MAX MINGHELLA TALKS TO COLLIDER ABOUT HIS NEW MOVIE SHELL
Collider's Perri Nemiroff spoke with writer-director Max Minghella about his new movie, Shell:
I did want to run through a couple of other collaborators. One in particular you mentioned during our last conversation. It's Fred [Berger], your producer, who also produced Teen Spirit. I really thought it was important to emphasize his work here, because when you find a producer that's willing to support your vision, especially when it's a big swing vision like this, it is of the utmost importance to have the right person in your corner, or it doesn't happen, or it doesn't happen the way you want. So what is it about him as a producer that not only helps you get your movie off the ground, but also ensures that you see your vision through to fruition?MINGHELLA: I love that question so much. You do ask the best questions. It’s true. I mean, that's a phenomenal question. Fred is the reason I've gotten to make anything. He's my guardian angel. I asked too much of him making this movie. It really was like a Heart of Darkness situation trying to get this film made, and he did it for nothing, for free. Anybody who's aware of him, he produced La La Land and A Complete Unknown. He doesn't need to be working with me at all, but for some reason has continued to support me, and I plan to continue collaborating with him for as long as I can. But he's the reason I'm able to work with the extraordinary crew who made this film. Drew Daniels, who shot the movie, shot Anora. He's an incredible cinematographer. Throughout the whole crew, there are incredible people who basically want to work with Fred, I think, more than me. So, I'm very grateful to him, and I don't know why he sticks around, but I'm happy he does.
You brought up Drew, so I'll ask a question about him that is inspired by something you were explaining to me last time. Last we spoke, you told me that you're both "mischievous" people, and you wanted your approach to this film to have a sense of mischief and play. What exactly does that look like? How do you spark mischief and play on this set, and where can we see it in the finished film?
MINGHELLA: I'm going to babble a bit, so bear with me. Hopefully the movie felt very unpretentious when you saw it and was very silly, but there was something slightly pretentious, I guess, in our thinking behind the film. When I first read the script, it sort of felt to me like Death Becomes Her by way of Paul Verhoeven, if that makes any sense. So it's like a perverse version, like a Brian De Palma-fied version of Death Becomes Her, and I thought that was a really exciting combination. So I started thinking about those movies and that time period. Paul Verhoeven made movies in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s through the studio system with big movie stars. Death Becomes Her is a movie made in the ‘90s with big movie stars, so I started looking at films in the studio era at that time, and they were lit in a very specific way.
Drew and I started looking at those movies a lot, and there are very specific things that people would do then, which they don’t really do now. Blue nights are banned in the modern era of cinematography, but I've always rather liked blue nights, so we brought some blue nights back. But also, I would just say that we put a lot of lights in camera. We were very inspired by [Jan de Bont], who was a director, but he also was a cinematographer, and we looked at a lot of his work, and used a lot of his lenses, and hopefully it comes through in the movie. Like Fred, Drew is an extraordinary cinematographer and an amazing filmmaker in his own right. We had 25 days to do it; it wasn't enough time to make this film. I would not have been able to do it without a cinematographer that experienced and patient and hard working.
