Alix Turner
Having enjoyed the UK premiere of The Spine of Night when it played at Mayhem Film Festival a few months ago, I couldn’t resist the chance to talk to Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King, its two writer/directors, when the opportunity arose. The Spine of Night is an epic animated fantasy, which explores tyranny and power via bloody battle scenes and psychedelic colors.
It was also kind of inevitable that my teenager, Nathan, would gatecrash the conversation too (it was a cartoon full of violence and magic, after all), so I let him kick things off: Nathan gave a generous and intelligent two-sentence review and then cracked up my guests by asking why so many characters were naked. “That’s a fantastic question,” said Philip.
“We’re both really big fans of fantasy and sword-and-sorcery fiction over the last century,” said Morgan, “and it tends to view nudity in a way that’s sexualized, rather than naturalized. So we asked ourselves what if we took off these tiny chain-mail bikinis that women are usually forced to wear in these things and approach it in a way that’s more elemental, a way that people should exist in a fantasy setting without trappings of modern sexualization. And then it felt like if we’re going to make the ladies naked, we should make the men naked too, just to make things fair to everyone.”
Philip added to that: “I think there is also a narrative explanation. Tzod the swamp witch exists in this natural state; her clothes mean nothing. Then after Ghal-Sur, the villain of the piece, takes the bloom; well he usually wears clothes, but when you see him next, he’s also naked, as though the contact with this wild, untamed force of nature has led him to emulate her. At that point, we already have two fully naked people, so then we just figured we’d unclothe the lot.”
Nathan had a second question, and I was tempted to give him the chair and step away: how different do you think the film might have turned out if there was a greater gender balance in the team? “It’s hard to say,” Morgan answered, understandably. “We were such a small team and it’s partly an issue of scale, as in how many people were we able to work with. But we had a fair amount of women and LGBTQ people working on the film with us, so I hope we got—through everyone’s input—a diversified view, though, of course, we’re both aware of being a pair of middle-aged white guys. But the more we could incorporate that in future projects, the better. Jean Rattle did a brilliant job of the casting, which gave this one some balance from the set itself. And we wanted to diversify where possible while still keeping the core of what we liked and jettisoning all the things that are unfortunately old and regressive and baked into the genre.” They certainly achieved a good blend of perspectives in the characters they wrote: that was a success, I think, in terms of the diversity.
I took the interview back from my pride and joy, and—pointing out what a wonderful cast they had—asked Philip and Morgan what it was like to work with such icons as Richard E Grant. “Oh Richard E Grant is a human being who is just astounding in general, obviously,” said Philip, “so when we approached him for the part [of the Guardian of the bloom], we just assumed he would say ‘no’, but he said ‘yes’, which was a total delight to me. We did a lot of the voice recordings during COVID, so we were trying to figure out how to record these people, and came up with this somewhat ridiculous idea that we’d send them microphones and then we’d record themselves, and we’d direct them via Zoom just like I’m talking to you. So we sent Richard a microphone, and very gamely, he was like ‘great! I’ll figure out how to use this’ while being on vacation in the south of France! We made him do his whole performance during his vacation; but then when we got the recording back, the performance was great but the sound engineers said it sounded like garbage: he hadn’t had the mic hooked up properly, so we had to make him do his whole performance again, which was very sad. I think he was a little grumpy with us, but it also informed the performance a bit too: I slightly prefer the second recording. That was made a while later into COVID, and he was back in London, and there was a sound studio he could use…anyway, he was a real charmer, and I love him.”
Moving on to the artistic style in The Spine of Night, I asked what was the benefit of the rotoscope techniques overdrawing the animation (whether by hand or computer). Morgan answered this one: “it brings a lot of the actor’s performance into the role. There’s a lot of ways in animation where you can imagine what a character would do in a situation and you have control over that, but the improvisational quality that you get from live action is so invaluable for bringing the actors’ views of the characters into what the characterization is, and in a way that I would never have thought of to do. So it makes it much more of a collaborative experience. Also, because rotoscoping is so fundamentally about the human body (which we explored when considering the violence and the nudity, of course) then I think it grounds it in a way; whereas more traditional, cartoon-style animation wouldn’t feel like flesh and blood: you can drop an anvil on their head, and they’re probably going to be OK. I could go on about rotoscoping, but those are some of the major benefits.”
My storyteller offspring jumped in with another (unprepared) question of his own: what advice would you give to aspiring writers when it comes to big-scale epic stories? Philip loved the question. “I’ve got some general advice which probably applies to that: write something inspired by what you love but not necessarily imitative of it. I mean we’ve all read Tolkien and seen Conan: you have to figure out a way to digest your influences and turn them into something which either pushes against your influences or explores nooks and crannies that they left unexplored. That’s how I approach a writing project; it’s like an anxiety of influence, where you’re at war with your influences. As for structuring an epic time period, I don’t know if I have specific advice for them.”
Morgan had some advice, though: “personally, I’d recommend the book A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. I read it twenty-five or thirty years ago and it changed the way I thought about time periods in fiction, it’s such a good story. It definitely casts a long shadow on how we put together this story.”
Some influences were apparent when watching The Spine of Night, so I asked where the original ideas came from. “So much of your life filters into creative work, so it’s hard to know where ideas come from,” said Morgan. “But I would say, from my perspective, that the animation takes so long that you have time to think about every single detail. Like where did this frog skull helmet come from? Huh! It takes a good day to draw one second of the film, so time can be spent fleshing things out while working on it. We both grew up before Star Wars was such a ubiquitous, over-explored premise; young enough to have seen it when you didn’t know anything about the characters in the Cantina, so they all felt like they had stories, just the beginning of a saga. We wanted to pick parts of the story’s history that implied a much bigger story, rather than spelling it all out and exploring everything. The film’s really concerned with how society interacts with myths and legends, I think; so leaving room for the viewer to take what is in the film and expand out or wonder about what could have happened was really appealing to me.”
Philip added “my favorite thing about fantasy is it gives you the space to utilize your own imagination. So the construction of the story was pulling familiar genre tropes, and then not exploring them fully, but hopefully leaving them intriguing enough that you’ll come away and think about maybe what would have happened to the adventurer librarian before we meet her in the film; or how did Mongrel end up on the throne. Those kinds of things, as a dyed-in-the-wool nerd, are what I really want for my audience. I don’t want to tell them a complete story that they can just forget about: I want them to engage themselves in that world.”
Considering the other films I’ve seen of Philip’s, They Remain and Europa Report (and briefly forgetting he also wrote many of the Love, Death and Robots episodes), I commented how different The Spine of Night is from those titles, and asked whether he expects to write something different every time. “Yeah, one shouldn’t rest,” he said. “I’ll say this though: between They Remain and Europa Report, I believe there to be a thematic link. They’re both about people driven to explore unknown places. In Europa Report, it’s a hopeful story about the possibility of knowledge and the use of knowledge; They Remain is its dark twin, about going to a place and learning that you know nothing. I don’t think they relate thematically to The Spine of Night, but each one demonstrates a genre that I love.”
“Oh I think they have a through-line of cosmic horror and the expanse of the unknown,” said Morgan; and that rang true to me too, considering the flamboyant visuals that accompanied the magic in this current film, reminding me at times of The Color Out of Space.
Talking of themes, I asked whether there was a message in The Spine of Night for an audience to take away—about power or mortality perhaps—or if it was simply a collection of epic and energetic stories. “I think we were working with a lot of underlying themes,” said Morgan. “To me, what a lot of it is operating on is how elective a lot of our myth-making and power structures are; the authority we ground things in is often a product of the stories we tell each other. Tzod has her swamp visions, then the guy on the mountain is talking about other legends that inspired him to go there, and he had to gatekeep knowledge for his people because they couldn’t handle it. In a basic ‘knowledge is power’ sense, it’s about the restriction of knowledge and the how the hierarchy of what is real or not real knowledge is used to support power structures; and that when you look at it all on a cosmic scale, that all seems very small and human and arbitrary, and that we have the power to change that.”
Moving on to the creative partnership I was essentially talking to, I asked whether this was the first time Philip and Morgan had worked together, and how that partnership works in practice. Philip was tempted to tell Morgan’s life story at this point. “Many years ago, Morgan started to get into animation, and taught himself animation, and that started with more rudimentary animated films with puppet mechanics. Then in one of them, he needed a cloak to move in a certain way and he thought ‘I could rotoscope this, like the old films I loved.’ So he rotoscoped that cloak and then around that time, he also decided to teach himself how to rotoscope entirely; that led to a short film called Exordium, which I watched. That was kind of a prequel to The Spine of Night but we retell the story of Exordium in the course of the feature. I saw that short and loved it, and reached out to Morgan. But it’s funny you say this is the ‘first time’ that we’ve worked together because it’s taken such a long time to make this movie that we’ve been working together for eight years at this point; so it’s technically the first time we’ve worked together, but it’s the better part of a decade.”
Morgan summed up how the partnership works: “I think it’s great. I had worked with a lot of people over the years and always wanted more collaborators, to help drive towards larger creative projects. It was always frustrating to me how hard it was to find someone who was talented and kind and made the work better. That’s hard to find! And it’s been an absolutely life-changing event for me to work with Phil: he satisfies all of that and more; he’s a brilliant writer, a great person, he’s supported this very long process way longer than any human being should. I mean, one of the advantages of being so independent is we had the time to do it and to finish it on our terms, and I guess the patience and creativity he brought made this an absolute dream.”
“I love collaboration,” added Philip, “in any creative endeavor, particularly film-making. It may be a truism, but it is true: it’s all about who you collaborate with. I can’t think of any real conflicts we’ve had in making the film; we’ve had disagreements, but they’ve always led to making the work better. At this point, Morgan is one of my closest collaborators and a good friend; there are times when you make a movie and think everyone’s on the same page, and they basically are until you look at the nitty-gritty of where on the page you are, suddenly everything falls apart. I never had that experience with this movie: we always approached things from the same perspective and were always good at keeping the same end goal in mind. Oh, and I just want to say, if this had not been such an independent project, it would not have turned out to be anywhere near as naked, or as violent; I can’t imagine anybody coming to us and saying ‘sure, keep her naked for the whole movie’ or ‘get rid of some of those d*cks’!”
“It turns out it does make it kind of hard to cut a trailer actually,” added Morgan. “We ran into that after it was all done.”
I had been conducting interviews like this with filmmakers since September 2020, initially to support a festival that went virtual for the first time; and looking back, over half of the interviews were with pairs or three people working together. I don’t know if that’s a growing trend, or if I just happen to have caught the indie crowd, and maybe mainstream films are made by solo creatives.
“I think it says a little something about how poisonous film-making is,” mused Philip. “The role of a director is important, but the idea of collaborators is really important too: a movie is always made by many, many people.”
And now, of course, The Spine of Night is soon to reach a wider audience courtesy of Shudder. “It’s really exciting,” Morgan said, “to have something you’ve worked on so closely (this was made in a handful of living rooms across the world) reach such a large audience. It’s hard to get independent films out into the wild and in front of people who might be interested and Shudder is a really big platform with a wide reach, and I think it’s largely going to be people who—even though it’s a horror platform, and our film is more fantasy than anything—might be the audience that didn’t know they were interested in this kind of thing. I hope they’ll be receptive.”
Then the big question that my interviewees can’t always answer: what are you both working on next? Morgan started: “I’ve been writing more stories in this world. I’m not sure which one we’re going to do, or if we’re going to do any of them.”
“The Vertebrae of Night,” joked Philip. “Maybe The Cranium of Night.”
“Maybe the whole skeleton!” said Morgan. “So there could be more. I’m pretty pleased with how it’s going so far.” Is that to be another collaboration? “It is,” conceded Philip, “but I’ve also been busy on other things. At this point, it’s mostly Morgan, with me going ‘I’ll read it soon, promise.’ I’ve got some things going on that I have to be a bit vague about, but there will be another season of Love, Death and Robots that I’ve written for, but I don’t yet know when. I do video game work too, and I’ve been working with a company in Sweden on a sci-fi/horror thing; and a couple of other things that I can’t say.”
Exciting things to come, it seems; and in the meantime, keep an eye on Shudder…and apparently, there will be plenty of behind-the-scenes insights included in the Blu-Ray release of The Spine of Night in due course too.
