[Editorial] Interview with Demigod (2021) Writer and Director Miles Doleac

Demigod is a new film from Miles Doleac, about a terrifying secret awaiting a woman when she returns to her birthplace in Germany with her husband. I described it as part folk horror and part survival horror, and Miles agreed: “I would definitely say it falls into the genre of folk horror and of course it becomes a bit of a hunt film, so I think it has that survivor element as well. We set out to make a folk horror film, in the vein of Michael Mann’s The Keep, It Comes at Night or Midsommar and so on.”

Having looked over Miles’ career on IMDB, it seems he’s made and acted in horror and drama, films and TV, about equally. I asked whether he has a preference, of either the format or the genre. “For me, it’s really just a project and it’s about making interesting work and as an actor, inhabiting interesting and complicated characters. My first film was a character drama set in academia; and I’ve made a Southern noir crime thriller. I started with making horror films because I thought they would sell better, that there was a wider audience out there for horror films. I don’t know at this point if that’s true, but it is a sandbox I’ve enjoyed playing in because it’s just rife with possibility; you can do a lot of things with horror. There’s a lot of opportunity for social observations and comment, the spectrum of characters that inhabit horror films is just vast, and that’s always been fun; and of course within the broad umbrella that is horror, there are so many kinds of horror, whether it’s folk horror that we’ve already mentioned or whether it’s slasher or psychological horror, or quasi-religious horror, ghost stories… there’s just an infinitesimal brew of the horror genre out there, so it’s really a fun playground for a filmmaker.”

Before all that, Miles came from academia himself, so I asked what prompted that change from teaching and research to the silver screen. “I originally set out to be an actor,” Miles said, “and my undergraduate degree is in drama from the North Carolina School of the Arts; it’s just at the beginning I wasn’t very successful at it. I moved to New York after graduation and did some off-off-off-off-off-Broadway plays, some soaps, that sort of thing; enough to get into the unions, but not enough to make a living. So I moved out to Los Angeles and tried my hand there: more of the same, soap work, theatre, stand-in work, and this sort of stuff, still not earning enough money to get by for the acting work I was doing. Having reflected on that life, I started taking some classes at UCLA. I had remembered, during my interview/audition process at North Carolina, the Assistant Dean of Drama told me ‘the only reason you should come to this school is if you simply can’t imagine yourself doing anything else. If this is your only love in the world, come here; otherwise, don’t do it: it’s too hard.’ And he was right. So I started doing these classes in UCLA, in history, and it turned into a new start.”

As I understood it, Miles moved into acting at a more mature age than most (I figured I could be cheeky about this as my age isn’t much different to his), so I asked whether that was an obstacle. “Well I’ve been acting since I was very young,” Miles clarified, “but it was just that I didn’t make any headway until I was much older. In some respects that’s been fortunate, because you know, you have a lot more perspective with age and you appreciate it a heck of a lot more if you’ve been banging away at the door for years and years and years. Then of course work in academia allowed me to travel the world, to Italy and Germany, and get this really broad expansive perspective on the world before I really began to hit my stride as an actor. So at the end of the day, I’m grateful. It’s not for lack of trying that it didn’t happen until my mid-thirties or so.”

I asked Miles who he considers to be his influences as a director. “Maybe this is an obvious answer,” he said, “for a lot of folks who love movies, but the director who’s been most influential in my book is Steven Spielberg; and my favourite films are Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark. In terms of style, I really love the work of Michael Mann: I love the way he frames shots, his use of Steadicam. The horror films that we’ve made have been influenced in a significant way by those seventies films like Billy Friedkin’s The Exorcist, or The Omen; since we’ve been working in the horror genre, that era of filmmaking has been important.”

Moving on to Demigod, I asked Miles about the forest spirit: did he come from actual folklore, or was he utterly made up? “So Cernunnos comes from actual folklore, he’s a Gallo/Celtic/Germanic deity, a nature and vegetation deity; which has some elements of the Roman god Dis Pater an other world god, and specifically the Germanic god Herne. Vegetation deities are fascinating, because they’re often the oldest deities: if man can’t grow things out of the ground and master the beasts of the land, they’re going to die, so they need the help of those nature gods. But they can also be very vicious, and Dionysus is the very example of that. So he is an existing deity, but we gave him our own spin, for sure. We made him a little more sinister than he is typically portrayed in his cult and in the lore and we really had a lot of fun with that. And this idea that there’s this god whose cult is charged with protecting the natural world, but doing so in a morally questionable way (certainly by modern) standards: I found this to be a fascinating dynamic that we played with in this film.”

I wondered how Demigod had been received amongst German viewers (having had similar thoughts about Swedish audiences in relation to The Ritual and Midsommar). “Well it’s not had its German release as yet,” Miles said. “It will be out in Germany by the end of the year, I’m told. Of course in the USA, it’s being released on October 15th by Gravitas Ventures, and in the UK by Bulldog Distribution a little later as well. But I’m fascinated to find out how it is received in Germany. We had another film that we sold to Germany, The Hollow, that went OK over there. Of course, about thirty percent of this film is in German, so that was something we paid very close attention to. We had a wonderful dialect coach in Oliver Hoffman out of New York City. And then Elena Sanchez, who plays Latara in the film, is trilingual, she speaks English, German and Spanish, and she was a big, big help on the set. We were sequestered on this campground, and she was like ‘hey, if I’m not shooting, and you just want someone to come and listen to the dialect, make sure it’s right, I’ll be there.’ She was a real MVP of this show, and it was very important for us to get the German right. I had a little bit of German from grad school, having studied at the Institute of Munich, but not nearly enough to be able to oversee an entire movie with so much German language in it. So Oliver and Elena were very helpful in that regard.”

As for the setting: I love trees and often crave a horror film in which forests provide sanctuary rather than the creeps. I asked Miles whether he considers forests to be scary. “I think they’re both,” he said. “I think they’re awe-inspiring, which can of course be creepy or comforting. I think some of the most emotional resonate moments in my life might be what you call an experience of nature mysticism; being in the open environment of the natural world and feeling the breeze blowing through your hair, staring up at some massive thing that has existed for five, ten times longer than you, or maybe much longer. Seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time, something like that. It also elicits a type of terror, so it’s certainly a bit of both, and we definitely wanted to edge toward the creepy in Demigod.”

I wondered if there is any kind of message or meaning that Miles wanted audiences to take away from the film; something about daughters, perhaps, or hunting, or heritage. “Well heritage is a big one, and lineage,” said Miles. “What does family mean? What is one’s responsibility to family? What type of role does generational trauma play in one’s responsibility to family or lineage? That’s certainly pertinent to our character of Robin [played by Rachel Nichols] as a girl. Those are things I’m often playing with in my films, just because it’s so rich: families are so wonderful and complicated and maddening, and everybody’s relationship with their parents, their siblings and their grandparents is just never straightforward. And then, of course, there are questions about the environment and man’s incessant need to destroy it, accidentally or on purpose; and do we need a Cernunnos or some supernatural entity that’s running around going ‘this is going to have serious, serious negative implications if you don’t stop’? So it’s a bit of an allegory in that regard as well.”

As with nearly every interview, I asked Miles what he has coming up next. “I am really excited about the release of Demigod and I have some events for the opening weekend on October 15th. The next script is in some ways a return to my roots in character drama: it owes a lot to someone like Noah Baumbach, but then at the same time it has this weird tonal style like a Wong Kar-Wai film, like 2046 or In the Mood for Love; and on top of that, it’s sort of a black comedy musical. I just wanted to do something that you couldn’t box in, and something that talks to the pitfalls of marriage and romantic relationships for a long time; and when I saw Marriage Story, I saw what that milieu was capable of doing. Then we were doing a music video for the closing credit song in Demigod, and shooting it on a stage with a fog machine, very much like eighties first wave kind of vibe, and I thought I should make a whole movie that has stuff like this in it. So our main character has hallucinations about being in a new wave punk band. It’s a fun script, we’ve got Jeremy London attached, who worked with me in the last two films, but in small roles, and I’ve been promising him a lead. Then, I’ll be doing some acting gigs here and there when the opportunity arises, because that’s always been my first love.”

If you’re in the USA, Demigod comes to theatres and on demand on October 15, 2021; it will be distributed elsewhere soon after.

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