'Joshua' has a deep Austin connection

By Chris Garcia
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, July 12, 2007

George Ratliff has done the Austin film scene thing, to a T.

He earned a film degree from the Radio-Television-Film department at the University of Texas. He absorbed skills shared by UT film professors Steve Mims and Tom Schatz. He won grants from the Austin Film Society's vaunted Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund, and he made independent movies that secured him traction in a competitive field.

Now, like quality Austin directors before him, including Mike Akel ("Chalk") and the Duplass brothers ("The Puffy Chair"), he's inching toward the big time. With the domestic psycho-thriller "Joshua," Ratliff has produced a major motion picture that elicited raves on the festival circuit. The homegrown Texan from Amarillo, 38, sold "Joshua" to Fox Searchlight after its first screening at the Sundance Film Festival in January, an experience Ratliff calls "outrageous."

Then, as the festival wound down, "Joshua" won the best cinematography award, which went to Belgian cameraman Benoît Debie, who's known for his creepy atmospherics in Gaspar Noé's "Irreversible."

Ratliff, who now lives in New York with his wife and children, handpicked Debie for what would be his first American picture. The director loved Debie's use of an old film (this is no digital video job) technique called "bleach bypass."

"It's when you skip one of the baths developing the film that creates more contrasts and less saturation and makes the grain pop a little bit in a very interesting and scary way," Ratliff says.

The technique seems tailored to a chilly, semi-horror tale about a family ripped asunder by Joshua, a reserved little boy whose outward perfection betrays wickedly destructive intentions.

"The movie gets progressively starker, and it becomes Joshua's movie, visually and narratively," Ratliff says. "The height of the camera gets lower for Joshua's point of view and Benoît used wider lenses instead of longer lenses for more precise compositions," which subliminally manipulates viewers.

"Benoît has a very dark sensibility, but he couldn't be a sweeter guy," Ratliff says by phone.

American-Statesman: What about you? "Hell House" and "Joshua" seem to reveal your own dark sensibility.

George Ratliff: Benoît and I really connected in that we're both big, nice goofy guys who like dark things and dark humor. We really bonded. We took the same car to the set every day. The whole experience was just too good to be true. It was charmed. The producer is now one of my best friends. I still get along with everybody on the film, and the movie is exactly what I set out to make.

There are plain allusions in "Joshua" to the "spooky child" movies that inspired your film, from "The Exorcist" to "The Shining."

I never try to avoid being influenced, and on this I really wanted to use it to our advantage. People understand movies, we all have this shared movie language. So if you include a nod to another movie, all it really does is create anxiety, if it's that kind of movie, and a sense of anticipation. In "Joshua," what happens is different than the expectation we've created. We use all these references to our advantage to create anxiety, then we take it in a different direction. It happens over and over in "Joshua."

What's it like moving from documentaries to features — moving from no script to following a script?

The script is the hardest part. I get a lot more credit for the script than I deserve. I work with a really brilliant writer named David Gilbert. His fiction's been published in GQ, The New Yorker and elsewhere. We wrote a script together before "Joshua." It was the first he'd ever written, and it was just a great experience for him and me. I got to explain how a screenplay works. We wrote "Joshua" quite quickly.

Where did the "creepy kid" idea come from?

It was David's idea. I was resistant to do it because I had just had kids. I didn't want to get emotionally invested in a movie about a kid who destroys a family. I would explain to him why it wouldn't work because it was cliché or too supernatural or whatever. Every obstacle we would work out. We'd find a really interesting way to solve the problems I would propose. The more we did this, the more excited we got, and I couldn't not do it.

How did you find Jacob Kogan as Joshua?

How we were going to find this kid was a big fear. I felt strongly that we could find someone in New York. I knew that the guys who created (MTV comedy show) "Wonder Showzen" had worked with so many kid actors in New York, practically all of them, from ages 7 to 12. John Lee, one of the creators, read our script, and I asked him for a short list of who he thought would be good, and Jacob Kogan was at the top of his list. We auditioned about 70 kids, but I already had Jacob in my pocket before that.

He works well in the film. I've heard you say that he was the smartest person on the set.

That's just it. Part of the idea of the film is that there are a couple of fundamentally scary things, and one scary thing is coming across a kid who's smarter than you are. And Jacob is really, really (expletive) smart. That's where he's just like Joshua. And that's a little disconcerting.