Jose here. When Ryder (Logan Miller) and his parents Cindy (Robin Weigert) and Don (Richard Schiff) arrive in Nebraska for a family reunion, things spiral out of hand when the teenager is implicitly accused of molesting one of his younger cousins. Tensions rise, and family secrets come to the surface, and yet nothing in this plot description makes justice to the uniqueness of Take Me to the River. Matt Sobel’s debut feature combines the eerie mood of a horror film, with the droll work of the best Finnish masters, to create a dreamlike experience that creeps under your skin. I sat down with director Sobel, and stars Weigert and Miller to discuss the film’s mood, their approach to the enigmatic screenplay, and the reaction the film sparks in audiences.
JOSE: Take Me to the River feels like it’s always a second away from turning into a horror movie. How did you set up that mood with your cast and crew?
MATT SOBEL: Years before making the film I was describing what I wanted to do to a friend, who said it sounded like I wanted to do something “uncanny”. I said it was more than just strange, so my friend suggested I looked up the definition of the word in the dictionary, and he was exactly right, the very specific meaning of it is: something that is simultaneously familiar and welcoming, and off putting and unfamiliar. That dissonance creates a very strong feeling of discomfort in everyone, so I spoke to my DP about how to achieve this every step of the way.
We brainstormed a lot of ideas on how to make certain things creepier, for example the scene in Uncle Keith’s (Josh Hamilton) house, but we realized the creepiest thing would be to shoot it like an awkward scene out of a comedy. It’s creepy because of the context and its placement in the story, but any choice to make things ominous or creepy in an expected way, would’ve made the film less effective. As the motivations of the characters got darker and more insidious, we wanted all the visuals to go the opposite way, and become more welcoming and friendly. I told my DP I wanted the film to look like a child’s coloring book.
JOSE: Your characters feel almost like aliens in this environment, was there a period of rehearsal during which you guys, and Richard Schiff, were separated from the rest of the actors?
LOGAN MILLER: Robin and myself came to Nebraska about two weeks before production and immersed ourselves in the environment, and worked on some pivotal scenes. Our characters are coming from a different situation, Ryder sees himself as this California teen who will be misunderstood, and then he realizes the lack of understanding is kinda coming from him. Everyone feels misunderstood, everyone’s going through something.
ROBIN WEIGERT: So from the get-go it felt to you like they were landing in this new place?
JOSE: Yeah.
ROBIN: It’s so interesting, because in my experience our characters were coming in from a different sensibility. We know there’s the possibility that things could go south, but I think Cindy lives in the hope it will be a peaceful time. She has the anxiety of having grown up with these people, and feeling different from them especially now. But it becomes Mars-like and foreign, once something happens that changes the course of the film. Suddenly everything under the surface comes up. It’s interesting you saw it as them being aliens from the moment they arrived.
Weigert, Sobel and Miller. Credit: Jose Solis
Yeah, even the title card comes right before they arrive in the film, so I assumed they were getting ready for Deliverance.
ROBIN: (Laughs) interesting!
MATT: Speaking as the director, I think simply putting Logan’s character in those red shorts, in that place, among actual Nebraskan who’d never seen shorts that short on a boy his age, you couldn’t help but feel out of place.
ROBIN: It’s a statement too.
MATT: I remember going to a family reunion in that house where we shot the film, doing research and actually wearing shorts like that to see what the response would be like, and the response was what I put in the script.
LOGAN: Ryder also comes into the story expecting a lot of things, and expectations are always different than what happens. He expects a crazy reaction and to be able to voice his opinion. This is a pivotal age for this character because it’s when he realizes he doesn’t know shit.
ROBIN: Cindy grew up with these people, so I think she’s walking into a place where the elements are familiar.
MATT: Cindy’s always trying to do things in the background that no one helps her with. She tries to have Ryder in the back of the photo but no one helps her...we put her in a set of impossible situations.
ROBIN: She’s the one person who feels she needs to reconcile both worlds.
MATT: We had a scene we cut where Cindy is trying to win the attention of the children by showing them some X-rays because she’s a doctor, and they’re totally not interested. She tries to keep control and loses it every step of the way.
LOGAN: I see this in my own family dynamics, where my parents try to impress others, but usually there’s a disservice there because of the expectations. Cindy spreads herself so thin that she ends up being even more stressed. She’s usually the one freaking out.
I kept crossing my fingers so Cindy would go Calamity Jane on all of them…
ROBIN: (Laughs) No, she’s very different.
Even though the film premiered at Sundance in 2015, it feels eerily fitting to 2016, given how the political environment has pitched two parts of the US against each other. We have this idea that “progressive” people from larger cities can’t get along with people from the heartland, who want their guns and religion first.
MATT: This has been bubbling up for a while, I can’t speak for the actors, but going to Nebraska I’ve seen things like this for many years. I don’t think my family will vote for Trump because they think he’s an idiot. But the Second Amendment rights thing has been a serious topic of conversation in my family reunions for many years. As soon as Obama got elected, gun sales went up astronomically because they were afraid he’d take away their gun rights.
LOGAN: I feel the movie does a great service in showing the other side people fear in a way. People in rural areas might not understand people in the cities, and the other way around, so it’s great to bring these two groups together and show we’re all human.
MATT: The way Ryder is introduced in the film is the way many people I know who have never been to the center of the country view them. They think they’re enlightened and the others are not. My family in Nebraska feels attacked, so that’s why they hoard weapons and why the rhetoric turns to such vitriol. That fear is in the film.
The film keeps so many secrets from the audience. Did the actors go beyond the screenplay and the directions to figure out the lives of these characters?
ROBIN: I worked from my own very concrete sense of what the backstory was, but it’s interesting that I probably had a different notion than the actor playing Keith had of the same situation. That’s the way memory works, both our characters would remember it differently. I think what the film allows is for an audience member to bring their own associations and they project their own life experiences. We’re all working with different things, I can only speak as to what I think happens, but I don’t know how interesting that would be in an interview…
It’s actually very interesting that you brought up memory, because your performance here reminded me of your character in Concussion because they’re both women with very rich inner lives yet they leave so much unsaid. How are you able to project so much while saying so little?
ROBIN: I think if I thought about projecting things it would be very difficult to do it (laughs) I don’t know I’ve ever had a conscious thought about projecting a thing, as much as about thinking the thoughts. I suppose I have a pretty readable face which is to my advantage, but I guess it’s true that in both cases the characters can be seen as opaque if you didn’t have the sense that the actor playing them didn’t understand their experience, there are things not on the page which are very important to who these people are.
MATT: I don’t know many human beings who that isn’t true of. If you’re an honest actor you will bring that life to it, and then the editor and the director sculpt that.
LOGAN: Matt shared some articles and pieces he wanted me to check out.
MATT: That’s right, we spoke about the Matthew Shepard case. A healthy way to think about the narrative negative space which allows people to project their own fears, assumptions and backstories into the story, is to imagine a book. When you walk into a room in a book you don’t describe every single element in the room, but you also want more description than “there was a table”, so directing in a way is similar in that you need to balance how much information you need to give people to spark their imagination, and there’s a certain point where when you give too much information you shut down their imagination. We did many test screenings in which we changed things like one line, which would completely change the film.
Take Me to the River opens in theaters March 18.