Little Tjay couldn’t have possibly known what was in store for him when he walked onto the set of “Taurus,” though he knew the cameras would be rolling. The rapper had been brought in to film at a recording studio and presumably he knew his co-star would be Colson Baker, better known to the world as Machine Gun Kelly, but the idea was they would be making music together rather than a movie.
“I asked Colson if he wanted to meet Little Tjay ahead of time and talk about the scene and he said, “No, let’s just meet on camera,” so that’s literally the first time they’re ever meeting,” says the film’s writer/director Tim Sutton. “He didn’t really know it was a movie until after and those kind of moments, the less director, the better. That’s when things can really become exciting because Little Tjay was just supposed to hang out. He didn’t know he was going to freestyle.”
The electricity of the creative process spills off the screen as the two artists collaborate in “Taurus,” taking a track that is only a few random rhymes and beats and working out the song so that the sour notes initially make the end result all the more sweeter and the fact it happened organically was indicative of a film where it can be hard to tell when a performance ends and reality begins for Baker, who goes by Col in the film and doesn’t shy away from parallels of his experience as a chart-topping musician who survived a rough childhood yet finds fame even tougher to navigate. While in his element in the studio where there’s no judgment from others in the room, Col is uncomfortable almost anywhere else, too famous to walk around in public without attracting unwanted attention and left with dark thoughts when alone in his hillside manor, seeking out call girls simply to spend time with getting high.
If wealth and notoriety only amplifies the person one was destined to become in the first place, “Taurus” imagines Col realizing how deep the rot goes when he finds it difficult to trust anyone in his inner circle, from his assistant (Maddie Hasson) to his manager (Scoot McNairy), and the same inspirations for his artistry are crippling anywhere but the stage. Ironically, it’s a film that couldn’t have been made if Baker hadn’t forged such a deep bond with Sutton on the set of their previous film, the western “The Last Son,” and Sutton draws on Baker’s willingness to dig deep to play a thinly veiled version of himself to explore terrain every bit as treacherous as his underground boxing thriller “Donnybrook” and the solemn school shooting drama “Dark Night,” only stirring exclusively inside Col, who may has been celebrated for crafting catchy hooks as a musician but has to break a cycle as a person. With “Taurus” making its premiere this weekend at Berlinale, Sutton spoke about the unique prospect of teaming up with Baker to tell a story so closely aligned with his real life, an evolution in his distinctive, often stationary shooting style and breaking into new worlds.
How did this come about?
I’ve always been fascinated with music and musicians. For example, in “Memphis,” my second movie, it was about an artist on a spiritual journey, and I never finished my interest in making movies about troubled musicians and how that affects their art. When I met Colson, he came over to my living quarters [while we were making “The Last Son”]. We were living in this Marlboro western village and we hung out together and we both got the sense very early on that we could trust each other and we were looking for the same things. He works on a massive scale of pop stardom and I obviously am in the indie cinema space, but we had the same outlook, which is in what we do, we go all the way. We’re not interested in the formula. We’re not interested in just pleasing people. We’re interested in exploring something deep within ourselves, so I said, “If you ever want to make a movie about a musician – if you ever want to make a movie, not a documentary – I’m going to make it.” And he said okay. And I went home from that film set, took three weeks to write a script and that was the platform for where we then ended up with the film.
Is that a different starting place for a collaboration when Colson is playing a version of himself?
That’s a benefit because as a writer and director, I write things [initially] to get financing and to introduce people to the kind of movie I want to make, so whether it’s an actor or a director of photography, this gives you the vibe of the film, but it’s never set in stone. It always needs to be a living and breathing thing and so it was important to have Colson really say, “These are the things that are important to me,” whether that’s in a scene or whether it’s in a line or whether it’s in an entire arc of the film. As a filmmaker, one of the things I like the most is going into unexpected territory, and I wanted him to tell me what he thought so I could synthesize that and match that with an idea I had. It’s one thing if you make a film that’s going to be good, but if you make a film that’s good in conjunction with a lot of other great minds and it becomes everyone’s film, it has the potential to be great.
One of your great strengths has been world-building, but practically was he bringing you into his? I have to imagine the opening concert was actually a Machine Gun Kelly show, for instance.
Yeah, the concert is his world. It’s a real mix because it’s also a kind of surreal dream of his world. That kind of recording studio is rarely a place that he does a lot of work, but I wanted the scale of the type of room you could get lost in. Then he has a big Hollywood house with a pool, but we wanted a very special vibe that this felt less like a home and more like a generic space, so it has that L.A. noir kind of feel that’s more me than him and then there’s parts that feel very specific to his world. It’s mixing the reality with the fiction to make a hybrid stew.
I always pictured you as a guy who headed to remote places and have these cocoon-like sets, but this is your second film in the city after “Funny Face” in New York. Has that been interesting to navigate?
It has been interesting and I have to say my first few films I felt like I was not ready to make a film about [big cities], especially New York. Because I’m a New Yorker, that had to be a very specific thing and I wanted to make sure it was the right story, so I found it more interesting being a stranger looking in, going to Memphis or the kids in Arizona in “Pavilion.” At this point in my career, I think I was just ready and really excited to make a New York movie and then an L.A. movie and to put my visual stamp on both those places. Earlier in my career, I was just more interested in building a complete world from scratch rather than trying to infiltrate a real world.
I’m also so used to stillness in your films, even the slightest, more overt camera move here caught me off-guard. Have you gotten more comfortable with those kinds of visual flourishes while protecting a certain sense of reality?
Yeah, this movie called for a little bit more of a maximalist approach. He’s a rock star, and he’s living on a house in the hills, so of course we’re going to want to see the city and boom down into that world and feel the steam coming off the pool whereas in “Memphis,” I would’ve just had the camera down by the pool and stay very still. So I was excited to try that, but also I specifically chose John Brawley to work with as a cinematographer because he had TV experience, sando it was the first time I shot some scenes with two cameras and used a steadicam and a technocrane. I’m not saying those tools are for every movie, but for this movie, it made sense and I wanted to make sure I challenged myself and tried to dive into that world as well, as much technical as emotional.
It was interesting to think about Colson doing the music for this when it completes his performance in a way as an actor. From what I understand, you left him to do his own thing, so what was it like when that music finally came in?
We always knew that the movie was about searching for a song and that song would evolve into something very specific by the end, so [Colson and I] sent each other songs that we liked. I sent him some Spiritualized and he sent me this Blue Foundation song and we really kind of found the tone of the movie, that noirish L.A. vibe that I think is so important. Then as he’s building the music, I can tell him, “Here is this vibe is going really well here,” but I don’t put a wild animal in a cage. I just trusted him to go off and do really interesting stuff and then typically me and my editor actually placed the music, so I have a lot of control once I have it, but I have no control when it’s being made. And I love that.
“Taurus” will screen at Berlinale on February 14th at 9 pm at Cubix 5 and 6, February 17th at 11 am at Cubix 9 and February 20th at 9 pm at the Cineplex Titania.
