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| Linoleum |
A hit at genre festivals around the world, Linoleum is the story of TV science educator Cameron (Jim Gaffigan), who is inspired to start buildinghis own spacecraft after a piece of space junk lands in his back garden. It’s also many other things, exploring a suburban world full of doppelgängers, weird coincidences and sports cars which fall out of the sky. As it prepared to screen at Fantaspoa go on digital release in the UK, its creator, Colin West, agreed to meet up for a chat. We began by talking about real cases of space junk falling on people’s houses, and I asked him if that was one of his inspirations.
“Absolutely, yeah,” he says. “Definitely, that was an inspiration. It was funny, one of the big inspirations being Bill Nye the Science Guy or these scientists that become sort of like a spokesperson for science for that generation of kids. I was reading one of Bill Nye’s books, and he did talk about how he always wanted to be an astronaut as well, so then I started researching all that stuff, and then came up with this idea of maybe something falling into his yard and inspiring that dream of his to come true. We had a scientific adviser on the movie, Dr. Paul Ronney Jr. He was an astrophysicist at USC, the university here, and I remember talking to him all about this and all about the physics of the movie, and all of a sudden being like, ‘Yeah, now this could probably happen.’”
Did he ever want to go into space?
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| Jim Gaffigan in Linoleum |
“Oh, absolutely. Yeah, for sure. I think if I weren't in filmmaking, or in the creative fields, I would definitely be in the sciences. I would say probably astronomy. As far as going into space, I would love to do that but I have a terrible fear of flying. That sort of counteracts that one.
“There's this TV show within the film, and it was inspired by those old science shows I used to watch as a kid. And I also grew up in a house of science, I like to say, because my both my parents were scientists. My dad was a mathematician and computer scientist and my mom worked in big tech. And so it was always around, that kind of talk. That emphasis on the way in which the world works was always very much present in my dad, always about reason and the physics of the world, and how the world is and why, and that kind of thing. So I definitely learned a lot from him growing up.
“He also turned me on to sci fi. Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, that kind of stuff, he would always push those books towards me, so I think there was a lot of influences around the show itself. It was a lot of fun making a world within a world with this cut paper animation that happens. We actually shot all of that stuff on the first day, with Gaffigan, and Rhea, so it was a fun way to get us into the mood of the movie. It was really joyful.
“I think that I relate to the daughter character quite a bit. I definitely like that kind of sass a little bit. I had that when I was growing up, that kind of know-it-all sass and calling your parents by their first name and stuff like that.”
I tell him that I find her interesting because characters like her are often picked on by cliquey kids in films but here it’s the other way round, and she’s quite mean.
“It's funny because we never really explore why that hatred is there,” he reflects. “To be honest, I think it's because she wants to be friends with her. It's sort of like, ‘Well, if I can't be a popular kid, I'm going to pretend that I don't like those people and I don’t want to be friends with those people at all.’ So it's sort of a façade that's being put on. And I think those those layers get peeled off as the movie goes on for those characters. That high school journey is on the periphery, but it finds its way in and works its way to becoming just as important as the other storylines.”
The film takes place in a time period which is difficult to define, and there are reasons for that, but it also suits the style of the film – it’s set in that sort of small town America where nothing much changes.
“We went into this film saying like ‘We don't want to set this in time, we want to set it in a tone,’ he explaiins. “Tonally it was a collaboration with all the department heads to make this happen, all the way down to the score by Mark Hadley, but also the way we shot it with Ed Wu and Mollie Wartelle, our production designer. Everybody had a hand in making this world into something that was very unique and special and sort of adjacent to reality, but not reality. Even the conversations with the actors, and the way in which we wanted to perform. It was a lot of discussion.
“I think honestly, that was that challenge that I think people really latched on to. The crew really wanted join the project because it was something unique. Because it was something that hadn't really been done before. I think a lot of it came down to just trying to be honest with the time period. Yes, there's a lot of anachronistic things happening within the movie, but it's not like Stranger Things, for example, this Eighties-set TV show that's very pop heavy. Every single little piece of the Eighties is in that show, and that's great, and that's totally their style, but our film was much more grounded and trying to be way more realistic.
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| Rhea Seehorn in Linoleum |
“I remember our production designer, Mollie Wartelle, would come up to me and be like, ‘Hey, so, what did the linoleum floor in your grandpa's basement look like?’ These very specific questions. And then we tried to ground it much more in this Midwest, Ohio kind of setting. And, you know, I think it was a tough balance. We kept talking about how it was like a snowglobe, you know, where it's like this little world that only exists in itself. IIt was a fun challenge.”
It’s a really carefully assembled crew. How did he find all those people?
“A lot of that came down to our producers, Dennis Masel, Chadd Harbold and Chad Simpson,” he says. “They were really instrumental in finding a crew, especially Chadd Harbold. We shot the movie in upstate New York, about an hour and a half from New York City, and a lot of the crew he knew from prior projects and things like that. I would have conversations with these people and see if they were on board for trying something unique.
“We shot in October of 2020, which was right in the middle of the pandemic, and it was before the vaccine was available. And so we got an entire hotel to ourselves and we turned the ballroom into a little pub for everybody to have drinks at night and stuff like that, and try to keep everybody together. So it was a very unique experience, but I think all the personalities really gelled.”
Casting was a big team effort, he says.
“Our casting director was integral in that. Her name's Jessica Sherman and she did an amazing job to get our scripts out there. At the same time, again, we were shooting during Covid. We were doing it in a very safe way but there was hesitation from a lot of actors and some crew members too, so it took a bit to find people who were willing to do this, but we really lucked out with this cast for sure. Rhea Seehorn, Jim Gaffigan leading the charge there, and obviously Katelyn Nacon and Gabriel Rush as the high schoolers. I just felt really lucky to be surrounded by such professionals. It just made it flow in such a good way, and being able to direct people with so much experience was just – I learned so much.”
Obviously, Jim Gaffigan has the big challenge with two very different roles.
“Yeah, absolutely. He was a real trooper. He looks different in both of the roles, right? So for one of the roles we gave him a wig and a moustache and stuff like that, and when he put on the clothing of the Kent character, the moustache character, he would really transform. I think it was really helpful for him to have that sort of physical change as well. Even off camera, he would be a little bit more stern, kind of standoffish in a way that was obviously not harmful at all for the set, but it was very obvious that he was doing something that he was not used to doing. It was impressive.”
A lot of people are looking at the film and trying to work out how pieces fit together. That's one approach, but it's also quite poetic in that one can look at it as an idea that's explored in mulyiple ways. Was one of those approaches dominant over the other?
“I threw the puzzle out the window at the very beginning,” he says. “I wanted the movie to forget about story logic, and to really dive into emotional logic. A lot of times people watch the movie, and at the end, they'll be crying and be like, ‘I don't even know why I'm crying but I am.’ And I think that's part of that. For me, it needed to make sense from an emotional standpoint
“There's a lot that’s revealed in the last 15 minutes or so of the movie that I think forces an audience to go back and reexamine what they've just seen, but hopefully not in a Sixth Sense kind of way, like this big reveal. We kept calling it a soft reveal, like a blurry reveal. Some people will figure it out earlier on and some people will later and that's all fine with me. I actually think that watching it the second time is better than watching it the first time, knowing what this world is? It was a delicate balance, but at the same time we were very focused on the emotion of the film.”
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| Gabriel Rush and Katelyn Nacon in Linoleum |
It’s something which stood out to me, I explain, because he took a similar approach in his previous film, Double Walker. Is it something that you're interested in exploring further as a filmmaker?
“It really is,” he nods. “I do think that you're right. Double Walker could also be considered some sort of puzzle. But, you know, for me, it's less about that and more about this sort of visceral, cerebral journey that you go on, and how it impacts your gut. It's something that I'm not intentionally doing, it just happens. I think it's just the way my brain functions. I’m neurotic and I have these looping thoughts and all this circling and kind of existential thing going on for for me, and it's just the way that I see the world. I think that that just finds its way into the way in which I speak through filmmaking as well, unintentionally. It's funny that you say that, because the film that I've been working on the most, that I'm trying to get off the ground next, has a lot of that kind of world building. That kind of, I guess, you could say, unreliable world building. And so yeah, it's there and I don't think it's going away.”
He’s beenpleasantly surprised by the way the film has been received.
“You hope for the best but the festival circuit really seem to latch on to the film. It’s very exciting. The film was just released digitally here in North America a few days ago, and then it was in theatres for two months before that. It's been such a wild ride. We've screened at almost 30 festivals now and have had a really great run, better than I think any of us really expected, and it's just sort of a joy to be able to go to these screenings and see people watching the movie. Festivals are really great for us filmmakers to get to interact with our audience, you know? It's just kind of unbelievable.”
Linoleum is screening at Fantaspoa and will be available to stream in the UK from 17 April.
