Interview: Blue Ruin Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier

At a time when we’re about to be overrun for the season by loud, dumb, nonsensical, pointless action bloat at the box office, a small, quiet, brutal film like Blue Ruin reminds us why genre still matters.

Funded on Kickstarter, Blue Ruin shows how something as simple and familiar as a rural revenge story can still sing out afresh in the hands of true original talent.

Written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, Blue Ruin stars Saulnier’s long-time friend Macon Blair as Dwight, a hirsute homeless man whose wide, sad eyes suggest both present-day confusion and past emotional calamity. When he’s told the man who murdered his parents is getting out of prison, Dwight is driven from lost befuddlement to vengeful purpose, but never as successfully as superhuman heroes in action movies.

Blair is an impressive find in front of the camera–his Dwight is a stumbling child, both when covered in Manson-like hair and beard or cleaned up to reveal the weak chin of a department-store middle-manager.

But the film’s impressively solid, character-driven story and quietly compelling pensive tone is the work of second-time writer-director Saulnier, who simultaneously dives head-first into the revenge-thriller drama while completely subverting the genre’s often-shallow emotional tropes.

I sat down with Saulnier in Chicago last week and we talked not just of our shared love of thoughtful and original-minded genre films but also our loathing for big, soulless, cruel violence-orgies like last summer’s abhorrent White House Down.

Blue Ruin is now playing in select theaters and is also available on demand.

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What draws you to genre film making?

Jeremy Saulnier: It’s more a question of what can draw me away from genre. When a genre film—an action or horror film—has legitimate characters and a grounded atmosphere, I just don’t want to leave that world. To me genres are the most inclusive because a well-done genre film has everything I need in a movie, period.

I grew up in the atmosphere of the ‘80s, the apex of special effects make up—it was palpable, something I wanted to recreated in my own bedroom. I’d put on zombie make up and crash private school parties. For me, genre just has that heightened experience and impact of storytelling.

And yet, Blue Ruin is such a restrained, often quiet film.

Saulnier: Moments that stand out for me in films are the scaled down ones. The climax of Taxi Driver is just so brutal and effective, but a relatively low body count compared to these spectacles today, like Man of Steel where a million people die. Hollywood has turned me off to that by trying to keep one-upping itself with spectacle and pyrotechnics—there’s no human consequence or connection to it.

I remember in the theater watching Unforgiven, when William Munny enters that bar at the end, the hair on the back of my neck stood up—it evoked a physical response. When I see the White House get blown up for the 15^th time, it’s just not there.

That sort of hyperbolic approach to film making has intention and craft and CG teams at work, but when you can ground a film in reality and downscale it all, I think works inversely by heightening your experience and connection to the characters. The plausibility will actually create a physical response. We’re just jaded by watching all this bullshit.

There’s this sense, especially this time of year, that every film has to be bigger and longer than the last.

Saulnier: And yet, you have films like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner taking that world but downscaling it into a very simple and quiet story, and the climax is emotional and not effects-driven. On the rooftop, in the rain—it’s heart-breaking. That’s the ride I want to go on.

Is what why Blue Ruin is so naturalistic? So quiet and understated?

Saulnier: For me, naturalism is key to any story that I want to tell. I appreciate a good slasher or spectacle-ridden action flick, but those aren’t the films I want to make, to invest in as an artist. I do use violence a lot in my films, but primarily as a narrative tool. There’s not a lot of spectacle gore in my films anymore. My first film was an exception because it was a gonzo horror comedy.

I don’t respond to films that aren’t grounded—if they don’t seem real to me, then I don’t buy in from the very beginning. They become Playstation4 video games, and I become removed.

For a lot of people, the only way to really invest in the story is through the characters. If you don’t ground your characters in a certain reality and flesh them out, then you’re not going to take the audience along for the ride.

When I made Blue Ruin, I also believed you can have an enthralling narrative if you put the characters in the right place and take your production outside of New York, Connecticut, or New Jersey. There’s so much value in archiving real locations and real things.

You film opens with no dialogue for the first 10 minutes or so.

Saulnier: I was watching There Will be Blood, and the opening sequence is just a man alone digging for oil. That is film making—I haven’t seen that in a long time. That sort of wordless arc is a language of itself. So for me, as a cinematographer who became a director, it was a storytelling exercise and release to take a more classical approach to film making.

You can guide audience through a narrative with a sure hand with just a camera and no words, if you do your job right and put the camera in the right place and move it the right way. There’s as much forward narrative thrust to that as when you have characters telling you where to go and what to think.

That’s more of a challenge to me than to haves scenes weighted down by dialogue. I feel very confident in my innate ability to tell stories visually because I started out as a fine artist, painting and drawing and taking photos.

You and Macon Blair have known each other for a long time. Why did you want him to star in this?

Saulnier: I didn’t know what it would be, but I knew my next film would star Macon. This film was built around the actor, reverse-engineered to be a vehicle for him.

I trusted him because he’s a writer and storyteller himself. And when I was writing, I could pre-visualize him as the character—it made it so seamless from the ground up.

We talked extensively about the character of Dwight and the histories of the two families at war with each other in this film—Macon and I knew everything about them and the origin of this tragedy, but the audience only knows a little. The characters never pander to the audience for the sake of exposition.

We had a fierce negotiation back and forth about the plausibility of Dwight’s revenge mission and what makes him leap into it. It’s a very human fantasy to want revenge, but to actually seek it is another thing.

Dwight is reluctant in his mission—he’s compelled by deep sorrow and obligation, not blood lust. There are little moments in the film where Dwight gets distracted, hinting at the fact that he’s not fully invested.

Dwight undergoes a striking physical transformation when he cuts his hair and shaves his beard.

Saulnier: I thought it would be fun to play with his physicality, to start with this nomadic guy, bearded, living under a tarp—it’s almost an Old-West hermit vibe.

But I really paid close emotional attention to Dwight. He has been wallowing and drifting, indulged in this quiet life, refusing to interact. And when he does act, it brings immediate regret. As his character regresses, he becomes more of a child.

You had your actor in Macon, you knew your character of Dwight, but how much of the film’s full story did you know from the start? When you started plotting it, did you know where it would all end up?

Saulnier: In order to make the film cheaply, we had to lay out all our resources and locations ahead of time. So I knew physically where it was going to end: on Macon’s cousin’s property in Charlottesville. I knew the story had to end in a classic way, but I indulged myself in the middle of the film, allowing the narrative to become totally scattered.

So I took left turns that I myself wasn’t expecting as I wrote myself into corners and tried to write my way out of them, asking myself, “What would I really do, what would Macon do in these situations?” That was an absolute ball. But I definitely knew where it had to end up, so writing was about bridging those two worlds.

What sets this film apart is seeing this Everyman character do very human things in situations we’ve seen a thousand times in genre films. But we rarely see people act as we would—so there’s more flight than fight. But this is not a message movie—it’s a story. So I wanted to have a very firm, classic conclusion.

What turns me off about violent films anymore isn’t the violence itself, but that for the sake of “entertainment” and escapism, most films completely ignore what it means emotionally to lose someone to violence or to violently take a life.

Saulnier: This film is very much about consequences. That’s so easily glossed over in most movies—consequences may serve narrative functions, but only for convenience. The first Austin Powers had this amazing joke about a henchman getting killed and then his family having to be notified. That struck me—it’s hilarious, but we never see those consequences.

Last summer when I was on the festival circuit with Blue Ruin, I was getting grilled in Q&As about its violence, but at the same time White House Down had just come out. That film’s rated PG-13 and probably 90 people die in 20 minutes, and no one cares, no one talks about it.

When someone dies in my movies, you’re going to feel the shock and the emotional loss, and you’re not going to cheer. And you’re especially not going to just forget about it.