In a sense, writer-director Steven Shainberg is the last of his kind. In a time where commercial blockbusters and franchise sequels reign supreme, he continues to create “movies about people”.
After winning the Special Jury Prize at Sundance for 2002’s Secretary, and creating the passion project, Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, Shainberg took a ten-year hiatus from writing and directing. But he returns now with Rupture, in which a single mother is abducted by a mysterious organization.
Shainberg co-wrote Rupture with Brian Nelson (30 Days of Night, Hardy Candy), and the film stars Noomi Rapace (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Prometheus).
In conversation with Creative Screenwriting, Shainberg spoke about his inspiration for movies about people, growing up with psychiatrist parents, and the disease of filmmaking.
Noomi Rapace as Renee and Peter Stormare as Terrence in Rupture, an AMBI Media Group release.
Photo courtesy of AMBI Media Group.
What originally led you into filmmaking?
Steven Shainberg
When I was in college, I was taking a photography class with a very great photographer named Joel Sternfeld. I was interested in landscape photography, but I was also interested in theater, writing, and literature. I ended up writing a screenplay for fun to see what it would be like, and amazingly enough, by crazy circumstances it made its way to a Hollywood producer. The movie almost got made when I was only 23 years old.
That took me out to LA at a very young age, where I was exposed to the difficulties of making independent movies very quickly. It was a quick lesson in filmmaking.
Your films are iconically different. What films inspired you to get into filmmaking?
The main thing that influenced me was that I had an aunt who was a painter, and I was really into visual art.
But I also had two parents who were psychiatrists, and their dining room conversations were about their patients. So I got a front row seat to the complexities and evolutions of characters. More than anything, that’s really at the heart of what interests me about filmmaking: people and their minds, how their minds work, and how that gets expressed, one way or another.
Actually, something that Joel Sternfeld said, which struck me as a crazy thing to say, was, “No great photographer was ever interested in photography.” I remember grappling with that for a very long time, and thinking, “how could that possibly be true?”
Then I remember thinking, well, it’s a media to express what interests you. And it’s what interests you that’s at the heart of things. It’s not the movie, per se. Ultimately, it becomes the movie as you get infatuated with various things within the medium that you’re working in, but at the heart, it’s something below that.
Michael Chiklis as Bald Man and Noomi Rapace as Renee in Rupture, an AMBI Media Group release.
Photo courtesy of AMBI Media Group.
Your films—Secretary, Fur, and Rupture—seem to revolve around personal discovery. Do you usually begin with the idea for a character, or with the outline for a plot?
You know, I don’t begin with either of those. I actually begin with some singular image that goes through my head. It can be something very simple or it can an entire sequence where I’m seeing something happen. That tends to be the seed from which everything else evolves.
The question that I would ask about that image in my head is, “what’s going on here and who is it happening to?” I might not know that for a while, but it tends to emulate the feeling of a room or the look of a landscape, or even a set where no one else is in the room. That’s more how it starts.
Can you think of an example of this?
For Fur Diane Arbus was extremely important to me, for a lot of reasons. Her images were sort of the origin of the aesthetic that has melted with other things by now, but it was very important for me to experience her photographs when I was a kid.
The image was a hairy person—a person covered in hair—which was actually not an image from Diane Arbus, but it seemed like an origin of how to make a movie about Arbus. There have been people like that, with that particular disease, but that movie just started with the idea of a hairy guy.
Then, I started wondering, who is he? What does he represent? Could the movie about Diane Arbus be told about her experience with this guy? All of these questions opened up from that singular thought.
Robert Downey Jr. as Lionel Sweeney in Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
© 2006 New Line Cinema
All three of these films have strong, female leads. What makes you prefer a female protagonist?
I’ll give the same answer as Kieslowski. When Kieslowski made Red, White and Blue, he was asked, “Why did you make three movies with three female protagonists?” He basically said, women are more attractive, so I prefer to look at them, but they’re also more complicated than men. I basically feel that way. I’m more drawn to women. I’m more interested in women.
You spend a hell of a lot of time looking through the lens at somebody, and then again in the cutting room. I haven’t had much of an urge to do that with a guy. That said, I do recognize the trend, so the next couple of movies I’m trying to make will involve a strong, male protagonist.
What was the original inspiration for Rupture?
There’s a Japanese movie by Teshigahara called Woman of the Dunes, which is a captivity movie about a man who is held captive by a woman in the bottom of the sand dunes. It’s an incredibly beautiful movie, and it made me interested in captivity movies. It generates a lot of energy to have someone held against their will. But it also becomes a film about self-discovery and transformation.
If you look at a list of movies that I wanted to make over the years, there will always be a captivity movie on the list. Stephen King’s Misery, with James Caan and Kathy Bates is another captivity movie, where self-discovery is forced upon somebody.
It’s a form that’s been done quite a bit, but the attractiveness for me is that the protagonist is forced to go through some kind of fundamental shift, to discover who they think they are.
Kyôko Kishida as the woman in Woman of the Dunes © 1964 – Toho Film
Rupture almost takes this a step further, as it dissects personal fears. How did you decide which personal fears were best for this protagonist?
The issue there is really a filmic problem. There are as many personal fears as there are people, but you have to be able to show something. You have to be able to put something on screen that is visual and powerful. When you take this film, it has to be, to some extent, iconic.
We as an audience need a backstory that is digestible and communicable, so that eliminated a lot of things that one could be afraid of. There are others mentioned in the script, but we had to decide which ones that the audience would connect with the most quickly.
There’s been a ten-year gap between Rupture and your previous work, during which time you’ve tried to get a project made, but for whatever reason, it didn’t happen. Did those various ideas for other projects come together to make this film, or is it a completely new idea?
This is an anomaly, other than the fact that I do love captivity movies. Everything that I was trying to make during the time between Fur and Rupture are what Hollywood would refer to as “movies about people.” They are the hardest movies to get financed now.
Michael Chiklis as Bald Man and Noomi Rapace as Renee in Rupture, an AMBI Media Group release.
Photo courtesy of AMBI Media Group.
I recently spoke with Ben Younger about his film Bleed For This, and he also had a ten-year gap between films. What inspired you to continue the path of being a filmmaker versus taking a different direction?
Man, I wish I knew the answer to that. I think it’s like a disease. It’s like that quote from Blue Velvet, “You put your disease in me.” When you ask David Lynch what his disease is, he never answers the question. Filmmaking is a disease. Hollywood puts it into you. The size of the screen puts it into you. Your childhood puts it into you.
In my case, the movies I want to make feel like splinters in my eye. Until I make it, it hurts. The only way to make it stop hurting is to make it.
The unfortunate thing is that there are several movies I’m trying to make now that are all splinters in my eye, but it’s very hard to get the financing. It’s very hard to get anybody to pay attention to anything any more, if it’s not a huge payday for the actor or a commercial movie, which the system gravitates towards almost instinctively. It’s a huge problem for people like me, that’s for sure.
Has anything about your style changed over the years?
I’m less interested in rushing through things. I think that’s probably true for a lot of filmmakers as they get older. The culture is just “faster and faster and quicker and quicker,” but that makes me want to be more contemplative. It makes me want to take my time.
I also have more confidence now in terms of staging the shot and making the audience wait. With Rupture, you don’t know what’s going on for a very long time. The audience does not get any information for a really long time, and that’s the kick of the movie. You’re put in the same positions as Noomi Rapace—she doesn’t know what’s going on and neither do you. I really like that about the movie.
Noomi Rapace as Renee and Kerry Bishé as Dianne in Rupture, an AMBI Media Group release.
Photo courtesy of AMBI Media Group.
Finally, is there anything else you’d like to add about the film that we haven’t already discussed?
It’s a very creepy movie, about finding the best relationship that we can have towards our own fears. We need to learn about our fears. How does each person deal with that? That’s really what the movie is about, on a spiritual level, or a psychological level. I like the fact that the movie can function as a parable and as a really scary movie for people who like scary movies.
“Rupture” is now in theaters and available on demand!
Featured image: Noomi Rapace as Renee in “Rupture”, an AMBI Media Group release. Photo courtesy of AMBI Media Group.
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