‘Strange Darling’ Director JT Mollner On Creating His Technicolor Nightmare [Fantastic Fest 2023]
JT Mollner’s Strange Darling is a fascinating experiment in form and telling a story out of order. Starring a stunning Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner, Mollner’s approach to time weaves a fascinating tale about consent, sexual empowerment, and subverting gender expectations one chapter at a time. Its technicolor approach to serial killers and desire is certain to be a conversation starter, particularly in regard to its final moments.
Read the full synopsis below:
A relentless predator tracks an injured woman through the Oregon wilderness. The woman does her best to outsmart her attacker, but with each tense moment, she grows weaker and less able. He’s a man on a mission, and it’s only a matter of time before he captures his prey.
Dread Central spoke with Mollner and musician Z Berg—who wrote and performed all of the original songs for the film—at Fantastic Fest about crafting this strange world, controlling color, and writing haunting music in a 100-year-old haunted house.
Dread Central: Well, congratulations first of all on Strange Darling. What a wild ride and what a wild experience. I’m trying to think of how to ask questions about this movie without spoiling anything. Can you tell me anything that won’t spoil it about where this idea came from and why you wanted to tackle serial killers and true crime?
JT Mollner: Sure. Yeah. I mean, think one of my obsessions is finding genres that I like and grew up with, and finding just a different approach. That’s the challenge for me. So my first movie was a Western and I didn’t want to do it unless we could find a different approach, which is something a lot of people are doing with Westerns now. But Strange Darling is a serial killer movie, but how do we show some humanity perspective? Maybe take some of the traditional sociopathy out of the equation and just get more into a day [in their life]. What if a serial killer falls in love? Or what if a serial killer feels these emotions? And just putting those ingredients into the equation and seeing what happens with a serial killer in those circumstances.
DC: So Z, how did you approach writing those songs for this film? How many songs are there?
Z Berg: 11, so if you start this movie and you don’t like my voice, you’re going to be bummed. Honestly, it feels a little bit like a fever dream to even remember how these songs were written, because a lot of these recordings, we had the first conversation, I recorded all night and sent you the demo. So I had to recently relearn how to play them. But it was fun.
At the time my music partner and I lived in this really crazy house. It’s a hundred-year-old Victorian saltbox house that kind of should be condemned. And around it are two empty lots, the freeway, and a massive Target parking lot. And it’s super haunted, the whole vibe. There’s the sound of the loud freeway kind of in all of the recordings, which just kind of sounds like ghosts or wind. I read the script and then I was just possessed to write song after song, and anytime he wanted to put someone else’s song in it. I was like, “Fuck that. Let me write some more.”
JM: She really did. I have this theory that when somebody is intentionally under pressure, it’s hard to come up with a hit or something that’s catchy in a way, or something that’s haunting, which is what we wanted. To come up with something haunting and sad and beautiful, you get really lucky. So I thought if I ask Z to write all of these songs now, she’s not going to come up with songs that resonate in that way. Then she started sending me songs, and every one of them was my favorite song of hers when I got it. And then the next one she would send was my new favorite song of hers. And the next one. It was just perfect. We had the unique opportunity to be cutting in these temps that she was sending. We were fitting them in the movie as we were shooting.
ZB: I feel like I was there for shooting. I feel like I was involved, but I wasn’t. So I was writing these songs in a vacuum, but I just kind of knew exactly what [Strange Darling] was and what they were supposed to be. It’s a weird thing. It’s not a normal process, and I’ve never had anything like it in my life. I mean, generally, the constant in my art is that people don’t like it. Every time I sent him a song and he loved it, I was just like, “What upside-down world am I living in?”
DC: So wait, did the title Strange Darling come first, or did the song come first?
ZB: The title came first
DC: Okay. And then you wrote the song?
ZB: It’s also the last thing I sent him. It’s the first thing I wrote, and then I got really embarrassed and thought it was really stupid. So I didn’t send it to him for months. And then finally I was, “Well, I did this thing.”
DC: Pivoting from the music, I wanted to talk about the way you use color in this movie, the color blocking, and it’s almost technicolor at some parts, especially in the garden at the house. It feels like almost like The Wizard of Oz.
JM: The colors were really important to us because I knew we wanted to evoke certain emotions, and I felt like the colors were going to get us there. So the whole thing was a dream. I wanted a really good production designer, and I knew the colors we wanted to keep control of. And I had never had the opportunity to work with a great production designer. I worked with a great production designer, but I didn’t have much input in my other stuff.
When I first started working with Chris [Robin Bell] as an editor, I told him, “I just need somebody who knows the technical stuff, who can push buttons. I know where I want to cut my movie.” And then we started working together and I realized what it is to work with a great editor because even though I know where I want to cut the movie, this guy knows better. So he’ll be like, “If you want to do that, this is the way to get there. That’s even better.”
So the same thing happened with Priscilla Elliot [the production designer]. I went and talked to her and we went to see Lost Highway together. But I said, “We want to control color here.” Priscilla and I wanted only primary colors and reds and blue and blacks for certain things and reds for these reasons. And she said, “Well, if you want to control color that much, why is there a woman running in teal hospital scrubs opening? You said, no tertiary colors. You’ve got teal hospital scrubs.” Well, I said, “That’s just one scene and I think it’ll look great.” And she goes, “This is exactly what every director does. They say they want to control color and then they want to make an exception. Something’s going to look pretty.” And she says, “Do you really want to control color or do you not?”
And I went back and I changed it to red. So she’s wearing red hospital scrubs. From that point forward, [Elliot] kept me disciplined and Strange Darling wouldn’t look the way it does [without her]. When she’s walking up to the house of all those flowers, we wanted blood on the flower bed. We talked about that from the beginning. And so all those flowers were planted by Priscilla and her team. They’re all brought in on trucks. And we wanted that feeling that you’re talking about.
DC: Paired with the couple that is just super weird. And I love ’em. I wanted to hear about the food scene and how that got constructed because boy, oh boy, was it such a good moment.
JM: So that breakfast scene is supposed to be sort of, it’s supposed to be eaten. This is a perfect example of a couple that’s been together for decades. And in most movies, you see the worst possible outcome after a couple’s been together for decades. This is the best possible outcome. These people truly love each other. They’re truly enjoying their Sunday breakfast. This is their version of, maybe they’re, who knows why they’re so hungry. They just enjoying this fucking breakfast. I imagine they have it every day.
I wanted to set up this idyllic thing so the stakes would be high. You knew the storm’s coming and this perfect existence, this perfect Sunday morning, their version of perfection, something’s coming for it. And I thought that the contrast there would be really nice. And Barbara Hershey and Ed Begley Jr., I mean, who better for those roles?
DC: Where can I get that painting with the two of them joyfully embracing in the hallway?
JM: Call somebody at Miramax and see if they’ll give me that painting. That was Priscilla Elliot, too. I wanted to have a picture of them up there. She says, “What if we had a painting that they commissioned?”
DC: I love Priscilla.
JM: She’s amazing. Oh my God, and the Blue Angel Hotel sign. I told Priscilla I wanted to have a sign, and this was sort of a look, and we looked at some other. Then she designed that and built that massive neon sign.
Categorized:Interviews
