Dread X: Nicolas Pesce on 10 Movies That Inspired PIERCING
Jonathan Barkan
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After the phenomenal The Eyes of My Mother, Nicolas Pesce created one of the most talked about festival hits of last year with Piercing, an adaptation of Japanese novelist Ryū Murakami’s novel of the same name. Critics and audiences alike were drawn to the dark and stylish horror thriller, which saw Christopher Abbott and Mia Wasikowska engage in a twisted game of cat and mouse.
Clearly, with such a film that has folks talking nonstop, we couldn’t let it slide, so we’ve got an extra Dread X this week that sees Pesce discuss 10 films that inspired Piercing. To say that they’re varied is an understatement. In fact, I think the list proves that Pesce is one of the most exciting and fascinating directors on the scene today. There’s a very bright future for him in the coming years, mark my words.
“In this twisted love story, a man seeks out an unsuspecting stranger to help him purge the dark torments of his past. His plan goes awry when he encounters a woman with plans of her own. A playful psycho-thriller game of cat-and-mouse based on Ryû Murakami’s novel.“
Piercing comes to home video today. You can get a Blu-ray or DVD on Amazon. Additionally, you can watch the movie on Amazon Prime.
Takashi Miike’s Audition
There would be no Piercing without Audition. Both films are based on novels by Ryu Murakami, but I only discovered Murakami after seeing Miike’s film. While they are very different films, we looked at Audition as a sort of template. Both films are about characters with nefarious intentions being overthrown by their much more nefariously intentioned supposed-to-be-victims. Miike managed to delve into such dark subject matter with such a bizarre sense of humor, and the result is awesome. The most twisted stuff could be happening on screen, but you find yourself laughing, and maybe you feel weird about that, but that’s the Miike magic. We were constantly trying to find our version of this off-putting sense of humor to breathe into our own Murakami cat-and-mouse game.
Dario Argento’s The Bird With the Crystal Plumage
It was hard for me to not put ten Giallo films on this list, but Piercing is more than just a Giallo love letter, so for the sake of variety, I’m choosing this one as the genre’s representative, as it was very much my entry point into the Giallo genre. Most people immediately jump to Suspiria when they hear Giallo or Argento, but Suspiria is not actually an accurate sample of the rest of the genre, nor is it Argento’s best film. Fine art, furniture, design, and architecture play such a large role in Crystal Plumage in so many ways. They are part of the narrative, the aesthetic, and the physical actions of the actors in the spaces. Visual design at every level is what ties all the elements together in this film, and the same can be said of many films of the genre. We were very inspired to do the same with Piercing. Also, Giallo music is awesome, but you can tell how much I love that stuff by how much we use on the soundtrack.
Luigi Bazzoni’s The Fifth Cord
Argento always gets all the love when it comes to Giallo directors, so I also want to use this opportunity to turn the attention to a lesser known Giallo director, one who is often left off the lists of the greats to make room for Bava, Fulci, Argento, and Martino (all of whom are also amazing and very much inspired Piercing), the one and only Luigi Bazzoni. And this film of his is particularly spectacular. The lighting and cinematography in this movie are amazing. Such graphic shots. Like film-noir but dripping with intensely saturated colors. The aesthetic of the movie is somewhere between Kubrick and 70’s pop-art. But there’s something almost Bladerunner-y about the aesthetic, and as a result, the setting of the film feels out of place and time. The world of Piercing is very much out of place and time, so this was a big reference in terms of how much lighting can do to the feel of the “outside” world.
Jacques Tati’s Playtime
This entire movie was shot on an enormous set. If you haven’t seen the movie, you won’t understand how insane and impressive that is. So many movies are shot entirely on sets, but Tati had an entire city built. An entire city. Not a functioning one, but for the purposes of a camera, it was a whole friggin’ city. Google pictures of that set, because I can’t express how insane and awesome it is. But I was so inspired by this idea of building an entirely artificial world, that more or less looks the same as our own, but feels slightly off, just a little wrong, and I wanted that to be the world of Piercing. We couldn’t do it to the scale that Tati had, but our film was also far more contained. All of the interior locations were sets, and all the exterior locations were miniatures, shot to look full size. So even when the characters are in the outside world, the buildings that surround them, in real life, are only three feet tall. Tati’s world feels real but wrong, and unfamiliar, and we wanted the same for Piercing. Seriously, go look at the insanity that was Tati’s set-builds. He was a visionary.
David Lynch’s Blue Velvet
I’ll never not steal from Lynch. David Lynch is my number one. I steal from different movies each time, but there’s always some Lynch in there somewhere. This time it was Blue Velvet. I’m obsessed with the way Lynch manipulates mood and tone in such abstract and unnerving ways. We have not yet invented words for the emotions induced by his films, so we’ve resorted to the blanket term of Lynchian. The way Lynch blends sexuality, kink, and romance in this film is wild, and similar terrains that we were exploring in Piercing. The look of Blue Velvet also felt particularly aligned with Piercing, set in these small dark rooms, where lurid, dangerous, sexual things transpire and linger in the place. The different worlds of Lynch’s film, the different lives of the different characters, all intersect in such unsuspected ways when the characters find their way to Dorothy’s apartment, and that was very much the function of Jackie’s apartment in Piercing. Any Lynch fan will notice that we even went so far as basically stealing the general design elements and color palette of Dorothy’s apartment in Blue Velvet for Jackie’s Apartment in Piercing.
Mary Harron’s American Psycho
Piercing is essentially a movie that asks the audience to spend a long time sympathizing and sometimes routing for a murderer. And that’s a hard pill to swallow. But few films have achieved that daunting task better than American Psycho. Part of American Psycho’s success has to do with its sense of humor and satirical tone. That movie, done straight, becomes a hard watch for a lot of people. But infuse a bit of playfulness, and a main character who is smart enough to get by but bumbling enough so we can have fun watching him fail, and you’ve got a great little recipe for a weird movie, but a weird movie we wanted to make. Like American Psycho, we tried to use the juxtaposition of humor and violence in Piercing to sort of poke fun at the tropes of the genre.
Brian DePalma’s Blow Out
Split screens, split screens, split screens. There are a lot of filmmakers who have used split screens to various effects, but DePalma made them cool. He made them sexy. He used split screens with such elegance, not only to just show you two things that were happening at once, but used them to such an ingenious effect that his split screens went beyond the simple storytelling of “This is happening here while this is happening here,” and instead used the split screen to put the audience in two different perspectives at once. Like an author getting to be in the first person and the third person at once. Piercing is a movie all about differing perspectives and perceptions, and so we used DePalma style split screens at the points in the movie when the characters’ perceptions of what was going on was at its most disparate, to really show what different worlds and perspectives our characters are in at any given moment.
Michael Anderson’s Logan’s Run
I was obsessed with this movie when I was a kid. I loved how cheesy the world looked. As a kid, I didn’t realize it was cheesy. I didn’t quite know what it was that I loved. The world felt simple, with bold bright colors, like something a kid could build. Later I realized that was called “camp”. And when I learned that was not
David Cronenberg’s Crash
Crash is a lot about sex. But it’s also a lot about love and romance, and finding your community, and like-minded people, while also being very much about sex. Piercing is very much a movie about sexuality, in a very unconventional way, and even more so, the sexuality that it explores is not the sort that everyone has experience with. We looked to Crash’s relationship with sexuality and kink and fetishes. The film treats everything with great respect, and if anything shows how much love there is within something that many see as dangerous or wrong. The fetishistic tet-a-tet in Crash finds its way into every relationship, every plot twist, everything step of every dance is imbued with Crash’s unique brand of sexuality. While Piercing’s brand of sexuality may be different than Crash’s we wanted to treat its relationship to the film in a similar way as Cronenberg had done with Crash. There’s a lot more actual sex in Crash, but that’s not the point. It’s the stuff that it threatens, the stuff that it teases that inspired the way we handled sexuality in Piercing. It’s casual, it’s normal, for these characters in this world, it’s not strange or odd or different, it’s the intersection of love and dealing with trauma.
Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct
The book that Piercing is based on mentions Basic Instinct quite a bit. In the novel, it serves as a cultural touchstone for the readers, directly pointing to the sort of story that the book is poking fun at. In the late eighties and early nineties, there were a lot of these types of psycho-sexual thrillers in the mainstream. What had previously been lurid culty thrillers were now cast with top Hollywood stars, and the steamy cat-and-mouse games were a hit. But packed into movies like Basic Instinct were the necessary tropes: the femme fatale who would prove more sinister than anyone had imagined and the naïve leading man who thought he was the one controlling everything. With Piercing, Murakami took this formula and gave it his own twisted spin. Basic Instinct was always on our minds while making the film. That movie drips with sexual tension at all times (even in the famous police interrogation scene), and from that movie we learned how much infusing all things with sexual tension can raise the overall effect of all the entire movie’s tension.
