by James Mottram
How did you come across Krystal Sutherland’s book, Our Chemical Hearts?
Well, actually the book was sent to me by Lili Reinhart. She had read it and wanted to play the role of Grace and wanted to somehow get a project off the ground. She had seen my first film, Southside with You, and thought I might relate to the material and I did, very much so. I read the book and what the book did for me was, sort of, put me right back into the high school state of mind… Conjured up a lot of old memories and I was particularly drawn to the darker prism, through which it looked at high school in those years… That it wasn’t chirpy and cheery, it didn’t glorify those years.
I think about it a lot like Henry and Grace, in terms of crossing a threshold from adolescence and into adulthood, but through pain and loneliness, and grief and loss and heartbreak and, kind of, experiencing those adult emotions for the first time.
It is a very unusual film with adolescents because it treats emotions very seriously. It’s not a Hollywood story if that’s what you want to call it… It’s very painful to watch at times and deals with grief and first love and really hugely painful topics, in a very serious way. How different is the book to the script?
It’s a hard question to answer because I haven’t read the book, since I read it the first time. When I first read the book, I just had a sense of how I wanted to do it as a movie because there were some critical aspects of the book that just spoke to me. So, a lot of what I was outlining earlier, but in particularly, this journey of pain that both characters go on. First Grace… We don’t understand what it is, but she, sort of, leads Henry down this underworld of a feeling that he’s never felt before, but she’s already there. She’s living in that world. So I knew I wanted to focus on that.
I knew I wanted to narrow the scope for the most part to the dynamic, the push and pull, the rollercoaster between the two of them. There were a lot of subplots… Bigger subplots in the book that didn’t make it into the script. I suspect that I was able to distil the essence of the book or the spirit of the book into the movie and I can only go by Krystal, who wrote the novel and that was her belief, that was her assertion.
Did you have much contact with Krystal after you started the project?
Krystal is from Australia and now lives in London. I wrote the script without having the rights to the book. Lili and I wanted to do it and I started writing. A month later, luckily, I was able to get the script to Krystal and say, “Hey, can we please have the rights?” And she loved the script and granted us the rights. But, Krystal made it very clear from the get-go that she saw the book and the movie as two separate pieces of art and wanted me to feel the freedom to make what I needed to go and make and tell the story as I saw it and she stuck to that, which I really appreciated. That being said, I was insistent that she come to set. She was there for, I think, about a week of filming and it was very important to me that she’d be there for the abandoned factory scene, which… That is sort of a center piece of the movie. It’s an important, kind of, metaphor in the movie and I always imagined her delighting at having created it in the book.
I thought it would be really special and surreal for us to be there together while it was realised for the movie.
What was her reaction to seeing that set realised?
Krystal was so unassuming on set with the exception of… I’d be filming something and I’d come back to the monitor via (video) village, or something, and I would just hear her squealing with glee in the background. She couldn’t believe that these characters that were created in the obscurity of her flat, somewhere in Australia, were now being given life. I mean, I think it was really, really special for her.
I spoke to Lili and she’s such an honest person to speak to about her own issues and she’s just a very open person, I found. Do you think that really translates through into the character? She really put her heart on a sleeve when she was building this character and giving this performance.
Yes, what’s interesting about it is that, for someone who is so open and transparent in some ways, she is also protective of her private life. She’s selective about what she’s putting out into the world. I think that translates very well to the Grace pathos or psychology. Which is that she… Henry only ever knows what Grace wants him to know at a given time or what Henry is able to surmise from little clues and little fragments of stories that she tells or reactions that she has. So it’s an interesting dichotomy because, on the one hand, you have Lili who’s very open and honest and vulnerable, playing a character that’s being incredibly guarded about what she’s feeling, but I think she pulled it off. I think that even though you only get glimpses and fragments of what she’s experiencing… Until we understand fully, by the end of the movie… I think that there’s never a moment where you don’t know that there’s so much emotion behind a guarded nature. And I think that’s a difficult thing for an actress to pull off or act.
She’s also an exec producer on the film, as you said she brought the book to you in the first place. Do you think she’s going to continue that? Was it great to have her feedback behind the scenes as well as, obviously, about the camera, about the character and on camera and so forth?
Yeah, I do think she’s going to continue and I think she should. She has an innate storytelling instinct and as you pointed out, she’s so honest and truthful and, I think, she has a great bullshit detector. I think that’s her secret weapon. Which is that, if there’s a line of dialogue that just sounds a little off for a 17 year old girl or 18 year old girl that she’s portraying, or there’s just a moment in the script that feels a little limp, or a song… There was a song that I put as a placeholder in my first cut of the movie, and I wasn’t sure about it and I showed her the cut and one of her only comments was about that song and that was one of the things that I felt insecure about with that cut. She honed right in on it, she said, “There’s something off about that song.” So, I went back… Ended up finding a playlist that Lili had put together, for inspiration, for the character of Grace and I found the song to use from that playlist. It’s not like she was even attempting to contribute or offer an idea, she gave her opinion, but she didn’t even suggest the song. It was just through osmosis, through her feeling like that was a good song for Grace, then I was able to pick up on it. So, I think if she keeps working at it and hones that, I think she could be a writer, I think she could direct, I think she could do a lot.
Music is so important in teen movies because it’s such a great way of expressing emotion. How did you work on the songs in the film?
I honestly put music in there that I love, that just felt right. I have to give credit to my fiance because she introduced me to Perfume Genius while I was editing the movie. She introduced me a couple of years back to Beach House, which is the centerpiece anthem of the movie. There’s a Sharon Van Etten song that she introduced me to, so I really feel I got a lot of that from her. But then there’s other music that’s just… I’m literally sitting there with the editor JC and I’m looking through my iTunes playlist and well, “Let’s try this, let’s try this.”
Some songs I wrote into the script, like the Tinashe song at the party or the Beach House song, ‘Take Care’. But then there’s the score too and I worked with Stephen James Taylor, who was the composer on my first movie. And we worked long and hard to get the score feeling just right. The material is very dramatic and, at times, it’s playing on melodrama tropes. Which it’s knowingly doing, but you got to be careful that you’re not going too far and the music can sometimes take it too far. So, with the music, it was all about pulling back and reducing and letting the silences speak.
What are your own essential teenage movies?
For me, I would say Rushmore was a big influence, at the time. I really, really related to Max Fisher and his overachieving, yet somehow still failing, sensibility. I started really coming into my own as a film buff at the time and so I was noticing Wes Anderson’s nods to The Graduate and to the French New Wave and those movies. It was the time I was becoming really aware of film references, meta-references in other movies. Better Luck Tomorrow, Justin Lin’s first feature, I loved. It was a big one for me. Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. Boyz ‘n the Hood… I could go on.
All very different kind of movies you’ve just mentioned, but was there anything specific that influenced Chemical Hearts?
Even though there were so many forebearers to look to, Say Anything, Pump Up The Volume, The Virgin Suicides, and these are all movies I’ve seen, these are all movies I like, they’re all there, you absorb all of them, but to be totally honest with you, Albert, my DP, and I, we looked at Vertigo. I showed the production designer and the costume designer, I showed them clips from Vertigo to demonstrate how Hitchcock was assigning colours to the different characters and how as they became more engaged with each other, they started wearing each other’s colours, and just things like that. I was focused more on that, movies about obsession and infatuation. We looked at Blue Is the Warmest Color, we looked at In the Mood for Love for composition. Movies that you wouldn’t think necessarily think have a basis in telling an American teen story like this.
How hard was it to find Austin to play Henry?
I wish I could tell some interesting anecdote about how challenging it was, but he was somebody I was thinking about from the beginning. I mentioned his name to Lili. She had worked with him on a short film years ago when they were 14, 15 years old. They were friends, they liked each other… I would have offered him the part, quite frankly, but he somehow got the script beforehand, sent in an audition tape, and was amazing… And we brought him in with a few other people, just to do our due diligence, to read against Lili. And it was just… He was the guy.
Are you working on anything else now?
I have a few different kinds of projects that are in various stages of development and there’s a couple of things that I wrote or co-wrote that I’m just trying to mount as a producer and bring in new filmmaker voices and help usher them, to the best of my ability. And then, there’s a couple that I’ve written, that I’ll be directing. It’s just a matter of time. When things are safely back up and running and I’m just trying to get everything in a good enough shape so that when the starter gun goes off, we’re off to the races.
I noticed there is one listed on the IMDb, about Julius Caesar?
That was a script that I co-wrote with a friend of mine in 2012. And it’s a really fun, sort of Spartacus meets Papillon meets 300, kind of… This is based on a true anecdote, a young Julius Caesar and his men are kidnapped by Cilician pirates. The first, sort of, pirates of the high seas back in Ancient Rome and they get imprisoned on this prison island and they have to stage this revolt and escape. Fun, action, adventure movie. Sword and sandal throwback that could launch a Julius Caesar Batman Begins trilogy.
I’d love to see it made at some point. Mark Wahlberg and his producing partner were involved for a little while, but now it’s just one of those things that sort of floats out there and maybe if I get into a good enough position at some point, I can try to get it made.
Would you be interested in bigger scale spectacle, star movies?
Yeah, one of the scripts that I recently wrote and finished is a much bigger studio spectacle film. It’s got a mix of science fiction and supernatural, and it would require a much bigger budget and it would really feel, in a lot of ways, like a 180. I would love to make a big piece of Popcorn Entertainment, stuff I grew up consuming. I have a lot of ideas in that space, but I also want it to be something that’s personal to me and something that feels original. So, we’ll see if I get to make that one. It’s not based on anything, so those are a little bit harder to get made at the studio level these days. Usually there’s IP that has to be a part of it, but we’ll see, we’ll see.
Chemical Hearts is streaming on Prime Video now.
