Roberto Minervini had heard war stories both literal and otherwise during his travels around the U.S. through the years. Approaching the making of any film as if he were a cultural ethnographer, he’s collected tales from the road like a modern-day Alexis de Tocqueville after arriving in America from Italy, gradually piecing together a mosaic of a fraying social fabric by training his lens on many communities that have fallen through the cracks with the spirit of self-sufficiency shown to be alive and well while raising questions about why it’s required so often. A trilogy of films set in Texas – “The Passage,” “Low Tide” and “Stop the Pounding Heart” – all blur the line between documentary and fiction as their protagonist fight against being hardened by their experience as they reach a crossroads in which they need to be open to others to find peace, and forays to Louisiana yielded the purely nonfiction “The Other Side,” about underground militias, and “What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire,” about turbulent times for the Black community around New Orleans, that when taken together form a portrait of the political powder keg that would explode in 2020.
It may seem like a departure for Minervini to make a costume drama, but his latest “The Damned” also seems like an inevitability, reckoning with one of the defining events in American history by joining an army outfit in the midst of the Civil War. The research for the film was no less rigorous than Minervini has generally conducted, but it wasn’t always about digging into the past as stories of contemporary war and the experience former soldiers carried with them upon their return informed the film just as much, presenting the futility of armed combat with a vibrant contemporary voice when the outcome has sadly remained the same throughout time. Enlisting Noah and Timothy Carlson, young members of the devout Christian family at the center of “Stop the Pounding Heart,” to serve amongst the troop that the film follows, Minervini explores the motives that leads people into battle and how that perspective affects how they process their experience, whether it’s belief in a higher purpose of either God or country or simply a means of survival in an existential or financial sense when some of the soldiers are just looking to get paid to stay afloat.
While the soldiers remain anonymous, you come to know them all intimately as they debate what is worse, to await combat for long anxiety-riddled stretches of tedium or be in the thick of battle where they could lose their life in an instant and Minervini is able to depict a different war when everyone’s sense of purpose is different and their commitment to the cause varies as they weigh if what’s unfolded is what they signed up for. Without using a formal script, the film allows the men involved to speak from the heart, retaining the naturalism that made Minervini’s work so electric in the past while revealing the director to be adept at staging elaborate action sequences that presents the past without question, even though he is keen to interrogate it in other ways. After first making a splash this time a year ago at Cannes, “The Damned” is now arriving in the U.S. where its reappraisal of war should be most welcome (though its humble director isn’t so sure), and Minervini graciously spoke about the process that has led to such soul-stirring films, going about the tough experience of recreating the Civil War in practice and finding truth somewhere between the past and the present.
One of the main things that attracted me is how war is a political tool that is meant to calcify preexisting divisions, never to solve them, [which is] something that transcends being a U.S. citizen and living in America. It’s an absurdity to pitch a war action as something that is unifying, but it continues to be perceived that way as a necessary sacrifice of human lives and of resources to restore balance. So this is an overall reflection, but something that concerns America. If you talk about America, this is really the quintessential war that took place to redefine socioeconomic balance within the United States and the sacrifice was massive. Yet unlike other genocides in history, this war is celebrated as a war of pride and cultural legacy that people still talk about. People still have a strong sense of pride in the Civil War, both North and South, for completely different reasons in a war that where hundreds of 600,000 people died unnecessarily, so it is one of the most sugarcoated genocides in the history of humanity and definitely in the history of our country.
You’ve said this is a film that is the most spontaneous of your work with no script to work off of, even though it’s the most fictional. How did it find its shape?
Yes, because everything I just mentioned might very easily sound like preaching pontificating and extremely pedantic, and I think if I wrote something, it would probably sound like an essay on war. That’s not the intention. The intention was to bring it back to something much more organic and much closer to us, which is the experiential aspect of telling a story about war. So for all of us involved, the only way to approach this film was to just relocate to Montana, which is a land that was the stage for some of the most brutal war events — not the Civil War, but right after in the American Indian Wars — so we’re located there and dig into this collective memory. Day by day, we created a story based on the experience of the collective, this nameless group of people who are stuck in a condition of being in war.
Knowing your history with the Carlsons, I was really moved that you involved them in this production. What was it like to reconnect with them?
We always stay connected, but artistically, every now and then we resume this collaboration with Tim and LeAnne [Carlson] and it’s very interesting to go back, sit down, have a coffee with them, spend days and days discussing how we could collaborate. With Tim, who plays a soldier in the film, we started actually working on the story itself. And the beauty of my relationship with them, which is exemplified in the film, “Stop the Pounding Heart,” is that we’ve been very mindful of our boundaries and our different backgrounds.
There are different experiences and beliefs, and there’s always allowing each other to be who we want to be safely, to express ourselves without judgment. The way we make films reflects the way we relate. We build our relationships, allowing ourselves to be who we want to be and [Tim] brought this idea of godliness or war very, very strongly because it’s an omniscient belief for him and the kids, so the spiritual side of going [to war] or killing and dying resonates very, very strongly for Tim and his family. That’s why it’s very important to build things experientially so that people can really bring what resonates for them into the film, not just me writing it.
I knew six people and the rest, I held an open casting session. I went to a town meeting, and I told everybody they were free to participate in the film with no particular commitment. They could come and go, stay for a day or for the whole shoot, bring a horse if they wanted to be cavalry or they could be infantry. And I didn’t know anything about them, their acting prowess, their beliefs, their behavior, their temperament, and that was very important to create something that is closer to going through a collective experience when you don’t know people and you’re stuck with them. I think that created the necessary tension for people that enhanced either their eagerness to participate or to leave the experience. Some of them felt trapped in a situation for two months, so some of them left, some of them stayed and that was a necessary tension to just let people with their own idiosyncrasies guide the story and not the other way around. That was incredibly rewarding as an approach.
It sounded like it was a remarkable thing that you were able to do, given that you didn’t have much of a script where the actors were able to process things that they were experiencing and perhaps if they did a scene one day, but still thinking about it a day or two later, you could come back to it. Was the process actually fluid enough to accommodate that?
Yeah. The process is very fluid and it goes both ways. I make sure that I just mirror things for them, to remind them of what has happened. I facilitate the assessment before and after the fact. I notice reactions of all kinds — intellectual and emotional responses, then I bounce them back to them and I mirror it for them. I say, “This is what I’ve observed,” and these are the questions that emerge from my end. And then I become a listener. Sometimes they are the ones that [say], “This is what we went through and we want to continue this experience. Please allow us to extend this experience.” We did that sometimes. Sometimes it’s me asking them, should we go back and reassess the situation? Does it feel complete? Or we should dig deeper? Sometimes it’s them. And I think that is the self-autogenetic aspect of making films unscripted. It requires from my end as the director to be highly respectful of what everyone’s needs are.
Only after the fact did I realize just what a fine-threaded needle you had to do with this visually because you’re not glorifying war, and yet I would describe it as a beautiful film. Also, it has that searching quality of your non-fiction work, but I imagine this had to be somewhat choreographed. What was it like to figure out the right camera style for this?
That’s very important, the fact that can we still portray something beautiful without glorifying [war]? Can the recipient of beauty be something else, maybe the image or rather than a protagonist versus another one, can beauty be an equanimous kind of common denominator, or does beauty create like a hierarchy among people? Those are questions that are intellectual as much as they are practical and were constantly in my head. We decided to stay in dialogue with the film genre — to embrace the idea of beauty in war for cinema, but to tweak it and to take away the idea of beauty from the landscape, from no idyllic space here, and to give it back to these people who are nameless.
The photography isolates these people, iconizes them, frames them at the center, and the lens is thrown at the outside of focus, so that the relationship that we have with the landscape is unresolved because it’s hard to define. I wouldn’t define the landscape depicted in the film as beautiful, but I wouldn’t define it as ugly either. There are peaks of beauty, but the characters are always framed and focused with care, so there is definitely this tension that exists between beauty and war cinema that is definitely part of my discourse and definitely part of the aesthetics that I brought in the film.
Yeah, I do the same thing — I direct and I operate the camera and then help with other processes — and I think multitasking and having different roles allows us to engage deeply and at different levels emotionally with the film. To frame a film, to photograph a film, and then to score the film, it just enhances even the emotional attachment to the film enormously. And I asked Carlos to score the film based on the experience, not based on the images that were edited. I worked on sound and music for six months before starting picture editing, so we could only rely on memory and on experience and that music that is completely unrelated to sequences. The music is not born out of the need to score or to embellish a sequence, so the score is Carlos’ memory of the experience of making the film and there is something very, very emotional about scoring a film like that. Carlos was the only one who could have done it, just because he had gone through two months of shooting.
It sparks so many questions. What’s it been like for you getting this out there so far?
It’s extremely rewarding. Right after the premiere of Cannes last year, I was thinking about America, because the world responds very well, but America, there’s sometimes a dissonance, a short circuit between what I do and what the response is, even from the auteur-driven press. Sometimes people are thrown off by the rhythm of my films, by the fact that things go unexplained, by the fact that the dramaturgy doesn’t follow a certain trajectory. That doesn’t surprise me, but at the same time, it makes me think about something that I don’t fully comprehend yet despite the fact that I’ve been in this country more than I’ve lived in Italy. I don’t fully comprehend the fact that unpredictability, and the precepts like the dramaturgy, the narrative, the art structure, and if we become a little more cryptic, art becomes hard to digest in America. Every time I present a film, I still ask myself, why is the reaction in America towards my cinema the way it is? This idea of detaching from reality while watching films baffles me. I understand many things about America, but I don’t understand its relationship with cinema.
“The Damned” opens on May 16th in New York at Film at Lincoln Center and in Los Angeles on June 20th at the Laemmle Royal.