ON SCREEN
What: Mandy
Where: Capitol 6, 805 Yates St.
When: Daily, 4 p.m. and 9:50 p.m.
Rating: 18A
If you happened to be a teenager living in a relatively remote location — such as an island off the west coast of Canada — in the early 1980s, life had a very small frame of reference. A-list concerts were few and far between, desirable albums at local record stores were expensive imports and video stores had so-so catalogues.
The majority of media that teens consumed came via Vancouver or Seattle radio stations, a few channels on TV and movies shown in a few local theatres.
This is the Victoria that 44-year-old writer-director Panos Cosmatos grew up in. The isolated existence of his childhood is played out in technicolour splendour in his latest film, Mandy.
The film, which opens tonight at the Capitol 6, is a revenge flick gone amok, with some of the bloodiest scenes put to film this year. With a ramshackle Nicolas Cage in the lead role of Red Miller, a logger whose life is turned upside down when he runs into both a sex-cult leader and a murderous gang of drug-addled bikers, the film has been garnering rave reviews, the majority of which praise Cosmatos’s directorial flair and innovative script.
At the Cannes Film Festival in May, Mandy received a four-minute standing ovation. Clerks director Kevin Smith has described Mandy as “masterful f — ing filmmaking,” while Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro tweeted: “Crazy. Good. Crazy Good. Gorgeous. See it.”
Mandy currently has a 93 per cent rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, which makes it one of the best-reviewed films of 2018. Academy Award nominations, for Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score and Hubert Pouille’s production design, are not out of the question.
The director’s arresting visual style — part heavy metal, part acid trip — was developed over years of TV-watching and late-night movie screenings at his family’s house in Cadboro Bay.
His father, George P. Cosmatos, was a Hollywood heavyweight who directed Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and Kurt Russell in Tombstone (1993). The house on Ten Mile Point was a den of movie-related artifacts and rare books, which Panos soaked up in a childhood that was anything but conventional.
Born in Rome, he’s a mixture of influences and ideologies: His mother, sculptor Birgitta Ljungberg, was Swedish, while his Greek father, an art collector as well as a filmmaker, spoke six languages. The family moved to Victoria in 1981 from Guadalajara, Mexico, and Cosmatos went to St. Michaels University School. He studied there until Grade 10, then switched to Mount Douglas Secondary for grades 11 and 12.
After high school, Cosmatos worked on graphic fanzines such as Dark Motel, and created the album art for several local bands, including Atlas Strategic and Daddy’s Hands.
It was here, in music, that the seeds for Mandy would be sown.
Rudderless following the death of his father in 2005 — his mother had died eight years earlier, at 47 — Cosmatos relocated to Vancouver in 2008 and began working on his first feature. “I decided I needed the resources of Vancouver to get [2010 sci-fi mind-warp] Beyond the Black Rainbow made, so I dove in over here.”
The fact that his second film is screening in Victoria at the Capitol 6 theatre is a big point of pride, Cosmatos said.
“That is where I used to go to the movies so much when I was a kid. It was one of my favourites.”
Mandy was shot in Belgium, in order to keep within its modest budget, but is set in the Pacific Northwest in 1983. Horror movies from the ’80s are referenced slyly and often — Friday the 13th aficionados will notice that Crystal Lake is a nearby landmark in the film — but music plays a more crucial role.
From the Black Sabbath and Mötley Crüe T-shirts worn by Andrea Riseborough (who plays the titular Mandy, a fantasy novel illustrator) to failed musician Jeremiah Sand, the Charles Manson-like cult leader played by Linus Roache, the movie is prog-rock come to life. Cosmatos calls Mandy his version of a rock opera, but with bloody axes and chainsaws in place of dance routines.
“Before I start writing a screenplay, there’s long periods of time where I’m assembling notes and images and songs in a playlist. A lot of the writing comes out of notes that I write while or after listening to music, losing myself in these soundscapes and songs. I really love the music-driven, sound-driven, audio-visual experience. I use the word juicy to describe my films — very, very textured and fetishistic in the way they look and sound and feel. I want these movies to feel like the way it feels to get an album when you’re a kid.”
The score by Oscar nominee Jóhann Jóhannsson is masterful. The Icelandic composer, who died of an accidental drug overdose before the film was released, had a background in heavy metal, which helped set the right tone in the film. As Mandy moves toward its apocalyptic climax, Jóhannsson’s moody, synthesizer- and guitar-based score becomes a centrifugal force.
Which is fitting, given that the film was inspired decades ago by a ZZ Top wallet Cosmatos purchased in Victoria at the former JayCee Fair. The ethereal character of Mandy was modelled after the woman who sold it to him, Cosmatos said; Riseborough even sports the same style of glasses worn by the clerk all those years ago.
All the actors are worthy of praise, but much has been made of Cage’s raw-nerve performance, one of his best in recent years. The Oscar winner, who is known for pushing the limits of every performance, was a dream to work with, according to Cosmatos.
“I think he’s an amazingly diverse actor, and I’m really proud of his performance. It is emotionally affecting and raw, and really from his heart. He really opened up in some of those scenes. I can’t imagine anyone else playing Red Miller. I feel like he really made it an iconic character.”
A two-minute scene near the middle of the movie — where Cage, wearing his stained underwear, dirty socks and a shirt soaked in blood, guzzles a bottle of vodka between primal screams — put the actor’s talent to the test, and he responded with one of the most committed acting showcases Cosmatos has ever seen. “He really draws deep in himself to go to those places. It was a joy to work with him. A very creative individual and a nice person. Those are the kind of people I like to work with.”
The performance almost never came to be, however. Cosmatos wanted Cage to play the cult leader at first, rather than the vengeful husband. Fittingly, the right choice came to Cosmatos in a dream.
“I got fixated on this idea of him playing Jeremiah Sand, and was really in love with the idea. But when I met him, he told me he wanted to play Red Miller. I was so married to the idea of him playing Jeremiah that I thought it wasn’t going to work out. A month later or so, I had a dream where I was watching a scene from Mandy, the finished film — which didn’t exist yet — and he was playing Red Miller. I realized that my id had thought better of my rigid mindset. The gods spoke and told me this was something that could be really special.”