Pulp Features

Jeremiah Kipp has directed several short films and videos, including Hamlet; Near To You and Forest of Dreams. His short film Snapshot is one of Film Threat’s Best Undistributed Films of 2002.

His film, The Christmas Party, is an examination of the way adults communicate their religious beliefs to children as well as being a thought provoking and disturbing look at the way that religions exploit the lonely and vulnerable in order to sell their message.

And he has very kindly agreed to answer a few questions about film making, The Christmas Party, and some of the ideas provoked in this excellent short.

Paul: Is “The Christmas Party” your first film?
Jeremiah: No, my first film was a scary movie we made in my basement when I was 12 years old. It had the production value of an Ed Wood movie, and a script to match. After completing about 300 of these movies with the neighborhood kids, I attended New York University and started making 16mm movies there. Since graduation, I’ve continued making short films and videos. So “The Christmas Party” is not the first, but some consider it to be the best.

Paul: Who or what inspired you to start making films?
Jeremiah: When I was a little kid, I enjoyed drawing pictures. I was also an avid reader, and would write stories. I performed in a lot of theater as a child, too. Films seemed to encapsulate all those things: pictures, acting, and storytelling. It felt like a natural progression. As I said, my first movies were horror movies. My favorite directors at that time were John Carpenter (”The Thing”), George A. Romero (”Dawn of the Dead”), David Cronenberg (”Videodrome”), people like that. I still have a great fondness for the genre, and feel like parts of “The Christmas Party” were directly or indirectly influenced by Carpenter and by independent horror filmmaker Larry Fessenden (”Wendigo”; “Habit”).

Paul: What was your inspiration for “The Christmas Party”?
Jeremiah: I wanted to make a film about how we present religion to our children, which is to address the idea of what we value. While I do not consider “The Christmas Party” to be autobiographical, the rural neighborhood where I grew up (in Rhode Island) had several Southern Baptists and religious fundamentalists who were strongly committed in their viewpoints. My grandparents were atheists and existentialists who believed more in Sartre and Camus than the scriptures. It never bothered me as a child, but one could see the tug-of-war that might create in a little kid’s soul. If they were feeling vulnerable, dealing with something like an alcoholic mother or divorce, religion might seem like a catharsis. To others, it may seem like a trap. It’s up to the audience to decide where they want to place their loyalty in “The Christmas Party”.

Paul: The film does, of course, deal with the way in which adults communicate their beliefs to their children. I felt that the evangelising was very much a “hard sell” and that Gabriel’s understanding of what was being offered was very different to what the minister and his wife were intending. Do you think that adults do - not always intentionally - pressure children into accepting beliefs they don’t necessarily understand?
Jeremiah: When I talked with the actors Tom Reid and Stephanie Foster, who play the minister and his wife, we approached the characters as being like salesmen. The minister makes the pitch, leading prayer sessions and singing songs during the party, and his wife is the one who closes the deal. When the minister dims the lights and says, “If anyone out there feels alone, if anyone feels like letting Jesus in, just raise your hand,” the wife is the one who brings Gabriel into the other room to finish his conversion. That means the children are being sold something, and there is a pressure to buy it. The fact that Gabriel is in a room surrounded by kids who have already become Christian only adds to that sense of pressure, coming from Gabriel’s 10-year-old peers. Add to that his own sense of guilt at not living with his mother, and we’re talking about something that Gabriel thinks he understands, but is actually being caught up in a sense of fervor. It’s difficult not to think of someone like Jim Jones and Jonestown when an innocent is caught up in that sort of one-sided groupthink.

Paul: One of the things I got from the film was a feeling of insincerity from both of the hosts of the party. Was this deliberate?
Jeremiah: I’d argue that the insincerity you feel has to do with the fact that the minister and his wife cannot state their true intentions outright. That would just frighten Gabriel. Instead, they lead him down a certain path. I’d consider it more duplicity than hypocrisy.

Paul: If so, do you feel that many or some people who cling to religious beliefs are less than sincere?
Jeremiah: Anyone who looks at the world from only one direction is not accepting that the world is a complicated place. Religious beliefs can create a system where you can decide what is good and what is bad, and provide a rulebook of sorts. Under the best of circumstances, it can provide a beautiful philosophy. But adherence to a religious text or a guru without questioning is a form of self-deception, or brainwashing. You could say the same thing about our media, or our politicians. I would also argue that Mel Gibson seems very sincere about his religious beliefs, but if you watch “The Passion of the Christ” carefully you can read it as bullying, obtuse, mean-spirited, and one-dimensional. Is that insincere? No. Is it corrupt? I think so.

Paul: Austin Labbe puts in an incredible performance. How did you find him and was it difficult working with so many child actors?
Jeremiah: We originally held auditions for child actors in New York City, where I live. But many of the kids we found were more appropriate for the tacked on smiles and cutesiness of Radio City Music Hall. Either that, or they were burned out and exhausted from doing low budget independent films and wanted to be kids again instead of actors, which is fair enough. The search went back to Rhode Island, where I scoured acting schools and programs. Austin Labbe was in one of those classes, and it was evident from his screen test that he had some training. He had already done movies and been on Saturday Night Live, and he had an introspective quality that felt right for Gabriel.
We hung out for an afternoon talking about the movie, and about football, and I felt comfortable selecting him for the role. He’s a very mature young man, and had his own version of the method that he would draw on when acting in a scene.

It was not difficult for me working with the other child actors, since they were well behaved on the set and excited to be there. Between takes, they would sit around listening to the grown-up actors talk about their careers, or watch us set the lights. Since I never left the set, I didn’t have to deal with them when they were running around playing in the snow. My producer Rachel Gordon and production coordinator Kiki Latimer had to keep an eye on them to make sure they wouldn’t ruin their costumes or get hurt.
They were good kids, but kids will be kids, right? When they weren’t working, they wanted to play!

Paul: The film’s score was also very effective. What were your influences, if any?
Jeremiah: It was my pleasure to work once again with composer Rob Reddy, who previously collaborated with me on a dark comedy called “Snapshot”. While Rob and I are both fans of film composers Mychael Danna (”The Sweet Hereafter”) and Andrew Dickson (”Secrets and Lies”), we didn’t get into conversations about what the influences would be. Instead, I allowed Rob to read the script long before shooting began, and showed him different cuts of “The Christmas Party” starting with an early rough cut. This allowed him to respond to the film itself while composing. Rob says that he was inspired by the season of winter in New England, with Christmas approaching. Rob is also able to tap into dark and disarming places within his music, and that lent itself nicely to the film.

Paul: What sort of reactions have you had to “The Christmas Party” so far?
Jeremiah: It’s been fascinating to observe the reactions. New York audiences tend to have a cynical attitude towards the minister and his wife, and often there’s nervous laughter until they’re swept up in the more eerie sequences — then they laugh again when they realize it’s not so bad, and finally they’re hit hard by the bleak climax. My audiences in Rhode Island are more familiar with these characters, since they can identify them as people they instinctively know. They view the film very seriously, and are more accepting of the religious couple. They see it as realism, or a slice-of-life. San Francisco, on the other hand, took it as a straight-up horror film where they were terrified completely by the Christmas Party itself, and aghast at what poor Gabriel had to go through. It varies from city to city, and from festival to festival.

But individual audience members have had very polarized responses to the film, and to the characters. Some love the grandparents, others find them irresponsible — and some find the minister to be a monster whereas others find him to be merely a neighbor seriously committed in his beliefs. That’s what I was hoping for with the film: to generate discussion.

Paul: So what’s next on your plate?
Jeremiah: I recently directed one of seven new commercial spot for Canon, demonstrating the features of their new XL2 camera. That was great fun, and afforded me the opportunity to direct a slapstick comedy. I’m also planning a short film to be shot in New Jersey, written by acclaimed playwright Suzanne Bachner. That’s a comedy-drama. But I’d love to make a horror movie, and am planning to work on a werewolf script this fall. It will take place in the same environment of rural alienation as “The Christmas Party”, and deal with similar themes of repression and desire. I’m actually very proud that members of the horror film community have responded so well to my work, and feel that the genre is especially important in today’s troubled times.
It’s an allegory for where we are.

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