It definitely goes to a really unhealthy place. To me, that pivot point where the movie stops being “fun” and starts being unnerving is important. Being able to do that takes an enormous amount of thought and planning, but I get the sense that you guys made the path by walking.
Scheinert and Kwan: It was scary. [laughs]
Kwan: I liken it to trying to hit five targets with one arrow, you know? We have all of these targets and we’re trying to hit them all with one arrow, and every draft is an arrow. The first draft only hits two of the targets, so you try to readjust your trajectory, and then you miss the first two, but you hit the three that you missed originally. For us, it was like a science experiment, trying to figure out the way to get to the final conclusion that we wanted to, and so yeah, there was a lot of discovering what we were trying to write.
That dark turn was one of those discoveries. It was not our intention to begin with, but the more that we wrote and the more that we listened to the characters, the more that we realized that was kind of a necessary thing for our characters to know and experience. So the big turning point for us and them, we’re pretty excited it works for some people. Obviously it’s one of those things that really turns people off if they’re hoping for a happy ending, but hopefully it’s still a bittersweet one, but something that feels a little more honest.
Speaking for myself, the ending hit these perfect comic notes; everyone in the theater, even people I knew were uneasy with it, just died laughing at the beats in the end. Is that what we should expect from what’s next, or will that be less about feeling out and discovery and more about strategy and planning? It sounds like you found things as you went through the process. Should we expect that approach from the next movie, too?
Scheinert: For sure. A lot of our work is a weird piece of performance art where we’re combining the forethought require for visual effects and ambitious storytelling with discovery along the way, you know? It’s like mumblecore combined with Pixar. It’s crazy making, but fun. I personally get a real kick out of that. The idea of making a movie where you have some sort of point to make, and you spend a few years making your point, sounds kind of boring, whereas we always try to bite off things that are going to keep rewarding us and challenging us, straight up through post-production, you know? At least that’s the process that seems to be what has happened in the past. It’s kind of hard to reflect on it entirely.
I wish more people took that approach to making movies. I feel like there’s a lot of rote, routine filmmaking out in the world today, so I wish people would step up to the edge like that.
Scheinert: Totally! Yeah, and I wish that when people stepped up to the edge, more people would celebrate that. Sometimes, I’ll see a really raw movie that I can tell somebody just poured themselves into and took a real risk, and I find that so much more entertaining than a good movie that took no risks. Like, “Alright, cool, you kind of painted a really good painting of a thing. Way to go.” [laughs]
At the same time, you can see that painting of a thing anywhere. It’s nice when someone does something different with it, and maybe puts a little bit of themselves up on the screen. Do you have a sense of why so many people are afraid to step to the edge? I know that’s a pretty broad question.
Scheinert: No, it’s a fine one! In some ways, I feel like that’s the theme behind “Swiss Army Man,” that we’re this society that accidentally shames people into hiding things about themselves, you know? You’re encouraged to always share the part of you that you already know there’s other people who share that out there, but anything about yourself that might be unique, you’re kind of taught to hide it, and be afraid of it. Even film criticism has been a really weird thing to watch and read this year, and kind of see how movies are celebrated because everyone can agree upon it.
Kwan: Rotten Tomatoes.
Oh god, yeah.
Scheinert: Yeah! It’s not the studio’s fault. It’s the culture at large accidentally teaching people to repress parts of themselves, you know?
Consensus is boring. Everything you’re talking about in film criticism is something I experience every second of every day. Yeah, consensus sucks.
Scheinert: But at the same time, it’s cool to see the film criticism that the movie is trying to do, where people fearlessly pour their hearts into what they connected to in the film, or trying to champion a film…that’s been so rewarding and interesting to read, these academic breakdowns of our weird little movie. It makes us feel like we’re smarter than we think we deserve. [laughs]
The way you’ve sold the movie as a movie about universal human experience, which is that everybody poops, and a movie about not shaming ourselves – that’s how I’m going to sell the movie to people from now on, if I don’t think they’d go for it normally. Because those things are there! But it’s also a movie where you see Daniel Radcliffe’s real hairy butt, and there are fart jokes!
Kwan: [laughs]
Scheinert: Yeah! Yeah!
I love that. I love layers. I think it’s good to have a movie that’s layered and that not everybody agrees on, but is also moving. You’ve probably been asked this a million times already, so excuse me for asking again, but what do you turn to for inspiration that encourages you to think that way for your own filmmaking?
Kwan: I think a lot of it comes from the fact that we spend so much time ingesting information, nonfiction, fiction, all of these things, and me and Dan, we spend a lot of time looking at grey area, because, I don’t know what it is about right now, but people feel a lot safer being very much either in the black or white. Everything has gotta be this or that, or right or wrong, good versus evil, and I think we spend a lot more time in the grey area, and that naturally comes out in our storytelling. I feel like anytime anything we make gets a little too black and white, it feels wrong.
I know that’s not answering your question exactly, but I feel like that’s one of the big reasons why we want to make movies that make some people uncomfortable, and feel like they’re not exactly sure how to label it. We spend so much time reacting to how quickly people like to label things. So there’s that.
And then there are these artists who are kind of exploring the kind of things that we really love. I’m trying to think of recent things I’ve seen that I’ve seen that have really felt exciting in that way…
Scheinert: There’s a filmmaking collective we love in Florida called Borscht, and they just make the strangest movies, and then they’ve just started supporting other filmmakers who want to make the strangest things. I remember a year or two ago, I discovered that they made four short films that I loved, and I didn’t realize that they were all theirs. They’re really inspiring and fun. And we got a lot of inspiration from the indie animation world, people like David O’Reilly, or Julia Pott, who’s one of our good friends, Kirsten Lepore, Dan Kwan’s wife…
Kwan: [laughs]
Scheinert: But that world is a unique one, where people just hole up in a room and make something super personal, and it’s pretty incredible what pops out of the other side of that, the kind of therapeutic journey that they go on.
From my own recommendations: If you guys haven’t seen “The Fits” or “Krisha,” those two movies feel ballsy in similar ways to “Swiss Army Man,” without the corpses and the farting.
Scheinert: Yeah, I can’t wait to see “Krisha.” I haven’t seen that.
Kwan: Yeah.
Oh, it’s great. Fabulous. I actually like that you’re talking about animators and filmmaking collectives. If you ask people about their influences, they’re very likely to talk about someone who you already know, like someone from the French New Wave, or one of the American greats. It’s nice to be reminded that inspiration comes from all kinds of places.
Scheinert: Yeah, we definitely have our list of “cool dude” filmmakers from the ‘90s, who we’re still trying to rip off, like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, and David Fincher…
Kwan: Yeah, David Fincher, definitely.
Scheinert: But lately interdisciplinary studies have just been so much more fun than just studying film. We’ve been reading weird books about neuroscience and taking deep dives into political news and political theory, just because it’s around us right now, and it’s really fun to go back to school.
In the meantime, are you guys just going to keep yourselves going by continuing to direct music videos?
Scheinert: Yeah, we’ll see! I think music videos at this point are a form that we really love. It’s more like a passion project kind of thing. We’ll keep ourselves going with who knows what else — TV stuff, writing gigs, or writing children’s books. Doing stunts. I’m trying to convince our stunt coordinator to hire me, but she won’t do it yet. I’m underqualified.
Please tell me you’re that not kidding about the children’s books, although I’m pretty sure you are, but that’d be great.
Scheinert: No! I’m always trying to bully Dan Kwan into actually trying to create some of his children’s book ideas.
Kwan: It’s my retirement game plan to do children’s books. I’ve been collecting ideas and writing them down. Actually writing the books, I just haven’t followed through. That’s my biggest weakness: No follow through. Maybe next year!
