Interview: Macon Blair, Writer/Director of Netflix's Fun, Gnarly Mystery I DON'T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE

Right now, you might best know Macon Blair as an actor who often works with Green Room director Jeremy Saulnier. Blair broke onto the scene in front of the camera in Saulnier's 2013 revenge film Blue Ruin, but now the actor has expanded his storytelling abilities behind the lens by writing and directing a new movie for Netflix called I don't feel at home in this world anymore. (yes, with the stylized lower case font and period at the end included). It's about a woman named Ruth (Melanie Lynskey) who enlists the help of a weirdo named Tony (Elijah Wood) to help her track down the guys who broke into her house and stole her stuff. It's a small, self-contained story that works almost like a buddy comedy for the first half before some intense violence abruptly enters the fray and has catastrophic effects on how the movie operates from that point on. The film arrives on Netflix tomorrow, and I'd highly suggest checking it out.

I had the opportunity to speak with Blair on the phone about making his directorial debut on this film, and after seeing the movie myself, I jumped at the chance to chat with him about it. I've included our conversation in its entirety below, but beware — I'd say there are some LIGHT SPOILERS in it. There's nothing that will ruin too much for you, but if you prefer to go in knowing only what you see in the trailer, watch the movie tomorrow and then come back and read this. Enjoy.

GeekTyrant: Congratulations on the movie. I really related to the main character’s observations about how most people constantly behave like assholes. Is that a worldview you share, or one you just thought would work well for this story?

Macon Blair: The blanket response is, it is one that I share. But it’s also sort of tailor-made for this story because it gives her somewhere to go. Meaning, it’s also true that the world is full of wonderful, decent, selfless people who go out of their way to do the right thing. I don’t know what the mathematical breakdown of that is. A lot of days, maybe just because of the media I ingest, it certainly feels weighted in favor of the assholes from the not-assholes, but I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that’s certainly a perception, and that’s what Ruth’s perception was, and while being a caper story and a detective story, I think part of the point was to sort of nudge her a little bit closer to Tony’s point of view, which is, “sure, problems, but you could also look at it from a more positive standpoint. But yeah, it’s easy to get bummed out.

It’s interesting because you have a character who obviously has to face her external conflicts, but she also has this impossible goal of changing the way everyone else acts all the time. I found that fascinating.

Yeah, and it’s exactly not achievable. That’s why, even though we kind of set him up as an uber villain, when she goes and confronts that rich guy and he’s like, “I don’t get it, what do you want?” she says “I just want people to not be assholes” and he kind of laughs at her, that’s — while I sympathize with Ruth asking that, I feel like his response is the correct one. Like, “What an insane thing to ask for. You drove all the way out here to ask me this?” She could have just just let it go and the movie would have been over, we wouldn’t have had a second half of the movie. But on the other hand, she would not have been in danger, and her buddy would not have gotten stabbed, so yeah, for me that was sort of a “what would you do” type of question in that situation. Would you let it go, or not? I’m not sure I have that answer, but obviously we had to go with that version of it to have a full movie.

So you play a guy, very briefly, who spoils a major plot point in a book series that the protagonist is reading. There are a lot of terrible characters in this movie, but what was it like for you to play the absolute worst scumbag in the whole thing?

I love it that in a movie where people are literally murdering and robbing and stabbing people, the worst one is the book spoiler. I tend to agree with you — yeah, it’s the worst. (Laughs) Honestly, that was kind of a last minute decision. I think I selfishly just wanted to say that I’d done some work with Melanie Lynskey. I wanted to have that on my resume, so I put myself in there at the last minute. I knew I couldn’t do a sizable role and be responsible with it and still be able to direct the movie, so it had to be something that could be done in a very short period of time, and that seemed like the one. It was more of a fun little treat for me.

Absolutely. So you mentioned Melanie, and I thought she was just terrific. She has a wonderful vulnerability but can also pull off this fierce toughness that works really well. How did you decide she was right for the part?

You kind of got both sides of it right there. I, very early on in the writing, had her in mind. I knew I wanted to at least offer it to her. I didn’t know if the movie was going to get made at all or with who, but she was sort of the best case scenario of who I wanted for it. And it was for exactly that reason. I first became aware of her in Heavenly Creatures, her first movie, and there was that one shot where she’s walking down the hallway and the camera’s moving back with her, and she’s only like 14 or 15 years old, but she just looks so vicious and pissed off and determined, and just that one shot kind of got baked into my brain. I was like, “That is Ruth in the second half of the movie.” And then she had this — all of her performances, I think in different ways, are powerful and emotionally honest and really fun to watch — but she had a supporting part in Away We Go, which was really heartbreaking and quiet. And that one kind of struck me as, “Oh, that’s Ruth in the first half of the movie.” So it was those sort of two tones that she just does so transparently and effortlessly: vulnerability and viciousness that I thought worked really well.

Elijah Wood was also great. This feels very much in line with the kinds of interesting choices he’s been making lately. What led you to cast him as Tony?

The same sort of thing. In a really early version of the character, I was sort of thinking of the guy as being more of a gentle giant, like an oaf, but I started to wonder if maybe I hadn’t seen that before. So I started thinking of him as more of a little guy with a Napoleon complex who’s really into his martial arts and his fist fighting that he’s not actually good at, and he started to make sense to me for that. I knew him a little bit from having met at film festivals, and he’s such a charismatic, instantly sympathetic, likable guy in person and on screen, so I thought it would be fun to on one hand take advantage of that, and on the other kind of invert it, you know what I mean? By making him this irritating strange character that’s sort of opposite him, but at the same time he would still have the audience totally on his side when he’s leaving dog shit in people’s yards.

Can you talk about your influences for this movie, both for writing the script and what kind of stuff you were watching to visually inspire you beforehand?

Yeah. The two different things — I think tonally, in terms of a fun, free-wheeling, grungy type of feel, movies like Repo Man were a big influence. In some of the oddball relationship kind of things, Harold & Maude and Trust were big influences. And then as far as the low-key, grounded, character-driven crime aspect, I was looking at movies from the ‘70s like Charley Varrick and Night Moves and The Friends of Eddie Coyle and stuff like that. Movies which really don’t feel at all like this movie, I don’t think, but just in the sense that they’re really focused on the character as opposed to the mechanics of the plot. Kind of plainspoken, and they feel kind of small. They still feel urgent and propulsive, but the universe feels kind of small. I enjoyed that and it seemed like a fun way to approach this story, which was half crime story and half shaggy dog friendship story mushed together.

What was the single biggest problem in either writing, filming, or editing that you didn’t anticipate beforehand?

I should have anticipated it because I’ve been on movies that had much more complicated and involved action thriller sequences, but definitely the last fifteen minutes of the movie or so where they’re running through the woods and they’re falling down and there’s gunshot effects and boats on open water and there’s snakes and swamps and stuntmen and stuntwomen and a whole bunch of stuff. We were out in the elements, so we were at the mercy of wind or rain, and we had a limited amount of time at a very particular location. I feel like we got the best version of it, and the crew, we were really able to improvise and pull some stuff out of thin air that I think worked well, but it was really ambitious given the amount of time there. So in retrospect, or if I’m in a position to do something like that again, I would either scale back the script and try to shoot less stuff, or I would scale up the schedule and ask for an additional day or two with which to shoot it. We were kind of racing that whole time and I wish we had a little bit more breathing room. But it also made it fun, like you couldn’t really second-guess anything. There wasn’t time to wonder if this was the right call or not. It was just like, “We’ve gotta shoot something because it’s getting dark in twenty minutes and we don’t have the snake tomorrow, so we’ve gotta go.” But I don’t regret anything.

Not to give anything away, but the movie doesn’t shy away from a bit of brutality near the end. Is that something you’ve always been attracted to as a storyteller?

Kind of. Jeremy [Saulnier] and myself and the group of kids that we grew up with, we got into making our own little home movies trying to imitate movies like RoboCop and Aliens and stuff like that. Part of it was an attraction to special effects and stunts and figuring out creative ways to shoot action sequences and stuff like that. So it’s kind of a craft-oriented thing, and it’s fun when it’s deployed in a certain way. One thing I did kind of want to do here, though, was basically have it be more about that brutality coming out of nowhere and surprising you, as opposed to “let’s put the camera in a close-up and watch a lot of blood and meat on the ground.” I was not as interested in the fluids and the blood, although the effects are awesome and they look great, but it was more about, “Oh wow, I did not see that coming! It popped up out of nowhere and triggered this chain reaction of craziness that is tumbling away from the viewer before they can even process what they’ve seen.” That chaos was more important than the actual splatter, if that makes sense.

Totally. The word I keep using to describe the violence is “gnarly.” How do you decide where the line is for striking the right tone and not taking things too far when it does come out of nowhere like that? 

It was a process. We shot everything. We got all the close-ups of the gore. We got slow-motion, we put a second camera on it so we could have that option. But at the same time, we’re trying to juggle that against, ostensibly, comedy moments. For example, the first time when somebody gets shot, Ruth’s reaction is to throw up — projectile vomit.

I love that moment.

It’s meant to be kind of a joke, because it’s meant to be surprising and funny, and as an escape valve from all of this bloodshed that’s happening. At the same time, it’s also meant to be honest. Ruth is not a gangster, so that’s probably the first time she’s seen real blood in her life, so that’s her honest reaction. Whether it worked or not, I was trying to have my cake and eat it, too: have a true character moment and also a joke in the midst of all this bloodshed. But yeah, we would go back and forth in the editing about “how much barf is too much?” At what point does it become more like an Airplane movie? And then making it too funny, does that then make the violence funny? And we wanted the violence to be legitimately horrifying, too, so it eventually became adding and subtracting frames here and there. “A little less blood, a little more puke — oh wait, that’s too much puke. Less puke, a little more blood.” And back and forth until we felt like we balanced it out the right way. As a result, we had her barf so much barf on set that the puddle of barf was enormous. It was like nine feet across. But we reduced it so much in the edit just because it started to feel like way too much. We had to go back in and when you have the overhead shots of the floor, we had to digitally shrink the puke puddle because it looked like somebody had just dumped over a bathtub full of stuff (laughs). It didn’t look right. So there was a lot of tweaking, and I’d be lying if I said we had that balance figured out when we shot it. It was definitely something we had to calibrate in the cut.

I think you guys nailed the balance on that, because I definitely felt the comic relief aspect of it and the horror that Ruth feels there.

That’s good to hear (laughs).

I think we have time for one more question. The cast announcement for Hold the Dark just came out a couple of days ago [Macon wrote the screenplay], and it looks like you and [director] Jeremy Saulnier have locked down an insanely talented group for that one. Jeffrey Wright, Alexander Skarsgard - sounds great. Are you guys excited?

So excited. Actually, Jeffrey had been — they just finalized the paperwork, so they were allowed to announce it, but he and Jeremy had met a while ago, so I kind of knew that was brewing. In anything, he’s among the best actors today, but for this part in particular, he’s just going to crush it. He’s so perfect. It’s a relief to finally have that announced because I’ve been wanting to share that with people because I was so excited for Jeremy. He’s got a dream team to do that one. It’s going to be a really cool movie.