Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on February 6, 2012, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Director Josh Trank has scored a hit with his debut feature Chronicle, which combines found-footage realism with big-scale action. But as Trank tells us, it all came down to character, specifically Andrew (Dane DeHaan), an outcast teenager who receives telekinetic powers that allow him to assert himself…in increasingly violent ways.
Your father is documentary filmmaker Richard Trank; did that affect the direction of your own film career?
It was definitely a part of it, but to tell you the truth, when I was 10 or 11 years old, I had no idea what he did for a living. I didn’t really understand what a documentarian really meant, but having spent so much time in dark editing rooms, because that’s where I’d visit my dad at work, I had a lot of exposure to men and women sitting in a room telling a story with images. That always interested and intrigued me, and I knew from very early on that I wanted to do that. I spent a lot more time with my mom growing up, and she’s a preschool teacher and really good at telling nap-time stories to 3-year-olds [laughs], and really gets into it. So it was a combination of a lot of storytelling influences growing up.
What was it about the Chronicle script that resonated with you?
Well, it was actually a story I’d developed on my own for a couple of months before I ran into Max Landis, who is an old acquaintance from high school. It came from a long list of ideas for little viral videos that I’d wanted to shoot but never got a chance to, about a group of kids with telekinesis who film themselves demonstrating their talents in public and messing with people, and different hijinks and scenarios. I began to realize that there was more to it, that this could be the beginning of the second act of a movie, before one of the kids in this group goes too far and there are horrible consequences. I’d been trying to figure out my first movie for—well, since I was in high school, really, and the kind of movies that always resonate with me are coming-of-age dramas and big, epic science fiction/fantasy films. I’d always wanted to find a way to merge the two, and this seemed like the perfect way to start off very grounded, almost as a personal documentary that plays like a coming-of-age drama, and then use the science fiction and fantasy elements to heighten the drama, the relationships, the stakes and the consequences.
How easy was it to get Chronicle set up at Fox?
It was definitely a challenge, because I had a lot riding against me. I went into the studio as a 26-year-old without a feature under my belt, and I knew I had a lot to prove, and I had to go at this with as much conviction as I could muster up. I wrote this four-page director’s statement which we attached to the screenplay and sent out to all the studios. It was a very detailed breakdown of how I would shoot the movie, what my plan was, basically saying, “OK, here’s the script and here is exactly how I’m going to make it.” Fox was the first one to jump at it, and they knew that this was a script with a plan and that they would be going into business with a filmmaker who was going to be able to deliver on the material.
Do you think the fact that Fox is also behind the very successful X-Men films helped them see their way to producing Chronicle, which has a similar theme?
Sort of; I’d say yes and no. Believe it or not, Fox doesn’t actually like to re-explore the same territory filmwise that they have in the past, and they were mainly concerned with how this movie would be different from those other films. It helped in the sense that they had plenty of experience making these big tentpole superhero movies, but it didn’t give us carte blanche to just do whatever we wanted. We had to prove to everybody there that this would be a very different movie, and that we could justify the kind of budget we wanted.
Can you say what the budget was?
Well, it was more than Paranormal Activity, less than Cloverfield [laughs]. It was less than $15 million.
Those movies represent the two extremes of the found-footage genre; obviously it’s much easier to tell a more intimate story than a big story in that format. Was this a particular challenge?
Yeah, because I wanted to maintain the same tone we establish at the beginning of the movie, in the first scene where Andrew turns on his camera, all the way until the final moments. Regardless of how extreme we went in scale and scope, I wanted to make sure the movie had the same connection to Andrew and to the emotionality of the story, because the second you pull away from the characters and become too objective, which is what the found-footage format does, we become too detached in observing them. So we had to put a lot of thought into the way every scene was framed and how every scene began and ended, so it connected that way.
How did you approach maintaining that connection with Andrew even as he becomes sort of the villain of the piece?
Well, Andrew is, regardless of the good-guy or bad-guy definition, the protagonist of the movie. And I think the meaning of a protagonist is the person whom the audience is closest to throughout the film, and the one we should have the most sympathy for. We should feel happy for him, we should feel bad for him, we should feel happy or bad with him. We go through a very intense emotional journey with Andrew, and we understand enough about him that when he hits that point of no return, we feel bad for him.
When you see a supervillain, you want the supervillain to die, you want him to be stopped, you want the good guy to rise up against evil. Chronicle isn’t that story. Chronicle is about a kid who is meek and defenseless and susceptible to abuse from his peers and his father, and is given a godlike gift. His friendship with Matt and Steve holds him together and allows him to experience happiness for the first time in his life through that gift. Once he loses that connection and that relationship, it all unravels, and he doesn’t have anyone to give him advice or moral grounding. There’s a humanity in Andrew from the beginning all the way through to the end, and as long as the audience can constantly sympathize with him, he never really becomes a supervillain.
How easy was it to find the actors who could not only embody the characters, but make them naturalistic given the format you were shooting in, contrasted with the fantastical nature of the subject matter?
Well, I think the way you just described that is verbatim what I wrote in my director’s statement [laughs]! It was very important, if not the most important thing in creating this film, to find actors with a naturalistic quality, who didn’t have the chiseled looks of Hollywood stars but had that kind of star quality. We wanted actors who were young and talented and had a familiarity about them so they could fit into those teenage archetypes but not be limited by them, so they wouldn’t become stereotypes. Dane DeHaan, who plays Andrew, was a very early pick for us. We saw his work on In Treatment, and he embodied that completely; he had both a vulnerability and strength to him. There was a relatability to him that felt like, if I saw this kid in the context of a documentary, I would both absolutely believe it and be very intrigued by him. We were really lucky to get him; he’s insanely talented.
Then we auditioned about 1,000 more actors and narrowed it down to 15, and did mix-and-match sessions with the guys. We’d get a bunch of different Matts and Steves, put them together in a room with Andrew in different combinations and played with scenes to see which group would be best. And when we got Michael B. Jordan and Alex Russell together with Dane…they had never met each other before, but the chemistry was instant. Everybody in the room—myself, our casting directors, our producers, the studio—knew this was our group. They seemed like they’d known each other for years; they had an instant rapport. It was so much fun to watch, and we wanted that relationship to pop out of the screen, and for the audience to feel like that was their group of friends from high school, or for kids in high school to feel like that’s their current group of friends.
You and your team did a great job of making your Cape Town, South Africa locations look like the Seattle area.
Well, Cape Town is a very diverse environment. You can find a place that looks like the desert, places that look like the Pacific Northwest, places that look like Santa Monica. So in picking areas that had, say, more pine trees, we would just limit the side of the street we were looking at so we would get a more Pacific Northwest look. It was always about picking and choosing which angle and which area and which direction we were shooting. As far as the homes and schools and everything, our production designer, Stephen Altman, is amazing. He has a history of creating sets and locations that look authentically American in different, unique ways. He did that show Shameless, which has a wonderful, dirty, grungy, gross-apartment look to it, and he also did Ray, in which he created Americana on a very small, tight budget. We had a small budget too, and Stephen created bedrooms, built on top of pre-existing locations and did a lot of different things to create the small details of what we would see in a true-to-life depiction of Seattle.
