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Six men lie face down on the ground, licking a deserted street in L.A.
It’s a stomach-churning introduction, but “Sour Minnows” is not a conventional tale. It’s a hangout movie about roommates Ricky (David Brown, “Jury
Duty”) and Tepper (Chase Williamson, “The Guest”) who accidentally step into a different plane of existence one day while getting groceries. Soon, increasingly bizarre happenings befall the duo and Ricky’s girlfriend, Aura (Suzanna Son, “Red Rocket”), and Ricky becomes the victim of “The Yellow Thing,” a being that temporarily takes over his skin and wears him.
Sound strange? It is! But Harrison Atkins’ sophomore feature, following 2015’s “Lace Crater,” is filled with indelible images that will get adventurous cinephiles talking. Atkins spoke to Variety after its world premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia Festival about the ideas behind the film, finding truth in surrealism and the joy of reading reviews.
What was the genesis of the idea for this movie?
I had been trying to get a movie going on a bigger scale for a while in L.A., and the films that I write are kind of weird. This movie, I had done about 40 drafts of it and had actors attached. It was moving at such a glacial pace: two steps forward, one step back. I was having meetings where I’d find myself at brunch with frat guys who said, “Oh, this is such a cool script. Of course, we could never finance it.” And so I started to think, “Man, I’m finding myself developing this other movie and sanding down its rough edges to try to fit it into a box to attract money. What would I be making if I was making a film that wasn’t for sale at all?” And I started to find myself writing poetry. The poetry was sort of in the shape of a movie. The movie originally was a document that was eight pages long, and it kept expanding until it was 80-something pages, and it was a cross between a screenplay and a poem. I wasn’t totally sure how I could make it, but I kept noodling on it. Eventually it hit a boiling point where I realized that I had to make it or else I was gonna die.
Is there a truth you achieve by keeping things on the weirder side versus if you tried to cram these same ideas into a more conventional project?
I’m most attracted to cinema and formal language that reminds you that the medium is young. I really want to be evoking sensations or tones or moods that are inaccessible in other art forms that you can’t express in words. I think a lot about the Edward Hopper quote, “If I could say it in words, there’d be no reason to paint.” So I’m trying to tune in to something that I don’t have words for. I think that what we’re calling “weird” here is almost aberrant. I find the delicious, juicy sensation that I’m chasing at the intersection between opposing meanings.
I try not to overintellectualize where the stories are coming from or where the images are coming from. I try not to look a gift horse in the mouth in terms of whatever is happening with my imagination when this stuff emerges. But I do find in a recurring way these images that are associated with maybe the supernatural or maybe the off-kilter weird. This stuff seems to kind of invade my work either as a byproduct or by necessity, as I’m searching for this transcendent third thing that emerges from the friction between two things.
What ideas were you considering while you were developing this film that shaped the final product?
The film is, I think, maybe inherently a post-pandemic movie. There’s something about the alienation between characters, friends who drift into becoming strangers, people having wildly different experiences of reality, almost postmodern bubbles, that I think reflects how we’re all being increasingly siloed into our little internet feeding tubes. We all have our own programming that we’re watching, and increasingly, our intake is becoming so dissimilar from one another.
I think that there’s something about that condition of modernity that permeates the movie and, maybe in ways that are subintellectual for me, they just bled into my attempt to intuitively channel what was coming out, this more guttural shape of the writing process for me, which was allowing ideas to flow into the movie rather than trying to shape them into a more traditional narrative form, into something more a hero’s journey or a three act structure. I tried to not filter or shape what was coming in and just sort of let it show me its form. So I think to whatever extent it’s a mirror of reality or of the time that we’re in, some of that stuff is just emergent.
When you’re making a project like this that gets people talking, do you read and process some of the feedback that’s written about it online?
This idea of trying to make a film that can’t be put into words … It’s exciting to me to see how the world tries to put it into words because there’s inherent tension between those ideas. I find it really fun actually to watch how people attempt to describe the movie, because I don’t know how to describe the movie. To some extent I’m not even trying to describe the movie. So to hear other people grasp for those words, it’s a bit delicious to me. I don’t know that I seek out everything that everyone says about the movie, but I’m happy to read what people think. Sometimes I talk to people about what they think. It’s very fun for me to get that feedback.
Gersh is representing “Sour Minnows” for worldwide sales as it searches for distribution.
