 |
| Daniel Dorr in Pure O Photo: courtesy of Pure O LLC |
Actor, filmmaker and musician Dillon Tucker makes his feature début with the autobiographical narrative feature, Pure O, that takes the audience inside the complicated and debilitating reality of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).
Cooper Ganz (Daniel Dorr) believes he’s suffering from depression, but then his therapist diagnoses him as suffering with the Pure Obsessional form of OCD. It impacts his personal and professional life, but through group therapy and continuing his work as a drug rehab counsellor, he discovers value in human connections.
In conversation with Eye For Film, ahead of the world premiere at SXSW, Tucker discussed the musical nature of film, and Hitchcock’s mastery of psychology and technical manipulation. He also spoke about the masculine point of view and mental health, and his desire to create a broad thematic reflection on human nature.
 |
| Pure O writer/director Dillon Tucker Photo: courtesy of Pure O LLC |
Paul Risker: Why film as a means of creative expression? Was there an inspirational or defining moment?
Dillon Tucker: I grew up in Southern California around the film industry, but I grew up as a writer. I went to drama school, The American Academy of Dramatic Arts. I'm a musician and I've recorded a lot of music. I’ve been playing music since I was a teenager, and eventually, I was acting in and writing films. I've loved cinema from a young age, but I didn't have aspirations to move behind the camera until later in life.
I look at film as being a true amalgamation of all the art forms. You’re dealing with photography and capturing moving images. You’re dealing with actors and human nature. You’re writing and there’s music. All of the art forms are there in this one thing.
When I look back on my life, in terms of where I've put my time and my resources, it was a natural progression to start making films and put it all together. It has become my artistic outlet and my voice. I've engaged with all of those things at different times, but when you're making films, it's a chance to use all of your skills to shape a story.
PR: As a musician, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the musical dimension of cinema, but not as it pertains to the soundtrack, and the diegetic and non-diegetic sound. Is there a naturally occurring rhythm to a film in the composition of its many beats?
DT: I edited the film and it's my first time doing a feature, but there was a clear distinction to me in making music and editing a film - in terms of the dynamism, the peaks and the valleys, and the crescendos of it. There's a pacing and rhythm to editing that was similar to making music that I felt natural doing it, and coupled with writing, it felt like an extension, a combination of those two things.
I love that you look at cinema in that way. I create music and so maybe I do it naturally, but that's a little of my own experience too. I look at the musicality within the film and I don't mean music, I mean that in terms of tone and pacing.
PR: It’s not only the edit that creates this musical rhythm, but also the way the performers move around the camera and the pace of the dialogue. This idea of a musical dimension is not emphasised as much as it should be, especially when you consider that in horror cinema, there is the idea that there’s a uniformity to the series of beats building to a jump scare.
DT: I remember watching an Hitchcock interview and he was analysing Psycho. However many cuts are in the famous shower scene, it's absolutely astronomical. He juxtaposes that with the later scene of the birds-eye view of Norman Bates coming out of the room and going down the stairs. It’s all played in one take with no cuts, and he talked about the psychology of it.
He’s obviously a master, not only for his film technique, but also how much work he did playing within human psychology, and the manipulation of the rhythm of the images and the editing, and the different effects from a lot of cuts to minimal cuts.
 |
| Hope Lauren and Daniel Dorr in Pure O Photo: courtesy of Pure O LLC |
I agree with you that it's not talked about a lot, and it's important because they say you can give the same footage to ten different editors, and you truly will have ten different movies. There’s an inherent manipulation that happens when you're using different set-ups. We’re obviously manipulating things, but you're hopefully trying to do that from an authentic place within the rhythm of the performances.
Coming from an acting background, everything I do as a director is driven towards performance, because that's the driving force for me in all films. You can be in a galaxy far, far away, but ultimately you have to have humans in your story. We connect to humans period, and that's how we experience the world.
As much as possible in the editing room, I wanted to allow my actors to dictate the rhythm and pacing, and obviously Daniel Dorr, who is incredible in his performance, sets the tone. He's in every scene of the movie, so I took time before I got into the editing to look at takes of Daniel, to get a sense of his internal rhythm. I tried to stay true to that as much as possible, even though I'd be manipulating the images. What he was bringing to it was so phenomenal and he gave me so much to work off, that it made my job easier once I started cutting the footage.
PR: Why did you decide to make this film and why at this particular point in time?
DT: The film is autobiographical - it's based on my life story. I didn't know anything about it [OCD] and it wasn’t like I'd been dealing with it my entire life. I was a fully formed adult during the onset, and they talk about it a little bit in the film. Not that it's easy at any point to deal with these things, but late onset is typically more difficult because you've already formulated your world view. You’re an adult, and so much of what you're experiencing is against your own sense of self, and how you view yourself in the world. Sometimes it hits even harder because you have to come to terms with something that's not how you perceive yourself.
[…] It was a very profound and pivotal experience in my own life. I was working on a different film that the pandemic derailed because we were shooting in a different country, and I knew that wasn't going to work anymore. I looked at what I was interested in, and I had this story sketched out in its bare bone form when I was going through it. But I didn't want to write it when I was going through the process, I wanted to wait until I was a little removed from it, and could look at it from a different place. It wasn't cathartic, but I figured if I got so much out of this experience and I didn't know anything about it, someone who has been around this field and therapeutic environments, then I was sure the general public wouldn’t know a lot about it.
 |
| Daniel Dorr and Hope Lauren in Pure O Photo: courtesy of Pure O LLC |
I thought there would be an interest there on a human level. I then felt if I could make it universal, and talk about all of these other themes and characters, not only the mental health experience for the individual, but how it effects everybody around him, that it could make a good story. It was not only by being subversive and introducing people to a mental health disorder that they don't know a lot about, but how it could also be a vehicle and catalyst for a more universal film, that deals with human nature. So that's why I decided to use it as a springboard, and then once I did, it all came together pretty quickly.
PR: People are trying to appropriate OCD as a fun personality quirk. If you're a perfectionist or you like order, then it’s, “You’re OCD.”
DT: It has become a verb.
PR: Your film has the strength of presence to introduce audiences to the complicated reality of OCD. Taking the subject seriously, you’re trying to enter into a dialogue that can educate.
DT: That's another thing that you touch on that was a massive inspiration for why I wanted to make the film. I wasn't able to find one accurate definition of this in Hollywood, within film. Every single time you see the OCD character, he's the quirky detective or friend, he's the quirky guy with gloves on, or it's The Aviator, which is its own form of OCD. But I hadn't seen anything, and as you say it's incredibly debilitating.
The World Health Organisation has OCD has one of the top ten debilitating forms of disability. It’s not quirky, and so the more normalised it can become, then people who describe something as OCD because they’re a perfectionist, “Oh, I'm being so OCD,” can hopefully have a better insight into what this condition really looks like, and what it is for people.
PR: The film embraces a broad range of themes and ideas, including relationship dynamics and the impact of our choices. The choice to be vulnerable and let someone help you can be the difference between two different futures. Pure O at its heart, is a far reaching conversation about human nature.
DT: […] I'm American and I don't know if it's universal, or it's an American point of view of white knuckling it and we only save ourselves. I'm sure it's not, I'm sure it's more universal than that, but the individualism of it all is definitely an American thing, and trying to break that down and deal with your own stigmas, of being, "No, it's okay. That’s all bullshit.” It’s more powerful once you give yourself up to it. If you help other people and you allow them to help you, that breaks down those barriers.
 |
| Landry Bender in Pure O Photo: courtesy of Pure O LLC |
Human beings are social creatures and nobody is going to get through this thing by isolating. It's not just an American point of view, it's a male point of view, and men's mental health in particular is so important. I just want men in general to be more open and vulnerable, to be more willing to speak out about mental health, even if that’s not in a public way, but talk to your friends and don't harbour things.
I don't know why the other issues got brought up in the film, but I did want it to be more of an expose on human nature than a niche thing that's just about OCD.
