Part thriller, comedy and horror, Green Room defies genres

Share

We all do regretful things in the mad haze of a film festival. This past September, for instance, I spent an entire day at TIFF subsisting on nothing but a single shrimp burrito and a pack of yogurt-covered raisins that had been in my bag so long it might not have been yogurt those raisins were covered in. Oh, and I also conjured up the term "gorenaissance" to describe the rash of innovative horror films screening at the festival.

First, that was an unfortunate portmanteau, reflective of a critical tendency to mash ideas together in a cute way and hope it passes for decent copy on deadline. My apologies. And second, I lumped the brilliant film Green Room into that very same invented hybrid genre, declaring it just one of many TIFF films that took horror to a new level. For that error, though, I can offer no adequate apology, because Green Room deserves better than to be simply jammed into a trend piece, or even classified as horror. It is so much more.

Following a group of punk rockers who make some very bad decisions while playing a gig in a club run by neo-Nazis, Green Room is part siege thriller, part dark comedy, part ode to punk music and, yes, part blood-soaked horror. But above all those labels, it is a film of pure adrenaline, driven by the dark wit and brutal vision of writer-director Jeremy Saulnier. And, fortunately for my peace of mind, he doesn't mind that critics tend to place the movie into one genre box or another.

"I like to be genre-agnostic. There are people who even call it a haunted-house movie, and they're also right," the filmmaker says during an interview at this past fall's TIFF. "As long as the story feels true, that's what matters to me. I think of it as a very grounded war movie with horror elements. However it's marketed or packaged, I'm happy to let that go and just get it out there."

Saulnier knows all too well the difficulties of actually getting a film out into the world. It took the Brooklyn-based director six years to make a follow-up to his debut feature, 2007's low-budget comedy Murder Party. But after maxing his American Express card, emptying his wife's retirement fund and getting additional help via a Kickstarter campaign, Saulnier cobbled together $425,000 to make 2013's Blue Ruin, a gritty and (surprise!) dark revenge drama that debuted to raves at the Directors' Fortnight program at Cannes – and catapulted the filmmaker's career to a level he thought was permanently out of reach.

"After [Blue Ruin], I could have gone way bigger, and there was that temptation to sign up with a studio, but you give away control," says Saulnier, who graduated to a $5-million budget for Green Room, thanks to indie production companies Broad Green Pictures and filmscience. "You have to take a lot of notes and your vision could easily get deluded. [Green Room] is so detail-oriented and so specific that I knew exactly what I wanted."

And what he wanted was a grubby and disturbing look at the underbelly of the punk scene, having spent a good chunk of his youth fascinated by the subculture. Growing up in the Virginia suburbs, Saulnier flirted with punk music, and spent countless nights listening to bands just like The Ain't Rights, the young and broke musicians in Green Room who, desperate for gas money home, play a gig for skinheads that goes wrong.

As a teen, Saulnier "felt both very much immersed and removed from this scene – I felt like an observer and an imposter at the same time," he says. "There was a real danger there, with real Nazis at these shows. I was fascinated. Like, how can this be? How are there people walking around proudly sporting swastikas in Washington, D.C.?"

"It's an aggressive and energetic subculture, one that's been sadly co-opted into being fashionable," adds Anton Yelchin, who plays one of Green Room's heroes. "But there are still some gnarly shows that I remember seeing back in L.A., with bands from the Inland Empire who were truly badass, crust-punk guys. It can be a beautiful thing, the relationship that these guys have with the music and the fans."

While Saulnier grew out of the punk milieu, he continued to be fascinated with the environment – its graffiti-covered dressing rooms and tattered, puke-stained stages the perfect setting for a thriller. "I became obsessed with the green room as the last stand in a seige, and this film has been plaguing me ever since," Saulnier says. "It's hardcore, brutal and violent – perhaps not the smartest career move if you want studio jobs in your future."

Despite his fears, though, Green Room did end up with a Hollywood sheen of its very own, thanks to the casting of Patrick Stewart as the film's skinhead villain. While Saulnier might have been reluctant to add a high-profile star to the mix, he quickly came around, and introduced the erstwhile Professor X and Captain Jean-Luc Picard to his own personal nightmare of grime and gore. But it's a level of violence, Saulnier is quick to point out, that's not as outrageous as the film's reputation might already suggest.

"With Blue Ruin, I had to also talk a lot about violence, and point to the other American action movies where the body count is like quadruple, or the Superman film where a million people must die," Saulnier says. "I think action choreography is an art form, and gore makeup is an art form. Film is supposed to be a spectacle, you love to be thrilled. But it's also responsible to show brutal violence up close and full frontal rather than just let it sneak by with no impact emotionally."

Still, the director concedes that even he felt regret over the carnage – maybe not "gorenaissance" levels of regret, but regret all the same. "In our own editing room, me and my editor were sometimes just, 'Ugggghhhh, it's too brutal!'" Saulnier says with a laugh. "But we had to do it. If you're devastated by this movie, that's okay."