Growing up in a small Minnesota town, the director Karl Mueller had plenty of inspiration for his indie horror movie “Mr. Jones,†part of this year’s Midnight Section of the Tribeca Film Festival. The film is set at a remote house where a couple, played by Jon Foster and Sarah Jones, goes up against unseen forces unleashed when they encounter an eccentric artist neighbor known as Mr. Jones (Mark Steger).
“We would spend the summer in a cabin, and there were some strange people up there,†said Mr. Mueller, 35. “As a kid you make up stories about the boogie man. There were a lot of guys sitting around for no reason who trapped animals and didn’t really socialize at all. In the imagination of a child you can blow it up quite a bit.â€
Mr. Mueller’s film starts out in a found-footage style, with actors speaking to the camera and filming the action, which grows increasingly disturbing. But as the film progresses the storytelling becomes unhinged to the point where it’s unclear just who’s doing the taping. In its last 15 minutes “Mr. Jones,†buoyed by low-fi but highly aggressive special effects, becomes a nearly wordless experimental experience.
Mr. Mueller recently spoke with ArtsBeat about his film. Following are edited excerpts from the conversation. Click on the video above to watch an exclusive scene.
There are a lot of horror movies about people in the middle of nowhere who are attacked by strange forces or people. In your movie that force is a weird artist named Mr. Jones who lives in the middle of nowhere and sends his sculptures to strangers. Where did that idea come from?
I would say it came from these weird hermits in rural areas, the off-the-grid people who I saw growing up in an isolated area. But I also like the idea of notoriety. Banksy has constructed this larger-than-life persona by going by a strange name and remaining anonymous. There’s a mystique about that that I thought could be exploited by the character of Mr. Jones. The idea of sending sculptures to people at random felt dangerous. I thought about the Unabomber, and the random nature of that, about not knowing who is sending things.
The other thing was the Tom Waits song “What’s He Building in There.†It’s a story told from the perspective of a guy who gets obsessed with a neighbor and all these noises from his neighbor’s house.
Did you ever meet someone like Mr. Jones when you were a kid?
No. It was more like you’d go up to the house, peek in and run away.
Where did you shoot the film?
We shot about 20 miles north of Santa Clarita, north of Los Angeles. We found a movie ranch, a big parcel of land with derelict houses on it. You can go there and mess them up. The guy who rented it to us had another piece of land where, for some reason, which was great luck, there was an abandoned mine shaft. Some of the movie takes place in caverns, but we didn’t have money to create that. But we had an abandoned mineshaft.
Preferred Film and TV Sarah Jones and Jon Foster in “Mr. Jones.â€There are a lot of found-footage elements in the movie, where you have actors film themselves. But by the end the story starts to get surreal and you’re not sure exactly sure who’s filming who.
It evolves into a literal nightmare. It came out of creating a mood and trying to sustain the feeling of the uncanny, or of being in a dream. We spent a lot of time on the sound design to make it feel like you’re under water, or in somebody’s head and they have a bad cold. I hate movies that end up exactly where you thought they were going to go at the beginning. That happens most with genre movies.
Did you look to any other directors for inspiration?
David Lynch, whose movies are basically on-screen representations of dream states and nightmares. He’s always experimenting with different uses of sound, pictures and lighting.
I also thought about “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,†where they pull off things with fairly low-fi tricks. They would strap a flashlight on a camera. I can’t afford to do anything expensive, so we did a lot of in-camera stuff, like messing with the lenses and putting panes of glass over the lenses to provide different effects.
How much of the film comes from nightmares of your own?
It’s nothing specific from my nightmares, really. A lot of what I was trying to capture was the state of falling asleep, when you’re losing control about what you’re thinking about. The imagery becomes more surreal. Sometimes you snap out of it, but that can be a nightmare feeling too.
