Tilt – Exclusive Pics and Release Info
Tony Timpone
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Tilt, one of our favorite films from the spring and summer festival circuit (we saw it at both its world premiere at the Tribeca and at Montreal’s Fantasia film festivals), just landed a theatrical distributor. Dread Central just got the scoop (and some exclusive pics!) from director Kasra Farahani on release plans for his unsettling psychological thriller, about a documentary filmmaker (Joseph Cross of “Big Little Lies”) slowly losing his mind when job, marriage and social problems begin to take a toll.
Farahani reveals that Tilt will be distributed digitally by The Orchard (Demon, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, this fall’s excellent Super Dark Times) next spring. West Coast genre fans don’t have to wait that long. Tilt will play this Sunday night, September 24, at the Downtown Los Angeles Film Festival. See here for tix.
“Certainly, making a movie about a frustrated filmmaker living in Silverlake will invite some comparisons,” Farahani explains. “The seed for Tilt came from my co-writer Jason O’Leary. He became struck by the mental image of a man in a dark room standing silently over his sleeping wife. After a few chats, this man became Joe Burns. The character became a vehicle to explore some personally familiar ideas about the fear of commitment, ambivalence about having children and exceptionalism. In Tilt, the plan was to use these common contemporary urban struggles to explore how a few bad turns could set a vulnerable person onto a very dark path from which he could not return.”
“I was not interested in making a tawdry film,” the director continues of his film’s political subtext. “For me, Tilt is a deep character exploration of a modern narcissist. Take your run of the mill (third wave) coffee shop intellectual, loosen a few screws, add a heap of humiliation and voila, you have Joe Burns. He has convinced himself that his vision is iconoclastic; that his art is a ‘cultural disruption.’ Joe would rather destroy everything than fade away into the sunset of an enviable if ordinary life, having compromised all the lofty ambitions to which he has felt entitled his entire privileged, middle-class life. Just as Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle struggled to re-enter society after fighting in Vietnam, Joe Burns struggles with alienation from a modern society that seems to be blind to his genius and happily whirring along without him. Joe fancies himself a brilliant crusader of liberal views, but for all his liberal grandstanding and artsy affectation, Joe might secretly prefer to live in the 1950s, the ‘mythic golden age of American life’ that he is making a rambling documentary about. More and more, he exhibits glimpses of the white male rage and entitlement that have become disturbingly vocal in the past year of American political life. Being an Iranian-born American, as half the country seeks to ‘make America great again’ via the exclusion of ‘others,’ I cannot help being affected by these voices. Ultimately, in Tilt, I wanted to explore how tenuous our senses of safety and control really are. How quickly the most familiar person in your life can become the most terrifying. How quickly we can become terrifying to ourselves.”
For more on Tilt, check out the movie’s Facebook page here.
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