Film Show 044: Joel Potrykus
Film Show 044: Joel Potrykus
An interview with filmmaker Joel Potrykus about his newest film 'Vulcanizadora', which premieres June 8th at the Tribeca Film Festival
Joel Potrykus’s thoughtful, ugly, independent filmmaking heralds the artist as one of the last hopes for contemporary American cinema. His depictions of “losers” could easily be spiteful or malevolent, but they’re cherished, witnessed, and valued in their desperate quests. His feature films include Ape (2012), Buzzard (2014), The Alchemist Cookbook (2016), and Relaxer (2018). With his newest feature Vulcanizadora (2024), which premieres June 8th at the Tribeca Film Festival, Potrykus is as contemplative and grisly as ever. A story of two friends on a camping trip with an unnerving destination, the film surfaces the profound sadness and haunting anxiety coursing through his characters, bringing them to an incendiary brink. Olivia Hunter Willke spoke with Potrykus on May 29th, 2024 via Zoom about fear, fatherhood, and catharsis through art.
Olivia Hunter Willke: Your films consistently defy genre. Is there a shorthand you use when people ask what tone they occupy? I’ve heard you describe them as “spaghetti Midwesterns,” which I love. Do you like to say black comedies, character studies, etc.?
Joel Potrykus: If I meet somebody and they go, “Oh cool, you make movies, what are they like?” I still don’t have an answer, and I just go, “Ughhhhahhhduhhhhh.” I do that for a long time, and then like what you said, I usually just go, “Like dark comedies, I guess...” And then they’re fine with that, but they’re not! They’re not dark comedies to me because that means you’re saying that it’s a comedy and they’re not comedies. I think to me they’re dramas—drama just meaning a story about a human or whatever. So, I don’t know how to classify them, I’m probably the worst to do it. I’ve heard people say, “Oh, it’s a thriller!” But thriller—I’ve never used that word in my life, so I’m the last person to ask about that. Or “weird indies” is another one I say, and people go, “Okay, cool, I love independent movies,” and I go, ‘Yeah, alright then.”
Your characters suffer from a Midwestern boredom that leads to urges of self-annihilation. Does it stem from your own experience or is that something you saw around you growing up in Michigan?
I think what I’m trying to do is just steal from all the movies I love. I didn’t even realize that people would be like, “Oh, these characters are so Midwestern.” I never thought the characters were weird. So clearly they’re just people I knew, and they’re just amalgamations of kids I went to high school or junior high with. The formula’s pretty easy: You cast a grown man and then just write the dialogue for a 15-year-old boy. And that’s it, and it’s not something I thought of consciously, but clearly that’s all it is. All the names and the behaviors are just stolen from dudes I went to high school with and knew growing up. But I always realize that after. There’s a few inside jokes with names and things.
I just wrote an article for TalkHouse and I talked about fatherhood and how difficult it was. I mentioned in there my fear of accidentally going to prison, which is one of my biggest fears. Like, “Whoops, I didn’t know that was illegal, now I’m in prison.” And I didn’t even put it together that that’s the thing Marty’s fearing most, why he wants to kill himself in Vulcanizadora (2024), because he’s gotta go back to jail or prison. So, that stuff is freaky to me, that clearly at the end of the day, it’s just me. All these characters are just different versions of me and my fears and dreams and all that shit. But I guess I don’t like to talk about that too much because then I feel like it takes away from people going, “Ah, I felt so much like it was me in that story!” But it’s definitely just all the different parts of me.
I was reading the Tribeca synopsis and saw that you are referred to as a “provocateur.” Do you view your art or yourself as an artist that way?
No! No, I wish! I view that guy (points), I view this guy (picks up laptop and holds it in front of a poster of Buffalo ’66) as a provocateur! And that’s somebody I love and I love provocateurs, and that’s cool that they call me that, but I would never.... I guess when we’re shooting, I’m like, “Aw man, audiences are gonna be grossed out or they’re gonna be really turned off by this moment.” Isn’t everybody a provocateur trying to provoke a reaction? So when I see that in black and white, I’m like, “Cool, I’m a provocateur, like Andy Warhol or something!” But I’m never like, “Ah yes, I am definitely a provocateur...” I’m just a normal, nice guy who is making movies that are not normal and nice.
Your characters can, I guess, be labeled as “slackers,” but they also have such a drive and commitment. Do you ever worry that they get pigeonholed too much?
I don’t really worry about that. It was a surprise when my first feature was getting a lot of “slacker”-ing. Like, that was my reaction, too. Especially Marty in Buzzard (2014)—that dude’s not a slacker! He’s on his lunch break, he’s going to a bank to get 50 bucks. He is ambitious like you said, he’s got drive. But I get it, we relate slackers to work or something, a lot of times they don’t work. And maybe Abbie in Relaxer (2018)… I don’t know, I never once was like, “I’m gonna make a movie about slackers.” I’ve never used that word, I never ever think about them as slackers or even lazy! I love these guys, so I wouldn’t use anything derogatory, so no.
That’s fine, I get it, I see it in every review now: “Slacker provocateur!” And I’m just like, that’s who I am now, and when I had a manager, he would pitch me around like, “he’s the slacker guy,” and I get it, people need some kind of a label or genre or whatever it is. I love the movie Slacker (1990) and love the whole ’90s losercore slacker aesthetic, so I just embrace it at this point. Sure, I’ll be the slacker guy, but I don’t see these movies as slacker comedies at all. If that’s what people get, then I think they’re missing the sadness—these are sad movies to me. And not heartbreaking melodramas, but just like, ugly and sad is always the vibe. But you can’t just do ugly and sad for an hour and a half, so that’s where they have to be funny a little bit, to break it up and to throw people off balance tonally.
Music, and particularly metal music, features prominently in your films. A scene that sticks out to me in your filmography is in The Alchemist Cookbook (2016) when he’s approaching the abandoned car, and it’s blaring a mutilated version of “No Games” by Serani. In Vulcanizadora, you sing along in parody to “Voodoo” by Godsmack. Do you always have a song or album in mind when creating these scenes or even films in general or is it something that appears later on during production?
I’m always usually listening to one album when I’m writing it, it just helps me get into a certain vibe. And as much as I would love to just write that song or some of those songs into the screenplay, I can’t afford to do that. A lot of it is just playing around and editing. You know, in the first Bill & Ted (1989) movie, when they’re at the mall, and it’s the montage of all the guys and they’re playing, the song is “Play With Me” by Xtreme, and it’s that electric guitar solo. I saw that in the theater when I was a kid and it changed everything that I thought about movies and electric guitars in movies, just like whoa. And then the more mature version of that is when I first saw Funny Games (1997) and the opening, I was like, “Holy shit, this is it. This is what I wanna do, I’m doing this. This is me, I’m stealing this from Michael Haneke.” I can’t describe it, there’s a feeling when a (makes deep noise) guitar comes on, it feels dangerous to me. Aw man, anytime a movie will do that, I am so locked in.
Do you design the gadgets in your films? Like the power glove in Buzzard and the metal face mask in Vulcanizadora?
It’s me and my brother [Chuck Potrykus]. My brother is the craftsman. My idea was that Marty was gonna make a Freddy glove, and then my brother was like, “We should attach it to a power glove because he plays video games.” And I was like, “Cool, that’s like Nightmare 6.” He handmakes these, there’s only one of them. For the mask in Vulcanizadora, my idea was a little lazier but also kind of scary in its own way. I just told him to just buy a ball gag and stick an M-80 in it. He’s like, “We can do better, we can do better.” And I was like, I don’t know, there’s something dangerous and kind of weird and taboo. Everybody was like, “Eh, I don’t know Joel, I think everyone’s gonna laugh when they strap those on.” And I was like, “Good, because it’s gonna be really ugly when they stop laughing!” But everyone convinced me that we should really go for, like, Marty has made it rather than bought it and just modified it. So, these are all made by my brother, and he just loves doing this stuff. I throw out an idea and then he actually executes it and makes it way cooler than I could’ve come up with.
You teach the Summer Film Program at Grand Valley State University. The last few short films you’ve done have been in collaboration with students, Unemployees (2023) and The Thing From the Factory by the Field (2022). Did you feel you were saving that usual kind of dark discomfort for a more personal project?
The short films I make with the students are me just trying out different things, like different types of stories and different ways to shoot stories. The features are all very much their own thing. Like you said, they’re darker, kind of uglier, but even the way we shoot ‘em is different. It’s with my DP [Adam J. Minnick], the same DP I shoot the summer films with, we’re always like, “Let’s try this and then maybe we’ll find something we really like and we’ll use it in a feature later.” And we really haven’t! We stick to an aesthetic for the shorts and we’re like, “This is really cool and this works.” But at this point, we are very much locked in on how the features move in their own way. But it’s really cool to try.
We shot one last summer called Pear that’s coming out, and the big radical idea for that was, let’s shoot it conventionally, what would that be like? I’m shooting one next week, and we’re gonna shoot it all in tight close-ups with a long lens and see how it works. I just want them all to feel different and to just try different things. I’m trying to write stories about women in those, which is different. So, I’m trying different story things, like narratively, and so the students help me with finding the female side of my storytelling. It’s cool to be in a room full of 20-year-old women who are giving you ideas—it’s not something I’m used to when we make the features. So it’s a totally different scene, and it’s awesome. It just helps me become a more evolved storyteller. To me, the features are very much me and my struggles about masculinity and all that nonsense. And the shorts are like, let me try something different and lighten up for a minute.
Before Vulcanizadora, Relaxer also touched on a fraught father-son relationship. Your son was born just days before the premiere. Did that anxiety about fatherhood get channeled into Relaxer or did it happen to be part of the story and coincided with the pregnancy?
Somebody asked me after Buzzard at the Q&A, “What are your daddy issues all about, Joel?” And I didn’t even think about it, I was like, “Oh yeah, he’s got a problem with his dad...” My dad’s great, I dig my dad. I think subconsciously when telling stories about guys, fathers come into that and the “sins of the father,” all that stuff. “What did your dad do to you to make you like this?” And I never want to show it, and I never want to explain it too much, but I just want people to put things together, probably from their own life, I want them to put that into it.
But Vulcanizadora, these two characters, if you followed Marty from Buzzard, you know that his dad wasn’t around, and now he’s gotta tell Derek’s son that his dad’s not gonna be around. Oh man, I love how messy that gets and how fatherhood-y it gets. I like Vulcanizadora very much, I’m so happy with that movie, and I feel like I got out so many bad, yucky thoughts in my head and urges and things. It was great to, whew, detox all that stuff. I mean, it’s super cathartic for me to make that movie for so many reasons. Every single thing… I think there’s something that I just need to put out in public and watch people see it.
What was your experience like directing your now 6-year-old son? And especially in a film that’s so explicitly about parental anxiety?
It was super emotional, but I wanted to make sure that he was cool with it, that we weren’t forcing him into it. But how great is it to have a movie about a dad and to then cast your real son? So for authenticity, I just wanted him to be in it. He’s a super smart kid so I knew he could pull it off if he just, like, took it seriously… or I don’t know, he doesn’t take anything seriously, but like, focus. So just coaching him a lot. And then I was really afraid that on the day he would just be bored or he wouldn’t want to do it, but he was locked in and it was great because he was doing so good—I got emotional watching him. I didn’t watch the monitor, I just stood next to him and watched his eyes. Yeah, it’s really cool.
He’ll see the movie someday I guess. And that’s one of the reasons that the movie is so cool for me—it’s a time capsule of a time in our lives together. It was awesome, I’m just really glad that he was into it. He doesn’t care about the movie now, which is fine. I’ll even show him his scene and he’ll be like, “Okay cool, let’s go play outside.” I’m so glad he was able to pull it off because thinking of the idea of having to cast an actor kid, and then watch the movie with my son later in life like, “Oh, that could’ve been you kid!” It would not have been as authentic to me if it would’ve been some other kid who’s the exact same age as my son playing my son. That would’ve bugged me. But we had another kid ready to go on standby!
There are stunning shots in the film of you guys as small, little figures, traipsing through these environments—the beach, the woods. Where in Michigan was this filmed?
All of that outside, the beach and wood stuff, is in a city called Manistee, which is right on Lake Michigan. It’s these picturesque dunes that tourists will come to. Our friend, our rich friend, owned a cabin there and let us take it over for a week. We shot all the forest scenes and all the beach, dune, cliff stuff. And sometimes, like in that one shot where we first emerge into the dunes, I have small problems with that shot, because it is so picturesque and so “ahh, this looks like a fucking calendar.” And I hate to do shots like that, but that one was more of a story thing. We need to show the woods and the dunes meeting so people can understand that transition. So yeah, it was pretty amazing that we actually avoided a lot of the more beautiful shots.
How long did production last?
I think we scheduled it for 10 days, but we got it in 9. We go really fast. And we’re shooting on film, so we don’t have the luxury of doing a ton of set-ups or a ton of takes. So, Josh [Burge] and I would rehearse it, rehearse it, rehearse it, and we’d usually get one or two takes, and that was it.
There’s such a textural richness because of the Super 16mm, what made you decide to use analog film?
I always just loved film, and with every single project, my DP and I are always like, “We gotta shoot this on 16, gotta shoot on 16.” It’s usually just a budget thing, and so at the last minute before we met with the investors, or maybe like a couple days before, I just tacked on an extra $15,000 onto the budget to see if they would still be into it and they were, which meant we could afford the film for the first time. Usually these are so low-budget, and the reason they’re low-budget is because that means I don’t have to make anybody happy, and I don’t have to feel bad if the movie doesn’t make any money. It just gives me more control, but it also means that sometimes we can’t do things like shoot on film. But I think we’re gonna shoot ‘em all on film because I just learned that trick of throwing an extra $15,000 at the last minute, and then you can do it!
Kind of a cheesy question, but would you consider this your darkest effort to date?
Yes! Yes, just even off of our test screening, people were just like, “I don’t know, I feel just kind of bummed.” I’m like, “Okay, that’s good.” Yeah, I mean, it’s weird. It has funny moments but not as many funny moments as the other ones and the dark moments, I think at least, are way darker. I didn’t even wanna try to raise a big budget for a movie like this. I couldn’t believe that there was even any interest in making this kind of movie from anybody. And it’s a difficult one in today’s climate, like even teaching and making a movie this kind of bleak is... yeah, I don’t know. I knew it was gonna be dark going into it. It was gonna be way dark and I just needed to make this. And it came out exactly as bleak and dark as I hoped.
What’s the origin of the title?
It’s a Spanish word, it’s Spanish for “tire repair shop.” In Michigan there was one in particular, like a Mexican mechanic and it just said “vulcanizadora” on the side, and I just thought it was the most beautiful word I’d ever seen in my whole life. And I always like every movie to sound like an album title, so to me it sounded like an unreleased Pixies album or Smashing Pumpkins album title or something. It kind of just barely relates to the story. I’ve been trying to make a movie called Vulcanizadora for years and this is the one, I was like, “I’m committing to it, this is the title no matter what. This is it.”
Joel Portykus’ Vulcanizadora premieres this week at Tribeca. Details can be found here.
Thank you for reading the 44th issue of Film Show. Trompe le monde, Pisces Iscariot, Vulcanizadora, the list goes on…
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