Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead Talk Spring

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Movie makers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have an incredibly unique film on their hands with their sophomore offering, Spring (review). Recently, Benson and Moorhead sat down with Dread Central to give us the skinny on their newest movie.

The duo began by giving an overview of just what audiences can expect when settling in with Spring. “Spring is a story about a young man who flees Southern California in an emotional and legal tailspin, picks a random, nowhere trip to Italy, gets to Italy and sparks up this very naturalistic romance with a beautiful woman in a little Italian Mediterranean village,” Benson said. “And when they go their separate ways, the audience sees these really grotesque transformations in the girl…and that’s as far as we should take it because, at the movie’s core, there’s a central mystery as to what she is and it’s fun to figure it out.”

Moorhead included, “The reason people are probably going to want to end up seeing the movie is that Nadia Hilker plays what a lot of people think is one of the best strong female characters that they’ve gotten to see recently,”he said. “She seems like very much a real person and not just some kind of fantasy or just a movie female. Also, the film has got a score by Jimmy Lavalle. He’s also known as the Album Leaf, he’d kind of like a Trent Reznor-ish artist. The Album Leaf is the name of the band, but he is the Album Leaf.”

Benson and Moorhead

“Also,” Moorhead continued, “this is one of the earlier uses of aerial drone photography in a larger indie film. We got to take it over to the Italian coast and it’s absolutely beautiful. Also, being set in Italy, it’s got a lot of incredible Italian coastline imagery and…it’s got monsters, an evolutionary myth and there’s a decent amount of discussion about that. So you get to anticipate your mind being stimulated at the same time as your heart. And it’s a weepy love story, frankly. It looks like a monster movie, but it’s a date movie. Truly, through and through, we’ve never had someone watch it and not be like, ‘Man, my wife cried. That was great,’ or ‘I cried.’ It’s not even just for the girls. It’s for everybody. Everybody cries. It’s a very, very sweet movie.”

The female lead in Spring, Louise, is the key to the movie. If Benson and Moorhead had miscast that role, we would not have been having this conversation. Luckily, the pair brilliantly brought in Nadia Hilker to play the role…and the rest is history. “We we’re like code red,” Benson said. “We had to find someone immediately, and we weren’t getting any help going the traditional talent agency route. Everything they sent us, despite the breakdown being exactly who Nadia is…you’ve seen her, very exotic, she has a thing. Despite that, the only thing we got from agencies were people you would not describe like that at all. They may as well have sent us 100 dudes to look at. It did not seem to exist in that world, so we sent out a code red to every international producer that we had met when we were on the road with our first movie, Resolution, going to film festivals in Europe. Nadia came back on several lists and we auditioned her on Skype and brought her into L.A. to have molds made for the special F/X company, Masters F/X. And when she came and did that and we met her, we were like, ‘Oh great, she’s as smart and charming in our life as she was in our online Skype dating phase.’ She’s incredible and she’s become a very good friend of ours and I don’t know how we got so lucky.”

Indeed Hilker was the driving force behind Spring and Moorhead talked about how bright her future is. “I don’t know if we’re allowed to take credit for discovering her or not, but hopefully we get to take credit for that because eventually we will not be able to touch her,” Moorhead said. “Hopefully we will, but eventually we won’t be able to touch her because she’ll be like ‘Sorry, Scorsese called again and I can’t guys.’ She’s truly one of those people who are a discovery. And in terms of working with her, and Lou (Taylor Pucci) and their acting styles…Lou has been doing this since he was younger than 18 and he’s able to absorb all of the meaning inside a script, tear it completely apart , internalize it and bring it back out however you want it. He’s a perfect emotional technician. He’s very reactive and everything comes from a specific place. Nadia is more like a rouge cowgirl. She can shoot from the hip, acting-wise, and brings a very, very loose…the person that Louise is in Spring is very similar to the person Nadia is. Just this really, really fun, intelligent, funny person that’s extraordinarily weird as well. She’s a weird girl in all of the best ways.”

Aside from gorgeous shots of Nadia as Louise, Spring has some insanely beautiful camerawork capturing the Italian landscape that provides the backdrop for the movie. The directors described just how they were able to capture such amazing imagery. “We had a very meticulous shot list and had a well thought out approach to the photography of the movie and after all that was done, our first AC/steadycam operator, Will Sampson, came to us and said ‘Hey, I’ve got this new drone I just bought. Should I bring it for the production? Maybe we could use it.’ We knew immediately how that would fit into our general approach to the photography of the movie. The photography should feel like an omniscient presence in the movie. It should feel very subjective, almost like a third, all-powerful character. So Will came out with the drone and, after almost getting arrested with it in a Moscow airport because they were thinking it was a piece of military equipment he was going to assault Russia with, we got to use it. Any day the crew was off, Aaron and I would continue to shoot. On Sundays in Italy, we’d continue shooting and that was when we’d do the drone photography with Will. Just grab as many shots as we could, experiment with it, see how it would work. And almost everything we shot with the drone made it into the edit. It’s one of the talking points of the movie. It’s pretty cool. It’s one of those things where one day, because a lot of people have started using them and someday people are going to look at our movie and be like, ‘Why did Moorhead and Benson use the fucking toy helicopter thing over and over and over again?”

Moorhead added, “But hopefully they’ll realize that back then, drones had just come out. We were like, ‘Yeah! Let’s use it!'”

Although, as Moorhead says, Spring is indeed a love story at its heart, it does contain some wicked special F/X as well. “We worked with Masters F/X as our practical F/X company and asked them to make this thing that was basically nature-based rather than based on existing creatures and existing monsters,” Moorhead said. “We didn’t send him pictures of it. We just sent him pictures of salamanders and diseased pigeons and stuff like that. Something that looks like it actually evolved at a certain point rather than something that imitates another monster. It is primarily practical, but we can’t discount the work of Frost F/X, which was our visual F/X company. They’re this small Estonian company who basically generated the lower half of her body, which can be seen in about three shots. We got on set and it looked really awesome, but we were like, ‘Can we make it look impossible? Like it can’t actually be something we shot on set, but is still real in nature?'”

And in addition to the F/X, Benson and Moorhead had an entirely new creature to introduce. Anyone who has heard the old Bob Newhart routine where he tries to explain the origin of baseball will understand just how difficult of a process that can be. The filmmakers talked about this, which was one of the biggest challenges in making Spring. “That was the longest portion of the development of the script,” Benson said. “It was constant experimentation. We’d be like ‘Okay, let’s try it this way, let’s give it to 10 readers and see how high their comprehension level is. And just see, did it go too high? Is it too low? Because the third act doesn’t work at all unless there’s clarity about how everything is working with everything you’ve seen before. Just trying to hit the sweet spot in comprehension and it didn’t feel like really intrusive exposition. Haunted house movies are great, but a lot of them have that scene where they’re like, ‘Call up the psychic!’ and they come in and explain everything headed into the third act. We were trying to avoid having to have a secret society come into explain what’s going on.”

Moorhead explained further, using an amusing reference. “Imagine it’s 200 years ago and you think up this new myth, and you’re like ‘Oh shoot, this is complicated. Maybe I shouldn’t tell the world about my new myth and just use one we’ve already used,'” Moorhead said. “‘It’s going to be really hard to get across the idea of a person who can’t die if they drink blood, but they also can’t see sunlight, they turn into a bat, they sleep in a coffin, they’re really good with women, they can see in the dark and there’s a bunch of other rules as well.’ These rules don’t follow from one another. Luckily, Louise’s rules follow from one another. There’s just one simple idea and everything else takes off from there. But if you think of the myths that we already know, it’s like vampires have a lot of really arbitrary rules. The only thing I can kind of imagine is that if you drink someone’s blood, maybe 200 years ago you might think that would make you immortal. But I don’t understand turning into a bat, sleeping in a coffin, having pallid skin, being really good with women. All of these things are kind of like…you assigned these rules randomly, did you? You’ve got to explain that. But thank god we got the vampire myth and people weren’t scared off by its complexity.”

Spring

Spring

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