With his latest film, The Sacrament (presented by Eli Roth) director Ti West has once again offered audiences a rich slice of horror-on-a-budget cinema. Only this time, the terror comes in the form of real-life scares. Sidestepping any hint of supernatural-infused story, West crafts a docu-style film that takes its inspiration from the events of the Jonestown Massacre (including the infamous “drinking-of-the-Kool-Aid,” by taking viewers into the heart of one of the scariest places seen on camera: Eden Parish, a remotely located compound who’s society is led by the scarily manipulative “Father,” (Gene Jones), leaving the audience to wonder, and witness, if there is anything scarier than atrocities performed in real life, by real people.
I had the chance to sit down with West, Jones, as well as the rest of the principle cast (and frequent collaborators) including Joe Swanberg, AJ Bowen, Amy Seimetz, and Kentucker Audley, at Hollywood’s Magic Castle, an appropriately spooky destination to inquire about the film. Seated inside the Player’s Club’s mini-theatre, we settled in, to find out more about this wholly arresting movie. We begin:
HOW CLOSE TO THE EVENTS OF THE JONESTOWN MASSACRE IS THIS FILM BASED ON?
TI WEST: The framework for the story is based on the last forty-eight hours of what happened at Jonestown. I wanted to use the framework of a real event, and use a real brand to tell the story, because I think that, you know, trying to make a horror movie that doesn’t have any supernatural elements, I wanted the sort of “horror” to be “horrific” and the violence to be confronting, and to be provocative, and to be socially relevant, to a certain degree. And I think a lot of the reasons that people joined People’s Temple in the sixties and seventies are just as relevant today. History tends to repeat itself. And I think that this “new media” way that we’re getting our news in this sort of embedded journalism is the way a story like this would come to us now. So all that stuff, to me was like, there’s what happens in the movie and there’s what the movie’s about, and what the movie’s about is far more interesting and terrifying to me. So, in trying to keep it steeped in realism, so that when you see this movie you have a visceral, scary experience watching the film, but then when you leave the theater, it stays with you because these themes are relevant, and these themes are scary, just generally. It’s not like when you go see a vampire movie and it’s scary for an hour and a half and then you go about your life. You know, hopefully the themes in this movie continue to make you think.
IN GENERAL, WHAT’S THE KEY TO CREATING SOMETHING REALLY SUSPENSEFUL WITHIN THAT DOCU-STYLE VISUAL AESTHETIC, AND HOW HARD WAS THAT FOR YOU TO EVOLVE CREATIVELY?
TW: The docu-style thing, it’s a little thing to adjust to, but you adjust to that before you even start. So it’s one of those things, a lot of times people ask me “What’s the challenge of shooting movies that way?” And it’s like, I don’t remember because it was never not that, you know what I mean? But I think that, it’s really just the same as any traditional thing. It’s just about what you show and what you don’t show, and that ratio, and that contrast of what’s scary and what’s not scary, and just sort of milking that. I kind of tell people it’s like, you know, like you can tell a joke and all your friends laugh, and then your friend can tell the same joke and it just bombs and you’re like, “What happened?” It’s like, there’s a sense of timing that you just intrinsically have in being able to read the situation, and I think that’s just the same with this.
FOR THE ACTORS- WHAT WAS THE CHALLENGE OF GETTING INSIDE THE HEADS OF THESE CHARACTERS, AS YOU’RE ALL PLAYING ESSENTIALLY FICTITIOUSLY REAL PEOPLE IN THE DOCU-STYLE WORLD OF THE FILM?
GENE JONES: It’s less than one day in Father’s life, and it’s not a typical day. So I didn’t do any Jim Jones research about what he read and how he interacted with people on a daily basis. What I tried to do was be a guy who was so nice you would follow him out of your, you would leave your family and leave your country and go with this guy.
KENTUCKER AUDLEY: We had, those of us that played VICE reporters, we had a very good, dedicated source of material, because VICE-guided travels, at least what I started figuring out, and I had already watched some of them, but we really got into it before we started shooting, there’s an aesthetic identity to the VICE brand that sort of transcends editing and photography. There’s a brand of journalism and there’s a brand of, I don’t want to say personality, but there’s very clearly, certain vibes. And so for me, I started noticing that there were seeming to be certain characters at other times. So the trick was humanizing, and being able to show that there’s a transition, that this person’s playing a character right now, and that he’s sort of taking that hat off, and as the movie escalates, as the story escalates, we sort of see that stuff getting stripped away, and you’re being left with this person that kind of loses an identity going down to this place.
“It’s not like when you go see a vampire movie and it’s scary for an hour and a half and then you go about your life. You know, hopefully the themes in this movie continue to make you think” -Ti West (Director)
JOE SWANBERG: Yeah, on the flip side of that, I mean think that my character remains detached. He’s willing to put himself in these dangerous positions, but when things seem intimidating he’s also the first one, I mean I think my character wants to live through this so he can keep making more, keep being a journalist. He’s not excited about the prospect of dying at this place [Laughter]. And he’s not getting emotionally involved, the line is much more clear-cut for my character than for AJ’s character and I feel think that’s an interesting dynamic that we were able to play off of where he’s, probably because of what he’s got going on at home where he’s sort of at a point in his life where he’s settling down, he’s a lot quicker to get emotionally invested in this young woman who we meet there, and the kind of “journalistic blinders” are still up for me where I’m like, “Look, we’re here to do a job,” and also, part of that job is to keep ourselves safe. If we die, nobody gets to hear the story, so we have to get home in order to tell it.
AJ BOWEN: Yeah, I think there’s an interesting thing with Joe and I’s characters, specifically about our detachment and our, you know, what happens with the shift of like, it’s a life and death situation, so like the “cool, above-it-all, we’re just doing this and it’s our job,” very quickly shifts to like, “we’re going on instinct, we’re going on survival, we’re going on this terror.” So at that point it becomes very universal, it becomes very similar to how anybody would react in a life and death terrorized situation.
AMY SEIMETZ: Ti said this and I agree with this one hundred percent, no-one joins a cult, it happens over slow increments over time. And so what you’re seeing, like Gene said, you’re seeing a day in the life of, or a couple of nights in the life of a very acute period of time, where it’s led to this point. And I guess, preparing for it, I was obsessed with cults for years, and sort of how people find themselves in this place. And they desperately want to believe in something bigger than them, and there’s a very fine line between actually believing and desperately wanting to believe. And so with Caroline, in the beginning, there’s a lot of like, putting up a front of, “I do really believe in this,” but also genuinely believing in it because it has helped her build a life outside of the rougher life that she was living before of drug addiction, etcetera. So I don’t think when she got involved with Father, that she was thinking, “I’m going to massacre people,” or you know, create a horrible situation.
YOU’RE ALL SUCH GREAT ACTORS, AND MANY OF YOU- MOST OF YOU, ARE ALSO EXCELLENT FILMMAKERS IN YOUR OWN RIGHT. IS IT EVER HARD TO TURN THAT PART OF YOUR HEAD OFF, OR IS THERE ANY COLLABORATION FROM A FILMMAKING POINT OF VIEW?
AS: Me first? Well, being the best filmmaker here, I’ll take this. [Laughter]
No I mean, we’ve all worked together in various capacities for, years now? And so I think, knowing what it’s like to direct a movie, none of us step onto the other one’s set and say, “I’m going to direct your movie-”
“CUT!”
AS: Yeah! I think there’s an ease to how we work together, and how working together repetitively helps get deeper, and have a shorthand together as opposed to create a power dynamic, in a way.
KA: Having worked with all of these directors, it’s just, you defer. You just trust the process of knowing the aesthetic that the individual director is going for and just trusting…you know, you look for ways to find your identity within it, you look for ways to insert your persona, or your being in some ways. But mostly it’s just like, trying to give them what they want, and trusting that they’re going to use it for the benefit of everybody involved.
JS: Yeah, I also think like, as an actor in somebody else’s movie, you don’t have the kind of whole picture that you usually have when you’re directing your own thing, so you’re not in every meeting about the visual look of the movie, you’re not in the costume meetings, you’re not having the conversations that a director’s having with a producer about the logistical aspects of figuring out, you know? You’re sort of only privy to the story and your character, so you’re kind of already coming at it from a different kind of place. You’re not trying to make the whole thing good, you’re just trying to be in the service of it as best you can.
But I do think that, you know, when you get on set, you do have to turn the “director brain” off, because everybody has their own aesthetic and their own ideas about how things should go, and also everybody runs their sets differently. And so if you get on somebody else’s set and you’re getting annoyed that it’s not moving at the speed your set moves, or there’s too many people around, or some other thing like that, it’s going to really get in the way of your ability to act, I think.
AB: Questions like that really are questions about ego, and one of the best benefits about collaborating with people over and over again is that you’re getting to start of a very different place. Most movies that I’m on, where I haven’t worked with people before, it starts off with everyone, in a well intentioned way, asserting their ego, their sense of identity, about, “Well this is what I’m bringing to the table.” And usually by the time the shoot’s done, you’re ready to go and actually make the thing, because you can now communicate with the people. But the great thing about working with these people, and doing it again and again, is that you’re starting at a place of trust and commitment, and there’s a much more open dialogue, and a much more thorough sense of communication about what’s going on.
So, as someone who has only acted in that capacity, it’s great because I don’t have to worry about so many things, like, “Is this movie going to, are we going to realize this script?” I don’t have to think about that with any of these people, so it’s really freeing.
