Red-Pilled: Dasha Nekrasova on "The Scary of Sixty-First"
Red-Pilled: Dasha Nekrasova on "The Scary of Sixty-First"
Interview
When friends Noelle (Madeline Quinn) and Addie (Betsey Brown) score a sweet deal on an eccentric apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side they had to know it would come with a catch. It seems to have been hastily abandoned: it’s been left in filthy condition, food has gone bad in the cupboard, there are disconcerting stains on the mattress. Oh well, fair trade-off for affordable rent in NYC—but the vibes are about to get much worse. A mysterious young woman (Dasha Nekrasova) shows up on their doorstep and claims to be investigating the death of billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his network of high-profile rapists. Turns out their new home was an “orgy flop house” for the disgraced financier and was likely a site for unspeakable acts. Noelle gets sucked into the woman’s plight to uncover the truth behind Epstein’s supposed “suicide” and the two quickly end up in an obsessive downward spiral. Meanwhile, this drives a wedge between the new roommates and the alienated Addie starts to exhibit increasingly strange, manic behaviour that suggests she may be possessed by the spirit of one of Epstein’s victims.
That’s the plot for The Scary of Sixty-First, the audacious directorial debut from Dasha Nekrasova. Known best as one half of the button-pushing Red Scare podcast alongside Anna Khachiyan (who has a surprise cameo here), Nekrasova is also no stranger to being in front of the camera, most memorably for her roles in Eugene Kotlyarenko’s We Are (2020) and Wobble Palace (2018, on which she also has a story credit), among a slew of other indie shorts and features, and is set to appear in the forthcoming third season of Succession. Those familiar with Nekrasova will recognize traces of the devil-may-care attitude that make her podcast so refreshing and which here distinguishes The Scary from a contemporary American cinema (and culture) that walks on eggshells. Knowingly and gleefully treading in tricky territory with no regard for tastefulness, it’s loaded with cinephilic reverence and wears its influences on its sleeve—most overtly Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy but those don’t account for its grindhouse-tinged 16mm aesthetic and the list could go on—without settling into being any one particular kind of movie.
Nekrasova, who wrote the film with co-star Madeline Quinn, balances a sardonic sense of humour with very touchy subject matter, which is probably putting it lightly for a film that evokes real life tragedy and also features the shameless titillating indulgences of genre cinema. However, The Scary of Sixty-First is perhaps best characterized by its palpable urgency which reflect both the manner in which it was made and the conviction behind its deeply personal grappling with the oppressive totality that the Epstein saga offered such a maddening glimpse of—and the very real and pervasive horror of a “brutality of affluence”.
I spoke with Dasha Nekrasova shortly after the virtual World Premiere of her film in the Encounters competition at the 71st Berlinale.
Adam Cook: Congrats on the Berlinale. I imagine the experience was a little underwhelming in a way, no red carpet for the world premiere of your debut feature, but I hope you were still able to enjoy it.
Dasha Nekrasova: Thank you. Honestly, it wasn’t much of an experience but I felt very welcomed by Berlin, they were very enthusiastic about the film. They’re trying to do something with the public in June, so hopefully they will be able to do that.
Cook: I know you’ve already talked about the origin of the film, how it grew rather quickly out of yours and Madeline Quinn’s own obsession with Epstein’s death. Did you have a sense from the beginning of what you wanted to do? Or did it evolve in surprising ways?
Nekrasova: There were a lot of drafts. We knew we wanted to make a horror or genre movie of some kind that had our specific voice to it. In the first iteration of the script, they were moving into a shitty apartment. We had access then lost access to a weird place that was also on the upper east side and had to rewrite it for a new location to work with the topology of the apartment. It took different forms as we were figuring out how to tell the story. There was a draft where my character and Madeline’s character Noelle printed out pages from Epstein’s black book. When I sent a draft to my agent he was like, “why is there a scene where you’re printing things??” [laughs] I really wanted to avoid the trope of a character googling something as a device. That’s why my character carries around that briefcase full of ephemera. We needed to establish the visual vocabulary of the Epstein stuff and convey all of the visual information about the island and the crime scene that was in the cultural consciousness.
Cook: What was the experience like of directing yourself? Was it demanding?
Nekrasova: It was definitely challenging, it’s not something I think I would do again. I found directing the days and scenes that I wasn’t in to be a relief, honestly, but there are advantages in terms of performing because you know exactly what you need. The hardest part was in the last act when my character is basically hysterical. It’s hard to be in a state like that while trying to control and execute decisions in a measured way on a set. I’d be interested to know how other directors have done it, like Polanski in The Tenant. For me, coming from an acting background, and preferring to act in an immersive way, my focus felt a little split.
Cook: I wonder though if that contributed to the manic energy of the movie.
Nekrasova: The whole movie is marked by a very manic state that I was in. I edited it over the summer so I had quite a bit of time in between the shoot and post but definitely pre- and during production had a very special vibe and it feels almost like this artifact of a manic episode.
Cook: You evoke a very specific aura out of the apartment and from the Upper East Side. Can you talk about the element of place in the film and what interests you about the energy of spaces?
Nekrasova: The townhouse where the climax of the movie happens with Addie, Betsey’s character, definitely felt super charged and haunted. I had been there before we started scripting and always thought it had this really intense gravity and evil affluent feeling. The Upper East Side feels that way a lot as well because it has this old money refinement but then there are all of these gargoyles that you see in the introductory sequences that were found by me and my DP when we were out shooting before production. We were noticing how many weird little demons and babies there were. [laughs] We wrote the majority of the script on the roof of Equinox on 61st street. Madeline and I would actually call it Kubrinox because it’s this special Equinox converted from an old sports club that isn’t totally refurbished so it still has all of these odd details that give it a very trapped-in-time haunted quality.
Cook: So you felt immersed in it while you were writing.
Nekrasova: Yeah, and then at the end of the movie it says “For Stan” because we conceived of it as this love letter to Kubrick. Eyes Wide Shut was very much in the cultural consciousness of the time after Epstein’s death because it was the 20th anniversary and all of the secret society stuff that Kubrick depicts.
Cook: New York obviously has a big role in movie history, but I think after the city cleaned itself up so too did the movies that portrayed it. Gone is the heyday of movies like Taxi Driver, Variety, Driller Killer, etc. We don’t really get that anymore, and yet I think there’s something more insidious about the deceptive appearance of New York today. We’re seeing some pushback on that to portray a more brutal New York, say with the Safdies for example, but I think that’s something you accomplish here.
Nekrasova: That’s interesting. I think that even though New York in the 70s and now are different, it’s still one of the best places to make a movie. It’s very easy to film outside. With a lot of our locations, like the townhouse or outside the prison or in the financial district, I thought we would maybe get in trouble especially outside the prison and we didn’t. So there’s a still a certain freedom to making a movie in New York—but the brutality I wanted to convey was this secret brutality of affluence.
Cook: The film hybridizes the psychosexual thriller, the possession movie and the conspiracy movie. Fredric Jameson has this idea of totality, of capitalism as this vast, invisible totality, and that conspiracy movies are a great way for drawing out that affect, such as The Parallax View or Videodrome, and that’s what resonated for me with your film. Possession goes hand in hand with conspiracy in this way because they’re both about helplessness.
Nekrasova: Yeah, and power. That’s what obsesses me about the Epstein saga, it felt like it perfectly encapsulated that already. Once the imagery of the island started surfacing I started making connections between extreme wealth, power, and the satanic. I think pedophilia as a feature or symptom of extreme wealth and its moral rot made a lot of sense: if you can buy anything, the logical conclusion of that is placing a price on human life, with children being the most uncorrupted by capital, the most innocent, precious thing that you can buy if you get rich enough. That’s what Epstein was really doing, buying children and trafficking them.
As I was writing the screenplay, I was also going to Thailand a lot because I was acting on this BBC show called The Serpent. I went like four times in three months or something. I also realized recently that the influence of jet-lag on the movie is an interesting feature of it because of the way that time probably felt to me at the time. I was jet-lagged for months and it felt like I was constantly going to Thailand which is also this human trafficking sex tourist hub, so all of that was really dovetailing my thesis about what the movie was ultimately about—which is this totality of capital and its human implications.
Cook: You kind of answered this already but I was interested in what connection you wanted to draw between your characters and Epstein’s victims. It’s audacious to evoke that and draw the connection that you do between pedophilia and the character of Addie. There are some disturbing moments that conjure that without fully going there, which I feel is a tricky balance to pull off.
Nekrasvoa: My character is shrouded in mystery but is basically a proxy for myself. She’s not super well developed because I wanted her to be this lonely drifter who dons the appearance of a detective but isn’t one. She’s tormented by realities of capital and exploitation and I was in a lot of agony making the movie and I wanted my character—whose name isn’t given in the film but here’s an easter egg, her name was Molly while we were making it—
Cook: —is that an inside scoop?
[laughs]
Nekrasova: You got an inside scoop. She’s in a tremendous amount of pain and doesn’t know how to manage it and protects herself by becoming this archetypal detective who isn’t actually good at investigating anything. She’s motivated by her sensitivity and emotionality. With Addie, Betsey’s character—actually, my therapist thinks that [laughs] they’re really one character and the reason that my character is so dismissive of Betsey’s is because she’s really afraid of how vulnerable Betsey is and they’re existing on the same traumatic fault line but experiencing it in different ways. Which is interesting because Betsey and I almost resemble each other in the movie. Betsey’s character is more fragmented, we make allusions to her having been abused and she doesn’t have any support systems in her life. Her boyfriend sucks, her roommate’s a bitch, it makes her extremely vulnerable to whatever satanic or demonic forces are present in the apartment, which is why she’s the one who ultimately becomes possessed, but I think both of the characters are processing their vulnerability in different ways.
Cook: Was it challenging to go there for you and Betsey?
Nekrasova: I think it was. Betsey gives a really gutsy, brave performance and I don’t know what she had to do psychologically to get to those places. There’s also a thread in there that’s about being a woman in a society that really fetishizes youth with Epstein being the ultimate example of ephebophilic fixation, of wanting to prey primarily on underage girls. That’s why there’s the scene where Betsey rubs her menstrual blood on the walls. My concept there was related to associating one’s pubescence with a diminishing sexual desirability. It’s really fucked up. It’s about femininity and pedophilic desire and getting older in a culture that privileges ephebophilic or pedophilic desires.
Cook: They’re the perverse flipside to each other.
Nekrasova: Yeah and I think a lot of women and girls are in subtle or extreme ways traumatized by puberty and from becoming sexual agents in the world. It gets more complicated as you get older and have to reckon with the fact that you were sexualized as a younger, underage person.
Cook: You mentioned how your character is a faux detective which is pointed because that’s kind of what we all are flattened into being right now. I’m thinking of the people on Reddit trying to solve the Boston Marathon bombing and stuff like that. We’re kind of forced, because of this invisible totality, to flounder amongst ourselves as these would-be detectives looking for some kind of clue to something we can’t actually touch.
Nekrasova: And I think the reason why the Epstein stuff and pedophilic conspiracy in general is so resonant to people is we all feel like we’ve been molested in some way by that totality.
Cook: Another thing it made me think of is Mark Fisher’s notion of the eerie, which he also connects to this totality and capital, he references Jameson and Zizek, and this notion that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Do you agree with that statement?
Nekrasova: Something I often wonder is whether we’re in an apocalyptic culture or a post-apocalyptic culture. There’s no way it’s not one of those. I think it is easier to imagine the end of the world but I don’t think that end is a literal end. I think capitalism is something you pass through to get to something else. Ultimately, I feel a little optimistic that there are new forms which are possible, we just haven’t conceived of them yet. Like with Can't Get You Out of My Head, the new Adam Curtis, he talks about this Fisherian idea of a crisis of imagination—I agree with the Fisher-Zizek premise but I think that imagination is a structure of consciousness that evolves as well.
Cook: What do you think of the media perception of conspiracy theories? Something has shifted, it feels like everything gets lumped into a category of irrational paranoia, there’s no nuance.
Nekrasova: I think that QAnon is almost like a psyop to discredit the more credible aspects of conspiracy and the notion of conspiracy theory in general. It’s meant to confuse and foster a sense of powerlessness. We all know Epstein didn’t kill himself but then the louder these QAnon voices get that are talking about lizards or Hilary Clinton’s kuru symptoms or whatever conflates the ridiculous with the plausible and real aspects of conspiracy.
Cook: For me, the film has this balance of something almost facetious on its surface but is sincere and serious at its core. There’s a flippant or ironic side to its humour but it’s also introspective and reflexive. There are lines of dialogue like “this is our 9-11” that straddles being satire and you have these millennial signifiers like tarot, the obsidian stone, Vyvanse.
Nekrasova: I think my instincts for irony and satire are very Russian or something. They are instincts. The Epstein documentaries that have come out that are produced by people in cahoots with like the Clintons basically, they have this very grave, serious tone while at the same time being so salacious and exploitative. I feel like you can respond by being irreverent and through that get to something that’s something more true or authentic. It’s an acceptable mode in which to interrogate these things.
Cook: I think it’s honest. Not all that comparable a film, but in terms of dynamic, Gaspar Noe’s Climax has this gratuitous surface to it but I think it’s quite a personal, sad movie.
Nekrasova: I love Climax [laughs]. I watched it a bunch of times.
Cook: I also thought of Bonello in relation to totality.
Nekrasova: I love Bonello, I talked to him about Nocturama. I met him at the New York Film Festival a couple years ago. He made it before the Parisian bombings but released it afterwards so it had all this backlash. I asked him how he made something so prescient and he described how it felt walking around Paris and just having this feeling of the center not being able to hold, that there was going to be some kind of explosion, maybe not literally, but it ended up happening literally. Related to that, when Epstein died, living very close to the prison and being around New York, I did have this intuitive feeling that it was a paradigm shift of some kind.
Cook: That feeling is pretty much Fisher’s idea of “eerie”. It’s wild that Bonello has that line in Nocturama where Adèle Haenel says “it was bound to happen”.
More practically speaking, could you talk about staging the scenes, both in terms of working with the actors and also the choreography of the camera with Hunter Zimny.
Nekrasova: Shooting on film was really important to me for a lot of reasons but it changes how you shoot when you’re working with a finite resource. There are some scenes that basically play out in one shot where we’d make the choice that we’re not going in for coverage, we’re just going to get as many takes as we can in this single frame, and try different things within it, not go in for a two-shot or close-up and letting it all play out in one space. I’m happy that I did that and I think that I was very informed by being an actor. When actors become directors one strength that they have is understanding blocking and how to position figures in a frame. There were scenes where I wish we had pushed out a little more instead of getting as much close coverage as we did.
With Betsey’s scenes, she’s a very embodied performer and she was very trusting. She said in an interview recently that the environment on set felt very safe which is nice of her to say. I tried to foster that and really wanted to let her explore psychologically and in that embodied way. That’s when a lot of the handheld stuff comes into play, and that was possible because I trusted Hunter who is really talented. Oftentimes, I think that the relationships between actors and DPs are almost more important than the relationships between actors and directors. That’s been true in some of my experiences as an actor, and when there’s a nice synthesis between the two it can turn out really well.
Cook: Stylistically, I think some of the influences that have come up have been over-emphasized.
Nekrasova: You mean to giallo?
Cook: Yeah.
Nekrasova: That was honestly an accident. [laughs] I think that had to do with some of Berlin’s framing and what people ran with and it’s not inaccurate, I’m very happy with that comparison, I’d never correct a mistake in my favour because I think had it been intentional, it would have been really clever. My character wears black gloves and it is like a murder mystery but with the person who has been murdered being actually the monster—that would be very clever of me to subvert giallos that way if I had meant to but it happened very organically.
Cook: What about working with Eli Keszler on the score? It does have a bit of a Carpenter or giallo vibe, in part.
Nekrasova: Eli and I didn’t talk about giallos too much. My editor Sophie Corra is very talented and has wonderful taste. She had a really good temp score she had selected so we had a good template to work with. For the scene where Madeline and I take Vyvanse for the first time and we’re in the study tearing it apart and basically being meth heads, I had Eli compose that music, that was the first cue that he composed, because I knew I wanted to cut to score rather than have him score to picture. I had him compose that song which was really cracked out and tweaky and spidery and weird. What we did talk about was the score for Paul Schrader’s Hardcore by Jack Nitzsche which has these really cool quasi-religious choral arrangements that devolve into these subterranean drones. That was a big influence on me but I wanted to switch out the religious music with new age music because I was interested in the satanic elements—I think there is a line between new age stuff and the occult, I think it’s a slippery slope into Crowleyism for a lot of people who dabble in the dark arts. [laughs]
I gave Eli a lot of freedom, I really trusted him and knew I wanted him to do the score. I feel really lucky to get to work with him. What I really appreciate about his score is that it’s not like some retro 70s score, it has very contemporary element. It has synths but then, because he’s a percussionist, it also has these really compelling acoustic elements. With the tarot cards, we composed two different cues for both of the tarot cards and when me and Madeline’s character make the connection that we have separately found these cards, we lock the cues in together to make a third cue that’s a synthesis of the two, which I thought was clever. But I don’t understand music very well and so a lot of the conversations I had with Eli were mostly psychological and he was able to interpret things that I said and descriptors that I had used and make them into something that is really successful, I think.
Cook: Going a bit outside the film again, one thing I lament that’s disappearing in film culture is unabashedly sexual, perverse, horny cinema—I’m thinking of like De Palma, Brisseau, Verhoeven—I wonder if you share my lament.
Nekrasova: Yeah I do, though I would include Claire Denis as a sensual, horny filmmaker working today. I actually took a vow of celibacy while I was working on Scary. I was on a whole grace of God tip so it was holistically informing my process, I was like a boxer basically, refraining from any sexual gratification including masturbating while I was making the movie. I think it comes across that I was probably profoundly sexually frustrated. [laughs]
Cook: Just like Rivers Cuomo did for Weezer to recapture that original sexual frustration, he was celibate for like a year or longer.
[laughs]
Nekrasova: Wow, yeah, I did not do a year, maybe two months. So Cuomo was getting too much pussy and the music was suffering?
[laughs]
Cook: Something like that. I didn’t take a vow like you did, unfortunately I’m currently an incel. Temporarily, I hope, in this covid lockdown period.
[laughs]
Nekrasova: Schrader’s films feel very informed by inceldom.
Cook: You need to get him on the pod.
Nekrasova: We’re trying.
Cook: Could you talk about Eugene Kotlyarenko’s We Are, which you co-star in and was surprised-dropped online for free in December after being shelved for a few years? I happened to be online the moment it dropped and I put it on right away and thought it was really strong.
Nekrasova: I also think We Are is very cool. We shot it the summer after Wobble Palace when he was in New York. Sean Price Williams who had also shot Wobble Palace encouraged us to make another movie with a very limited budget. Eugene had access to this VR space that his brother was working at or an investor in or something and we basically had access to the office space that Keith [Poulson]’s character lives in. I flew out to New York to shoot my portions but it was made very much on the fly and I think challenging to cut together, which is why I think it has flashback sequences and a little bit of disjointedness that I think actually works for it. I wasn’t there for post so I don’t know what Eugene’s process was like but I had a lot of fun making it. A lot of it was unscripted or very loosely scripted and then improvised. I had the flu for a portion of filming and was really hating Eugene for making me go to set [laughs] but I’m glad that I did.
Cook: Could you talk about the Oneohtrix Point Never “I Don’t Love Me Anymore” performance or video—I don’t even know what you’d technically even call it—that you directed.
Nekrasova: Yeah, it’s weird, it’s not quite a music video. Dan Lopatin got an opportunity to do a Tonight Show performance for his new album and because of COVID, it’s getting a little more creative because you can’t do in-studio stuff and he usually doesn’t have a band. When he played me a demo of the song, I really loved it right away and immediately thought that it would be a really cool karaoke song. I was really inspired by Korean stock karaoke videos, especially ones that have little narratives. So, we devised a way for him to perform it with a band in a more “rock” way and he arranged it for that performance. Leia Jospé had just worked on How to with John Wilson for HBO and when the trailer dropped for that, I thought we should get her involved. She and I went out with camcorders and got cool New York COVID stuff to splice into the performance. I wanted the whole thing to feel like a karaoke video basically and we shot it in a studio in Brooklyn.
Cook: Podcaster, actor, filmmaker, music performance video thingy director.
[laughs]
Nekrasova: Yeah whatever that is, [laughs] I’m really happy with how it turned out.
If you enjoy this and other pieces, please consider supporting Long Voyage Home by becoming a paid subscriber.