Light From Light, opening December 6th at Central Cinema, is the second feature film from Knoxville filmmaker Paul Harrill. In addition to his work making films, Harrill also works as a professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Tennessee. He also co-founded and co-programs The Public Cinema, which transformed the landscape of locally available titles for Knoxville cinephiles back in 2015 and lately has done the bulk of their work through the Big Ears film program – all of which has been covered fairly regularly here at Arts Knoxville. Public Cinema has been relatively quiet over the past year or so largely due to Harrill’s time-intensive production of Light From Light, a quietly supernatural drama about a paranormal investigator (Marin Ireland) offering free counsel to a widower (Jim Gaffigan) who believes his recently deceased wife may be trying to make contact. I spoke to Paul over email about filmmaking in the south, working with Jim Gaffigan, telling a nontraditional ghost story, and the spiritual dimension present in both his films.
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• Regional Specificity
Andrew Swafford: When you helped program the Big Ears film lineup in 2018, you celebrated the concept of “Regional Cinema” – movies made on small budgets by local filmmakers working outside of New York and Los Angeles. I’m wondering how much of a concerted effort you make to convey “a sense of place” (to use your phrasing from the Big Ears program) when planning your films – or does all that happen organically just because you choose to shoot in Tennessee?
Andrew Swafford: I’m also curious about the business-and-logistics side of making regional cinema. Light From Light is in some ways a more high-profile film than your previous feature (Something, Anything), as it stars two well-known actors – Marin Ireland and Jim Gaffigan – the latter of which even went on Seth Myers’s talk show to promote your movie. Did it feel like you were making a “bigger” movie despite the fact that you were still shooting in and around Knoxville?
Andrew Swafford: What are some of the benefits or drawbacks of making a film like this in a town like Knoxville?
Paul Harrill: Knoxville’s really unique. I mean, obviously, it doesn’t have the crew base or infrastructure for production that you have in the major centers of production, so that adds to the challenge of making work here. But for a city of its size, Knoxville does much better than most. The cable industry here, of course, is a big part of that. It helps to have a film office, particularly one that’s as supportive of local filmmakers as this one. And then we have a great art school at UT – that means there are always new, creative people coming to town. The biggest upside of making films here is that people get that I’m part of the community, and a lot of my collaborators are part of this community. They want to support the work however they can. The pride – the kind of emotional investment – people feel really motivates us to make something great.
Andrew Swafford: Your production company, Self-Reliant Film, is named after an essay by the American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, and both of your films include somewhat transcendental moments in the Smoky Mountains. As a filmmaker, what interests you about the Smokies – or perhaps just Tennessee’s natural landscape in general?
• Gaffigan
Andrew Swafford: I’m sure one aspect of Light From Light that will get many people’s attention is the dramatic turn by Jim Gaffigan, who usually takes on such a silly and self-deprecating persona in his stand-up comedy and television roles. In Light From Light, his performance as this forlorn widower character is paradoxically the last thing you would expect from him and also maybe his most perfectly suited role. I hear that you wrote the character specifically for Gaffigan – could you talk a little bit about the process of writing something for a star like Gaffigan and what it was like to direct him working in such a different mode?
When Jim came on board the project, I didn’t approach working with him any differently than I do anyone else really. It was really about making sure he found a way into connecting with the character, making sure we were on the same page with the approach to tone, and then just focusing on telling the beats of the story. Jim felt a lot of connection and empathy for Richard. He had almost lost his wife to a very serious health scare a year earlier, so he’d faced down the prospect of being a widower in reality. He had that to draw on.
• Music
Andrew Swafford: Another element of the production I’m curious about is music. One of the greatest cultural signifiers of East Tennessee is its music, and the ethereal, guitar-driven score of Light From Light is one of the most distinct things about it. Certain sequences, especially those set in the mountains and overlooking the hills of East Tennessee, felt greatly complemented by this. What can you tell me about the process of collaborating with your composers to create this music for the film?
Paul Harrill: When I first talked with Adam Granduciel about the movie, within just a couple of minutes we learned we were both huge fans of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. That album was a really strong point of connection. It’s not that we wanted the score to sound like that, but there’s a warmth and intimacy and searching quality to that record. We also talked about Mark Hollis and Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock. So Adam, and later Jon Natchez (Adam’s bandmate, who happily joined in the collaboration), and I talked about feel more than anything. From there they recorded sketches and sent them to me. And I’d experiment with marrying those sketches with moments that called for them in the film. Then they’d revise the work based on what was working or not working. There was a lot of experimentation and conversation.
• Religion
Andrew Swafford: It’s interesting that you mention Laughing Stock and All Things Must Pass as touchstones, as both are both very spiritual albums. There’s a religious element to this film, as it’s a priest who initially connects Jim Gaffigan’s widower character to Marin Ireland’s paranormal investigator; early on in the film, she’s asked if she is a skeptic or a believer, which also echoes the language that people often use when talking about religion. Your previous film (Something, Anything) dealt with religion directly and could even be considered a “faith-based film.”
Andrew Swafford: Maybe “faith-based” is too loaded of a term – to clarify, I don’t in any way mean to suggest that either of your films would sit comfortably on a shelf beside God’s Not Dead. On the contrary, it feels more of a piece with First Reformed, Ordet, or Winter Light, all of which I would consider “faith-based films” in the way they directly wrestle with religious questions. Both of your films seem to do this as well – the phrase “Light From Light” even appears in the Nicene Creed. I’m curious what your interest is in exploring questions of faith on screen.
Paul Harrill: Religion is a facet of many people’s lives. And whether we choose to participate in organized religion or not, it’s part of the world. Our decision to participate — or not — in organized religion is a facet of our identity. So part of my interest stems from simply wanting to be truthful about representing the world I see around me, particularly when so many movies shy away from depicting this.
Beyond that, what you’re asking about – it’s harder to explain. If I could completely articulate it with words, I probably wouldn’t need to make the movies. One of the reasons I make films is because it allows me to explore and express things that I don’t have the words for.
I mean, I can try to answer by saying that I’m drawn to characters that haven’t got everything figured out. And I’m drawn to tell stories about characters that are trying to do good, but they aren’t sure how to do that or even what that is. So that means looking beyond themselves for those answers. But, this is an oversimplification.
Andrew Swafford: Do you have any expectations as to how the quasi-religious, soft-occult nature of Light From Light might be received by people of faith?
• Ghost Stories
Andrew Swafford: Your new film is a ghost story, but as we’ve alluded to, it operates completely outside of the horror genre. Nevertheless, I’m curious what ghost movies, if any, were floating around in your head when writing Light From Light, despite the fact that it handles ghosts in such a decidedly non-frightening way.
Paul Harrill: I’ve mentioned in some other interviews that I briefly heard a radio interview with a real paranormal investigator. That was one of the inspirations for the film. But most of the story and its themes came from a more personal place. I enjoy watching movies, but I don’t really use them as a source of inspiration with regards to creating a story or plot. So, as part of the background research I did for Shelia’s character I did watch some episodes of a reality TV series, Ghost Hunters. Beyond that, though, I really wasn’t watching or thinking about ghost movies.
Andrew Swafford: What did you glean from Ghost Hunters that wound up making its way into the film?
Paul Harrill: I don’t recall anything specific from that show making its way into the film in terms of a plot point, or from a stylistic angle. But that show, as well as the books I read on the subject of ghost hunting, were a way for me to feel confident enough to write about the subject. It was important for me to see people actually do the work. What they do is not scientific – it’s pseudo-scientific – but it’s very concrete: “Let’s record audio. Let’s record video. Let’s log all our footage and see what we find.”
• Pacing
Andrew Swafford: Another thing that makes Light From Light distinct from a more traditional ghost film is its pacing and tone, which is somewhat hushed and low-key. This style is similar to – though not exactly like – 2017’s A Ghost Story, whose director, David Lowery, served as an executive producer on Light From Light. Lowry’s film is more along the lines of what some critics (myself included) call “Slow Cinema,” a style of filmmaking that emphasizes the passing of time as an essential attribute of the viewing experience. In a recent interview with Filmmaker Magazine, you distanced yourself from the term somewhat, saying that your films are merely reflective of the pace of Southern life. What kind of stylistic decisions do you find yourself making as a director in order to capture what you call “the pace of life” in the South?
Paul Harrill: A film’s pacing emerges from so many elements — obviously the editing, but also the cinematography, the way you direct actors, the sound design, the score….I could possibly break these elements down to intellectually understand the decisions, but the bottom line is, the decisions about the pacing come from my gut. Is it because that’s the pace of life in the South? I don’t know. Maybe. Are the films “slow cinema”, or whatever? I mean, that’s a label, something that a critic can apply after the fact. I don’t set out to make something that fits into that rubric.
I can say that I am trying to make something intimate, something people can believe in. If you listen to people talking intimately and truthfully with each other, they don’t talk fast. “Fast talk” – the phrase itself is literally synonymous with dishonesty. I want to be honest with audiences. I like giving the audience time to think, giving them the time to arrive at genuine feelings on their own terms. Plus, I think the silences between people are interesting. But I get that this isn’t for everyone.
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