Tag: Mandy

Our dirty questions to Panos Cosmatos

Posted on by victorfraga

Panos Cosmatos (pictured above) subverts low-brow genre film making by blending exploitation subject-matter and crafting it into beautiful, cinematic events of emotional, visual and sonic intensity. Carving out a new genre of film, Cosmatos draws from a global heritage of art and artefact, high and low, to tell stories that resonate, captivate and obfuscate with equal measures of sledge-hammer force and artful finesse.

His second feature film Mandy (after the 2008’s critically acclaimed Beyond the Black Rainbow) stars Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough and Linus Roache and is about set-fire to everything we thought we knew about cinema and story-telling. You can read our exclusive review of the film by clicking here, where Stephen Lee Naish compares Cosmatos to Lynch and Kubrick.

Lara C. Cory met with Panos Cosmatos as he travelled to London for his film premiere at the London Film Festival on October 11th. The film was launched in cinemas across the UK the following day. They talked about the origins of Mandy, why he took a decade between his two films, working with Nicolas Cage and unusual “paces”. Read on and find out more!

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Lara C. Cory – It’s been a long time since your first film Beyond the Black Rainbow in 2008. Do you remember the kernel of how Mandy began in your imagination and when you knew it would be your next film?

Panos Cosmatos – It was right when I was still writing Beyond the Black Rainbow [pictured below; all other images from Mandy], and looking back on it now I realise now it was sort of like an antidote to BBR which was all about suppressing my emotions and grief [Panos’s father, director George P. Cosmatos died aged just 64 in 2005]. Unconsciously, I think I needed to purge my grief in a volcanic eruption of feelings. I chose the revenge genre for its innate emotionality and operatic qualities.

LCC – You deliver such emotional depths in your films, in spite of the minimal dialogue and simplistic plots. In a cinematic landscape where so many fail on this level, how do you get it so right?

PC – I think because I’m morbidly fixated on the idea of simplicity in a weird way. It’s reactionary too, because when I was writing these films, the mid 2000s, films had become preoccupied with intricate plot lines. But they were only an illusion of complexity because emotionally and tonally they were not complex films. I wanted to do something simple; start with a simple story and build up a rich emotional, sonic and visual experience around that. To me, the story is fuel that drives the hot-rod. It doesn’t need to complicated to be interesting or powerful.

LCC – The pacing of your films is noticeably slower than most releases today. Can you talk about your decision to pace Mandy, in the first half anyway, as gently as you did?

PC – Beyond the Black Rainbow was deliberately slow because I was interested in the zone-out, hypnotic, trance-like quality of 35mm film. I wanted people to lose themselves in the film and not feel pushed forward the whole time. Mandy was a bit more propulsive, I think of Beyond the Black Rainbow as slow speed, and Mandy as medium speed. I wanted the audience to sink into this metaphorical lake of this reality, let them become comfortable so I could slowly tear it apart.

LCC – Not only Cage, Roache and Riseborough in Mandy, but Michael Rogers in Beyond the Black Rainbow have all delivered extraordinary work. How you manage to draw out such incredible performances from your actors?

PC – You have to trust the actors and give them room to breathe. When Linus came in he started doing his lines super-fast thinking it’s what I wanted. So, I told him to really slow down and he was a bit shocked but delighted that he could take his time. In modern film and TV there is high premium on constantly propelling things forward in a very artificial way. There’s something beautiful about letting an actor speak for a long time. To see the characters you’ve created come alive is really magical see and I too want to revel in it.

LCC – There seem to be little clues that signpost your favourite films and directors throughout Mandy. Who are some people and films that have influenced your style?

PC – The film maker that sparked it for me when I was making Beyond the Black Rainbow was French exploitation filmmaker Jean Rollin, who made these weird, ultra-slow art-house vampire films. That triggered something for me; I saw this blending of this extreme art-house technique with very low-brow exploitation subject matter. For Beyond the Black Rainbow the DP and I drew on a lot of very specific frames and references from other films to create the colour palettes and textures, but for Mandy I felt more confident to draw on my own experiences. A lot of the colours and tones come from moments in my life, for example, sitting on the roof of the car and seeing the smoke illuminated by the tail-lights in the rear-view mirror, and growing up in the pacific northwest and how that looks and feels, especially at night.

I’ve always loved villains that are perverse ego maniacs. And definitely Frank Booth [from David Lynch’s 1986 Blue Velvet] and the films of Stuart Gordon have these villains that are these delusional ego maniacs. I like that as a starting point. These people who are kind of pathetic more than they are scary, and when their self-image is threatened that’s when they become scary.

LCC – Both Mandy and Beyond the Black Rainbow are set in 1983 – why?

PC – I was delving into the things that meant a lot to me as a kid, and, I guess I see that year as signifier of a mythical imaginary reality. Before my dad died I rejected the 1980s as ridiculous. I stopped watching genre films and was more interested in French new wave and foreign films, it was fresh to me. But after dad died, I realised that these low-brow genre films were equally important to me and spoke to me in an equally powerful way. I wanted to merge them together.

LCC – You’ve said that music plays a big part in your creative processes. Can you tell me a bit about the sound palette you used during the making of Mandy?

PC – It’s all over the map in a way. I usually compile a playlist for each project which I then have to whittle down when it gets out of control. Often, I’m searching for the opening title sequence track and it takes me a lot of time trying to find the right one. I spent years looking for the title track for Mandy and out of the blue one day, my wife started playing me Starless by King Crimson, her dad was a big fan. The second I heard it I knew I’d found the right one, finally. The playlist I had by the time I spoke to Johann was stuff like Van Halen’s Sunday Afternoon in the Park, the Flash Gordon soundtrack, and this gentle, almost Spanish guitar instrumental by Black Sabbath called Laguna Sunrise which in my head, was Mandy’s theme.

LCC – Knowing the sort of the music Johann was known for, it must have been a bit of risk getting him on board considering the style of Mandy. Do you remember what it was like when you heard his first submissions?

PC – Yeah, it can be a bit nerve-racking to hear that first piece of music but I’ve been lucky so far with both Sinoia Caves and Johann. I didn’t think he’d want to work with me. I think of his work as very austere, but after talking with him I realised he grew up as an Icelandic metalhead and we had a lot of the same touchstones growing up. I immediately connected with him, in a weird way he kind of reminded me of my father growing up. He was gruff but very open. When I showed him the playlist he responded to everything on it and really liked the idea that this would be the starting point. We didn’t want to ape it, we wanted to interpret the songs via the film. It was like Christmas getting the first tracks from him. I feel like we only started to scratch the surface of what we could’ve done.

LCC – Do you think you’ll leave plenty of room before your next film, or have you got something lined up that you want or have already started on?

PC – I don’t what I’m gonna do. Hang out with the cat for a while.

LCC – Was there any reason you called her Mandy?

PC – Because of the Barry Manilow song. I absolutely love it!

Mandy

Posted on by victorfraga

WARNING: THIS REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS

Around half way through Mandy, the sophomore feature film from visionary Italian-Canadian director Panos Cosmatos, the reclusive Caruthers (Bill Duke) explains to vengeful Red Miller (Nicolas Cage) that the people he intends to hunt down and kill for brutally murdering his girlfriend have had their minds warped and twisted by some powerful LSD. There is no humanity in these sick souls. One might be thinking that as this scene plays out and Caruthers gives us the only tidbit of expedition the film offers that the ticket purchased from the kiosk to watch Mandy has also been laced with some bad acid.

Mandy exists as a headfuck, a hallucinatory trip, but it’s one worth taking and experiencing in all its lucid glory. The action takes place in 1983 in the Pacific Northwest of America that seems devoid of people, at least normal people. But we know this is no alternate reality, however much Mandy believes in the supernatural or the otherworldly. President Ronald Reagan appears on the radio rallying against drugs and pornography. If Mandy had been released at the time of Reagan, the moral majority would have flipped at its bent vision of religion and God. Still, the woods, mountains, and lakes are bathed in a fog of dreamy light and aura that offers a sense that weirdness is a norm in these parts.

Red and his girlfriend Mandy Bloom (a bewitching Andrea Riseborough) live in a rural retreat, a secluded cabin by Crystal Lake. Red works as a lumberjack whilst Mandy mostly hangs around the house drawing and reading wild novels of fantasy and as we later learn works in a local roadside store. Mandy is a doomed character. She seems to sense this and carries the knowledge that she will suffer an inevitable gruesome death with her. A scar under her eye hangs like a permanent streak from a lifetime of cried tears. A freakish cult, known as the Children of the New Dawn travels though the wilderness and when their alluring leader Jeremiah Sand (played to wicked and perverted perfection by Linus Roache) spots Mandy on the roadside he becomes instantly intrigued by her. He orders his minions to kidnap and bring her before him to be initiated within the cult as a servant and witness to his greatness.

Up to this point the film has unfolded in a slow and delicate pace. Conversations between characters have hung in the air and attributed nothing to the direction of the narrative accept to act as backdrops for the film’s genuinely gorgeous use of colour and cinematography. But the summoning of a weird convert of mutated bikers – think Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987) on wheels – by the cult’s henchmen to kidnap Mandy and dish out a beating to Red begins the film’s ascent towards its weirdo high. Mandy is brought before Jeremiah whom. He plays a folky recording of his own making to her Manson-esque fashion. It turns out Jeremiah was once a promising singer/songwriter. Anything sound familiar?

Although succumbing to the bad acid (and an odd wasp sting) that she is given by the converts, Mandy laughs in his face (and at his flaccid penis) and rejects his cult and his sexual advances. Jeremiah runs out of the room humiliated. Instead of further urging, the cult decide to burn Mandy alive and in front of a chained up Red. The scene is genuinely disturbing as the bagged up body of Mandy sways and writhes as the flames take hold as Red looks on. As the cult members leave Red is left to die chained up and gagged. Red frees himself by allowing the wire’s to cut into his wrists and once he crawls back to the house he stares at the television as a creepy commercial for Goblin Macaroni and Cheese plays. His life has fallen apart yet he still can’t pull away from a good commercial spot.

He then necks a bottle of vodka he finds in the bathroom and pours it over his wounds to stifle and cleanse the bleeding wounds. His soul however is shattered beyond repair.

This scene in the bathroom is a hard watch, though not for the reasons you might think. Shot from a single camera and a fixed wide shot, we watch in gruesome voyeuristic detail as Red moves from sobbing to shouting to screaming and back in only a matter of seconds. The scene is fraught with emotion, yet this scene is also played out with Cage wearing a tiger emblazoned t-shirt and a pair of soiled tighty whites. Any other actor might have found the nexus of emotion and seriousness in the characters situation to play it straight, but with Cage as Red it is played out with delirious lunacy.

We enter in the half of the film in which Red seeks revenge on those that have wronged him. He locates an old friend, the aforementioned Caruthers, who loads him up with a crossbow and an assortment of swords and blades.

Unlike the ethereal first half of the film that moves at a snail’s pace, the last half shifts briskly and features some bloody horror tropes that are reminiscent of the Hellraiser franchise and Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy, especially the chainsaw dual between Red and a Children of the New Dawn thug which pulls heavily from Army of Darkness (1992) and of course Dennis Hopper’s maniac avenger in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Tobe Hooper, 1986). Red is victorious and his revenge against Jeremiah is complete when he tracks the leader down to his church and crushes his skull with his bare hands. With his mission over Red imagines his Mandy sitting beside him as he drives away from the horror. The maniacal grin on Red’s blood soaked face indicates that his mind has fully gone to the dogs.

Mandy is a blood soaked revenge caper, but its exquisite palette of colour and trippy use of lens flare takes it far beyond the b-movie shock horror it might have become. Lens flare, also known as panaflares refers to the process of aiming small LED lights into the barrel of the lens, The aesthetic is truly pleasing and immersive, conjuring a kind of hypnosis that draws the viewer in slowy and subtly. The trashing violence and destabilising, sometimes comedic performance from Cage shocks the viewer out of the fever dream for a moment, but the pauses of calm bring you back in easily.

Nonetheless, there is an otherworldly quality to the film that grounds it in the weird sci-fi novels that Mandy reads and the Heavy Metal genre and Dungeon and Dragons influences that bestow the film. Reviewers have commented on the idea that the film is akin to an Iron Maiden record sleeve coming to life. I’d like to picture something more modern such as King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s recent concept records coming to life. King Crimson’s beautiful Starless opens the film as well as a title card of the last statement from death row inmate Douglas Roberts: “When I die, bury me deep, lay two speakers at my feet, put some headphones on my head and rock and roll me when I’m dead.”

The mutant biker gang might’ve added to this supernatural quality. When they are first summoned to do the dirty work of the cult they arrive in a red mist of dew and exhaust fumes. They appear to be from another dimension. When Red sets out on his killing spree he invades the gang’s domain. Except their domain is an abandoned house with discarded takeaway boxes and beer bottles littering the floors and tables. One gang member sits admiring the rhythms of seventies soft-core pornography. The bikers are clearly human, but so perverse and drug addled that the form no longer seems familiar. Their biker leathers seem fused to their skin. They are an odd bunch.

Speaking of odd, let’s take a moment to appreciate Nicolas Cage. His performance has been described as “wild” and “feral” and “overblown”. This is a fair assessment. Cage employs his most riotous tendencies here. We’ve seen only glimpses of this madness in films such as Drive Angry (Patrick Lussier, 2011), The Wicker Man (Neil Labute, 2006), and most recently in the comedy horror Mom and Dad (Brian taylor, 2017) and Paul Schrader’s gonzo Dog Eat Dog (2016), but in Mandy we see it come to fruition and it’s glorious. Cage is wrathful and yet incorporates intricate moments of subtle humour to elevate the insanity. Take for example the moment Red brutally dispatches a member of the mutant biker gang. He slashes away at his enemy and after coming out victorious, scoops a wad of cocaine up in his hand and gleefully snorts the lot. The performance is pure gonzo theatrics. Does it steal the film away from his co-stars and the importance of the narrative? Yes, no, and maybe.

It is also worth noting that Red actually has very few lines of dialogue. His conversations with Mandy mostly has him sleepily responding, whilst the conveying of emotion and his hack and slash revenge trip is mostly a bunch of hoots, groans, laughs, and cries. He’s given a few off kilter one-liners (“You ripped my favourite shirt!”) and any monologue (“Only one I believe”) is a stunted and jilted mess of incoherence.

There is another character in the film that you won’t find in the casting credits: the soundtrack. The last film score entry in composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s incredible discography is a fitting, though sad end to a career that placed the soundtrack back in its rightful place as a vital component of a films aura. The music used in Mandy is a symphony of simmering ethereal synth and booming, decaying electric guitar. It literally shakes the screen. It’s a masterpiece that plays brilliantly by itself, yet take it away from the film and suddenly Mandy loses its unearthly quality. The soundtrack is a solid movement that pushes and prods the emotion within the film. If not accompanied by the film, it’s best experienced alone and in absolute darkness with a decent set of headphones.

Mandy is a very dirty and highly effective movie due to many factors: Cage’s performance, the outstanding soundtrack, the eeriness and dread of the first half, and the rage and madness of the second half. Yet as a whole it clearly belongs to director Panos Cosmatos. Cosmatos has created a vision that, while inspired by grimy VHS nastiness and late night sci-fi oddities, is truly singular. Cosmatos’s masterful approach aligns him with Kubrick and Lynch in delivering perfectly believable and fully realised worlds and characters that operate within their own laws of physics.

Mandy shows as part of the BFI London Film Festival taking place between October 10th and 21st – click here for our top 10 dirty picks from the event. It’s out in cinemas on Friday, October 12th. Out on DVD, Blu-ray and VoD on Monday, October 29th.