INTERVIEW: Let’s get weird with Moorhead & Benson
Photo: Something in the Dirt stars, from left, Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson. Photo courtesy of XYZ Films / Provided by Fusion Entertainment with permission.
Filmmakers Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, better known as the duo Moorhead & Benson, recently put out a horror head-scratcher called Something in the Dirt, which is a wholly original take on the haunted house (or rather haunted apartment) subgenre. The two are self-proclaimed “weird” directors who like to push the audience into asking questions and developing different interpretations. Something in the Dirt definitely elicits some questions, many of them often profound.
The movie, which is now available on VOD, follows Levi (Benson) and John (Moorhead), two next-door neighbors in an apartment complex in the Hollywood Hills. They begin talking and realize they have an instantaneous connection, but then a strange incident occurs. They both witness “something impossible” that changes the course of their lives and sends them down a rabbit hole to try and capture evidence of the supernatural.
The origins of the movie are difficult to pinpoint, Moorhead said in a recent Zoom interview, with his dog sitting on his lap.
“We are often asked where did it all come from, this movie or any of our movies, and we’re normally a little dumbfounded to answer it because it’s such a weird mesh of how things pop up,” Moorhead said. “We’ve actually been pitching since our first movie, Resolution, which is 2013. We pitched on haunted house movies, like a big haunted house franchise, and they say, ‘Give us your weirdest idea.’ They bring us in as the weird guys to see what the boundaries were, and we would pitch the strangest idea possible after spending a week developing a really fun wild pitch we’re really excited about. And it was always the same thing: ‘Guys, thank you so much. You did exactly what we asked, and it’s too weird.’ It’s always that, and so we were unemployable for a long time. But those ideas were really cool. It’s funny the first thing that you think of when you watch Something in the Dirt is probably not a haunted house movie, but actually that’s was probably where it all began.”
Levi and John, the two characters in the film, were born of a gigantic Google Doc where the two would trade ideas, Benson said. The two filmmakers (Benson writes, and both direct) said they brought many inspirations to the creation of these two roles.
“We knew that we wanted to swap the power dynamic that we had played in a movie called The Endless, where we played brothers who had a very opposite power dynamic as to Levi and John,” Benson said. “We’re really into the Vince Gilligan universe of Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad, and took a lot of inspiration from the way that they write characters on those shows. Obviously some of the dynamic between John and Levi certainly no doubt has similarities to Walt and Jesse in Breaking Bad.”
Benson added that Moorhead gave John characteristics that were remembered from Moorhead’s own childhood and adolescence, while Benson brought some memories of guys he remembered when he was a child — men who didn’t survive to adulthood or dropped off the face of the planet, as he put it.
“I always had been so curious what made them tick, and because they weren’t around anymore, there was no way to resolve that,” Benson said. “So I was attaching characteristics of them to this person that I can make up fictionally and exploring that. … We consciously wanted them to be very, very different from who we are, probably because we’d be playing filmmakers, and by virtue of doing that, people might see it as being autobiographical. But it was like, if we made them different enough, no one would suspect that.”
There is a treasure trove of theories about Something in the Dirt that one can find online, but it’s best to head into “Theory Land” only after experiencing the film and developing one’s own unique takes. Moorhead said the two filmmakers appreciate the dialogue and are fascinated by the different pathways audience members have traveled.
“I think this film more than anything we’ve ever made is designed to be interpreted many different ways,” Moorhead said. “We both know what we believe happened, so it’s not just a random surrealist assortment of possibilities. But we did design it, especially in the script and edit, that what exactly is happening by the end of the film, what happens, what’s real, what’s not real, those things are designed to be, I don’t want to say open-ended, but I guess debatable. There’s enough to leave questions so that there’s a really interesting conversation to be had by the end of it, but there is a real answer. We love it. The movie is designed to be that way.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / JohN@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Something in the Dirt, directed by Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, is now available on VOD. Click here for more information.
