Writer/director Alex Ross Perry (“Listen Up Philip,” “Queen of Earth”) is not interested in making movies the way Hollywood wants him to. He has a very respectable and dense creative process, one that would likely be undermined by the corporate chain of studio hegemony. Clearly, he puts a lot of care into writing his films, and the typical screenplay model, no doubt, does not suit his style.
Perry’s newest film, “Her Smell,” starring Elisabeth Moss in an incomparable performance, is essentially 5 mini stage plays strung together by a series of home movie interludes. The structure sort of feels like “Steve Jobs” (the Danny Boyle and Aaron Sorkin one) by way of “Raging Bull,” featuring the downfall of a punk rock star, Becky Something. But, unlike those films (and some other recent musical biopics) “Her Smell” was entirely unconcerned with recreating somebody else’s story.
Rather than cull from readily-available information from infamous rock stars and their antics, Perry’s new movie doesn’t try to chase an obvious parallel; it’s concerned with its own character’s stakes and emotional journey of its fictional band, Something She. The film is not at all interested in the glitz and glamour of the rock music world and it doesn’t care about subscribing to any musical drama formula.
I was fortunate enough to chat with the well-spoken and thoughtful filmmaker. He discussed the process for his new film, his collaboration with Moss, the reasons the two bands in the movie had to sound the way it did, and why we all need to listen to Steven Soderbergh.
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The movie is wild, and Elisabeth Moss’ performance is just so raw and explosive. What was the screenwriting and rehearsal process was like? Was it all scripted and blocked out beforehand?
Everything in the movie is very specifically scripted. No improvising. And the blocking, each one of the 5 acts of the movie was preceded by a rehearsal day, where we didn’t shoot and we just spent the whole day going over the lines, the blocking, the choreography, with camera and everything. Just so that when we started rolling it could be like chaos, but controlled and planned.
I assume you don’t want it to feel too measured, but at the same time, it seems like there’s a lot of fairly complicated staging going on, so you had to do some amount of prep work.
Rehearsal was exactly right. The more time that we spent planning that stuff out, the crazier it was allowed to be, because I was figuring out, ‘where do I move?’ The only decision they had to make was, “how do I play this; how crazy can I go; how big can I be?” All the stuff you generally get hung up on we’d already sorted out.
What about the interludes in between the 5 main sections? Were those more improvisational?
All the interludes were scripted exactly, and then we just kept filming. I think each one was about 1 page, and all of the lines that in the script for the 5 interludes. Well, the 5th one has no lines. All of the lines for the script, for the 4 interludes, are exactly as written. And then the 4th interlude is just exactly as written. I guess the first 3 are the ones that we shot the lines, and then we just kind of kept filming so they felt a little more like a found object.
Like home video footage, I’m assuming?
Shot on the same Sony Hi8 Handycam, my actual camera from high school, that my dad found and sent.
You’ve worked with Elizabeth on several films now. How has your collaboration evolved?
There’s just no need to talk about the nervousness. It’s just complete implicit trust and faith in each other, to deliver without any complications. And I can write this script that’s full of pages upon pages of complicated, specific, difficult, rambling dialog, and I don’t have to worry about can she do that? Because I really feel like, when I’m writing it, that’s she’s already done it, and it’s just a matter of fact that she hasn’t; and then she knows that she can go as big as she wants, and that we’re doing everything we can – rehearsing and everything – to just be ready to capture that performance. And she knows that I don’t need it 15 times and that she doesn’t have to pace herself. She knows that I want it big, and crazy, and I want it 2 or 3 times, so she can use all of her energy right away, rather than pace herself. She can just give the performance that is what she wants to do and knows that I’m not going to come in and fine tune it, and nit-pick it for hours and hours.
How did you lock down all this talent in the cast?
Well, once the movie is kind of up and running and you have Lizzy’s involvement, and people get the script, they can picture it and then they’re excited to participate. The casting was really just envisioning chemistry, and just saying, who would be cool? Who looks cool next to each other? Who is clearly in a band but not the same type of woman, and how do we create that? It was really kind of imagining, and having Lizzy as a producer, being involved with looking at the cast ideas, and kind of figuring it out with me, rather than just me doing it in a vacuum.
Was there any particular group influence, or stories from the Riot Grrl era, that you mined for inspiration?
No, not really. I mean, if anything, the challenge was to stay far away from anything like that. Because as soon as I looked at anything that closely, I would just be stealing something that actually happened to somebody else. So, hair and makeup and wardrobe, they had 1000 pictures of 200 different women all over. Every single one of those women was an influence on the characters design in some way.
For me, as a writer, I didn’t want to look too closely at anything that is just literally the story of one woman who lived it and is probably still alive to tell that story. That’s probably not my place to tell, and that’s really not what I want to do as a writer. If there was a version of my just being able to steal things and put this in this movie, there would be a scene where Becky’s on stage and takes out her tampon and throws it into the audience. Which would be a great scene! That would be a really great moment in this movie, but that’s Donita Sparks from L7 that did that, and most people know that she did that, and I wouldn’t be given any credit for coming up with a big, crazy thing for Becky to do, I would only be given credit for knowing as much about L7 as everyone else, and stealing; and that’s not something I’m interested in doing for Becky, or for anything.
So how did you settle on the musical style, can you talk about that a little bit?
Well, it was just about finding the musical style that suited the dramatic stakes of the movie. The band can’t be a super raw, DIY punk band, because then it doesn’t make any sense that they are being given 6 months to make an album by a media major labor, or that they’re getting a platinum record. Nor can they be very poppy and sounding like a band that would win a Grammy. So they kind of have to occupy this very era-specific sweet spot of great music, that is something that would have a really catchy couple of hits on the radio – making it a gold record, perhaps platinum — you’d be on the cover of SPIN, but not Rolling Stone.
Eventually, it became clear that the perfect sweet spot was somewhere in between The Breeders and Elastica. Very hooky bands, with great melodies and great lyrics; they’re not really punk bands, even though they’re kind of catchy like punk, but they’re not really grunge, because they’re a little bit later than that. But then you just have these beautiful, bold, female harmonies over the raw and distorted guitar, and somehow it just becomes its own thing. Huge hit single; an inescapable kind of sound, and in the case of Elastica they never really reached those heights again.
You’ve spoken in the past about problems with the independent film distribution model. I’ve gathered that, like Steven Soderbergh, you disagree with uniform marketing tactics. Have you noticed a change in the winds at all with the continuing rise of streaming?
You mentioned Soderbergh before I did, but that’s just the thing. I mean, you read him — in these interviews, he was doing recently — where he says; there has to be a different way. There has to be a way that if I put out a movie, like “Unsane,” and I know by Sunday that it’s going to tank, that I could press a button and have it online on Monday. And I thought that was one of the most genius things I’ve ever heard about distribution.
No, the problem is that I don’t see change. And neither does he. And the problem is that we all think that something should be different. There’s still a very strict adherence to very established [ways] of doing things; sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. But what he’s talking about is what I’m looking for, someone, some way, to try something different. That’s strange. That takes an individual movie, or views into account, rather than just committing, 6 months in advance, to a strategy that you can’t change, no matter how things go.
I’m just curious about why there’s no flexibility. You can change anything. It’s all 0’s and 1’s. With the click of a button, you can do whatever you want. Instead, they just do the same thing that someone did last time.
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There’s an argument to be made that Disney, Marvel, Netflix and such, are actually making it more difficult for artists, like yourself, to do what you want to do creatively. Do you have any thoughts on that and how things are evolving?
I really don’t. I don’t know anything about the way they do business. I don’t know. I mean, I’ve never worked for Netflix. I don’t know anything about the way they approach anything. I have worked for Disney and I think the Disney+ streaming sounds great. Lots of stuff on there I want to watch. But there’s lots of stuff on Netflix that I still want to watch too.
So Netflix has never reached out to your or anything about possibly collaborating?
Never.
As a writer and filmmaker, are you consciously thinking about how you’re going to tackle each new project? Do you have a bunch of ideas you have to get out as your career moves forward?
It depends. I mean, some of the movies are kind of in response to the last one, to pivot and do something different. Like with “Golden Exits” that was a very quiet movie, and it gave way very quickly for making this movie, which is a very big loud movie. But I feel like because this one is 5 little movies, this one kind of used up everything I had in the reservoir. And for the first time in many years, I find myself at the end of a process without 5 or 6 things that I really, really want to put into the next one but I didn’t get to put in this movie. I kind of did it all, between these 5 sequences.
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Well, you did so much with all the scenes, it almost felt to me like they were doubling themselves, like a repeated chorus perhaps?
One of the things I wrote, very early in the script, is that the movie reverberates like an echo. Anything that feels that, dialog, shots, an edit, facial reactions, anything that doubles, or triples up on itself, was either written into the script or tracked very deliberately while filming.
“Her Smell” is in theaters now.