Fear is Elias Merhige’s business, as you’ll know from his earlier films like the avant-garde creeper Begotten and the 2000 arthouse hit Shadow of the Vampire, with its witty premise that the villain in the great 1922 silent film Nosferatu had been played by a real vampire. His new film Suspect Zero stars Aaron Eckhart and Carrie-Anne Moss as FBI detectives on the trail of a killer (Ben Kingsley, in another of the great performances he’s been turning in lately) who appears to have psychic powers. Merhige talked to us recently about the film.
RAKE: Before you got on board as director, Zero was a more traditional cop thriller, and you rewrote the script to make it stranger and more psychologically driven. Tell us about that.
MERHIGE: The story needed to be taken out of the police procedural into the subjective. The stories that interest me the most are the ones that are psychological. There’s nothing more terrifying than the mind. When you want to get into investigating true fear and true horror, the mind is a great playground.
It was more like Seven in the early drafts, right?
Yes and no. But it was different enough from Seven, because I’d never want to do another film that’s already been done. So I told the producers that I would want to take this thing down a very different path. I realized that in order to make this a truly significant work, stories can no longer be told where you have this dualistic idea of good and evil. There’s just a big fat grey area right now where good and evil commingle with one another, and walk hand in hand with one another. We see it now in the war against terrorism, in our attempt to bring in “the bad guys.” Another thing I wanted to express in this film is how the ordinary world is terrorizing us. Airplanes, trains, and trucks—even something as innocent as opening your mail has consequences. The idea in Suspect Zero is that this serial killer is someone who’s just ordinary, and that true evil is completely ordinary.
What attracts you to making movies about violence and fear?
It’s the role of art to explore darkness. The darkness within us, the darkness at the void of the universe. It’s the only way to understand the light and what true redemption is. By understanding the darkness, it no longer becomes monstrous.
Do you see yourself as a genre filmmaker?
Not at all. Genres eat directors. I like challenges. I like to stand beneath the mountain and wait for the avalanche, and then try to outrun it. That’s what excites me about a genre, is to turn it on its head and take it off-road in a completely different direction. I don’t think Suspect Zero is a genre film. It’s several different kinds of storytelling and several different genres. There’s a science-fiction element. It’s more a psychological thriller than a serial-killer film. There is a serial killer, but that’s not really what the movie’s about. It’s about contemplating the nature of justice and redemption in our post-9/11 world.
Shadow of the Vampire had a strong streak of black comedy, but Suspect Zero is much more serious, even somber.
There’s a great deal of humor in Shadow. Somebody as deadly serious as [John Malkovich’s character] Murnau, someone who is obsessed, is very funny. I think there’s great humor in deep seriousness. But in Suspect Zero I didn’t want to be funny because there are so many delicate, important issues that are raised. I didn’t want it to feel exploitative or insensitive. I think the sadness and the melancholy in Suspect Zero is something we all feel as a country. I just felt that was the right and truthful note to end the film on.
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