Near the beginning of Jeremy Saulniers Green Room, Anton Yelchins guitarist explains to an interviewer why his band doesnt have a social media presence: When you take it all virtual, he says, you lose the texture. Not long after that, Yelchins band, the Aint Rights, find themselves barricaded backstage at a neo-Nazi compound in the Oregon woods, after a last-minute gig culminates with the discovery of a freshly killed corpse. A slow-burning, no-frills siege thriller, Saulniers follow-up to his 2013 breakthrough movie Blue Ruin has plenty of texture, but its long fuse is attached to a powerful charge: Once Yelchin and his bandmates discover the depth of the trouble theyre in and the machetes, pitbulls and shotguns come out this modern exploitation-movie insta-classic hits the gas and doesnt ease up until the last body has dropped.
I dont listen to punk that much now, admits Saulnier, a 39-year-old married father of three and Virginia native who used to frequent Eighties and Nineties hardcore gigs. When youre so immersed in a scene and its so definitive to who you are as a person and theres no archive of it other than your fading memories its kind of disturbing. When he was writing the script, the filmmaker spent months reaching out to comrades from his punk-rock past, collecting touring anecdotes and unreleased demos; much of the Aint Rights musical repertoire is taken from his old friends bands.
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Creating that anarchic energy on set was another matter. Alia Shawkat, who plays the bands guitarist and de facto road manager, says that the cast would do jumping jacks before takes, hyperventilating or forcing themselves to cry in order to work themselves into the properly beleaguered state of mind. At the end of every night, we were tired, she says. But it felt great, she says. He really exhausted everything.
In a sense, Green Rooms protagonists could be any group of unsuspecting strangers from out of town the latest version of the road-tripping twentysomethings in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. But for Saulnier, the movie is as much about the exhaustion of punks once-vibrant energy as it is the evils of the extreme political right. The Aint Rights, he explains, are kind of scavengers trying to find the remnants of a once-vibrant subculture. When Pat says you gotta be there, thats 100 fucking percent true. Hardcore is about the experience and participating. When I was introduced to punk rock, it was skateboarding, clocking the T-shirts of the cooler, older kids, trying to remember band names, going home, telling my mom to drive me to the record store, please, picking out the band that I thought was the one that I thought I saw on the T-shirt, buying it, committing to it, taking it home and then youd fucking hear what you bought. This is an old man getting nostalgic, but thats why the scene thrived. Now, you can just sit at home and click.
Yelchin, who played guitar in a punk band called The Hammerheads, says that feeling still thrives, although you have to seek it out. We live in a culture where its all about posting that moment, so you let other people know that you are doing this thing, he says. Its like if theres not some cheap photo posted of the moment, its like it didnt happen. If you go to a punk show, and those kids are actually there for the music, a lot of those kids dont have their phones. Theyre in the pit, being silly.
After Saulnier gathered together his group of young actors and put them through a sort of punk-band bootcamp, he needed to find the perfect embodiment of evil; enter Patrick Stewart, who plays the neo-Nazis charismatic, cold-blooded leader, Darcy Banker. In a frenetic movie, Darcy is an oasis of apparent calm, never raising his voice even when he gives the order to kill. Hes persuasive enough to rally young people to his cause, even when its not clear what that cause is theyre right-wing skinheads, one character explains, or technically ultra-left and to convince the imprisoned band members that they actually have a chance to talk their way out of this mess. When Darcy says, Itll all be over soon, that always makes me laugh, Stewart says. Its said in a way thats completely reassuring, but what Darcy means by it is completely different.
The things that have always frightened me were not zombies or vampires. It was people, real people, who were of a mindset and an attitude that no matter what the situation you find yourself in, you couldnt reason with them.Patrick Stewart
Stewart is famous for playing men who lead with their heads instead of their guts: When asked who would prevail in a fight between James T. Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard, his answer is that Picard would persuade Kirk to settle their differences without resorting to fisticuffs. Darcy presents himself as a kindred spirit to his Star Trek: The Next Generation captain and the X-Mens leader Charles Xavier; the big difference between them and his white-supremacist figurehead, besides the fascist leanings, is that hes only pretending to listen to his opponents while he figures out the best way to cut their throats.
For Stewart, the contrast was terrifying, so much so that he took a break from reading Saulniers script to lock the windows in his house. The things that have always frightened me were not zombies or the walking dead or vampires, Stewart explains. It was people, real people, who were of a mindset and an attitude that no matter what the situation you find yourself in, you couldnt reason with them. You couldnt sit down with them, have a cup of coffee, and say Lets talk this over.'
Thats the thing thats scariest to me in reality, says Shawkat. Its not zombies, its not aliens. Its people who exist who hate each other so much. And sadly, they are going to rallies now, and being filmed on television.
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