Currently showing in cinemas is the darkly-funny, gruesome tale of Piercing, based on the novel by Ryû Murakami (Audition). Directed by Nicolas Pesce, we got the sense that he might just be a horror aficionado, having made his directorial debut in 2016 with The Eyes of My Mother and following Piercing with a reboot of the Japanese classic, Grudge.
Now, after living in Barcelona for three years, if there’s one thing we have to do every year is make the annual pilgrimage to the Sitges Horror Film Festival – so we needed to talk with Nicolas about Sitges, gore and walk-outs.
So, Nic, first things first. Loverboy is (partly) based in Barcelona, so we have to know, have you visited the world famous Sitges Horror Film Festival?!
I have never been and I am so desperate to go. Eyes of my Mother was showing there while I was shooting Piercing. Then Piercing was there while I was shooting Grudge. So I’ve just never been able to go. But I want to go so badly.
You’ll have to come for the zombie walk!
Wait…what?!
Congratulations on Piercing. You must have attended a lot of screenings of it by now. Which has been your favourite?
I loved the audience at Fantastic Fest in Austin. It’s a weird festival that only plays weird movies but the community is always so awesome. Piercing has so many inside jokes that it’s a different experience watching it with people who don’t get those jokes. But it is always fun to watch it with people who see black plastic gloves being pulled onto someone’s hand and know exactly what it means. There are all these things where I think I’m the only person that finds it funny but when I’m sitting there with an audience who laugh at the same things – it’s a very satisfying experience. Fantastic Fest are people that just love off-kilter shit and I always feel like I make my movies for that kind of audience. But Sundance is always a weird bag because I always feel like the weird kid in the room. Everyone has all these movies that they have taken so seriously and I’m always laughing at the bloody stuff.
It’s pretty dark. Have you had anyone walk out yet?
Yeah, but that always happens and that’s the best! With my first movie, the walkouts happened because sometimes it was too violent, sometimes it was too slow and sometimes people are just like, ‘Oh shit, I didn’t realise I was seeing a subtitled movie.’ But with Piercing, if someone is walking out, it’s 99% most likely because of the violence. The cool thing about it though, and this is by design, is that the violence in Piercing that we show onscreen, is non-life-threatening violence. It is violence that can be mended by stitches at worst.
We’re really used to seeing life-threatening violence onscreen, we see people eviscerated and executed so to take something that isn’t as threatening but shoot it in a way that is so in your face and intense, that it feels more threatening is a really interesting thing that I always think of in movies. The severity of violence can be affected by how it’s portrayed and shot.
With Piercing, I am taking non-life-threatening violence and putting it way in your face but in my first movie, The Eyes Of My Mother, I am doing really life-threatening, really gruesome violence and doing it all off-camera. Both films weirdly yield to the same net result.
I heard you say in another interview that you acted out the film with models before filming…
Yeah, very much. I mean what’s funny is that when I read Piercing, there’s something about it that feels like you’re playing with dolls in a doll-house. It’s these two characters in these super-confined spaces acting out these weird little plays. That affected the design of the movie. Everything is on sets and the outside world is made out of miniatures – literally doll-houses. I’m a meticulous planner and if we had had the money to storyboard or if I had had the time to draw it myself, I would have.
We were building all the sets during filming so I didn’t have space for me to take stills in. So I took the blueprints from the production designer and I built all the sets out of foamcore and then literally with Barbie dolls, that I had dressed up to look like the characters, I positioned them in all the sets, took photos, shot the whole movie. We recorded all the actors doing the dialogue, I did rough sound design music. I laid out the whole movie and cut it so everyone could watch it and be like, ‘Oh, ok, this is how this is going to be shot, oh, that doesn’t quite work the way we thought it would.’ It became a really fascinating, problem-solving device. I think the fact that my brain works like that in real life, is a lot of the reason why the scenes with Reed planning the murder are the way they are. That was one of the more challenging parts of the book to translate.
If you are such a meticulous planner, having Mia cast at the last minute must have driven you crazy!
I’m so glad that Mia did it. Now I couldn’t imagine anyone other than her playing that role. Her coming in at the last moment – it definitely changed things but things always work out for the best. For example we shot the movie chronologically so Chris and Mia had met in real life only moments before their characters meet onscreen.
The music is very important and I noticed there were a lot of references to La Dama Rossa within it. So I have a theory….La Dama Rossa revolves around a cycle of a one-hundred-year curse and I was wondering if that was a reference to the cycle of abuse that Reed endured from his mother? Or does it not go that deep?
I mean…that’s good!! Haha…In this case it was a more superficial thing. We knew we wanted to have a musical through-line and not just a total hodge-podge. I wanted to be able to hear themes coming back in the way that old-Hollywood scores do. We needed to find something that had the humour, the romance, the tension and could do all those things but was also obscure enough.
But I always love hearing people’s analysis of stuff because I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s awesome…and don’t be surprised if I steal that from you.’
Our last question we ask everyone. Loverboy is named after the infamous Mariah Carey song. What is your favourite Mariah song?
It’s moments like these that I wish I had more knowledge of Mariah. Oh wait, I once sang her Christmas song for a talent show when I was in middle school. Did I win? It wasn’t a competition, we were millennials, everyone got a turn.
Piercing is available to own now on Digital HD.
