SLIFF 2017 Interview: Marc Meyers – Director of MY FRIEND DAHMER

MY FRIEND DAHMER screens Friday, November 10th at 7:00pm at The Tivoli Theater (6350 Delmar) as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. Director Director Marc Meyers will be in attendance. . Ticket information can be found HERE.

Before Jeffrey Dahmer became one of the most notorious serial killers of all time, he was a teenage loner. Conducting grisly experiments in a makeshift backyard lab, Jeff was invisible to most, until his increasingly bizarre behavior unexpectedly attracted friends. Based on the acclaimed graphic memoir by cartoonist John “Derf” Backderf — who was a teenage friend of the nascent serial killer and nearly became his first human victim — MY FRIEND DAHMER chronicles the origins of the man, the monster — and the high-school senior. Ross Lynch portrays Dahmer in a performance that Paper Magazine describes as “haunted, sad, scary, and unforgettable,” and the exceptional cast includes Anne Heche, Vincent Kartheiser, Dallas Roberts, Alex Wolff, and Tommy Nelson. Variety hails the new film from director Marc Meyers — a two-time SLIFF alum with “Approaching Union Square” and “Harvest” — as “a serious and audacious attempt to dramatize the inner life of a sick puppy when he wasn’t quite so sick” and declares that “‘MY FRIEND DAHMER is disturbingly compelling and original … the movie that Gus Van Sant’s ‘Elephant’ wanted to be: a humanizing dissection of teen psychosis.”

Director Marc Meyers took the time to talk to We Are Movie Geeks before his film MY FRIEND DAHMER screens at The St. Louis International Film Festival.

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman October 24th, 2017

Tom Stockman: Have you been to St. Louis before?

Marc Meyers: Yes, my first feature, APPROACHING UNION SQUARE was in the new filmmakers showcase there a few years ago and that’s where I met everyone associated with SLIFF. They showed my next film, HARVES, as well.

TS: How does your new film MY FRIEND DAHMER differ from other movies about serial killers?

MM:  The biggest distinguishing factor is that it’s based on a graphic novel that was written by a guy, Derk Backderf, who grew up with Jeffrey Dahmer. They were friends in high school. So it’s not only from that unique perspective, but it’s about the days before the stories that we know him for, before he became a serial killer. It’s about his experience in high school. It’s his embryonic stage, the making of the monster.

TS: Have you ever seen DAHMER starring Jeremy Renner as Jeffrey Dahmer?

MM:  I did watch it once to see how much my ideas might overlap.

TS: It would be a good companion piece to your film as it takes place a few years later than yours.

MM:  Yes, there’s another chapter of his life that I’m aware of. In between Dahmer which is the area of his life he is most known for; going to the gay clubs and what he did to some of these men. He also went to college but got kicked out. He joined the military and got kicked out of that as well. So there’s another sequence there. My film is about his experiences in high school and also about his family life. It’s sort of the marriage of these two worlds that Jeff is living in. His home life, where his parents marriage is dissolving around him, and also at school where he’s a lonely kid. He finds a way to attract some other oddballs in high school and they form a club called the Dahmer Fan Club. That became their identity as a group where they would pass the time finding ways to disrupt the high school like many oddball kids might in a town where there’s not much else to do.

TS: Do you remember when the publicity about the Dahmer crimes happened?

MM:  Yes, I remember when all of that played out in the news. I was in college at the time so following the news was not a priority, but the news was everywhere, even worldwide.

TS: Was Derf Backderf involved in the script for your film?

MM:  No. Abrams ComicArts is the publisher of his graphic novel and there’s a lot of great information about Derf’s book at their site.

TS: What were some of the challenges in adapting a graphic novel as opposed to making a film based on your own scripts?

MM:  The other three films I made were original scripts from my own stories and those had their own challenges. Here we had an existing story of fact that is sometimes weirder than fiction. The book was a great roadmap. The challenges there we’re how to dramatize a nonfiction graphic novel. There are obviously some visual qualities to a graphic novel that you can see as cinematic potential in certain areas. At the same time, you have to take what is a factual book and find dramatic devices to accomplish the same emotional spirit that the book is communicating. So my agenda was to be loyal, but also to honor the original story in a way that people who knew the book, and also people who didn’t, could all watch the movie and be entertained. It’s a different medium so it calls for different devices to be at play. We have to condense the timeline of events happening because you really can’t tell a story that takes place in a high school over four years. You need to tell a movie in a shorter period of time.

TS: Some directors who make movies based on graphic novels intentionally compose their shots the way they are drawn in the graphic novel. Did you do that what did you consciously avoid that?

MM:  People that know the book will recognize some of the imagery in the film. But my film is very naturalistic and authentic. I even shot in Akron, Ohio where these characters grew up including at Jeffrey Dahmer’s real home. We brought the crew and actors there for a little over a week for scenes based around the house. There’s that true authenticity, but when my script adaptation and the book overlap, I used part of the panels from the graphic novel as inspiration in my story board. There’s a way to remain loyal but I didn’t do what some other graphic novel adaptations do like include animation or other visual references from the novel, or give it a pulpy sensibility just to make it comic book-like. For me, it was about telling a story set in 1977 and 1978 and making it a period piece and sort of a time capsule. There’s no voiceover and there’s no looking back from now to then.

TS: Let’s talk about this actor playing Dahmer, Ross Lynch. He had starred in a lot of Disney Channel and Nickelodeon-type of shows. Did you cast him to sort of play off of that image?

MM:  No, I cast Ross because I honestly thought he was the right actor for the role. I know that people are finding it fascinating that there is this alliteration from Disney to Dahmer, but he’s not the first great actor to come out of Disney. These are young talented guys that are performers from very early age. They’re working in their profession and though I may not have been watching the shows that they were on, I definitely knew that there was a pool of talent there. I met with over 100 actors for all of the main teenage roles. Once I met with Ross, I locked in on him and felt he was right. He’s originally a dancer and also an actor and a singer so I knew that he would understand the physicality of the role, the gate, the posture. He’s an amazing performer and a really talented actor. After a couple of sessions with him, it was clear to everyone to everyone involved in the movie that he was the right pick.

TS: Where did you grow up?

MM:  I grew up in Peekskill New York, about an hour north of New York City. It’s now called Cortland Manor but it’s very much a bucolic area that to me was very reminiscent of the environment that this movie is set in. I could relate to living in a suburban town that was very similar.

TS: Did you grow up a movie buff?

MM:   I grew up watching movies but I was never someone who swore they were going to grow up and be a movie maker. I first found my love of writing. That’s what brought me to New York theater. From there I started to improve my skills and realize that I really like working with actors. I had been making little movies in my backyard just for fun so I suppose it was always part of what I was doing, I wasn’t just waving the flag and claiming that that’s what I was going to do.

TS: Are there some filmmakers that you admire and that have influenced you?

MM:  Yes, it goes in waves that it has to do with what kind of project I’m trying to do next and one other filmmakers I find that have done and I gravitate to for a range of reasons to see how they’re doing certain things.

TS: Whose work did you look at while you were planning MY FRIEND DAHMER?

MM:  I looked at a bunch of teen movies just to see how teen films had changed from the mid-80s when I was growing up.. From THE RIVER’S EDGE and the John Hughes films to more recent stuff like THE FACULTY and current stuff, movies that are a little more glossy and hyper-smart. But I wanted to make something that looked and felt like it was something from the 70s. I knew I would have a Steadicam so I looked it how P.T. Anderson used it and moved the camera around on a lot of his movies. Krzysztof Kieslowski, the way he moved the camera in his movies such as BLUE, WHITE, RED, and THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE. I also love Spielberg and Cassavettes. Kubrick has been on my mind a lot lately.

TS: How has MY FRIEND DAHMER been received so far?

MM:  It’s been playing wonderfully. I’ve shared the film across the United States at various film festivals. St. Louis is the last US film festival where I will be with the movie. I just came back from a trip where I showed it at the BFI London Film Festival and at Sitgest in Spain, which is the largest genre film festival in the world. What’s interesting about the movie is that it is been programmed and shared in the genre community, and at prestige film festivals, and also the LGBT film festival community as well because he’s known in some areas as the “gay serial killer”. It’s been an interesting crossover.

TS: What’s your next project?

MM:   I’m interested in other true life stories; I’m looking at another graphic novel. This is the first film I’ve made where I was doing things with genre devices and I really enjoyed that, so I may do some more of that. But there’s not one title right now that I can share.

TS: Good luck with your next project, whatever it is, and will see you November 10 at the St. Louis international film Festival and your screening of MY FRIEND DAHMER.

MM:  I’m looking forward to it.