Photo by Molly Phenom.
O
ctober Crow is the directorial debut from Jack Haven, known to many from their role as Maddy in I Saw the TV Glow. The film follows a young woman who flees Kentucky for the bright lights of New York. There, she befriends James Steele, a benevolent fiend who names her Bella and introduces her to life as a dominatrix in a religious brothel run by La Bruja.
As stated by TITE, the film was born out of Haven’s friendships with leads Alexandra McVicker and Peter Nolan Smith, and is a largely improvised, earnestly kinky and unabashedly punk testament to the power of creative freedom and true love in a hostile world.
Haven had a set of guidelines for the film, which includes the cast and crew being around during the press cycle (dependent on availability). This meant that composer Mina Walker and actor Peter Nolan Smith were also present at the European premiere in Dublin, offering their insights alongside Haven.
Liadán Roche: Can you tell us about the origins of the film?\
Jack Haven: Yeah, so I moved into a building and Peter [Nolan Smith] was living upstairs as the super, and day one, he asked me if I would make a movie with him.
Like two years later, [Alexandra McVicker] moved to New York, she moved in with me. And Peter was very sick with liver cancer. Alex and I sort of had been dreaming of a movie that was about this orphanage for sex workers. We had big dreams for it, but when Peter ended up in the hospital and we felt like things were getting pretty serious, we were like, let’s just start making it now.
And so the first day we shot it, Peter was in hospital and we just started shooting on my phone. That’s not in the movie, but...
LR: Your one goal was to reach that feature length film mark, right?
JH: Yeah, every time we shot, I’d say, it has to be long enough, and we have to win a Palme d’Or! Those are the two requirements.
LR: What was a standard day of filming like for all of you
JH: Alex’s brother Austin died just before we made the film. We went to his funeral in Kentucky, and we shot the first scene that’s at the graveyard. We shot that like, right before the funeral.
We just happened to be hanging out with her friend, who plays the boy at the beginning. And I was like, “This is really awkward, but would you want to just shoot a movie right now?” And he was so sweet, and he was down for it.
A lot of the scenes would be like that. Some of them, Peter would have been texting me dialogue for months leading up to shooting. The exchange that ended up in the movie is: “Do you like sex?” “Yes.” “How many times have you had sex?” “Six.”
LR: I have a question for you, Peter, about James Steele as a character. What is the core truth of that character for you?
Peter Nolan Smith: I was living in Thailand, I had about five kids and two grandchildren there, with my wives. Somehow I picked up this name ‘James’, because somebody thought I looked like James Bond at the time, and my wives still think my name is James. I worked in nightclubs for a long time, wandered the world... It’s like James Steele was brought back to life. My wife still doesn’t know what my real name is.
LR: And Mina, I wanted to know a bit about the process of composing for this film. That was mostly improvised?
Mina Walker: Yeah. Jack was like, “I’m making this movie, and I want you to score it. We have to finish it in like, a week.” So we just met every day in (cocomposer) Avsha’s basement, we would watch a scene and just bust out a song for everything.
We were like, okay, you get a song, I get a song. We made one track for Jack. We’re like, “Okay, this is the like, raucous, sexy song,” and Jack just started spitting in a British accent. [Laughing] No offense to the British, but it was so fun to work that way.
It just felt fun to embody these characters, to be the sonic voices. I think that the way that we all sang was also a little bit different than the projects that we do in normal life. The movie was super DIY, so we wanted this music to sound very DIY and spontaneous.
LR: I’ve heard you use the word ‘punk’ in relation to
October Crow
. I really want to know what ‘punk’ means for you, in relation to the film, but also your own artistic practices.
JH: ‘Punk’ is the word I would use publicly, but in my own philosophy, it’s ‘waif ’. Waif Magazine was like an absurdist art magazine that we ran for six years, and ‘waif ’, the original dictionary definition, means “anything found without an owner”. I guess punk and waif is creating and adapting to a life that is unowned.
A lot of the work that I did when I was first coming up was super capitalist. I did a show for Nike that was like, how I first made money, and then I worked for Netflix, which is a tech company, so becoming more waif to me means like cutting out ownership of the work in order for the work to stay as honest and as fresh and as human as possible. MW: Punk is so much more about the core of something than the product of it. For everything I’ve done, I’ve felt like I didn’t know how to. Everything I’ve ever made with Jack, we’ve been collaborators for 14 years, has been waif and punk. We didn’t necessarily have all the resources or the skills or whatever, but we had this raw passion like, “We’re gonna make a band, we’re gonna make a movie!”
It feels like a punk movie. What Jack’s doing doesn’t feel like anything I’ve ever seen before. And they work with a $0 budget, and it’s really a $0 budget. It’s not like ‘low budget’ with $100,000. JH: Although I did pay Peter $250 for two days of work.
LR: Which two days did you pay Peter for?
JH: I don’t remember which two days, but there were two days when he just called and said, “Listen, I just, I mean, is there any money in this or?” And I was like, “Well, I mean, I can Venmo you?”
LR: Have any big takeaways from
October Crow
influenced the subsequent stuff you’ve been working on?
JH: There’s one Letterboxd review that really criticizes the sound. Then I saw Castration Movie Anthology II and in Castration II, there’s a 25 to 30 minute sequence–
LR: In the party, right?
JH: In the party! Where it’s so visceral, but you cannot hear what they’re saying other than like every three words, where Ivy Wolk is talking about how she was non-binary for four years in college. But it’s so funny that it almost doesn’t matter. So scratch that takeaway! The sound is actually fine.
Maybe the biggest takeaway is being gentle on the story. It doesn’t have to be too much, it doesn’t have to be too dramatic. Just let it play, let the characters fall in love, and you’ll fall in love.
I just want to have so much space for grief in all my work, because that’s what I want to make more space for myself, because there’s so much to grieve. There’s this great book by Martín Prechtel, he’s an indigenous writer, it’s called The Smell of Rain on Dust. It’s about grief as praise. I really believe that grieving deeply for something is a way to worship, pray, or to appreciate something. Like, what do we have left? Even the Palme d’Or, it’s like, it’s a joke, right? There’s nothing left to achieve. We’ve done it. We’ve stolen all the land, it’s over, you know? This way that we compete with each other, we have to untangle from that.
LR: To tie it back into TITE, I wanted to know what trans filmmakers influence you and your work as well.
JH: I’ll just say the trifecta to me, and I had a dream once that they were all looking at an iPad together, is Jane [Schoenbrun], Vera [Drew] and Louise [Weard]. There’s also Luis De Filippis, a Canadian filmmaker.
I actually haven’t seen Henry Hanson’s movie [Puppygirl], so I’m excited to see that. I’ve seen one of his shorts, which is awesome, but I’m excited to see the feature. Ava Hart is a young filmmaker who I know from New York. She has a really great short but she’s going to make a lot of work.
LR: People have also been coining the term ‘Trans New Weird’ for this new wave of trans film. I was wondering how you feel you relate to that?
JH: I think in a way, it conjures like a ‘Keep Austin Weird’ feeling, which, to me, is white supremacist. I feel like there is a white supremacist edge to ‘weird’.
I think what I notice about trans film, even the people that I’ve mentioned, are all white. I think there’s a belief that you can kind of sidestep accountability, or – all these words have lost meaning, because, like, Israeli PR firms use them – inclusivity, whatever, it’s all kind of weird.
But what are we avoiding when we keep our film circles white? I think in trans circles, that’s something to just kind of keep an ear out for. What are we not looking at? What do we want to protect? Ultimately, we want to protect our status. We want the Palme d’Or, right? Because we still believe in it, even if we say we don’t, even if we’re creating something new, what cycles are we repeating?
LR: More generally, I was curious what you think about
October Crow
being exhibited in a trans context, do you feel like this is a particularly trans film for you?
JH: To me, I understand trans filmmaking as inherently resistance filmmaking. Transness has always been a way to decode colonial ideas about identity. And I think that filmmaking is always a reflection of where we are culturally, and how we experience image, and how that image affects our relationship to our body.
And so I think October Crow was made sort of as a trans body of work, because it was invented for its own sake, for its own self-realization, and it was also invented in collaboration with Peter as he was dying. It was like we made the film as we were reinventing his body.
He got a new liver on Christmas Eve, about a year after we started shooting, and we were able to finish the film. So there’s a transition inherently in it.