The soldiers of Roberto Minervini’s The Damned play cards, wander around, and casually debate theology. The year is 1862, and these Union soldiers find themselves in the heart of gold rush country, far away from the theaters of Shiloh and Antietam. They never speak of their mission, and they rarely give orders, but somewhere just offscreen the enemy may be lurking. They go through flat grasslands, they battle, then they ascend.
Minervini worked with the cast in this, his first fiction work, in much the same way that he worked with his previous documentary subjects. In fact, many of those subjects are literally a part of this cast, all of whom are amateur actors. The result is a tense blend of documentary and fiction, as conversations these actors had on set are presented or reenacted in the conversations on screen. They’re heady conversations, too, and the effect of hearing these soldiers debate the theological meaning of war is even more impactful knowing that many of these actors are indeed military men. It’s equal parts a filmed historical reenactment, a documentary on military life in the United States, and a fiction film about a country that doesn’t know where it’s going.
On the occasion of The Damned’s release, I interrupted Minervini’s Cannes jury duty to discuss the film.
Zach Lewis: A selfish question first. I’m originally from rural Mississippi. And I’ve always been fascinated with being able to see the American South from outsiders’ perspectives, especially Europeans, like the French intellectuals appreciating Faulkner in the forties and fifties.
Even though you had moved to Houston by happenstance, I’m curious if you had any interest in the American South before you were making The Passage (2011).
Roberto Minervini: I would say the honest answer is no in the sense that I would have a hard time recalling anything that I’ve done or experienced in life when interest towards anything was intellectual first.
I think everything for me is experiential. Like living without a safety net, sometimes having a smooth landing, and sometimes hitting the ground hard. And then from there, assessing the situation and then taking it from there. So everything that’s really primordial, instinctual, experiential — this is what’s led me to being who I am today and being who I am as a filmmaker. And, of course, although I’ve matured intellectually and I’ve definitely become more sophisticated than I used to be, what I trust the most is my instinct and my experience.
Had I read Faulkner? Yeah, casually I had. Bukowski and Richard Ford had more of an impact on me for my formation, or whatever that schizophrenic kind of form of education that I’ve had from my life, than Faulkner and the Southern Gothic in general.
My interest in the South happened just because I lived in the South; I would not make another film in the South now that I live in New York City. It’s not how I feel comfortable. I am very wary of approaching things from a distance, of raising a red flag, of being too voyeuristic or too opportunistic in my approach. It might trigger a judgment that is done without inhabiting spaces, without meeting people, and, for me, that would be a baseless judgment and frankly uninteresting and dangerous.
ZL: In a way, The Damned is also at least partially about the South, even if it’s not set there, because, in a classic Southern Gothic fashion, the Confederacy here is composed of almost spectral figures. We don’t necessarily see their presence very much, but their possible presence haunts those Union soldiers. Do you see this film as a continuation of your experience of being in the South and thinking about those things?
RM: Yes, there is a continuation in the sense that there are people who are participating in the project who are coming from the South. And just like in the 19th century where people would just start from the same academy — maybe they start from West Point and just discretionarily join one side or another for mercenary reasons — it made sense that people from the South would fight for the Union, at least in the first stages of the war. But they carry the Southern perspective and experience which I am familiar with by not only living in the South, but also through them. These are people I knew. This was years removed from our collective experience in Stop the Pounding Heart, and it was a great moment to just gather together and assess where we’re at. We had to face the past and the present because ideals and ideas and perceptions shift as they become more and more lost in memory. Or perhaps they just solidify and then are never put into question again.
So to be there in 2022, and to be able to dig deep into memory, into our ideologies, into our political views, and put them into perspective of something new, and, at the same time, something that represents continuity. It’s a continuity with my work that is clearly rooted in the Southern experience.
ZL: I read that you met with members of the National Guard in Montana who also happen to reenact the Battle of Little Bighorn each year. I’m curious if you’ve visited any of the Civil War reenactment sites across the United States, because, like The Damned, they’re usually put on by amateur actors who are tasked to embody a historical character and embody a kind of historical spirit.
RM: So, I have never attended any reenactment, and I haven’t even attended the Renaissance Festival that is huge in Texas. Because I always felt a little out of place. I would just be a distant viewer. And though I never had a particular interest in attending, the Carlson family — the father and kids that are featured in the film and the family of Stop the Pounding Heart — they always participate in war reenactments and Renaissance reenactments, and they always told me about their participation. So I know about these reenactments, and I know how they work, and I know how passionate they are. And a lot of the people in Montana, yes, since they do reenactments, and since they are active in the military, I thought this was a great synergy to create. It became very fruitful.
ZL: You researched quite a bit about the Civil War in preparation for this film, but I know that there’s a daunting amount of Civil War scholarship. At what point did you feel that you had done enough research?
RM: Yeah, I never feel like I’ve done enough research, just like I never feel like I’ve done enough shooting. I just need to put an end date on this process. I’ve always had a not-so-symbolic end date to my shoots, which is my birthday at the end of July. So I did the same thing here by putting a deadline on my research. Then research continues and takes other forms, other shapes, so it becomes like oral traditional research as we continue to talk about things. But, paper-based or Internet-based research, searching through the archives — that ends at some point. I don’t recall when it ended, but I do recall focusing particularly on the causes that triggered this war, which is an endless search.
But it was particularly interesting to go and read the speeches of Abraham Lincoln in Congress and how the perspective around the abolition of slavery changed since the Missouri Compromise of four years before.
And then, there was the pressure on the Union from the UK hoping that American democracy will finally fortify and finally rid itself of the heavy weights of the past that were weighing on it. So having read all that, I was trying to decipher what had been said, to truly understand the sentiment behind what could trigger a war that kills at least 600,000 people.
Because, in the end, if I could catch a glimpse of the sentiment behind all this, the heavy decisions that have been made prior to starting a war, perhaps I could communicate those to the characters, to the people involved in the project. And maybe we could start from that emotional standpoint, not from an intellectual, cerebral standpoint, right?
There’s no way for me to become competent about the Civil War. But, for me, research got me to a place where I became sensitive about the Civil War, and that was the starting point of the project.
ZL: Were there particular elements of the film that you were more focused on getting historically accurate than others?
RM: Yeah, up to a certain point, I care about the look, the appearance of things because I didn’t want that to be a distraction, not because of historical faithfulness. Because I knew that I would just depart from that and I would never be able, with my means, to be historically faithful. Even Hollywood studio projects fail at that. But it’s more because I didn’t want that to be an obstacle to hamper the experience that the audience would’ve with the film.
Whereas when I completely departed from reality, I made it as a conscious choice, and it’s very explicit: it’s the language. I did have it in mind that I wouldn’t bring up the conversation with the interpreters, the characters, on how they should speak. And if they didn’t ask, they would just be able to speak the way they wanted to. I was just reading a review of the film about the fact that there was something about the film that was anachronistic for 19th century America, and that’s the therapeutic or psychotherapy language. It gets triggered in the moment, as part of the catharsis of thinking about what it means to be a man.
And that is anachronistic. Of course it is. But that is an integral part of the approach, to make sure that there is this constant tension, this kind of give and receive between past and present. The past becomes alive; it’s not a moldy document. And it becomes alive thanks to the symbiosis that we create with the present. And American English is a huge part of creating this kind of marriage between the past and the present, in keeping the past alive.
ZL: There’s that famous quote from Faulkner, “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.”
RM: Yeah.
ZL: Were there any moments when your actors with military training were coaching the ones without or were they all looking to you for guidance with that?
RM: Yeah, that happened heavily in the first week. Just, very organically, those people with that experience would not only coach, but share their expertise and their memories with those who never had any proximity with military experience whatsoever.
And there was a lot of generosity, and perhaps that stems from a certain sense of duty and pride for those in the military and war veterans who were sharing their wisdom. And a lot of that has been caught on camera, but the utmost majority, if not the totality of that footage, is not included in the film, just because it created that kind of hierarchy among soldiers, which I wanted to eliminate or at least hide in the film. Hierarchy is something that is hidden because it carries too many meanings. It’s not just a hierarchy in cinema, or roles of wisdom and expertise, but it almost becomes a hierarchy of beauty, a hierarchy of even the right to succeed.
There’s something hierarchical that happens when we as audiences get attached to a character versus another. It could be inverted sometimes: we could get attached to the working class, the privates and not the generals. In other words, I didn’t want anything hierarchical to happen, so that footage is not in the film. But the exchanges are very poignant, because it was an attempt to really share and be understood; people wanted to be known and to matter to each other. It was beautiful to see.
ZL: I’m curious about the location scouting for this film. Were you looking for a particular section of Montana that would have disparate landscapes? You have the flat grasslands, you have some forestry, you have rocks, and you have snow. It’s also fortuitous that you shot in Montana where a lot of the cast-to-be own and ride horses. Did the high amount of horse ownership in Montana affect your choice to shoot there?
RM: [Laughs] Yeah, I did spend some time in Montana where some of the people who guided me were those who were involved in both reenactment and the National Guard. They drove me around and showed me the valleys, especially the Helena Valley. All these people are deployed; the National Guard is deployed in Helena.
So I chose the Helena Valley where I knew that I could count on access to land and wildlife because there are particular valleys where, at a certain time of the day, you would see elk and buffaloes crossing those lands and it was extremely evocative of the timelessness of this land, since it’s preserved land. That was the first thing.
The second is that in Helena, we would have access to the local community thanks to the National Guard. I held a city hall meeting in Helena saying that everybody attending the meeting was welcome to be part of the film, of which I could only say that it was about being at war, patrolling in this frontier land, and waiting for the inevitable to happen. And then we would assess it together to take it from there. So that’s all they knew. And I told them, if you have a horse, you’ll be cavalry. If you don’t have a horse, you’ll be infantry.
Then a man who wasn’t supposed to be in the film brought horses. And so I asked him to be in the film. So the people who owned a lot of horses and trained horses became characters in the film. So that’s how it started.
ZL: Did you ever look at all those horses and think to yourself, “Oh no, my insurance costs just doubled”?
RM: I have no choice but not to worry about the repercussions on things including insurance and budget. I must not worry, not because I’m not responsible, but just because worrying about the consequences for anything put in place can easily translate into self-censorship.
Assessing the “doability” of a scene and the dangers of it immediately works as an inhibitor for the creative process, especially for a film that is improvised. If I start worrying about things happening, then I’ll become too afraid to take risks. And for me, that is not possible. People who partake in this risk agree on that. And those who are in the film are those who agreed to dive headfirst at times into their scenes.
ZL: The film very much emphasizes the individual soldier. Not only are they engaging in these pensive monologues, but you’ll often frame the single soldier in the center of the screen with these vintage lenses that literally blur out the rest of the world around them. Was there a particular impetus to make you focus on this meditative, solitary soldier?
RM: Yeah, absolutely. The clear intent of using those optics and throwing everything in the background out of focus was to represent war as an individual experience. And the battle itself is built and filmed individually. There’s nothing, with the exception of when the battle starts, about the group being at war.
And there’s also another aspect: in the 19th century, they are fighting a two-dimensional war. There are no 3D devices. So you basically rely on very rudimentary optical devices or your eyesight. I think throwing things out of focus also signifies and enhances the fact that when you don’t get to see what’s past your range of view, it’s extremely scary. Death could be literally around the corner. I think throwing everything out of focus doesn’t just allow us to be with the character, but also prevents us from seeing past what the character can see. I think, subconsciously, not having a clear sight of the landscape causes tension in the film.
ZL: Speaking of that lens, I’m curious about your working with Carlos Alfonso Corral, who had previously worked in your camera department in some of your Texas productions, but here, he’s both DP and composer. What were you discussing about the image and sound during pre-production? I imagine that lens is a little bit more temperamental than the kind of lenses that we use today.
RM: Yeah, we knew that there’s part of the lens’ behavior that we could control. But, for example, the way it registers the color is very complicated. So we knew that we had to accept that from the beginning. There wasn’t a lot of testing going on; when you don’t have a lot of control, at some point you have to let go. And when you let go of control, you have to rely on your instinct and sensitivity. That’s why I wanted Carlos to shoot this film, because I could trust Carlos’ sensitivity. And I’m talking about humanity here, like the way he sees things, the care he places on details, on people and faces.
Similarly, when he scored the film, he did so prior to us editing the film. He scored his own experience on the film; the music existed before editing the picture of the film. And then when we started picture editing, I told the editor that it was the music of the film, and it was also Carlos’ experience, and to edit with that in mind. In both cases, I knew that I could trust Carlos’ innate sensitivity.
ZL: The actors here frequently talk about God, faith, and this kind of contradiction between the Christian agape, the neighborly love, with what war asks of them. Were these actors independently arriving at these conversations? Did it naturally emerge through other conversations, or were you seeking to push them in that direction? The movie is titled The Damned, so I assume there are spiritual concerns happening there.
RM: Some of the conversations, yeah, they go a long way back. We’d talk about the godliness of life and the godliness of death and the godliness of killing. Those are conversations that I had with some of the people involved in the film for a decade at least; that’s when I started writing the story with Jeremiah Knupp, who’s the red-haired protagonist of the film, and Tim Carlson, who’s the long-bearded soldier. When I first started talking to them, we considered including a chaplain — which is historically appropriate — traveling with them. That’s to illustrate how prominent this conversation was.
It was so present in the film that the character of the chaplain was removed, just because it would’ve become redundant. The average soldier at that time was most likely a Christian and would’ve just carried on with that conversation.
Though this conversation happens spontaneously, what I do is try to intersect what is said, perhaps the peaks of the conversations, and I tell them to go back or to pause for a minute and to dig deeper into that conversation one way or another. So, I do stir conversations. I rarely trigger them, but I constantly stir them.
ZL: A lot of the other conversations revolve around things like penitence and regret. And funny enough, whenever I was watching this movie last year, I happened to be reading Dante’s Purgatorio. And I kept thinking that these soldiers are behaving just like the shades, those in Purgatory who are still attached and working through these worldly concerns before they’re saved. It made me rethink that old adage “war as hell.” Most of this war is just waiting around and being concerned with themselves; it’s more of a purgatory.
RM: Yeah, I think all of your parallelism with Purgatory is spot on, actually. And I am frankly surprised that not many critics have intercepted it, or at least not explicitly. Because this is something that is very clear and that is why nothing is happening. The tedium happening, this kind of wandering around, is not due to lack of dramaturgy or the lack of development of a clear narrative.
I hope I’m not so untalented that I’m not able to build a clear structure, right? [Laughs] Or for film, I hope not. But the intentionality [of this structure] comes precisely because of that, because of the fact that they’re in purgatory. In both literature as well as in spiritual belief systems, in Purgatory, people wander around for perhaps forever.
And the fact that war is hell — again, politically we can argue that war is hell. But spiritually, theologically, war is purgatory. Because death is an ascent to paradise. So it is not hell. Since I’m not asked this question, I haven’t talked about this, but the truth is, when I was filming, especially in the third part of the film, in my mind I was seeing these soldiers as a group of ghosts or lost souls, not humans. I always asked myself whether anybody was alive.
And if you ask me to interpret my own film, I do see that. I always saw it that way. But, this parallelism — which is more than important, it’s key — with the Purgatorio has been mainly unobserved. I think you are absolutely spot-on with that, and it’s essential to understanding why I built the film that way.
ZL: I’ve also read that you’re feeling a bit disenchanted with making documentaries. Do you think you will be sticking with projects that look like The Damned, or are you interested in making straightforward fiction pictures?
RM: Yeah, it is a question to which I haven’t come up with a clear answer. It’s a question I ask myself. If you’re asking me today, I could say I am definitely more interested in exploring the tension between realism and fiction as I continue to introduce more fictional elements and as I continue to borrow from the fiction cinema tradition.
So I’m asking myself how far I can go with this. I’m asking, and I don’t preclude the possibility of just making a much larger leap into the fiction world and see what that does not only to my films, but to my idea of cinema. Right now, I know I am not going back to making documentaries, because documentaries speak to a much smaller audience. They have lost a little of their effectiveness in triggering a deep political discourse; it’s become quite marginal.
And because the market has shrunk so much, the work we see is harmless for the status quo. They’re more aligned with some preconceived ideas or right or wrong; there’s no more provocation in documentary. So, I do think that polluting an ideal realism with fiction might be something provocative enough to motivate me to go in that direction.
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