You think “The Delta” is a depressing movie?
I can say many things about “The Delta” but…I always felt it was too German! I had watched just a hair too much [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder. I wasn’t quite as bleak in life as I was in that story.
Although, as I’m saying that, I realize that I don’t agree with it anymore.
I should say that there was a lot of darkness in my understanding of the world, and the film reflected that, very authentically.
I was re-watching “The Delta” today before this conversation, and two things jumped out at me. One was, it’s very much a classic coming-of-age story in the issues it’s dealing with: an 18-year-old man figuring out who he is sexually and stumbling into the answers. And the other thing is that there are a lot of moments where it reminded me a little bit of “Moonlight.” I wonder if you felt any sort of affinity for that movie? Did it speak to you the way it did other people?
It did, particularly in terms of its understanding and its interest in place and the specificity of a culture, and being located “somewhere,” not nowhere, and not in a place of the imagination. That was central to “The Delta."
The opening shot of Lincoln walking down the road at night: there’s something about the quality of the light and the sounds of the insects at night that took me to the American South. The humidity, the bugs. I grew up in Texas but I had relatives in Arkansas, Alabama and places like that, and all of a sudden, watching that opening, I was back there.
Yeah man! I grew up in Memphis. I don’t think I could make a movie there anymore because it’s been 30+ years since I lived there, and now I lack an intimacy. I’d be an outsider. But at that point, it filled my imagination…Memphis, and the kind of feeling of that place.
I went back to Memphis after writing an initial, kind of rough outline of the script. I moved there for six months with my producer Margot Bridger, and she and I turned the film into something contemporary, of the moment, because I still had a little bit of distance as someone trying to imagine being a teenager who was then in his late 20s. I was reprogramming that through the people I met, and that world.
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