Preston Barta // Features Editor
A WOUNDED FAWN
Not rated, 90 minutes.
Now available to stream on Shudder.
Remember Scarlett Johansson’s method of madness in 2014’s Under the Skin? She would lure men into her trap by doing a fatal mating dance. While we don’t exactly see Josh Ruben’s serial killer character in A Wounded Fawn following the same path, his unassuming charm and hell-made visions create an equally as fierce whirlwind.
Ruben (Scare Me) and director Travis Stevens (Jakob’s Wife) describe their new nightmare as “American Psycho by way of Evil Dead.” But one could also say it’s a bloody brilliant cocktail of Michele Soavi and Dario Argento with a pinch of David Lynch. So, fully expect your mind to get its extra steps in during your viewing.
Oozing with visual style and impressive, day-wrecking disturbances, A Wounded Fawn runs up your ticker by centering on a killer’s pursuit of a woman that evolves into one hell of a feverish hallucination. Some could say this is about as close as it gets to getting a film directed by Satan. Within is Bruce Ernst, a seemingly nice guy who captures the heart of museum curator Meredith Tanning (Wolfcop’s Sarah Lind).
All have the markings of a romantic comedy when Bruce invites Meredith to a weekend getaway in the country. And, as you guessed, things go extremely south, but not in the way you may expect. This is a fascinating two-part affair that unfolds into a surreal experience for the ages.
To paint a bigger picture of this hellscape, Fresh Fiction had the opportunity in September to speak with A Wounded Fawn director Travis Stevens and actors Sarah Lind and Josh Ruben ahead of the film’s regional premiere at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. In our transcribed interview below, we discuss their feelings going in and out of the film, casualizing the chaos, and developing these unforgettable images.
Q&A
The following is a transcript of an interview conducted on September 22 at Fantastic Fest, an annual genre film festival in Austin, Texas. Some of the questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Preston Barta: Well, thank you so incredibly much for your time today and for producing the lasting thoughts and images that are in this film. I haven’t quite unknotted my stomach and untripped my mind. So, naturally, I am curious about the journey for you, Sarah and Josh, in actionizing these complex feelings and moods. Did you both have really hot heads from the intensity of it all? [Laughs]
Josh Ruben: Yes, really hot heads going in, especially because one of the first days of shooting was in a really hot car, driving over the George Washington Bridge 19 times in 90-degree weather.
Sarah Lind: No air conditioning, and the windows had to be up because of sound. And during Covid.
Josh: During Covid, yes. So, really, it was all about trust, which I think leads back to your question. We trusted each other very much to do all the weird and terrible things we did in the film.
Travis, I’m curious about the company you hang around with…
Travis Stevens: [Laughs] What have you heard?
Don’t worry. I’m setting it up. [Laughs] So, like your family, have they seen your film? And if they have, are they like, “Yeah. This is Travis, all right?” When did the left-of-center material really ramp up for you?
Travis: Thank you for this question, truly. I have a very loving family. I got adopted, so I think there was still a period of time where there was some side eye. I think the first time was in college. I made a film. My parents came to the screening, and in that film, there was one character who could only reach orgasm by slamming a window on himself, and another character who liked to have sex with watermelons. At that point, my dad and mom looked at me, and they were like, “We’re paying for this school? What are you doing?” But ever since then, they’ve been incredibly gracious enough to not make me feel too weird. So, it started early.
At this point, my dad comes to festivals like this, and he’ll just be sitting in a theater watching a movie where a guy’s having sex with his 80-year-old mom, and my dad’s just like, “What are you guys doing? What is this world that you’re a part of?”
“It’s Korean, dad! It’s great! See, this is about…” So, yeah.
[Laughs] That’s great! Thanks so much for that.
With Meredith, it was interesting to follow her journey. She notices all these signs that are telling her to, essentially, run the other way. But being in the company of Bruce, Meredith has such a loving heart that she doesn’t want to abandon or reject the situation too early because she hasn’t quite figured him out yet. Sarah, did playing Meredith cause you to get more inside your head? Are you more hyper aware of your surroundings as a result of doing this film?
Sarah: I would say that there was a lot of personal experience I was able to bring to Meredith. One of the things that I really wanted to do with her is when she’s noticing all these danger signs, she’s like, “That was weird, but…” She went through her abusive past relationship and has learned from it. So, she’s not, not noticing. She’s not instinct injured any more, but he’s a psycho. He was just so far beyond the pale and really, really good at this. She registers it, but there’s a plausible reason for her to be like, “OK, we can keep going. I registered that, but keep going,” which I think is really relatable and a natural reaction. And it’s also usually how things go really wrong, because you very slowly end up out where you can’t swim any more, which is sort of what happens to her. I don’t know that I’m different from having played her, but it was a nice circle closing to be able to use what I’ve learned personally and give it to her.
And with Bruce, Josh, was it a trip to casualize his madness?
Josh: That’s a great question. I wouldn’t say that it was a trip to casualize it. It was a really enticing challenge to play, just as someone who’s been a comedian for so long. My acting challenge, my inner motivation – let’s call it – was to seduce, or to try and live in what the sexy part of Josh is, which, for most of my life, playing goblins in sketches for College Humor, was like, you have to go from this place of actual attractiveness and staying in a grounded place.
I think Mike Nichols was one of the people to talk about this: with psychos, there’s no playing scary. It’s about playing it the most normal, casual and grounded way you can all while doing some awful things. That’s what’s truly scary, as opposed to twirling your mustache as the train is coming up to run everybody over. That was a really enticing challenge. I guess I did it. I made everyone’s hair stand up. Because I look at Twitter, you know what I mean? And really, I apologize.
Did it require a bit of a sanity check at the end of this?
Sarah: Not every actor feels this way, but it doesn’t go home with me. I enjoy it.
Josh: Yeah, same.
Sarah: I think I have a harder time in life feeling everything. So, you get a chance to do that, and I’m like, that’s nice. Terror, sadness – great. See ya. Goodnight. It’s fun.
Josh: Yeah, it’s all good fun.
Sarah: And it’s pretend.
Josh: Yeah, exactly. We knew it wasn’t heavy. It just felt like playtime. We all knew what we were doing: Travis’ work.
How was the experience watching the complete film, with the visual language complimenting a lot of the internal feelings your characters were having?
Josh: On set, we had the wonderful experience of seeing everything practically done. Ninety-nine percent of it was experiential, was experienced on the day. But the 16mm, the sound design, Vaaal’s score, Erik Bergrin’s costumes – everything put in that combination put the thing on a whole other level that certainly exceeded my expectations.
Sarah: Yeah. What I liked, that really surprised me, was [Josh’s] performance. You don’t always know what’s going to end up in the film when you’re with someone, and I had imagined Bruce in a very uncreative, uninteresting way. Then, it was so much different than what I had imagined. Josh plotted Bruce’s killings. He played him for real, but also, his humor came through, and it was so arresting to be laughing at Bruce, truly at him. You understand his humanity, but you’re also like, “You’re a monster.” Josh doesn’t let him off the hook. I don’t know exactly what happened to make that possible, but I just was blown away when I saw Josh doing what he was doing.
I know what you mean. One of my favorite quotes was when Josh said, “Oh, I’m just basking in the morning light. I’m a basker!” That was one of those moments that injects humor into the intensity. Did math or science become involved when it came to figuring out how to deliver your lines?
Josh: That was in the wonderful, chewy dialogue and the circumstance, and also knowing that was framed in a certain state. There are so many different ways to interpret it. Last night, I watched the film and thought “basker” was him actually saying “bastard.” But he stopped us. He’s in the state he’s in. That had everything to do with what the script is – and the combination of who I am, who Sarah is, who Travis is, that all contributes to it. And the fact that, essentially – I don’t know if Travis has comped me on Twitter when we were talking about doing this – we’re doing American Psycho by way of Evil Dead. But it has to go that rangy route, and has to be fun. Or, at least, I imagine that’s why I was chosen to do it.
As far as the math for dialogue – that’s a great question. I watch a lot of what I do, unless I’m really playing a character. I’m like, “That sucks.” That’s my curse. I’m very hard on myself as a person, an actor, and a filmmaker. There are moments in my life where I’m like, there’s awful math to that monologue, or that moment, but it’s wonderful to hear people like you guys be like, “Yes, that’s interesting,” or, “What a wonderful choice.” But I’ll carry that curse with me. I just try to take every opportunity, especially with these film mags, the limited time you have to just do something different, which I think Sarah and I were trying to do every time we pushed these scenes. Like, what’s another thing we can do and try?
Travis: I haven’t said this to Josh before either, but because this film has such an exaggerated, subjective point of view, which I think is kind of what you’re saying in the question. In the crafting, the editing, the reason why it was easier for me is because there are these nuances in the gears that you guys shift with your faces in these moments that you can see when that thought or a thing happens, and then I can cut to something wild, or something innocuous, or whatever and we’ll impose whatever feeling, because Josh and Sarah really are so expressive and so fine tuned with what their performances are doing.
In the edit, rather than trying to force something to happen, it was already there based just on their coverage, which just sold the other wild, scary or dangerous thing on the other side. It’s not always like that.
We’re just about out of time, so I close out by asking Travis about the visual language of the film. That hazy, warped feel, and the way you showed hands – I’m curious about adding all that accoutrement in your scenes to amplify the feelings you’re going for moment to moment.
Travis: Yeah. The way I described it to the department heads was to think of this as a fashion film, not a horror film. What I am interested in is all of the details of each of the costumes, the hair-
The handkerchief shots.
Travis: Yeah! So that in the accumulation of those details is what will create the feeling in the audience. And it makes sense for the characters, but that’s what I wanted to create. When you see a beautiful $20,000 dress coming down the runway, it’s one thing. When you see it up close and you see each hand-beaded element of it, your brain just kind of goes, “Wow.” That’s what we were trying to do, because I had made movies about bad men before. In trying to find what I could do that I hadn’t done before on this, that exploration of female surrealist painters became a key to the math. And starting to incorporate references to their work opened up some pretty wild visuals.
A Wounded Fawn is now available to stream on Shudder. A seven-day free trail is available.
