I reach the 25th floor and step out of the elevator on the giant building on Wilshire Blvd, excited for what’s about to come. Besides the fact that we have mutual friends, director Jeremy Saulnier and actor Macon Blair are so down to earth and, seemingly unaware of how successful they are about to become after the theatrical release of their film Blue Ruin. They’ve been friends and making films since childhood and as I walk into the conference room to meet them for our exclusive interview, the energy is so high and welcoming, I feel as if I’ve been friends with them since childhood too. We sit around a long oval table and begin:

WE FIRST SAW THE FILM AT LAST YEAR’S AFI FESTIVAL, BUT AFTER WATCHING IT, I THOUGHT THAT IT DESERVED AN EVEN BIGGER ARENA TO PLAY IN.

Jeremey Saulnier: Well, do you know where we premiered? Director’s Fortnight at Cannes! So we totally got the dream premiere beyond our hopes and dreams. We did Sundance, Toronto, we did everything. So we have, I think, the coolest festival run we could ever imagine. Yeah I mean like, after the Cannes premiere, it got bought very shortly after that and so then just like the weird halo effect of having been bought there by Radius, Weinstein Company, all the other festivals were kind of like, “Come in! Come in! Come in!” which is the opposite of our, you know, normally you have to submit and hope and pray, and now people were the opposite, they were asking us to come which was very foreign and exciting. It was- Weird. The full fairy tale. So much of that I think, I especially, I was guilt ridden. Because all of a sudden, the public back-and-forth about where our film was, was just all of a sudden hard to cope with actually. Because it was the dream scenario

DID YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHILE YOU WERE MAKING THE FILM THAT IT WOULD ACHIEVE ALL OF THESE SUCCESSES SO QUICKLY?

JS: Absolutely not.

Macon Blair: Not like this.No way. No.

JS: We were definitely hoping for a top tier domestic festival in the U.S. like almost all filmmakers, when they embark on such an, indie project. And this is not hyperbole, we had sat down at one point and declared, with a certain “reality check” moment, that this film was not a Cannes film, like that was just out of our scope. And then we got in! So we proved ourselves wrong, and it was a delight. [Laughter].

MB: But it got in, the movie was not done. So when we found out we had to race to finish all of the post production in a very compressed time frame, just to be ready for the premiere. And Jeremy hadn’t even seen the finished product until the night of the premiere. It was uploaded to being projected there, like, forty eight hours before we flew over there, so it was like, literally a race to finish this.

JEREMY, YOU WROTE, SHOT, AND DIRECTED THE FILM. WAS THAT YOUR PLAN TO DO SO FROM THE BEGINNING?

JS: We make a lot of our decisions based on necessity, and that was very pragmatic. And also, I have an affinity towards the camera, I’m a working cinematographer, so I felt very comfortable with leaning on my technical background, to help us through production, and to be very lean and mean with how we covered scenes, and the amount of scenes we cover. And I do think that being the writer/director/cinematographer helps, because when I wrote the film, when I sat down and cranked out the script, it was pre-visualized. I knew so many of the locations we’d be using because there were friends and family that were supplying us with locations. I knew Macon was going to be the star , so I could visualize him in these scenarios. And there was so much intimate knowledge about what we were going to be doing ahead of time that, when I wrote it, I was blocking shots out as I did it. So that helped. I storyboarded whatever I could, I never got through the whole film, but I storyboarded the first act. And because so much of the film is virtually dialogue free, it was a very easy collaboration between myself, and my other self. But, when it came to the dialogue scenes, it was I think a disservice to the actors when I was worried about headroom, or technical infringements, and not just focusing on performance. So luckily we had awesome actors come on board and were able to rehearse a few key scenes before production. But, um, it’s not something I recommend arbitrarily, but it just worked out that way, and again, we didn’t want to bend the world to our will, we just wanted to accept our limitations and liabilities and just move forward. And we saved a good amount of money, by not having to travel, and hire a separate director of photography on set.

THE CHEMISTRY AND TRUST IN YOUR GUYS’ RELATIONSHIP IS SO NATURAL. DID YOU KNOW EACH OTHER PREVIOUSLY? 

JS: Yeah, we’ve been friends since elementary school. And it was sort of like a group, we all grew up in the same neighborhood in Virgina, and a group of us, that was like our after school activity, was making movies together. And everybody kind of went to different film schools, more or less, but we all re-converged after college in New York, and tried to make a professional go of it, and it just ended up taking much longer than we thought! We had some false starts, and thought we would be able to break though with a short film, or a feature, and so this was kind of the last, ultimate attempt, to, if this is gonna be how we pay the bills, making movies, then we have to make this one count. And we didn’t. It might’ve not worked, and we were prepared for that reality too, so we just kind of tried to throw like, every last hail Mary with this movie that maybe it would be the last one we could get to make.

WHO ARE YOUR INSPIRATIONS?

JS: I’ve always revered films, and performances, rather than directors and actors. I’m uncomfortable with just the whole, “celebrity” and “star power” and “branding.” I think some of my favorite directors have faltered, more than once. But that’s just the name of the game, it’s a law of averages. But my biggest influences growing up would be John Carpenter, sort of a plethora of 80’s action movies. Die Hard with McTiernan, all that stuff. But I think that I feel most akin to the Coen brothers, and how they tell stories. I think that just visually, they’re geniuses, and the language that they use to tell stories is what I relate to most. And I love how they can weave between genres within one film, and then they can ride that line, and it’s just expertly pulled off. I love Michael Mann, early Friedkin, all that sort of stuff. So I am an unabashed lover of genre filmmaking. But there’s this sort of nostalgic connection to films of my youth, which I think were more atmospheric, and traditionally crafted. And I love makeup effects, so again, that tactile, visceral filmmaking is what I’m attracted to. But I also, I’ve been influenced recently by arthouse movies, and my collaboration with Matt Porterfield, who does these really great indie/arthouse films. And I think that Blue Ruin is a nice hybrid, where I felt like I wanted to not just make an exploitation for the sake of exploitation, and celebrated violence, and action choreography. I respect it as a craft. And I just wanted to ground this in a little more reality, and have it ultimately be a character driven piece, and that’s where Macon came in.

FOR THE ROLE OF DWIGHT- WAS THERE ANYONE WHO YOU WERE BASING THE CHARACTER OFF OF, OR SOMETHING YOU CAME UP WITH?

MB: Well it was someone that Jeremy completely came up with, and then he and I just talked about it, mostly for like a year, leading up to it. There’s certainly like some real people that I knew that I would kind of pick little pieces of their personality, and try and use those. And there were also some performances and other movies, not that I was trying to copy necessarily, but inspired me like, “We could approach it in that sort of way,” and just kind of like mush it all together. But really it was almost a full year before we even knew if we were going to make the movie at all, when like the money wasn’t the question and stuff, the pressure was very low stakes and we could just kind of have these long, theoretical conversations about why he was doing anything, or not doing anything, so that when we actually got to the time we were shooting the movie we didn’t have to waste any time having those talks, because even if we had disagreements early on, by that time, we had synchronized so that we were very much on the same page. And you said something about shorthand, which was very true, we didn’t have to have a lot of big discussions, it could be just gestures, and I knew what he was getting, and he could make adjustments to what I was doing with a minimal fuss. And I think that was helpful because it was low-budget and independent, and we had to move as quickly as possible, and get in and out of locations, and get the day done.

JS: And Macon’s also a writer, so him approaching film from that standpoint really helped with character, because on set he would protect the story, as well as his character and stay true to it, and I could defer to him when I was faltering, or if I was  too busy lighting, or whatever it was. Honestly, when I was at a loss from time to time, and I’ll answer for you Macon, he would make sure that he would approach it from not only like an internal ‘Dwight’ perspective, but story. And having that overall knowledge of the arc of a story, and dramatic necessity that we needed to pull off, to make this a cohesive film, he was there. And I will say, the whole film was built around Macon, and the character was written just for him. But it was me knowing, not so much, I knew what he could do in front of the camera, but a lot of Dwight was just pushing Macon just out of his comfort zone. It wasn’t about just, “Oh, this is written for Macon, I’ve seen him do this a thousand times, let’s justplay it safe,” it was about knowing the raw talent was there, and for both of us, exploring new territory in that this was a stark, emotional, raw film, where we’d both be vulnerable as artists, and so it was terrifying. It wasn’t just like, “catered just for you like your last three film,” it was like, “Let’s finally do something that is new, for both of us, and expose ourselves…” Well, that’s a little too explicit…[Laughter]