Filmmaker Interview: Andrew Stasiulis and Eric Marsh

The following interview should appear at Time Out Chicago sometime in the next few days.

One of the highlights of the film-going year so far will occur on Friday, April 21 when local filmmakers Eric Marsh and Andrew Stasiulis quietly debut their feature film Orders at DePaul University. This surreal war film follows the adventures of a nameless soldier (Keith D. Gallagher) as he wanders the less-than-hostile streets of the Chicago suburbs fighting a faceless enemy in a series of scenes shot through with a potent absurdist humor. I recently spoke to Andrew and Eric about their film ahead of its local premiere.

MGS: Where did the idea for this crazy movie come from?

AS: I went to grad school at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland where I became really into the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet. I came across a novel called In the Labyrinth and I had this dream of adapting it. So when I came back from grad school I started writing a pure adaptation of the book. I sort of sat there and, after I’d written the adaptation, I was like, “I’m in love with the ideas in this story but it needs to become something different. It needs to become something American, something contemporary, and my own.” So then I just kind of threw that out and took the basic premise of a soldier wandering around, this sort of odyssey-like structure, and started writing out notes and scenes and fragments. Then when I reconnected with Eric after coming back – we had worked on a couple shorts together – one day I was like, “Hey, do you want to help me do this?” So Eric helped me put it into some kind of script.

EM: You should talk more about the idea.

AS: Yeah (laughing). I was a senior when 9/11 happened. I felt like my class, my generation, that was born in ’84, we were the 18-year-olds who were watching the Towers come down and knowing it was a Pearl Harbor-esque moment. A lot of my friends signed up – for patriotic reasons, for the “poverty draft,” or whatever it was – but a lot of my friends were galvanized by that moment. I didn’t. I’m completely 100% glad I didn’t make that decision but I stayed close with all my friends who did and I watched what they went through and I watched what America was going through and I was becoming enraged by a lot of what I was seeing on the screens, the combat image of the War on Terror. And in making the film I wanted to encapsulate the idea of an image of war, an experience of war, that is so much more internal than external and how subjective it all really is.

MGS: It occurred to me that it could be seen as an allegory for PTSD and the things that soldiers bring home with them.

AS: I think that that reading of the film was one we welcomed. We wanted to create an open text, something people could engage with on multiple levels. When we were starting to shoot it, we just had little bits of footage here and there. We had some on Eric’s Vimeo page, some teaser footage, and my Dad, he’s such a proud papa, he’d be showing it to every one of his patients – he’s a dentist. They’re sitting there and he’ll pull it up on his computer. “You wanna see what my son and his buddy are doing?” I was in the office once and there was a woman that came in. And she’s now the caretaker of her nephew who’s a vet. He was wounded and he lost a leg and he’s suffering from all kinds of combat trauma. She’s a sheriff’s dispatcher so this is a salt-of-the-earth kind of lady. And my Dad pulls this thing up and I’m thinking, “Oh this woman’s going to be like, ‘What the fuck are you assholes doing? This isn’t a joke.’” And she started crying and she pointed and said, “That’s my nephew. That’s him. He’s still in full battle rattle. Even though he’s home, he’s not entirely present. He’s still haunted by this other place.” If that’s the reaction we’re getting from somebody – and no offense to her at all in any way, shape or form but she doesn’t seem like anyone who knows anything about Robbe-Grillet or French mid-century modernism – I feel like we’re getting something across here.

MGS: The opening scene feels like a microcosm of the film as a whole. It seems like a battle scene and then you have this hilarious reveal of the well-manicured lawn and the riding lawnmower comes into view. Why did you want to juxtapose images of soldiers in combat with this kind of idyllic suburban landscape?

AS: We were thinking of collisions and disruptions, collisions of the real with the surreal or the artificial – losing the ability to differentiate between what’s going on and what maybe you’re imagining. Look, I’m a fucking huge student of Baudrillard, man. I’m all about the “death of the real.” I get it. So, for us, it was meant to be a savage coupling between the aesthetics of war and violence and cookie-cutter suburban Middle America, the Leave it to Beaver kind of thing.

EM: This appealed to me as well because I grew up in Glen Ellyn, he grew up in Elmhurst. Obviously, we’re both film history obsessives. We like everything but we like dude shit (laughs): war movies, and all of the Hollywood action movies. So that was common ground for us. War, in reality, is televisual for Americans. We don’t see war, we don’t experience war ever. When was the last time there was war in America? Hundreds of years ago. So bringing a bunch of dudes with assault rifles to Elmhurst, that image of soldiers in the fucking Chicago suburbs? I get this project. And, of course, it’s almost like real life one upped us because the militarization of police has made those images quite common. We started the film in 2012 and now it’s like some sheriff’s department has a Humvee and assault rifles. But it seemed sort of daring when he pitched it to me.

MGS: The filmmaker I thought of the most while watching it was David Lynch. Was he an influence?

EM: That’s something that sort of happened organically because I think once we cast Scott Morton as the Dad in the family, from the minute we saw him in a casting session, this guy’s got this David Lynch/otherworld quality to him. He’s so great. We started getting those vibes and kind of ran with it.

MGS: The family scenes reminded me of Eraserhead. I loved the barbecue scene where the main character isn’t able to man the grill. It’s really funny but it’s also disturbing. It shows anxiety about not being able to fulfill a social role.

AS: I think in a lot of the notes that I brought to Eric, it was just a lot of moments like that. It wasn’t a plot. For me, it’s like “Think of iconic, Middle-American suburban activities and how can we now make this uncomfortable. How can we make this somewhat twisted?” One of my favorite scenes is when everyone’s at this “Welcome Home” thing and everyone starts stuffing their face with watermelon. Growing up, it’s summer in the suburbs and you’re eating dinner, it’s like, “Where’s the watermelon?” Everyone’s eating watermelon so we’re taking it to this almost Leone-esque level of disgust. Eating is like sex: it’s pretty ugly when you think about it. As great as it feels, watching someone else do it can be horrifying, especially with the camera’s ability to make small things large and large things small.

Orders screens for free at DePaul University’s Loop Campus at 14 E. Jackson, Lower Level Rm. 105 at 6:30pm on Friday, April 21. Stasiulis and Marsh will be present to discuss the film. You can sample teaser footage from the film here.