The word “assured” is frequently – like surprising or unique, often too frequently – used to describe the well-received debut of a new director. It means the filmmaker’s first feature espouses a point of view, or demonstrates stylistic elements, that suggest a level of directorial confidence often surprisingly or uniquely elevated above the common run of first attempts. In other words, “assured” is entertainment journalism shorthand for “this guy knows what he’s doing.” For all the wear and tear it’s suffered in entertainment journalism, it is assuredly the word to describe Lou Howe’s feature debut, Gabriel.
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| Lou Howe |
“There are a lot of movies, American movies from the ‘70s, that inspired the structure and the approach to the story,” says Howe. “Movies like The Gambler or Straight Time, where you spend a lot of time with one character and grow attached to them, and at the halfway point of the movie they start doing more and more questionable things. They both pick up this kind of suspense pace. Because you know the character so well, you’re rooting for them, even though they’re descending and doing worse and worse things. I tried to structure the movie in a similar way.”
Rather than turn upon a change at the midway mark, however, Gabriel depicts its protagonist doing questionable things from the outset. We first meet Gabriel on a charter-bus ride. He makes friends with a little girl peering out from between the seats in front of him, eventually gaining her trust by offering her candy. It’s an innocent gesture, if one most anyone familiar with current events should know better than to perform. But Gabriel appears unable to understand why the little girl’s mother grows upset when, having lost her daughter among the rows of seats, she finds her munching on Twizzlers with a stranger. In his defense, Gabriel chooses the unfortunate phrase, “We were just fucking around.”
The opening scene establishes Howe’s twofold aim: Endear Gabriel to the audience – he’s very good with the little girl – and invite the audience to question Gabriel’s state of mind, thereby setting the stage for the film’s suspense: What next?
“What drew me to [Gabriel],” says Culkin, “was the fact I didn’t know what he was going to do next. I didn’t know what he was thinking. I was constantly catching up with him.”
Says Howe, “I think the hardest thing for me always is creating authenticity. Making things feel real is much harder than I think people realize, and I’m proud of this movie in that I think it feels like real people in real places.”
The writer-director was himself inspired by real events. “The very first seed of the idea was my experience seeing a close friend diagnosed with mental illness in his late teens…Just thinking about his experience, I started writing Gabe and this whole fictional world grew out of that.”
Howe’s desire to maintain authenticity led him to seek external resources. “The Child Mind Institute was involved earlier on, reading drafts of the script, helping me stay true to the character’s mental state.” A community center for people struggling with mental illness in New York City let the director visit and bring Culkin, who spoke with several of its patients.
However, although “we did go and meet people with mental illness and I did give Rory some books,” explains Howe, “basically as soon as possible I did try to move out of the research phase and just think about Gabe as a person and as a human being…I didn’t want Rory to get bogged down in other people’s perception of the character or how he might appear. But really just build him from the inside out.”
To that end, says Culkin, “I had to come at it like I knew better than everyone else. I was always right, Gabriel was always right. I always felt like I was doing the right thing, even if I wasn’t…It was either the person I’m interacting with is evil, they’re a bad person, or they’re just stupid. Either way, I’m better. That was the mindset.”
For all the intensity of subject matter, Howe says he “tried to maintain a relaxed atmosphere” on set. According to Culkin, he succeeded.
“Directors always lose their cool at least once, but Lou never lost his cool, and if he did, he hid it from me. I don’t know if he did. There were times where the crew and the surroundings just sort of faded to black and it was just us. I felt very protected.”
“I lost my cool privately.”
“Did you?” asks Culkin.
“A little bit. I don’t know if I fully lost it. Maybe it slipped a little. But, you know, there were some difficult conditions, physically. It wasn’t a physically demanding movie, but we were shooting on a beach in the middle of February. There was a very windy, cold day, with an actress in a T-shirt. I forget exactly what happened, but we got her bundled and re-set to do another take, and then as soon as she took off her warming jacket, [I learned] the camera was out of film, it needed a new chip. So that was one time I remember I ran at the cameraman. Had a little private cool-loss. But in general I tried to keep things compartmentalized and not burden anyone with extra worry.”
To keep things professional, assuredly.
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