Hats off to director Zachary
Treitz and co-writer Kate Lyn Sheil for sidestepping the more introspective,
resource heavy trends of much contemporary independent filmmaking, and swinging
for the fences with their Civil War period piece, Men Go To Battle. Set in 1861
Kentucky, the brothers Francis and Henry Mellon (Tim Morton and David Maloney) are desperate
to scare up some funds for their overgrown farm before winter arrives, but the
pair’s constant quarreling is a hindrance to much progress. Eventually fed up
with Francis’ heavy drinking and general flippancy, Henry takes off to join a
far more populated battle amidst the Confederate army.
Gorgeously lensed by Brett Jutkiewicz, Men
Go To Battle successfully juggles the intimacy of a fraught fraternal drama
with the implications of its loaded historical setting. Filmmaker spoke with
Treitz and Sheil about the extensive logistics behind a low budget period
piece, narrowing the film’s scope, and more. Men Go To Battle world premieres
in Narrative Competition tonight at the Tribeca Film Festival.
1.
Filmmaker: Period pieces alone are ambitious
undertakings on a relatively low budget, but this one covers so much ground.
What were some of the challenges you faced in rendering several settings from
the mid-1800s, and how were you able to circumvent them?
2.
Treitz: We wanted to create the sense that the
story could go anywhere, that nothing in the characters’ lives is
predetermined. We didn’t want this feeling to be limited by our budget, which
meant seeing a lot of different locations and environments.
3.
Sheil: The movie hinged on whether or not we
could find our two main locations: the cabin and the town. Zach and I drove all
over Kentucky, Indiana, and Virginia searching, but we were coming up dry.
There are plenty of dilapidated log cabins, but the trick was in finding
buildings that were period appropriate and also in good shape, could pass for
relatively new. We were about two weeks out from our first big shoot and still
hadn’t locked down our location, the home of the two main characters, when our
producer Steven Schardt called. He had been on a nature walk at a farm just
outside Louisville and stumbled across a stone cottage, the one you see in the
film.
4.
Treitz: It was the kitchen of a stage coach stop
in the early 1800s, and had survived because it was stone. Jake Heustis and the
rest of our art department then had to take off a 1970’s porch addition,
replace the roof, etc., until it looked like it was actively lived in. They
thought that was bad, but then they met the real nightmare: creating a small
1861 town. One of our actors knew this small town that a lawyer named Bob
Griffith had preserved. But it was on a main highway outside of Fort Knox and
we knew we would have to cover the road with dirt…we calculated about 13 tons
of dirt. But once we started putting up signs to warn people about this, that’s
when the local newspaper articles started showing up, then the editorials, then
the calls from state senators, and finally the death threats. People really
didn’t want us to close the road for a day, which I understand, but threatening
to shoot someone over a 20-minute inconvenience seemed a little extreme, even
for Kentucky. It probably didn’t help that it was hunting season. We moved
around our schedule to accommodate the locals before the dirt went down. There
were a few people who drove right through our barricade to show us who was
boss, but most everyone else was simply interested in what we were doing. One
of our first thoughts for how to pull off the feeling of this huge world was to
shoot at Civil War reenactments, but we had never been to one. The reenactment
community is pretty wary of outsiders, and it took a lot of explaining and
convincing until they let us in. Just a few of us would show up, dressed up in
1860s civilian clothes, pretending to be war correspondents, as we followed our
actor Tim around for these long weekends. By the end of that first weekend,
which was a huge event with thousands of reenactors, several of the soldiers
came up to us and told us they hadn’t ever seen a camera crew that was so
inconspicuous and respectful, and we went from there.
5.
Filmmaker: I believe this is both of your first
times co-writing a script, so can you speak about that process? Would you write
individually and then piece scenes together?
6.
Sheil: Zach and I would work on the outline
together then write scenes individually. We’d then hand those over for revision
to the other person. Once scenes were placed in the script, we’d read it top to
bottom, whatever we had at that point, and discuss how we felt about it. It was
an evolving process that was informed by research and eventually by rehearsal
with the actors.
7.
Filmmaker: I wanted to ask about your decision
to leave out one of the defining points of the Civil War — slavery — and the
economic impact that would have had on a town like the Mellons’. When Francis
tries to sell his land, there are some intimations as to why nobody’s buying,
but nothing explicit.
8.
Treitz: We wanted to tell the story through the
eyes of these two brothers who are further down in rural Kentucky society than
they’d like to be. We researched what they would see and experience by combing
through archives of unpublished diaries and letters of the time, and doing a
fair amount of background research. The story takes place in the Upper South,
and in the county in particular that we were imagining, the population was
about 13 percent slaves. Henry and Francis do not own slaves, but when they go
to a more affluent family’s house, there are certainly slaves. We wanted to see
the culture and society of the time through the eyes of the characters. The lack
of judgment from the characters in the story to me makes something like slavery
all the more horrifying… that you can have these seemingly nice people who own
human beings, and everything else that goes along with that.
9.
Sheil: We never wanted to make a movie about the
Grand Old South. The story is a very middle class one, very regionally specific
to Kentucky. The area where the movie takes place was not one of a plantation
culture and the two main characters of the film are too poor to be slave
owners. That having been said, slavery was something that we obviously thought
about constantly and never took lightly. We didn’t want to let any of our
characters off the hook by allowing them to have moments of uncharacteristic foresight
or intelligence; we didn’t want to ignore the terribly racist climate of the
time, but we also didn’t want to artificially impose scenes on the movie where
we, as twenty-first century filmmakers, expressed our disapproval, guilt and
shame through the mouths of characters from whom those sentiments would seem
uncanny.
10.
Filmmaker: The cinematography is really strong.
What were some of your reference points — historical or filmic — in shaping the
texture of the film?
11.
Sheil: To my memory, the primary movie
references for us were Peter
Watkins’ Edvard Munch and Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights. We wanted
to buck the oppressiveness of the period piece by shooting close, divorcing
ourselves from the most “beautiful” visual approach by resisting the urge to
fetishize the landscape.
12.
Treitz: It’s hard to make a preindustrial period
piece without referring to how Kubrick shot with candles in Barry Lyndon. But
we were aiming for something a little less formally composed, something a
little rougher. Brett
Jutkiewicz, our cinematographer, really created a way of working with
the actors and the environments that felt alive and nimble. And he can’t seem
to help but make things beautiful, even if it wasn’t our first concern. Brett
was a collaborator on the entire project.
13.
Filmmaker: A successfully cast period piece
requires little suspension of disbelief, and the two leads certainly fit the
bill, which may have been helped by the fact that I’d never seen them in
anything before. How did you find Tim Morton and David Maloney, and, broadly,
where did the idea to shape the film around two brothers come from?
14.
Treitz: I know Tim and David from growing up in
Louisville, Kentucky. David and I made a couple short films over the years, and
the two of them were good friends who grew up together. They made a lot of
incredible little movies together in high school and had a shared sense of
humor, and nearly identical voices and speech patterns. To make them brothers
was not far-fetched, and putting these two in 1860 makes just as much sense
when you see them. Something between their physiognomy and their slightly
insidery way of talking between each other really fit the time and place.
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