[Slamdance] A Conversation with ‘The Severing’ and ‘The Mothman Prophecies’ Director Mark Pellington

Musical and cinematic genius Mark Pellington has had a prolific and versatile career. From directing cryptid-chiller The Mothman Prophecies (2002) to being behind some of the most iconic music videos on the planet, including Pearl Jam’s Jeremy and Foo Fighters’ Best of You, Pellington’s range has no bounds. His new film, The Severing, which premiered at the 2022 Slamdance Film Festival, is yet another testament to his range as it continues to showcase his vast and far-reaching skill. An exploration of motion, sound, and light, The Severing examines the murky depths of grief and how we move through them, uncomfortable though they might be. The film was a collaboration between Pellington himself, cinematographer Ann Evelin Lawford, and choreographer Nina McNeely from Gaspar Noé’s Climax (2018). 

Read on to find out more about this brutally resonant dance film below.

Dylyn: Thank you so much for meeting with me this morning! It’s such an honor to get to speak with you about your new film, The Severing (2021), that premiered this year at the Slamdance Film Festival. I'm a huge fan of your work and The Mothman Prophecies is actually one of my favorite films ever! I probably bring it up several times a day, so I was excited to see this one on the line-up!

Mark: Wow, that's great. You should send me your email; there was a great thing online yesterday, like one of the best articles I've ever read about it. That movie’s really found a new life and a new appreciation, which is really gratifying, and we're developing a TV show and really launching deeply into the TV version of Mothman. 

Dylyn: Oh my gosh! I'm so excited about that, I could cry! I'm sure you can't tell me very many details about that, but is there anything that you can share about the new TV show?! 

Mark: Sure, I can tell you. It’s just in the developmental phase. We haven't sold it. Alex Kurtzman, who is the creator of the entire Star Trek empire, is an executive producer along with a guy named Terry Matalas, who was a showrunner on the show, 12 Monkeys, and is now doing the show Picard. You know, they're very strong TV producers and we joined forces, because they're huge fans of Mothman, of the film. They really get it on all the levels that the fans get it and they appreciate it for all those things. So, they've been helping me and my writing partner, Nina Baker, really shape it to say, ‘Okay, that was a movie. What could it be in 2022 as a streaming series? What could Mothman be with smartphones? Is it 50 years in the past? 30 years in the future?’ You can really explore a lot when you think about entities and energy and the different ways and shapes that Mothman presented itself: as Indrid Cold, as a texture, as a light, what's everything about all those permutations, especially now that it's got lots of storylines. But you always have to kind of go back to character and emotion, and my job, as the director of the initial film, is to really just protect that thing that makes it Mothman, that particular thing that just makes you and other people get unsettled by it. That's a tone, it's directoral, but it's also just a point of view of withholding and not showing everything and you can kind of get away in a two- hour movie without really answering anything. In a larger sense, maybe a streaming thing, you could suggest different answers. So, we're working on that level, but it's been fun. 

Dylyn: That sounds incredible. I'm actually a huge fan of Star Trek myself. I used to go to Star Trek conventions and everything like that. I love that idea. It sounds like some sci-fi and horror is mixed in there. 

Mark: Yeah, I mean, the movie, it wasn't really a thriller or supernatural/mystery/horror, but we didn't really show any gore, and I’m genre-agnostic, I never was into the paranormal before that movie. To me, it's about fear, perception, subjectivity, and the human capability to allow different emotions into their brain and their body and the manifestation of that, and how others are afraid of it and that shared information and the things that you don't know really scare you, right? The things you don't know: the boogeymen, like what's under your bed at night. The minute you start to reveal it too much, it loses its magic. So, my job is to just keep the magic.

Dylyn: I can totally get that same feeling too, from your new film, The Severing, which brings me to my next question actually. I was going to ask about what genre you might consider that film to be, because when I saw the logline that said, “Pina meets Saw,” I thought it was going to be a horror film, and I was curious if you considered The Severing a horror film.

Mark: Well, if people know what Pina is, right? If people knew that Pina was a dance film, a 3D dance film that wasn't a documentary. It wasn't talking; it was dance, right? Bodies in motion and movement, right? So, if you knew that, it was that meets Saw, meaning it was dark, it was scary. I could have used another film, maybe, as a reference, but I wanted it to be very visceral, like yes, this environment that these characters are in and the way they look could very much come out of a horror film, a dark fantasy film. I could have said Pina meets Caravaggio. That would've been a good reference, but people are like, ‘What's Caravaggio and what's Pina?’ You know, who knows what the mashup was? But I felt like, the horror genre - those people can kind of see it and hear the soundtrack, which is very dank and dense and thick. I was very inspired by Dunkirk. I was like, ‘oh my god,’ what incredible sound design and just immersive take-your-face and just stick it in there and it's not comfortable, but that's what the experience is sometimes. 

Dylyn: Well, it goes that way for life too, that oftentimes it isn't comfortable, but it's still something that you're thrust into. 

Mark: Yep. You're thrust into it and everybody's got different experiences with it. Mine is like, the only way through it is through it, right? The only way is that you have to kind of trudge through loss or change. Everybody experiences it or will experience it at some point in their life, and some more severely than others, and it sucks but if you just keep putting one foot in front of the other and, literally, move through it, then there's another side. It's not always black and white, like it’s bad and then it's good. I don't believe in those terms, because there's too much tragedy and craziness for you to think like that, right? I think some people are lucky and some people are not lucky. So, grief ,trauma ,anxiety, and moving through those feelings, these were dancers that were each expressing that kind of operative idea in it and how difficult it is sometimes, in grief, to connect to other people and how you feel disconnected from yourself and, therefore, you're kind of disconnected with other people or a group. You know, we're all just trying to connect and fit with people and present ourselves as things that are whole, yet sometimes we're just—and I'm trying to be a positive person—but sometimes we're just broken and sometimes we need to allow ourselves to be broken and move and just rebuild ourselves. 

So, this film for me was that part of that process and I was just grateful to work with such artistic collaborators from the dancers to the editors, Sergio Pinheiro to Evelyn van Rei and the DP and Nina McNeely and all the dancers and Blake Armstrong, the makeup artist, because everybody just kind of did their thing. It was like a no-budget, one day just do-your-thing. No dollies, no lights, you know, so it was very free. It would start moving and do this thing and I was fascinated. I had never seen dance like this before, movement like this. I was like, ‘wow, this is great.’ This is just so raw and to see somebody eight feet away from you and you're just sitting there. You know, you have great respect for dancers the same way I've got respect for poets or musicians or painters or sculptors. So, as filmmakers, we’re always like, oh my god, there's so many people involved and, I mean, it's hard to make a film with less than 12 people, right? And the scheduling and everything’s engineered sometimes, so the spontaneity in films is very hard to achieve. That's why I like making smaller films or videos, because you can just kind of feel it right there and the camera can capture something that you never thought could happen before or you allow it to happen. So, that kind of spontaneity and trust and instincts find their way into a TV pilot or a Star Trek short film or a commercial. You're like, all right, let's see what happens. Let’s let the actor, let's let the camera, let’s let the light evolve and do whatever. So, the influence of making it finds its way into other mediums and other forms and I'm sure that's the same with your work or writers; a writer writes poetry that influences their short stories. So, it all is just like a muscle, a tool that we use in collaboration and in our own expression. 

Dylyn: Wow. So I actually have a question that kind of relates to spontaneity. You just brought up Nina McNeely, who did the choreography for Climax, which I saw in theaters right when it came out. I'm a big fan of dance and poetry and interpretive dance myself. A lot of these concepts are really nebulous and are really different depending on people’s experiences, and I was wondering if there was any specific message or emotion you wanted to impart on your audience when you were making this film? 

Mark: You know, I had seen Climax. It was like…wow. So, that was in my brain when I heard this track to do a music video. I said, I'm going to call her. I want to work with her. I think maybe she could work with me on this video with a tiny budget, and she lived in LA, and I just tracked her down, I think, on Instagram. I don't think there's a great science to it. I said, “I want to express a peace about grief, the difficulty of reconnecting and the difficulty of when you feel, you know, ripped apart or invisible.” The original title was “Invisible” and then my editor, Sergio Pinheiro, watched it and I had written something else about being apart from yourself and he goes, “You should call it The Severing” and I was like, ‘Ooh, that’s good.’ It was more active, you know what I mean? It was like the severing of your body from your soul, the severing of the love that you lose when you lose somebody. So, it had a visceral active meaning to it and, so, it was kind of that expression. You know what I mean? A little more elegiac and beautiful and a little less dark. The soundtrack is very dark and the picture is very dark, so I want to see what it’s like to counterpoint, now, with something that’s just a different tone, because you can put all different sorts of sound to it and it would have a different feeling. 

Dylyn: That's actually something that I had written down was that it was really interesting and beautiful to me that there wasn't even any spoken narration until a little beyond the 19-minute mark and I was curious if you think that a more dialogue-driven, or now that you mention it, different sound-driven narrative would have taken away from the concepts explored in this edition of the film.

Mark: I don't think it would have taken away; I think it would've been that version. You could have a spoken-word, right? You're a poet. You've worked with poets. I've worked with poets and made a series called the United States of Poetry. Is it one shot of the poet? Are we putting music under it? Are we illustrating their poem? Each one, from a Nobel Prize winner to a new Eurekan poet, from a 12-year-old to a ninety-year-old, some were like ‘Hey man, I wrote the poem. You do what you want.’ Other ones were very specific and each thing changes it. These are just varying versions, interpretations. So, if you did a score, a cello score, and had words over top of it and you showed it to somebody. For example: ‘I’m going to record 10 peoples’ comments as they watched the film’ and, now, ‘I'm going to lay that back over it’ or ‘I'm going to lay peoples’ memories about loss just like stories.’ It has nothing to do with the picture, but it's another through line. I had thought about doing a tech story that could literally crawl under the bottom, like a complete story that you'd be reading and watching and maybe doing single lines. So, that's why we're like, wow, is this thing kind of a physical experience? Could you integrate confessions and stories and text and sound all around the film, a screening of the film, in kind of an immersive experience? The Severing: when you walk into a room and you bring a picture of somebody you've lost and you write something on the back and then you watch the film. Then, those words that you wrote are then illustrated. How do you feel after the film? And when you hear those words spoken back by somebody else? Like, oh shit, what's that? Is that me? You could totally have fun with that and we were starting to explore that and then Covid came. It's like, okay, no public events, but now that we're kind of going into another phase, that idea’s coming back and even talking to you about it and riffing these ideas gets me excited about The Severing as a brand. It's the dark, sad version of Cirque du Soleil and it's got a lot of moving parts to it. 

Dylyn: So, it sounds like this is going to be the beginning of a series of Severing-related experiences.

Mark: That would be the hope. That's what we started to talk about, because I'd finished the film kind of in its shape right before Covid and that just put a kibosh on it. It was a year before I even said, ‘what do I do with it?’ and showed it to Slamdance. A couple of festivals were like, “I don’t know what this is” and called it “too weird,” but Paul Rachman at Slamdance was like, ‘This is really cool. We should maybe show this outside.’ So, last year they were going to do it outside, but it didn't work because Covid was getting worse and I just stayed in touch with them as this new one was coming down and they were still interested in it and screening it. So, this became virtual, but at the end of February, we're going to screen it on the big screen at the American Cinematheque here in Los Angeles, which will be great, because it's a really amazing experience on a big screen. 

Dylyn: I would love to be able to see it on the big screen. That sounds like that would make it even more immersive. Early in the film, where one of the only pieces of narration is—verbal narration—the fourth dimension was brought up and I was curious, with how much the fourth wall is shattered, if there was any sort of connection between the fourth wall and the fourth dimension in the Severing universe.

Mark: You mean, because of the audio that uses that phrase?

Dylyn: Yes. 

Mark: That’s very interesting. There's definitely a VR experiential application to it and really hitting that experience head-on in terms of that fourth wall. I didn't shoot it that way specifically. Sometimes, the people do look at the lens. Courtney, at the very end, wants to crawl through her body and the camera lens is like ‘help her.’ I remember shooting it and sitting behind the DP, who's kneeling on the floor, and I almost wanted to reach my hand around and hold Courtney's hand and pull her into me, i.e. pull her into the lens. So, if you started this, literally you could go to that shot and pull her through and be in another dimension and she could be like, ‘Where are we now? Where do I go now?’ That could be like, after The Severing, where do you go in healing? And then you go to another place. I would love to trip out and riff on The Severing, the experience of being severed, the emergence out of it, and then the life beyond as like a four-part journey, a four-part visual, sonic, physical journey. After working in films, that kind of thing and getting into immersive theater or ballet or whatever, some merger of screen and experience, that would be fun for me and that would be a challenge and that would be something completely different. 

Dylyn: I think, with you mentioning Cirque du Soleil earlier, it would be really cool to see this as a stage show or a live show and I'm a big fan of theater and I could imagine seeing this in a room live-performed and how powerful that would be. 

Mark: Nina and I and a composer we talked with, that's what we were starting to sketch out: movement and film, physical ballet, dance and film, and is there spoken text? I wish I lived back in New York, because I always read the New York Times and I will see these reviews of, maybe, an experimental dance thing or something that plays with some of these ideas and there was one that was a theater piece, but the entire 70-minute audio was the woman on stage lip-synching to a real recording of somebody who had been in crisis or—I'm going to get it wrong—but it was like a 911 call or some call where she was trapped. They recorded her being trapped in her car, or some horrible thing, and the voice was like, holy…you know what I mean? So, instead of recreating and writing and having the actor do it, they played it back and she lip-synched to it and I was like, god, that's fascinating. That’s really fascinating. So, it's stuff like that; my brain works like that. 

Dylyn: It really is a genre-bending thing, experiences like that, where it's horrific and it's so many other feelings coupled with that. 

Mark: Yeah, and it's funny, as we're talking, that’s why I was leaning to the other music version. Let's say, you cut this down and you made it 40 minutes, 35, but there was a third part. There's a part before The Severing and there's a part after and it can be danced in front of events that you realize caused the loss. Then, you have images that caused the loss and then The Severing is the physical result of that, but then you have to come out. You have a choice. Are you going to let yourself go? No. People do not recover from it…or you can recover in some way, shape, or form, and move forward. It's not like, ‘oh, and then you see the light!’ It ain’t that way, but there's something on the other side if you can withstand it and survival is a very, very powerful state to achieve and the resulted change from that survival can be, ultimately, very healing. 

Dylyn: I actually wanted to wrap up on that note, because I noticed that I only have a few more minutes of your time, unfortunately, and, of course, I could talk about this with you all day…

Mark: We could have a part-two. 

Dylyn: Oh, I would love that! Thank you so much! So, you were talking about healing and I'm no stranger to loss and grief myself and a lot of the feelings I got from The Mothman Prophecies are from the idea of Mothman and the way that you brought that to the screen. I felt that I was feeling again, in The Severing, a lot of the hope in the loss, a lot of the what-comes-next. I was curious what is going to come next for you? What other projects that we might not have discussed are on the horizon? I was also wondering if The Severing would be available in the future on physical media, so on DVD or anything like that? 

Mark: I have not made any sort of deal with anybody, which I would love to. So, if you send this around the country and around the world and somebody wants to put out a DVD of it, they're more than welcome. I'm getting into that now, of at least having it have a home and, ultimately, it'll live on my website and my YouTube channel, which I just started. So, anybody could see it at any time. My website has all the pilots I've ever done, even unaired ones, all my videos. They don't have the full-feature films, but they have all my short films and all the experimental stuff.. So, the whole body of work is there and I can put The Severing there. It's not like there's heavy traffic towards it, but just showing it at Slamdance is really the beginning and then the screening in L.A. is like the first time the world has seen it. So, that's why we need people, such as yourself, to tell others about it. You've given me great ideas of what it could become and, you know, because not everybody's heard the song—you and I have heard the song and a lot of people have—but they don't want to talk about it or feel it because there's still the societal distancing from grief and loss and death. It's still a tough subject, way better than it was 15 years ago, 10 years ago, but still, it's difficult stuff to deal with and difficult stuff to talk about. 

Dylyn: really is and I appreciate your honesty and candor with me today about that stuff. I like to be open about that stuff myself and I really appreciate all of your thoughts on The Severing and I will tell everybody I can about that. 

Mark: Great, and I look forward to continuing and if you're down in our area around then, please be our guest to the screening. 

Dylyn: I wish I was and I definitely am going to find a way to see it on the big screen, sometime, if I can. Thank you so much, Mark, for everything. 

The Severing premiered at the 2022 Slamdance Film Festival. To see more of Mark Pellington’s work, visit his website at markpellington.com.