Bingham Bryant & Kyle Molzan
For the Plasma, Bingham Bryant & Kyle Molzan (2012)
Bingham Bryant is an American actor, screenwriter, editor, producer and film director; Kyle Molzan is an American editor and film director. Written by the former and directed by both, their first feature film For the Plasma premiered at Jeounju, Maryland, Indielisboa, Nashville and BAMcinemaFest.
In an exclusive interview with Filmatique, Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan discuss the Sundance stigma, Japanese techno-pop philosophy, the duplicitous nature of films and their next projects.
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FILMATIQUE: For the Plasma has a very distinct and even unusual style and structure, leading it to be compared to the works of Shane Carruth, particularly Primer. Did you find any inspiration within that film? If not, what were your influences— cinematic or otherwise?
BINGHAM BRYANT: Carruth isn't an influence. He makes puzzle films— which in his case is not just to say that they are films to be solved, but also that they're constructed out of thousands of tiny pieces, each jigsawed into shape for a specific and limited function— a shot for each action. We were more interested in creating a space, one within which ideas could flow and interact with each other in unpredictable, ambivalent ways. It was about finding ways to open the film, to allow more in, and finding a style and structures that deconstructed themselves in their own making. We talked a lot about Raúl Ruiz's The Territory, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Charisma, and Artavazd Pelechian's distance montage. Movies that eat their own tail, and are better for it.
KYLE MOLZAN: Carruth has the Sundance stigma. Silent provocation was more our style of thought.
FLMTQ: The film strikes this balance between tranquil and unsettling, which is nicely underscored by the charming but disjointed synth music. What led you to collaborate with the Japanese composer Keiichi Suzuki? How did you work alongside him to evoke the particular atmosphere of For the Plasma?
KM: Asking Keiichi was basically asking our favorite musician to do a score, with digital-pastoral as the goal.
BB: The thing is that Plasma had been, from the moment we began making it, a Japanese techno-pop movie. So much of the film was informed by ideas we'd found or explored through this music. It is, even in its most commercial, anodyne forms, a philosophical music— one driven by unresolvable tensions between nature and technology, discovery and synthesis, exoticism and the familiar. Keiichi had been a pioneer of the genre, as the frontman of the Moon Riders and as a producer for other artists. So the film was already in dialogue with his work, before he was ever directly involved, and he intuitively got it. Though we spent a long time talking about how the music could interact with this particular landscape and environment, with the sounds that were already there.
For the Plasma, Bingham Bryant & Kyle Molzan (2012)