By Jesse Dixon
Lenore When a controversial influencer suddenly disappears, a terminally online sycophant goes hunting for answers, but comes face-to-face with the monstrosity of his own sins.
Jesse Dixon: Thank you so much for chatting with me today, David, and congrats on both your debut feature and its inclusion at the Fantastic Film Festival. It must be an amazing feeling to put all that work into a project and see it up on the big screen with a packed house.
David Ward: I don’t think there is anything I could have done to prepare me for how that would feel. That’s the kind of thing where you just have to wing it. As soon as the film goes out to the audience, it doesn’t belong to me anymore. It’s not mine. I find that really liberating and exciting. There’s something really nice about just sitting there in an audience and engaging with the film as an audience member, rather than the guy who made the thing. So it’s really nice to just sit there with it and see how people receive it, and how they react to it. And you don’t get that until you get an audience in front of it. So, it’s been an awesome experience so far.
JD: I was doing a bit of research, and you’re very seasoned in the arts, from acting, dance, choreography. I’m curious, when did you first get the desire to pursue film, to become a filmmaker?
DW: I’ve always loved movies. My mum and dad started taking me to movies and theater as soon as I was old enough, to get in the door of those places. I grew up in Geelong, and lived in Geelong until my early 20s. Geelong has a really vibrant performing arts scene, which I was really heavily involved in as a performer, as a director, as a writer. But as far as how film became the thing that I ended up in – I did media studies consistently throughout high school, and it was always my best subject, it was always the thing that felt kind of effortless, in a way. I took a year off after graduating high school. I wrote a play and staged it, and then went off to film school in 2011, and that’s where it all sort of started for me.
JD: You’ve made some acclaimed short films in the past as well. When did you realize that you were ready, or felt like it was the right time to have a go at a feature film?
DW: It’s something I’d always wanted to do, you grow up going to the cinemas, and you don’t see short films, you see feature films. And I’ve also written and directed plays, so I have a sense of how to tell a story within 90 minutes or 2 hours which is quite different to a short film, as you know.
A short film can really only contain one or two ideas that you really have to hone in on, but a feature can cover a hell of a lot more. So in my late 20s, I’d been working in the industry for a while, I’d made short films, I’d made commercials, I’d made music videos, directed a lot of theater. And I just thought, well, this seems like the logical next step, to go up into whatever the next echelon of storytelling is. I had done my dash with short-form storytelling and really wanted the space to play with a larger idea. Lenore made sense as a first feature film because it’s so self-contained and small in so many ways, so it was very feasible to do as a first feature.
JD: When you were coming up with the idea for Lenore, were there any particular films that influenced you, or perhaps things on the internet?
DW: Well, the basis of the film is an unproduced stage play that I started working on in 2015/16, so this thing’s been cooking for quite some time now. Obviously the stage play version of Lenore never happened, and I just took the script away and kept working on it. But to answer your question specifically about whether or not I was thinking about any particular films, absolutely.
Videodrome‘s a big film for me because that’s a film about the treachery of images and media persuasion, which is really relevant to the subject matter of Lenore. There’s also a lot of J-horror in Lenore. I was thinking a lot about things like Ringu, Pulse, if you know the films of Kyoshi Kurosawa, generally speaking. And there’s a touch of Michael Haneke in there as well, especially Benny’s Video, as Haneke’s work is largely about surveillance in a lot of ways. Oh and there was another one that I’ve just remembered, have you ever seen The Vanishing?
JD: No, I haven’t.
DW: It’s a Dutch film from director George Sluizer. I think that it’s the best thriller ever made. A thriller is sometimes very adjacent to a whodunit, and we weren’t interested in doing a whodunit. One of the cool things about The Vanishing (Spoorloos) is within the first 15 minutes of that film, you know what happened and who did it. But you don’t know why they did it, and you don’t know how they came to do it. And then the rest of the film is about discovering that. And for whatever reason, that format of a thriller really works for me. Less of a whodunit, more of a why-done-it. So those were the kinds of films that I was thinking about.
JD: I’ll have to check it out! Now, you co-wrote Lenore with Josie Hess. What was it like working with a co-writer, and how does it differ from writing something by yourself?
DW: Josie was the producer on one of my early short films. We went through film school together, we stayed in contact throughout the years, and I love the work that they do. During the pandemic I reached out to them and said, look, I’m really stuck on this thing, I feel like I’m onto something, but there’s a lot missing here. Would you be interested in coming on and helping me, figure this thing out? And they were like, yeah, let’s do it.
We spent most of the pandemic just tearing apart the script that I had already written and then rebuilding it.
JD: As I was watching, I was really impressed by the physical performance of the lead (Nicholas Jaquinot) and his use of the limited space. I’m curious, did your experience as a choreographer help you when directing actors?
DW: Very much so. But it would be disingenuous of me to take too much credit for what Nick’s doing in the film physically, because that’s very much his invention. He shed that weight, he shaved his head, so many of the things that are identifiable about that character are ideas that Nick had about the character. We talked in terms of insects a lot, as far as his (Max’s) physicality goes. That there’s something almost vermin-like about the performance, he’s like a praying mantis, or a bug, or something like that.
There’s a shot in the film where he’s sitting on the middle of the floor and he stands up to answer the phone, and the way he stands up is his arms kind of crook over his legs and he comes up off of his haunches, My direction to him was think praying mantis, think spider going to attack. And he really took that physicality and ran with it.
But as far as how the dance and the choreography aspect of my work comes in, I’m very conscious of behavior in a film. There’s a beautiful David Fincher quote, which is that film is behavior over time, and that’s not just the behavior that we make audibly, or the conversations that we have. It’s the way that we shuffle on our feet when we’re uncomfortable, it’s the way that we wring our hands when we’re nervous. Those sorts of behaviors are things that I’m always very cognizant of. This is such an obvious thing to say, but it probably bears repeating that so much of character is embedded in the body.
JD: And what about the character of Lenore? Did that come from the actor (Ruby Duncan) or was that based on any online creators?
DW: Yes, it’s both of those things. When I was pitching the film to investors I made a lookbook, and there was a big chunk just dedicated to all of the inspirations for this Lenore character. Before Ruby was even attached to the role, Josie and I had some pretty clear ideas about who this woman was, and what kind of art she made. We were thinking about her as a hybrid of the pop star Poppy and Marina Abramovic, the performance artist. She’s a mainstream performer with a transgressive underpinning. But then, of course, when Ruby was cast in the role, the role changed almost completely to fit on her.
Obviously, fundamental things about the character didn’t change extensively, but the specifics of what kind of music does she make? How does she dress? How does she speak? What kind of a writer is she as this Lenore persona? All of that is shaped largely by Ruby.
And it was important for me that Ruby have autonomy in that role because there’s some really difficult things for the character to do, or to go through in the film. She had to feel completely safe and completely secure in the role.
JD: The protagonist, Max, is very connected in Lenore’s online fandom, and yet we view him as an extremely lonely and isolated character. Do you think this is common amongst people who, you would say, are chronically online, or is it possible to form genuine, fulfilling relationships over the internet?
DW: Oh, that’s an interesting question. I’ll answer the second part of it first. Yes, I think it is absolutely possible to form meaningful relationships with people online. The difference here is that I don’t think Max is actually interested in a meaningful relationship. I think he’s interested in something he can control. It’s one of the things the film is most interested in, is the sort of blurring of the boundary between audience and artist. Especially in the world that we live in now, where, you know, you and I can have this conversation remotely, or I can reach out to Nick Sadler from Daughters to do the score, just by tracking him down on Instagram and messaging him. And there are good things about that, but I think we have to be quite careful about that sort of stuff because it’s very easy to get obsessed, and for that obsession to parlay into ownership. And it’s so easy to think that once you understand somebody’s image, you own them, and I’m sure lots of people find themselves in that kind of dissociated place. Parasociality is what the film’s interested in, and what the film is critical of.
JD: You often hear people say, like, oh, I’m obsessed with Lady Gaga, or I’m obsessed with this album, or this other thing. And your film makes me think that some people are saying that lightly, that there’s a difference between just being a fan of someone and being truly obsessed with them.
DW: One of the guys who Nick and I kept coming back to in research was a guy called Ricardo Lopez. Ricardo Lopez very famously stalked the singer Bjork in the 90s. His interest in her was in her as an artist, predominantly. But, for whatever reason, he started to feel like Bjork was communicating directly with him, and Bjork was completely unaware of this, had no idea that this guy was. Ricardo Lopez also recorded a lot of video diaries of himself all throughout this period, so Nick and I watched that stuff really extensively to try and find out exactly where that tipping point is that you referred to.
And I think the tipping point, as far as I could tell, the tipping point for somebody like Ricardo Lopez was when Bjork started dating the artist Matthew Barney. And that was when Lopez’s interest in Bjork went from largely innocuous to actually obsessive and dangerous. Where he felt like the object of his desire had done something without his permission. And so, his obsession with her got a lot more violent. He tried to mail a letter bomb to her, which got intercepted. And the story ends, basically, with Lopez, taking his own life on camera. We tried to crystallize all of this in the Sam character, in a way. There’s a speech that Sam has when he’s being interviewed by Max, where he says, ‘I caught myself getting angry at her for not asking my permission first’. I imagine that a lot of the time, what tips fandom from being kind of benign and innocuous into properly dangerous is when the audience member feels like they’ve been betrayed by the object of their desire.
JD: I was wondering, obviously you developed this idea a couple of years ago so maybe this didn’t come into your mind, but as I was watching it I was thinking about the manosphere. Although Max isn’t like one of those boisterous alpha males typically associated with this idea, did that idea come into his character at all when you were kind of developing that?
DW: It’s interesting, because if we were making the film now it would be ridiculous for us to not address that, because that’s where the manosphere is living. It’s living in this kind of hyper-testosterone, alpha and sigma-coded sort of space, but Max is not that. The idea for the film has existed since 2015/16 and started writing the film in earnest officially during the pandemic, so the fact that the film has remained as tacitly relevant as it has all throughout all of this is either a testament to the film, or a real blight against us as humanity.
JD: Or both.
DW: Maybe it’s both, and in fact, hopefully it is both, but, no, I think if we were making the film now we would have to address the looksmaxxing, alpha/sigma sort of thing, but Max is very much incel-coded anyway. And in some ways I’m very lucky that I was born when I was, because I dodged all of that fucking red pill bullshit. But somebody like Max didn’t, and a lot of these men – in fact, I’ll generalize, and I’ll say all of these men – are I think a really dangerous combination of complete and utter self-loathing/disgust in themselves and an equally powerful sense of entitlement and narcissism. And those two things shouldn’t live side by side with each other, and yet somehow they do in these men. Which is a really fucking dangerous combination, because those guys are liable to do all sorts of things, and all sorts of dangerous, stupid things. I talk to a dear friend of mine about this quite a lot, and I think so much of the bad shit that men do is less about women and more about other men.
JD: What would you say then to young male audiences that may see your film, what’s the main message that you’d want them to take away for them to not misread Max’s actions and go down a bad path?
DW: No, absolutely, and yes it could be something like that. For me, the film is about just how far desperately lonely people will go to feel connected. While the film doesn’t really provide any solution to the problem, ultimately what I would like for men to get out of it is that we’re actually a bit more responsible. A lot of the time, we’re more responsible for our own torment than we would like to admit.
This is very much a hell of Max’s own making, and everybody is just a few bad decisions away from becoming the thing that they hate, or the thing that they say that they hate. What I’m ultimately getting at, and especially for a male audience, is that you might be living in a hell of your own making and the only way out is through community. The only way out is through other people.
If there is anything to take away if you’re a male audience: be careful what you fantasise about, and if you’re already living in something like this, you may be more responsible for it than you want to admit. And the only way out of it is through connecting with other people.
JD: Absolutely right. What’s next for you, David? Do you have anything coming up? Is there gonna be a play adaptation, perhaps, of the film!
DW: Well, at the complete opposite end of the spectrum, something that we have a big gap in in Australian cinema is we don’t have a properly great film about Australian Rules football. So, I’m working on a big, epic sports drama. Big, sweeping family epic set against the backdrop of regional footy.
But I’m also really open to working on assignment. I’d love to adapt novels. There’s all kinds of things that I want to do. I love horror films, I love genre films, I would love to stay in that space, but there’s a lot of different kind of stories I’m interested in telling.
JD: I’m so keen for that Aussie Rules epic! Thank you so much for speaking to me today David, I really appreciate your insights, and congratulations on the film!
Lenore had its Australian Premiere at the Fantastic Film Festival, follow @lenorefilm on Instagram to keep updated on screenings!