No Film School: Your work often puts fantasy elements in fresh settings. What was the initial inspiration for setting a fantasy story during the Depression?Alexander Thompson: In so many words, fantastical storytelling is a very excellent insurance policy against the ravages of time. Fables, myths, and fairy tales endure across an ever-shifting topology of cultural, social, and political tectonics because they speak to an innate, primal sensibility we all understand as an evolved storytelling species. These are the tales that dispense with the quotidian and embrace abstraction and allegory - elements like these are part of a very old, hard-wired vocabulary that will likely be understood for a very long time to come. This is an appreciation that came naturally to me as a youth and was later reinforced by deeper readings of Jung, Campbell, Marie-Louise Von Franz, Erich Neumann, and others, who lent academic credibility to the notion. They told me through their writings that this was the correct path to walk, that this was a good way to commune with future peoples.In the case of Em & Selma, the setting evolved over the years. I first conceived and wrote the film nearly a decade ago, while living in the Southeastern United States. The 1930s backdrop was always a mainstay as it was a time of major historical flux in the world, this short tense pocket of uncertainty nestled between two explosive world wars. A pressure-cooker era like that made sense vis-a-vis the themes I wanted the film to...
Published By: NoFilmSchool - Yesterday