Interview with the vampire
Elias Merhige sinks his teeth into film history
SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE
****
Starring John Malkovich, Willem Dafoe. Written by Steven Katz. Directed by E. Elias Merhige. (STC) 93 min. Opens Jan. 26. |
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"One of my biggest fascinations with Shadow of the Vampire was the idea of showing the motion-picture camera itself as a form of vampire," says director E. Elias Merhige during our interview at last year's Toronto International Film Festival. "How it fixes its gaze on subjects and reduces them to a series of shadows. It destroys your flesh, but then you live forever -- and if that's not vampirism, I don't know what is."
Brave, slightly grandiose words, especially coming from a guy who's never made an even vaguely commercial movie before. Merhige has never been one to back down from a challenge -- Time's Richard Corliss said his experimental first film Begotten (1991) made Eraserhead seem like a Disney movie.
By turns hilarious and hypnotic, Shadow of the Vampire, written by Steven Katz, aims to remind the oversaturated movies-on-movies genre that the word visionary means, literally, "someone who has visions." The film revolves around the wonderfully revisionist conceit that Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe), the star of German silent-film pioneer F.W. Murnau's (John Malkovich) 1921 Dracula adaptation Nosferatu, was a real-life bloodsucker, secretly cast for maximum method-actor mood-setting.
"I loved the historical background that Steven worked into the story," Merhige says. "He really showed how Murnau was a Promethean figure with an utterly maverick spirit, totally capable of bringing a monster onto his set and not warning the people who'd have to work around it of the danger they were in. And that was because, at the time, movie-making wasn't even looked on as an art -- it was a technological form of trickery, just at the point of becoming art. So anything was possible, and anything was justified, in the service of getting the picture made."
In a brilliantly funny and unhinged performance, Malkovich plays Murnau as a prissy, tantrum-throwing control freak obsessed with exploring "what lies at the bottom of the flower box." "We are scientists engaged in the creation of memory," he tells his crew, as they embark on the long train journey to their secluded shooting location.
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Merhige, with his consistent commitment to content over style, takes the phrase just as seriously. "That scene did inspire me," he admits. "That whole idea of filmmakers as new gods in a godless world, creating tiny little alternate realities -- it has a definite appeal. And when I was making Begotten, I did use much the same techniques Murnau does in this movie. Since it didn't have any sound, I directed almost by narrating it, talking to my actors while the camera was rolling, telling them what to do and think and feel. I remember it being literally like ideas were moving out of my mind and into my mouth, becoming words expressed in the flesh of my actors.
"All that aside, though, another revelation to me is just how funny Shadow of the Vampire is. I mean, Begotten was very, very serious, almost to its own detriment. But in Steven's script, humour forms a great bridge and a vehicle to bring across ideas that might otherwise seem unbearable or unpalatable."
One of these "unpalatable" ideas, Merhige hastens to point out, is the image of Dafoe's ancient, contemptuous, utterly unattractive Schreck -- a hard pill to swallow, especially for most diehard fans of the modern vampire mythos largely created by novelist Anne Rice.
"Anne Rice created this image of the vampire as an 'angel,' ultimately beautiful and cultured, a predator's predator," Merhige says. "We have an old, dead guy living in a hole in the ground, too tired to move, with no memory of how he got there, or why he should care. Not exactly the kind of thing that sells tickets.
"On the other hand, though, we do have Willem -- and John, and Udo Kier, and all these other wonderful actors. And that's a special effect in itself, because great performances are like rare colours -- you either have to not use them at all, because they're so different they tend to overwhelm everything else around them, or you have to deepen and broaden the landscape you're painting far enough that it can practically contain them. Which is why working with this cast constantly upped the ante for everybody else, including me."
Though cut for time in ways that almost ruin its third act's denouement, Shadow remains a strange and potent Art Deco brew -- an illusion that, in the end, can seem dangerously realer than real.
"When Murnau made Nosferatu, he was consciously trying to comment on the destruction of Germany after World War I," Merhige says. "To him, Schreck -- the vampire -- symbolized everything he saw eating Germany away from the inside. This weight of pestilence and spiritual grief engulfing a culture too happy to sense death coming.
"In Shadow of the Vampire, meanwhile, an idealistic and egotistical filmmaker wakes up the decaying, cannibalistic nobility of Germany and says, 'All right -- I'll put this rat-like fiend in the centre of my flea circus and I'll turn him into a great work of art.' Even though it's impossible to make art out of something dead. But with this film, we certainly tried."
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