Antonio Campos Talks The Challenges Of Making 'The Devil All The Time' [Interview]

With the upcoming adaptation of the Daniel Ray Pollock novel “The Devil All the Time,” director Antonio Campos delivers his most ambitious, sprawling drama to date. Taking place across generations, the film tells intersecting stories of faith and violence in the American heartland.

READ MORE: ‘The Devil All The Time’ [Review]

With an ensemble that includes Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Jason Clarke, Riley Keough, Eliza Scanlen, and Bill Skarsgard, this is the kind of challenging adaptation that would scare off a lot of experienced filmmakers.

Social distancing during the pandemic, Campos called into us to talk about the challenge of such an epic story, maintaining authenticity, masculinity, and faith.

READ MORE: 2020 Fall Film Preview: 40 Most Anticipated Films To Watch

How do you wrangle so much narrative into 140 minutes and what were the challenges of that?
It’s a puzzle. The two things that we’re sort of juggling as we’re editing the movie is doing justice to each storyline and each character within the storyline that you get invested enough and care if they live or die. And then keep in mind that there is one main thread that you’re tracking from the beginning to the end, which is the relationship between father and son. So it was a lot of sculpting and chiseling and whittling down. We really wanted to make sure that we had looked at the film from every possible angle. Throughout the course of editing, we would move a section over before another, and see how that played out and what the ramifications were. And really feel like at the end of the day that the structure that really was the structure of the script was the way that the film needed to be. It’s a very complicated narrative, and you’re juggling a lot of things and hoping that the audience keeps track of everybody.

It sounds to me like you’re doing most of that shaping in the editing room. Was there ever a consideration to make an even bigger, longer film?
The original assembly was really long, but that’s not because there were a ton more scenes. It’s just the natural process. But there was one storyline that got cut that had a lot of really great scenes in it and that was Roy and Theo’s storyline. That had a lot of wonderful stuff between Roy and Theo. It had some great stuff from Pokey LaFarge that I hope I can show someday because he’s so good in the movie. He has an amazing monologue. That was a story that when we got to the edit, we were like ‘this story has to be about Roy and Helen.’ We had to focus it on Roy and Helen and make sure that that’s what we’re connecting to. For the most part, there wasn’t a longer version where I was like “Got it, oh shit now we have to cut it shorter.”

Authenticity in period and setting seems essential to this and so far away from the people involved in making it so how do you work to achieve that?
One, the accents – getting really good references for the accents, which came from Don Pollock himself and people Don knew. It was very important that there were subtle differences between the way someone like Sandy might speak vs. someone like Hank. That there was a difference between [the film’s settings] Knockemstiff and Meade, and that the way someone in West Virginia sounded was different than Southern Ohio. There was a different music. The dialogue coach, Rick Tipton, and I spent a lot of time figuring out what those things were, and he spent a lot of time with each actor to nail that down. And then you continue the process of finetuning that in post.

And then in terms of place – I went with Don and visited Knockemstiff. I traveled to West Virginia from Southern Ohio, and I tried to absorb as much as I could. And also go to the book. And the reality is that you have to deal with the locations that you see in real life. Luckily, we found some really special locations, but it took time. We shot in Northern Alabama.

I didn’t realize Pollock was narrating his own book until the end. How did that happen and how closely did he work on the production overall?
Don wasn’t super involved during production. We became really close before the movie. I would visit him in Chillicothe and I started to go once a year to spend time with him to get a sense of the place and to spend time with him and talk about the book and understand where things were coming from. He read drafts and would give my brother and me his opinions and suggestions and thoughts. He got really involved in the voiceover process. As we were editing, I would have this idea for voiceover and I would send it to him and right away he would respond with like a line. He’d respond with a few takes and sometimes an alt take. It was a really organic process and he was so collaborative on that front and a fan of the movie. He really liked it, which meant so much to my brother and myself.

Did you worry about being too heavy with narration and how to find the “right” amount for this story?
Yeah. I didn’t want it to be too heavy. I needed him to have a presence. I needed you to become accustomed to his voice and his role, but I didn’t want it to be interfering with the story. In the whole movie, there is a total of 12 minutes of narration. It’s a very small fraction of the movie. We tried to be judicious and have him come in in a way that was novel and had personality and even humor at times. And give us insight into characters that don’t really express how they’re feeling. That’s how we tried to use him. I hope that people get into it and appreciate it.

There’s a theme of masculinity in the film reflected in moments like Arvin saying the best day with his father was one in which he saw him nearly kill another man. What do you think the movie says about masculinity in terms of fathers and sons?
The film is talking about what we inherit from our parents and how do we mirror that and how do we struggle with it. You see Arvin is a very sweet kid, and that’s kind of what his father is getting frustrated by. He seems kind of weak to him. And so he does this thing in front of his son to teach him a lesson, and it sticks with him. The reason Arvin says that was the best wasn’t because he saw him beat the crap out of people. It’s really because he made a connection with his father. It’s a moment where a son who has a father who doesn’t really express himself was really vulnerable and present. The only other time we see them connecting is when he’s not even looking at his son—he’s looking at the cross in front of him. It’s like this is a moment of a father and a son connecting over something. The problem is that they’re connecting over brutality. And it instills this kind of behavior in his son and then the son perpetuates that violence and deals with things the way his father dealt with them. And it leads to this avalanche of violence at the end of the movie. The hope is that the son will break the cycle that his father has put him in.

The avalanche of violence takes place against a backdrop of faith and religion. Someone expresses the idea that being closer to death makes one closer to God. Why do you think art has been examining that connection and what does this add to that conversation?
I don’t know what it adds. I know what it’s doing. I think that there is a desire that artists might have to transcend, to create a feeling of transcendence. There seems to be a connection that once you understand your mortality, you can transcend it. That specific feeling is conveyed through Carl, who is a deranged serial killer. It’s a perverse idea in the movie—that to experience God, he needs to be close to death. In reality, I think that the film is hopefully getting to a place where to experience transcendence, you need to get away from that cycle of thinking. It is in the presence of life where you can experience God. As someone who is a new father, experiencing that for the first time, I have transcendent moments every day just watching my son marvel at the simplest things.

Why was it important to shoot on film?
Film is amazing! It transports you right away. For a period movie, film is the way to go. It immediately transports you to another time and has a feel to it. I think that the other thing is that this isn’t a huge budget. It’s an independent movie in a lot of ways. What film does is that you can have a really simple backdrop and a good piece of wardrobe, and it already starts to feel like another time [because of film]. It was so important because of that aspect of it. All the references I was looking at were on film or painted. So it made sense to have that painterly, film quality.

Why this film now in your career and how would it have been different if you had tried to make it ten years ago?
The process of getting films made is so long. I started writing the script in 2015. I started trying to get it made in 2017. Got it set up in 2018. It’s a really long process. You never know what film is going to be the one you make next. I don’t think I could have made this movie ten years ago. I don’t think I had the bandwidth to juggle this much story and character in my head. But if I had made it…I can’t even tell you what it would be like. Maybe it would have been 3.5 hours.

“The Devil All The Time” debuts on Netflix on September 16.