Interview: We Are What We Are Director Jim Mickle

In the atmospheric horror film We Are What We Are, a small family in upstate rural New York town struggles to maintain their private religious tradition.

Mild Spoiler Alert: They’re cannibals, their modern-day practice rooted in a devout, strict mixture of Biblical faith and frontier survivalism that became tradition.

Though the Parkers–including a stern father (Bill Sage) and his two teenage daughters (Ambyr Childers and Julia Garner) and young son (Jack Gore)–keep themselves and their practices isolated, that gets tricker but when the family’s mother (Kassie Wesley DePaiva) dies mysteriously, bringing unwanted questions from the local doctor (Tarantino regular Michael Parks), a neighbor (Kelly McGillis), and the older daughter’s deputy-sheriff suitor (Wyatt Russell).

We Are What We Are was adapted by writer Nick Damici and director Jim Mickle from Jorge Michel Grau’s 201o Mexican film. Mickle and Damici’s previous horror works include Mulberry Street (2006) and the acclaimed indie vampire-apocalypse film Stake Land (2010).

I sat down with the incredibly easy-going and likable Mickle in Chicago a few weeks ago to talk about religious isolationism, the Donner Party, his naturalist-ethereal style and the influence of Andrew Wyeth on the look of We Are What We Are, and of course, the gory outcome of ritualistic cannibalism.

We Are What We Are opens today in select theaters.

________

One of the things I really like about the film is the theme of religious dogma as a justification for otherwise morally questionable survival traditions. How did that work its way into the film?

Jim Mickle: We don’t outline stuff as we go, we explore. My creative partner Nick just starts writing and ideas come to him, and he throws stuff down, and some of it works and some doesn’t. The exciting part of the process is to see stuff develop and then steer it. He mapped it out as he was going, and it evolved, and pretty quickly we both found that religious theme. I was doing a lot of research to back his stuff up, and my research into the Donner Party brought up a whole angle into American history and the survival thing, and we had the obsession with organized religion and wanted to use that, so all that came into focus.

I found the ideas about culturally isolated childhoods and religious beliefs fascinating because I grew up in a small-town funeral home in an Amish community. So I get that “fishbowl” effect of not really realizing your experience is different or odd until you step out into the wider world.

Mickle: I grew up near Lancaster Pennsylvania, and the Amish had a huge influence on me, I was fascinated by them. I respect what they do.

But along with all the nice quilts and “simple living,” there’s also a darker side to that lifestyle, in terms of strict discipline, even abuse.

Mickle: I’m actually working on putting together a TV show that’s going to play with that idea, the beautiful side of what they strive to represent, but also what that rigidity can also breed.

A lot of time today in our political discourse, you hear one side fall back on “values” and “tradition” and “our way of life.” But this film points out that not all tradition is good or right.

Mickle: Not to get to political, but the way religion ties into politics is very frustrating. It feels like so many policy decisions are made based on a morality that’s been handed down and interpreted from The Bible. Like old white guys telling women what they can and can’t do—that’s a huge part of this movie, also.

The original Mexican film was set in an urban area, but you moved it to a rural upstate New York setting.

Mickle: That was definitely in order to get the fishbowl thing. I didn’t really know or feel that comfortable with an urban setting because I grew up in a very woodsy setting. So I wanted to do a very personal film, and if I’d done a movie about growing up in a city, it would have felt fake. But a lot of the motivation was that idea of growing up in a fishbowl, where you believe what you believe.

But I laugh because even New York City has this bubble of, “Oh, look at how backwards they do things in the Midwest,” but it’s not the Midwest—you go 20 miles north of New York and you hit rural areas with really shitty racism. So cities have their own bubbles, their own fishbowls. But I felt I could speak more directly about it by setting it in the country.

I’m glad you mentioned the Donner Party—I assume you’ve seen that amazing 1992 PBS American Experience documentary by Ric Burns.

Mickle: It’s funny. Our way of working is every day Nick will send a draft, and I’ll read it, take notes, tweak stuff, and pull stuff out, or even jump in and start playing with dialogue, and we’ll send it back and forth two or three times.

And at one point, unbeknownst to Nick, I was watching that Donner Party documentary, and I was blown away about it. And right after that I got a draft from Nick where he started jumping back into the historical flashbacks, and that’s when I knew we were totally in tune. That whole story is fascinating.

There are scenes in that documentary—shots of snow falling in woods—that reminded me of your visual style. You seem to balance naturalism with an ethereal quality.

Mickle: It depends on the film. What I’m most proud of is that we’ve been able to adapt to what the movie should be. For Stake Land there was this heavy naturalism because it could have been a big, pulpy B-movie and we wanted to avoid that. Same with Mulberry Street.

In this one, we came in and threw all that stuff out—no hand-held, no roughing it and improve-ing–we had a very tight script and stuck closely to it. We wanted to do a lot of wide shots and long takes, with a Norman Rockwell/Andrew Wyeth framing because it should feel like a very rigid Americana. Then this summer we did a film set in the ‘80s, where we used a lot of zoom and tried to light it with neon. So hopefully we are able to adapt and serve the story. I don’t like to be super showy, but at the same time, I want you to feel it.

You mentioned Wyeth. I felt a lot of Nick Cave. What were some of your other inspirations when making the film?

Mickle: A lot of Andrew Wyeth. And A Tale of Two Sisters, the Kim Jee-Woon Korean film—it’s such a gorgeous film, and I loved the contrast of these really beautiful floral patterns and decadent wallpaper with a little element of heightened fantasy, but also a beauty and eeriness working together. I would watch that all the time, often with the sound off, just to take in the really classic, elegant horror film making. Our poster really reflects that influence.

I also listened to a lot of really sad, melancholy music, like the soundtrack from Never Let Me Go—I listened to that a lot while writing and played it on the set to set the tone. Also the Robert Altman film Three Women—I’d send that around to show people kind of what we were going for. Picnic at Hanging Rock is another.

The first part of the film has a naturalism and restraint, but then you go for the gore with a baroque ending.

Mickle: I love gory stuff and the shock of it. There’s a certain level of fun to it. But in this film we were holding back on it. Stake Land called for the pedal to the metal on the gore, but this time around we didn’t want to undercut our message and only used the gore when we really needed to—we let the audience’s desire to see the gore keep them going. Then when we finally do it, we hopefully throw you a bit, where it almost feels beautiful, in a weird way. That was fun, to flip the expectations of gore. But when we need it, we bring it—not because we want something shocking, but because there’s a cold reality to what they’re doing, and it would feel false to not show it at all.