By Iain Blair
Director Antonio Campos made a name for himself with his debut 2008 feature Afterschool, which premiered at Cannes and was nominated for the Caméra d’Or and Un Certain Regard awards. He followed that film with the Sundance hits Simon Killer and Christine.
Campos, who also plays in the episodic world, directed the pilot of USA’s Emmy-nominated series, The Sinner. He is currently serving as an executive producer for the show, which is ramping up for its fourth season.
His latest film is Netflix’s The Devil All the Time. Spanning from the 1940s-1960s, it is a gothic epic that weaves together stories of the families, preachers, cops and killers who inhabit small towns in Ohio and West Virginia.
The Devil All the Time follows an unholy preacher (Robert Pattinson), a twisted couple (Jason Clarke, Riley Keough) and a crooked sheriff (Sebastian Stan) — who converge around Arvin Russell (Tom Holland) as he fights the evil forces that threaten him and his family. The lurid thriller was adapted by Campos and his brother Paulo from Donald Ray Pollock’s novel of the same name.
I recently talked to Campos about making the film, the workflow and his love of editing and post.
What sort of film did you set out to make?
Something that was a hybrid of Southern gothic and hard-boiled crime fiction. They’re two genres steeped in very similar moods and both interested in a certain kind of grotesquerie. Where your average drama is a mirror held up to the audience, these genres create a reality that feels more like a funhouse mirror being held up to the world.
Why did you shoot in Alabama, and how tough was the shoot? I heard you shot very quickly?
We always wanted to shoot in southern Ohio, where most of the story was set, but because of an actor’s availability, we had to move the schedule earlier in the year and had to find some warmer weather down south. Northern Alabama had a similar terrain to what we needed, so that’s where we shifted our focus. It also had a wide selection of little churches and old farmhouses to choose from.
It took me a long time though to find just the right locations that fit the look and feel I was looking for. We had to move quickly to get everything we needed. Toward the end, we needed a second unit to make sure we got everything to complete the film, and luckily my good friend and wonderful director Brady Corbet came in to shoot four days of second unit.
Can you talk about the look you and DP Lol Crawley, BSC, went for? What kind of camera and lenses did you use?
So much of the look of the film was inspired by Andrew Wyeth paintings and William Eggelston photography. We wanted to start off in a quiet, earthy, warm place and allow the colors of the palette to shift into a more pastel and artificial color palette. It was very important to Lol Crawley and I that we shot on 35mm. I hadn’t shot anything on 35mm since my first feature. I’ve shot everything else since on the ARRI Alexa, but we knew for this to have the transportive quality we wanted, it needed to be on celluloid.
Lol is a master of shooting 35mm and leans into pushing the medium as far as we can. Even in our night exteriors, he underexposed and pushed the film in the processing to get grain, and just the right amount of information on the subjects, while maintaining the beautiful dark, very much inspired by the work of Gordon Willis.
For a film that played so much with light and dark, as is key with Southern Gothic and noir, we embraced the bright, sunlit exteriors and the moody, shadowy interiors.
We shot ARRI LT and ST camera bodies with Cooke S4 and Canon K35 lenses. Cooke S4s were our primary lenses since they gave us just the right amount of softness we were looking for. The K35s were used for close-up work since they gave us a lovely fall-off in focus. The reference for this was the wet-plate collodion work of Sally Mann.
Can you tell us about the post?
We finished at Technicolor’s The Mill with colorist Damien Van Der Cruyssen and mixed at Final Frame, both in New York. Editor Sofia Subercaseaux and I worked out of our home in Chile for the first cut and then finished editing the film at The Edit Center in Brooklyn.
Do you like the post process?
A film is made in post. That’s a fact. I love it. Part of me wishes it could go on forever. I enjoy obsessing over every detail, whether it be picture or sound. Once you land on all the structural changes you’re going to make in the edit, it’s so satisfying getting into every moment and sculpting them until everything feels right.
Sofia Subercaseaux also cut Christine for you. How did you work together?
Sofia is also my wife, so we work very closely from the script phase until the film is finished. She is my closest collaborator. Sofia loves doing puzzles, and this film in particular was a puzzle. We had done so much work in figuring out the script in the writing, but when we got into the edit, we really wanted to explore every possible way the sequences could be arranged. We looked at the film from every angle, and there was some subtle reordering that we did, ultimately, that really kept the film moving without losing sight of the bigger narrative at play.
Can you talk about the importance of music and sound?
I worked with the same composers I’ve worked with on my last two features — Saunder Jurriaans and Danny Bensi. They are really inventive, and I love giving them room to find the sound of the film unencumbered by any temp score. So the first cut that those guys always see has no temp score at all. It’s just dry, and it allows them to find the sound of the film organically. As for the source cues, Randall Poster, who’s the producer on this film but better known as a music supervisor, was sending me playlists since the script phase, so I had so much of the music in mind as we were writing.
It continued to evolve through the edit until the very final stages of mixing. We wanted to find the right mix of gospel, pop and country to work alongside the score. It was important in the sound design that the sound was grounded, but that we weren’t afraid to go subjective, weird and dreamy at times.
I feel like sound is key to getting under the audience’s skin and making a tense moment even more tense or the violence all that more shocking. There is this perception that the film is very violent, but if you watch it closely, the film isn’t actually that visually graphic. It is the sound that gives you the sense that you’re watching something really shocking.
Where did you mix, and what did you aim for?
We mixed at Final Frame in New York. Ruy Garcia and Craig Mann were the mixers, and Jonathan Schultz was our music editor. In terms of design, as I mentioned above, it was about being grounded but embracing the dreamy or nightmarish elements where it felt right. In terms of music, we spent a lot of time fine-tuning the way a piece of source or score worked within every scene. Even if the music was playing off a radio in a scene, we would make it fuller in the mix to celebrate it and let its magic accentuate the action.
There are quite a few VFX. Who did them, and what was entailed?
Phosphene and Hey Beautiful Jerk did the VFX, and there are a lot of subtle but important VFX shots throughout the film. There was a lot of world extension and period cleanup to be done throughout. The heavy lifting, though, was where we augmented the special-effect wounds and violence that we had done practically in production.
For instance, we did a considerable amount of work on Miller Jones, our crucified marine, to make sure he was appropriately shocking to leave an indelible mark on Willard. Most people assume that the spiders in the scene with Roy in the church are VFX. Those are 90% real spiders. Harry Melling poured about 50 real spiders over his head — none of which were hurt during the making of the film. We then added some CGI spiders at the top of the pouring and three crawling around his face, but you’d never be able to tell which ones were real and which were fake.
What about the DI?
The DI is incredibly important to me. I find it to be such a peaceful part of post. I like doing it with no sound and just watching as the colorist — in this case the brilliant Damien Van Der Cruyssen — fine-tunes the cinematographer’s work and arrives at the image we always intended it to be. Damien was involved from the very beginning, working closely with Lol and I from the testing phase to find the look of the film.
Director Antonio Campos
Translating any novel to a visual medium is always tricky, especially all the inner psychological detail. How challenging was it being co-writer and director?
It was challenging, but when the characters in the book are so beautifully and fully rendered as they were in Don Pollock’s novel, you have so much to work with.
Because the film is covering so much ground in terms of story and character, we had to be economic and capture the essence of the character while also keeping the story moving. The film is designed so that someone might be a side character in someone else’s story and the star of his or her own later. So every moment counted.
We relished those little moments with a character that we met in passing, which — with the aid of a narrator (voiced by Pollock) — gave us some insight into who they were and cued us in on what their journey would be.
What’s next?
I’m currently developing the story of the Michael Peterson case — the subject of Netflix’s The Staircase — into a limited series, with Harrison Ford playing Peterson.
Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.
