1. Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?

My interest in making movies began around age ten or eleven, when Toys “R” Us began stocking collectible action figures based around the stars of the various ‘Universal Monsters’ properties from the early 1920’s- through mid 50’s. Unlike the other toys I was familiar with, these figurines were assertively historical. The plaques which accompanied the brooding Frankenstein’s Monster, Wolf Man, and Mummy detailed the year of the film’s release along with each actor’s name, implying a detailed and complex world behind all of my favorite Halloween creatures.

I became obsessed. I promptly transformed into the precocious know-it-all child who watched nothing but pre-gore black-and-white horror and sci-fi films (even the ones that weren’t technically horror films but were marketed that way, like The Tower of London and The Mad Ghoul). My knowledge of the actors, directors, and Hollywood backstage gossip was vivacious and verbose. I am surprised I made it out of that phase with any friends at all. Luckily, my taste eventually expanded from there and as is usually the case, college and peer-pressure introduced me to new ways of thinking about and loving film.

It wasn’t until embarrassingly late in the process of filming They Cry by Night that I realized that by adapting a pre-war horror mystery monster film, I had come full circle and was interacting with movies as I had first fallen in love with them. 

2. What’s the backstory here - what was the initial idea and how did it evolve from there?

After college, living at my mom’s house, I had stumbled across Jacques Tourneur’s 1943 film The Leopard Man on TCM. I was then only vaguely familiar with producer Val Lewton’s stable of sophisticated RKO horror films (in my childhood I was strictly a Universal boy) and it immediately made an impression on me. Not only was this a film about New Mexico (my home state and endless obsession), the film was complicated, scary, funny, and insightful. What really stood out was the strong, clear, and emotionally complicated indictment of the settler-colonialism of the West, far ahead of its time. I recently read the book Black Alibi, from which the film is based, and that theme is nowhere in that text, making the vision of Tourneur/Lewton even more impressive. I remember while watching the film I thought that it would be a fun film to re-make, but I didn’t move forward on that and instead spent the next 8 years trying to make unsuccessful experimental mumblecore films based in and around Santa Fe.

As I began to learn more about New Mexican history, the more the final scenes of The Leopard Man kept jumping up into my mind. After Trump was elected, my revised version of the story began to take shape. I made a point not to re-watch or read anything about the original film while I wrote and planned the new movie; I wanted the idea I had of the film to ferment and transform into something different.

Santa Fe is a city, in many ways, structured around cultural appropriation. Our houses are fake adobe meant to look like Taos and Acoma Pueblo, our hotels are littered in faux Indigenous designs, the White and Spanish population very much profit off the identity and culture of the various Indigenous people that live here. I was also thinking a lot of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, the most successful uprising of Native people in North America, which was able to eradicate Spanish occupation in Santa Fe for 12 years. I thought it would be an interesting send-up of the cultural appropriation of Santa Fe by creating a scenario in which a non-native group inadvertently appropriates, distorts, and takes credit for events inspired very very very very very loosely on the legacy of the original Pueblo Revolt. An appropriation that eventually does much more harm to the people of New Mexico than good.

So between that, The Leopard Man, and the anxiety and turmoil of the Trump Administration, the building blocks of They Cry By Night came into being.

3. What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And generally what part of the creative process do you enjoy the most, and the least?

When I started working on this film, I was working as a Videographer at a photography school in Santa Fe and I developed a close relationship with many photographers. As I spent more time with them, I started to grow envious of many of the freedoms photography allowed that seemed absent from the process of making movies.  I started dreaming up possibilities that would merge the spontaneity of photography with the storytelling abilities of film and what I ended up with is a stack of notecards with various plot-points and story ideas written on them, which I would refer to when I felt inspired by the setting, light, and people I was with. Because of this loose structure, it took over a year and a half to film, editing and writing as I went. I also had to rely on myself to do all the cinematography and sound, since I never knew when I was going to film. I wanted to focus on the small everyday moments of life in Santa Fe, rather than using the characters and scenes to heavily move the plot forward, instead, I relegated the “plot” to voice over and more experimental storytelling styles. 

Of course, as the story began to take shape, more pre-planning had to come in (especially when multiple characters were needed) but the spontaneity and laid back style was the general goal. It was really fun to dive into all technical aspects of filmmaking myself, making the whole process feel very personal and intimate. I am really thankful I have a good group of friends who are open to me saying “Hey, can you pretend like you found a dead body right now real quick”; I couldn’t have done any of this without them.

4. What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?

The streaming site MUBI is currently doing a yearlong retrospective on Indian cinema, which I am very excited about. Aside from a handful of Satyajit Ray films, I really am mostly ignorant on the films of India. The first film they showcased was Mani Kaul’s 1970 film A Day’s Bread (or Our Daily Bread) which I absolutely loved. The pacing, structure, and cinematography were completely unique to anything I had ever seen and had me hooked for the whole film. The editing was very interesting and counter to everything they teach you in film school. Few of the edits were motivated by action and instead followed the completion of the moment that was being filmed (sometimes even overlapping or repeating the moment when switching from wide shot to close up i.e. A woman hands another woman an apple in a wide shot, followed by a close up of the same moment repeated from this new angle). This disregard for linear time is mirrored in the entire structure of the film which echos moments from the beginning, middle, and end throughout the film. While my description may make this film sound overly intellectual and abstract, it really isn’t. Its structure wholly supports the themes and rhythms of the day to day life and repetitions of a rural Punjab village and the power relations (age, gender, class) that exist there. 

5. What’s next for you?

I’m not quite sure! I am currently working as the lead editor for a feature documentary on the Trinity Downwinders (Hispanic survivors of the first nuclear bomb test in 1945 southern New Mexico. These unknowing ranchers and villagers lived as close as 12 miles from the blast and to this day have massive amounts of cancer and health risks associated with radiation). This is the first feature film I have worked on as a job, and I am learning a lot. Structuring and putting together this film has taken a lot of my creativity and I haven’t been super focused on working on another personal project yet. I am looking forward to my next project when it comes around naturally, but I am enjoying the break and the change of priorities at the moment. I am hoping my experience on this film will lead to new creative ways of movie-making in the future.

—

http://www.wessheridanvideography.com/

IG: @funkyyakattack

Twitter: @funkyyak