Chistopher Greenslate is an award-winning director, writer and producer. His directorial debut Saviors (2020) won the jury prize in Madrid, and it received a Raindance nomination and a St Louis nod. Christopher has also worked in television. Christopher’s second film Bananahead premiered this year at the HollyShorts Film Festival. Victoria Luxford describes it as “the beginnings of an intriguing feature, speaking to toxic elements of the human psyche that all of us will have encountered, either in ourselves or others”

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Victoria Luxford – What first brought you to the story?

Christopher Greenslate – This should be such an easy question! I’ll do my best… I guess I’d say that Bananahead is the result of several different threads I’ve been holding on to for some time. Obviously, the absolute terror of expectation is a theme that holds many of us hostage in our daily lives. That’s probably been brewing for a while. Maybe my whole life? However, in a very practical sense, this film really came to fruition as a result of a conversation I had with actor Sally Maersk. We connected over a feeling of frustration related to doing creative work. More specifically, the desire, or obsession, to produce something that would challenge us and excite us… at a very fundamental level that one conversation connected us in a deep way. That meeting was very honest and vulnerable, it had a sort of confessional quality to it that eludes most Hollywood coffees.

This might be a warning to anyone I have coffee with. It’s probably going to get a bit deep and dark, but inevitably we’ll awkwardly laugh at death. Anyway, the more Sally and I unpacked our experiences, the psychology of creation, and the irony of achievement, the more we leaned into what those things meant for us. It was a rich discovery process. So, I guess it was that initial feeling and then our investigation of what it meant that led me to write the script.

VL – Were there any real-life inspirations for the story? Hollywood is full of legends of mysterious disappearances…

CG – Definitely. It’s worth noting first, and you mentioned it, but Hollywood history is full of mysterious disappearances and that gave birth to the idea of Andi’s mother and grandmother disappearing. I don’t think this is discussed very much any more, but I find it fascinating that people can just vanish. At the time I was writing this film, I remember reading everything I could about the Jean Spangler case. For those who are unfamiliar, Jean was an actress who mysteriously disappeared in 1949. She told her sister-in-law she was going to meet her ex-husband and discuss child support, then go to set for a night shoot, but she never got to set. Her purse with a mysterious note was found in Griffith park, and everyone close to her was questioned, but we still have no idea what happened. So, there are some nods to that story, Andi’s last name for instance is “Sanger.” Jean’s daughter’s name was Christine, which becomes the role that Andi auditions for in the film. Ultimately, I couldn’t help but think of what it would mean to have one of your parents completely disappear, like, if your mom is a doctor, as a kid you’d know, ‘Oh, I could become a doctor!’ – but what if as a kid it’s ‘My mom disappeared… ’ then isn’t the same realisation also true? Which clearly comes through in Andi’s audition.

VL – I think that the piece relies very heavily on Sally Maersk. When was the point you realised she was the right person for the role?

GG – I mean, there was never anyone else I would have made this film with. Sally and I hatched this thing together. We were in it together for better or worse. However, once we got into pre-production, I could see how seriously she was preparing and I got this feeling that she was onto something special. That first day on set, she was absolutely stunning. She’s a true talent and I feel honoured to have the opportunity to work with her.

VL – It’s a visually diverse film, with the supernatural elements contrasting with Andi’s everyday experience. Did that add extra work to pre-production, knowing that the sequences had to be distinct but also work alongside each other?

CG – It definitely is! It wasn’t extra work per se, just more specific work. I tried to lean in without reservation to all the things that provide context for the film, basically everything that has come before in terms of stories like this… it should be obvious that in many ways the film is speaking to other films, not just within the thriller, or horror genres, but in terms of narrative connectivity, other tales of cosmic horror. I once read that every story is like a singular eel inside a barrel of eels that are all writhing around one another and that’s stuck with me in terms of how I visualise things as well. Which means that for the film intelligentsia audience, they will watch Bananahead and immediately see the homage to Hitchcock’s Psycho [1960] in the drain and eye transition, one that we use before we see Andi on set, but the relevant question should be ‘why are they doing that in this film?’ – for me it was a very obvious way to signal death, which by the way is also in a thriller where a woman will ‘disappear.’ In Psycho, that’s the end of Marion Crane’s life, and so I use it here not just to pay homage to Hitchcock but to foreshadow what might happen to Andi in our story. Then we actually cut to black and white for the film itself, signaling a visual parity to the romantic era that gave us Hollywood’s most famous black and white thriller. I made a lot of choices that way, so it was a bit more brain work, but not more physical labor or planning.

VL – There are a few jump scares in the film as Andi battles with vision. Is there an art to finding the right timing for those jumps?

CG – There certainly is, but I’m not sure I’ve mastered it yet. I mean, the film has been playing at festivals and the scares have worked every time. You can hear the frenzied inhalation and nervous laughter that follows. I admit that’s been really satisfying. That said, as a viewer I’m pretty on the fence with most jump scares. The best ones you never see coming, but then once a director hits you with an effective one, you know what the game is and will be looking for them. That first one really has to be a proper surprise. Repeating that technique with the same power is super difficult. The second jump scare in this film is really more of a game with the audience because technically we foreshadow it more specifically so they’ll know it’s coming, it’s just a matter of when. That’s much different than the first one. I’d love to figure out how to make the second and third jump scares feel like the first one. That’s something I’ll be working on in the future.

VL – What was the most challenging aspect of the shoot?

CG – I’m really not sure. I try to be super prepared. I’ve story boarded everything in advance. I’ve brought in the right collaborators. A couple days I got ahead of schedule because Sally was so great and my DoP Rasa Partin was nailing things. We were a pretty well oiled machine. That said, the hair and makeup changes were definitely tough to do quickly. Sally’s looks in the film are very specific and radically different from one another. Sally definitely has stories about that process when we were fighting the clock on our last day.

VL – Was there anything that had to be cut that was difficult to let go?

CG – This was a very deliberate shoot. We didn’t shoot anything we didn’t absolutely need.

VL – Did you draw on your own experience in the industry for the story, both in terms of the ‘film within a film’ and Andi’s own dreams of success?

CG – Of course. It’s all there in the film and to me feels pretty overt, but I guess it’s worth adding that if this film functions as a kind of warning about letting one’s expectations drive our own behaviours to the point of madness, and I mean actual physical and mental deterioration, the sickness of not being where one wants to be and suffering as a result, then it’s worth remembering that Bananahead in the parlance of its time meant ‘idiot.’ Quite simply, the longer you decide to stay in the realm of expectation the more likely it is that you’ll be buried there. To quote Marilyn in The Asphalt Jungle, when you feel the pressure of your own future bearing down on you it might be worth saying to yourself, “Haven’t you bothered me enough, you big banana head?”

VL – Do you think Bananahead is a story that could be expanded into a feature? Would you want to do that?

CG – I definitely think it could. Of course we’ve heard that from people who’ve seen the film. I should say we were never intending to do that, but If someone loves it enough and wants to set sail further into this darkness, then I’ll pack my bags and assemble the crew.

VL – Finally, are you working on any future projects at the moment?

CG – Always. Sally and I have another short we just finished called Drainomania which we’ve started submitting to festivals. We’re also working on a feature together that re-interprets a play by Ibsen. Outside of those, I have a couple of features I’m currently working on, including my attempt to do something akin to Silence of the Lambs[Jonathan Deemme, 1991], and then I’ve got a few TV projects as well. I also have two comic book projects that will be released next year. One of which is an original graphic novel with a big creature, and another is a monthly comic featuring an iconic character from the punk and hardcore scene. Lots of exciting work to come!

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Christopher Greenslate is pictured at the top of this interview. The other image is a still from Bananahead.