[Editorial] Interview with Attachment (2023) Director Gabriel Bier Gislason

Attachment AKA Natten har øjne is a queer love story with a Yiddish and demonic twist. It’s also the first directorial feature from Gabriel Bier Gislason, who shared some of his time with me recently, and I should warn you that some of his insights do reveal mild spoilers.

I opened by asking him about how his career brought him to this point. “I grew up in the industry,” Gabriel said, “both my parents being filmmakers, so there was film everywhere around me. My grandmother (a teacher, rather than a filmmaker herself) was also obsessed with film and she showed me movies since I was tiny; I mean, I messed up my shoulder when I was seven, because she showed me Singing in the Rain and I tried to run up the wall like Donald O'Connor does. So film was always in my life, but in my teens and twenties I got curious about other things, because if you grow up around something you get curious about what else is out there; then slowly I did gravitate back towards it, starting as a screen translator when I was about nineteen. I was more or less bilingual and every Danish film needs an English language version of the script; usually for financing purposes, because most Danish films are co-productions of some sort. So I started out by translating one of my Mum’s films and then the same company hired me to translate other people’s films, and the word spread; there aren’t many people who can write decent English and understand Danish films too, so I did that for a while. It was a really interesting way to learn about writing, because it’s rare that you get to do something where you go through a script line by line, word by word, and understand the mechanics of the script that you’re working with.

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Also, when you’re translating, it’s not just about the meaning, but about the intent; and a script is the blueprint for what you want to happen on the set: what’s the practical cinematic intent of this line or this scene, and can I translate it? That made me think more about film and so once my creative interests started bending back towards film, what I had learned as a screenplay translator became really handy. Then I made my first short when I was about twenty-four; my take on a wedding comedy, with finance from the Danish Film Institute. And as soon as I went on set, all those years when I was a little bit wary about whether I wanted to make movies or not, it just felt very right, felt like a way for me to be in the world that makes sense. I applied to film school at NYU and made a series of fun (but not very good) shorts; and once classes wrapped up there, I took advantage of being Danish, because that means I have access to the funds from the Danish Film Institute, which has an amazing fund for first features. I flew home, pitched Attachment to a production company, we applied for the funding and we got the funding.”

And then a premiere at Tribeca, I prompted. “Yes, then Tribeca,” Gabriel grinned. “It had a theatrical release in Denmark and a number of festival stops too, including BFI in London. It’s been a wonderful experience.”

In return, I told Gabriel a bit about Ghouls Magazine, which is all about horror “through the female perspective”. Attachment has three women at its centre, and those characters are written so well that I was surprised to find that the writer wasn’t a woman. I asked Gabriel what that insightful and intimate writing had involved for him, as a male writer. “That’s such a kind thing for you to say,” he said modestly, “and really quite significant for me to hear. I think almost everything I’ve written since film school has been with women leads; I don’t know why, but that’s just the way the stories have come about. In this case, there is a clear explanation in how the film came about: for a long time, I wanted to make a film that was a riff on Jewish mythology and folklore in the same way as films I’ve seen that riffed on Catholic mythology, dogma, tradition, and all those things. In those films, it always feels pretty playful. What I loved about those horror movies when I was growing up was that even the darkest of them (like The Exorcist) are always very playful in the way they deal with the mythology itself: there’s an irreverence where they take the bits that work for them, discard the bits that don’t, and then fill in the gaps in a way that makes the story work; and it’s not about educating anyone, but using these things as a launch pad to create a world. I wanted to do that with the Jewish mythology that I grew up with and felt was very unrepresented in the genre. But I didn’t have a story to latch onto. Josephine [Josephine Park, who plays Maja] is one of my closest friends, we’ve known each other since high school, where we did really bad theatre together; and a few years ago, she and I went out together and got drunk. She told me these crazy stories about her and an ex-girlfriend, and how they’d both been between apartments for a while and needed somewhere to crash. Her ex said ‘why don’t we go stay with my mom? It will be fine’… and they did, and it was not. It was a stressful time. The stories were stressful, way over the top and kind of funny, but also kind of sweet; there seemed to be something tender underneath it all. So in our drunkenness, I said to Josephine ‘I’m going to make that movie, and make you a star.’ She did go on to become a star, but I had nothing to do with that.

“Anyway I had to think about what to do with all that, because it was a premise, not a story; and then the Jewish thing came back into my head and I started thinking about the trope of the Jewish mom, and how the Jewish mom is always super overbearing and domineering, and how everything is a matter of life and death. And I thought, wouldn't it be great if you made a movie where unbeknownst to a lot of people, it really is a matter of life and death…”

(I didn’t want him to give away the story, of course, and made sure that’s as close to spoilers as we got.)

“The stakes of it started seeming really fun to throw around,” Gabriel said, “and that idea kind of worked with the structure of these three women in a house together. So I discarded the stories that Josephine had told me because they didn’t really work with the Jewish aspect of it all, and also I think Josephine is relieved about that, because she doesn’t get any angry texts or phone calls from this ex’s mom, which is good! But the remaining elements gelled together, and so became the film. So by the sheer circumstances of the idea’s formation, Attachment has to have three women at its core; and also it’s about engaging all three of them in conversations throughout. Josephine was involved from the start; I wrote Sofie’s [Sofie Gråbøl] part for her, as Chana, the mom, and she was involved from the second draft onwards; Ellie came aboard shortly before production. But from the moment each of them signed on, I sought feedback on every draft and talked to them about their characters, because I wanted to make sure everything felt… well, I’m always wary about using words like ‘real’ when we talk about film, because I think there’s something worth protecting about the artifice of it… but it felt true, true to them. It’s a weird tone-bendy, genre-bendy movie that we were making, so every shift had to feel true to the character we were asking them to play.

“So I hope the feelings you mentioned about the film when you watched it were due to that close collaboration,” he continued, “that what they brought to the script through all our conversations, and the way I would tweak it and adjust it is there on the screen, and not just on the page.”

It sounded as if Gabriel didn’t put any special effort into sounding or writing like women, but simply wrote the characters in a way that worked for the people involved.

But on the subject of these women… I asked Gabriel whether any of the characters in Attachment were based on real people. I confessed I had wondered this in particular about Chana, Leah’s mother, and Gabriel burst into laughter at that.

“I can promise you that Chana is not based on my Jewish mother,” Gabriel said, “but I guess there’s a bit of everyone’s Jewish mom in her. There’s a lot of drawing on those tropes and I think in an earlier draft she was even more of a, well, the inspiration would have been Shelley Winters in Next Stop Greenwich Village, which was like the sine qua non performance of Jewish motherhood on film, it’s so insane, over the top and overbearing. I ended up reining it in because with Sofie, I wanted it to have a slightly different shape. Josephine’s part isn’t really based on Josephine, except that they’re both actors, but Josephine is doing significantly better; and in life, she’s very different to the one in the film. The source of inspiration came from her life, but the character didn’t: in fact, while her character is probably the closest to anyone in real life, because it’s fun for neither her nor me to make a film about Josephine, we actually put in a lot of effort to make her character distinct from her real life.

“When we did test screenings, I had people come up to me and ask whether my mom had seen the film, and what did she think? Yes, she’s seen it and she gets it! It’s all good. I don’t think anyone was based on someone from real life; but (and this isn’t particularly profound, because it’s true of so many people who do what I do) there’s probably a lot of me in each of the characters, a lot of feelings that I grapple with in various situations , which inform what happens with the characters, and which in turn were inflected by the actors who played them and how they reflected on the issues themselves.”

Gabriel had mentioned the Jewish mom tropes, which reminded me of something I had wanted to ask (and so did): how does he go about navigating that blurry line between representing a culture and presenting its stereotypes?

“I think for me, as a Jew,” he said, “one thing that was important was that I wanted to have the same freedom that Christians and Catholics have, in that it’s not my job to educate anyone about the culture. I wanted to take my own liberties in ways that I’ve seen other people do. At the same time, I also didn’t want to play into conspiracy-type stereotypes about Jews either. So I was very mindful that the film should be very tender and caring: it wasn’t about the accuracy of representation (and I don’t really know what that means in some types of art anyway, especially something like this that includes the supernatural); but also it opens with a frantic elf running into frame, so I hope I’m telling the audience to take everything with a pinch of salt. On a purely emotional level though, I wanted to make sure the film treated everyone (either the cultures or specific characters) with care; and as long as that felt consistent, then that was the most important thing.”

The film certainly had a sense of affection about its cultural aspects. Personally, when watching Attachment, I was very aware of viewing it from outside the Jewish culture, and had to almost take for granted that everything on screen could potentially be authentic, but had no way of knowing for sure.

“I get that,” said Gabriel, “and that’s exactly why I didn’t want it to look as though the film was trying to present a study of the religion, because then authenticity would be really important. Everything there is drawing on something in tradition or mythology, right? So as long as I’m not sending someone down some crazy rabbit hole in the wrong direction, then that’s fine. I’m not too worried. It’s more about what does the centre of your film feel like? That’s much more important.”

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Back to the story. Attachment brings together a number of elements--romance, religion, possession, etc.--and something about what Gabriel had said earlier reminded me of one of Stephen King’s insights. I’d been listening to the audiobook of his The Bazaar of Bad Dreams recently, and in the introduction for one of his stories (“Batman and Robin Have an Altercation”), he talks about a terrific idea being no good on its own, and how he packed it away for some time in his mental attic until another idea came along that he could combine it with; until then, it was like “a cup without a handle”. I asked Gabriel whether the formation of his story was a deliberate effort in a similar way. “It was more like an amorphous interest or desire to make a Jewish horror movie,” he said, “but without a story to clasp it onto. And then Josephine’s stories gave me a premise without a story. So when those two met, the trope of the Jewish mom seemed to work with both, and I felt like now I could actually get the potential out of it all. In terms of the genre bending, Horror is actually a lot less reliant on conventions than a lot of people seem to think; it’s actually a really great storytelling form, and one that plays really well with other great storytelling forms, if you want. I felt that each iteration of the story (the love story, the psychological act, and the later outright horror), to me, it’s always a love story, so it consistently made sense with that continuing thread: the film could dip in and out of each genre as long as it was fundamentally about the same thing from beginning to end.”

Gabriel had mentioned the mother figure again, which raised a question for me that I hadn’t planned at all: it seems to me that mothers feature in horror films a lot more often than fathers do, and I asked Gabriel if he had any theories why that might be. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess the boring answer is that it’s something Freudian, but I don’t think it is necessarily. In the case of Jewish settings, motherhood is synonymous with care, or too much care; and so in both horror and Jewish art, the fun comes from dialling the care up beyond its reasonable limit, and seeing what might happen. In Jewish art, that can be really funny: Mel Brooks movies, of course, but all over the culture. In horror movies, it’s the same thing, because there’s something terrifying when care becomes too much. I’m not sure that maps onto reality, or if it’s a certain cultural notion that we’ve inherited, but in the case of Attachment, it worked really neatly, because the story that inspired it was basically a real-life iteration of that extreme thing we encounter in pop culture. I knew I had to just see where it went.

“I’ve got something else to add too, but it might be a little close to spoiler territory for you,” Gabriel continued (at my risk). “One of the things I also wanted to do was upend that notion a little bit by saying, well that care that we often see in horror, or in those Jewish stories, where it’s taken to an extreme; it rarely goes to the extent of looking at what the personal cost would be for the person who behaves like this. What if a person is driven to being so overprotective? How does it fray them? And what is left behind after having to exert all that labour? That’s what I wanted to touch on (and eventually reveal) in the back half of the film; that what is often played for scares or laughs stems from something that comes from enormous emotional labour and cost.” Spoiler or not, I felt this was worth capturing, because it’s not easy to sympathise with the mother at first, and gradually that does come.

I asked Gabriel whether he is a parent himself. “No I’m not,” he said. “I am married, but we live nine time-zones apart currently. My wife is a professor at the University of British Columbia and I’m based in Copenhagen for work. It hasn’t always been this way: we used to live together in New York, but the world took a bunch of turns and now we’re apart. So parenting isn’t really in the realms of possibility right now.”

The geographical divide brought me on to another aspect of his film: Attachment featured a couple made up of one person from the UK and another from Denmark. I asked Gabriel whether it was filmed in London. “We did two days of exteriors,” he said. “Originally, we wanted to shoot all the London parts in London, but it’s so low budget (because it’s from this first features scheme, and they put a number of caps on what you can spend), and it became increasingly tricky to do as much in London as we wanted to do. And then the COVID pandemic made it completely impossible. So we decided to do all the interiors of the London sets in Copenhagen, and because I had lived in London for many years, and my production designer had too, we sort of knew what we needed from a house to look like it would be in London. We spent ages looking for a house and we found one; it wasn’t perfect, but it did the trick. We spent most of the pre-production time (valuable, irreplaceable time) figuring out how to make this house that just about worked fully work; then two and a half weeks before we go on set, the homeowner calls and tells us that we can’t shoot in her house after all, because she just understood now that it was a horror film and---she meant this quite literally---she was worried that we would curse her home. So we were two and a half weeks out and we had no location, a real issue. We had to use the tiny scraps left in our budget to build it on a stage; so everything that is in those London apartments were actually built onto a sound stage in a couple of weeks with a skeleton crew. There’s stuff that hopefully you wouldn’t be able to see now, but we couldn’t afford windows or doors, so every time you see an actual window or actual front door, it’s the same window or door that we literally moved round to different parts of the house.”

Surely Gabriel would have been tempted to do a rapid rewrite and set Attachment all in the same country? “Two and a half weeks out, that’s an even bigger ask,” he said. “The thing is, one of the reasons it’s set in an orthodox community is less to do with Hasidism or Orthodox Judaism and more to do with the fact that a lot of the folklore I drew on comes from Yiddish culture. The only modern iteration of Yiddish culture exists in these orthodox communities, while in most other communities, things like Kabbalah are frowned upon. There is no such community in Denmark; well, I think there’s one Hasidic family in Copenhagen, and that’s it. I wanted it to be a city with a Hasidic community and a city that I knew as well, so I wouldn’t be going into it blind; and there were only two cities that fit the bill: London and New York. Out of the two, London seemed like a better fit for the story.”

Considering Attachment gave Gabriel a major premiere, and is now available on Shudder (as I had mentioned at the start), I had to ask what on Earth is coming next. “I look forward to finding out for myself,” he said. “I have a few different projects in development. There’s one that is also under Nordisk Film Production and getting some development finance from the Danish Film Institute, so they have a draft, and it’s set in Iceland. I’m writing it for Sofie, and it’s got a kind of genre bent as well. Then, I have an American spec script, which is slowly circulating out there. Who knows if it’s going to go anywhere, but it will be fun if it does. That’s a haunted house riff, with some comedy and siblinghood and mental health… but I’m not going to talk too much about these projects, as Sofie advised. Hopefully, something will happen soon, but it’s a grind.”

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