Movies on a Big Screen…the blog!

Well, good ol’ MOBSblog got a bit sick there for a bit… but it’s all better now. However, this should have been posted a few weeks ago, so the reference to The Romantic playing this Sunday is no longer correct — we already showed it. This is still an amazing interview with writer/director Michael Heneghan! If you missed it when we screened it, you’ll definitely want to catch it when it becomes available. And now…

The world of film distribution and exhibition seems to be as harsh and loveless a place for The Romantic as the fantasy world depicted in that film. This Sunday, MOBS will be among the small handful of venues to have screened the animated feature since its completion last year. The Romantic lets the audience fend for itself as genres blend, archetypes warp and the artfully crude animation style (reminiscent of Gerald Scarfe) frames this allegory on religion and the absence of myth in modern culture. While it could easily claim the title for the year’s best no budget animated feature (literally), The Romantic stands apart as a return to adult-geared animation that doesn’t sacrifice intellect for entertainment.

Galen Howard: What is your animation background?

Michael Heneghan: I graduated from the University of the Arts (Uarts) in 2006. While there I made a half dozen or so short films, mostly in stop motion (puppet) animation. The Romantic started as a twelve minute senior thesis project at Uarts, which grew and grew until the idea eventually warranted a feature length film. So I made an abridged version of the 1st act and animated that for my senior project, with a kind of “to be continued…” ending. Then when I graduated I gathered up some friends and turned it into a feature, which brings us up to the present: one feature in the pocket, trying to get the next one off the ground.

GH: What/who are your primary influences, both as an animator and storyteller?

MH: For animation, I tend to look east – Yuri Norstein, Jan Svankmajer, and Yiri Trnka. All of them are very visceral filmmakers – a lot of texture and sound (especially Svankmajer). The sound design for The Romantic is very Svankmajer in parts – squishy, slurpy, gravelly, brittle, etc. I love the design work of the 50s and 60s – many of the characters in The Romantic have some flare borrowed from that era. I’m also a Henson fan, so there are a few muppety looking characters.

Storytelling… hmm, when I started writing The Romantic (5-6 years ago) I was coming to an end of a long period of studying the mythologies of our world. Those stories, perhaps Greek and Norse primarily, informed The Romantic greatly. I even made a short stop motion film once that was a retelling of The Oresteia that got lost to a corrupt hard drive. The character of Orestes looked just like Romance. I think that tale in particular – Agamemnon killing Iphigenia, and the chaos that ensues, can definitely be seen in The Romantic.

Blood Meridian is perhaps my favorite book, which I’m sure informs some of the violence in my own film, though the storytelling styles are very different. Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore were huge influences on me growing up, perhaps even the reason why I became an animator (wanting to do what they did to comics in the animation world).

GH: The Romantic seems to revolve extensively around myth and its absence in modern society. To what degree has myth influenced your other scripts and projects?

MH: It’s influenced it to the degree that I perceive all my work as myth, not just the stuff with gods and monsters and heroes in it. I take it seriously, I think it’s a sacred process. The characters I create out of imagination and experience are transmutated into illusions that then inform and perhaps transform the thoughts, ideas and imaginations of others. Perhaps this transformation will extend to the body through action, who knows, but it’s possible. It’s a deeply psychological process that can carry real weight in the physical world. This is how I unpack and define mythology.

We have tons of mythology all around us, most of it’s flaccid, some of it is downright evil. But most of it is clumsy, tepid, lukewarm. It informs us and we inform it in this scummy eco system of story.

Look at the stories we are consuming. What it says about what we value, whether or not we have integrity, what we’re really working with – or more so, what we are choosing not to work with. We have mythology but it’s rarely dignified as such and perhaps that is problematic.

GH: Talk a bit about the genesis of The Romantic. How did the initial premise develop and over what period of time? Were any of the characters taken from your previous work?

MH: The characters developed over a very long period of time – I probably started working with this idea in 2003. I have tons of bizarre early sketches of all the Gods. I think Pjorrc, the god of time, started out with a crazy bushy moustache. Originally I think I wanted to make a creepy stop motion short film about a pantheon of gods… it was going to be very surreal, very much like a Svankmajer short. All of them were going to be carved wooden puppets, done in that Eastern European style. By 2004/2005 I had decided to do a cut out paper short film… then I learned how to mimic the cutout technique in Adobe After Effects. At some point I had this idea that a young man was going to hunt down these weird Gods and kill them one by one, finally meeting the God of All Gods for a showdown and finding that God was himself and in destroying his “self” he’d be born again into a newer self. Like a fantastical Kill Bill… then there was this idea that his true love was taken from him, hence his quest, but then… that his true love wasn’t his true love, which was revelatory to the protagonist… and it went on and on.

GH: How did you assemble your vocal cast?

MH: Since we didn’t have any money, hiring professional voice actors wasn’t really an option. About 99% of the cast were friends of mine. Some had acting experience as well, but most were just friends. I had worked with Jason (Romance) before on some short films. Peter Stambler, the voice of Fat Daddy, is the dean of liberal arts at Uarts. He was also my first scriptwriting teacher. The old version of Love was voiced by my mom. I think the only person I didn’t know ahead of time was Tom Hogan, who voiced King Cookie, Mr. Gord, and a couple of background characters. He answered a post I put on craigslist and auditioned for me over the phone. He did a fantastic job, so much so that I had him do multiple voices. Oh, and Alex Albrecht, who I met at comic con a couple years back. He did a brief cameo as The Spank. Aside from those two, everyone was connected to me personally somehow.

GH: How did you support yourself through the production process?

MH: I’ve worked a lot of different jobs while making the film to keep afloat. I’ve done freelance animation work, mostly motion graphic stuff. I’ve worked as a comic book colorist and flatter under Nick Filardi, and subsequently Marvel, Boom, Devils Due, and others. When the recession hit and work dried up I took a job working for a photo booth company setting up photo booths and other entertainment contraptions at weddings and bar mitzvahs etc. Finally, I took a job as a pastor’s assistant where I’m currently still employed.

It was the same story for everyone else working on the film – pulling long hours, working different jobs, making meager incomes, etc. None of us got paid – at least financially – for any of the work we did. It’s uncertain if we ever will. But we did make a feature film, and that’s something I think we’re all proud of.

Sometimes I look at The Romantic with all it’s blemishes and think “man, if I had $100,000 to make this, how much better this film would be…” but I try not to go there. This in many ways is my adolescent film, and it’s appropriate that it has some cringe worthy moments. It’s appropriate that it has its pimples.

GH: What is your opinion of modern animation? Do you think there’s enough emphasis on storytelling?

MH: Well the animation world is very big and I’d hesitate to speak about modern animation as one thing. But as far as American mainstream animation – what gets distribution, what the larger audience is actually aware of…

There is an emphasis on a kind of storytelling – one that is very predictable, very safe, very formulaic. Pixar, for instance, does know how to make you feel warm and gooey. They are masters of emotional manipulation. But I get bored at the lack of innovation and diversity in those stories. I’m not being challenged. Ever. Mainly because they are the most commercial of the commercial films – they are multi million dollar kids films. That’s the American animation machine right there. They sell bed sheets and lunchboxes. Mainstream animation is stuck there – stuck being a kids thing. For the most part, not even an interesting “kids thing.”

GH: I found it interesting that all your female characters are all in secondary roles and die (or at least presumably in the case of Love) before the film’s conclusion. Have audiences responded to this particular aspect?

MH: No – or, at least, no one has asked me about it yet. I was particularly nervous about that. The film goes to real dark places real fast. There is great cruelty here. Some towards women. I don’t know if Romance is misogynistic or extremely self involved, though I tend to feel more towards the latter. His girlfriend is never named, she’s sort of a McGuffin, because the whole thing really isn’t about her; it’s about the feelings she gives him, and his inability to master the chemicals in his head, which are very real, but aren’t the Truth.

Fat Daddy killing The Vent Monger (an anagram for the government, I read a lot of James Branch Cabell around this point) was sort of a reenactment of the destruction or dominance of a matriarchal or matrifocal way… or at least a point where woman carried mythological heft. Perhaps the defining of God as a father, which would later inspire an inseparable male association with God, or ultimate reality. These deep psycho movements are enacted in The Romantic when Fat Daddy corrupts “the son” into killing “the mother”, a deep, deep perversion of nature.

GH: Do you feel love in modern society has any more of a chance than it does in the world of your film?

MH: Well Love does win out in the film. But not in “the world.” When Patience says “so there’s no hope left for love in this world” when the mask is destroyed, he’s correct. What needs to happen can’t happen in this broken place that they inhabit. Their entire set of systems, governments, rituals, are all earthly and broken – no one really is leading from the correct point of view in the film, they are all leading from their self interests, each one. “The world” is destroyed because that is what happens when these self-interests are lived out, or made flesh. “The world is ending, as worlds do, when the creatures within them forget how to grow up.”

Our world is the same. I think an apocalyptic love waits insistent in our future; it has to, or the alternative is annihilation (an end of the world, but not the one I speak of). We’ve been playing the same game for so long and while the stakes have gotten higher (better bombs, better instruments of destruction) I’m not sure we’ve gotten any better at playing it.

When I say “the world” will end, in the film or otherwise, I mean a psychological world of schema, idea, that is made flesh in our actions. I don’t mean volcanoes and the earth blowing up. In The Romantic things are physical because it is myth and they are all manifestations of ideas anyway, so even if at some point we sense a physical destruction that is not the case. What’s destroyed at the end of The Romantic is Romance, and what’s reborn is Romance. The body remains, perhaps the physical world does as well, but it is ultimately a new world, a Love centric reality. Not a phony bologna self-centered love. To quote my friend Aaron: “when we swear ‘our love is real’ we mean ‘I like the way you make me feel’” Not that kind. The kind that is like the Sun that shines on the earth. The one that casts light not to receive, but because it is in its only nature to shine. Hence the sun at the end. Perhaps the whole story of The Romantic is this alchemical transformation of Love, from one that is adolescent into one that is omnipotent. I hope that this, too, is our story.

GH: To what degree do your dreams influence your work?

MH: I’m not sure. My dreams are seemingly too mundane to recount, I rarely dream of anything fantastic or interesting so much so that it’d make a good story. Right now my dreams are linked to anxieties I have about certain things – certainly those anxieties find their way into my work.

GH: How was work dispersed between such a small crew?

MH: I animated about 80 of the 95 minutes of the film. The remaining animation was done by three fantastic animators – Sean Dooley, Christie O’Brien, and Kayla Halstead. The storyboarding and background coloring followed a similar ratio. I drew all the characters & backgrounds. Dan Gauthier did all the wonderful VFX work, lightening, rain, snow, magic – that was entirely his talents. Nate Terry wrote and recorded all the music, and we collaborated on the sound design.

GH: What are your plans for distribution?

MH: We’re going to give it away for free on the internet. I’d like to raise some money first so I can polish the sound design and press some DVDs to sell on my site. We’ve been trying to start an IndieGoGo campaign about this, but it’s not entirely underway yet. Check our blog/facebook/website early in the fall, I hope you’ll be able to download a copy then!

GH: You’ve wasted no time starting your next feature, Burp’s Christmas. Are you approaching that process differently, given what you’ve learned from Romantic?

MH: Yes – I’m only going to make the film if we can raise our budget of $200,000. That may not happen, though I’m optimistic. I’m also spending a lot more time on everything – working out character designs, experimenting with different styles, polishing the script, etc. Everything will of course be much tighter, much more professional. The Romantic was a student film in many ways.

For more information, visit http://www.theromanticmovie.com and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Romantic/147717729593
You can follow the progress of Burp’s Christmas at http://burpschristmas.blogspot.com