Q&A with Matthew Wade
A conversation with animator and director Matthew Wade on his short horror film, Maniac Landscapes.
How did you first get into filmmaking?
I suppose I got into filmmaking like lots of kids: by falling in love with certain films and wanting to be part of the magic of making them. I think Hook was my first time seeing a movie and realizing that real people had created it and were acting in it. It was a job to manifest fantasy. Later, it was 12 Monkeys, Gummo, an Ingmar Bergman VHS box set (I have no idea where it came from), and of course the first time seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey. That was the point of no return.
I was an actor in theater and movie projects while in high school in Idaho, but there was no guidance in the early 00’s for kids growing up there who wanted to do something as weird as make movies or be on Saturday Night Live. I got some scholarship money for acting so I tried out traditional college but I just couldn’t find my place in those traditional structures. So I bumbled around working various jobs, drawing, making skate and sketch videos, and watching a lot of movies - just trying to find my place for a while before deciding to shoot a short film, if only to see if I could actually do it. That film, It Shines and Shakes and Laughs, made over the course of a winter with just my friends, a super 8mm camera, and a bounce card, ended up getting into the 2009 Slamdance Film Festival.
After that, my girlfriend-at-the-time, Sara Lynch, was planning on moving to Vancouver, Canada to study acting. I didn’t want to be without her and had nothing tethering me to my life in Idaho and she suggested I submit in my art portfolio to the school’s animation program. I got accepted and we packed up and moved there, then to Los Angeles after graduating and getting married. After a few years in the commercial freelance world, the itch returned and I finally felt like I had something to say, so we moved back to the Northwest to make our first feature, How the Sky Will Melt. We had planned to possibly move back to California once the movie was done (and we could get out of the debt incurred during the film’s production process) but we ended up continuing to create at a much steadier pace living in downtown Boise than we did in LA. So we stayed and started our production company, Sky Melt Film, in 2015 and have been at it ever since.
What was your creative process for this film?
Maniac Landscapes came from a series of recurring dreams where I could hear crying, always very distant, always from a person I was never able to see, but always somehow close to me. These dreams often feel like precognitions, only of some parallel life, or sometimes as memories of another time and place. Though I was only a ghostly observer in these dreams I was able to feel the impact of this unknown and heavy sorrow on the physicality of the house itself. The things in the film are not literal images I experienced. The dreams were mostly just sensations and unseen premonitions of where the house was and who was in it with me. Never narrative explorations within it. Any meaning I would later try to project onto these experiences perverted the explorations the dreamer came away from. Why do I need to understand it? That’s not what it was for.
The animation in the film is a way to try to interpret and translate these feelings, if only for myself, by drawing them over and over. Discovery in repetition. Like the dream, I wanted the way the film looked and sounded to remain a kind of mystery - an archive of a real dream. It’s clearly hand-drawn in many parts, and that’s intentional because it’s tactile and adds life to otherwise lifeless compositions. But when people want to know more about the mechanics of how I made the film look the way it does I find myself protective of the process. Seeing behind the curtain, at least to me and with this specific film, can bastardize its more visceral expressions. It's simply meant to be and be experienced.
What projects are you working on next, and how can people who are interested best support or follow you.
Our latest feature, A Black Rift Begins to Yawn, premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival earlier this year and is on its festival run with a handful of screening coming up. It’s a very experimental/narrative hybrid about paranoia, conspiracies, loneliness, and how others affect our perception of self. Its themes seem to resonating now (especially in the Pacific Northwest, where it’s had it widest support so far) in a way they may not have as much before the pandemic. Most people think it was made during the initial lockdown, but we actually wrapped photography on it in late 2017.
I’m also neck-deep in a genre horror screenplay that I’ve been haunted by for years. I’ve been outlining it for the last year; it’s been slow going because it deals with a lot of my childhood memories and tapping into that is both exhausting and takes me a lot of time to get right. On the other end of the spectrum, we've developed an animated comedy pilot that will be going into production this fall/winter. Just silly, colorful, design-heavy fun.
