‘Chain Reactions’ Director Alexandre O. Philippe On Celebrating ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ With Stephen King and Rediscovering Kim Novak — Venice Film Festival
Alexandra O. Philippe’s Chain Reactions is an extraordinary documentary about an extraordinary film. With contributions from comedian Patton Oswalt, writers Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Stephen King, plus filmmakers Takashi Miike and Karyn Kusama, it examines the legacy of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 shocker The Texas Chain Saw Massacre through a series of very personal and revealing interviews. Written by Hooper and Kim Henkel, two Texas students, the original film finds five teenagers coming unstuck when a road trip takes them to the Sawyer house, the bone-strewn home to chainsaw-wielding maniac Leatherface (so named for horrifically obvious reasons) and his inbred cannibal family.
Philippe’s thoughtful, reflexive style has developed a lot since his breakout film The People vs. George Lucas (2010), a meditation on Star Wars fandom. In 2017 he released 78/52, an intensive study of the shower scene in Psycho, which he followed in 2019 with Memory: The Origins of Alien, a deep dive into the themes of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi. Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist followed in 2019, then came The Taking (2021), about the place of Monument Valley in the history of the Western. Most recently came festival hit Lynch/Oz (2022), exploring the many references to The Wizard of Oz in the work of David Lynch.
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Chain Reactions, screening in Venice Classics, might be his best film yet, a rare documentary that only enhances its subject’s dark cult appeal as a vicious, post-Vietnam cultural satire, notably by taking into account how the film was seen, not just when and where. We learn that in Australia the film was only available on a degraded video print, which spoke to the country’s parched, hot climate. “We’ve gotten invited by so many festivals now, I can’t even keep track,” says Philippe. “It’s almost a daily occurrence at this point. Obviously, a lot of them are doing double bills — The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Chain Reactions — as they should, but I’m hoping one of them will go, ‘Hey, let’s show the Australian VHS…’”
DEADLINE: Why did you choose The Texas Chain Saw Massacre?
ALEXANDRE O. PHILIPPE: I would say The Texas Chain Saw Massacre chose me, in the sense that I got a call from the rights holders, initially MPI and then Kim and [his son] Ian Henkel. They were looking to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the film. They were familiar with my work, and they said, “We’d like you to do something special. Are you interested?” For me, it was a no-brainer. I’ve made a number of films at Exhibit A Pictures about seminal horror films, so to have done films about Psycho, Alien, The Exorcist, and then have the opportunity to do something on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was just really, really special. It’s a film I have a very strong relationship with. It’s an absolute masterpiece, both artistically and also in terms of all the things it has to say.
DEADLINE: How did it come about?
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PHILIPPE: As is always the case with me, it came together very quickly. I’m more and more interested in the idea of exploring a film through very intimate lenses. Look, there are people out there who do great behind-the-scenes docs, or making-of docs, but that’s not my wheelhouse. I want to go beyond the anecdotes and really tap into the resonance — the magic, really — of movies. And there’s a lot of magic in those films, as there is any time a film resonates with culture in such a profound way.
Tobe Hooper once said, “The zeitgeist blew through me.” I think that’s such a great way to put it, because I do believe that the zeitgeist picks the messengers, and the messengers are not necessarily always ready. If you want to look at it in terms of Joseph Campbell [author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces], the hero in this case was not necessarily ready to accept the call to adventure. You’re looking at Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel; these guys were super-young, didn’t have any money, and they’d made this incredible film. It’s just so smart. Every aspect of it. It’s an extraordinary piece of work, and the way that it resonates 50 years later is extraordinarily powerful. So, for me, the excitement was like, “OK, so how do we do this?” I wanted to find people who really had something to say about the film and look at the film through their unique lenses.
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Then I became really excited by the idea of structuring the film chapter by chapter and giving it the same timeline as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: starting around high noon, going through the night and then coming out the following morning — which had a lot of logistical challenges, obviously. It also occurred to me that I could play with the outtakes from the film and some other never-before-seen shots as a bridge.
In a way, it’s almost like we’re looking at the Sawyer house, and our interviewees are trapped there 50 years later. But we’re crossing the threshold of time, as the characters from 50 years ago take us inside the house, and now we’re in the present day and we go back and forth. To have this dialogue between the film itself and people talking about the film 50 years later, I thought that was the right approach.
DEADLINE: What is your process? Is there any waste, or any interviewees who don’t turn out to be quite right? You picked five bullseyes there.
PHILIPPE: Ultimately, it’s really intuitive. I’m going to sound a little bit esoteric here, but I think when you commit to this kind of approach, in terms of the steps you take in trying to get people to participate, I think the universe gives you certain things and withholds other things from you. And you have to accept that when it doesn’t give you what you think you want, it’s actually for the best, and it works that way. Honestly, in retrospect, I wouldn’t go back and change this cast. I think they work together in a beautiful way. All of those people, ultimately, were no-brainers. I love the fact that they each took the film in completely different directions, and I think that’s always going to be the case when you have people of that caliber, people who are so thoughtful about art and writing and movies — of course they’re going to give you something that you’ve never thought of.
DEADLINE: But how do you know for sure?
PHILIPPE: Well, there’s a lot of factors involved. First of all, research is a component of it. In the case of Patton Oswalt, David Lawrence, who edited the film, pointed me to an article in the New Yorker that Patton had written, about the poetry of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I thought, “OK, that’s interesting.” I loved the idea of opening the film with Patton Oswalt because here you are, you’re sitting down, you’re watching a film that you know is about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and the last person probably you would expect is Patton Oswalt. So immediately, I think, it clears the deck in terms of expectations. It’s like, “Well, now you can just sit back, relax, because we’re not going to take you in directions that you think we’re going to go.” And so that’s why I gave him the High Noon chapter. He was always going to be Chapter One.
Same with Karyn. I knew her, because I’d worked with her before, and I hadn’t originally planned on including her in the film. But she invited me to dinner one day, and I told her about it. She basically said, “I have to be in it.” I said, “OK.” And then she told me why. I knew she was going to be able to deliver an absolute punch of an ending, the perfect exclamation point. And I structured my questions that way. I nudged her to give me just that, which she did. So, for her, I had to commit to giving her the Sunrise chapter.
Before I get to the others, I’ll tell you the one that I do regret, even though it would’ve made for too long of a film. I had a lot of just really wonderful back and forth with Ari Aster. He really wanted to do it. He adores The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. He happens to like my films, which is lovely. He really tried, and he agonized over it, and I felt really bad because he was like, “I really want to do this.” But he was in pre-production, basically, and he seems to me to be the type of person who really likes to prepare, which I completely respect. I don’t think he felt comfortable just coming in and shooting from the hip. So that was that. And I’m sure his take on it would be amazing.
DEADLINE: As it is, the big coup of the film is Stephen King. How did that come about?
PHILIPPE: He was the easiest of all, and it was really one of those times when the stars aligned in a perfect way. A very dear friend of mine is a really big literary agent. She has a lot of big clients, and I knew that one of her clients worked with Stephen King and knew him well. So, I asked her, “Do you think that you could forward something to him?” She said, “Write me your best letter and I’ll forward it to my client. Knowing him, if he likes your letter, he’ll forward it straight to Stephen King.” So, I wrote my best letter, and on whatever morning it was, she sent me a text, saying, “OK, I just sent your letter to my client.” Thirty minutes later, she texts me again. She says, “Stephen King has your letter.” And not even an hour later, she says, “Stephen King just contacted me, says he’d love to do it. Here’s his email address. You can go ahead and contact him.”
So, it was just super easy, but then it became complicated, in the sense that he was just getting ready to have hip-replacement surgery. His recovery took a little bit longer than we expected, so it took us four months of delay to eventually be able to do it. But he was just so gracious with his time; just so thoughtful and so passionate. I love the way he ties the film to his own childhood experiences. His chapter is such a masterclass in horror — horror versus terror, and all of that. I also really liked the idea of having him be the nighttime chapter, it’s almost like there’s this guy hiding in the basement. You hear his voice first. It’s like, “Who’s the monster in the basement?” “Oh, it’s Stephen King.” I wanted to play on that.
DEADLINE: How does this square with all your other films?
PHILIPPE: As I always say, my films are not about explaining, my films are about the mysteries. I’m much more interested in the mysteries of the creative process — opening doors for the audience to go through and find things for themselves — because, to me, that’s the beauty of it. The moment you try to explain something… [Pauses.] There’s nothing more reductive to me than when people say, “This is the definitive documentary.” What does that even mean? You could make it a 100 great films about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, because the film itself taps into the zeitgeist, meaning it taps into the universe, it taps into the human condition, and there is no bottom to that.
So, to me is if you were to try to define what my films are, that’s what they are. But now, of course, stylistically, my films are changing. All the people that I work with are getting better and better and better at what they do, and I think I’m getting better and better and better at what I do. And so, I look at The People versus George Lucas, and it was what it was. I would do it very differently now. But that’s OK. That’s part of the way that, hopefully, as an artist and a filmmaker, the more you progress, the more you’re honing your craft.
I don’t know that I can really define [what I do], and I would say also that it’s not really for me to define my work. It’s very intuitive. I love to tap into the resonance of movies and the zeitgeist. I love to find a style that gels with the spirit of the film. It’s not about mimicking it; it’s about gelling with the spirit of the film. To a strange extent, I think a lot of my films are ghost stories of sorts. I’m summoning the ghosts from those films because that’s what resonance is, right?
DEADLINE: So, what are you up to next? What can you reveal about your new project?
PHILIPPE: Well, I’m working on a very special film about Kim Novak, which happened very, very quickly. It fell in my lap in a very serendipitous way, one that I think is very, very cosmic because I’m also working on a Vertigo project. I initially reached out to her to interview her for that, and then it turned into something much more personal and a lot deeper, and really about her and her art. But without giving too much away, it’s almost turned into a film séance. We raised some spirits together, let’s just put it that way. We filmed her being reunited after 67 years with Madeleine’s outfit [from Vertigo], the famous Edith Head suit. And the emotions that came out when she opened that box… I felt I was witnessing film history. It was very, very special.
There’s a lot of stuff that happened. We took her back to her old house in Carmel. She’s had an incredible story. She’s had multiple fires and mudslides, and multiple homes destroyed over the course of her career. But we went back there. I think she hadn’t been there in 30 years, so it was hugely emotional for her to go back and find all these incredible things in her attic. I was digging into her attic for days, which in itself is crazy to think about. I watched her paint. She’s an extraordinary, extraordinary artist. She’s so soulful. I joke that she’s like Snow White — she attracts all these animals into her life, and they just follow her around. She isn’t like anybody I’ve ever met, and I think it’s high time a film was made about her, because she’s begging to be rediscovered, for sure.
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