“It’s a medical documentary gone wrong, is the way I describe it,” he says of his new movie, which deals with the subject of dementia. “It’s ultimately a possession film wrapped in a completely grounded medical documentary.
“For my first movie, I wanted to make something that was manageable at a price. I had always been terrified of Alzheimer’s disease, my uncle would wander at night and people would find him in their backyards.”
He explains his love for the horror genre, which he says he was always intrigued with as a child. “For me, horror is scariest when it takes something in reality and turns it on it head. I thought, what if one of these cases of dementia is actually something else. Because more and more of us are living to 85 years old, you know dementia is becoming very common. And they don’t have a cure – medicinesSLOW
it down for a little bit, but it’s a terminal, chronic thing.”
He added of the concept: “There’s nothing more terrifying than a bright member or society losing their mind.”
The producer of the film is X-Men director Bryan Singer. “I’ve known Bryan for quite awhile, and I knew he loved anything with medical… he’s the producer of House. He also seems to be quite a hypochondriac – so I hear.”
He said he came across a clip of a woman who had mid-stage Alzheimer’s disease and she was talking lucidly about losing her mind. She would leave post-it notes around the house and comeHOME from work, and she would sit in her chair and her mind would completely go blank. “It was like a 60 Minutes kind of interview,” he said.
“Then the clip cuts to two years in the future, and it shows her in a much-deteriorated state, not recognizing any of her loved ones. She is going from violence to complete paranoia, to deep anguish, all in the spell of seconds.”
He said he showed Singer the clip, “And I could just see his mind… and I was like, Bryan, I want to do a possession movie that uses this as a jumping off point. And that was kind of all I needed to get him excited about it – he saw the potential.”
The association with Singer helped get financial backing for the project. “We took basically Bryan’s name and were able to leverage that in the marketplace. We sort of collateralized the money that way – it was still a challenge.”
The latest film is his directorial debut, although he said he had directed a few industrials before that, and he came from an acting background.
He spoke about the challenges of being “pushy” in the director’s role. “You have to be demanding, you have to know what you want. And by the time you get to production, I had seen every frame, so there’s this weird discord between the movie you have in your head and the movie you’re actually going to attain.”
Robitel’s background includes both film and acting, but he says that he still wasn’t sure what he wanted to do while attending school. “Acting is probably my biggest passion, but I do not have the skin for it. You have to be in love with auditioning, and you have to okay with rejection. You have to have a deep, inner compass.”
He reveals he would have an audition and then be super nervous, “like the apocalypse was coming,” and then he’d go through the process and become completely deflated because he thought he clearly wouldn’t get the job.
He also revealed he came from a background of gymnastics and martial arts, and initially wanted to do stunt work in Hollywood. His role in the original X-Men in 2000 involved stunt work, but he says after seeing another actor get his face bashed in during a stunt-gone-wrong, he decided it probably wasn’t for him.
“Ultimately looking back, if I were to reverse engineer my career, the real turning point for me was editing. Because editing is the best form of storytelling, in terms of taking raw material and just crafting story,” he said, encouraging others trying to get into the business to take this path.
He confessed to a love for working in horror, which he calls “the most manipulative of all genres.”
“You have to really take advantage of all of the filmmaking gimmicks and devices to pull off a good scare. Whether it’s sound design, whether it’s framing, it’s the illusion aspect of the genre in filmmaking.”
Horror Stories certainly are in demand this year, an Independent Film It Follows by David Robert Mitchell really came out of nowhere and impressed audiences across the United States.