Talking with Jim Mickle of "We Are What We Are"

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Interviews

Published on Friday, 11 October 2013 23:26

Written by Matt Oakes

If you haven't already, take a look at our review, or read the following snippet to get an idea of our thoughts:

In 1826, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, "Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es" (Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are). Morphing throughout time to arrive at the now common idiom, "We are what we eat," (a sentiment mostly passed down from overprotective moms encouraging their chubby kids to lay off the potato chips and eat their damn vegetables), has never been more penitent than in Jim Mickle's cannibal-horror We Are What We Are. Forced to consume a set of distressing ideologies (centered around a medieval virgin-consuming ritual) alongside their main course of human meat, the Parker family  - a sneaky riff on the uber-sterilized Partridge family - is the centerfold of this gloomy tale of distorted moral recompense and dietary wrongheadedness.

From why he doesn't like remakes, to ideas for prequels and sequels, and his thoughts on his favorite film endings of all time, Jim spilled the beans on what made We Are What We Are worth making.

Why did you choose to remake this film for an American audience?


Jim Mickle: Well I didn’t really choose to really. It was brought to me and originally I was very much not excited about the idea. I’m not a big fan of remakes, I’m not a big fan of US remakes of foreign films. I feel that they’re usually done poorly and didn’t want to become part of the problem so I had avoided them in the past. I was approached by a couple of producers who had the rights to do an American version of this, not necessarily a remake, and hemmed and hawed about it for about a good month and Nick Damichi, the guy who wrote the film, the two of us sat down early on. I think I had mixed feelings about it but ultimately I think we approached it in a way to make an original film out of it, to make it based on our story. We both really liked what the original film did and themes and the structure and what it was trying to say. I thought it was really interesting and pretty bold for a horror film and that was the kind of thing that I wanted to do. He found a way to honor the original film but also make something that was our own.

What about this cannibal story makes it so that it needs to be told in a modern day context? How was the time period an essential part?


JM: Well I think that the basis of the original and what made it so cool was this idea that they were a family just like any other family. The original film is set in a really gritty city in Mexico and part of the allure of it is that it is everyday seeming. It’s happening right under your nose. And that was one of the pulls of the original. At the end of the day though, it’s really not about cannibalism. It’s more about tradition and faith and family values and what gets handed down and I think that to do that, we wanted to create otherwise normal seemingly people. The first film I think kept its distance a little bit from the characters and we wanted to put you in the family or have you feel like you can understand what was going on and relate to them. We thought to make them common, the better.

In my review, I talked about how the most horrifying part for me is just this idea of parents having total control over their children, to the point where they can just spoon feed them human meat and they’ll eat it. What horrifies you the most about this story?


JM: I mean, just that. Not necessarily the eating human meat thing but deep absolute faith. To me, it’s terrifying when people follow something so closely and so literally that they sort of turn a blind eye to pretty obvious mistakes. That can be pretty scary and I think that is what we wanted to draw comparisons to. Doing anything in the name of a higher power.

Going off that, what frightens you the most in real life situations? Is there anything from spiders to tight spaces?


JM: I’m very claustrophobic. It’s a pretty universal fear but I’m not a big fan of flying and then, kind of in line with the movie, organized religion. Those are my big three fears

One of the things I was thinking as the movie going along is that we don’t know too much about Bill Sage's Frank character. I was wondering if you ever conceived of an origin story for him and how he was indoctrinated into this tradition and whether he went along with it pretty easily or if he was hesitant and rebellious like his own children were?


JM: We’re actually working on that write now. Nick is writing a screenplay off of that backstory. 


Oh very cool, can you tell me anything about it?




JM: It’s in the middle of the process right now but there’s a concept there and stuff that is pretty interesting. There’s no real foundation put in place yet though.

So the whole atmosphere of the movie is so gray and rainy and bleak and downtrodden and there really is no place for comedy in it. Why did you take this really hard-nosed approach without any of the camp and asides. Why did you feel that that was the appropriate way to approach this film?


JM: I think because we’re taking our themes really seriously. I am a fan of horrors but I think a lot of times horror movies apologize for themselves by being campy and going “ha ha” but I really appreciate that our movie had the courage to draw comparisons to bigger issues and take it straight on. At the end of the day, we wanted it to be taken seriously. We’ve done two other films and those are horror films but both have sociological things and political things and bigger issues that they’re tapping into. There’s a big level of the b-movie to both the films but it was really fun to play with. Here we had something where the characters were strong enough and the story was strong enough that we didn’t have to let it breathe or go “Ha ha, it’s just a movie”. We really wanted to give it a feel of a drama. People do a lot of absurd things but one of the themes of the movie is that people do do a lot of absurd things in life. We’re just so used to our perspective that we don’t always see it.

The only time that I really laughed at the film, and I don’t want to spoil the moment, was the final confrontation within the family because it’s just so over the top and so absurd and you just don’t really see it coming. Obviously you need to honor the original, why did you feel like in the context of your story, it need to end like that?


JM: Well it didn’t end like that in the original. That whole film is very, very, very different. It has a similar opening scene but then it goes a really different direction and fundamentally they’re really different. We flipped all the genders, the original story is about two brothers who lost their father and there’s very little cannibalism, if any, that you actually see and the ending is all ours. Just for that reason, we wanted that ending. It’s a huge story and I guess thematically in terms of what is being said comes down to three or four characters sitting around a table setting but thematically, the consequences of what is going on is so huge that we wanted an ending that would kind of capture that. I think anything else would have felt unearned or undeserving of the rest of the story. To me, that ending is beautiful character-wise and it’s also fun to see the reaction from people in the audience because people either love it or hate it. I think a lot of it is that we keep the audiences down in sort of a dark, dingy, repressed place and then finally give the characters and the audience have a bit of a release, which I really enjoy. It’s a magic ending and will divide people forever, but I think those are the best kind of movies.

For me, it was my favorite part of the movie. Going off that, what do you think are some of the best move endings of all time that do pull that final punch and really make the whole thing great.


JM: Good question. For some reason what comes to mind is La Haine, the black-and-white French film from the 90s with a very young Vincent Cassel. That had a great ending and I took that with me. Another great ending is Sleepaway Camp. That’s got a great ending. John Carpenter’s The Thing is also amazing with Keith David sitting there by himself.

As the movie caps off, we see the kids driving away and you hint that they might be continuing down this path because they’ve taken this old book which is a relic of their past with them. Just as you’ve considered what Frank may have been doing before this story, have you asked yourself what you think this kids will be doing from this point on?


JM: I have my ideas but I kind of like that people can interpret it differently. I think one of the best things is hearing people talk about their interpretations, and all of them are right. I think it’s something that’s really fun to just let people come up with their own ending. I have my ideas but those are best left unsaid. After our ending, the original director, Jorge Michel Grau, he is at the moment shooting a film and then working on a sequel to our film with our characters.

That’s a cool system of passing the material back-and-forth that you guys have going on. Right now, you’re filming Cold in July with Michael C. Hall and Vinessa Shaw. Can you tease some of that for us and tell us what it’s about and what it’s been like making it?


JM: I’m actually editing it right now. We wrapped about a month ago. It’s set in the 80s, it’s sort of a Texas kind of revenge story/thriller. It’s a little bit uncharacterizable plot-wise, which I like. It’s a sort of fast, serpentine story and you never know where it’s going. It’s based on a Joe Lansdale novel who does these great southern-fried noirs. He does these kind of contemporary noirs that don’t really follow any structure, which I really love. It was really different from We Are What We Are which is fun. It’s got a lot of humor in it which is fun to get to do.

How was it working with Michael C. Hall?


JM: Amazing, he’s unbelievable and I’m just getting to the point now where I’m sitting down to edit and seeing his performance. Onset there’s so many things going on so  I really didn’t fully realize how great he is until the editing room. It’s gonna be great for him, I hope, because it’s really different from Dexter and Six Feet Under and really shows a side to him that even I didn’t expect out of him so I think audiences will have a lot of fun with it when it comes out.

Very cool. He’s definitely just emerging into the film world after his 12 year stay on premium television. Finally, is there anything that you have already planned in the future after you wrap up editing and post on this or are you just gonna take a breather?


JM: I think take a breather. Whatever comes comes. For a long time, we’ve been trying to work on Cold in July because we’ve had the rights to the book and have been working on it and trying to pull it together between other things and this time, we actually got to shoot it. It’s kind of a crazy moment for us because we shot We Are What We Are last year, and premiered it very quickly after that, and then shot Cold in July after that very quickly and am editing that very quickly. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next after all that. I’m psyched to see what opportunities will come from making these two incredibly different films.

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