“Did you have any trouble finding us?” Alex (Campbell Symes) asks Claire (Katie Mumford) after she finds her way onto a orchard that looks like paradise in “Prime,” actually pleased to hear the answer is “A little bit.” The farm off the beaten path isn’t meant to discovered by all as it appears to be a sacred space that needs some protection from the wrong people making their way in. For Claire, who had a traumatic youth, it certainly seems like a sanctuary and she’s welcomed with open arms after sending in an application and has to be impressed with the instant sense of community she feels upon setting foot onto the lush green grass where the buzz of the people working the fields seems greater than that of its apiary. With the focus on clean organic living, Claire’s actually a bit sheepish about the fact that she remains a carnivore, though a promise that she’s “cut down on meat a little bit” is also greeted with a bit of a surprise when little does she know later on that day, the collective she’s joined has a common practice of a “blessing of the chili.”
Something is obviously off from the start in “Prime,” both with Claire and her new surroundings, but writer/director Meagan Coyle’s trippy psychological thriller is on point, dazzling the eye as it surveys the land where everything is in bloom and creeping inside the head as Claire starts to sense something is amiss. Filmed in the widest frame possible, Coyle, who previously worked in hair and makeup on such stylish indies as “Swallow” and “Fior de Latte,” thinks big in general for her first time behind the camera as it carries a major swagger and instills a massive sense of dread. As Claire comes under the guidance of Rhea (Anita Durst), who strikes more of the pose of a cult leader than a farmhand, the psychological whiplash of feeling as if the bottom has fallen out of a place that was supposed to offer some stability is sensationally expressed, drawing on all the sights and sounds of nature made to swirl around Claire as she tries to find her footing and a vocal cameo from Tim Heidecker nods to Coyle’s sense of mischief throughout.
With the filmmaker set to make quite a splash at Sundance with the darkly comic short premiering in the Midnight Shorts program, Coyle spoke about putting her all into her most auspicious directorial debut, getting the right vibe for the unnerving film and having the run of such an eye-catching central location.
Was the director’s chair something you’d been eyeing for a while?
Just being a fly on the wall for so many different types of movies and different styles of direction and producing, people below the line always have opinions about how things are happening. I was in a unique position because coming from makeup, I’m right behind the monitor, and in a lot of cases right next to the director, and then going back to the makeup room and seeing how talent is actually responding to how things are going. So [directing my own film] is an opportunity to put my money where my mouth is, because I would always keep it to myself, but [sometimes I’d think] “Maybe I would move this over here” or “If they just said this one line, or if we just got an insert, that would be so cool.” This was an opportunity to get in the chair and prove that, first of all, I could do it, but also just to see how hard it really is. And it’s really hard. [laughs]
Some of that it seems you brought upon yourself with how ambitious this is. How did it come about?
I was working on a movie that had a lot of vegetarians on the set — not as many meat eaters and I was picking up the lunch and someone said, “Whose meat meal is this?” And I got really weirdly defensive about it, where I was just like, “Oh, I don’t eat meat all the time.” After the fact, I walked away and I was like, “What was that about?” But then I was working on a different movie in upstate New York and driving around, you see all these rolling hills and farms and I started to connect the things together and it snowballed and turned into “Prime.”
And this is a passion project through and through. And I’ve worked on a lot of passion projects and a lot of times people laugh “Oh, that just means we’re not getting paid.” I’m very proud to say we did pay everyone, it just was not a lot, but I was really fortunate that a lot of people that I’ve worked with before really lent their talents for not a lot of money and I was able to put the money that I did have into really great equipment. My DP Joshua Echevarria is amazing and we were able to, through some connections, get an Alexa 35.
Did the location immediately come to mind or was that something you had to find? It’s a remarkable farm with the apiary and everything.
I wrote a lot of the script to the location. Some scenes would come to me walking around these areas and I know just from working on a lot of low-budget movies that if you are able to use your locations and use your resources in a way, you can make it look like a million bucks, so I was trying to keep the story as small as possible and film outside a lot because there’s not a lot of production design that you need to do on a big area. But we were given a lot of the locations and I just feel so fortunate that people believed in the script enough to let us run wild on some farmland.
It looks like you had pristine weather too. Was that actually the case?
It’s so funny you say that because we were going to shoot it in the summer, but it’s a passion project, so you’re at the whims of certain things and we shot it the first week of October. I wanted it to feel more green and I was in the location the week before [production], and there was a crazy storm. The wind blew all of the leaves off of the trees. and then there was a threat of a rainstorm throughout the whole shoot. All of our locations are outside, so [we were thinking] how do we do this? And we were lucky that it didn’t really rain. But when you have the threat of rain, you have to act as though that’s going to happen, so even though it was cold out, the weather obeyed as much as it could and we did have a looming threat that forced us to scrap some things and to move quickly.
Because the B-roll of the surroundings becomes so integral to reflecting the fractured state of mind of the lead character, how were you collecting it?
I always told Josh, “If we have downtime, let’s just try to get as much inserts as we can. There’s a scene where a bee comes out of a flower, and if you look closely, the flower is moving a little bit, and that’s because I’m crouched down holding it, trying to move the flower closer because I saw there’s a bee in it and [I thought] “We’ve got to get the bee! We’ve got to get the bee.” There was talk of maybe we could sell that as stock footage and be able to fund some of the post-production. [laugh] But we really just went wild and with the camera that we had, we wanted to maximize however many beautiful shots as we could get and we managed to do that. Also, with Josh, who is so talented, I was just like, “If you feel inspired by something, please go. We’re in this together.”
What was it like getting the right tone with the actors?
I think it’s a comedy, though I think a lot of people would probably disagree. But in my mind, I always wanted it to be played very straight and very grounded and I wanted to believe everyone. Even though some of the lines could have been read very silly, I enjoy movies where you’re watching it and whether the intent is to laugh or not, if you don’t know, I like that. And it’s funny when people [would say] what’s the tone of this? It’s hard for me to nail that down. I just wanted it to be as based in reality as possible.
The music really gives it a grandeur and you’ve got that unnerving “ding” throughout that’s both regal and unsettling. What was it like to work on the score?
I asked Yan [Pavelchuk], the composer, “What’s your version of spa music?” because I thought of [meditative] yoga music and I liked the idea of using some more synthetic sounds because everything is so organic. I’m really just drawn to that kind of music anyway, and I also lived in China for a while and I’ve always really liked like Mongolian throat singing. It has such a cool, otherworldly sound to it, so I asked someone to do some throat singing and [Yan] was able to incorporate some of that into his sounds, [as well as] the dings [other] binaural sounds. We were exploring those things and how they can be unsettling sometimes.
When you talk about mixing the synthetic and organic, it’s not a great analogy, but that introductory moment in the car with the lead character where you see the waves crashing outside of it has that feel of the real and unreal colliding. Was that kind of juxtaposition in mind from the start?
It wasn’t, it was more because in a short, you’re trying to get a lot across in a really small space. My editor and I were talking about what are ways that we can get inside of her headspace quicker? In post-production, we were getting more into that because in my mind, we don’t really need to know where she’s from or how she got there. We can hint at it, but there was an early version where it just seemed like she was a person where things were happening to her, so we thought she needs to be more involved in the story and you do want to know more of what’s going on inside this person’s head.
That moment in the car where she’s listening to the meditation tape, we wanted that to feel like she gets transported to somewhere where she can feel calm and go back to her happy memories and what that can feel like — and what meditation can feel like and how intrusive thoughts can come in when you’re trying to get to your happy place. Then Tim Heidecker agreed to do that line in the car to end the podcast, which was just so cool because he has a great podcast voice, so I was so happy that he agreed to do that for me.
It’s a very nice easter egg. What’s it like to get to this point with the film where you’re ready to share it with audiences?
It’s so crazy and terrifying. I haven’t seen it with an audience yet or in a theater, but I’m just so excited. It’s really weird to hear about your art that you’ve been sitting in a room with for so long, that now it’s out in the world and people have opinions and they’re talking about it, it’s really gratifying, but it’s also really scary. To have it go into Sundance and have it be the last year of Park City is so crazy and I really did think it was a joke when they called, I [thought] Is this real? And then I got the follow-up email, and to have it be my first, my first go at something out the gate and to have people respond in this way is insane. Everything is a bonus and I couldn’t be more lucky.
“Prime” will screen at the Sundance Film Festival as part of the Midnight Shorts program on January 26th at 8:50 pm at Megaplex Redstone, January 27th at 3:30 pm at the Broadway Centre Cinemas, January 30th at the Holiday Village Cinemas at 12:30 pm, and February 1st at 8:50 pm at the Megaplex Redstone.