32-year-old writer-director David Gordon Green is quietly acquiring a reputation as one of the strongest filmmakers of his generation. This month marks the release of his sixth film in seven years. Snow Angels goes into limited release next week, and will be slowly expanding across the nation over the next couple of weeks.

Due to the structure of the film, it’s no spoiler to tell you that the film is about relationships that end in violence; but this is no inspired-by-Montel over-the-top smackdown or overwrought Woody Allen melodrama. It’s a quiet, meditative examination of relationships and situations gone horribly wrong.

Interestingly, the story’s central character happens to be a Bible-believing, praying Christian—and so the question of faith became very explicit in a post-screening discussion following the film’s premiere. Courtesy of a local publicist, PtP Managing Editor Greg Wright had the chance to meet with Green the day after the premiere for about twenty minutes.

So last night was the premiere screening of your film.

David Gordon Green: Uh-huh.

The first question the moderator comes out with after the screening is, “So… Should we be afraid of every born-again Christian?” And the first response from the audience is an emphatic “Yes!”

DGG: Right.

How do you feel about that?

DGG: Well, that was a— When you’re standing in front of a new crowd and don’t really know who you’re looking at, and you hear a question like that, it really throws everything into a fight-or-flight defense mode. That was a little abrasive way to start the evening. But it’s something that is a very fragile subject matter, and people will take their own messages away from the film, and will have their own interpretations. But for me and the actor who played Glenn (Sam Rockwell), we certainly knew what we were getting into and wanted to explore that emotional and spiritual side of the character; and that’s one of the things that drew us to the character and to the project. So being asked that kind of a thing about a movie takes me off guard sometimes; but one of the foundational themes of this movie is someone who is trying to— Well, I can just talk you through what Sam and I discussed within that character.

Sam did a lot of research into religious organizations and certainly brought a lot of education and perspective to that character; but ultimately we did have to take the path of a character who had been emotionally damaged and was trying to put the pieces back together. And I think one of things—and I touched on this a little last night—that’s worth looking at in a little more detail: if we looked at Glenn’s religion just like his relationships, Glenn’s relationship with God and a church reflected Glenn’s relationship with Annie. It reflected his relationship with his daughter. It reflected his relationship with himself.

And as I said last evening, it’s difficult when two people— Say you’re in a relationship; say Annie and Glenn. If they’re not completely happy with themselves, it’s hard to connect with each other. It’s hard to communicate with each other. It’s hard to meet each other on a fair playing field because one person may be leaning on the other more than is healthy. But if two people can each connect with happiness, then the possibilities are endless. So with the success of a relationship—when companionship really works—we build from each other. They help exercise elements of us that are fragile or unexercised or weak, and we can together climb mountains.

So we took that as our foundation for Glenn and Annie, and then extended that to Glenn and Christianity. Now, he hasn’t been exposed to a Christian upbringing, but in the downward spiral of his relationship he needed something to cling to. And when he and Annie weren’t communicating and they weren’t climbing mountains together—and when they were doing the opposite, digging holes, if anything—he reached out and latched on [to religion]. And in the subtext and backstory, that happened in the workplace; he has this boss at a carpet factory who introduced him to an organization; and Glenn just didn’t have the tools at that point, emotionally, to be in a position to successfully (and in a healthy way) navigate that terrain.

It’s fair to say that he doesn’t listen to God any better than he listens to Annie.

DGG: Right. Or anyone. He doesn’t listen to anyone.

It’s characteristic of who he is.

DGG: Right. And so he interprets that. And I think, honestly, he becomes overwhelmed by the love he has for his daughter and the frustration that he has with trying to reconnect with his wife—and the new messages that are coming to him from outside organizations. So we tried to make it ultimately where— It’s difficult to say, but we wanted to reconnect it at the end where, in Glenn’s head, there’s a happy ending. There’s a religious recognition, there’s a reunited love with his wife in a rock-bottom time after he’s made some really poor, tragic decisions. He says, “Hi.” That’s his true rebirth, with him really recognizing his failure and trying to find a way to release or to surrender.

Reintroduce himself clean.

DGG: Starting over, yeah. Clean slate.

Well, with the foot-washing gesture I can certainly see that. I did find that first-blush audience reaction to the film very one-dimensional—to Glenn’s character in particular, because he’s as much defined by his alcoholism and his clinical depression as he is by his Christianity. So it would seem just as fair to ask, “Well, should we fear everyone who owns a gun? Should we fear everyone who drinks?”

DGG: The alcohol—yes. It’s all of those elements that are just as damaging to a character who is not ready for them. What he probably needs is going back to the sparks of being 18 years old and falling in love, and take baby steps.

The film to me very much resonated as a compassionate look at the human condition—resonating as strongly with me on that level as The Dead Girl.

DGG: I didn’t see that. I heard amazing things about it, though.

It was also a very compassionate look at the human condition. I presume that one of the things you wanted to do with the film was to look at characters who are broken and who are hurting and not judge them, and not pass judgment on the decisions that they make in the midst of that pain and that grief.

DGG: Yeah. That’s entirely what excites me about this movie. And “excitement” is a misleading word, because it’s not with joy but with intensity that I’m excited about this emotional exploration. And in looking at the human condition, particularly in America, I find that people are repressing feelings, surrendering to cultural expectations of themselves and not emotionally feeling like they are able to exercise [those emotions]. So to me this was an opportunity to create a movie experience: that is, people in an audience emotionally exercising—among other people—and feeling the gasps and the laughs and the various roller-coaster jolts of emotions, with the movie being the escort.

I think that’s a good thing, because the most dangerous thing that our society has conditioned us for is to not cry in public, to not make out in public. I just got back from Argentina, and people are emotional everywhere. They’re kissing on the street with their loved ones. They’re holding hands everywhere they go. They’re fighting aggressively at a restaurant. They’re constantly having release for whatever it is they’re truly feeling—rather than feeling like they have to be so formalized and composed and controlled at every moment, and like they’ve got to keep their cool. I guess I’m just not interested in cool people.

That connects with me very personally at this moment. My wife has been going through a series of life-threatening illnesses for the last four years, and just recently we discovered that’s exactly what we have been doing: as each successive visit to the hospital rolls around, you start withdrawing more and more. You think, “Well, nothing very serious happened last time; no reason to get as worked up about it this time out.” Because you’re protecting yourself. And the more that you repress that emotion—the potential loss and the grief associated with that—the more the other stuff gets repressed, too. Because you can’t have the one without the other.

DGG: Yeah.

You have troughs and you have peaks. If you damp the one out, you damp the other out, too. So we’ve been going through trying to reconnect with our own emotions about all of that; and the scene where Arthur’s mom tells him, “You need to connect with this—”

DGG: “You need to feel through this.” And she says, “It’s important that you don’t put this away, because that’s what I do, and that’s what most people do. But you need to feel through this.” A person like her, who is going through emotional disconnect with her own husband at the time, is seeing signs of who she’s been and where she’s come from; and she looks at her offspring and truly gives him advice that’s from the heart. Someone told me that one time, and I translated that into a character. Feel through it. It’s such an easy thing to ignore, to dismiss, bury. Distract. You know, go to work the next day and clock in and everything’s normal, right? But it comes back up.

A couple of other movies that seem like predecessors of Snow Angels would be The Sweet Hereafter—which I didn’t feel succeeded quite at the level your film did—and Snowcake last year.

DGG: I didn’t see Snowcake, but I loved The Sweet Hereafter. I looked at that and Affliction—which I thought were similar terrain that I liked and had great respect for; but I wanted to avoid walking the same path.

Sweet Hereafter seemed a little too clinical and cold to me. Too intellectual, not emotional enough, whereas this film connected with me more at the emotional level. I actually got physically sick to my stomach several times watching these scenes and watching what these characters were going through.

DGG: Wow.

Because there was such sympathy. It wasn’t a cold, analytic look at what these people were going through—standing at the outside to observe. It really felt like you were getting in and dwelling with these people.

DGG: Well, that’s good to hear because that was certainly one of the goals. In talking with the author of the book—and in just opening up and reading the headlines in any newspaper—I’ve seen that the journals can create monsters. Right now I’m doing an adaptation of a nonfiction book about a guy who was innocent and on death row. And watching someone who began—as all of us did—as someone’s baby, full of life and possibility, and seeing those choices and the downward spirals— When we open up the headlines and see those monsters, I kind of wanted to back it up a little bit and see the transition from the baby boy that had every potential, and for whom mom and dad every love and tried to provide every opportunity, but through a series of misfortunes finds himself literally becoming a monster. And it’s not through any diabolical mad-scientist science-fiction; it’s through very realistic emotional situations of tremendous gravity.

So trying to make all of the characters a realistic blend of sympathy but not trying to paint anyone in a— I wanted a balance of— You’ll see Annie being very frustrated by her daughter and making choices that she’s regretting by the next scene. She’s a mom and she hits her boiling points; not to look away from those moments, but to investigate those internal frustrations that she has. And you run the risk of presenting an unsympathetic character when you put that in a movie—it’s not often seen, a kid crying in a movie—because it upsets us. It always does. Then finding that she’s having an affair with someone that we don’t entirely approve of. But trying to design within her something that doesn’t necessarily justify that to us, but that can certainly justify it within her—enough so that we can see that this is someone who comes from a real place, though maybe she’s not making the choices I’d like her to make or making choices I’d make myself; but I want the best for her. So if I can be rooting for all of these characters to figure out the puzzle of the opportunities and the misfortunes that they’re kind of Square Dancing around, hopefully it will come together in a way that…

One of the things in the movie that I think structurally helps achieve that is the generational comparison between Glenn and Annie versus Arthur and Lila. Realistically speaking, Arthur and Lila are Annie and Glenn, only ten or twelve years prior.

DGG: Right.

So there’s that potential, still, for Arthur and Lila to go any number of ways even though Annie and Glenn are self-destructing. But there was a time when they were happy.

DGG: You see the camera wander into a photo of them at a dance. It’s little reminders like that. Or when Annie says to Nate at one point, “He used to make me laugh and tell me I was beautiful.” And Nate very simply says, “People don’t stay the same.” We’re dynamic; our relationships are dynamic. Hopefully, we grow together. Sometimes we grow apart.

One of the key turning points in the film is when Arthur is talking to his dad—I believe they’re on the campus—and his dad says, “Sometimes we do things we can’t explain.” And just as he’s saying that, they go out of frame… and then snap! We’re with Annie as she wakes up and realizes something is horribly amiss. I thought that was brilliant.

DGG: That was an accident, and I flipped out. I loved it!

Really?

DGG: The dolly grip wasn’t paying attention and I was like, “Whatever just happened?” That was take ten, and he was tired and just not paying attention. I was just like, “That is the happiest accident I have ever seen.”

Well, brilliant. The way that you cut and used it was just brilliant.

DGG: Isn’t that interesting? I kind of pride myself on creating an environment where stuff like that can be incorporated into a movie. Things not so preconceived.

Like you mentioned last night about your misgivings with screenplay conventions boxing you in.

DGG: I’m glad you picked up on that. I was worried about that cut being too distracting, and people were challenging that in the editing room. But I really felt it was—

When you cut from that shot to Annie, it really was brilliant.

DGG: I love it. I’m glad you felt that way. I really appreciate that; it’s cool.

Another key moment—and this is kind of ironic because Griffin Dunne is in the movie—is Glenn’s dance scene, which is so reminiscent of Dunne’s dance scene to “Is That All There Is?” in After Hours. Completely different movie, tonally; but that moment in After Hours when they’re dancing has very much that same feel.

DGG: That’s very interesting. After Hours is that perfect thing which is devastating and inspiring at the same time. And After Hours is a great example; and I hadn’t thought of it for that specific scene, but that’s one of the reasons that the only actor I had in my head when I was writing his character in this film was Griffin. He does take those roles that are darkly comedic. He takes those roles that are challenging, emotionally. And After Hours is one of those movies that is so not obvious about how you’re supposed to be feeling all the way through it. And that scene was, to me, that feeling in spades.