5 Questions with Roger Hayn

Last summer, when the Baltimore-based filmmaker Roger Hayn first reached out to me about releasing his debut feature, Congratulations Debby, I was stunned to learn that almost no one else had seen it yet. Hayn, whose excellent hybrid short Introducing Bobby screened at many prestigious festivals and won the Grand Jury Award at AFI, considers himself a “ride-or-die” DIY filmmaker. His experiences at these international showcases left him craving a more direct, immediate approach to reaching audiences. He was frustrated when festival programmers gently suggested that, in order to maximize success, his first feature should be akin to the lowkey, observational style of his breakthrough short. Congratulations Debby is nothing of the sort. It is a warped melodrama that plunges the viewer headfirst into the fractured psyche of its protagonist. What begins as an uncanny suburban mystery along the lines of a Todd Solondz film, unfurls into something even darker and stranger. Just when you think you have a handle on what kind of movie you’re watching, Hayn weaponizes Debby’s subjectivity against you, hinting at horrifying details in her past, and slowly revealing the emotional crater she’s left on her family and community. While it sometimes looks like a 50s B-movie, it’s not quite a horror film—it often just feels very wrong, something truly unsettling in an intangible way. But for all its formal tricks, tonal shifts, and cinematic sleights-of-hand, what really kept me up at night was its emotional core: Debby, and the brutal, empathetic care with which her story is told. Eschewing conventional aesthetics has also given way to reconfiguring traditional distribution: Hayn and I collaborated on the release of Debby through D E E P, my travelling IRL/URL presentation of experimental cinema. Though D E E P mostly centers around work specifically about the internet, the prospect of premiering one of the most audacious indie debuts in recent memory was an honor too great to pass up. I spoke a bit with Hayn about his process of making and releasing Debby in uncompromising fashion:

Congratulations Debby spins on a different axis than other recent indies: it foregos naturalism and cathartic narrative beats in favor of a heightened performance style and experimental aesthetics, without ever sacrificing its emotional acuity. Can you talk a bit about your process in finding the wooly shape and structure of the film, specifically with regards to the various formal departures and tonal shifts that occur as it unfolds?

Of course, and thank you so much for inviting me to participate in this interview. Though I am a filmmaker, I’ve always considered myself a narrative artist first and foremost. I come from a creative writing background rather than a technical film production background, so my mind is wired to think about film in terms of things like form, composition, structure, movement, rhythm and pacing before anything else. In the case of Congratulations Debby, the genesis of the narrative was actually the alignment of two unrelated scenarios transpiring in my artistic life at the same time. I was attempting to write a feature length screenplay but would perpetually overthink what I was doing and abandon a script near its completion, then start another one only to do the same thing again. I did this about five times in a row over the course of six months, and it was getting quite frustrating. At the same time, I was becoming more interested in the idea of what it meant to apply distortion to a narrative film in a similar sense to the way it’s applied to sound. I had recently moved on from thinking about Introducing: Bobby, which was mainly influenced by George Kuchar’s Weather Diaries and the fiction/non-fiction hybrids that Ulrich Seidl was making at the time. I knew I wanted to continue working within the framework of character portraits, but I also knew I wanted it to be a stark departure from Introducing: Bobby. Instead, I was beginning to gravitate toward the concepts of portraiture-warping and portraiture-distortion. A piece of music by Alvin Lucier titled I Am Sitting in a Room provided me with a breakthrough of sorts. It sparked the idea in my mind of a narrative structure based around new layers of distortion continuously being placed on top of a reoccurring event, to a point in which its final form looks nothing like it did in the beginning. From there, I started thinking more and more about what would be required of a film’s narrative to justify that sort of formal experimentation. I’m not exactly sure when the eureka moment occurred, but at some point, I wrote a treatment for a film which was an amalgamation of the previous five scripts I had written, structured in a way that would allow me to move forward with the shape-shifting portrait concept. That treatment became Congratulations Debby. Things took off pretty quickly from there, and looking back on it, all of the self-inflicted creative delays served an indispensable purpose.

After fully developing the narrative trajectory, I focused on world-building. I found myself drawing inspiration from art-film/melodrama hybrids like Footprints on the Moon, Fists in the Pocket, The Swimmer, Seconds and the work of R.W. Fassbinder, as well as experimental films by artists like Aldo Tambellini, Peter Tscherkassky and Takashi Ito (all three of whom I think would genuinely dislike my film). In entirely different ways, camp and experimental film seem to be the two most notable examples of distortion being applied to cinema (not to mention low-budget DIY cinema) so it made sense to merge the two to construct Congratulations Debby. I wanted to look at as many examples of both categories as I could and utilize disparate elements from them to paint the world of the film. Being able to then connect the dots between seemingly unrelated films and styles also provided me with an understanding of how to transition between forms and tones. Aside from at least starting out as melodrama, I look at this as a genre-less film and it borrows equal amounts from Pasolini films and Showgirls as it does from Giallo films and Zardoz – all of which are drenched in their own distinct styles of distortion. My goal was just to melt down all of these genres into textures and then use them to create something that was entirely its own thing, hopefully in a way that’s structurally cohesive.

Jennifer Dorr White is phenomenal as Debby. It’s such a difficult role to nail, and one on which the entire film depends. How did the two of you work together to build Debby?

I think Jennifer is the most powerful artist I’ve personally worked with and I’m certain the film would be worthless without her. Believe me – I wish I could say that it was my work as a director which brought out the best of her as a performer but that would be so incredibly false. Before her audition, I provided her with some sides, a character breakdown and a few clips from Fassbinder and Dreyer films so she understood the level of camp I was aiming for. She then arrived to the audition with such a firm grasp of Debby that it informed my understanding of the character – not the other way around. My job was to create Debby’s world. Once we were on set and ready to film a scene, Jennifer took it from there and came up with things I could never have thought of. I never doubted her decisions. She often made suggestions for further strengthening the characterization of Debby, many of which made palpable differences to the final product. Also, while Jennifer does have quite a lot of screen experience, she’s primarily recognized as a veteran stage actress who has worked with many prominent playwrights in the New York City theater community. Her intuition for fundamentals like blocking, timing and stillness are razor sharp. This played a crucial role in our ability to craft the aesthetic of the film. So I guess you could say our collaboration is one that was built off of trusting each other, and I’m so thankful for the level of trust she placed in me for as many years as it took to finish shooting.

You made this film on a very low budget, shooting in a piecemeal way, sometimes completely redoing scenes you’d previously shot. What did this loose production style lend to the film?

The actor who plays the role of Michael, J. Dixon Byrne, also played the mortician in Lodge Kerrigan’s Clean, Shaven – which is, in my opinion, one of if not the most important “DIY” films of the 1990s. One of the things about Clean, Shaven is that it’s a film that spoke to me on multiple planes: its subject matter, its formalism, the marriage between the two, but also its piecemeal style production. I remember reading an interview with Lodge Kerrigan in which he spoke about the piecemeal process and how it enables you to see how things are coming together so that you can gradually sculpt a stronger product. It was an insight that profoundly altered my outlook on how to make a film. Being able to watch your film come together over time is a vital asset for anyone working within the confines of low-budget, handmade cinema. A lot of things go wrong on set and these issues can be drastically magnified by a lack of financial resources. However, at least in terms of filmmaking, what one lacks in money can be compensated for with time. By allowing things to unfold at their own pace, you’re provided with the freedom to let the film reach a higher potential. That could mean anything from noticing things in the story beginning to change and being able to adjust accordingly to seeing when something isn’t working in a scene and having the chance to acknowledge what needs to be re-shot (something we did a number of times during the production of Congratulations Debby). Due to the structure of the film, having this level of flexibility is the only reason we were able to make it. What’s worth noting, however, is that should someone want to follow this production path, it is necessary for the project to have a narrative which can accommodate the variables associated with the piecemeal process. For instance, this approach only worked for Congratulations Debby because, aside from Debby/Michael and the house, the film never visits a character or location more than once.

Your previous short, Introducing Bobby, was selected to screen and won awards at major film festivals. But for Debby, your first feature, you pointedly chose to release it in a different way, online through D E E P and now NoBudge, as well as pop-up theatrical screenings in NY and LA. Why was it important to you to forego the traditional route of distribution for this film? How did your experiences at bigger festivals color this decision?

I very much wanted for this film to feel like something new and different to people. When the time came to determine how to get the film seen, I began to realize that perhaps it made the most sense to attempt releasing it in a way that pointed toward the future as well. I didn’t immediately arrive at this decision, however. I’ll never forget how intoxicating it felt to be at AFI Fest and SXSW with Introducing: Bobby. And for the record, these are the places that offered me my start and without them, Congratulations Debby would probably not exist. So I am eternally grateful to the people who gave me the opportunity to showcase my work there. But I also won’t forget how out of place I felt screening a film like that at festivals that factored things like status, celebrity and industry so heavily into their decisions. I remember walking to a filmmaker event at SXSW and directly across the street from the restaurant was a horde of people waiting in a line to get inside of a tent with a sign on top of it that said “MEET MARK CUBAN.” I can’t articulate what exactly it was, but something about that moment made me feel like I was going in the wrong direction.

In the end I think I just wanted an alternative option; one where I could streamline the film directly to its intended audience. I decided to attempt carving out my own path by releasing the film in a way that felt cool to me – through forming partnerships with younger screening platforms who are on the front line of challenging conventional film aesthetics and distribution models in independent film. For as long as I can remember, my primary interest not only as a filmmaker but as a consumer of art and a human being in general has been exploring the stuff that occurs beneath the surface. I’m eager to participate in the fostering of a new American underground cinema, and I felt that the best way to reach a like-minded community was by exhibiting the film outside of the mainstream system via streaming and micro-cinemas.

This is a scary film to me. Scary in how it looks and feels, scary in the questions it raises, scary in the subject matter it probes. How did you manage to live in this world for such a sustained period of time? Do you feel like the process of releasing Debby has been cathartic in some way?

I was born on November 1st. My mother went into labor with me on Halloween night. From my earliest memories onward, Halloween has always been a personal New Year’s Eve for me, so to speak. I’ve always been obsessed with it, as well as anything spooky or scary in general: haunted attractions, horror films, etc. I collect ceramic light-up haunted houses and other Halloween memorabilia as well as cult horror Blu-rays and VHS tapes. When I was very young, I used to be obsessed with graveyards and would throw tantrums unless my parents took me to new graveyards so I could have my picture taken next to my favorite graves. Here’s a photo of me when I was 4 years old.

As I got a little bit older, I got into building carnival-style “haunted houses” in my basement for people to walk through, not just during Halloween but throughout the entire year, be it February or July. In retrospect, they really sucked and only vaguely resembled anything close to a haunted house, but they were definitely my first foray into world-building for an audience. In many ways, I look at all my films as haunted houses which I’ve constructed, just in a broader sense. I frequently describe Congratulations Debby as a hall of illusions, only instead of specters and magic, the illusions are products of memories, denial, deception and a warped perception of reality. I suppose what I’m getting at is that in terms of me living in the world of Congratulations Debby for the last five years, I’ve felt right at home.

What was far less comfortable for me was the five years of bullshit that came with the process of building that world. The interpersonal conflicts within your own team, the constant fear of bankruptcy, navigating never-ending legal troubles, being threatened with lawsuits, not to mention managing your own insecurities, all while fighting in the trenches to complete a project that means everything to you. It’s like running in a marathon without ever knowing how much further away the finish line is, regardless of how little you have left inside of you. I’m an action-oriented person as well as commitment-oriented person, so the volatile, stop and go nature of making this film became acutely challenging for me. There were so many times I thought I was going to have to give up on this thing and write it off as a lost cause. It’s these things I’m so happy to see exorcised from my life. I’m not apprehensive about publicly stating that making this film drove me to want to hurt myself, if not a bit further than that. In many ways, making it through to the other side left me feeling like I had died and come back to life.

For better and for worse, I’m a person who naturally experiences extreme emotions. I feel things very deeply. Sometimes these extreme emotions can be scary or distressing - and that might be present in Congratulations Debby. For a long time, I had no outlet for this and found myself sinking into destructive, negative places as a result. Film has offered me a way to channel these feelings into something I feel compelled to share with people who might also understand what I’m expressing. That is actually what has been most cathartic for me. Truthfully, the scary part is releasing Congratulations Debby, because now I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. But whatever that winds up being, I can assure you it won’t look anything like Introducing: Bobby or Congratulations Debby.

Contact Info:

IG: @rogerhayn500000000000000000000

D E E P website: https://memory.is/deep