Robert Parent: Director
Interview: Robert Parent
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
His first film, "Voice of Reason" is a Kubrickian flirtation, an exploration of medicine, technology, and the way it intersects with the natural and supernatural world.
Parent is not only an artist, he's a technologist, and his interest in developing and sharing independent filmmaking strategies with the context of equipment and technique is an important part of his work.
Cinescare spoke with Parent about "Voice of Reason," about the arc of the independent director seeking some purchase on a mountain of new faces and dreams, and about the next steps for an entrant to the business.
Cinescare: This is your first film, and you made a choice to make a genre film. Talk to me about your relationship with horror movies and genre film, and how that plays into the creations of "Voice of Reason" as your first movie.
Robert Parent: With regards to horror movies, I've always been a big fan. Anything that's horror-psychological-science fiction, I usually get into it. Since probably the early 80s I've been a big, big horror fan. One of the first ones I've been a big fan of-for a low budget movie-was Sam Raimi's "The Evil Dead." I'm a big Stanley Kubrick fan. He's a perfectionist. His one scary movie, "The Shining," is not actually a very complicated movie, but the visuals are stunning. Other types of horror movies ... I generally see all types of movies. For my first feature film ... one of the things you have to keep in mind when working on a low-budget film is what you can do versus what you can't. Generally, it's a location-based setup. You're trying to find the location that's going to convince your audience that this is a scary place. At the time I was working on planning this production, I was competing for the same place "Session 9" was.
Cinescare: So you were looking at Danvers State Hospital, in Danvers, in 2000?
Robert Parent: I was looking at it in 2000 and 2001. Also in Oakham, Mass., and in Rutland there's a facility that was shut down in the 30s. I got a little archival footage from that place. It's quite the place. It's typical of those reality programs that go into a "haunted" building. It's just a scary place. It's so run down. I found a location down in Taunton. By the description of it, I wasn't sure it was going to work out. But I went down there and took a tour of the place, and I was actually very impressed. It had a whole network of tunnels, and it had a lot of dilapidated buildings. Not really bad, but bad enough. It gave the impression of - something was there, but you don't really know what. It actually had kind of a steep history to it, as well. I immediately grabbed that location. I'd looked at a haunted home down in Easton. We couldn't get the rights to shoot there. We were also up in New Hampshire checking out mines and tunnels. Originally the story was going to take place on a mountaintop, and in a mica mine up in New Hampshire that has all these tunnels that go all through it. It was a limitation based on what we could get access to.
Cinescare: The setting you chose, is called Dever Rehabilitation Center. It has a certain clinical presence onscreen, even the rundown nature of the rooms are far more institutional looking than Danvers State Hospital, which looks more like a haunted house. This is very much a move about a clinical setting, in every sense. As the narrative unfolds and the psychological context of Traci's experience becomes more evident, the fact that the hospital still looks like a hospital and that's where her last significant sane experience occurred, seems right. Did you go back and retool the script to emphasize that experience, tat clinical entrapment she experiences.
Robert Parent: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I was looking for probably about a year, year and half ... we wanted to get the right location to develop the story around. I had the idea of the story in my head. I had some notes about what I would need to pull it off. It was a situation of: Where do I plop them? Where do I plop the characters. The situation was generally the same, in a sense, but it was "Okay, do I put them on a mountaintop, in a haunted house, or in a haunted building?" That story part could be almost anywhere. The hiking trip part is the part that could have been shot almost anywhere. What I like about that place was the network of tunnels and the buildings. It had some eeriness of it. The back part of that facility was old and dilapidated and rundown, and the front part was more modern. That hospital building wasn't actually a true hospital. The building itself was a rehabilitation center. But it had that look. It looked like a hospital. I was like, "We can set this up. We can make this look like a hospital." The story was built up around that location. What we tried to convey in the movie ... I wanted to convince-to give everybody the impression-that her being in the hospital was real. In essence, it's not.
Cinescare: Talk about the monitor device in the movie.
Robert Parent: One of the aspects of what I tried to do in the movie was the whole idea of her being evaluated by this monitor. You never see the doctor who's questioning her it doesn't exist. Your first thought is: This is a very bizarre way of conducting an evaluation. And I think that helps set the tone. Plus one of the things I did in post was turn the lighting up a little bit - make it a little brighter in that evaluation room ... it's kind of like if you work in an office environment where the lighting's too bright. It's irritating. That was the type of thing I wanted to emphasize. I didn't want it to look real pretty, nor did I want it look too run down. "I don't like that room," that's the type of thing I wanted my viewers to see.
Cinescare: Talk about how you composed the music for the film.
Robert Parent: I have a little bit of a musical background in a variety of different instruments - drums, guitar, keyboard. I tend to like the more traditional-classical-instruments. Some of the old movies, like some of the old Dario Argentos, you can throw in some pop music or something and it works for the way he's trying to present it. I wanted to be little bit more traditional. I think violins, and violas, and harps, and that kind of stuff ...
Cinescare: You don't often get a classical score in a low-budget genre film.
Robert Parent: Yeah. Finally there are tools that the independent filmmaker can use to produce high quality music. I love orchestral stuff. To me, it's not an over-complex score, but I took it in stages. I took it scene by scene. I came up with a basic theme that doesn't really come out in the beginning of the movie, it comes out in the latter half when she's trying to escape the hospital. That's really the theme that perpetuates her really wanting to escape just everything. She doesn't know what reality is. That's how I did it. I spent three or four months doing that. You get that theme working, you get the sounds coming in. It just adds another dimension. I love that kind of stuff.
Cinescare: Did the location inform your composition?
Robert Parent: No, when I was on location my focus was on visuals - to get the best visuals possible, and get the best performances out of the talent.
Cinescare: Did you edit "Voice of Reason" in your home studio, as well?
Robert Parent: Basically editing, compositing, and music. I have a friend of mine I worked with, who I hired for animation.
Cinescare: Speaking of animation, let's talk about the monitor camera in the film.
Robert Parent: I came into the location with a couple of different plans. Originally I was planning on shooting it with an actual doctor on location. That particular actor didn't work out. It was kind of an odd situation. Before we had even stated shooting I had a game plan where I had wanted that camera, that monitor hanging on the wall. I though that was a much better way to go. It turned out to be the correct way to go with that. We had a physical monitor on that wall that the actors could play off of. Later, in post, I had an idea for the look of the animated monitor - which I drew out. I wanted to make it photo realistic. I spent a lot of time compositing it after Ian provided the animation. It looks pretty convincing. Animation is kind of funny. One of the things I like about animation is it's great from a distance. You really have to pay a lot of attention when it's close up. It's either that or make a prop.
Cinescare: It hearkens to Kubrick, in regards to HAL from "2001."
Robert Parent: Like I said, I'm a big Kubrick fan. I really like that effect in "2001" with the computer and little red eye.
Cinescare: You made a choice to have the lens dilate in reaction to what Tracy says in the script, and the first couple of times it happens it's very unsettling.
Robert Parent: I really kind of thought that would be a nice twist, to not have the camera come out and stay static, but to have it move a little bit like it's looking at you. To have the iris close and open to emphasize when she says something ... is it really believing her?
Cinescare: It was kind of brilliant. You sort of got to create the effect of the way a camera shoots a conversation, shot-reverse-shot, but without ever changing the shot. When the lens dilates it is like the cut to a shot to show the reaction, but it's a static shot. It's probably the most effective moment during her interrogation, when that camera communicated some kind of heightened interest. It became a really important tool for emphasizing shifts from reality to fantasy on the part of the speaker.
Robert Parent: You hit the nail right on the head. Putting that together in the editing room ... that was the first thing that caught my eye. When I showed my kids, family, and friends ... they had the same response. The right thing to do is to cut back and forth, but to hang on-and to show some subtle, almost like an expression-it's just weird. It's scary.
Cinescare: What have you experienced in terms of moving "Voice of Reason" out into the world and seeing what it does to people?
Robert Parent: It's been a very enlightening experience. The best way I can say is that making the film is one big massive stage. The next step is almost as difficult. It's something I've never experienced before. It's a whole other world. I want to put this out in a way that it's seen by a wider audience. I really like the fact we now live in a world where we can distribute these movies everywhere. Back in the 80s or 90s people could shoot a short or even ten minutes and package it up and find people who wanted to make a full-length film. My personal opinion is that the movie industry is going the same way the music industry has gone. Back in the 70s, 80s, or 90s you could count the musical groups around. There were maybe a couple hundred, at most. Now, it's like 3,000. There's much more variety out there. [Movie[ independents are growing by leaps and bounds now. I think the technology is helping them get there. ["Voice of Reason"] was shot with the intention of transferring it to film, it was shot DV with anamorphic lens with the intention of being transferred to 35mm film. Now we have the HD camera. You can get some very good quality out of them if your know what you're doing. Many people today would rather just rent a DVD, or get it off Netflix. In another three years or so, people are going to be doing online downloads.
Cinescare: Some filmmakers decide not to seek brick and mortar distribution first, but to seek Internet distribution. Whether self-made, or carried by another portal, like MySpace or iTunes. Places where they can give people the film directly. They hope to reach more people without all the downtime between finishing the film and trying to get marketing people to talk to them about it. I'm not sure if that's something that's ahead of its time, or if that's where people are going with digitally photographed movies, now. The format is eminently transferable.
Robert Parent: I really like to follow the industry pretty tightly from the technology side. [The RED ONE camera] is going to change the world of Hollywood, forever. Not only is it moving people away from film, but the camera is inexpensive and it give you the ability to shoot high-quality imaging at a very, very affordable price. Computers are now ramping up ... it's not going to be too long before producing high-quality independent movies is a reality. I'm not sure about distribution yet, on the Internet, though. I don't think I would play that. I'd play that as a side feature at this point. I don't think it's really developed yet. I know a bunch of companies in the New England area that have been pushing that technology, but it's still not really there for the masses.
Cinescare: Do you have the follow-up project in mind?
Robert Parent: I know people would like me to do another horror movie, or something in that realm. I actually have a couple of storylines that are probably in that realm of horror and suspense. I tend to like that anyways. The only things that are going to change is that the storylines are going to get much more complicated. Much more intense. I think I've got some really good ideas. They're going to make really nice features. I don't think people will have seen stories done quite this way.
