FLOOD 9 — Side B — Tenacious D Version

LO U IS FU TO N

ORIGINAL TRACKS is a monthly series, brought to you by ORIGINAL PENGUIN and FLOOD Magazine, featuring performances and interviews from some of today's most unique and talented artists.

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BRYCE VINE Check regularly at ORIGINALPENGUIN.COM for the latest episodes!

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

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APROPOS OF NOTHING

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BREAKING: D’ARCY CARDEN, DYLAN BALLIETT, EMMA ALLEN

22 CHILDREN OF WOMEN: YALITZA APARICIO AND MARINA DE TAVIRA’S TRIP TO “ROMA” 26 THE LINE AND SIGHT OF DAWOUD BEY 36 WALLACE RICHARD MILLS’ MEMOS OF REPETITION 42 HADDONFIELD, REVISITED: JOHN CARPENTER’S WALK BACK TO “HALLOWEEN,” FORTY YEARS LATER 52 COLLUDING WITH ROB ROGERS AND TENACIOUS D’S JACK BLACK AND KYLE GASS 66 PAUL DANO AND THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

FLOOD MAGAZINE IS PUBLISHED BY FLOOD MAGAZINE LLC, 542 N. LARCHMONT BLVD., LOS ANGELES CA 90004. VOLUME 1, NUMBER 9, 2018. FLOOD MAGAZINE IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING, INCLUDING THE RETURN OR LOSS OF SUBMISSIONS, OR FOR ANY DAMAGE OR OTHER INJURY TO UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPTS OR ARTWORK. ANY SUBMISSION OF A MANUSCRIPT OR ARTWORK SHOULD INCLUDE A SELF-ADDRESSED ENVELOPE OR PACKAGE OF APPROPRIATE SIZE, BEARING ADEQUATE RETURN POSTAGE. ©2018 FLOOD MAGAZINE LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. FLOOD IS DISTRIBUTED FOR FREE IN SELECT LOCATIONS AND AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE AT FLOODMAGAZINE.COM PRINTED IN CANADA TENACIOUS D COVER ILLUSTRATION BY ROB ROGERS / PAUL DANO COVER PHOTO AND TABLE OF CONTENTS PHOTO BY MICHAEL LAVINE

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Last summer, I had a troubling conversation with someone who told me they’d all but given up on going to the movies, repeating the classic gripe of Hollywood becoming “too political” as the reason they, like, so many others, have turned to the safer medium of TV instead. The movie that pushed this viewer over the edge was Kong: Skull Island, a movie characterized by its unsubtle visual homage to Apocalypse Now, and one that preaches a nearidentical indictment of militarization to Francis Ford Coppola’s film (a film that, it should also be mentioned, was released nearly forty years ago, and is still one of the most popular American films of all time). Movies aren’t getting more political. We, individually, just tend to become more aware of how politics inform non-political movies as we grow older.

The parallels between American life and the horror films we churn out, for example, have been a popular subject of scholarly discussion since the genre crossed over into the mainstream midway through the twentieth century. Yet when we watch Night of the Living Dead today, it’s simply a zombie movie; in 1968, it was a movie about civil rights issues and Cold War anxieties told with graphic imagery recalling newsreel footage of Vietnam. In the following decade, John Carpenter’s Halloween exuded a more timeless terror—a tale of being unsafe while inside of one’s own home. Conversely, some of the scariest movies I’ve seen as an adult are movies that left me mostly unfazed as a kid, such as George Miller’s Babe: Pig in the City, whose hotel invasion scene—written twenty years ago—uncannily prophesied the violent immigrant removal tactics of our current White House administration.

It may very well be that most of the stories included in FLOOD 9 revolve around the theme of domestic anxiety by coincidence, but perhaps it was inevitable in the year 2018. Included in these pages is a reappraisal of Carpenter’s horror classic, which contrasts with a feature on Paul Dano’s Wildlife, in which the horror has germinated organically inside the house (sort of like an update on Possession, sans the sex monster and literal self-mutilation). In reentering the Wu-Tang’s 36 Chambers, and assessing the photography of Dawoud Bey, we learn about individuals who rallied against the horrors of their communities being neglected or misrepresented in the media. Elsewhere, Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce and Lala Lala’s Lillie West open up about the events that led to them shrinking into their apartments to write their new albums.

Although this may be our most overtly political issue since we featured the men of Veep on the cover of our debut installment (four years ago!), I can assure you FLOOD is not becoming “too political.” Admittedly, stories on M.I.A., Shad, and cartoonist Rob Rogers are radically diplomatic in subject, but their narratives are principally universal, literary, party-less. The political nature of these stories is entirely dependent on your own subjection to the news— just know that we can’t refund your ticket if you disagree with it.

— Mike LeSuer, Editorial Assistant

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WU-TANG CLAN

25 YEARS AIN’T NUTHING TA F’ WIT

AND THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

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FLOOD #8 COURTNEY BARNETT

FLOOD #8: KATE BERLANT AND JOHN EARLY

FLOOD #8: ROY CHOI

FLOOD #8: ROY CHOI

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FLOOD #8 JACK WHITE

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STARRING DR. STEVE BRULE

FLOOD #8: KATE BERLANT AND JOHN EARLY

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THE FASHION ISSUE

Follow These Directions to The Decemberists’ Secret Show

by Ella Gale

We absolutely freaked when a little bird told us that The Decemberists were throwing a free, secret show, because we are not used to talking birds (technically, it was a man cursed to live as a jackdaw by a cunning sorceress, but you get the picture). After we calmed down, though, we knew we had to share all the inside info with our loyal readers.

Here’s how to score tickets: 1. Lace your traveler’s boots and hit the New England coastline. The Decemberists have flung a hundred handblown glass bottles into the churning waves of the Atlantic. The tickets are inside those bottles. All you have to do is wander the lonely, gray beaches and rocks (looking wistful helps) until you snag one. If that bottle is lodged in the eye of a bleaching whale skull, JACKPOT. Those are backstage passes, baby.

2. Unfurl the vellum scroll inside the bottle, preferably in a nearby lighthouse. On one side is the barcode you’ll need to show the door person. On the other side is a map with no key and a couplet that ends with the words “find Compass Rose.”

3. Compass roses are those fancy circles on maps that tell you which way is North. Compass Rose is also the name of a woman who can tell you which way is North. But where to find her? According to the scroll, Rose has a single blue left eye and wears pools of black gossamer, so try Craigslist missed connections.

4. If you’ve tracked down Compass Rose, congratulations! But she’ll only work in exchange for a piece of a memory. In practical terms, this is usually some kind of trinket that has emotional significance. If you don’t have anything like that on you, find a nearby memento ATM. 5. Once your map is complete, you’ll find that it points to a place that time has not yet reached, accessible only by steam train. Get on the train. Inside one of the boxcars, a vagabond will invite you to share his fire. If you offer him pavlova and wine (don’t overthink this), he’ll sing you a lament with a voice like a miller’s river. Pay attention. You’ll be doing the harmonies.

6. If you can nail the song’s bridge, the steam engine will start to slow. That’s where you jump. Is jumping off a moving train super dangerous? Yes, but please know if you die at this point, The Decemberists will write a very affecting song to be played at your funeral. There will be banjo.

7. Did you survive your leap into the dark and through time? Find the nearest glade. If you don’t know how to find a glade, maybe you don’t deserve to be at this show. At the entrance to the glade, you’ll be welcomed by a woman in a tree, branches twining ’round her arms and fruit on her lips. She’ll scan your ticket.

8. Nice work, you made it in! Enjoy the show!

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A Rare Look Inside the National Jazz Hands Academy

by Brian Boone Tony Award–nominated choreographer Clint Rockaway will forever be remembered as the inventor of jazz hands, a physical language that consists of gentle vibrations of outstretched palms and the wiggling of fingers. In a moment he’d later describe as “God doing kick ball change on my heart,” Rockaway developed the technique in 1965 while rehearsing the musical New Orleans Jamboree.

In 1975, Rockaway staged Palms, an experimental work that told its story entirely through jazz hands. The show closed after one performance and lost millions—Rockaway’s millions. The show also made him a pariah, and drove him mad. After sleeping very little during rehearsals, on opening night he heard fellow choreographer Bob Fosse make fun of it, prompting Rockaway to bite off a piece of Fosse’s ear.

Driven from town by the theater elite and the New York Police Department, Rockaway purchased a disused camp in rural Idaho and converted it into the Rockaway School. Now, Rockaway rigorously prepares students for a career in the performing arts, molding raw talent into polished, impeccable skill. And that skill is jazz hands—it’s the only subject the school teaches, and the school is the only place that teaches it.

The academy is so rigorous and elite (there are spots for only ten students) that it goes years without accepting new scholars…because Rockaway will not graduate anyone unless he decides they have truly mastered “the art of the jazz hand.” And it takes as long as it takes. “I don’t remember my parents,” said one female student, who matriculated in 1989, “but I’m betting this is the year Professor Rockaway finally lets me try jazz hands!”

The school’s motto, “We aspire to jazz hands,” is carved into the wood above the entrance, and is whispered everyday by Rockaway himself over an intercom at 6 a.m.—which, along with some hot jazz, rouses his students from their bunks. Then they’re in for a long day of study.

HERE’S THE ROCKAWAY SCHOOL’S DAILY SCHEDULE: 6:30 a.m.: “Handers” stand on a “jazz hands mat” (a yoga mat) with their arms outstretched and palms flat, as if ready to break into jazz hands. They don’t, lest Rockaway slap their hands with a metal rod.

11 a.m.: Handers eat a nutritional paste shaped into a hand.

11:30 a.m.: Handers connect with the notion of jazz hands by drawing jazz hands, sculpting jazz hands from clay, and journaling about what it would feel like to do jazz hands.

6 p.m.: Handers sit in silence and picture themselves doing jazz hands.

10 p.m.: Handers go into the woods and do “jazz feet.”

11 p.m.: Handers may use a marionette to perform jazz hands.

Midnight: Handers chant, “It’s not in the wrist, it’s in the heart,” before retiring for the evening.

If it’s a rare and special night, Rockaway will wake a student, proclaim them ready, and demand they perform jazz hands, at long last. If they succeed, Rockaway pours holy water on their hands and sends them on their way. Should they fail…they remain in school.

FFLLOOOODD

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Shadow World · Mitski, “Two Slow Dancers” · Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach, Painted from Memory · Halloween [soundtrack] · Leonard Cohen, Old Ideas

Music we listened to while making FLOOD 9

The Monzas, Hey! I Know You · Lou Reed, Street Hassle · Sic Alps, Sic Alps · Noname, Room 25 · Gen

Welcome to the Salon Where Female Characters Change Their Hair to Indicate Personal Growth

by Lizzie Logan

STYLES The “Straight and Narrow” — $50

If you’re a shallow party girl who learns responsibility, we’ll take your tresses from curly to straight, the texture of serious women.

The “Wild and Free” — $65

If you’re an uptight workaholic who needs to loosen up, let us transform your locks from straight to curly, the texture of fun women.

The “All-Nighter” — $40

Up late to meet an important deadline at the newspaper, magazine, or newsmagazine where you work? A messy bun held in place with a chewed-on pencil shows that you’re stressed, and also relatable, and also fuckable.

The “Blow-Him-Away Blowout” — $10

Instead of tying it back like you did before your sudden influx of confidence (ironically triggered by an embarrassing mishap), let your hair hang loose, brushing your bare collarbone. Soon, Ryan will realize that his dorky best friend is…hot!

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COLORS Blond to Brunette — $100

When you were abusing drugs, you bleached your hair; bleach is drugs for hair. Now that you are sober and ready to forgive your mom, your hair is chestnut brown, because that’s safe.

Brunette to Blond — $300

A rigid platinum coiffure tells the world, “I’m not afraid to stab a friend in the back. I’m different now. My laugh is mean.”

Unnatural Colors — $150 per color

Purple, pink, and blue streaks are only for clients who emerge from a gauntlet of challenges with supernatural abilities. We can apply temporary washes in cases of a flashback to your Wild Days before The Incident.

CUTS Bangs — $75

It’s been a while since the male protagonist last saw you. Bangs indicate that time has passed.

Chin-Length Lob — $100

It’s been a very long while since the male protagonist last saw you. A chin-length lob indicates that time has passed. Also you’re a mom, and the kid is his, isn’t it?

In Disguise as a Man — by consultation only

Please book your appointment in advance and come with a picture of a hairstyle popular at the Boarding School/Monastery/Military Faction/Elite Club you’re trying to gain access to. Otherwise, you’ll be given a Generic Unruly Mop Top ($65), unlikely to raise suspicions.

The Chop Room — $15 per hour

In the rear of our salon is a soundproof antechamber. Inside is a chrome sink, a cracked mirror, and dull scissors. If you have been illtreated, emotionally manipulated, or otherwise traumatized, please use this area to hack your hair off while anger-crying at your reflection.

d · bedwetter, volume 1: flick your tongue against your teeth and describe the present. · Kweku Collins, Grey · Denzel Curry, TA13OO · Lana Del Rabies,

Liars, Mess ·

You Have Control of the Aux Cord.

Don't Fuck It Up!

by Andrea More

Congrats! You made a big fuss about Jake giving you the aux cord and now you’re in charge of the music.

You said, “Since you get to drive, I should get to choose the music” and Jake said, “Do you wanna drive?” and you said, “Nah, it’s OK. Thanks, though.” Secretly, you’ve been scared to get behind the wheel ever since you ran over that squirrel two weeks ago. Who did it leave behind? Children? A nest? In your defense, squirrels should have evolved to learn how to use a crosswalk by now.

But you and Jake are just going to CVS, so it should be fine. What’s some good CVS music? But wait, CVS music isn’t a thing. Well, maybe it is, but you can’t replicate that right now. You’re getting in your head. You always do this. Jake says, “So are you gonna pick a song?

We could also just, like, talk.” You say, “No, no, it’s fine.”

It occurs to you that you don’t know what kind of music Jake likes.

You’re starting to squirm and sweat a little bit, just above your upper lip. It must show because Jake says, “Is everything OK?”

Jake says, “Damn, dude. This is emotional for just going to the pharmacy.”

You say, “Didn’t you get dumped in a pharmacy in college?”

Jake says, “Yeah, Bethany. I was just starting to get over her. Thanks for reminding me.”

You say, “Hasn’t it been like six years?”

Just play Fleetwood Mac. Everyone loves Fleetwood Mac.

Jake says, “Only five.”

You put on “Tusk.”

You say, “She’s probably married by now,” and Jake says, “How is that supposed to make me feel better?” and you say, “Well, 50 percent of marriages end in divorce so you might have a chance down the line,” and Jake says, “Has anyone ever told you you’re bad at comforting people?” and you say, “Actually, yeah.”

Jake says, “Whatever happened to that girl you were seeing?

Stephanie? Samantha?”

Fuck, he didn’t say anything about the song. Does Jake not like Fleetwood Mac? No, that would be crazy. Should I tell him about how they recorded the legendary horn parts for “Tusk” at an empty Dodger Stadium with over a hundred members of the USC marching band? He probably already knows. When was the last time you learned a new fact? Why can’t you finish a book anymore? Remember how much you used to read in high school? But then again, your skin was gross back then.

Maybe it’s too upbeat. You play “Landslide.”

Yikes. If only you had a go-to playlist for driving with other people.

Something you could just press “shuffle” on so you wouldn’t end up in the kind of dire situation you’re in now.

Jake rubs his eyes. It’s probably just allergies. Jake says, “It’s just allergies.”

Oh, thank God. The red CVS sign. You’re here. On the way back, you should probably just stick with NPR.

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Billy Bragg, William Bloke · Ice Cube, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted · Lana Del Rey, “Venice Bitch” · The Black Tambourines, Chica · Julian Casablancas, Phrazes

ne Clark, No Other · Lil B, “Fuck KD” · Sidney Gish, No Dogs Allowed · The Black Keys, Magic Potion · Jay Rock, Redemption · Colin Blunstone, One Year ·

for the Young · Moor Mother, Fetish Bones · Thou, Rhea Sylvia · Bracken, We Know About the Need · Pictureplane, Technomancer · Talking Heads, Nak

BREAKING

D’ARCY CARDEN D’ARCY CARDEN IS ON SUMMER VACATION. The season itself is waning, but her two shows, Barry and The Good Place, are on break. So Carden’s spending time doing as little as possible.

“I’m hanging out with my dog right now,” Carden says. “These days are very chill. Like, I wake up and think, ‘Hmm, I guess I’ll do pilates today.’ Not a lot going on. Seeing friends and chilling, for real.”

Carden has earned the respite. Not many can claim supporting roles in two of the most morally complex comedies on TV. Chipper, snappy, and sharp, Carden has carved out a niche for herself by bringing complexity to characters whom you might not expect it from. She excels at broad physical comedy and pratfalls, but she also brings a vibrant heart to all of her performances.

Take Janet, her role on The Good Place.

Set in the afterlife, Janet was introduced in season one as not much more than an affable, heavenly version of the Microsoft Office Assistant paperclip, quick to offer help and then disappear. But when it’s revealed that—season one spoiler alert—the show’s human characters aren’t in The Good Place at all, but rather The Bad Place, Janet and her demon boss Michael, played by Ted Danson, find themselves outside the boundaries of their “programming.” The thrust of the show is whether or not its human characters can learn to become better people; in many ways, Janet and Michael find themselves trying to accomplish the same goal.

The Good Place shines by being dumb in deeply heady ways. With its constant references to the ethical concepts of thinkers like Kierkegaard and Kant, the show genuinely explores an ever-crucial idea: What do we, as people, owe to each other?

“It’s hard to talk about these emotional, big ideas when we’re just talking about a sitcom on NBC, but there is something about the show,” Carden says.

BACKSTORY: A Californian who headed to New York to join the Upright Citizens Brigade before making waves in TV FROM: Danville, California; now lives in Los Angeles YOU MIGHT KNOW HER FROM: Broad City, Comedy Bang! Bang!, or Inside Amy Schumer, to name a few shows NOW: Appearing on HBO’s dramedy Barry, and in her breakout role on NBC’s The Good Place as Janet, an afterlife guide with infinite knowledge of the universe, but no idea how to navigate her developing feelings

“She’s sort of evolving,” Carden says. “She’s getting in touch with these weird emotions she’s never felt before. There’s something really lovely about Janet and Michael, these non-humans who are changing alongside people who are really growing and learning and helping each other.”

BY JASON P. WOODBURY 16

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Though Carden doesn’t often get to employ her improv background on the show, which is tightly scripted (“we just don’t do it,” she says of on-set improvisation, a hallmark of creator Michael Schur’s previous show Parks and Recreation, because “the writers are too goddamned good”), the show’s cosmological flexibility has allowed Carden to shine by playing alternate versions of Janet, like Bad Janet, or what she calls “Baby Janet.” “They’re all the joys of my life to play,” Carden says. “I love every color of Janet. But I did have a lot of fun back in season one with the newly rebooted Janet, figuring out what a tree was. It’s fun to play dumb, for sure.”

The Good Place is a series about growing, and it’s inspired more than a little reflection in Carden, whose main goal right now ties directly to her comedic skill: She’s working on being present in every moment.

“So often you look back on something and think, ‘Oh, that was really great,’” Carden says. “And maybe you’re looking to the next thing, or focusing on what little thing is wrong instead of looking at the big picture, and you forget to enjoy the thing as it’s happening. The last couple years, I’ve been trying to focus on enjoying the day to day.”

PHOTO BY CATE HELLMAN

mfg U.S.A.

BREAKING

DYLAN BALLIETT “I THINK IT WAS A RESULT OF MY DAD HAVING R. CRUMB BOOKS AROUND THE HOUSE,” Dylan Balliett muses, explaining his natural evolution from a preschooler drawing comic books to his current status as an adult...drawing comic books again, but with an unconscious populated

by Robert Crumb’s disconcerting imagery. Balliett’s post-preschool art tends to echo Crumb’s penchant for grotesque human forms, only the physical gross-out humor is swapped for an insecurity plaguing his characters that’s nearly as upsetting—often depicted through the mature themes of Larry David–inspired social faux pas and David Cronenberg– incited body horror. “I drew a ton of comics all the time when I was a little kid, but I grew out of it as I got older,” he continues. “I got more self-conscious and down on myself.

I overthought everything.”

Obviously, a lot has happened to Balliett between the time he picked up his first Crumb comic in the late ’80s and when he began selling his art in the form of prints, shirts, pins, and zines on Etsy in 2015. Growing up around his parents’ record store in West Virginia, where he was constantly subjected to the imagery of ’90s alternative underground culture, his return to illustration seemed inevitable, even if this outlet was mostly eclipsed by music throughout his teens and twenties. “I always felt like comics were my passion,” Balliett insists over the phone from his Brooklyn apartment. “It just felt like what I should be doing.”

guys again, Dylan?’ And it just kind of stuck.” His art book Funny Strange begins with a portrait of the artist enthusiastically welcoming you to “[his] terrible world,” preparing the reader for a trip into the cartoonist’s familiarly millennialist universe of social commentary and self-deprecating comedy, as narrated by Dylan-guys.

In the same way Dylan-guys inhabit their own universe, Balliett’s humor remains a constant throughout his visual art. His pun-laden prints riff on everything from high art (“Ceci n’est pas une e-cig” written in an unmistakable font under a horizontal monolith) to low-brow Internet humor (a reimagination of that early YouTube video with the Haitian weather guy, only everyone’s a skeleton), which, Balliett claims, sometimes develop organically from ideas he debuted on Twitter. One such case came about while he was helming the account of The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, with whom he played guitar on tour in 2016: “For some reason I kept tweeting kinda cliché, memorable lines from books that you read in high school. I tweeted, ‘Everything Was Chill and Nothing Harshed My Mellow, Bro,’ like the tombstone in SlaughterhouseFive. Obviously I’m just shitposting or whatever they call it on Twitter, just trying to make my friends laugh. That’s kind of the goal of a lot of my prints, too.”

BACKSTORY: A Brooklyn-based musician and visual artist finding his way back to his childhood love of Nicktoons- and MAD Magazine– inspired illustration

With frequent guest appearances from beloved pop cultural figures, Balliett’s FROM: Shepherdstown, West Virginia In recent years, Balliett has found a healthy growing presence online has led to his YOU MIGHT KNOW HIM FROM: His former role as touring guitarist for Midwest emo band The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer balance between music and art, finding first—and hopefully last—legal hurdle: a Afraid to Die, or his current musical project, Spirit Night time every day to “draw anything,” as he cease and desist from the estate of Dr. NOW: Prepping two new comic books—one called Trouble with puts it. “There are no rules—it’s really Seuss over a print (reverently) recreating writer Andrei Alupului, the other titled Disrespect—as well as working on a fourth Spirit Night record and the debut LP of his new just about moving my hand, practicing.” an illustration from Oh, the Places You’ll band, Miracle Worker Common among his doodles are clusters of Go!, bluntly captioned, “Fuck this place.” anxious figures most prominently featured “I wonder if Matt Groening is cool with on his band Spirit Night’s Shame LP, caricatures he and his girlfriend lovingly the Simpsons reinterpretation,” he ponders, of his t-shirt depicting Bart refer to as his “guys.” “It’s kind of a joke. As in, ‘Oh, are you drawing your taking bong rips with Garfield. “I hope he is.”

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BY MIKE LESUER PORTRAIT PHOTO BY ANNIE SULLIVAN ALL OTHER IMAGES BY DYLAN BALLIETT

from the art book I'm a Monster

from the comic book Trouble

BREAKING

EMMA ALLEN IF EVER THERE WAS A TIME FOR THE NEW YORKER’S WELLKNOWN BLEND OF SERIOUS JOURNALISM AND ABSURDIST HUMOR, THIS PECULIAR HISTORICAL MOMENT—characterized by a simultaneous hunger for objective facts and an overwhelming desire to escape them—would surely be it. “I think a lot of people enjoy the fact that New Yorker cartoons are embedded within articles that are so bleak and grim,” Emma Allen, the magazine’s new cartoon and humor editor, suggests during our conversation. “They’re moments of levity that can be silly and lighthearted and stupid.

‘Stupid’ sometimes is not an insult.”

As a relative newcomer keen to minimize the well-known pain of being edited, her modus operandi has been to approach the process with humility and “crippling empathy.” But paired with an ambitious creative vision, that empathy has proven far from crippling; instead, contributors are thriving on constructive feedback and alternate opportunities for exposure, as Allen has worked tirelessly to carve out an ever-larger place between publication (in the traditional sense) and rejection.

In her unprecedented role overseeing much of the publication’s humor content, Allen has already expanded its breadth and potential to accommodate new voices, building up Daily Shouts, Daily Cartoon online, video series, and podcasts, alongside her standard-form duties as cartoon editor. “The New Yorker was founded as a comic magazine,” she reminds me, and indeed, her appointment feels like a timely renewal of founding editor Harold Ross’s serious commitment to “gaiety, wit, and satire.”

When I call Allen, she’s surrounded by “towering stacks of printed out gags,” trying to decide which ones to bring to her weekly meeting with editor-in-chief David Remnick, and in what order for maximal impact. Also of concern is how effectively her black velvet onesie is operating as a magnet for all the lint in her office, and not if, but how much, Remnick will mock her for it.

BACKSTORY: An ambitious humorist whose wit and grit allowed her to climb the ranks of The New Yorker from assistant editor to department head in just five years FROM: New York, New York

Allen’s interest in experimenting with new formats online, from longer-form cartoons to moving image and even augmented reality, plays into the rise of a new generation of comic jacks-of-all-trades. “I think the boundaries between specific types of comedy and specific types of comics are breaking down,” she says, which has meant that the submission process is no longer “just this endless game of presenting work and then hearing ‘yes’ or ‘no’—and instead it’s been, ‘How can we adapt this into something else we can use?’”

New regular features online have also allowed the magazine to be “hyperresponsive” to current events, particularly important when “there’s just so much to respond to and satirize in the world of politics.” Still, it has been a balancing act mediating the imperative to “lampoon people in power” and simply offer readers a reprieve from it all.

YOU MIGHT KNOW HER FROM: Her wryly humorous essays for The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section on everything from cult filmmaker Jack Smith to 3D-printed cookie cutters

Allen herself is the only one who doesn’t get Every Tuesday, Allen assesses the latest a break, living and breathing a daily comedy cartoon “batches,” submitted digitally or in variety show, from the podcasts she listens NOW: At thirty—twenty-nine when she was promoted— she is the mag’s youngest and first-ever female cartoon person, and numbering around a thousand, to on her morning commute to the stand-up editor, taking the mantel from longtime editor Bob Mankoff before culling her way to an edit by Wednesday. specials she watches before bed. “You do There is no secret formula for making the cut, get to the point where you’re saying ‘laugh but as she sees it, the essential categories for the classic gags are “gimlet- out loud’ instead of laughing,” she admits, “but for the most part I think one eyed observational things” and “things that are just totally dada and surreal of my qualifications for this job is that I have a pretty infinite appetite.” and come from the minds of madmen.”

BY ELIZABETH BREINER 20

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PHOTO BY NATALIE CONN/LOVE + WOLVES

YouTube Series Out Now Album Out November 2nd

CHILDREN OF WOMEN: YA L I T Z A A PA R IC IO A N D M A R I N A de TAV I R A’S T R I P TO ROMA

Alfonso Cuarón’s follow-up to Gravity is Netflix’s first big play for Best Picture. Its star had never acted before.

BY CARLOS AGUILAR PHOTOS BY CARLOS SOMONTE

YALITZA APARICIO (SECOND FROM LEFT) AND MARINA DE TAVIRA (RIGHT) ON THE SET OF ROMA

YALITZA APARICIO IS NOT SURE WHAT HER FIRST NAME MEANS. “I’ve had problems with my name since I was very young,” the lead actress in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma says over the phone, speaking in Spanish.

When Aparicio’s parents tried to register her after birth, Mexican government officials initially refused to call her Yalitza, arguing that it wasn’t a common name. “My mom really loved it and my dad stuck to his guns,” she says. To date, Aparicio has only been able to find two possible definitions: “Dawn of Life,” in Nahuatl, or “Light, Power, and Imagination,” in Hindi, but she’s never met anyone fluent in these languages to ask for confirmation.

Either interpretation would be appropriate to illustrate the essence of her Oscar-worthy performance as Cleo, short for Cleodegaria, a domestic worker from an indigenous community living with an upper-middle-class family in 1970s Mexico City as she, the country, and her bosses undergo a drastic transitional period.

“Cleo is the most important person in the house,” says Marina de Tavira, also speaking in Spanish, who plays the role of Cleo’s employer Sofia—and the mother of the children that Cleo nurtures. In this love letter to joint motherhood, Cuarón drew inspiration from Libo, his beloved nanny, and the matriarchs of his upbringing.

Like Cleo, Yalitza Aparicio is a Mixteco indigenous woman; her hometown, Heroica Ciudad de Tlaxiaco, is located in the Mixteca Region of the state of Oaxaca. It’s there that Aparicio first auditioned for the life-changing part without major expectations. (She only went to the audition in the first place at the request of her sister, who was also interested in the part.) “Being an actress had never crossed my mind,” she notes. Several months went by without any word from the production.

Around the same time that Aparicio was graduating with a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education, she got a call inviting her to the capital for a meeting with Cuarón. “I had no idea who he was,” she says, laughing. Another period of time went by before she was summoned to a photo session with de Tavira, where Cuarón formally offered both women their respective roles.

TOP: ALFONSO CUARÓN AND YALITZA APARICIO; BOTTOM: APARICIO ON THE SET OF ROMA

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“He asked us if we were willing to be a part of this project and to live this adventure, and I told him I was,” notes Aparicio. At the time, she didn’t have a teaching job yet; thus, devoting her energy to an unforeseen career detour sounded like a productive alternative.

No conventional screenplays were provided to any of the actors. Instead, Cuarón met individually with each cast member to disclose the elaborate backstories he had concocted for them, mixing memory and fiction in a variety of measures. They were all only conscious of everything that happened before the film’s opening scene; the rest would come in small increments.

“We filmed the movie in chronological order, and we would discover what was going to happen to our characters one day at a time,” explains de Tavira. Dialogue was also flexible—Cuarón would predetermine the context, but allowed the actresses to rephrase the sentiments with their own spin while upholding the desired gravitas or lightness.

Collaborative magic resulted.

The novelty of the process demanded unrehearsed reactions, as well as the alacrity to cede control. “It was an exercise in being constantly present,” says de Tavira, for whom the experience required deconditioning from the memorization techniques typical of her work as a thespian. “I had to forget all that methodology to let the character be the one reacting, and just leave the actress out.”

“I T WA S A N E X E R C I S E I N B E I N G C O N S TA N T LY P R E S E N T. I H A D T O F O R G E T A L L T H AT M E T H O D O L O G Y TO LET THE CHARACTER BE THE O N E R E A C T I N G , A N D J U S T L E AV E T H E A C T R E S S O U T. ” — M A R I N A de TAV I R A Raising four kids as her marriage crumbles, Sofia’s distressing circumstances are similar to what de Tavira’s own mother withstood. “[Sofia and my mother] are women from a decade where those who had separated, or had to live in a family where the husband was no longer present, were heavily criticized by society,” she points out. “They were women who felt that the divorce was their fault, and they had to push forward carrying a social stigma.”

Honoring that resilience brought personal satisfaction to the actress.

For Aparicio, the inextricable parallels linking her to Cleo run even deeper.

“Despite the many years between the period depicted in the movie and our present time,” says Aparicio, “I have experienced the same discrimination as Cleo because of the color of my skin, because of my indigenous roots, and because of my social class.” In Roma, she speaks Mixtec, the mother tongue of her people, but one that she isn’t fluent in, and had to learn through a translator.

Growing up, Aparicio and her siblings were instilled with the notion that speaking the language could bring on more rejection. “My dad thought, ‘My children are not going to learn Mixtec because I don’t want them to experience what I already went through,’” she explains.

Lifelong prejudices toward indigenous cultures in their own homeland urged her father to suppress his identity. “When people heard him speak his native language they would dismiss him,” Aparicio says. It’s her hope that Roma ignites renewed appreciation for Mexico’s neglected linguistic history.

Yalitza Aparicio is the film’s guiding force—no small feat for an actress on her first try in any feature, but particularly so when it’s for an Oscar frontrunner. And while Roma is spun from Cuarón’s own memories, it’s where his past meets Yalitza’s present that cements the movie’s future as a masterpiece.

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“WOMAN AT A LUNCHEONETTE,” NEW YORK, NY, 1980

The Line

and Sight

of

Dawoud Bey

A conversation on Polaroids, trust, and the humanity of all people with the groundbreaking photographer.

BY ASHLEY STULL MEYERS PHOTOS BY DAWOUD BEY, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Producing contemporary photography is a delicate negotiation between aesthetic intuition and questions of autonomy. The medium is a chess game of vision and ethics—a game Dawoud Bey seems to have mastered. The Chicago-based photographer, originally from Queens, New York, was a 2017 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship award (colloquially known as a “Genius Grant”) for his prolific body of portraits of the black community. Spanning back to his now-iconic series Harlem USA (1975-1979), Bey’s images of black life are noted for their commitment to illuminating a multitude of subjective truths behind a complex web of sociopolitical narratives that have dominated the study of black photography from the civil rights era onward.

It’s common for talented photographers to be praised for their ability to see and reveal the souls of their subjects. Multilayered interior states and lived experiences are palpable within the composition of Bey’s images: They’re captivating. But Bey is clear that the camera is a not a tool of metaphysics—it has limitations and biases, and can be used as an accomplice to questionable power dynamics for photographers who neglect to actively subvert that potential. Bey’s mode of subversion is primarily one of principled collaboration.

Through his every interaction with individual subjects and broader communities, the images he constructs are uniquely attentive to the weight of specificity. They tell stories, but not ones concerned with tidiness. Their power lies in narrative left lingering—thoughts of what remains outside the frame.

On the occasion of the release of a career-spanning book of his work, Seeing Deeply, Bey reflects on the nuances of his practice and the stakes that underpin the resulting photographs.

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“MUHAMMAD,” 2001

“A COUPLE,” NEW YORK, NY, 1980

“A BOY IN FRONT OF THE LOEW’S 125TH STREET MOVIE THEATRE,” HARLEM, NY, 1976

Did you think up the title of the book? I’d love to hear about the methodology of “seeing deeply” within your work.

Yes, the title is mine. It’s what I try to do in each project and each individual photograph: to both see the physical surface, but to always look more deeply, to see more than what the mere surface reveals. With the individual, that means to see beyond the social context in which they are situated and to get at that deeper and more complex psychological representation that connects all of us as human beings, trying to find and secure our place in the world, wherever that may be.

A camera as a mechanical and optical device can only visualize the surface. As the artist making the work, it’s incumbent upon me to establish a relationship with the subject that is based on trust, and that then allows the interior person to momentarily come to the surface. “Seeing deeply” to me implies not just describing the obvious surface, but to somehow see and think more deeply about what one is seeing.

I want to borrow what was perhaps a rhetorical question from art historian Sarah Lewis, who contributed a lovely essay to the monograph. “When is the negotiation of being seen in front of the lens a civic act?” Can you speak to the way in which you feel making images of black bodies is inherently political?

Well, being black is an inherently political state, so the making of representations of the black subject takes place inside of that politicized context. For me, what is important is to give each person a sense of individual presence and psychological nuance—not to consider them as sociological “types,” which often happens in the discourse around the black subject. I want to create an expansive representation of the black subject one person at a time, and to have that add up to a broader statement about the fundamental humanity of black people. And I want to add something to the long history of how black people have been visualized within the medium of photography.

You’ve named various projects after their sites (Harlem USA, The Birmingham “USHA,” GATEWAY HIGH SCHOOL, SAN FRANCISCO, CA, 2006

Project, etc). Maybe that’s just meant to be practical, but I think it’s also somewhat romantic. Can you speak to the immense presence “site” plays as an additional subject in your work?

When I do an extended project about a place—a particular site—it is an examination of that particular place, whether that is the landscape of the place, its history, or the people who inhabit it. The project titles give the work a specificity: that it is about this place and time.

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“THREE WOMEN AT A PARADE,” HARLEM, NY, 1978

“A YOUNG WOMAN AND A GIRL,” AMITYVILLE, NY, 1988

“MARTINA AND RHONDA,” CHICAGO, IL, 1993

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I hear you have roots as a musician. Does an appreciation for melody and rhythm influence the way you take photographs? I imagine a sort of informal choreography goes into making images in a public space.

I began my creative and expressive life as a drummer. I think what I take from that background, having studied and played jazz, is the confidence of being able to go into a situation and freely improvise—to feel comfortable not knowing, but having the understanding of the form you are working inside of, and the full confidence of knowing your instrument, or camera, to such an extent that you can work with it without having to think about it too consciously.

And there’s also the sense of understanding what coherent and resonant form is. In music there’s a certain number of bars, a time signature, the interplay of melody and rhythm. With the photograph there’s the rectangular space of the picture and the opticality of the lens, and how one manipulates that. Being completely fluid with one’s tools allows you to say and do what you need to do freely when you’re in the place where you are making your work.

Many of the images in the book were shot with a 35mm camera. Although,

DAWOUD BEY / PHOTO BY JASON MADSEN

of course, your choice of equipment will frequently be situational, what’s your favorite set-up? What influenced your foray into Polaroids?

black subjects that I was photographing a print was important to me in being Over the forty-plus years that I’ve been making photographs, I’ve used a

able to disrupt the hierarchy of privilege that traditionally exists when only

range of different cameras, depending on the kind of photographs I was

the photographer is in possession of someone’s image, as they were able to

making. Early on I used a 35mm camera with a 35mm lens. It conforms more

immediately confirm the way in which they were being seen and represented.

to the field of vision of the human eye. I stopped using the 35mm camera in the late 1980s and began working with a 4x5 camera on a tripod. Portraits

We are in a moment, much like that of the civil rights era, where we see a

made with a large-format camera are more deliberate, and also require

proliferation of images of black life that largely revolve around the state of

the active consent of the subject, since it’s a much slower process—unlike

American politics and protest. While these images are important in their

working with the small handheld 35mm camera, which allows one to work

own right, I find myself more and more coveting images of black joy. Is it

more quickly and, if needed, unobtrusively.

important to you to capture joy in your work?

Along with the 4x5 camera, I started using Polaroid film, putting a Polaroid

What I covet is black complexity. I want the subjects in my work to exist in

back on the camera and using a film that produced both an instant print

a rich psychological space that is more complex than joy or a set of various

and an instant reusable negative. I would give the subjects the instant print

pathologies or sociology; a complex humanity that belongs to the black subject

and later make exhibition prints from the negatives. Being able to give the

as much as anyone else.

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WALLACE RICHARD MILLS’ MEMOS OF REPETITION Tequila, art, and what it all means, man.

“Cloud Cover”

BY DAVE CARNIE ART BY WALLACE RICHARD MILLS, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

I

’m meeting with my old friend Wallace Richard Mills at a Mexican restaurant in Downtown Los Angeles, where I ask him one of my favorite first questions: “Give me a Wikipedia definition of who you are.” I guess that’s not really a question, but Wallace supplies some basic information about himself. I will now present that information in the following list disguised as a paragraph: Wallace Richard Mills is a forty-five-year-old artist. He was born in California. He earned his master’s degree at The School of Visual Arts in New York City. He made art. He hung his art in art shows. Jerry Saltz was one of his teachers.

Richard Tuttle was one of his heroes. Tuttle visited Wallace’s studio and totally tut-tutted Wallace’s art. Later, Tuttle retracted his tut-tuts and said that he liked Wallace’s art. Wallace made more art and had more shows, but he felt like an outsider in NYC and eventually moved back to California.

Wallace got a job as a cobbler, designing skateboard shoes. He has worked for Sole Tech and DC Shoes, and is currently senior director of product at Supra Footwear. At some point, he got married and had three boys. Art was being created throughout this period, but it was done mostly in secret. He recently bought a Gibson SG guitar. It was on sale for $700.

“Journey”

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“Untitled”

“Four Points Made”

In case you’re wondering what Wallace looks like, he has a long, gray beard.

His hair is closely shaven. He does not smile often, although he seems like he is smiling all the time. His eyes are wise and quiet.

Now that that’s out of the way, we can join back in our conversation. I was in the middle of asking Wallace something like, “Why are we doing this interview?”

“Well,” Wallace says, “now being forty-five, I decided to pull my head out of my ass and actually do what I wanted to way back when I was in my late twenties, which was show art and get out there and do it. I just had a show where the title was BEGIN (again). I was just trying to say, ‘I gotta start this all over.’”

Wallace mentions that some of the pieces in that show—as well as some in the show he’s working toward now, to be hosted at the FLOOD Gallery in LA— are Polaroids, a medium he’s been using since graduate school. His Polaroids are deceptively simple. It’s hard to figure out how they’re created.

“I have this Vivitar machine,” Wallace explains. “It’s from way back before there was digital film, and it was made for photographers on set so they could check to see if their settings were right and if the model looked good and all that. What I slowly started to do with that was make little slides of these

“Game Show”

abstractions, and then I’d just start playing with it. The result is almost a photogram. But then I’ve been watercoloring on top, collaging, and always fucking them up even further. So it’s like a photo of a photo of a photo.”

Wallace has always created abstract art. I know this because I ask him if he went through any phases where he painted, say, blue clowns. Wallace replies that he did not go through any phases that involved blue clowns. Same with landscapes: no landscapes.

When he was a student in New York, he was lucky enough to work at the Guggenheim—he just sold “tickets and shit”—and this position afforded him the privilege of free admission to any of the other NYC museums. He would often visit The Met on his lunch break, find a comfortable spot in front of a piece of art he enjoyed, and just chill for an hour.

“The paintings that I really loved,” Wallace says, “were these non-objective paintings that I’ve always felt kept giving back. Whether it was Ellsworth Kelly or Franz Kline or whatever—I’m not going to barf out a bunch of names—but just all of that stuff was very enriching and I always wanted to revisit it. I fell in love with the language that they had come up with, and I guess that’s what I’ve been trying to build on my own: What’s my Rosetta Stone of symbols and things that I create with?”

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I have no idea what he’s talking about. I’m kidding. I know what he’s talking about, although I’m also kind of not kidding. I’m always curious what abstract painters are thinking. What is the meaning? What are you striving for? I’ve stood in front of those paintings before and, yeah, I’ve felt something too, but what does it mean? What does it all mean, man?

“Back when I started painting, I was doing twelve fucking layers of gesso and sanding it to the point where these surfaces were beautiful, but then I’d start painting on it, and I’d start overthinking it, and the thing would just turn into a pile. That’s why I love memos. They’re short little thoughts. Sometimes it’s of something I saw, a shadow I looked at, a repeating pattern, or a weird fucking tequila sign that says, ‘Por Favor.’”

“When I hear the word ‘memo,’” I say, pausing to admire the weird tequila sign that is over my head, “I immediately think of corporate shit: ‘I’ll shoot out a memo!’

It’s interesting that you use it in describing something that’s really supposed to be so happy and joyous—art—because no one likes receiving memos.”

“When I think of a memo,” Wallace replies, “it’s more of a memoir, and that’s

“Untitled”

where the diaristic side to some of the things that I do comes from. If you’re writing in a diary, you’re usually not belaboring stuff.”

It should be noted, incidentally, that “memo” and “memoir” are cognate. I am not a linguist, but they both appear to be derived from the Latin “memor,” which means “remembering.” So a memo really is kind of a little memoir. I stand corrected.

One of Wallace’s titles—memos, whatever—that I was immediately drawn to was “Cliff Them All.” Obviously a reference to Cliff Burton (RIP), Metallica’s bassist on their first three albums. What I didn’t know was that Cliff ’Em All is also the title of a documentary devoted to Burton.

“I think the ‘Chain Link’ piece is nice, too,” I say, “because it looks like someone asked a child to paint a picture of a chain-link fence. Picasso said, ‘Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once [they grow] up’—but the little movies that you recently made for this upcoming show kind of look like a children’s program. They’re very primitive. Is that intentional?”

“A little bit,” Wallace says. “More honest, I guess. I was thinking of stop-motion animation. I was doing all these things in my head, but it wasn’t happening and I wasn’t able to get the technical stuff ready to be able to do it. So I decided, ‘I’m going to make what I think I can.’”

“Chain Link”

“Skarfing Material”

“Two Layer Cake”

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HADDONFIELD, REVISITED:

What many consider the scariest movie ever made started as a casual idea tossed out to a young filmmaker, who understood the terror inherent within our own homes. That filmmaker also knew how to play the synthesizer.

by Nate Rogers photos by Michael Muller Halloween set photos by Kim Gottlieb-Walker, from the book On Set with John Carpenter

J

ohn Carpenter has an Oscar, but he doesn’t know where it is.

The award was won for The Resurrection of Broncho Billy, a 1970 short film he worked on with a handful of other University of Southern California students, and it was subsequently kept by the school on behalf of the filmmakers. (“The head of the USC cinema department brought the Oscar in a paper bag and showed it to us,” Carpenter told USA Today a few years ago. “That’s the height of arriving in Hollywood.”) Carpenter cowrote, edited, and scored the short, which is about a college-age kid stuck in the bustle of a big city despite being obsessed with cowboy movies and the Old West.

The character is endearing but ultimately somewhat tragic; the city chews him up and spits him back out.

Oscar in a university drawer somewhere, Carpenter set off on a bullheadedyet-elegant career in which he became known for doing damn near everything himself (he is quite literally the most noteworthy director/ composer alive)—and, while we’re talking about it, he’s made his own fair share of odes to Westerns, too. His traditional feature debut, 1976’s Assault on Precinct 13, is a reimagining of sorts of Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo, but set in the sketchy depths of gang-torn LA, and incorporated with elements of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Cowboys and zombies, Westerns and horror.

The film was made on a shoestring $100,000 budget—independent by independent standards—and did poorly at first, but it slowly built acclaim, eventually making a splash at Cannes in 1977. Soon after, a man from Miracle Films purchased Precinct 13’s theatrical distribution rights for the United Kingdom. His name was Michael Myers.

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“I believe in evil, sure,” Carpenter says, sitting in the living room of a pleasant Hollywood home that he’s converted into an office. “It exists, it’s in nature, it’s in humans. I don’t believe in the supernatural, but that’s just a belief. I could be convinced otherwise if a flying saucer lands out there.”

He’s talking about Halloween—and, in this case, specifically about the composition of Michael Myers, a character who has seeped into the framework of our culture as much as any in film history, for better or worse, depending on whom you ask. Myers, like the shark in Jaws or Regan in The Exorcist, has fundamentally changed the landscape of people’s fears and neuroses. For forty years now, the image of a jumpsuit-clad man in a disfigured Captain Kirk mask, spray-painted white, has lingered in the peripheral darkness of our kitchens and laundry rooms. Carpenter’s depiction of an escaped mental patient’s massacre of three high school students in the fictional town of Haddonfield, Illinois, on Halloween night in 1978, has scared viewers out of ever watching horror movies again.

“He’s not quite a human,” Carpenter explains. “Not quite. There’s something scarier to me about that. ‘I’m not sure what this thing is that’s after me. Is it a man? What is he?’ That was my idea.”

Halloween has come to define Carpenter’s career, despite the fact that none of the cult-hero director’s later films are anything like it, really— and despite the fact that many of those later films are true landmarks in their own right. Even with the legacy of midnight-movie sci-fi classics like The Thing and They Live looming large, he can’t escape Halloween, which lingers in his shadow in the same way that Myers does behind innocent Laurie Strode as she walks home from school.

Even indirectly, the film is always there: That office in Hollywood? It’s not too far from the actual house that served as Laurie’s in the original film. (“Total coincidence,” he says, as if the proximity had never even occurred to him.)

NICK CASTLE AS THE SHAPE

Surrounded by props and posters from his various films, Carpenter sits down in his leather chair of choice to discuss past and future.

Maintaining a stern mustache and a casual ponytail, he is both an intimidating and welcoming figure, speaking with unquestionable conviction one minute, joking around like there’s nothing to have conviction about the next. In his speech, he occasionally adopts a well-practiced, half-sarcastic ~spooo0ky~ voice, and over the course of an hour-long conversation, he drops at least several “hell yeah”s.

Carpenter, now seventy years old, is turning and facing his shadow on the record because there’s a new Halloween in the world. It’s the eleventh film in the series, but for the first time since 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch—a Carpenter-produced (failed) attempt at expanding the franchise outside of the realm of Michael Myers—he was actually involved in this one’s making, executive producing in addition to recording a reprisal of his iconic original score. The 2018 Halloween, directed by David Gordon Green, who wrote it with Danny McBride and Vice Principals collaborator Jeff Fradley, ignores all of the previous nine sequels, simply picking up the story straight from the original, four decades later.

“Jason Blum [of Blumhouse Productions, the studio behind the film] said, ‘You know, instead of just sitting on the sideline and saying you don’t like these sequels, why don’t you come and help this time? Actually contribute, bigmouth,’” laughs Carpenter. “I thought, ‘OK, I could do that. I could shepherd it through.’”

John Carpenter was born in Carthage, New York, but his family moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, when he was about five, after his father, a music professor, took a job at Western Kentucky University. Young John did not like it there.

JOHN CARPENTER WITH JAMIE LEE CURTIS

“My parents were Yankees, and we all moved down to the South,” he remembers. “And this was the Jim Crow South. It was not a very pleasant place in those days, and I was a fish out of water. I was not a hillbilly—I was not one of those country boys—so they loved to pick on me. And that was not fun. I learned all about evil in that little town when I was growing up.”

Going to the movies was an escape for John—as was making them, eventually. He got out of Bowling Green to go to film school at USC in Los Angeles, where he was initially so naïve to the sprawl of the city that he tried to walk from the airport to campus, luggage in hand. (That’s a cool ten-mile hike, if you’re wondering—and not a welcoming one, either.) “I looked at a map, and it looked like SC was right up the street,” he laughs.

“So I just started walking. I got out of the airport—I think I made it down to Manchester [Avenue, near Inglewood], and started up the street and thought, ‘You know, this is not a good thing.’ So I took a bus.”

DONALD PLEASENCE

“[MICHAEL MYERS IS] NOT QUITE A HUMAN. NOT QUITE. THERE'S SOMETHING SCARIER TO ME ABOUT THAT.” 48

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Carpenter dropped out before graduating, but first he made a key friendship with Nick Castle, a fellow USC student. Castle was the cinematographer on Broncho Billy (he also doesn’t know where the hell that Oscar is), and played the mischievous, orb-like alien in Dark Star, a school-produced comedic sci-fi short-turned-feature that was directed, cowritten, and scored by Carpenter. (The other cowriter of Dark Star was Dan O’Bannon, who went on to write Alien a few years later. Castle later became a notable filmmaker as well; he cowrote Escape from New York with Carpenter in 1981 and directed the Walter Matthau–led version of Dennis the Menace in 1993.)

After Precinct 13’s relative success, a pitch came in from the film’s distributor, Irwin Yablans, who wanted Carpenter to make a movie called The Babysitter Murders—about, well, babysitters getting murdered and stuff. B-movie fun. Carpenter agreed on the condition of final cut—he wasn’t going to let the project be contained as a straightforward thriller, like his as-yet-unaired TV movie Someone’s Watching Me! was on its way to being—and he wanted his name above the title. “I saw this as a showcase movie,” he says. “I approached it that way.”

With a paltry budget of $300,000 secured (financier Moustapha Akkad had been making a movie that cost $300,000 a day, so the project seemed like a throwaway gamble of sorts), Carpenter got to work, enlisting his then-girlfriend Debra Hill, who was the assistant editor and script supervisor on Precinct 13, to be the sole producer and cowriter on the film with him. (Hill later cowrote The Fog with Carpenter in 1980 and Escape from L.A. with Carpenter and Kurt Russell in 1996. In 2005, she passed away from cancer.) The lore goes that Yablans was the one who eventually suggested the setting and name of “Halloween,” although Carpenter is wary of how much credit he deserves. “He had nothing to do with it creatively,” Carpenter says, seemingly still kind of pissed off about the way the story is generally spun. “Irwin is a pirate. Be careful of what you believe.”

Hill and Carpenter made their first big decision by casting nineteenyear-old Jamie Lee Curtis as the lead, Laurie, in what would serve as her big-screen debut. It was Hill, a savvy marketer as well as filmmaker, who in particular grasped onto the kitsch value of having the daughter of Janet Leigh—best known for taking a very unfortunate shower in Psycho—as the star of the movie. The most expensive casting decision

(costing the production an extra $25,000) was hiring Donald Pleasence to play Dr. Sam Loomis, Myers’ psych-ward doctor who is frantically trying to track his patient down before the inevitable happens. (“Sam Loomis,” by the way, is a reference to the Psycho character of the same name.) But as for casting the character of Myers himself? You know, the guy who’s on-screen almost the entire movie? That wasn’t so planned out.

“I knew John was doing a new movie,” Nick Castle remembers over the phone, “and I found out that they were in pre-production close to where I lived. So I went down and said, ‘Can I just hang and watch the whole thing? Because that would be really helpful for me—I want to be a director, you know.’ And John said, ‘OK, why don’t you be the guy walking around with the mask on,’ and I went, ‘Uh, OK.’” He laughs here, still amused by the ridiculousness of this story.

“That’s as simple as it was. It was offhanded, one pal to another. I think John has embellished it to be, like, he knew the way I walked and stuff like that.”

This is true. When asked, Carpenter dismisses Castle’s humble portrayal of how he got the role of “The Shape,” as it is curiously but tellingly billed, and instead insists that it was a deliberate choice, citing his friend’s gracefulness and tact. (“Nobody walks like he does,” Carpenter says. “Nobody.”) But regardless of whose version of the story you believe, there is validity to Carpenter’s explanation: Castle’s performance is nuanced in its own way. Myers glides across the screen in a manner that makes the scenes surrounding the murders just as scary, if not more so, than the actual murder scenes themselves.

Consider the definitive moment of Castle’s performance, which occurs after Michael has pinned the unlucky Bob—who really shouldn’t have said “I’ll be right back” to the soon-to-be-unlucky Lynda before heading downstairs—to the kitchen wall with a frickin’ butcher knife.

Instead of heading straight to Lynda, Michael instead pauses and simply stares at Bob, gently turning his head ever so slightly, back and forth, observing the body like a dog might observe a tree. It’s a subtle and somewhat inconsequential moment, but it gets under your skin.

“That’s the perfect kind of acting for me,” Castle explains, noting that he actually suffers from stage fright, dating back to a bad experience with a Shakespeare soliloquy in college. “Put a mask on and walk

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me around and tell me where to go and tilt my head and stuff—I’m perfect when I can do something that simple. Believe me: [playing Myers] took absolutely no talent,” he laughs. Talent or not, Carpenter got his money’s worth from his old friend: Castle was paid twenty-five dollars a day.

Production of the film blazed by in a month’s time, crewmembers fielding numerous roles, pennies pinched every step of the way. The set-design team, for example, who were faced with the challenge of making Southern California in spring look like fall in Illinois, had to gather their prop leaves after each scene to reuse them for future shots. (“I couldn’t hide all the palm trees,” Carpenter bemoans of shooting in LA. “I couldn’t do it.”) Also worth pointing out: A popular behind-the-scenes photo from the shoot shows Castle drinking a Dr. Pepper through the Myers mask, but the whole reason the photo even exists is because, desperate for something to spice up the craft services department on set, the production struck a deal with Dr. Pepper to donate sodas under the condition that the cast and crew be photographed drinking them.

Carpenter refers to Halloween as a “word-of-mouth movie,” its popularity spreading in the weeks after its release like a dare from friend group to friend group. Reviews initially weren’t strong, but a glowing late review from Tom Allen in the Village Voice started to turn the tide. “It became a bigger thing than it was,” Carpenter notes, blasé.

“Roger Ebert interviewed me—he liked it. Nice guy.”

Back before production had begun, Carpenter worked it out with Akkad that he would be paid only $10,000 to make the film, with the tradeoff being that he receive 10 percent of the movie’s profit.

Halloween made $70 million worldwide.

These days, Carpenter is working on developing a few TV productions—and he recently helped pen a series of Big Trouble in Little China comic books—but he seems to spend most of his time focusing on music. Working with Cody Carpenter, his son, and Daniel Davies, son of Dave Davies of The Kinks, Carpenter has put

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out three synth-drenched records in the past few years on the indie label Sacred Bones. He tours a bit, too: For the second year in a row, John, Cody, and Daniel will be playing at The Palladium in Hollywood on Halloween night.

“Movies are rough shit, man,” Carpenter explains. “Music is a joy—it’s a joy to do.”

This partially explains Carpenter’s return to the Halloween series, in which he took advantage of a higher budget and better technology to rerecord the spine-tingling 5/4 theme. (And maybe that means the Academy will use the opportunity to replace the Oscar that USC has hidden away somewhere; in his entire career, Carpenter has yet to receive a formal nomination.) Castle, too, is back for the 2018 film: Most of the new Myers performance was done by James Jude Courtney, but for the scene in which Laurie—once again played by Jamie Lee Curtis—and Michael first see each other again, that’s Nick behind the suit. He “can’t retire on it,” but they paid him more than twenty-five dollars a day this time.

Carpenter doesn’t like to rewatch the original Halloween—or any of his old movies, for that matter—but he’s in small company on that front, as the movie seems to get a theatrical rerelease year after year (this year, a remastered 4K cut is being shown across the country), and not a single person seems to come away from one of those screenings with the conviction that the movie didn’t scare them this time. It’s the little details and offhand images that continue to land the hardest: a handful of hospital-gown-wearing psych patients wandering around at night, in the rain; Michael standing in a doorway, wearing a sheet over his head, just breathing; Laurie frantically banging on a neighbor’s front door, screaming for help, only to have the porch light turned out on her. Several generations on, John Carpenter’s ninetyminute suburban fever dream is still the quintessential post-Manson American horror experience. “‘There but for the grace of God go I’—that’s what you’re saying to yourself,” Carpenter considers, on the topic of why we so badly want to be scared by a movie like Halloween. “‘Oh, look at that guy—that evil guy there. Thank God it’s not me.’”

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Colluding with Rob Rogers and Tenacious D’s Jack Black and Kyle Gass Recently fired for his work’s criticism of Trump, the Pulitzernominated cartoonist is now free to speak—and draw—how he really feels. JB and KG aren’t afraid either—and have a new hand-drawn YouTube series to prove it. So we got them together to talk it out. No censorship involved.

by Dan Epstein images TK

Recently fired for his work’s criticism of Trump, the Pulitzer-nominated cartoonist is now free to speak—and draw—how he really feels. JB and KG aren’t afraid either, and they have a new animated YouTube series to prove it.

So we got them together to talk it out. No censorship involved.

BY DAN EPSTEIN OPENING ILLUSTRATION AND COMICS BY ROB ROGERS POST-APOCALYPTO IMAGES BY JACK BLACK

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We know what you’re thinking: What could an award-winning political cartoonist and the self-styled Greatest Band on Earth possibly have in common?

Well, as William Shakespeare writes in The Tempest, “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows”— and indeed, the misery of daily life amid the corruption and ineptitude of the Trump administration has tremendously impacted and influenced the current work of both Rob Rogers and Tenacious D. This past June, Rogers was fired from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette after twenty-five years of service, when the newspaper’s publisher decided that the cartoonist’s work was too critical of Donald Trump—despite the fact that the president has repeatedly railed against our nation’s free press, even calling it “the enemy of the American people.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Jack Black and Kyle Gass spent their summer putting the finishing touches on Post-Apocalypto, a six-part animated video series (with an accompanying album of the same name). Written by Black and Gass, who voice all the characters in the series—every frame of which was also hand-drawn by Black—Post-Apocalypto marks The D’s first foray into both animation and politics. When evil stalks the land in the wake of a Trump-triggered nuclear blast, Jables and Kage realize that it’s up to them to save the world, even if it means battling everything from cave-dwelling monsters to White House–dwelling members of the Ku Klux Klan.

In light of all this, we figured that Rogers, Black, and Gass would have plenty to talk about.

FLOOD: Rob, maybe you can start off by telling us a little bit about your story.

Kyle: Listen, Rob: I have 100,000 [Facebook] followers, and I never post.

It’s not a contest, though! [Laughs.]

Rob Rogers: I’ve been a professional political cartoonist in Pittsburgh for thirty-four years, the last twenty-five of which have been with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. For most of the time I’d been there, they were a very liberal-leaning paper, but the publisher started to slowly grow conservative and move to the right. And then when Trump came in, he became enamored with him, so he hired a new editorial-page editor who also shared his feelings about Trump. In my last three months at the paper, starting in March, I had eighteen cartoons killed, when normally it would just be two or three a year. And then in June I got fired. So there you go!

Rob: But even though I don’t have a full-time paycheck, it’s been good; I’m getting offers to do cartoons for magazines. And I’m working on a book right now to talk about the story of my firing.

Kyle Gass: Thank god for the First Amendment! [Laughs.] Could it strangely have had a positive effect [to be fired]?

Rob: Well, it did. I think I had five thousand Twitter followers before this happened. And then, when they started killing the cartoons, the media picked up on it, and they were like, “Why are they not running your cartoons?” Everybody started theorizing that it was because they were Trump cartoons, and people started getting interested in my story.

And then when they fired me, it sort of went viral—and now I have ninety thousand Twitter followers.

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FLOOD: Jack and Kyle, do you anticipate getting any blowback for the political commentary of Post-Apocalypto from certain segments of your fanbase?

Jack Black: I mean, I’ve let it be known that I’m anti-Trump and anti–the current administration. We’ve always leaned left; I don’t think it’s going to be a surprise to anyone. But yeah, I kind of respect the Jim Carreys of the world—you feel something, you let it be known. And if you can pick up a pen and do some half-decent drawings on the subject, all the better.

FLOOD: How long has Post-Apocalypto been in the works?

Jack: I think we’ve been working on it for a couple of years now. Right around the time when Trump first came down the escalator—I think that’s when the seed was germinated. The moment of conception was that ridiculous ESCALATOR DESCENT INTO HELL! And I think once the blue wave hits, and the impeachment proceedings begin, we’ll finally be able to move on to our next project.

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“THE WHOLE PLANET COULD BE DESTROYED

BY ONE MAN BECAUSE OF HIS INSECURITY ABOUT THE SIZE OF HIS PENIS. THAT IS WHAT I THINK IS IMPORTANT TO FOCUS ON!" — JACK BLACK

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Kyle: Oh, gosh…

FLOOD: What do you mean by “oh, gosh,” Kyle?

Kyle: Well, let’s not get over our skis now. Let’s let this process play out.

Let Bobby Mueller do his job! [Laughs.]

FLOOD: Speaking of moments of conception: There’s a whole lot of seed-planting going on in Post-Apocalypto. The sheer amount of erect penises and gaping vaginas in the series is pretty impressive.

Kyle: Wow, gaping? Were they gaping? That seems like an unnecessarily descriptive word. I don’t know, though. Jack, were they gaping?

Jack: No, there’s no gaping to be seen.

Kyle: No gaping was used in the creation of this series. But it seems like we’ve been hearing that a lot about the sheer number of members.

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Rob: As someone who’s had a lot of cartoons killed by my editors, and who is not really allowed to draw penises and vaginas for a family newspaper, I was wondering: While you were working on this thing, did you ever edit yourself? And if so, what kinds of things didn’t make it in?

Jack: No, that’s the advantage of not having a boss!

Kyle: Does it look like we edited anything? [Laughs.] I’d like to know what we didn’t use, too!

Jack: Well, we didn’t use the thing about the two-headed dog giving a two-headed blowjob, which I think was a good self-edit. There were little nips and tucks, but there was no boss upstairs telling us what to do. I think it’s pretty obvious! It’s the most free we’ve ever been with our craft. But on the subject of the penises and vaginas, I wanted to go back to that for a second: It seems like it’s at the center of our current situation—that the whole planet could be destroyed by one man because of his insecurity about the size of his penis. That is what I think is important to focus on!

Kyle: I have never thought of it that way, but you’re right.

Jack: Dude, he’s gonna launch it just to prove that he’s got a big one! I’m sorry, I don’t mean to rant. But if you wanna talk about the connection between genitalia and the end of the world, it’s pretty obvious what’s going down. If you’re going to ask me, “Jack, why are there so many penises and vaginas?” the answer is: “WE’RE HERE TO SAVE THE WORLD!!!”

Rob: I do think it’s interesting that Post-Apocalypto starts with the nuclear bomb coming down from nowhere; you don’t even know who drops it. But I guess that’s the point, right? It doesn’t even matter who starts it.

Jack: Well, it’s a murder mystery—you’ve gotta figure out who destroyed the world. And—spoiler alert—it’s Trump! [Laughs.] It’s one of the most obvious whodunits ever.

FLOOD: It’s interesting that Donald Trump Jr. gets all the screen time in the series, while his dad is only vaguely referenced a couple of times.

Rob: Yeah, he’s like a specter.

Kyle: It’s good that you noticed that; it’s very important.

Jack: Well, there’s a theme running through the whole series about fathers and sons—Jables Jr. and Donald Jr. It wasn’t really something we

were conscious of doing; it was just sort of writing itself. And we’ll let the critics and the pundits untangle the subconscious elements [laughs].

Rob: My theory was that he wanted to see the explosion in all its glory— just like when he looked at the sun during the eclipse—and he got fried by the mushroom cloud!

Jack: We just wanted to avoid talking about “President Donald Trump” because I think there are rules against even fictionalized accounts of presidents, depending on what you’re going to do with the character.

I didn’t want the FBI knocking on our door saying, “Hey! What are you doing?” So we found the loophole. Donald Jr.—no one cares about that guy! [Laughs.] I’m counting on zero FBI door-knocks or wiretaps. Also, I don’t think we ever say the word “Trump,” so it could be a different Donald Jr. Kyle: We tried to be a little oblique… And then we just sort of gave up.

Jack: Oh, no—that’s gonna hold up in court.

Rob: I also noticed that Donald Trump wasn’t in it, and I thought that was brilliant for two reasons: One, you’re drawing this at a time when you’re not sure where he’s gonna end up—he may be impeached, he may be gone by the time this thing gets released, right? [Editor’s note: He’s not.] So you’re thinking ahead. But also, you really don’t want him to be president. By not acknowledging that he’s president, it’s kind of a jab at him. So I kind of liked that he wasn’t in it.

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Jack: Thanks, Rob. And there’s another reason why he isn’t in it: Isn’t he, like, eighty, and doesn’t he eat Kentucky Fried Chicken every day? We didn’t want it to be old news in that way, either. [Editor’s note: Trump is “unequivocally the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”]

FLOOD: Let me play devil’s advocate here: Do any of you think there are any positive things that have resulted from this administration?

this slamming shut of doors and walls. We’ve got a fever going on here, and it’s scary because it feels like the whole world is in a delicate balance—the survival of the species is at stake if we don’t start working together at some point soon. How long do we have? A hundred years?

Two hundred years? We’ve gotta get this shit together. And maybe this pendulum swing will go in that direction.

Jack: I would say no, really.

Rob: When you look at Europe and the rest of the world, a lot of those people that are coming out now in those nationalist parties—do you guys think that has anything to do with Trump? It did begin with the [refugee crisis], and certainly it’s been happening for a while in France. But I think it really exploded when Trump became president, because now all these nationalists and Nazis and racists around the world decided, “Hey, if he can become president, then maybe there’s a chance for us, too.”

Kyle: Sometimes it seems like there is a pendulum that swings back and forth, but I’ve never seen it swing that wildly. Maybe now it will swing wildly into common sense, and wonderful things will happen on the rebound.

Kyle: I just thought that was one thing we could all agree on: that we’re all working for a no-racist society. But I guess that was kind of an idealized civil rights thing—racism remains, and is huge. We’re nowhere near past it yet.

Jack: Yeah, I’m trying to find the silver lining here. I think there’s something to be said about exposing the darkness to the sunlight—the disinfecting that we didn’t even know needed to occur, because we didn’t know what was boiling beneath the surface of America. Like Kyle says, it will be interesting to see how the pendulum swings on the way back here, because it feels like the whole world is under the spell of the swing of this particular pendulum. Nationalism is big not just in the United States, but in the UK and Europe; all across the world, there’s

Jack: Did you see that documentary about Jane Goodall where she realized that there was an inherent violence that runs through the chimp’s DNA, that we probably share? At the end of the day, this fucking “winning” thing—this “I’m gonna get us winning, and we’ll get China losing so we’re winning”—is some fucking chimpanzee-brain shit going down here. And it does not end well! I mean, I guess this has always been the way it is, and maybe it’s a very snowflake-y thing for me to say, but it’s time to evolve.

Rob: [Laughs] Good drawings for me!

Kyle: It’s always good for comics and stuff, to have this kind of thing…

But yeah, I don’t know. It’s kind of beyond the pale.

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Best known for his creepy, crawly, oddball roles in an assortment of your favorite films, Paul Dano has now directed his first, Wildlife—and it’s a testament to the sympathetic nature that compelled him to play all those despicable characters in the first place.

BY ANYA JAREMKO-GREENWOLD PHOTOS BY MICHAEL LAVINE STYLING BY MICHAEL RAY SOLIS GROOMING BY JOANNA PENSINGER-FORD

Paul Dano is scared.

Or, at the very least,

Paul leans into all that. He’s willing to appear weak. Lose control. Be

scary is an adjective Paul Dano clings to. His eyebrows slope upward

humiliated. The first time most people took true notice of him was

at their center in a kind of reverse Vulcan, two ramps a pair of ski

bolting out of a yellow van in 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine. His uncle,

jumpers could glide down into different dimensions, leaving him

played by Steve Carell, has just shattered his dreams (“you can’t fly

with a preternaturally worried look.

jets if you’re color blind”), and the teen boy abandons the family vehicle and races down a hill to release a mighty “fuuuuuuuck!”

Some things Dano describes as scary include, but are certainly

breaking a months-long vow of silence before collapsing to the

not limited to: the moment in a theater right before a film begins

ground in sobs. I recall feeling surprised by the scene when I first

and the lights plunge you into anticipatory darkness; putting a

saw it: You don’t often see a man like that. The moment has sex

child actor (notoriously risky) at the center of his directorial debut

appeal, but it’s vulnerable, not virile.

Wildlife; returning to Broadway after eight years to star alongside Ethan Hawke in a Sam Shepard play; acting with a director he

Dano hasn’t had too many starring roles, unless you count indies

knows rather than one he doesn’t (he can more easily fool the one

(no superheroes on the docket yet), and he’s often relegated to odd

he doesn’t); and the type of character people accuse him of playing

or dark supporting characters without easy glory. He abandoned

over and over again on-screen (the other type, he tells me, is gentle).

Hollywood entirely in 2016 for a major part in Tom Harper’s BBC miniseries War & Peace; the Tolstoy adaptation and British

Paul may know his stereotypes to be “gentle” and “scary,” but he

production required a six-month shoot in Russia and Latvia, and

doesn’t remark upon how much one informs the other. Like most

went on to become a huge hit in the UK. Furthermore, while not

artists, he isn’t wild about analyzing patterns or repetition in his

technically the star, Dano was the sole presence rivaling Daniel

work. Not only is Paul apparently pretty fearful, he is also famously

Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s punishing two-and-a-half

adept at scaring others—as a plantation boss taunting his charges

hour There Will Be Blood. DDL had a year to prepare for his role as a

with a jaunty, slur-ridden singsong in 12 Years a Slave, a mentally

wily oil tycoon, while Dano replaced another actor on short notice

deficient pedophile/murder suspect dangling a dog by its collar

and had four days.

in Prisoners, an unctuous preacher who shrieks and connives and tongues the hand of an elderly lady in church, swearing he can cure

If you say Paul’s name to someone who isn’t a film nut, they

her arthritis, in There Will Be Blood.

probably won’t recognize it. If you cycle through one or two of his roles first, they will know immediately whom you mean. The work

His on-screen presence routinely offers a weaselly, skittering

speaks, and haunts.

threat. The first hint of autumn in the air, a lingering unease.

Please understand: Dano is not an actor who will intimidate you physically—because he is the one who gets hurt, repeatedly, beaten bloody in all three of these roles. What’s most frightening is how badly you’ll want to watch him suffer. His characters deserve it,

On the Internet, there are frequent jokes made—even articles

you despise them, and yet—you’ll shudder at how soft-bellied he

written—about Paul Dano’s “punchable face.” He’s so good at

remains. Maybe you’re the monster.

getting beat up, voyeurs want in on the fun. The majority of wouldbe Paul-pummelers are perhaps responding to how odd of a face

One thing Dano does not fear is playing a coward. His costars

Paul’s is (odd is not an insult; it’s a face that can’t be imitated, that

cry, pine, and bleed, but they tend to maintain a certain macho

seems to change like a mood ring). It’s perfectly round from the

dominance over him—and frequently, full beards. Dano himself

front, with high cheekbones and a small dimpled chin tapering

cannot grow a full beard, and when he does sport facial hair it

down like a lightbulb. From the side, an arrowhead nose juts out

seems tentative. In Swiss Army Man, his thick, deserted island Cast

unexpectedly.

Away whiskers are fake.

When he has a small smile, Paul reminds me of the “slightly

Three respected actors are hefting into the director’s chair this

smiling” emoji. You know the one: a circular golden head with

fall: First is Bradley Cooper, with his remake of musical tearjerker

neutral eyes and thin mouth corners turned politely skyward,

A Star Is Born (starring…himself); next is Jonah Hill and his tale

used if a texter can’t commit to the frantic cheer of the grin or the

of adolescent angst and skateboarding in Mid90s; and then, of

smug of the smirk. “[It] may be used as a form of passive aggression

course, Paul Dano. The first film has a pop star attached (Gaga,

or to convey the notion that ‘this is fine’ when things are, in fact,

Our Lady of Perpetual Extra), and the second has hip distributor

not fine,” reads the description on a dot-org called Emojipedia;

A24 at the helm. Hill also bros around with stars like Leo DiCaprio

Gizmodo called it the “calm smile of terror.” It’s kitten-cute,

and Brad Pitt, and over the course of writing and directing Mid90s,

though the tight lips conceal some inner turmoil. Its partner, the

he consulted no less than Spike Jonze, Ethan Coen, and Martin

same face but upside down, descends more overtly into chaos.

Scorsese.

When we meet in Brooklyn, where Paul lives (and loves to take

It’s a bummer how the flash of Cooper and Hill’s films threatens

the subway), I feel no desire to punch him. Less than no desire;

to eclipse Dano’s revelatory glow. If the director got advice from

negative desire. He has owlish glasses, a quiet voice, and he

any famous filmmakers in the process of making Wildlife, I didn’t

answers questions like an academic. There are few declarative

hear about it. He cast Carey Mulligan to anchor the film and Jake

statements, and he skirts around anything too brazen, conceding

Gyllenhaal to play her husband, the latter of whom he’d worked

that it might just be him who feels that way. Every time he talks

with on Prisoners and Okja. These are two of the most interesting

about his first feature film as director, Wildlife—a drama based on

actors of their generation, and Dano does them justice. Gyllenhaal

the novel by Richard Ford and starring Carey Mulligan and Jake

proves, yet again, to be most powerful in less traditionally

Gyllenhaal—he compulsively mentions his cinematographer (the

powerful roles—Brokeback Mountain’s lovesick Jack Twist, or the

talented Diego García) and editors in the same breath, eager to

creep from Nightcrawler—while Mulligan is at long last given the

point to the team effort of it all. I’m guessing he’s not keen on

opportunity to sparkle on-screen as she hasn’t since 2009’s An

auteur theory, either, as evidenced by how integral he considers

Education, in which she played a sixteen-year-old, though twenty-

his girlfriend of twelve years and the film’s cowriter, Zoe Kazan,

four at the time.

to the project.

Now, Mulligan acts her age. She has the stately aura of a serious I bring up Mook, Paul’s now-defunct band. They attended South

thespian, not a movie star. Gyllenhaal is the movie star—but in

by Southwest in 2010, but Paul didn’t have sufficient time to

Wildlife, he purposefully recedes into the backdrop, absent for

commit to both music and film—at least not until he portrayed

long stretches of time. They are Jeanette and Jerry, a married

young Brian Wilson in the 2014 Beach Boys biopic Love & Mercy, a

couple in 1960s Montana, whose relationship is dissolving faster

performance for which he sang, played piano and guitar, and was

than a tablet of Alka-Seltzer in a cup of water; their early-teenage

nominated for a Golden Globe.

son, Joe, is the one getting sprayed by damp fizzle.

The photographer wanders over. “Did I hear you were in a band?”

A self-proclaimed Criterion Collection enthusiast, Dano has wanted to direct for a long time. He gets noticeably excited cycling

Paul practically recoils: “Well, yeah. Once. I feel very self-conscious

through the many collaborations a director must accrue (sound

talking about it.” I ask whether he was the frontman. “I guess so,”

design, music, costumes). “I found it so fun to be working with

he says softly.

so many people,” he tells me. “Acting, by comparison, now feels much lonelier. A lot of your preparation is alone. A lot of your

To punch such a person would be insane.

work is showing up prepared for the moment. Or maybe it just feels that way to me. I don’t know if anybody else would say it feels lonely. But compared to directing, where you’re always having to express all your thoughts to everyone… ” FLOOD

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PAUL DANO ON THE SET OF WILDLIFE / COURTESY OF IFC FILMS

“Family has some of our greatest love, but is also probably the source of some of our greatest struggle.”

Acting is a career of relative self-denial. Performers spend weeks,

One thing Wildlife gets right is how parents in conflict vent to their

months, even years pretending to be people other than themselves.

kids about each other. It’s having the two pillars of your life—the

All that prep time and searching for motivations hidden in fiction,

sun and moon—at odds. As if your right and left arm are pulling in

though, tends to exercise the empathy muscle. Paul’s seems strong,

separate directions, but you can’t properly detach from either.

judging by the compassion with which he oversees Wildlife’s mother-father-son trio. Joe is played by impressive newcomer Ed

The film also understands why parents complain to their kids about

Oxenbould, who has the kind of face that could belong to an adult,

marital fissures, even when the kid isn’t old enough to hear it yet. They

but he also looks younger than his age (and somehow resembles

can be a parent’s source of comfort, the sole trusted ally. Adult friends

both Dano and Kazan a little). As an only child, he bears the burden

don’t necessarily know how bad things have gotten, but the kid always

of his parents’ problems. Joe is a sensitive kid, though most kids

does, having witnessed it all. Still: There’s a cruel power imbalance in a

are like wind chimes where their parents’ slightest breezes are

parent leaning on a child. Children are not their parents’ equals.

concerned, and many scenes—Jerry losing his job, Jeanette and Jerry bickering—take place with him observing or eavesdropping,

This is where Mulligan excels. Both Jerry and Jeanette confide in

the camera rested on his open, disbelieving face.

Joe, and he does his best to convince each that the other still loves them; but Jerry refuses to work as a grocer and signs up to fight a

Wildlife is one of the best divorce movies I’ve seen. When I ask Dano

wildfire in the mountains instead, while Jeanette is fed up with his

whether his own parents are still together (it’s a genre evaluated

avoidance and tendency toward needless risk. She begins a love affair

most fairly by people who have divorced parents), he’s hesitant to

with a much older, less attractive neighbor (played shamelessly by

share specifics. “They are...” he says, though the way he emphasizes

Bill Camp), and makes Joe watch.

the second word makes it sound like a technicality, “...but they were not always. They were sort of… They have a unique relationship.

In a lesser film, Joe would villainize the parent who knows it’s time to

They were never officially divorced, but there were times where,

split—that the relationship is not healthy anymore—for breaking up

you know…things were different.”

his family. (That’s Jeanette.) In this film, Joe sees both sides. Clearly, so do Dano and Kazan.

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CAREY MULLIGAN IN WILDLIFE / PHOTO BY SCOTT GARFIELD, COURTESY OF IFC FILMS

CAREY MULLIGAN, ED OXENBOULD, AND JAKE GYLLENHAAL IN WILDLIFE / IMAGE COURTESY OF IFC FILMS

PAUL DANO IN MEEK'S CUTOFF / IMAGE COURTESY OF OSCILLOSCOPE PICTURES

PAUL DANO IN LOVE & MERCY / IMAGE COURTESY OF ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS

BENICIO DEL TORO AND PAUL DANO IN ESCAPE AT DANNEMORA / IMAGE COURTESY OF SHOWTIME

“Love is what makes something painful sometimes, right?” says Dano of the story’s themes. “Something about that really moved me. That was my perspective of it… I didn’t rebel… I sort of wanted

Paul and Zoe Kazan, who is also an actress, wrote Wildlife

to try to help, you know—keep the ship as steady as it could be.”

together, but they did not write it at the same time; after she gave

(Here he is referring, I suspect, to his own experiences.) “Family

him copious notes on a first draft he was secretly quite proud of

has some of our greatest love, but is also probably the source of

(lovingly, of course—it wasn’t even written in screenplay format),

some of our greatest struggle.”

they passed it back and forth in edit mode for years. I ask whether he felt emasculated by his girlfriend tearing apart something he’d

Just as Dano has done on-screen, Mulligan allows herself to be

slaved over. Most guys would. “I probably felt debilitated,” he

unlikable as Jeanette. She’s hard, domineering, decisive, and much

admits. “It was my first time trying to write. I definitely needed the

braver than her husband, even if he’s the one battling a forest fire.

help, though. I mean, I was asking for it.” Dano wrote by the image

The generosity and space Dano provides his actors is the biggest

a lot, so Kazan brought a sense of structure to the thing, taking

indicator of his time at the camera’s other end. He lingers long

multiple images and turning them into one scene rather than

and hard on his leads, and Mulligan in particular is given the rare

three. In interviews, he likes to refer to her as “a proper writer.”

chance to be messy. There are scenes where she just about makes your skin crawl.

The first film Paul and Zoe acted in together was Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff in 2010, a tale of adventure and hardship on the

“We shot the film in a fairly economical way, so it allowed her

Oregon Trail that required a grueling desert shoot. The second

enough takes where it was like, ‘You don’t have to worry—let’s

was Ruby Sparks in 2012: Paul starred, Zoe wrote the screenplay,

go search for it, let’s play,’” he explains. “It’s like parenting. It’s all

and Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris—the same couple who

them. You’re just giving them the space to be them and be their

made Little Miss Sunshine—directed. The indie was marketed as

best selves, pushing them occasionally.”

a rom-com, even though it’s more of a rom-horror. (This should be a genre. One could argue for Knocked Up as a rom-horror,

Paul recently worked with another actor/filmmaker: Ben Stiller,

for instance: Two people trapped inside a compatibility-bereft

director of a new Showtime limited series called Escape at

relationship after an accidental pregnancy.) In Ruby Sparks, Dano

Dannemora, based on the true story of an upstate New York prison

plays a novelist named Calvin who’s struggling with writer’s block,

break and the resulting manhunt in 2015. Dano plays a convicted

and whose therapist suggests he write about a woman who loves

cop-killer who makes a miraculous bid for freedom alongside

him unconditionally to get the creative juices flowing. He does,

another inmate (Benicio Del Toro), abetted by an older female

and the woman he invents is Ruby, who then appears IRL (played

prison employee who is sleeping with both of them (Patricia

by Zoe) with no idea she is Calvin’s rib.

Arquette). In episode one, Dano does his first major love scene with Arquette; well, love is a generous term for the uber-quickies

Initially their bond is magical, but when Ruby begins showing

they have on the clock while she’s overseeing his work in the tailor

signs of having a mind of her own, Calvin starts editing her to

shop. Dano depicts the life-sentence-serving David Sweat with

fit his whims. One particularly sinister scene involves Calvin

seductive insolence and a small, reddish goatee.

revealing to Ruby that she’s not real, and proving it by executing his authorial control: typing commands on a typewriter (to bark

As a fellow director with acting cred, Paul found Stiller sympathetic.

like a dog, to speak in fluent French, to scream “you’re a genius”

“It’s based on a true story, so he’s very meticulous with details—but

over and over), and watching as she’s forced to obey. Zoe has made

with the actors, he’s very free,” Dano says of Stiller. “There were

it clear the film didn’t echo her and Paul’s actual relationship, but

times when he was like, ‘I know that this sucks.’ There were many

she did write it for them to play together on-screen. “I feel like

uncomfortable things we had to do. Especially because prison is

even with Paul, some of the things that made me attractive to him

fuckin’ bleak.”

were the things that now he finds very challenging,” she told W Magazine truthfully of the film’s relation to their lives.

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Dano has no social media presence to speak of, while easy-breezy

jealous. I love how active Zoe is socially and politically—that’s got great

Zoe has beautifully curated hers. She tweets back and forth with

value.” I mention the Monsieur Hulot thing (he’s a cinephile, so I’m

journalists, film critics, and other celebrities; chipper and intelligent

speaking his language), but when I say the tweets present him in a light

and politically engaged. Unlike Paul, Zoe’s family is in the biz (she is

the public wouldn’t otherwise be privy to, he gets really giggly and asks

Elia Kazan’s granddaughter, in case you didn’t know), but they live in

for clarification: “That I’m like, what? A neanderthal with technology?”

New York and not LA because Paul prefers it. The two met performing

(That’s precisely what Hulot is. I’m not so sure about Paul.)

in the 2007 play Things We Want, directed by Ethan Hawke, and both have delicate features and ways of speaking, equal parts fragile and

Social media freaks him out because of all the negative energy, in

earnest, two country mice living in the big city but hunkering down

addition to some healthier contributions. Reading the news every

at home to watch foreign films. Zoe attended Yale, and has discussed

morning of this administration takes its toll. Twitter can exacerbate

the pair’s joint workaholic natures, telling The Los Angeles Times last

the bad stuff, as it’s a place where everyone goes to wail; if personified,

year: “I have a partner who is very work-oriented. Sometimes we’re

a newsfeed would sound something like a billion wolves howling in

two hamsters on a wheel.” In a recent happy birthday post for Zoe

agony. (Maybe a few of them would be laughing.)

on Twitter, Lena Dunham wrote that her friend “looks fourteen but is ninety years old inside.” Paul and Zoe, then, are a couple with old

“I think I’m not on it because, honestly, what am I going to say? I don’t

souls and fresh faces.

need to tweet something. What am I going to say?” The second time, the question sounds almost helpless. I have no good answer for him.

Dano insists he’s not as serious as he seems. But he is private, so he doesn’t show his “goofy” side in public much. (“I know a lot of actors who are like this, actually—but I’m just not somebody who likes to put myself on display.”) If you want to see the real Paul, I couldn’t tell you where to look—but I can point to the tender portrait his longtime lady

Paul Dano loves all sports, but basketball especially. In middle school,

paints of him on social media, a version you won’t find anywhere else.

he dreamt of playing in the NBA.

On socials, Zoe refers to Paul as “PD.” She tweets about him sweetly

“I think in art, probably the most important thing is the gut part,

and a little mockingly; the “PD” tweets aren’t frequent, but they do

above the intellect,” he tells me when I (snobbishly) note the possible

illuminate. She makes him out to be part Monsieur Hulot, part Larry

disparity between his high intellect interests (Criterion, theater) and

David, but kinder; a little bumbling, unapologetically unhip, a tad

the more primal ones (like sports). Both athletes and actors have made

crotchety. Last year, she transcribed a conversation the pair had while

focused physicality their profession: It’s about bodies and what you

watching sports news: PD asked Zoe what “ICYMI” meant, and when

can do with them, but it’s also a grace under pressure, an uncanny,

she explained the Internet acronym, his response was incredulous.

natural-born knack. Athletes have an assigned position on their team,

“Enough people know that?”

like an actor does in a story—still, within those roles, there’s room to get weird.

My favorite might be a screenshotted text exchange featuring PD on a plane, messaging Zoe that there is a cat beneath his seat. “Oh

It makes sense, too, that basketball would be Paul’s pet sport. It

no! Your allergies!!!” Zoe texts back pityingly, to which PD sends a

allows for more creativity than some of its equivalents, and there’s

somber reply: “I know.” And then: “This kitten is noisy and under my

something more intimate about the handling of the ball. Baseball

seat and the plane will be circulating the air.”

players smack it away with a bat or catch it in a glove; soccer players kick it with cleats; footballers tuck it crudely beneath their arm and

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He smiles a lot when we talk about his online alter-ego. “I’m always

sprint. But there’s a tenderness to the dribble, bare-handed, no body

shocked when I find out that she’s [tweeted about me],” he says. “I know

armor. A method of cradling the thing that’s reminiscent of Paul’s

that happens, but I think it happens more than I know. I’m sort of

gentle side, both behind the camera and away from it.

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