Red Rooms – Interview with Film Writer / Director Pascal Plante

Listen to the interview and read the transcript below — edited and condensed for clarity:

Hi, I'm Connor Winterton of Borrowing Tape, and I'm here today with Pascal Plante, the director and writer of the crime thriller film Red Rooms. Thank you for joining us today, Pascal.

Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.

 

Firstly, let's talk about the filming process. Could you please tell us how long the principal photography took and what the filming process was like generally?

Yeah, it was 23 or 24 days because we did half a day doing just metro station shots, and we did one winter day. There's one interview at the very end of the film. I'm not going to say more, but yeah. It's mostly 23 days in Montreal and its area. And what was it like? We were pretty efficient doing all the courtroom scenes because the courtroom was actually a set. So, we built that room, and so we were extremely efficient, and we could also do more elaborate mise-en-scene in those shots. It takes a long time in the film. I think it's almost 40 minutes of screen time in one white, overly bright room. The visual language of the film has to evolve as the film progresses. I had to pull all the directing tricks out of my hat to make this single room as dynamic as possible.

So this was very efficient, with all the shooting for the courtroom in only three days, which is nuts. But then it was, yeah, 20-ish days more in Montreal and around. Doing the outside door in front of the Montreal courthouse is terrible, just in the middle of a city. Of course, we had permits, but still, the cars were moving and all that. So, this is the exact opposite of how efficient it is when you're actually on the set.

 

Yes, when you can control the elements right, and they've got so many uncontrollable when you're out in a public space.

Exactly.

 

So, as you said, the film is set in Montreal. Was there any particular significance of this setting? Was it a practical choice to film there? Was there a symbolic significance to setting the film there?

Well, I guess a bit of both. I grew up in Québec City, but now my professional life is mainly in Montreal, and the film industry in Québec is mostly centered in Montreal. And so yes, it's convenient on the one hand, but on the other end — I really don't want it to sound like I'm piggybacking on something dreadful to make any sort of promotion on it, but in Montreal 12-ish years ago there was the big trial of a notorious killer that involved a video. I'm not gonna say necessarily the name, but you can take the hint. That happened in Montreal, and I think collectively, it impacted a lot. We saw those images. Of course, in Canada and Quebec, cameras are not allowed inside the courtrooms. But I remember looking just at the journals periodically, and there were these drawings and every day, you would follow the trial through the drawings, and I remember seeing the convicted killer in a glass cage and how striking this image was. And so, yeah, maybe there's subconsciously a bit of that in there as well, but it's mostly because the film industry is based in Montreal. I also do a lot of what we call soft prep before doing the actual pre-production, where a lot of the key creative partners are involved. I could do location scouting mainly myself with the producer. I could do casting but also very extensively. So just do a few auditions that day, maybe a few auditions two weeks later, because this is where I live, and it's convenient for me. We were doing that in the in the Nemesis Films office. So, it's very casual, but yeah, I could work ahead.

 

Great, thank you for explaining that. I did wonder if there was a real event that had happened that potentially inspired some of the film's narrative. And recently, in the U.K., there was a similar thing happened, where two young girls were murdered.

I know. This is crazy. This happened after the film was finished, of course, but I know what you're referring to. This is insane. My producer puts Google alerts whenever she, for instance, with keywords like red rooms. And so I think it was around Christmas time last year that it broke in the news and how we were following, we're trying to just follow the press that's being printed about our film. But a lot of the time, real-life events kept popping up, which is very scary.

But yeah, sorry if I cut you off, but the answer to your initial question is no, it's not based on a single real event. It's mostly based on the folklore, the myth [of] what I was reading online about red rooms, about videos of snuff films. And I didn't want the psychopathic profile of the killer to be too in tune with the real killer. Because again, I think it would make publicity for them. And when I say them, I mean serial killers. And I know it's a trendy keyword for thrillers and to attract an audience for a film. I'm extremely ill at ease to make any promotion on these bastards because they're narcissistic people who took other people's lives. Those are not people we should celebrate in any way, shape or form. And so, I wanted the profile of the killer to be entirely fictional in the film.

 

Well, it sounds like there was something there then for you about ethics and an ethical decision. And I was reading an interview that you did with Screen Daily and you'd mentioned that you really like the films of Michael Haneke. And he's a very ethical filmmaker who wants to take ethical approaches toward certain topics. And it sounds very similar.

Yeah, sure. I mean, but he's also doing very harsh films in the process. It's not films that they're not sugar-coated in any way. If anything, they're very meta-experiences for the viewer because there's the film that's going on in front of your eyes. But then there's the films you conjure up in your mind's eye. And there are thrillers and true crime and all that jazz. Our brain becomes hyperactive very quickly. I don't know why, really, like I won't try to psychoanalyze it as to why, but we just make these scenarios in our brain.

Whenever there's a killer, there's a case, there's victims — we always want to piece pieces of the puzzle together. I think, as an audience, we're a bit bloodthirsty in the entertainment we seek. And I'm not puritanical in any way. Like I could watch anything. I can watch a gory, dumb, fun film and not be shocked at all. I'm not a prude in any way with the entertainment that I consume myself. And yet, I still feel sometimes, when you want to create a film that is a bit analog to real life, well, then violence and the way you depict violence. Yeah, you have a lot of responsibility about it. The film, basically in a meta way, in a Haneke-like way, not that I'm comparing myself, because he's a master, obviously, but it still operates in this fashion, I feel. A bit. It tries to, at least.

 

Yeah. And that reminded me of his films like Funny Games or Caché (Hidden). It's like anti-horror films, anti-thriller films. I've read that you'd called Red Rooms like an anti-serial killer film.

Yeah, maybe I did once. And yet, Funny Games is one of the more unsettling films there is than sometimes way gorier and more intense films out there on a graphic level, let's say, and the only graphic violence depicted in Funny Games is the one we cheer about.

I don't know if you have a fresh in your mind, but there's one scene with a shotgun. And then the filmmaker basically breaks all the rules. And he's like, Nope, you shouldn't have cheered. Basically, this is almost telling the audience. And he rewinds it and then gets trapped again in this gloom. But most of the violence is depicted off-screen. The point is, why is it that unsettling? It's because the psychological effect of violence is relatable. And a lot of films, if you watch a Tarantino film, it's not relatable. And it's fun in other ways. But there's no psychological trauma that you can cling on to as an audience and be like, "Oh, my god, I would react this way." And this is very unsettling. And so, when we think about it, not that many films do that. Not that many films are actually very overly conscious about the psychological impact of the violence they depict.

And the characters, they don't act accordingly. The film becomes more fantasy-like escapism, more than something you relate to. And I think in Red Rooms — the film becomes expressionistic as it moves along, like it doesn't stick to sheer realism. The violence and the psychological consequences of violence remain relatable as much as possible, even though the film finishes in a Suspiria, very expressionistic way.

Yeah, I teach some courses on things like violence in cinema, and you've essentially just summarised most of that there. That was great. Thank you. I'd love to analyze some of Haneke a bit more, but let's keep the focus on you and Red Rooms.

 

So my next question was: Red Rooms dives into the psychology of what some have called serial killer groupies. What drew you to this? And how did it inspire the characters of Kelly-Anne and Clementine?

Well, this is the very first thing that inspired me to do this piece. For instance, I would watch a true crime doc. And just for the record, I like true crime like any other person, but I'm not obsessed with it. I know some people are very into it to an almost unhealthy degree, whereas I just keep in touch with the genre as much as any other genres. But let's say I'd watch a Netflix doc about a killer, and usually, there would be maybe a few shots out of a six-hour series based on the narcissistic killer that we go into detail about his evil mind. There would be a few shots about people that flock around these people. And I kept telling myself like, this is interesting, I want to see a film about them. This is very intriguing and very fascinating. And so, I did lots of research.

As always, this is my third feature film. [I] did lots of shorts. And research — I don't write films about my own personal experiences, but I binge research, basically. The groupies are the first thing that led me to other things, most notably like the Red Rooms, per se, or The Dark Web, that whole folklore of violence on screen. But the groupies themselves were the starting point of the whole thing. It's such a complex phenomenon that I didn't want to necessarily have only one single character to embody this whole complex phenomenon.

So, I needed at least two opposite ends of a wide spectrum. And I think Kelly-Anee and Clementine, they're very, very dissimilar. They're basically the opposite. And so by making them both exist/coexist, I think one can say, oh, but there's, yeah, there's this whole spectrum. And if it were a documentary, maybe there would have been 10, [or] 12 characters that each have their own fascination. I knew it couldn't just be a lone wolf type character, because again, there's so few of these characters in narrative fiction that I felt there's a responsibility to depict them right. So that's what started the whole thing. But then I got caught in the genre film components of it where Kelly-Anne ended up becoming this ghost-like presence. She started very material in the research that I did and then became this almost spectral, otherworldly entity in a weird way. This was the process. This just started with research and then became more of a fantasy film in a way.

 

I think it's interesting what you're saying about the phenomenon of that. There was the film where Zac Efron played the serial killer Ted Bundy? Do you remember that? And then there was all this stuff came out, like people on social media saying about how hot Bundy was and then all this stuff, and I think it's deeply disturbing, but also fascinating, isn't it? The psychology behind that.

Of course. Let's say Zac Efron played Ted Bundy. It's been — yes, of course — depicted a lot online, and people were maybe against the choice, but it's also because he's viewed by standard canons of beauty, like a beautiful guy, charismatic guy. In our film, the killer needed to be very banal. And that's not to take away anything from the performance of Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, who plays the killer. He doesn't say a word, but he still has a big presence in the film, obviously. I wanted a guy that looks like your neighbor. Like in real life, when horrible stuff happens, 99% of the time you have like the neighbors and vox pop in the news, and they're like, "Oh, he was like a regular looking, like, I couldn't have suspected that he was doing this. "

You know what I mean? It's like the banality of evil felt more attractive because, on the one hand, you have Zac Efron, and on the other end, you have an ugly killer looking like somebody who looks like a killer; it's almost written on his forehead. I think then, it's not as scary, and just having a face in the crowd, somebody that resembles, looks like your neighbor, makes it more anxiety-inducing. And even down to Kelly-Anne herself. I think Kelly-Anne is a character that people look at with red flags, obviously. There's a sense of danger around her. For me, it's actually narratively important to see her take the metro, for instance, just be doing something, just being a face in the crowd, walking, roaming the courthouse like some other regular person. Yeah, just [the] point being, it's important to have them relatable in society. And for that, it needed to be very banal, the killer, the choice of the killer.

 

Yeah, and I want to actually just go a little bit more into Kelly-Anne as a character; reading some reviews, as a character, she's been described as "gripping, but also icy. "And what was the process like in crafting quite a cold but mesmerizing character? And how did you work with the actress to kind of capture this?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, one word about Juliette Gariépy: it's her first substantial role in the narrative, like her first lead role in a feature film. She's an actress. She's a former model. She had many things that I was looking for for the role. But we did a good old-fashioned casting call. She's the one who nailed her audition the most or felt the most intriguing because that's also a big part of the character. I keep saying this, and I'll repeat it here, but the film can only function if you look at her the way she looks at the killer, like knowing as little as possible and yet being obsessed, yourself basically, just cannot look away kind of thing. Yeah, she needed to have the killer could be banal, but she needed a weird magnetic charisma. And I think she definitely has that. Yeah, and how did I shape her? I guess the medieval stuff came a bit after I really didn't want her to be a Lisbeth Salander 2 .0. Because there are so few examples of female anti-hero leads that we cling on to the one that we know and the cultural reference that we know. If you have a dark hacker-ish character, of course, you're going to be compared to the Lisbeth Salander character.

So, at one point, I almost wanted consciously to make Kelly-Anne way different, even down to her clothing and her other field of interests. But also, it just goes to show. We've had how many Travis Bickle-like characters in the history of cinema, like a man, loner, obsessive, dark protagonist. And how many women can one name? Very few. It just goes to show. To me, that's also what's stimulating for me as a creator. If you are going to come up with a film, at least maybe expand a little bit on the references we have. And yeah, so there was a little bit of a Lisbeth Salander, and maybe now there's a Kelly-Anne, and maybe a few years from now, there's going to be other examples. Yeah, just again, how many Travis Bickle's are there?

 

Yeah, I think that Kelly-Anne is an important character within that, and you're saying about Lisbeth Salander, who I did think of when watching the film. Which is good, it's good then. Yeah, when I was in university, I'd written a paper on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and writing about how actually, as a kind of anti-heroine, she's not necessarily tied to being sexualized or objectified or all these other things and stands out, then it's quite a significant heroin or anti-heroine. I think Kelly-Anne fits that as well.

Well, thanks for bringing it up because I'm obviously like a man writing women, but then the actresses themselves, I give them a lot of liberty. And also, like for what it's worth, behind the camera, we're like half and half, like there's so many women in creative key roles, and I keep telling people, try to counter the gaze that I can have on them that can be a bit off, or the DOP is a man, but he's queer/gay, but maybe that helped also. The point being is that I'm being very pure [and] careful about my own biases when it comes to how I would maybe objectify or sexualize someone, even if it's not something conscious like it's something that can very much happen, not knowingly.

And so, I keep telling people, if that happens, please tell me. I'm not going to be offended. It's a creative process, [a] collective creative process. And I give them Kelly-Anne, Juliette, Clementine, Laurie, her name is — the actress. Basically, they're doing their homework. And they proposed to me on the day, like they're not just acting out the fantasy character that I've written. They become something else when they put the meat around the bone, and they do their work, I feel. And then I work for them. They don't work for me as much. Yeah.

Brilliant. Well, thank you for explaining that. And thank you for joining us today. I really enjoyed this interview.

Thank you.

Watch Red Rooms — in select theaters now