‘Blue Film’ Director Elliot Tuttle and Stars Reed Birney and Kieron Moore Break Down Their Hotly Transgressive and Thought-Provoking Film
Elliot Tuttle knows that he’s playing with fire. His feature debut Blue Film – starring Reed Birney and Kieron Moore – was rejected from multiple film festivals last year, both large and small thanks to its nonjudgemental focus on a pedophile and his desires. I didn’t know about any of that when I saw it at last year’s Philadelphia Film Festival; it made it into my schedule because of the intriguing logline – a camboy meets a man for an after-hours gig who turns out to have deeper ties to his past – blue-drenched still, and my desire to support an LGBT film that I could easily forget about once it wound down.
No matter where you land on Blue Film, you aren’t likely to forget it. Tuttle honed his craft first with the 2021 podcast Lina’s Song, starring Hari Nef and Dylan Gelula, produced by Mark Duplass (who also produced Blue Film). Birney has been a longtime presence on Broadway–winning a Tony for The Humans–and reliable character actor on everything from Succession and Poker Face to The Menu and The Hunt. Moore made big waves last year with his role as Marine Slovacek on Netflix’s gay military series Boots, but UK audiences will probably know him from ITV/Britbox’s Code of Silence and Sex Education. All three were united by their absolute trust in one another and a willingness to take a deep dive into murky territory, and it’s a gambit that paid off in one of the best films of the year. It’s a magnificent chamber piece keenly aware of the effect a camera can have and asking the audience to bring its own subjectivity to the proceedings.
I spoke with the trio over Zoom on a Saturday afternoon to get their thoughts on the controversy, transgressive cinema, and their characters’ truths.
Devan Suber: I wanted to start off by asking Elliot about some of his primary inspirations behind the film. I saw some sex, lies, and videotape in there personally, but of course given the extremity of the subject matter people will be wondering what drew you to it.
Elliot Tuttle: A lot of transgressive cinema, a lot of Catherine Breillat films, Michael Haneke, the 1986 Spanish film In a Glass Cage… but the biggest inspiration was Breillat, and taking all of these notes of her very honest and very vulnerable explorations of adolescent sexuality. It’s a transgressive label, but it’s transgressive because it’s very honest and moving. That’s what I was really responding to at the time of my life when I started just even the inception of this project, thinking about the writing of it. Before it even started in Final Draft, it was lots of notes, lots of journaling, and that way, it was informed by something very personal.
DS: For Reed and Kieron, what was it about the script that sort of drew you in, aside from, the most outré part of it? What made you think you could take these roles on?
Reed Birney: I just read it and thought it was an incredible part. I was gonna get to do so many things as an actor that I don’t always get to do, and things that I’ve always wanted to do, so it was like a present, tied up in a bow.
DS: What kind of things did you have in mind?
RB: Kieron has talked about this, the sort of shame, the Darkness, a guy who’s lived a life of real pain. You know, most characters you get to play have some degree of pain, but this is perhaps the most pained character I’ve ever played. And, I thought that was an interesting exercise. How do you convey that without it being self-pitying?
I think he’s a man who has made a decision to live his life in a positive way, given how dark his life is. So I thought that was all really complicated and interesting.
Kieron Moore: From a performance standpoint, I guess it’s, like, I’ve been banging the doors down, trying to get an opportunity to sort of show what I can do, and show myself what I can do, and this was so exposing, there was nowhere to hide. It’s a 100-page script, full of dialogue, and going to extremes of human vulnerability, and I just felt like it was an actor’s dream. I’ve said this before, and it’s just so true, I just was so scared of it, in the sense of, could I do it? Could I bring something worthy to it? But the thing that scared me the most was the idea of anyone else doing it. I was like, “I have to do this”. And I’m deeply proud that I did. I just think there’s so much human-ness in it. I see it day-to-day, people’s inability to work past their awareness of their shame, or their sin, or what they think about themselves, and the lack of productivity once they become aware of their failings. I think at that time in my life, I was courageous enough to be exploring my own shame. I was at a quiet point in my life, and it was just something where I felt I would be for the better as a human for doing it, as well as an actor. I think I’ve achieved that.
DS: I’m a fan of podcasts like You’re Wrong About or Behind The Bastards where frequently they’ll talk about really horrible people but in a way where you get an understanding of their lives and you can extend a sort of sympathy or empathy towards them without necessarily absolving their actions. How did you all try to toe the line between kind of making the audience understand these people, but not necessarily making it seem like you were excusing them?
KM: I don’t think the movie makes anyone do anything, personally. That’s always my standpoint on it. I think the movie gives you an opportunity to listen to two people, and sit with your own impression of that, and I think that the audience becomes the third character. The movie’s only as uncomfortable as you are willing to, sort of, sit in your discomfort. For me, I don’t think everything has to say something. I think it has to give you an opportunity to listen to something sometimes, and we’re not there to constantly strengthen or deny opinions. I don’t think the movie does that, I think it just gives you an opportunity to unravel to yourself how you might be feeling, and for me, a win of this movie is always when someone says that it made them do this, or they had this ability to, because I think,”Oh, well, you really took the time to sort of listen to two human beings that are fictional”. The characters are only as fully formed as the audience, in my opinion.
RB: I don’t know of another movie that relies on the audience’s feelings to sort of be the final component to the success of the movie.
KM: And imagination.
RB: Yeah, because we don’t do anything that’s illegal. We’re just a couple of guys meeting up. And yet, the audience has so much emotional investment in the idea of pedophilia, or sex work, or whatever, that it’s really sort of asking you to rethink your prejudice, for lack of a better word. And not necessarily change your opinion, but just to look at it.
DS: Something that’s stood out to me a lot both times I saw it was this idea of performance; how much is a barrier or a defense mechanism, and how much is actually them being honest. Do you all think these two characters are both being honest with each other, and do you think they believe that the other person’s being honest?
ET: I think that even when they’re being dishonest, it’s revealing. Whenever these two characters may lie to each other or omit the truth, it is still, in a way, revealing of that character, as it is when any of us lie about anything. It at least reveals to us what we’re not willing to tell the truth about. Sometimes these characters are not being honest with each other. They’re lying by omission, but the character itself never becomes clouded.
RB: I think from my experience of playing, I don’t think Hank is ever consciously lying or performing. I think I’m trying to get Aaron to stop performing, for him to remember who he was. I’m sure there are times that Hank is lying. We’re not telling everything, but I think he’s determined to be as honest as he can be, so it’s interesting that people perceive him as [lying].
KM: I think Aaron’s lied the whole time, which is one of my favorite things about the script. It was kind of like this: “Okay, I know him now”, and I got to the next page, “oh, that’s a lie”. There’s these things that are unraveling before him. I think the thing is he’s lied to himself so much that it’s become his truth. So how can we call that dishonest? So many people, you say something long enough, it becomes who you are, you know? And I think there is a point for me, as an audience member, and obviously I know I’m the one acting in it, but when I can watch the movie now, the movie becomes a million different outcomes. Because there’s so many different sentences where if you decide “I think he might be lying there”, the movie changes, the mood changes, the undercurrent is there, and I think that’s what’s so beautiful and so finite. Elliot refused to ever have entertained a conversation with me about where we think Aaron goes at the end and what his life looks like after that, because Elliot was like, “That’s not mine to decide. The audience can choose that.” There’s sort of a freedom in that, and that’s why I just do think that the audience’s imagination, and spite, maybe, or sympathy, whatever it is that your moral or your conscience usually leans to will be intensified or picked apart whilst you’re watching it, if you allow it to.
DS: Yeah, I’m not sure exactly how much stage experience you have. I know Reed obviously has a ton, but did you both sort of approach performing this as kind of like a play since so much of it is stagey? And for Elliot, too: how did you try to keep it more cinematic?
KM: The world’s a stage, baby. The audience is badly cast. [laughs]
ET: I think that it was important that this was a film, because when you’re sitting in an audience, and you’re looking up at a screen, and you’re able to look into an extreme close-up of someone, and you’re able to look right into their eyes and not at all feel self-conscious because you’re in a movie theater, and they’re up there… there’s not an experience like it in being human, where you can look at someone so intimately. Theater is brilliant in many ways, but you are sharing the same space as that actor physically. This story really warranted being able to look so, so closely into Reed or Kieron’s eyes, and not feel self-conscious at all, and just listen to them. Because I think it’s the most beautiful part of cinema: being able to sit in a dark room and look up at someone, and it’s just you and them… you at least have the space to cry, and they don’t have to know you’re crying. You can laugh, and they don’t have to know you’re laughing. It’s such a beautiful thing. That, I felt, like, really spoke to why I wanted to tell this story in the first place. It’s how intimate and vulnerable it can get.
RB: I think it’s too intimate for a play, honestly. This very thing that Elliot’s talking about, this ability to come in close, you would lose all of that In a play. And maybe there’s a play version of this, but I was very happy to make the movie. I don’t think I ever thought about whether it was cinematic or not. Our job was to tell those scenes as truthfully as possible, and then I knew that Ryan [Jackson-Healy, cinematographer] was brilliant, and that Elliot was brilliant, and they would take care of the cinematic aspect of it.
KM: I haven’t done a play, but me and my acting coach saw how it could be. But all I know is if it does get made into a play, I better get first dibs. Maybe in a few years, I’ll play Hank.
DS: Elliot, one of the more mysterious elements are the home movie interstitials, which I read are actually your own. Why did you decide to put yourself in the movie like that, in addition to using multiple different film formats like the one that gives the sex scene a semi-porno feel?
ET: [That one was] a MiniDV. I loved switching up the formats. One, I just think it’s so fun visually, but two, I was really kind of intent on using MiniDV footage, because to me, this film kind of lived in this space almost between a home video and a snuff film. I feel like if you really think about it, like, a camcorder is used for both of those things almost exclusively. It’s like home videos or snuff film. And so, I really was kind of intent on incorporating that format because it felt like it spoke to the intimacy and danger of everything that happens in the film.
DS: Yeah, I don’t really know why this is, but to me, it feels like when there’s a bit of degradation or resolution loss, it feels more real for whatever reason. If the video looks kind of a little bit shitty, then it’s like, “Oh yeah, no, this is something someone actually shot.” Like, if it looks too good you feel like it’s fake, which worked really well when it goes between the MiniDV to the Regular stock [in the sex scene] when the camera’s just locked on [Kieron’s] face, because it feels really jarring and real.
ET: Yeah, and I think that’s because we all have a connotation of that format with family, home movies. In terms of incorporating the baby footage: it was important to me to use these interstitials as a reminder of what is being talked around for most of the film. Whether we’re talking about Hank or Aaron’s story, it really does come back to the child. It felt important to… To kind of speak explicitly, at least in some way, about…what… a lot of what is really being talked around and provide an anchor of sorts.
RB: I love that you don’t know If that baby is Hank or Alex.
ET: As a visual: one, I used myself because I don’t think anybody else would let me have their home movies to us as the interstitials so it was kind of up to me. But, I also loved incorporating a bit of myself into it. The film is very personal in lots of ways, and so it was nice to be able to do that, and to create a kind of coherent aesthetic for those deep mini-DV scenes, and for all the reasons, I guess, I just described.
DS: I saw Blue Film at the Philadelphia Film Festival last year and Adam Kirsch was there for a Q+A. I didn’t know the film had been rejected by so many festivals until he mentioned the trouble. Obviously you all expected it to be controversial, but did you ever think you might have to release it yourselves because otherwise no one else would be able to see it?
ET: I don’t know if we had gotten quite there yet, but it was kind of demoralizing for a while. More so, the more people I talked to, the more it spoke to something larger that I think is going on in the film industry right now, or at least the festival world, that is kind of risk-averse.
DS: Yeah. I think it’s also just kind of the environment we find ourselves in, where there’s this attempt to sort of bring homosexuality back as a perversion in itself, and tie it back to pedophilia, which is a whole cultural and historical conversation that we don’t really have time to get into now…
ET: I would love to say that. I think, the larger people who are in charge of programming this film, the gatekeepers or tastemakers, of course, are attuned to a much larger conversation around homosexuality’s conflation with pedophilia in a really negative and stupid way. But, you know, they’re serving a huge mass of people, and creating a taste for a large group of people is political in a way, but I’m not making a film for the masses, I can never entertain that. How stupid would it be to entertain a notion of the lowest common denominator of someone watching the film while you’re trying to make art? I would never think of people who think of gay people as pedophiles while I’m trying to make a good movie, like, you can’t do it. That’s why you get Daily Wire originals. It’s like, you know, I’m not trying to make that.
DS: Yeah, it’s complicated, because on one hand, I do kind of understand it, but on the other I feel like it’s just a really bad faith read of the movie and the characters, because it’s like, do have to live with these people in our society, you can’t just kind of shove them down and forget about them, because this is kind of how we get to these problems in the first place.
ET: My greatest hope with any audience member walking into the movie is that they are taking it in good faith. That they are meeting the film halfway, that they’re engaging with it in a critical way.
DS: Final question, for Reed and Kieron, also: what do you hope that the audience – and the broader gay community as a whole – gets out of this?
KM: I just hope that people go into the cinemas, and they watch it, and they find whatever speaks to them in it. I’m not here to tell them anything, I’m not here to tell them how to think, I’m just hoping that in some way, what we’ve done allows them the ability to feel something, you know? And that should be enough. I’m not trying to reaffirm anyone’s opinion, not trying to deny it, strengthen it, nothing. I just hope they can see themselves a little bit clearer by the end of it, you know, in whatever that means. And then, selfishly, I’m at the start of my career, I want people to walk away asking “Who’s Kieron Moore?”
DS: That is absolutely my experience, because for reasons of using my parents’ Netflix and geolocking, I never saw Boots, so I went into Blue Film being like “Wow, who is that???” [laughs]
KM: And I appreciate that. But that’s another thing, it’s like, you know, the people that are aware of me on that commercial level… There’s an element of work that I’m deeply proud of, but they were the roles that were made available to me. Blue Film is a real chance for me to be an actor, and show that I love my craft, and that I get to do the work. Like the movie itself, I’m just so proud of the opportunity… I’m so thankful for the opportunity to do it.
RB: I think I would like people to… One person at Newfest told Kieron that they thought it was a really beautiful love story. And I’m inclined to think that’s what it is. It’s an unusual love story, for sure. But I think it’s about two people who feel very deeply and don’t know how to manage their feelings, which a lot of people feel. It’s not a gay thing, it’s not a straight thing, it’s not a pedophile thing, it’s just a person thing. How do we manage our feelings? And I think this is a… a beautiful exploration of that with two very specific damaged people.
Blue Film is currently in select theaters from Obscured Releasing and opens wider on May 8.
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