Jeremy Saulnier’s movies: How filmmaking influences shape an original voice in genre cinema.

The feeling I left with after watching 2015 Green Room a few years ago was truly unique. The movie is about a punk rock band that fights for survival after witnessing a murder in the green room of a clubhouse full of white supremacist neo-nazis. The story could be approached as a slasher film, suspense or? be driven by the character’s “particular” choices under high intensity stakes.??

But, let’s see how it’s director Jeremy Saulnier achieves? and shaped a unique style throughout his short but promising filmography learning from the masters of genre and auteur cinema.

What do we talk about when we talk about influences??

Every artist is influenced in one way or another by different voices. Steven Spielberg said multiple times that? his main influence in his directing style was director John Ford. Paul Thomas Anderson stated that his are Jonathan Demme, Scorsese, Kubrick and Robert Altman. Even David Fincher has been called the new Hitchcock influenced by the late master of suspense.?

You could spot the similarities between? their body of work and the legacy that their influences left behind. So, it’s fair to say that these modern directors built their filmography by learning from their masters, but manage to deliver a unique? and own style.

Let’s go back to 2007, when a young director from Virginia released his debut movie “Murder Party”.? Jeremy Saulnier wrote it, shot it and directed it. It was a low budget horror-comedy slasher movie.

It’s Halloween, a 30 year old lonely man named Christopher randomly found on the street an invitation to a murder party.? As he arrives to the location: an abandoned warehouse, he encountered a group of 5 “artists”? who will murder him n the name of art. They aren’t the smartest, in fact, they are dumb and don’t know what they are doing, so things get out of control and the cycle of violence presents itself with a menu including baseball bats, burned faces and even a chainsaw.

Taking into account the absurdity of its plot, you could immediately identify the influence from the early works of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson? on Saulnier’s movie at the way he approaches and captures violence, resulting in a laughable but impressive set piece of? bloody elements within the slasher horror-comedy subgenre.

The characters’ dumb choices and the absurdist atmosphere created on camera were the main attractive aspect of Saulnier’s film feature debut.? It’s runtime of 88 minutes had a few scenes that were looking for tense situations, almost effective. You could see what the upcoming director was aiming for.

Six year passed by when Saulnier came back with a very effective and highly-acclaimed revenge thriller: Blue Ruin.?

Saulnier served as a writer, cinematographer and directed the hell out of this movie. It was the big sensation in the film festival circuit in 2013. Critics and audiences called it “the best indie american film since Reservoir Dogs” and one of the most effective neo noir movies.?

As said in an article published by the New York Times: “The movie evokes the bleak, deadpan humor of the Coen brothers and the stylish bloodshed of Quentin Tarantino, while delivering a pained vision of rural down-home Americana all its own”.? And this is where I want to stop for a second.?

So, the movie tells the story of Dwight: a bearded beach bum, who lives out on his car and? from time to time trespasses houses to take a shower. One day he gets the news by a police officer that Wade Clealand, the guy who murdered his parents is going to be released from prison in a couple of days. She advises Dwight to leave town. He doesn’t obey. As a man who has never killed anyone before, he steals a gun but it’s locked and fails ? to use it and ditches it. He finds a knife and goes after him in a club’s rest room and stabs the guy? in the head in? a messy, gory and clumsy way.

In the average revenge thriller, that would be the end of the movie. But the death occurs in the first 17 minutes. The movie goes on to see how he could protect his estranged sister by going after each one of the Clealand family members.

The way? Saulnier guide us through Dwight’s journey is pure visual storytelling. It is filled with scenes with no dialogue lines at all. It was noticeable that behind the camera was a more experienced artist? whose knowledge on the craft grew bigger.??

The superb performance by Macon Blair added to the director’s skills behind the camera, the mis-scene and their collaboration helped? to create an effective and unique tone.?

I think that Saulnier drinks from Coen brothers work? to achieve the confusion, ignorance and clumsiness of his protagonist. He even stated that one of his main influences on Blue Ruin was 1984 Blood Simple, the film debut by the Coen brothers. And this shows up a parallel between the protagonists of both films Ray (Blood Simple) and Dwight (Blue Ruin).?

Both are “good” men doing bad things for the right and wrong reasons. As actor Macon Blair said in an interview? to the Austin Chronicle, "A big influence was this whole noir idea about a weak man making bad decisions, and getting himself into a worse position than he already was in."?

You could see that in a particular scene where Dwight goes to Ben, a childhood friend’s house played magnificently by Home Alone actor Devin Ratray (perfectly cast) to ask? him a weapon.??

Ben? shows Dwight? his varied weapon collection like a kid’s Hot Wheels collection and bombards Dwight with questions about shooting range, while Dwight is clueless and ignorant on the subject make perfect balance to create this deadpan humor.?

After his second feature, Saulnier proves that he can take the best from auteurs and genre cinema directors and shape his own style in the landscape of emerging genre directors.

Due to the success of Blue Ruin, Saulnier makes his third movie Green Room in 2015, coming on board big names like the late Anton Yelchin, Sir Patrick Stewart and Imooge Poots, among others.?

This time Saulnier steps back as a cinematographer. He calls Sean Porter due to his previous work, stating that he’s a guy who can do a great job working with the director’s vision without leaving a footprint.

Saulnier designed a cluster-fuck of eight people stuck in a room against an army of Nazi skinheads. He explained in an interview with IndieWire: “It was so key to keep emotional charge in the room and have all these characters maintain continuity. It was a tremendous amount of work and I knew I could not be focused on the camera.”

Being a siege movie, his main influences? were John Carpenter’s Assault of Precinct 13 and Sam Peckinpah’s ultraviolent Straw Dogs. Both movies are about a small group of people trapped in some sort of constricted setting, with someone(s) outside that space threatening their lives.?

As soon violence appears in the room it is raw, explicit and gritty, like a punk track. Saulnier doesn’t cut away, he shows us how Anton Yelchin’s arm gets slashed by a machete or Imogen Poots’ character slits the stomach? of one of the bad guys with a box cutter.

I’d like to elaborate on how Saulnier takes the siege subgenre and reinvents it by creating a unique experience.

In Straw Dogs and Assault of Precinct 13, we as audience are experiencing the movie through the protagonists’ point of view. Like the protagonists, we aren’t aware of what the “bad” guys are exactly planning to get in.?

This is called information deprivation. “A key element to building tension is knowing how to play with the concept of information deprivation, as it applies to both the characters and the audience. Knowing (or not knowing) something can be absolutely terrifying”, said Saulnier in a Letterboxd Q&A. I would dare to say that Saulnier like every director of the genre learnt it? from? master of suspense director Sir Alfred Hitchcock.

In Green Room, the director plays with the siege sub genre elements and the concept of information deprivation even more than his influences.

The protagonists are trapped scared as shit, afraid of going out and having no control of the situation, the “bad guys” are on the top of their game, like sharks or a wolfpack planning on how to attack. At doing this,? the director takes one of the old concepts in storytelling: opposition or contrast. This translates into empathy for our characters.

Saulnier is aware of the audience, so in Green Room he provides them information that the protagonists don’t know but also deprive information from both the audience and the characters.

By setting a? tense? mood? either when sometimes you know what will happen but also we don’t have a clue what the bad guys’ next move will be, the director plays with the audience.? This unpredictability and elements of surprise keep us hooked throughout the entire movie.

It’s a good thing that directors like Jeremy Saulnier are out there reinventing genres and it’s always fun way of watching cinema this way.?

By tracing back the ones who inspired a certain director, you wind up discovering hidden gems, B movies, cult classics and the voices that influenced the influencers.?