In an exclusive interview which took place last week during the Sydney Film Festival, I got to sit down with acclaimed filmmaker Ramin Bahrani – a man who critic Roger Ebert hailed as “the director of the decade” before his passing (in turn, 99 Homes was dedicated to Ebert) – to talk about his new film 99 Homes, which had its Australian premiere during the festival.
In our 15-or-so minute chat, we talk about the importance of Florida as a location in the film, “I was interested in why the global economy tanked (in 2008) and it was the housing crisis. And the epicenter of that was over four states and Florida was one of them. I wanted to go to Florida because of retirees, palm trees and golf and Walt Disney world and all that… this movie predominantly takes place in… McMansions… these generic looking both beautiful yet soulless mansions… and that could have been in any suburb.”
In fact, the film was actually shot in New Orleans, “but I don’t think anyone can tell,” quipped Bahrani, “in fact the suburbs of Orlando don’t have many palm trees. But I knew if I didn’t put in some palm trees that no one would believe me. The reality is always different to film.”
Bahrani initially headed to Florida for inspiration on the film, “I started doing work on the film in 2012. I was finishing up my last film, and I started going down to Florida, spending time with fraud attorneys, I was going to the foreclosure courts. They’re known as Rocket Dockets because they decide your fate in 60 seconds flat… It’s a pretty horrible and vicious system there. I spent time with real estate brokers. I was startled to see that they all carried guns, which I never knew. I don’t think that any of the brokers expected that their job would become evicting people, they didn’t know that, they signed up for something else.”
So much of these experiences became part of the plot of the film, “I spent a lot of time with your everyday, average middle class families… who are now suddenly living in a motel on Highway 142 that leads to Disney. People with part time jobs were living next door to gang bangers and dealers and prostitutes and migrant workers, and a bus shows up to take their kids to school. In a motel. The corruption was mind boggling in Florida and in the housing industry. It was like everywhere I turned there was something even more corrupt.”
“I had read about how the banks and the government were involved in rigging the system, which is a big part of what the movie is about, but I didn’t know on the ground what was happening. And pretty strictly the structure of the film came to me, when I was on the ground in Florida meeting people. A man gets kicked out of his home, begins to work for the nasty real estate broker who kicked him out, in order to get his home back. And then he has to evict people, as it happened for him. This deal with the devil or Faustian story, its structure seemed strong and solid
“It’s my fifth film, they all tend to have a humanist or socialist core to them, which this has. But unlike my previous films, it was suddenly a thriller or a gangster film. You can call it a humanist thriller. Where the pace of the film came clear to me, the violence, the scams, the corruptions, how Michael pulls Andrew into this thing. That all came apparent to me while I was down there. And that was very exciting, to know that this film would be like that. It would have a pace. Even when I was writing it, I knew this should have a score with a drive to it, that Anthony did such a good job with… it’s so strong.”
We go on to talk about the change in the audience’s perception of Michael Shannon’s character, “…without any doubt he’s one of the top five actors in the world. He’s so good. I’d always wanted to work with him. I’ve told him he has no choice, he’ll be i. I wanted him to be slick and handsome, I wanted a different Michael to who we’ve seen in the pas”
There are some very minor spoilers of the film included, and we start talking about the ending at the end of the interview, but you can listen to our entire chat in a special podcast below:
99 Homes screened at Sydney Film Festival. It has a tentative Australian release date of October 1st.
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