For his first feature, director
Zachary Treitz was looking for adventure. “Going into the unknown was really
important to us and not knowing what was going to come out was the exciting
nature of filming,” he told me last weekend when we sat down with his cowriter,
actress Kate Lyn Sheil, to discuss their new Civil War drama, Men Go to Battle.
Bringing an independent, DIY approach to period piece filmmaking—a formidable
undertaking for any first time feature director—with the help of Sheil and
cinematographer Brett
Jutkiewicz, Treitz has crafted an inspired and accomplished debut that
stands out as one of the best films in this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.
With impressive set design and
documentary-style shooting alongside Civil War reenactments, Men Go to Battle
stars Tim Morton and
David Malone as brothers Henry and Francis Mellon. The precisely
detailed and absorbing film follows the daily life on the brothers’ struggling
farm in rural 1860s Kentucky. We observe as their intense relationship becomes
increasingly strained, and their entwined lives more suffocating as the days go
by. One night, when the two are forced to mingle with the prominent members of
their town, Henry makes a forward and embarrassing advance towards a young woman
(played by Rachel Korine), spurring him to run off without a trace. When
Francis eventually learns that he’s joined the Union Army, the film unfolds
through the brothers’ correspondence, as they must individually come to terms
with the approaching war and its effect on their now separate lives.
Last weekend, I sat down with
Treitz and Kate Lyn Sheil to chat about their in-depth 19th century diary
reading, the immaturity and maturity of Rachel Korine, and bringing the outside
world into a period piece.
1.
What was it about this
period in history that intrigued you as writers?
2.
Zachary Treitz: I’m from Kentucky, and my family
is from Kentucky pretty far back. I’d heard these family stories for years, but
my grandmother was talking to Kate and me about this one story, and we didn’t
know how much of the story was real and how much was apocryphal, so we had this
idea to do some research on it. We started going to these archives in
Louisville and other places around, then we started reading first hand accounts
and diaries and letters that were unpublished. We were just sifting through in
these vaults for fun; we thought maybe we wanted to make a movie or a project
around it. Then we ended up ditching the family side of it and started getting
really into these incredible first hand accounts of life in the 1860s in small
town Kentucky.
3.
Kate Lyn Sheil: Simultaneously we wanted to
write something for Tim and David, so it was the marriage of Zach’s family
history and writing around those two dudes.
4.
Treitz: Tim and David are friends of mine from
Louisville. They have a similar way of talking and a similar sense of humor
that’s—
5.
Sheil: Very specific to Kentucky. It’s weird.
6.
Treitz: You look at them and they don’t look or
act like they should be twenty-first century people, so we put them back in the
1860s. It was a long process of the two of us trading ideas on the writing. We
made the movie over the course of a year, so we were able to shoot stuff and
then see what was working with the actors and non-actors. We could see what was
married together and then change the direction of certain things to suit what
was working. The overarching ideas, themes, and story were there, but we were
able to change scenes and things to fit what we were shooting, which was really
nice. It’s a different way of working.
7.
That research really
comes through in the film’s specificity. Some of the most interesting moments
were the mundane, everyday tasks of the characters, which I’m sure came from
thoroughly combing through those diaries.
8.
Treitz: The research part was basically to be
able to not have to imagine things. We didn’t have to make stuff up when we
could just read it.
9.
Sheil: We wanted wall to wall detail to make it
more immersive.
10.
Kate, have you always
been interested in writing films, and do you want to continue doing so?
11.
Sheil: I’ve always written, but this first time
a script that I’ve written has ever been made. Writing is also a torturous and
difficult experience, so we’ll see when I do it again, but I’d like to.
12.
Do you find that your
work as an actor informs your writing, because you can hear the dialogue in a
unique way and know how you’d want it delivered?
13.
Sheil: Totally. Writing for Tim and David was
great because we could tell how the words were going to come out of their
mouths because we know them. But then it was certainly helpful in writing the
scenes when we didn’t know who was going to be playing the part. It was really
fun coming up with stuff that I thought was difficult and would be an exciting
thing to play, and then to know that I wasn’t going to have to do it.
14.
Considering you wrote
the roles specifically for Tim and David, did you also write with Rachel Korine
in mind? I really enjoyed the scenes between her and her suitors and how they
were played with an equal amount of awkward energy and tenderness.
15.
Sheil: We didn’t write with Rachel in mind, but
we were so lucky to get her.
16.
Treitz: It was hard to find somebody that had
the right amount of immaturity and maturity at the same time, and someone who
could play a pretty young role. Rachel read the script just a couple weeks
before we started shooting with her. She was supposed to go to France with her
daughter and her husband Harmony but cancelled that just to be in the movie.
She was just so strong about it; it was crazy. We wondered if we’d find someone
who was going to be able to take it over the top.
17.
Sheil: Yeah, and get the humor. We needed
someone to take it over the top but still be incredibly good actor. With Tim
and David, we rehearsed with them, but we didn’t really rehearse with Rachel.
We knew how talented she was, but it’s always a wild card. So as soon as she
started playing the scene we were like, thank god.
18.
Treitz: It’s also tough because, while Tim and
David have acted in stuff together and made movies together, they’re not
trained actors. Rachel’s not a trained actor but she’s an actor. There were
other people that were trained actors too, and mixing those two things was
always a big gamble, but somehow we got the formula right. Steve Coulter, who
plays Mr. Small, he’s acted in a ton of things and he’s really great and really
confident. He worked well with David and Tim and they took each other to new
places. It was fun for Steve to see somebody at the beginning of his career
coming into this world and be able to steer them, but it also puts him on his
toes a little bit more. It was also weird to have people that were not from Louisville
or Kentucky to have a pretty similar sense of humor and meet at the same place
intellectually and humorously.
19.
What tone were you
trying to establish between the brothers? A lot of their early scenes are quite
funny while still existing inside this mounting tension.
20.
Sheil: The humor was definitely a through-line.
21.
Treitz: We wanted a certain amount of intensity
to both the humor and the more serious or combative parts so that it would be a
constant opposition of those two things against each other, those two brothers
against each other. There would always be a line of, is this funny or is this
mean spirited? At the same time, between them, that’s would be how people who
are that close and live in a tiny place for a very long time with very few
options are with each other.
22.
Sheil: Who are also nearing the end of their
relationship.
23.
Treitz: Yeah, but will always be in a
relationship in some way. We wanted there to be a tightly wound intensity to
the two of them that would be all those things at once. Then there would be an
insider feel, a shorthand we tapped into because they already have that. While
the actors aren’t playing themselves, they’re playing exponents of their
personality that we knew we could draw on from them.
24.
Sheil: We also wanted to allow for there to be
randomness in the movie. Within a scene we wanted there to be moments that were
playful followed by a moments that were really violent. So that was important
to us.
25.
The letter writing
scenes, for example, were cut together in a really interesting way. How much of
the film was planned out ahead of time and how much developed in the editing
process?
26.
Treitz: We shot it in a way that we knew we
could modularly put things in different places. We wanted to feel like we were
constantly dropping in and out, in a very jagged and caustic way, into moments
of these people’s lives. While there’s a storyline, it comes from the events,
not from the hand of god writers. We wanted to create a narrative and film it
in a way that felt like we were just watching it unfold.
27.
Sheil: It’s interesting with the army stuff,
because while that entire portion was written out in the script, we shot at
reenactments documentary-style. So the final reenactment we went to we did
stage a lot of scenes.
28.
Treitz: We never knew how we would do it. Going
into it, we were just like, okay that area over there looks like it has a good
background and foreground, do you think that we can grab three of these
reenactors and do it in fifteen minutes? Tim do you remember your lines?
29.
Sheil: In terms of casting, the guy who plays
his friend in the army, we just found him in a battle reenactment.
30.
Treitz: We would just look at these guys and
their faces and their accents and be like, okay you’re perfect.
31.
What was your experience
like working with the reenactors, and were they hesitant about letting you into
their world?
32.
Treitz: It’s a pretty insular world, and they
rightly keep people out of it a little bit. They don’t want tourists and they
see everyone as tourists. They’re wary of being distracted from something they
like to do, so it took months of convincing and pleading constantly to get them
to agree to open the door just a little bit to us. The closest we got was a
“maybe.” Then we just rented a camera and drove down, got these costumes from
one of our actors, and dressed up and went out there. We had no idea whether or
not they were going to let us film anything. They weren’t interested and didn’t
want us to do it, but after we started shooting for a couple of days they
realized that we were on their side.
33.
Sheil: Brett was walking around with the camera
in a burlap sack pretending that it was a bag of potatoes.
34.
Treitz: Yeah, we dressed up ourselves like Civil
War journalists or correspondents. By the end of it they were coming up to us
and saying. “Man, I’ve been doing this for twenty years and I’ve never seen
anybody whose as a respectful and unobtrusive as you guys.” So then they just
invited us along to do more.
35.
Sheil: But in terms of what it was like shooting
there, it was like, okay we’re going to get as much as we can.
36.
Treitz: Pure chaos.
37.
It’s pretty rare and
great to already have that built-in world there for you to use and become a
part of.
38.
Sheil: Yeah, it was one of many many things on
this movie—which is true of most movies I suppose—where over and over again
there would be some new hurdle where it was, if we can’t get this we can’t do
the movie.
39.
Treitz: Really up until the last scenes we were
filming.
40.
Sheil: So once they opened the doors to us it
was a wonderful and very lucky experience.
41.
Treitz: We wanted the filming process to be an
adventure for us—maybe not as much adventure as it turned out to be—but going
into the unknown was really important to us and not knowing what was going to
come out was the exciting nature of filming. A lot of movies are incredibly
premeditated, and we had a lot of that, but we tried to leave things open to
chance to fill in the liveliness of the world. It’s weird to say that you would
want the outside world of effect a period piece, but we really tried to open it
up.
42.
How did you work with Brett to approach the cinematography
and the overall aesthetic of the film?
43.
Sheil: Brett is incredible, and he and Zach have
been working together for a decade now.
44.
Treitz: Yeah, we went to school together and
made a lot of movies together—short films and features I produced and co-produced
and he shot. As with a lot of people when you’ve worked together for a while,
you get a shorthand and you’re able to push each other further than you would
with a normal professional relationship. A lot of the actual aesthetic that
Kate, Brett, and I talked about was pretty simple. We wanted a utilitarian
approach to how we filmed the scenes that wouldn’t be drawing attention to the
cinematography.
45.
Sheil: It’s sort of the same with everything
about the production design, just hiding the seams.
46.
Treitz: And not trying to be really artsy-fartsy
with things.
47.
Sheil: But Brett can’t help himself.
48.
Treitz: Basically Brett is unable to not make
something beautiful, so that was the push-pull that we had. We were hurrying
him constantly and bringing him a little outside of his comfort zone. So you
have a feeling of this rushed, rough aesthetic that goes really well because
Brett’s constantly pulling back towards the composition and beautiful
cinematography. So for the content of the story and the characters, it works.
We were in beautiful locations but not trying to shoot them in beautiful ways.
49.
Sheil: That’s the play between the production
design and the cinematography. We were conscious of the danger of, well we put
all this work into like the details here, we better linger on them. But we
didn’t want to do that. We built this world but then shot it as though it were
this room we’re in now.
50.
Treitz: We didn’t want to be precious about
anything. Nothing was allowed to be sweeping; the only sweeping was the dirt.
51.
Were there any films you
looked to for inspiration?
52.
Treitz: Kate and I both go to a fair amount of
movies and we love watching movies from all eras and all genres. We were really
conscious to try to avoid any reference, because it was important to make it
feel like it was its own hermetically sealed universe. We weren’t throwing out shout outs to other
things that we liked, but it wouldn’t exist without certain movies, like Come
and See, which is one of Kate’s favorite movies. Also, Edvard Munch, which was
big inspiration on how to do a period piece and make it feel really intense and
gross. We never got to those places entirely, but we liked the idea. Both of
those movies feel like they come out of nowhere, and you can’t imagine why
anybody would even make that movie or how they would even think to do it. We wanted
to push ourselves to make a movie where it was beyond our own imaginations, and
make something better than ourselves.
53.
Sheil: And if you didn’t know us, the hand of
the filmmakers is not necessarily visible or obvious. In terms of new movies,
the only new one that we thought of Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights.
54.
Treitz: The first time we saw that we saw it
projected, and it was the first time in a long time where I was just blown away
by the combination of visual aesthetic and the acting. Everything just came
together really nicely in that movie. It’s hard to avoid Barry Lyndon or
something when you’re thinking about lighting a space with only candles. But
Barry Lyndon’s also really funny, and keeping a sense of humor about it was so
important to us—having brevity and not being so self-serious.
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