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| That Cold Dead Look In Your Eyes |
It will take years to fully analyse the full effect of the Covid 19 pandemic on the film industry, but some individual films were hit really hard. Onur Tukel's That Cold Dead Look in Your Eyes was one of the titles which had been attracting excited interest but ended up getting lost as cinema audiences slumped and online platforms went through a rapid process of readjustment, with fans struggling to identify what they might enjoy and where to find it. This melancholy tale of a man overwhelmed by the world in which he finds himself stars Frank Raharinosy, with Alan Ceppos as the father of the girlfriend he manages to lose in the first scene. it blends the director's trademark black comedy with observations on the modern world and some stunning shots of an eerily depeopled New York City. Hoping that there is still time for viewers to discover it and form a connection. Onur agreed to answer some questions to put its story in context and expand on its wider themes.
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| Lost in the city |
Jennie Kermode: How did the idea for That Cold Dead Look in Your Eyes first develop?
Onur Tukel: My friend Franck Raharinosy approached me about writing and directing a film for him to play the lead. I had cast Franck in my previous movie Black Magic For White Boys and he was fantastic in it. I told him if he could raise enough money, I’d write him a script. Franck is the kind of guy who really goes after the things he wants. He’s very inspiring. He went out and raised the money from several investors and I wrote the script relatively quickly, basing the story on this weird forlorn period I was going through at the time.
I didn’t really know if I wanted to continue living in NYC. My girlfriend of seven years had just broken up with me. And I’m always experiencing some kind of financial anxiety. So I wove all those things into the script, along with a lot of other stuff - fear of 5G (which was being installed everywhere), sexual existentialism, imposter syndrome. We had financing. We had a script. A few months later, the movie was in the can. Six months later, the movie was edited, mixed and ready to send out into the world. And then Covid happened and the movie got lost.
JK: With Leonard's increasing difficulty in distinguishing what's real in the world around him, did you want to comment on the difficulty of working out what's true in the media and online sources today?
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| Confrontations |
OT: I wasn’t commenting on that, although that’s an excellent theme for a movie. The amount of misinformation out there is terrifying. The presence of AI amplifies it. It’s all going to snowball into this apocalyptic volcano where we’re all being gaslit, manipulated and controlled by the things we say and buy and….wait, that’s already happening.
Ray Kurzweil’s prediction on the singularity is coming true. You can feel it. There’s a change out there. Something rotten has burrowed itself into people’s brains like parasites. The good news is that you can tell that people are trying to resist it, by reading books. That’s the answer to all this digital emptiness, these bite-sized fragments of informational sugar being fed to us on Tik-Tok and Instagram. Have you ever looked at someone sitting on the subway or sitting in a restaurant, transfixed to their screen, swiping up, up, up, like a robot? They look like zombies. That image certainly informed the ghouls that haunt Leonard throughout the movie. The idea that technology is rewriting our brains, changing us, killing us.
So, what’s the anecdote to consuming thousands of frivolous messages a day? Books. Non-fiction, written, researched and fact-checked by a human. Or a compelling 500-page work of fiction filled with philosophy, fantastic characters and themes. On the subway in NYC, I’m seeing more people reading books. It’s reassuring. Books are for the social media addict what AA is to an alcoholic. Books are going to come back in a big way in the coming years.
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| The worst cook in New York |
JK: Was it your intention that, initially, Leonard seems stable and Dennis like a force of chaos, with those positions gradually reversing over the course of the film?
OT: That’s a good way to describe them. I always saw Leonard and Dennis as kind of the same person. They both think they possess Marie in some way. Leonard is the pathetic boyfriend that wasn’t good enough for her, yet cheated on her anyway. Dennis is the gay father who conceived her by mistake and now gets to use her apartment for his perverted photo shoots. Neither man deserves her. Leonard’s art is food and he’s terrible at it. Dennis’ photography is not much better.
I certainly think the chaos Dennis brings to Leonard’s life is a reflection of Leonard’s mental turmoil. Leonard is losing his mind. He’s losing his grip on reality. Again, he perceives threats that aren’t there. Why the hell did he cheat on this beautiful, intelligent woman? Why can’t he commit to a life with her? Why can’t he have kids with her? Perhaps he’s gay? Maybe he’s terrified of that fact. He’s in denial. Maybe Dennis represents this existential crisis that Leonard is having.
I don’t like to be completely conscious of the creative decisions I make when I write. I like the messages to reveal themselves to me unconsciously. If I take a moment from my life that has significance, and I carry it around with me for years, sometimes decades, it becomes a part of my creative DNA. It speaks to me like some omniscient spirit. It’s one of the reasons I love writing, drawing, playing music and making movies. The work feels like it’s being transmitted to me in some way. When I rewrite it, I shape it, and it becomes more of an intellect exercise, but initially, it’s about pulling something out of the swamp of memories, fears and desires that I’ve accumulated over time.
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| All too much |
For example, the ‘gay panic’ that Leonard experiences throughout the movie was inspired by a conversation I had with a girlfriend almost ten years ago. I was 40 at the time and she said to me “I don’t trust any straight man who hasn’t been married by 40.” I asked her why and she said, very succinctly, “Because he’s probably gay.” I thought it was a fascinating and funny thing to say and I still think about it all the time. “Am I still a bachelor because I’m gay and I just don’t want to admit it?” Well, now it’s fashionable to be gay so maybe I should just come out of the closet. Wait, that wouldn’t work. I’m not gay. But wait, am I?
This explosion of sexual politics has muddled so many things. People can identify as cats now. Male athletes can troll women’s sports to mock ‘inclusion’ for trans women. Gay men can pretend to be trans in order to garner opportunities that weren’t available to them before. If we’re all on a spectrum, then, hey, everyone is gay. And the more homophobic you are, the more likely you are to be a repressed self-hating homosexual. Leonard’s confusion in the movie is my confusion. Is Leonard gay? Is he sleeping with gorgeous models to resist the simmering warmth of his quivering sphincter, beckoning for someone to plow it from behind? That’s up to the viewer to decide. I address some of these ideas in my new movie Poundcake.
You may argue that everything in That Cold Dead Look In Your Eyes is a dream. One of the producers, William Degado, compared the final art gallery scene to the end of The Wizard Of Oz, when Dorothy wakes up in her bed and notices that all the people in her room were also in her dream. Cold Dead Look is a wonderful little puzzle. It makes sense to me. I think. The unconscious is a beautiful thing.
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| Toilet humour |
JK: How did the chemistry develop between Franck Raharinosy and Alan Ceppos? Was there time to rehearse before shooting?
OT: We did rehearse. But not enough. I’m really happy with both of their performances but I was extremely limited in what I could do as a director. I got it in my head that I could direct a movie in the French language, even though i can’t speak a word of French. But the problem was that one of my most useful directing tools wasn’t available to me on this movie - my ability to rewrite the script, revise the dialogue on set and incorporate improv when needed.
We had the script translated to French and revising wasn’t an option. On an English-speaking movie, if the performances aren’t working, it’s usually a result of sloppy writing. So I’ll cut some of the dialogue or I’ll rewrite it or we’ll work some improvisation into the mix. I didn’t have that luxury here. When we shot scenes, I tried my best to pay attention to the energy of the performances. Did I believe what the actors were saying even though I couldn’t understand it? It was all very frustrating for me. If I didn’t like how a scene was going, it was hard getting it to a place I was happy with. I was grumpy throughout the entire production. It was a tough shoot.
JK: We're used to seeing stories like this in which some twist of fate sees the protagonist rescued at the last minute. Did you want to tell a more realistic story, or suggest that Leonard needed to take responsibility for saving himself?
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| Model guests |
OT: Leonard unravels because he’s weak and lame. He is a bad chef, a bad boyfriend, and a whining cry baby. He doesn’t have the strength to change his situation. He sees threats from everywhere because that’s what victims do. Everything is ugly to him. Everything is dangerous. The man who wants to buy his motorcycle is a threat. The waitress who criticises his cooking is a threat. The gay men in his apartment are also a threat.
Leonard is sleeping on the couch. He is terrified that one of the nude models will soil it. Instead of taking responsibility and fixing his situation, Leonard plays the victim. He should accept that his relationship with his girlfriend is over. He should accept that he is a terrible chef. He should leave NYC and live a quiet life in a small town doing simple tasks, but for some reason, he thinks he can still hang on to the life he had.
Leonard doesn’t have the ability to save himself. His only way out, after failing time and time again, is to become this fantasy version of himself, a monster, where he has the power to kill everyone who threatens his ego. After the massacre at the restaurant, I think Leonard plans to go home and kill himself, and maybe he does. Perhaps the last dream he has before he dies is the birthday party where he and Marie get back together.
When he finally dies, he’s stuck in limbo. He’s not in Heaven and he’s not in Hell. Instead, he is made to walk the earth without a home. When he finds solace at the ‘house of the wounded women’, yes, he is rescued, but again, he comes face-to-face with another version of himself, the homeless man on the couch. Are Leonard and the homeless man the same person? Has Leonard been living on the couch this entire time? Is the couch at Marie’s apartment the same couch in the ‘house of the wounded women’? Or is Leonard dead and now having to spend eternity watching his sins on television? The movie can be interpreted in so many ways, which is one of the reasons I’m aggravated that no one has seen it. It’s a remarkable movie.
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| Too hot in the kitchen |
JK: How do you strike the right balance when it comes to making satire about something like the New York art world?
OT: When I write something, humour is my crutch. Absurdity is my armour. This life that we’re born into is tragic and terrible and oh so very beautiful. I’ve dedicated my life to being creative. I think one of the reasons I’m so angry is that I don’t want to die. I think the theta-boxes in the movie are really just harbingers of doom. They remind us that death is imminent. The ticking black theta box is measuring each heart beat before it stops beating altogether.
I don’t know really know anything about the art world in NYC. I’ve had a few outsider art shows here and there but I’m not enough of an insider to satirise it. I just saw Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up and it’s a wonderful exploration of the process of the artist. At first I thought she might be making fun of the artists’ process by accentuating the absolute meaningless of it all. But I don’t think she was doing that. She’s just letting us glimpse the life of a group of artists. It’s objective and unromantic and sort of brilliant.
JK: The film is really striking visually. How did you connect and work with Eric LaPlante?
OT: I love the look of this movie so much. I saw an indie movie that Eric shot called Sylvio about a gorilla artist who hates his day job. It was one of my favourite movies of 2017. I wrote a piece about it for the Talkhouse.
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| Looking for escape |
I loved it so much I tracked down Eric and asked him to shoot my movie. After he read the script, he came to our first meeting, at a bar in the Lower East Side called The Magician, with so many insightful notes and questions and ideas and suggestions. I’m in awe of him and shocked more people don’t hire him to shoot their movies. He’s a sweet, funny and very intelligent guy. At some point during our shoot, I suspected he was the valedictorian of his high school. He told me he was.
JK: Can you tell me something about that you're working on now?
OT: I just finished a horror comedy called Poundcake that will be coming out later this year. This movie is pretty special.
I just directed a comedy special called Sweetie for my friend Irene Bremis, who also has a role in Poundcake. She’s a very funny comedian and a very special person. We’re almost finished editing and she’ll be shopping that around soon.
And I’m hoping to make a new movie this summer if the funding comes through.
