Made on the heels of “Listen Up Philip” (2014), his dissection of misanthropic literary hero worship, Alex Ross Perry’s latest film, “Queen of Earth,” is a decisively less self-conscious but more intense psychodrama starring Elisabeth Moss (“Mad Men”) and Katherine Waterston (“Inherent Vice”) as Catherine and Virginia, two friends who escape to the latter’s family lake house in search of solitude. Catherine, who breaks up with her boyfriend at the opening of the film, has also recently lost her father, a well-known artist for whom she worked as an assistant. As she moves through her grief, the film cuts back and forth between the present and the previous summer, when the two female friends were in the throes of a similar struggle, although the roles were reversed.In a recent conversation, Ross Perry spoke with ARTINFO about his desire to do something different with “Queen of Earth” from his previous films, the unconscious influences of Roman Polanski and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and the importance of working with a tight group of collaborators.I wanted to first ask about writing “Queen of Earth” and what was going through your head writing specifically for female characters?What the writing of anything is about becomes an issue of splitting whatever questions I’m currently finding to be fascinating and overwhelming between two separate characters and letting them have it out, that being the meat of the film. So in “Listen Up Philip,” that’s what happens between the Philip character and the Ashley character. In “Queen of Earth,” the idea of splitting one mentality into two protagonists was very consistent for me. So this type of story was always very clear. The protagonists would be female; I wanted to do a women-centric story after “Listen Up Philip,” which was, I don’t want to say masculine, because that gives the weak men in that film too much credit, but it is a male film where, despite the amount of time you do spend with the female protagonists, they are still subjected to the behavior of men. I wanted to, in keeping with my challenge for myself of just doing everything I could differently this time, do a woman’s story, and almost every single thing that could even remotely be conceded an influence is a woman’s story, which is appropriate and historically accurate to the genre.Many have foregrounded the seriousness of “Queen of Earth.” But the film is also very funny. I was curious about your approach to the genre, where these two elements coexist. Yeah, I think you look at a big influence on the film, which we were talking about constantly, which is Polanski. We were talking about him in regards to the subjective cinematic tricks he uses to align a viewer, through the use of a character, with the protagonist. And I’m always saying that this film is totally different from my last one, it has no jokes, it has no comedy, but I watched it in an audience in Berlin and realized that the Polanski influence is so overwhelming and so complete that we don’t realize, of course, that to be influenced by Polanski is to have this very dark streak of humor throughout the film. Which is, of course, paramount to all of his work. For us to have been thinking about him, we didn’t even have to think of every element of his films, because thinking about his films, and being experts — myself, and Sean Price Williams, the cinematographer — those elements became part of what we were doing because we just know what his films are made of, even if we don’t know it on a conscious level.Polanksi is a clear influence, and I know you’ve talked about Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant” in relation to “Queen of Earth.” Are you going back and watching those films and trying to capture something? Or are you influenced simply by your memory, or response, to the films? I never need to go back and watch anything. It’s more just that, a lot of times, because I see a lot of films in the theater in New York, and Sean the cinematographer does as well, it’s less going back and watching things and more just something that one of both of us has happened to have seen recently. So we don’t need to watch it because we just went to see it, just because we wanted to see it, but at the end we say, we should use some of this stuff in this movie, there’s some great stuff in here. Going back to rewatch things would be totally exhausting and unnecessary. But part of it then is deciding on what the influences are, and then it’s almost more fun not to look at them and just remember what the movie meant to you. Like we were just talking about with Polanski, I’ve seen every one of his movies, ranging from dozens to several times, and Sean’s probably seen them all twice as many times. If we went back to look at them, we would have been saying, ‘Oh yeah, we should add some humor into this movie.’ And then it would have been a thing we felt we had to do.It would have been forced.Yeah, now it’s just kind of in there. Having said that, there were a couple of things I wanted Elisabeth to see, a couple of things she was not as familiar with as someone who has nothing else to do with their life except watch films, such as myself. We had “Petra Van Kant” on my computer for her to look at, and I made a bunch of screen-grabs of it for reference. She was looking at those, and she had watched some Polanski on her own leading up to the shoot, and she was watching Robert Altman’s “Images” on my computer [during the shoot], which became a big influence. But even then, Sean hadn’t seen it in a long time and didn’t really like it, didn’t hold it at any high esteem, so he just looked at a few frames of it. That’s about as deep as it goes. We’re talking about films all the time, but we’re not ripping anything off. We’re free-associating in the way that two guys who’ve known each other for 10 years because they’ve worked together at a video store are going to do when they make a film together.You mentioned Sean Price Williams a few times, and I know you also work with the same editor on your films, and this is the second film with Elisabeth. What is important to you about working with a tight group of people on every project?Well, on a very primary level it’s the only way that makes any sense to me, because if you’re happy with people’s work you don’t let go of it. It’s not that I seem to be happy with them, but that I hope to retain them indefinitely. Everything you need to go ahead and do this thing is in place if you believe that the collaborators that you surround yourself with are the best at what they do. It’s this unspoken relationship of trust and respect that makes it possible to go make another movie very quickly. If I had to interview four costume designers, and sit there and look at their presentations of the film, that would have taken forever. I knew Amanda [Ford] from “Listen Up Philip” and said, “Hey, can you help me with this movie?” She said yes, she knew what kind of things I liked for costumes, and was able to do the work quickly and efficiently. To me that’s the best. If you look at any prolific creator of films, anybody who can do a film a year or more, and of course there are many, behind all of those directors is a great repeat crew. Fassbinder didn’t have to crew up every time he made a movie every three months, he didn’t have to cast the movie every three months; he would just get everybody on the phone and announce it was time to go again. To me, it’s very obvious that that’s the way a lot of the films I grew up loving were made and, you know, you don’t think about those things until you’ve made a few, and you really think about how they’re made, and you get past the idea that they’re all made by the director. So yeah, you can say you like “Petra Von Kant,” but you have to realize that everyone in that film was part of a company of actors and the cinematographer, all that stuff is part of it. Realizing that is a really important thing for me in the last couple of years.“Queen of Earth” is out in theaters August 26.A condensed version of this interview appears in the September issue of Modern Painters magazine.
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