Ti West takes old fears and makes them new again in The Sacrament, a horror movie in which reporters from Vice magazine travel to the isolated community of Eden Parish, which is a nice place to visit if you don’t mind all the uncomfortable parallels to Jonestown, the site of the famous cult massacre in 1978. Let’s just say that things don’t turn out well for practically anybody in the cast.
I sat down with Ti West in the hallowed halls of The Magic Castle in Los Angeles, CA to discuss the influence of Jonestown on The Sacrament, the perverse way in which a mass murder has been reduced to the offhanded expression “Drink the Kool-Aid,” his decision to delay the horror for as long as possible and finally a little bit about his upcoming western, The Valley of Violence, starring Ethan Hawke and John Travolta.
The Sacrament is available on VOD now, and arrives in select theaters on June 6, 2014.
CraveOnline: I’ve noticed that in your feature work in particular, your last three films tend to play off older anxieties: the satanic panic, Jonestown, even good old-fashioned ghost stories that seem to be going out of fashion. Is that a coincidence or just where your mind’s at?
Ti West: It just might be my taste. I think that after making House of the Devil, which was as you said, I’ve always been kind of fascinated with the satanic panic, it always just stuck with me, and then The Innkeepers was a very personal movie about our experiences when we made The House of the Devil so it’s a totally different thing, but it was meant to be a very old-fashioned ghost story. And then with this movie, just getting as far away from The Innkeepers was just like, I don’t want to do a lighthearted, quirky thing. I wanted to do something that was very confronting and provocative, and is heavily steeped in realism. Which is something that I don’t want to do again, but it was like, if I’m going to do it I want to do it all the way. So used a real event as the framework, and I wanted to use a real brand as the way to tell the story.
Why don’t you want to do it again? Did you just get it out of your system?
Yeah, I mean maybe someday. Two things. One, I did it, so doing it again feels like, “Oh, we’re doing this again.” Which feels cheap. And also, the one thing about this sort of documentary thing – I also wanted to make a documentary, I had nothing to make a documentary on, so this helps – there’s a sort of, I tried hard to make this movie cinematic despite it not being a very cinematic format.
It shows.
Thank you. But next I’m doing as western which is as cinematic as it gets. So I’m just excited to get back to being 2:35, big dolly moves, very motivated camera direction and so forth. Which this movie is but, because it’s so heavily real, it has to be a little rough around the edges. There’s just something that, as a filmmaker who really likes traditional cinematic stuff, by the time I was finishing up editing the movie I was like, “I gotta put a camera on a dolly or something. Let’s put some lights in here,” or something like that. But we tried hard to make it interesting. But it wears you out a little bit.
So the idea started out with you wanting to base it on something real, was the idea always Jonestown?
Pretty much, yeah. I’ve always been fascinated with Peoples Temple and what happened with Jonestown, and I think that it’s been reduced to “drink the Kool-Aid.” That’s a really weird thing when you think of the 900 people committing suicide and being murdered in Guyana, which most people don’t even know where that is. It’s just such an astounding and horrific thing that happened in the 70s, and it’s weirdly glossed over and it’s been reduced to just, “Drink the Kool-Aid.” So it felt like one of these big tragic events that people don’t know as much about as you would think they would, so it felt like a good one to use. Not to reintroduce people to it, but it felt like the themes that brought people to join Peoples Temple are just as relevant today as they were in the 60s, and I think that what’s scary about that and what Jim Jones was doing is that he took desperate people and promised them something and then manipulated them into something horrific. And it is more of a mass murder than a mass suicide.
People don’t quite understand that. Because it’s just sort of a “Drink the Kool-Aid” thing, to me it felt like the right kind of… because I think that violence and horrible things and the news or whatever, we’re so desensitized to it that it’s like, “Oh, those are just religious fanatics.” And I thought, well, no, let’s show it. Let’s show violence in confronting, realistic manner. You know, for instance, when Amy kills Kentucker. That scene is a real-time death…
That’s a fantastic scene.
Thank you, they’re really fantastic in that. I’d never seen that before. That’s not the kind of thing where you clap at the end of that scene. That’s the one where everyone’s like, “I don’t know where this movie is…” I think like that’s, when we’re talking about something real and tragic, that’s what you need to be confronted with is provocative stuff like that. Like, this is what real violence is like. It’s not the head gets cut off and rolls down the thing and you cheer. And the last thing about that is, to me there’s what happens in the movie and what the movie’s about. What the movie’s about is what’s scary.
There’s so much to that community environment and that cult mentality. You chose to show it from the perspective of outsiders, guys who are only there for a day. Were other drafts, other versions where you thought about making it bigger, more expansive, more protagonists perhaps? Or was it always very clear to you?
It was always pretty clear. Mostly just because I knew what the budget was before we even really were making the movie, so it was written pretty specifically for as it was. I mean if we had more time and money it would be bigger.
How much bigger?
In a perfect world…
Give me the perfect world.
I could have conceivably done an eight-part mini-series about Jonestown and gotten a lot of these themes out and then gone off the real stuff. To actually make it Jonestown, the 48 hours at the end of what happened in Guyana is a small part of the history of the Peoples Temple. It’s a huge part, but it’s huge moment in that it’s the most memorable thing from it, but to tell the Jonestown Story you have to start in Indiana, you have to [go to] San Francisco, and Guyana and the aftermath. You have to do all that because it’s about real people and it’s too big of a story to just say, “Oh, and then they drank Kool-Aid.” But in using just the framework to get these social horrors out there, yeah, I could have made it a little bigger, but you know, honestly I would have had to have had so much more money. Making it 50 people bigger wouldn’t have made much of a difference. It would have been like, “Oh, we have $20 million and we can build a gigantic compound and put 900 people out here instead of 200.” But it’s still the same movie.
The technical aspect of it interests me because you don’t have coverage. I assume you have to plan it all out way in advance.
Yeah.
Was there anything where you wanted to cut it or you couldn’t, or you had to add ADR just to make it make sense? Or are you so brilliant that you nailed it on the first try? And I don’t mean that sarcastically.
It was incredibly planned out, which was part of it. There’s probably 40 minutes that aren’t in the movie, so any time you see an edit in the movie… like the interview scene with Father is twice as long. Every interview with all those people before you get there is twice as long. There’s a whole character that’s not in the movie. There’s a bunch of stuff, but also what happened was the information that got cut out was interesting but you kind of… So what’s not in there, you want to know where they got all that lumber from? It was in there. You want to know where all the guns came from? It was in there. You want to know how the local people ended up being guards and why these people do this and why other people don’t, it was in there. You want to know what city that old woman was in when she met him? It was in there.
But you didn’t need to know she was from Baltimore and that she met him at church and that her husband died and she joined. It was like, “I get it.” There was more about that Australian girl but you get it. She was this girl in Brooklyn and she joined this groovy community and now she’s down here. So it was things like that, they were interesting but not essential. And it just made the movie very, it became so information driven that I just didn’t think it would be a good film.
Whether in the post-production or development or screenwriting phase, were there ever versions where you wanted to tease the horror element earlier? Because I loved this about it, but it waits for so long that I started wondering if I was even watching a horror film.
Right. No, because for me it was very important that they Eden Parish not be seen as a terrible place or a place full of bad people. Because otherwise it makes no sense to me why it would even exist. If Father was just an obvious bad guy nobody would follow him. If everyone at Eden Parish was scary, robe-covered cult people, you be like, “Well they’re fucking weirdos. They’re fucking psychos. Get out of here.” And then you’d never give them any credibility and they never would have made it as far as they did.
So it was important for me to show that for the first half, it’s like, I don’t want to live here but I see their point. And I think if you can understand their point then you can understand how their situation was bad and this is better – maybe it’s weird, but it’s better – it’s like, “Well, okay.” And you realize, wait, this is a bit of a façade, and it’s not that. And that’s what’s so scary about Jonestown is that eventually people got down to Guyana, they were promised one thing and then they got there and it was like, “Dude, this isn’t what we were promised,” and then it kept getting worse and there was no way out at that point. You don’t have any money. You can’t just wander off in the jungle and hopefully wave down a plane and get a ride back to the United States with some random plane and then have no passport and get in and all your friends and family and all your money’s gone and you’ll just be homeless. So when people say, “Why did they drink the poison?” It’s like, well, what was the other option?
“I could wait here with all the corpses and hope that someone shows up eventually…”
It’s like, what would you possibly do? You could run away but one, they would probably kill you if you tried to run away, and even if you did get away and you did get back to America, maybe if you’re so lucky, then you’re a homeless person, and all your friends and family are dead. That’s not a… there’s no life there. It’s easier honestly to just go to sleep than it is to confront that other option, which is not really an option.
What can you tell me about the western that you’re working on now?
Not very much.
Is it just a straight-up western?
Straight-up western. Very Clint Eastwood-type movie. Like a High Plains Drifter, spaghetti western kind of thing. So far Ethan Hawke and John Travolta, that’s announced…
Well done.
Thank you. Ethan Hawke was really… I went to him, and he wanted to do a western, and he was doing MacBeth in New York. I was like, “When do you wrap? I’m going to write a western, and if you like it we’ll make it, and if you don’t we won’t.” And then I wrote it and he liked it.
You hear, “Oh, Ti West is going to work with Ethan Hawke and John Travolta,” and it’s like, “He’s gone Hollywood.”
Right.
“When are you going to settle down and direct a nice superhero movie.”
It’s not for me, man. I don’t have the love for superhero movies. The sad thing is, because I don’t aspire to that, I have no idea how to succeed because that’s… there’s no budget movies and then there’s superhero movies. I would be like, “Oh, they gave me $40 million to make a Zero Dark Thirty kind of movie.” Or like, “Hey, we got whatever to make whatever the Coen Bros. are making.” But outside of that, it really is… like, I guess Godzilla 3 would be something I could look into, but I don’t know. Maybe at some point I’ll be like, “I want to direct a really effects-driven movie.” Comic book movies I don’t think are really my thing, but maybe there’s something there, but it’s not really my vibe. And it’s harder because there’s not much of a middle-class filmmaking anymore. But you know, I’m psyched to be making this western. I realized that, after my many trials and tribulations in essentially trying to do what you suggested, and I’ve come very close on some big movies that have been down to me and one other person and it just hasn’t been me…
Bastards.
Yeah, but it’s a good thing though, because I don’t think they would have worked out. I think it would have ended up being a bad thing. I experienced that once before and I don’t want to experience that again. I can generate my own material. I’ve been writing, directing and editing all these movies for ten years now and it’s like, I might as well just keep doing that. And so I’m doing this western, and what I learned about the western is, if it’s not a horror movie then suddenly people want to be in them. It’s like, “I’m going to make a horror movie!” “Well I’m going to get paid, right?” “No, it’s a horror movie AND you’re not going to get paid.” So if all I’ve got to offer is a good movie, if it’s a horror movie they get nervous, like, “I don’t know.” Whereas if it’s a western, every guy wants to be in a western.
“Do I get to keep my own hat?”
“No. We can’t afford to let you have the hat. We’re going to return it.”
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
