That’s a great way to envision it. I guess ‘Hunter’ is where the idea for the black and white came from?
Yes, that and also “Psycho.” When Hitchcock made “Psycho” back in 1960, color was available for your movie, but he decided to still shoot it in black and white. I believe it was because he wanted to set a particular mood within his film that really brought an extra dimension to the characters and atmosphere. I was very much trying to do that with this film. We were trying to make it look like it was made in the ’60s. I wanted to put you in a totally different world and setting. Black and White sets up a moody atmosphere that can directly make you feel the protagonist’s psyche. It’s a moody stylistic choice.
Any other influences you had in making this film?
“Straight Jacket,” “Psycho,” and even “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” and to me, that’s what’s always attracted me. Family dramas or character studies with horror elements, violence and that all just combines to heighten the tension of the family drama at hand. The surprise element: it’s really more than enough knowing that it’s a movie about a lonely girl; the rest you can discover while watching the film. You know you could take out all the violence in the movie and it would still have this resonant story about a girl coping with the loss of her mother. She doesn’t really know how to deal with the feelings she has. This isn’t a film about an evil girl. She does deal with it in an unusually grotesque way, but that’s just part of the character study I’m conveying.
I had no idea where it was going.
[Laughs] Yeah, that’s precisely how the film should make you feel. What happened to going into a movie cold? Not knowing anything about it? That’s what the cinema is all about.
Right, but you run the risk of, if you’re sensitive or easily offended, being horrified by what you see and just walking out of the theater.
Yeah, like the surgeons [laughs].
I actually wrote in my review that it felt like a Pedro Almodóvar movie.
I think there is definitely an Almodóvar influence in the movie. Especially his later stuff like “The Skin I Live In,” which is a great movie and was an obvious blueprint for the film. Almodóvar mixed a peculiar set of genres into a whole movie; it was a melodrama thriller that was also a medical horror movie. I actually recommended that film to the cast and crew before we started production, especially to [cinematographer] Zack Kurpstein.
I’m sure the successful run this film has had at fests worldwide has brought upon a few new opportunities, so what’s next for you?
We’re actually about to shoot a new movie which deals with similar themes, but it is a very different movie than “The Eyes Of My Mother,” but we do play again with the question of what could lead you to kill, what would put you on the brink of crossing that line and committing such an act. It’s an adaptation, but I can’t reveal details any further than that.
“The Eyes Of My Mother” opens on Friday, December 2nd.
