CFF 2021: Interview – Jonathan Cuartas & Owen Campbell Talk MY HEART CAN’T BEAT UNLESS YOU TELL IT TO
Michelle Swope
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Living with chronic illness can take a toll, not just on the person who is sick, but also on family members who may have to provide care for them. As someone who lives with a chronic illness which sometimes causes me to rely on family members for support, I relate to Jonathan Cuartas’ first feature film My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You It To on such a personal level.
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Cuartas is a director/editor/producer known for the short films The Horse and the Stag (2018) and Twelve Traditions (2015). He wrote and directed My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You It To, which tells the emotional story of two siblings who have to go to murderous lengths to supply blood to their sickly brother in order to keep him alive. Patrick Fugit (Almost Famous, Wristcutters: A Love Story) gives an affecting performance as Dwight, a man who lives with his sister Jessie, played by Ingrid Sophie Schram (Phantom Thread), and their younger, frail brother Thomas, played by Owen Campbell (Super Dark Times). Thomas suffers from an unknown affliction and must ingest blood to survive, which requires Dwight and Jessie to do horrible things.
Haunting performances from Fugit, Schram, and Campbell dominate My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To, one of the most powerful and moving horror movies I’ve seen this year. The film premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival last week and this weekend it’s screening at the 2021 virtual Chattanooga Film Festival.
Dread Central was thrilled to have the opportunity to talk with director Jonathan Cuartas and star Owen Campbell about My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To, including Cuartas’ personal inspiration for the story, Campbell’s heartbreaking performance, and a lot more. Read on to find out what we talked about!
Synopsis:
Dwight (Patrick Fugit) prowls the streets after dark. He searches each night for the lonely and forlorn, looking for people who won’t be missed. Dwight takes no joy in this, but he needs their blood. Without fresh human blood, his fragile young brother Thomas cannot survive. Each death takes a larger toll, the burden of his crimes weighing heavier each time, threatening to crack his spirit. But Thomas (Owen Campbell) and his sister Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram) are all the family Dwight has left, and as a fiercely private and close-knit family unit, they depend on him and the rituals they’ve learned in order to keep their secret. But while Dwight yearns for another life, Jessie needs them to stay together. And always the boy must feed.
Dread Central: Jonathan, you wrote and directed My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To and it’s your first feature film. This is such an emotional movie. What inspired you to write this story?
Jonathan Cuartas: It kind of came from an extreme with my family. My father is the youngest of ten siblings and my grandmother was in hospice in 2016. I was in this very small house and there was a bunch of family members there, a bunch of cousins and aunts and uncles, and I saw the tension in there that kind of overwhelmed all of us at the time because of decisions we had to make about my grandmother. We knew that she wasn’t going to get better, and it was very tense, but at the same time there was a lot of love surrounding my family because at the end of the day we were a family.
I wanted to explore this tension and this love and some of this situation and make it a little more intimate. I surrounded three siblings because I have two siblings myself and I just gravitate towards horror, so I thought, “What’s the best subgenre to talk about codependency or family sacrifice?” So that’s how that came about.
DC: The movie implies that Thomas is suffering from vampirism because he requires blood to survive and it made me think of films like The Addiction and Habit, but those films are basically metaphors for addiction. This film is different because Thomas actually seems to have a health condition, so it feels like a metaphor for chronic illness. Jonathan, what do you hope audiences take away from the movie?
JC: I always find it interesting who audiences empathize with because I tried to characterize everyone in the movie, even the victims, and it’s always interesting to hear who sympathizes or empathizes with who. For example, some people think Jessie is the antagonist and she’s a cold-blooded killer, which she is, but I also empathize with her a lot because I feel like she’s the foundation that holds the family together. And I feel that she’s very strong, so it says a lot about the individual person who they gravitate towards or empathize more with, so that’s what interests me the most to hear from audiences and to hear how that resonates with different people.
DC: Owen, you are amazing as Thomas! Your body movements and your facial expressions convey creepiness and innocence at the same time. How did you get into this character’s head?
Owen Campbell: Thank you so much! There was always a discussion that the character had to be extremely innocent, and I think it’s very easy to make monsters in monster movies, but this is cynical. I think you touched on it earlier that this is embracing an illness that this person is struggling with, rather than something that defines him completely. That guided all the choices for me. I think Jonathan was really sensitive to everything the character needed.
DC: Jonathan, this story deals with isolation and loneliness, something we’ve all experienced over the past year. Thomas longs for contact with other people. Were you at all influenced by the pandemic or had you already written the story?
JC: It’s so interesting because it’s so relevant now, but we had finished the film. Even post-production was done right before the pandemic. We did a little bit of the final touches during the pandemic. It was already written and already filmed, so I think it’s very interesting how it relates so much to it. Now we all want to go outside and make friends again.
DC: All the performances in this film are incredibly powerful and you really seem like a family that cares about each other. Owen, what was it like working with Patrick Fugit and Ingrid Sophie Schram on this movie?
OC: We definitely really got very close. Closer than I’ve gotten with actors on other films. On very few films do you get this close to people and when you do you know it’s going to be a special film. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that Ingrid and I were living together. They put us up in a house together and we really became siblings. We cooked dinner together, she would give me advice on my relationship [laughs], we talked about art and the film, and we worked scenes together. Having that intimacy allowed us to build a very special bond that then plays very well with the greater relationship where they have a sort of separate closeness from Dwight.
Patrick was such a joy to work with, he’s such a professional. He was so playful on set that he made it really easy to feel like a family because he really cares about everyone and was making sure everyone was comfortable. All those little symmetries in reality that mirrored the character dynamics were just such a gift because it meant that we didn’t have to invent a closeness that wasn’t there. We weren’t ever pretending to care about each other. We really grew to love each other and care about each other. There were no egos on set, if that makes sense. [laughs]
DC: I think it’s important not to give too much away, but the ending of this movie is both devastating and beautiful at the same time. Jonathan, why did you decide to end the story the way you did?
JC: It’s interesting because in the original edit, it didn’t end that way. It was a lot different. We just felt that Dwight’s character should stay in some sort of purgatory and again stuck, this time with himself and with his guilt, that felt more totally relevant to the rest of the movie. Just to leave some speculation at the end fell in line with the rest of the movie, just some sort of meditation. That’s why we all, the whole production, chose to end it in this way. It originally ended in a more abrupt way, in a more violent way, but it just felt totally off. There was something about leaving our character in a purgatory that felt more right.
Dark Sky Films will release My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To in theaters and digital VOD platforms on June 25th.
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