actually gone through the scripts he wrote.<\/p>\n

Leigh Brackett said not a word Faulkner ever wrote made it on screen, because he would just write Faulkner.<\/b><\/p>\n

I could see that. Even in this version, a lot of the lines are almost<\/i> word-for-word from the book, but even so you\u2019re trying to uncrinkle it so there\u2019s only two or three turns in each sentence instead of six or seven. Which is funny because I noticed some of the reviews and stuff, people hear it as word-for-word. Some people liked it, but some people complained about the thick Southern accents. But it\u2019s like, oh no, no, no\u2014that was a middle-of-the-road take on the dialogue.<\/p>\n

That must\u2019ve been so hard for the actors, those accents. Because they almost don\u2019t even exist anymore.<\/b><\/p>\n

Exactly, they don\u2019t exist. And now we have the gentrified southern accent that people know well. And then there\u2019s this sort of generic southern accent, rural accent.<\/p>\n

The Walking Dead<\/a> accent?<\/b><\/p>\n

Exactly. And that was one of the best things about filming in Mississippi, is that a decent amount of the crew and stuff\u2014I mean, some of them were locals hired along for the gig, a lot of them worked out of New Orleans, but a surprising amount of them had Mississippi roots. And so they would, every once in a while\u2014usually to me because obviously they don\u2019t want to butt their way in there\u2014say, \u201cActually, the way they\u2019d say it was\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

And Tim Blake Nelson is amazing. He came with that whole thing worked out like that.<\/p>\n

Doing it in Mississippi, did it feel like there was a sense of ownership? Did it feel like they still responded to Faulkner?<\/b><\/p>\n

Definitely. You\u2019d be surprised. I was, at least. It\u2019s just crazy to imagine, because he\u2019s such an icon, it\u2019s standard reading in all those high schools and stuff and, what did you get out of that? Most schools, it\u2019s not uncommon for AILD to show up on a high school syllabus but I mean, most of them have read a lot<\/i> of Faulkner, even though a lot of them are also like \u201cI didn\u2019t understand a word of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

But there is a strong sense of ownership, and a strong sense of Southern literature both historically and contemporary. When we were in Greenwood, Mississippi\u2014that\u2019s where we shot for S&F\u2014there was this cool little bookstore there with a huge southern lit section with all the contemporary authors. So there\u2019s this strong sense of ownership. But they\u2019re also very positive about the whole thing. And I think a big part of that was that we were shooting it down there, which they liked.<\/p>\n

S&F gets into some of the racial stuff that AILD doesn\u2019t really touch on.<\/b><\/p>\n

Yes. One of the things I\u2019m really excited for about S&F is, as much as I love AILD, the film and the book, the novel works against itself in so many ways, always undercutting itself. It\u2019s an epic quest in which the quest is shown to be futile. It\u2019s a family drama in which no one talks to each other, about a bunch of people who can\u2019t articulate what they want to say. Which is cool and such a challenge, and also, stuff like the deep poverty of the rural south at the time, it\u2019s all great to work with but also a little limiting at the end of the day. So with the Compson house and family, both, you get that sort of aristocracy, the faded gentility of the family, but then you also have the other relationship with their servants, Dilsey and her family. You have a lot more of the town, interacting with more people, and also the different temporalities. And the art department loved it, because you got to dress the entire house for 1900 when it\u2019s still\u2014well, they\u2019re going downhill at that point, but it\u2019s not the decrepit house of 1928.<\/p>\n

Ahna [O\u2019Reilly, Dewey Dell in AILD and Caddie in S&F] said she spent all of AILD in one dirty dress, whereas this, there\u2019s a lot more involved in costume. It might feel like more of a period piece in that sense, but I don\u2019t think so since it\u2019s pretty weird also. As far as the visuals of it, you get more of a sense of the history in a way.<\/p>\n

There will be more of a tonal range. In a lot of ways, the bleak parts are bleaker, because the tragedy of AILD is none of them can articulate what they want to say so it comes out in these small gestures, but in S&F there\u2019s a lot more drama. People articulate what they want. They yell, they cry, that sort of thing.<\/p>\n

And even Quentin out of context into what\u2019s practically a Fitzgerald novel, there\u2019s something so poignant about how alone he is out there.<\/b><\/p>\n

Big challenge in the Quentin section is that in the novel his mind is just racing, racing, racing, and he can\u2019t stop and everything is running over each other, and it\u2019s all language overflowing his conscious experience. But at the same time, aside from in the flashbacks, he barely speaks. So you\u2019re trying to convey his emotional turmoil with his sort of elegiac, stoic acceptance.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s the extended looping conversation slash dream flashback he has with his father, where his father gives him all his philosophies, but as far as actual external dialogue, other than in the flashbacks, it\u2019s just mostly when the little girl shows up.<\/p>\n

Scott Haze is Jason, which is a lot of fun. He\u2019s really, really good.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a rough character.<\/b><\/p>\n

You see him sort of represented in the town, and you don\u2019t exactly sympathize with him necessarily because he\u2019s still just an asshole, but you empathize with the sense of impotence he has. You understand why he yells at his servants when he\u2019s at home, because when he\u2019s out in the world, no one takes him seriously.<\/p>\n

Was there no temptation to put some of the characters from AILD in and do an Avengers thing with Yoknapatawpha County?<\/b><\/p>\n

Well, we would have, except that gets ruptured by the fact that we somewhat inadvertently ended up doing something more like the old Shakespearian Company model, because there\u2019s a lot of the same people but just in different roles.<\/p>\n

One of the things that we tried to think about as far as the through line is that, in a weird way, it\u2019s Caddie\u2019s story. Seeing her through Benji\u2019s eyes, then Quentin\u2019s and Jason\u2019s.<\/p>\n

[Desperately trying not to spoil the novel] So then you really have to, I guess, deviate? To give her lines. You have to put yourself in that Old South writing style.<\/b><\/p>\n

But also I feel like in this one, again, someone who only has a passing familiarity with the novel will think it\u2019s almost exactly like the book, but we deviated more often in order to fill out the world a little bit,\u00a0and also because of the problematic politics, such as the racial politics, which you don\u2019t want to smooth over but you also want to present in such a way that it\u2019s\u2026<\/p>\n

Palatable?<\/b><\/p>\n

Yeah. Yeah, basically.<\/p>\n

I read an article that called Franco a \u201cpolymath\u201d, and I thought that\u2019s ridiculous, and then it popped into my head that he did this and This Is the End<\/a> the same year. And then I thought maybe in a limited, artistic way, that\u2019s not a bad description.<\/b><\/p>\n

And Spring Breakers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I loved Spring Breakers.<\/b><\/p>\n

Me too. I didn\u2019t know what to expect going in.<\/p>\n

What\u2019d you think of This Is the End?<\/b><\/p>\n

I loved how funny it was, and, this is sort of the writer in me, I loved that they actually managed to carve a narrative out of it from beginning to end. So many comedies, even good comedies, do this thing where the first 40 minutes are hilarious and then you can see them go \u2018oh crap, I guess we need to finish this now\u2019. And then they have some crazy hijinks, and usually with the action plot, you lose the comedy in the last 40 minutes.<\/p>\n

Like why Ghostbusters<\/a> works and Stripes<\/a> doesn\u2019t.<\/b><\/p>\n

Yeah, but you hear more people offhandedly talk about the genius of Stripes, and it\u2019s probably from the TBS version of watching it, where you\u2019re clicking through and you see 30 minutes and say, \u2018oh my god, this is hilarious\u2019, and then click away again before you realize it\u2019s just that chunk that\u2019s funny.<\/p>\n

This is one of things we tried to deal with in AILD, too. One of the things I disagreed most with in some of the reviews is the idea that \u2018the book is ironic and funny, the movie\u2019s not ironic and funny, therefore he didn\u2019t get the book\u2019. And it\u2019s like, one, I think the irony\u2019s there. It\u2019s not laugh out loud funny, but the book\u2019s not laugh out loud funny. The irony in the book is there, but it\u2019s never performative\u2014it\u2019s never experienced in the scene itself, it\u2019s only experienced in the retroactive act of reading itself. You read a chapter, and then you read the next chapter and you see it from a different perspective, and then you go back and go, \u2018oh, I see it\u2019.<\/p>\n

The last scene is essentially a punchline to the whole thing.<\/b><\/p>\n

Yes, and there\u2019s also that idea of when you are suddenly presenting the characters visually, you want to not treat them like caricatures or jokes, you want to treat them as fully-rounded characters, so perhaps at times some of that humor was lost, but it was lost in service of making sure some of the characters were treated with dignity. I feel like that happens a lot in S&F too, with some of the stuff with Dilsey and her family.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s the question of Dilsey\u2019s section in the end, right? In some ways, it\u2019s the most beautifully written section, and it\u2019s giving her final say and it\u2019s this moment of grace, yet at the same time it\u2019s the only one not in first person. She\u2019s not given a voice. She\u2019s not given an interior life. Or, you could argue that\u2019s a form of respect or\u2014I don\u2019t know. But all those theoretical questions come up in the process of writing.<\/p>\n

I guess there\u2019s no hiding from that in a movie.<\/b><\/p>\n

But at the same time, there\u2019s more room in those small moments to present the character with dignity, to give them the screen in a way.<\/p>\n

Have you seen any of the other Faulkner adaptations out there, like The Story of Temple Drake<\/a> or Intruder in the Dust<\/a>?<\/b><\/p>\n

No, no. All of that\u2014especially with an academic background, my first instinct was, \u201cI\u2019ve gotta see all of that, I\u2019ve got to read all of that,\u201d but then my intention went the other way. It\u2019d be paralyzing.<\/p>\n

The only one I started was the old Sound and the Fury<\/a>, the 1953 one. It\u2019s the craziest movie. It doesn\u2019t make a lick of sense. It\u2019s Yul Brynner as Jason Compson, but he doesn\u2019t even try to do a southern accent. He\u2019s just Yul Brynner. And they just do crazy things with the story. So I watched like five minutes of that and was like, \u201cI\u2019m alright. We won\u2019t do that to it.”<\/p>\n

When you write about contemporary stuff, so often people are interested in newness for newness\u2019 sake, and the argument that \u2018this has never been done before\u2019. What I\u2019m more interested in is that constant oscillation. There are a lot of arguments about Modernism in general, and Faulkner in particular, about the roots of his whole project, and one of the ways that you can read it is that in a lot of ways, his work is about the emergence of film. It\u2019s all about him then both thinking filmically in literature, and then also trying to move into those realms\u2014the interiority, the stream of consciousness, the multiplicity of perspective\u2014that, especially back then, the fixed camera couldn\u2019t do. Which of course the irony is that while he was trying to do that, he was writing those screenplays. Seemed much more successful on one end of the spectrum than the other.<\/p>\n

One of the only successful Faulkner screenplays was To Have and Have Not<\/a>, the Hemingway adaptation. His big rival.<\/b><\/p>\n

That\u2019s interesting because on the one hand, there\u2019s the sort of practical side of when you have your arch-rival\u2019s book, \u2018Ha ha ha, I have my rival\u2019s book\u2019, but on the other hand, maybe there is something about the antithesis of styles. If you gave Faulkner a blank slate for a script, he would push it into his way of doing things, which didn\u2019t always translate, and if you take Hemingway\u2019s way of doing things, which didn\u2019t always translate, maybe it ends up somewhere in the middle.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve danced around but haven\u2019t addressed yet this idea of Faulkner being \u2018unfilmable\u2019. Which always struck me a meaningless term. Why do you think that\u2019s a thing?<\/b><\/p>\n

That\u2019s a good question. You could probably do a book or at least an academic article about the whole institution of this idea of unfilmablility in Modernist literature. As is always the case, it\u2019s certain people\u2019s vested interest in holding these stark lines. But the degree to which we hold onto that\u2014I mean, back then so much of it probably had to do with the distinctions between high and low culture, and the fact that film wasn\u2019t taken seriously as an art. It\u2019s this literary argument that literature does something different that\u2019s embedded in the language.<\/p>\n

But my answer to that would be, \u2018well, of course!\u2019\u00a0Of course you\u2019re not going to translate that directly. But that doesn\u2019t mean you can\u2019t make a quality film out of that. That doesn\u2019t mean you can\u2019t make a film that doesn\u2019t capture the same effective experience as reading the book. We try to really embrace the idea that adaptation is always translation. It\u2019s always, you know, if you\u2019re translating a poem from another language\u2014and poetic translation is such a creative act\u2014you\u2019re writing a new poem. There\u2019s never a one-to-one mechanized algorithmic method. But in some ways, it just seems like a fun opportunity. And it\u2019s a challenge, a freeing challenge, because you know you\u2019ll never get it all. But the things you know you won\u2019t be able to get are the things you can come up with stylistic analogues to.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s very different from things like Lord of the Rings<\/a> or something, where when there\u2019s things you can\u2019t get, it means that you have to cut down the plot, basically. These subcharacters and subplots that, for the fanbase, these are the things that make Tolkien Tolkien<\/i>, right? Whereas with Faulkner, it\u2019s the language, it\u2019s the philosophy. And you can come up with analogues, with translations. And that searching for different stylistic approaches to try and approximate it is part of the fun.<\/p>\n

The unfilmable thing even as a rhetorical move is just so fascinating, having been through this process, both writing them and just being on set seeing the movies get made. It\u2019s all attributed to one person, but you see hundreds of people doing their jobs and making choices, and sometimes, it\u2019s practical logistics that get in the way. One review, an academic journal, identified these two scenes, key scenes\u2014actually it just puts a lie to what I was just saying before, because for this person, the keys were <\/i>these plot-based things. Anyway, it was these two scenes, and if you didn\u2019t have them, you didn\u2019t understand the book.<\/p>\n

Well, one, I radically disagree with that as a mode of analysis. And two, I don\u2019t agree with that, in that particular case. But the other thing is, both of those were things we shot that, for other various practical reasons, didn\u2019t work. In one, the performances and sound just didn\u2019t come through. The other worked great as a scene, but narratively just killed the drive of the latter half of the movie.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a big believer in, for example, \u2018why not<\/i> remake movies?\u2019 Why not remake movies five years after? Embrace the idea that each one is just a different interpretation. So, offer a new interpretation of it.<\/p>\n

You actually didn\u2019t include my favorite scene, Vardaman drilling into the coffin to make air holes. I\u2019d love to hear why. <\/b>[MAJOR SPOILERS FROM HERE UNTIL THE END]<\/b><\/p>\n

We did film Vardaman drilling into the coffin\u2014it worked as an individual scene, I thought, but the main reason it didn’t make the cut is that it threw off the timing of the sequence from Addie’s death to the funeral to the family loading the coffin into the wagon. There are several key scenes that happen in the wake of Addie’s death\u2014Dewey Dell and the dead fish, Anse by Addie’s bedside, Cash seeing her dead and continuing to build the coffin. Something had to go, and so we had to make the tough choice of cutting what is undeniably an iconic part of the book.<\/p>\n

What were the two scenes that person thought were the keys to the book?<\/b><\/p>\n

When Anse steals money from Dewey Dell and when they come across the African American sharecroppers outside of Jefferson.<\/p>\n

We did film the Anse scene, and it was powerfully acted\u2014on its own it is a great scene – but it totally disrupts the rhythm and tone of the final Jefferson scenes, and it removes any last ambiguity about Anse’s character. He’s clearly the villain, at that point. We thought that omitting it left open the ambiguity as to whether we should read Anse as a conniving villain or a sympathetic fool. Again, this isn’t to say that another person’s (even if only imagined) interpretation couldn’t opt to make a different choice\u2014my argument is that an exclusion should be read as an interpretative choice, and not dismissively read as a failure to understand the book. That mode just seems so much more productive and interesting to me than the incessant desire to render a summary judgment.<\/p>\n

The second scene was the one in which, as they approach Jefferson, Jewel and Darl walk by the African American sharecroppers and get in a fight with the white guy who draws a knife on Jewel. Yes, the scene is the only direct reference to race in the entirety of AILD, so I understand its significance (eliding, momentarily, the problematic academic move of reading rarity\u2014especially in canonized literature\u2014as inherently significant). But the scene doesn’t work filmicly for the precise reason that it works on the page. The sudden appearance of the African Americans, which is effectively jarring in the novel, feels like a random disjuncture when visualized, as if we suddenly crossed into a different storyworld altogether.<\/p>\n

This feeling of disorientation could, of course, be read as precisely Faulkner’s point, but we felt that, when played on film, the disorientation didn’t have that sense of purpose, especially to a viewer unfamiliar with the book. You can imagine it: \u2018Oh, so I guess Franco suddenly remembered, 90 minutes in, that there were black people in the south?\u2019<\/p>\n

Especially as it comes so near to the end of the film when we were trying to build movement from the barn burning into the final Jefferson denouement. While that scene, on its own, is one of my favorite Darl scenes because he stands up to the stranger while simultaneously getting Jewel to stand down, I\u2019m ambivalent about how it fits into the trajectory of the rest of the novel. We see Darl at his most sane, moments before he is carted away to the insane asylum at Jackson. One way of reading this is as being deliberately ironic, that Darl, as the only sane one, is judged as mad by the others, but this reading is then undercut in the novel by Darl’s final scene in which he has, apparently, gone quite mad.<\/p>\n

What makes Faulkner of such academic interest is, of course, precisely this ambiguity and seemingly counter-intuitive progression. But unfolding on screen, the whiplash between Darl as sane arbitrator and Darl being carted off to Jackson only confuses things. An adaptation of a novel like this must constantly attempt to walk that line between effective ambiguity and ineffective confusion.<\/p>\n

You could imagine a version of the film that focuses on Darl exclusively, allowing the other characters to fade into the background. That<\/i> version might have the space and time to delve further into these ironies and contradictions, and it probably would be a more nuanced portrait of Darl, yes, but at the expense of the rest of the family.<\/p>\n

As a big Jewel fan, that would disappoint the hell out of me.<\/b><\/p>\n

Another complaint was that we didn’t include the explanation of the work and sacrifice that went into Jewel getting his horse. True, we didn’t, but can you imagine what that would have entailed? Either a five-minute flashback, two-thirds of the way through the movie, dealing with him clearing fields and saving money\u2014or lengthy exposition. Neither option is particularly compelling from a dramatic point of view. We could have done this, but instead we attempted to, throughout the movie, visually convey his almost primal bond with his horse, rather than relying on backstory and exposition.<\/p>\n

Critics can say \u2018should have done X\u2019 without actually stopping and imagining what this new version of the film would actually look like, not taking into account the reality of the counterfactual they proclaim as superior. I think this is such an interesting topic because the emphasis on considering what wasn’t included as an inherent error encapsulates the issue of reading adaptations as a one-to-one comparison of book vs. movie, rather than treating the film as an interpretation of the book.<\/p>\n

Viewing a movie as an interpretation means treating elisions and alterations as choices, and the discussion of those choices becomes the starting point of a discussion about the book, the film, and the process of adaptation more generally, rather than being the concluding point of a summary judgment. For me, all of this has less to do with any specific response to this particular film, and more to do with what I find most interesting from a scholarly\/critical side\u2014the process of adapting from one medium to another as a means of opening up new ways of thinking about a familiar text.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"asilaydying3\"
\n

\nMatt Rager is the co-writer, alongside James Franco, of Franco’s\u00a0As I Lay Dying<\/a>, an adaptation of the Faulkner novel<\/a>. [Ed. note: you can read John D’Amico’s review<\/a> of the film here.] He’s also the sole writer of the pair’s upcoming The Sound and the Fury<\/a>, also based on the Faulkner book<\/a>. Recently, we sat down over banana bread and talked about filmmaking:<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,2505],"tags":[3209,3620,3624,3212,3628,3630,3623,3627,1426,95,3216,3625,3619,3626,3629,104,185,3621,3228,3622,3230,3229,3217],"class_list":["post-4588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts","category-johns-interviews","tag-as-i-lay-dying","tag-as-i-lay-dying-interview","tag-as-i-lay-dying-matt-rager","tag-as-i-lay-dying-review","tag-david-foster-wallace","tag-david-mitchell","tag-faulkner","tag-infinite-jest","tag-james-franco","tag-john-damico","tag-matt-rager","tag-matt-rager-as-i-lay-dying","tag-matt-rager-interview","tag-matt-rager-sound-and-the-fury","tag-murakami","tag-smug-film-2","tag-smugfilm","tag-sound-and-the-fury","tag-the-sound-and-the-fury","tag-the-sound-and-the-fury-interview","tag-the-sound-and-the-fury-james-franco","tag-the-sound-and-the-fury-movie","tag-william-faulkner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4588"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4622,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4588\/revisions\/4622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}