I’m curious about your intent with that confrontational rape scene that occurs in the second part, in which Guy Pearce’s Harrison Lee sexually assaults László (Brody).
The thing is, I love neorealist films. There are many neorealist films I love, but that’s not what this is, and it’s not what I do. We were making a film that’s set in the 1950s, in the style of a 1950s melodrama. So it was important to me to have a character a la [Hollywood Golden Age actors] James Mason or Joseph Cotten that was a capital-A antagonist.
So my feeling about this was to take the relationship to operatic heights, and to photograph it in the way that a filmmaker in the 1950s or very early 1960s might have. What’s interesting about it is that there’s a misunderstanding sometimes, when viewers find themselves frustrated by a film’s lack of subtlety. And yet, the 1950s was not a particularly subtle time for cinema. Because the film owes this debt to films that were shot on VistaVision, and both the protagonists and antagonists in that era, that’s the reason that it’s handled in the way it’s handled. If I ever make a film that more closely resembles a docudrama or a neorealist movie, I think I would handle things very differently.
And I mean, they’re also surrounded by Greek statues. [Laughs.] It is this mix of what is contemporary in the film, and what is classical, and this strange brew that makes the movies what they are. Because they’re both.
Can you give me a few words on why you picked that wonderful, wacky Italodisco song for the credits?
“One For You, One For Me,” it’s sort of a double entendre. There are three reasons. First reason is it’s an Italian pop song from 1979, and the movie ends in 1980, so that of course feels appropriate. “One for you, and one for them,” is this trope that we’re all very familiar with from Hollywood.
And the third thing is, if you pay very close attention to the lyrics, they’re very sexually coercive. They’re suggesting that whoever this man or woman is, who the character is singing to, he keeps encouraging them to have another drink and stick around a little while longer. So given the fact that this is a movie about not just Adrien’s character, but an entire family that has been violated… I mean, one of the first lines in the movie is Erzsébet’s (Jones) voiceover, she says, “It’s neither better nor worse than you might have imagined, I kept myself mostly to myself.”
And then, of course, it’s heavily implied that Joe Alwyn’s character made some sort of a pass at Zsófia [Raffey Cassidy] in the forest… So that cycle of abuse and trauma that the film is exploring, for all of those reasons, the song felt absolutely correct.
Finally, I wanted to touch on the Respeecher story that circulated recently. I’m not going to go over it again, I know that you’ve responded with a statement already — but I’m interested in how you felt when the story first got out there. It seems like there was this maelstrom of sensationalism, which is understandable with the present fear around AI, but it can’t have been a comfortable position for you to be in.
