Spike Jonze-directed Arcade Fire film not intended as political statement
TORONTO – Arcade Fire has long held a reputation for seriousness, whether it’s the Montreal band’s carefully contemplated music, their politics or their unwaveringly independent ethos.
So it’s perhaps not surprising that the stark images in the band’s new Spike Jonze-directed short film “Scenes from the Suburbs” — in which shadowy military characters at one point execute a civilian on a pristine suburban street — are being interpreted as a statement on the military, or U.S. border security, or the suburbs themselves.
But really, the band’s Will Butler says they were just having fun making a short film influenced by the sci-fi adventure movies they grew up watching.
“No, I think it starts with the genre, like: ‘Let’s make a dystopian movie,’” Butler corrected.
“It wasn’t like: ‘The world is going to hell, and this is the hell we’ll be in in 25 years.’ It was more like, let’s make a sci-fi movie. Oh, what’s a plausible path that this could take?”
“But really, we want some guys with guns in the future.”
Indeed, “Scenes from the Suburbs” — which is screening at the CFC Worldwide Short Films Festival this week in Toronto and will then be included as part of a deluxe version of the Montreal band’s third album “The Suburbs” on August 2 — is a sci-fi puzzler that seems to blend the paranoia of Terry Gilliam films with the nostalgia of classic Steven Spielberg flicks.
The nearly 30-minute film fills in some of the gaps in the shorter version of the music video for “The Suburbs,” wherein a group of teens aimlessly fritter away their time in an immaculate American suburb despite the foreboding presence of armed soldiers, plumes of black smoke and helicopters buzzing overhead.
In the expanded film, the audience gets to know the protagonists — bored, harmless kids — and learns more about the standoff between two neighbouring suburbs, which inspires soldiers to drag people from their homes and slaughter a resident in the street while the protagonists ride their bicycles nearby.
Grim stuff. But the film, which was written by Jonze, Butler and his brother, Win, also features witty, fast-paced dialogue mumbled by the teen leads — non-professional actors who improvised many of their lines in rehearsal.
In other words, the movie is, at times, quite funny — an adjective rarely applied to projects from the Grammy-winning band.
“Just ’cause our main thing is doing music, and we don’t have that many comedic songs,” Butler points out wryly.
Some reports have indicated that the brutish soldiers in the film are meant to be agents of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — an idea Butler dismisses, saying they were just “shady military guys.”
And he says that the future setting for the film wasn’t intended to serve as some sort of chilling vision of what’s to come.
“We could have just made a present-day movie about kids hanging out in the suburbs, but it might have just felt like a soap opera-y episode of a TV show, but with not professional actors,” he muses.
“Like it might have just felt like ‘The Hills’ or something like that, the suburbs edition.”
And it’s clear he had a good time on the project.
In fact, he says it was easy to get carried away and completely forget that the Oscar-nominated Jonze — the acclaimed director of such beloved oddball comedies as “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation” as well as dozens of famous music videos by the likes of the Beastie Boys, Kanye West and Weezer — carries a serious pedigree.
“It felt really natural, so it really just felt like a bunch of jokers making a movie together,” Butler said.
“And then you’d be like, oh no, wait. This is a real guy who’s made a lot of movies.”
For their inspiration, Butler cites kids’ adventure films, Spielberg movies (specifically “The Goonies”) and one specific ’80s Cold War cheeseball classic.
“We almost wanted it to feel like ‘Red Dawn,’ but cut down — like if you took a full-length ‘Red Dawn’ and cut it down to 20 minutes, what would still be left of it.”
And to hear Butler tell it, the film works because of the real-life teens cast in its lead roles.
To locate them, the producers sent a casting director out to chat with kids milling about at skate parks and local high schools around Austin, Texas.
Butler and his brother grew up somewhat nearby in the suburbs lining Houston. So did he feel a geographically inspired kinship with his cast?
“Austin is a lot smaller, and a lot cooler of a town — so the kids were probably cooler than we were at their age,” he says.
“And ’cause Houston is like L.A. without the ocean or the mountains, it’s just kind of a sprawling wasteland, and it’s all international businessmen. It’s not a great town.”
Still, he found himself growing fond of his team of young actors.
“The kids really reminded me of what I was like when I was 15,” he said.
“‘Cause most of the kids you meet in the world are just random kids, like kids you run into on the subway, and you’re kind of like: ‘Oh, the world’s going to hell.’ But then when you meet kids that you relate to, you’re like: ‘Oh right. It’s just ’cause I’m meeting random kids.’
“So it was funny. There are kids out there that I totally relate to.”
Aside from co-writing the film, Butler served as a producer and script supervisor — or, as he puts it, “boss of everyone and assistant to everyone.”
“Like, oh, let’s wipe down this car bumper so it looks better. Oh, let me fix your costume for you. Oh, actually, say this line instead of that line.”
But while it wasn’t exactly hard labour, it was still time-consuming work.
So no matter how much fun he had, he says it’s unlikely the band will try to expand “Scenes from the Suburbs” into something bigger.
“I don’t think we really could for budgetary and time reasons,” he said.
“I think it’d be really fun. But I think as a band we need to do albums, and movies take even longer than albums.”
