By SHAWN MACOMBER
THE SEEDING, coming to theaters and VOD this Friday, January 26, is not merely a gorgeous, distinctive, disquieting and profound cinematic journey; it is also a fascinating study in contrasts–on- and offscreen.
Which is to say that for decades, writer/director Barnaby Clay operated mostly within the world of music, helming incredible video clips for artists as diverse as Rihanna, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Take That and Depeche Mode frontman David Gahan, as well as the wild, wonderful feature-length Mick Rock documentary SHOT! THE PSYCHO-SPIRITUAL MANTRA OF ROCK. He, in short, added a visual dialect to the cosmopolitan universal language of popular music.
Yet when it came time for his debut narrative feature, Clay chose to pursue a story that’s equal parts LORD OF THE FLIES and THE HILLS HAVE EYES, in which that and any other lingua franca is taken away. A civilized man from the city (ANTLERS’ Scott Haze), following his camera-lens muse, hikes into the wrong sandblasted patch of badlands and finds himself captive to a pack of sadistic boys in a small enclave with a mysterious woman (Kate Lyn Sheil from YOU’RE NEXT and SHE DIES TOMORROW) whose allegiance is questionable at best. In this story of survival and devolution, the loudest melody is played directly from the heart of darkness.
RUE MORGUE spoke with Clay about what it’s like to square the circle of humanity’s duality–our professed desire for refinement and enlightenment that seems unable to overcome the inherent penchant for savagery under the right circumstances.
Considering your background in capturing and celebrating culture and art that transcends borders and language while offering glimpses of what unifies rather than divides us, I’m curious how you came to tell a story about a well-meaning, self-sufficient everyman who finds himself stranded in a state of nature where the borders are stark and the culture is reductive in the extreme.
As with many projects, the story beckons you. You’re not necessarily making a distinct choice to pursue anything at the outset. At the same time, I’ve thought a lot about how we’re more and more attached to the technological world that surrounds us; how we react to being pulled out of that is interesting to me. You know, I like going out to the desert, and there are many moments out there when I feel not only more vulnerable, but also a sense of reawakening in a way. And there is a musicality to nature, but those rhythms have become alien to us living separate from it in cities. That’s an idea present in THE SEEDING, I think, just in a darker way. It’s about tuning into something we’re very detuned from, if that makes sense.
That 100 percent makes sense. THE SEEDING is actually something of a counterpoint to all the AI talk dominating the cultural conversation. As we ask, “Well, what’s going to be left for human beings?” there’s a natural inclination to romanticize a state of nature. But in reality, there needs to be a third way, because as your film shows, there are real issues with setting the clock too far back.
Absolutely. One thing I was very adamant about while writing THE SEEDING was that it needed to keep one foot in reality as much as possible. Whenever I came up with a plot point, I was like, “Could this really happen?” And, luckily, this is set in America. It’s like, “Oh, crazy shit happens here, basically.” [Laughs] So to me, the film is about how this little microcosm of a universe evolves in its own way. It’s on one level a LORD OF THE FLIES situation; [William Golding] takes these nice children out of British public schools and puts them on an island, and two weeks later they’re trying to kill each other. THE SEEDING is similar, but is more about how, just as a group of people can evolve over generations, they can also devolve. And what would that look like? What would happen to them, if they were left alone for all that time? You know, the things that are horrific in the film might not necessarily be so horrific to the characters to a certain extent, because it’s just their world. That has implications for us, too.
That’s the macro, sociological level. Then, on the micro character level, you have this very interesting interplay between your two main characters in the canyon. They’re being forced to discover what they’re really made of, right? Because we can conceptualize being isolated, or extreme war-game scenarios, but there are not too many moments in modern life when people get to discover themselves on that primal level.
Well, Wyndham [Haze’s character] is evolving throughout. Obviously, at the beginning, it’s all about survival and trying to get out of there. But at a certain point, two things begin to happen. One is that he starts to question the value of what he has left behind. What is he trying to get back to? And all he comes up with is, like, a cheeseburger. That’s it. In the film, he doesn’t have much backstory, but in my mind, I wrote him as somebody who didn’t have much of a social life, who wasn’t really looking for a family or anything like that. He’s basically trying to live in the city, trying to push it all away. And then he gets in a situation where he’s essentially forced into being on his own, outside of all that. At first it freaks him out. But then he begins to look around him and appreciate the simplicity of the situation and the oneness with nature or…whatever you want to call it. It’s not Stockholm Syndrome.
It’s more like he slowly comes to question his fundamental assumptions–not only about his life, but the lives of the woman he is trapped with.
Right.
It’s also a one-way door. Right. He’ll never be the same after this experience, whatever it does to him.
Yeah, exactly.
What you just described requires very nuanced performances to get an audience to suspend disbelief, and maybe question some of their own assumptions. That’s a tough needle to thread. How difficult was casting?
Casting was very difficult, honestly. We had the film cast initially and then, you know, the typical situation–financing fell through just before the pandemic, and we had to totally recast the film and went through so many different actors. I was never in a situation where I was like, “This is the person. I want Scott Haze, and I want Kate Lyn Sheil.” I was just going through all these people. And actually, Scott was somebody who I did not know about until someone told me I should check him out. So I looked at his work in [2013’s] CHILD OF GOD and had a conversation with him. I had this real sense that he was capable of taking on a character who starts here and then he ends up all the way over there. A lot of people can do everyman-from-the-city very well, but to do that and the primal state of devolution Wyndham gets to is a much more difficult task. Only certain people can do that. And Scott is one of them. He was amazing.
Sheil had a tall order, too: She had to convey a lot of quiet intensity and mystery.
I was aware of Kate and some of her work, but for some reason just didn’t get ’round to her until very close to preproduction. Again, this was all during the pandemic, so I met her on Zoom. I knew she was a good actress–a great actress, actually–but she just had this slightly unknowable quality to her, and I was like, “Ooh, that’s interesting. That definitely jibes with her character; you’re never quite sure what she’s thinking.” She holds her cards very close to her chest, you know?
As a director, it must have been such a relief to see both those performances start to come together in front of the camera.
Oh, yeah. It was fantastic. ’Cause as I said, they were very much last-minute casting calls. I think it was a week later, I went off to Utah to prepare. So it was amazing seeing them together and how they respected each other’s very different styles and embodied both characters so brilliantly together. They were so invested in the roles. I could not have asked for anything more.
What about the location? It’s so distinctive. Were you familiar with the space already, or was it a hunt?
A hunt. I mean, we looked everywhere from literally a volcanic crater in Romania to the Canary Islands to northern Mexico to Canada…all over the place. And then somebody sent us a picture of this canyon in southern Utah. It’s not sealed up–that’s movie magic–but because there was a bend in the canyon, it offered us a very large wall to work with. One of the things that really drew me to it was this amazing texture and reds on the walls. It had an almost feminine feel to it, actually, which, without giving anything away, just really fit the story.
And now you have locations for all the sequels.
[Laughs] Exactly. Yeah.
