Tribeca 2016: Karl Mueller and Harry Hamlin Preach the Creed of Rebirth
Having recently portrayed a dutiful and overworked employee in festival favorite Bloodsucking Bastards, Fran Kranz slips back into a familiar treadmill lifestyle in Karl Mueller’s latest feature, Rebirth, only this time trading real-life vampires for metaphorical zombies.
Meet Kyle (Kranz), a pen pusher working his butt off in social media, performing the same rigmarole day in and day out, and he’s totally okay with that–that is, until his old friend Zack (Adam Goldberg) shows up out of the blue to invite him to a self-help seminar with an agency called Rebirth. Somewhat skeptical at first, Kyle can’t beat off that niggling curiosity inside of him and packs his weekend suitcase, only to end up lured down “a bizarre rabbit hole of psychodrama, seduction, and violence.”
With Rebirth (review) screening at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, Dread Central caught up with director Karl Mueller and actor Harry Hamlin to talk all about this satirical, yet dark and deeply disturbing perspective of cult dynamics…
DC: So, how did the Tribeca premiere go?
Mueller: It went great! We had a dream audience and everybody laughed where we were hoping they would laugh, and then things got kind of quiet when things got awkward and uncomfortable, as they were supposed to. It was really fun.
DC: Did any audience feedback afterwards in the Q&A come as a big surprise?
Hamlin: Well, I just read a review and it was very existential. The reviewer found metaphors and allegories in the film that were Kafkaesque apparently, so I was pleased with that.
DC: Karl, was it always your intention for Rebirth to play out as a satire, or did it start life as something maybe much darker?
Mueller: It’s a little bit of both I guess. It’s a bit of a beast of its own with the tone. We start out with a very satirical frame of mind looking at the self-help movement and the self-approbation movement, these different things that have cult-like parts to them. But then, as the movie goes along, it gets a little more intense and goes into more thriller territory. As I’m conceiving or writing to create something, I don’t really think whether it’s a satire right now or whatever; I’m just trying to create an interesting story and keep people engaged as they are watching.
DC: Some reviews have picked up on similarities between the Rebirth group’s creed and that of Scientology. Are these similarities the fruit of coincidence, or is everything we see in the film borne out of research?
Mueller: Research is always a starting point and then you have to let invention take over. Rebirth is not specifically about Scientology or any one movement. I mean, that’s kind of the one movement that gets all the press at the moment but there are a lot of groups and they have good and bad qualities and I know a lot of people that are involved in them. Some people will get really good results out of them whilst with other people you have to listen to them talk all about it at dinner parties and it all becomes quite banal. But there’s this world of these movements that has its own way of speaking, its own way of framing how the world works, and I think it’s fascinating to drop a character who doesn’t really have any frame of reference for how that world works into it and have him get lost in that maze.
DC: Harry, you only have a small role in Rebirth, but your scene is certainly one of the most memorable. What was it about Gabe, this guru-like character, that struck a chord with you?
Hamlin: First of all, I thought the script was really different, interesting and funny, and at the same time there was something chilling about it all. Also, I think I had very recently read the book on Scientology which was called Going Clear, and I thought it was an interesting look at that kind of an experience. I’m a little bit older than these guys so I remember Hess very well. There was a whole lot of those things back in the day and I just thought it was really interesting to go back into that realm and explore that. And then to play one of the wackos who was a part of it was even more intriguing to me.
DC: Karl, in the Q&A after the premiere, you said that you felt the actors you brought in played just as big a role in creating the story as you did. I’m guessing you were very open to their suggestions and improvisation?
Mueller: For sure. My dream is that the actors get so locked into the parts that they can make the vibe we’re going for in the scenes come alive. If they’re actually feeling it and feeling open in the moment, then whatever is going to come out of them is going to be more truthful than what you just wrote into a word processing program three months ago. At the same time, the movie is a very structured journey, a sort of thrill ride, so we had to stay pretty tightly in those confines. There are seven or so set pieces and they’re fairly long and they’re “rangey” and the actors get to explore really different places there so we needed it all to feel alive.
DC: Rebirth is all about surprising the protagonist and the audience. Did you intentionally pull any surprises on Fran Kranz to squeeze even more authenticity out of his performance?
Mueller: I think the biggest surprise for him was the location that we shot in. It was a pretty rough-and-tumble abandoned building that had been condemned and closed off with vagrants living inside for who knows how long. Just putting the actors in that environment was a pretty shocking experience. We weren’t on a sound stage where you can just walk off and have a mineral water so being in that weirdness sort of helped.
DC: Karl, your previous scripts like Mr. Jones or The Divide focus on outsiders in some way or another. Is there any specific reason why you tend to focus on that section of the community?
Mueller: That’s a good question. In those stories, the main character is usually from the more mainstream society and it’s those characters who are encountering these off-the-grid figures. I guess I tend to go back to that territory because it’s a really good way to make people see the underlying assumptions and patterns that they’re living in that they might not really be aware of. You get to really bring all those things out and question them or make the characters have to go through some sort of metamorphosis or big life-changing experience.
DC: I must ask you about Nicky Whelan’s character in the film as the circumbendibus methods she uses to manipulate Kyle into making his own decisions were an absolute joy to watch. In the end she succeeds in getting the audience to self-question themselves just as much as the protagonist.
Mueller: For sure! Her character functions kind of like a mirror. From my very limited research into the world of group therapy and New Age therapies, and even some more Eastern-tinged, Zen-influenced type therapies, a technique that’s used a lot is this mirroring thing where you just repeat back what somebody says to you and you NEVER answer their questions. You just kind of string them along so that they pull their own things out about why they’re feeling insecure and they’ll start getting a little more self-conscious about that. Nicky’s character, Naomi, is this really buttoned down character who is very appealing just because she is so put together and so beautiful, but she just gives nothing back and forces the characters to feel their guts and start talking about things that they hadn’t really examined before.
DC: The film poses so many questions. I’m guessing you asked yourselves a lot of questions given the subject matter involved. Would you say this project helped you learn things about yourselves that you weren’t aware of beforehand?
Hamlin: I’m not sure I can say that I learned that much. Like I said, I had already read the book Going Clear on Scientology, and this isn’t a movie about Scientology at all, but there is a structure to this Rebirth group that’s similar in some ways to a cult like that. I wish I had a better answer for you in terms of learning something. I certainly learn something from everything that I do so I’m sure that I did come away with something, but I can’t be specific right now, Howard. It was a REALLY hot day [laughs].
Mueller: It WAS a hot day. There were a lot of lights, it was a small room, and there was no ventilation. Learn how to cope with that! [laughs]
Although this movie can kind of be called a satire, it’s not that I’m against this self-help world at all. In fact, I think it’s a valuable thing. It’s not so much any specific group or what they aspire to. If people are in a space in their life where they want to look deeper into the patterns that their thinking goes through and the ways that they socialize, that means that they’re working on themselves and they’re trying to grow and I think that’s a good thing. At the same time, some people can take advantage of people who are like that, who are looking for answers. But just by doing research on these groups, I found there’s a lot of good stuff to take away, for sure.
DC: Jonathan Snipes’ score was astounding as it manages to traverse as wide a range of situations and emotions as the film itself…
Mueller: Jon is a brilliant guy who I found through my producer, who also produced a Rodney Ascher movie that Jon did the score for called The Nightmare. He’s just a very open guy, and we went in and talked about what we wanted to do. Once Kyle leaves his cocoon world and goes to the seminar in this off-the-grid building, I wanted everything in there to be very organic with no electronic instruments or anything like that. So Jon took that idea and ran with it, and a lot of the percussion stuff that you hear in the film is actually the building that we were in being played. Jon went in there with a couple of percussionists one night and they recorded themselves banging on pipes, banging on walls and all these different things. He recorded these sounds that he took back with him and then mixed together in his mad genius music studio so you’re hearing the sound of the building itself which, hopefully, subconsciously gets you into that world. He’s a really talented guy, and I was very lucky that he wanted to do this.
DC: Just to wrap up, can you tell us about the release plan for the film with Netflix and what the both of you have in store in the near future?
Mueller: So this is actually a Netflix original film, and I believe it will be coming out in July. That’s what I’m hearing, so all their 70 billion subscribers will be able to access it, which is really exciting for me because people will be actually able to see it. Most people I know have Netflix and it’ll be right there, just one click of a button away. And then, in terms of the future, I’m in the middle of writing my next thing right now so hopefully I’ll finish that very soon.
Hamlin: The thing that I’ve got going on right now is The Meddler. I’m in that with Susan Sarandon and that’s out this week too so….
Mueller: Yeah, Harry has two movies at Tribeca this year, which is pretty amazing.
Hamlin: Yes. And then I have the first virtual reality/live-action film which is in post-production right now. It went to Sundance and now it’s going to Cannes but it’s only a little bit as it takes a while to do post-production on virtual reality. It’s being released in serialized six-minute increments and you can only see it on the Oculus Rift or the Samsung Gear or something like that, so that’s my thing. [Note: This screened at Sundance under the name of Defrost, a six-minute pilot where you are placed inside the body of someone who woke up in 2045 after being frozen for 30 years.]
Just as Mr. Mueller said, thanks to Netflix’s latest campaign to delve deeper into the world of original films, viewers will be able to catch Rebirth amidst a torrent of quality genre movies premiering on said streaming service, including Mike Flanagan’s recent hit Hush and Babak Anvari’s highly-anticipated Sundance hit Under the Shadow. We’ll be sure to let you know as soon as an official Rebirth release date rolls out.
Source: Cindy Ord/Getty Images North America
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