I feel like building mystery in the way you did, it can’t be easy to do. I’m talking about the question of what happened between the brothers. What’s your process for deciding what to reveal when?
Lerner: We didn’t even decide what was going to be the big thing that happened between them until we got to the scene. We knew something huge happened between them.
O’Brien: At first we were like, “Can we really do that?” That’s a pretty major thing to have happen, but we realized it’s totally in line with the story because it’s about people being like their parents. They would make the same mistakes their parents made. It makes a lot of sense. We see it time and time again through families. The sins of our fathers they get passed down through generations.
There are a lot of secrets in families. One of the actresses jokingly termed the film a family thriller, but it’s really true that there’s a lot of things that get kept hidden from people. The writing was set up so that there’s always somebody watching somebody with them knowing that they’re being observed. Actually, in the theater just now, there was one shot that it didn’t occur to me what it was doing until I was watching, but Joe’s watching Adelaide as she gets out of her truck and goes to the thrift shop. They’re talking on the phone and she doesn’t know that he’s watching her. The next shot it cuts to is over Adelaide’s shoulder in the woods and Joe’s walking by and he doesn’t know he’s being watched, so now she’s watching him. There’s this game of cat and mouse as they’re both trying to find out about each other.
Lerner: Later you get to watch her watch him sleep. If you could isolate certain scenes of this movie it could be a detective film. Hitchcock is one of my favorite old directors and you’ve got a little Vertigo. The fact that the family member at the end is named Rebecca is not a coincidence. She kind of mysteriously looms over the whole movie. We watched The Celebration and we watched The Long Goodbye, which is family drama with a horrible secret. A darkly comic mystery.
O’Brien: There’s a lot of levity in the film. We wanted it to be fun. It had to be a fun journey for there to be temptation. These characters who do these bad things, they’re the devil, but the devil’s really alluring. So we wanted there to be lightheartedness and jokes in it, too. As well as these deep dramatic questions.
Lerner: To your question about how in the writing process we came up with what the big secret would be about what split the family apart, what it ends up being just beckons back to the idea of inevitability and fate. Are these two condemned to basically repeat what happened with the older generation? Almost the futility of can we break out of it? Can he make his choices, or is he condemned to now have the desires that the older generation had? It’s a cool thing to think about that we don’t have the answers for.
O’Brien: We were aware, we knew we were doing this small story about a family that takes place within a family, but we knew that the concept of inherited grudges and people learning to like or dislike people based on how their parents felt or how their grandparents felt, that has a lot to do with a lot of conflict in foreign countries. We realized that it was much bigger than just this family setting.
Lerner: That’s kind of where the title came from too. People have been asking me a lot about that. What Katharine just said, when we were talking about the bigger themes this movie is about, that popped out. The idea of hatred being passed down or inherited involuntarily. Almost subconsciously. We didn’t want to do a movie about cultures passing down hatred, which they definitely do, but on a smaller scale there’s family doing it.
No one’s really a good guy, no one’s really a villain. Everyone’s likable, but doing questionable things. How’d you tip-toe that line with your character?
Cross: Just trying to keep him a real person. Making sure the decisions are coming from a real place. When you meet Davis, I don’t think that him and his girlfriend are really sleeping together. I think that the physicality of their relationship is gone. I think he’s missing that in his life in addition to what Justin was just talking about. Not having the freedom in the sense of spontaneity in his life that he’d like. When you pull back the curtain and reveal the other side of his family, I think he wants to dive headfirst into all of that. To experience it. To change his life up. To go on an adventure. He just gets way more than he bargained for. Bites off more than he can chew.
Lerner: I always like approaching conflict with the idea that they’re both right. Both Ricky Jay and Richard Schiff. They’re both correct, they just disagree. It’s not necessarily good or bad. It’s difference of opinion. Then it’s just about trying to argue each side as well as possible. Like in debate class. You really should be able to debate each side of an argument. I think that’s our job too. It leaves more for us to talk about later. It’s not easy, but I’ve never seen a film that I’ve really thought about later that didn’t at least try to take on something that wasn’t that easy.
What are you guys working on? What’s coming up?
Cross: I just did a movie called Everything Beautiful is Far Away with an actress named Julia Garner. First time filmmaking team, a married couple. Their names are Pete Ohs and Andrea Sisson.
When’s that coming out?
Cross: I don’t know, we’ll have to see what happens. We aren’t even finished filming.
Lerner: Julia Garner’s great. She’s a great actress.
Are you guys working on anything?
O’Brien: I have my next feature I’m going to be directing. Looking to go into production next spring or summer. It’s based on a true story about a friend who was schizophrenic and a group of friends chasing him around trying to get him back on track, back on the rails. Sort of darkly comedic. Justin and I love working together. We’re like brother and sister. we’ve known each other for so long.
Lerner: We met, starting writing this script, while at the Weinstein Company 8 years ago.
O’Brien: We call each other to help draft important emails now.
Lerner: Or texts.
O’Brien: Exactly. We’ll do something again in the future I’m sure.
Lerner: Katharine is a very talented director who just also happens to write. And we’re so close that this collaboration came very organically. But we also think it’s important to work on our own things and be there for each other in support. All great movements across film history came with a very small school or group of closely-knit filmmakers who were always, constantly writing something for them, producing for the other person. If you even look at the guys in New York doing Martha Marcy May Marlene, they all rotate. Each one produces one, then one directs, one writes. I think a lot of filmmakers work best that way.
O’Brien: It’s great to change up the roles, too. I worked in art direction for this one, and it was really nice to inhabit that place and find out how much you’re telling the story through small little decisions and stuff. Justin’s such a great leader in terms of communicating his vision, it was nice to go through the process of making a movie without a heart attack every day.
Lerner: I also found that I would not want to do this again on my own movie, but I raised the majority of the money on this one and I learned how to do it on this, I’d love to do it on somebody else’s film.
As far as stuff I’m working on, The Automatic Hate is the second film of a planned informal trilogy about taboo relationships. My first one was called Girlfriend. It was my first feature, played Toronto a few years back. It was a story about a young man with Down Syndrome who starts having an emotional and physical relationship with a young single mother. Obviously the one that you’ve just seen was part two. I’m writing a third right now that’s equally as challenging but in a completely different and new way. I’ve also written two scripts that are at different phases of putting together.
I’d like to make the third part before I work on the other two, but we also had a plan to make Automatic Hate before Girlfriend. So, I’m open to whatever comes. I’m writing a social satire set in the deep south right now. And also a mystery thriller, well my version of one, which is never straight up, that takes place both in the U.S. and Spain. I lived in Spain for a long time after college and I have always wanted to shoot something there using the language. Those are three projects that I’m going to continue to push forward as we all push forward after our world premiere here at SXSW with this movie. We’ll see what happens.
That concludes our interview, but we’d like to thank Justin, Katharine, and Joseph for taking the time to talk with us.