IN CONVERSATION WITH RAITIS & LAURIS ABELE
Raitis and Lauris Abele are heading to FrightFest with their animated feature DOG OF GOD which receives its UK Premiere on Friday night. A wild and weird tale based on a 17th century trial in Livonia involving witches and werewolves, this adults only, animated feature is the most visually distinctive film to play at this year's FrightFest. GORE IN THE STORE chatted to the two brothers about why and how they made the film, its many influences and the storytelling benefits of 18th century ale and shamanistic experiences.
GORE IN THE STORE - What made you decide on telling this particular story in this very particular way?
LAURIS ABELE (LA) - When I finished film school, and made my graduation work, we directed it together and it was also about werewolves, because we have a lot of forests and we have wolves. If you go outside Riga, I would say in one hour, two hours, you can be somewhere where there are only forests, no people. Then when you meet the locals, to this day, they still have werewolf stories to tell that they experienced, or someone they know experienced, or their grandma experienced it, and there was a Dean of Faculty of Sociology in the Latvian University…
RAITIS ABELE (RA) - He's a priest, actually.
LA - He went by the coastline and collected these verbal stories, and they were super interesting and nothing like the Western werewolf type of story. And we were super interested in the fact that our kind of werewolf is different. And then Raitis has a story regarding him studying at the same time in New York finding a book, that was kind of a synchronization.
RA - Yeah, it was actually by a British author, Douglas Adams, but not the Hitchhiker guy! He had a book called The Beast Within, which is a popular scientific book about lycanthropy and different kinds of werewolves. And there was a big chapter about Livonian werewolves. In this particular section, he looked at how Livonian werewolves are different from Central European werewolves and how the verbal stories from Switzerland and Southern France became Hollywood franchises and became world known. Livonian werewolves are very different. It's more connected to pagan rituals, to dark entities, and probably some rituals in taking some substances. I read it like, Oh, wow. I had no idea. Nobody taught me that in school. But then a friend of ours, script writer Ivo Briedis, approached us with his script. He had seen our film BALTIC TRIBES that we did a while ago. It's a reenactment documentary. And he came to us and said, Hey, I believe you're the only ones who could pull off this story. And that's how we got the script initially. It was supposed to be a feature film, but a couple of years ago, I was helping our friends who were making FLOW. On the first year, I was helping them to assemble an animators team, because we had a studio with animators, and we were working together, and I was pretty much involved in this animation world. I said to Lauris let's use animation to make our script, and Lauris was kind of against it. He didn't like it. But then we asked our friend, lead artist, Harijs Grundmanis, to do some sketches and some test visuals. And that was when Lauris bought it, and we decided, okay, yeah, this might be a great way to tell that story.
LA - And also to add, you asked us about the rotoscope technique. We call it animation with real actors, because we recorded all the sound. There's no ADR, it was recorded on a set. We wanted it to feel real. So the actors look animated. But we read in one review where somebody wrote that “Klibis is voiced by actor Jurgis Spulenieks.” It's not just voiced, it's his acting there. So in that way, it was kind of like a feature film with real actors.
How did you find the rotoscope process? Was that quite difficult for you? Or did you take to it quite easily?
RA - We thought it would be very easy…
LA - But it started out way too hard.
RA - We did tests with four or five second shots or even two seconds and then we applied for financing. We got financing, and then we started to do real tests. And then we suddenly found this takes much longer. It's much more difficult and at one point, before starting we wondered how are we going to pull this off? We had financing for an experimental film. So it was limited for an animation film, but then we started to think of creative ways, like in the background, we just used silhouettes of some actors. Then we tried to think, how do we minimize the labor effort? What was great was that Lauris works in an art school, and the young animators from his class came to help us, and that was a big help. It was great, because they could earn some money, learn some things, and we got much more artists, more manpower, and women power. We got much more. And that's how we did it. With students, it was a bit hard at first, because you would see the rotoscope animation, and you’d say you have to do this again, here is a mistake and here's a mistake. But after a year of drawing, everybody learned their craft. So when we finished the film, we all knew how to do it.
Is this a particular period of history that you're interested in?
LA - We find this period very interesting. We recently kind of celebrated one hundred years of our independent country, but we lived, starting from 13th century under the Livonian law, and in these territories where we are, it's always been like a battlefield, like in World War Two, or it's where Russia and Germany, West and East, had their conflict, not on their soil, but on our soil, so our history is very complicated and very weird, because we were always under someone. We were like pagan kings. Then came the Fourth Crusade, and the Germans and we and the Lithuanians were the last official pagans in Europe. And then they Christianized it, and we were Livonia. And then Livonia was not under German, but under Swedish rule. So it's politically a super weird period. And let's say in this when Theiss was in the actual trial, it was Livonia under Swedish rule. It's also written in some anthropological books that maybe he was just a trickster who knew that the Inquisition was prohibited a few years earlier, where he could have gone to the trial and confess to being a werewolf, and would probably be tortured to death. So that is a very interesting period in our history in that there's Latvians, and always some ruling class over them, but Latvians keep it underground, and I'm aware of this kind of symbol for that.
What kind of research did you have to do for the film?
LA - When we made BALTIC TRIBES, as it was a reenactment documentary, we worked with a lot of historians on the 13th century, and we made a lot of friends with a lot of academics and archeologists, so we kind of already did our homework on certain things. We read anthropological books, Popular Science, books about this trial and everything that we could and then we consulted with historians, so we did the research, but it's still a fantasy. Let's say a lamp in a tavern would be like a lamp from that time and the costumes. But there's some mystical things we have added. Some other things are unreal. So we wanted to let people know that this is a fantasy with historical elements, but it's still a fantasy.
RA - There's an open air museum where there's an actual church from that time, a wooden church that’s been preserved. And we went in there and we scanned it all. Then we put it in Blender and made the model out of how exactly this church is. We used it as a perspective for artists to draw over it. So some things are really accurate, historically.
LA - Or the baron's sex toys!
RA - Yes! Lauris did the research. I remember the WhatsApp chat where we talked with Harijs, we wrote to Lauris “You have a task. We need references for at least twenty, seventeenth century sex toys. Please send us by the end of today.”
LA - That was quite interesting.
I also wanted to ask you about what kind of visual influences you had for the film.
LA - Most of the visuals came from the main artist, Harijs Grundmanis. But we exchanged a lot of different references with him. There’s HEAVY METAL and obviously the Ralph Bakshi films like FIRE AND ICE and THE LORD OF THE RINGS. Then also a lot of visual references from 80’s dark fantasy animations, which are kind of forgotten about these days, but they’re really like mini-masterpieces in animation. You know, from that time, movies like LABYRINTH or THE NEVER-ENDING STORY, movies we watched as kids, that you can still watch as a grown-up. They're not silly and they're not stupid. So a lot of those animations from back in the day, and then some Latvian and Estonian animations that we also had growing up as kids, which were actually very dark, because our TV was limited. And whenever you looked at the TV schedules, there was animation. Sometimes they were grown-up animations, and they were very artsy.
RA - During occupation, I think one way for creative freedom was for animators to express themselves in these dark stories. That was a rebellious move. So the animations during the Soviet occupation were not pretty Disney style animations.
LA - And then there's some paintings and some compositions from tarot cards. So there's really a lot of things that we like, and it's particularly influenced by the looks of these vintage animations. But when you do it on the computer, at first it looks pristine and clear. And we didn't like that cold, super clear view. We wanted it to look like it’s filmed with old lenses like you would see in an old cinema. We wanted that feeling.
RA - Also, one more reference we had a lot of screenshots from, was BLADE RUNNER.
Are there any more folklore tales that you would like to tell in this format, or any other format?
RA - There's one Estonian author that we are now trying to negotiate the rights for. He has a great book that we would love to do in this style. We had the idea that we could do it as a feature film, but that would be just so expensive. It's a folk story, and very weird with mushroom eaters and a grandfather eating soup from the skulls of Christians.
LA - It's like magical realism, but with this Baltic dark humor.
RA - Yes, that's what we like. We're in the negotiating process of that, so we will see how it goes.
In your end credits, you very helpfully give a recipe for an 18th century ale. Where did you get this recipe from, and how much of it did you drink during the making of the film?
LA - Harijs found that recipe when the whole film was in animatic form and black and white with my and Raitis’s voice over, and we needed to be very precise with the shot list, because when you rotoscope something you can’t improvise or do anything like that. Everything had to be done, by and stick to the shot list. And when we did this in the studio, there was really good weather, it was spring, beginning of summer. We were sitting in the studio, drawing it, figuring out how to put the script on, how it would look. And then when we would run out of ideas in the evening, we went out for a few beers.
RA - And you did, eat all the psychedelic honey that I brought from Nepal!
LA - Yeah, we did that at the beginning! Raitis brought this mad honey from Nepal. We would sit down in the studio, have a taste of the honey, and start to draw. And then when we were having those beers, we thought, okay, we’re out of ideas for today, let's continue tomorrow. But sometimes we would use the ideas we came up with when we had those beers, and come to a solution that also turned out good the next day. I'm also looking forward to having English bitter when I’m over at FrightFest.
RA - And Lars is a beer maker at home, his bathroom is like a brewery fermenting room.
Also in the end credits, there are references made to two shamanic rituals. I was wondering if I could ask about these?
LA - We went with a team of animators…
RA - With animators, because we knew that we could be on the same page, not with the students.
LA - … who wanted to visit a shaman who administers a super interesting substance that when you smoke it, everything becomes alive, like trees become alive in an instant. And you can believe it or not but it was a very good experience for our lead artist. It's not a long process, but at one point he said ”Where the hell did those guys take me and when will this end?” But he really liked this experience, it's very visual. Everything looks like, I would say like, 3-D animation, like Avatar, but maybe that’s a little bit blasphemous, because you can see the shamanic spirit of everything.
RA - At one point the shaman put a hand on my shoulder and said “When you see the parallel world. Don't be afraid. Just breathe and watch and just look.” And I thought, Oh, this is just a shaman playing with my mind. But when you smoke it, it becomes this, instantly parallel world. Everything changes, like this (clicks fingers), and then I understood what he said just watching the parallel world unfolding in front of me.
Have you encountered any adverse audience reaction to the film? From anyone who has found it too explicit or offensive?
LA - There will be a point when we won't go to screenings, but it's still quite interesting to see the reaction of the audience. We had a premiere in New York and people came to talk to us. It felt like everyone loved it. We also got very good reviews. It's interesting that, let's say Americans are very concentrated on the sex in the film. Where it doesn’t really concern us so much. If you watch Japanese tentacle anime or something like that, that is very hard in comparison. We thought we were doing a kind of soft core. It's in silhouette and more what you see in your mind. But visually, I would say it's not very graphic at all, compared to some Japanese anime. And then when we were at the Grossman festival in Slovenia, during the church orgy scene, I saw one guy leave, and I thought maybe he's a Christian and he didn't like it, but I don't think that our movie is against Christianity. But you know, a person can have their opinions. And some people on Letterboxd are commenting, "how can you do this in animation!?” It's kind of not a bad commentary. It's actually a compliment!
RA - And one other thing is, for those who didn't enjoy the film so much, could be that they really come for and are expecting a werewolf movie. So this is not like a typical shape shifting werewolf movie. Somebody said that it’s more about personalities, about the relationship between different people and who is more important than the other. One other thing from the Polish audience was that they take this church issue more seriously than we probably do. Our critique was against dogma and against the hierarchy of one person's thinking that his point of view is much better than another person's point of view. So it's a critique of dogma, not a critique of the church as a place where you can get a spiritual and shamanistic experience.
Well, that's great, guys. Thank you very much for your time.
LA - Thank you for having us.
RA - Thank you for the good questions. It was fun.
LA - From time to time, we get questions that really make us think. So your surname, you're from HIGHLANDER?
Yes, I am a MacLeod and an actual highlander from Caithness, right at the top of the country.
LA - So, how old are you? Six hundred years?
A wee bit younger. Growing up in the 80’s and 90’s when I was introduced to someone, I’d always get the reply “MacLeod, from the clan MacLeod!” I'm not too sure about this remake we're going to be getting.
LA - Me too. It could be interesting. But sometimes those remakes they make are just the worst. Today it may be a possibility to do some things more effectively, but they always seem to fuck it up with the script by adding some silly stuff.
Well, all I can say is, we've got an Englishman playing a MacLeod, and I'm not too happy with that. But, we'll see how it goes. Well, I'll hopefully get to say hello to you in person at FrightFest.
LA - Oh yeah, we’ll see you around and have an ale together.
Iain MacLeod