The gestation period of Dark of Winter was a short one. The film came about very quickly once I was able to nail down which direction we were headed in. It actually started out as something altogether different, but I was having some problems figuring out the details of the narrative for my original idea, and so I decided to concentrate on one storyline instead of the three that I was trying to write. That’s right around the time that it started to become the psychological horror film that it is today.
When I decided to go in the new direction, I found that my influences changed as well. I started to think about the work of David Lynch, specifically his 1997 film Lost Highway. A “neo-noir”, as it has been called, Lost Highway is typical Lynch and one of my favorite films in his oeuvre. Filled with unsolvable mysteries, riddles, and striking imagery, Lost Highway can get under your skin if you let it. But what has always fascinated me most about the film is its very unique structure.
The film circles back upon itself, a kind of cinematic moebius strip. As frustrating as an idea it is, displacing time in the narrative, it always struck me as something incredible and it turned out to be one of my favorite things about the picture. As I began to write Dark of Winter I realized that I wanted to attempt my own take at this structure and see where the story could go within those confines.
I also did some research to see if there were any other films that were designed the same way and I fortuitously discovered Milcho Manchevski’s 1994 film Before the Rain. I had heard about the movie as it had been released on DVD by The Criterion Collection (a bit of an obsession of mine) but I had never seen it. So I dropped it in my Netflix queue and it arrived the day before we began principle photography.
Before the Rain was a revelation for me. The cinematography is gorgeous (Criterion should seriously upgrade it to Blu Ray) and the performances are fantastic (I actually did a shot in Dark of Winter as an homage to Before the Rain, but I’ll leave you in the audience to figure out which one it is!). And just as I suspected, the film circles back upon itself, similar to Lost Highway, but not nearly as bizarre.
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not big on horror films. They also know that I am big on circumventing classic cinematic tropes and forms by putting my own take on them. Dark of Winter began as a dramatic character piece that eventually morphed into a psychological horror movie. I didn’t set out to do that; it just happened. I’m not even sure exactly how it happened, but as it took on its own life (as films often do) it just headed in that direction. And as we started shooting, another film lodged itself in the back of my mind.
But I’ll save that one for another day…
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