Orson Welles said everything you wanted to know about a filmmaker was discerned by watching his first film. “Suture,” the debut feature of San Francisco filmmakers Scott McGehee and David Siegel, is a provocative meditation on race, class and representation. What the film says about its creators is elusive, but what its daring and wit augers for their future is not.
The film, which opened in Chicago Friday, is a hypnotic story of two radically different men trapped in a whirl of deception and intrigue. Vincent Towers (Michael Harris), a meticulous industrialist who is the primary suspect in the murder of his wealthy father, orchestrates an elaborate plan to evade the authorities. He plants evidence on his unsuspecting half-brother Clay Arlington (Dennis Haysbert), switches identification with him, then stages a car explosion, with Clay as intended victim. But Clay miraculously survives, though he is left horribly disfigured and amnesiac.
A sympathetic plastic surgeon named Dr. Renee Descartes (one of the film’s sly jokes), played by “thirtysomething” actress Mel Harris, must reconstruct his face from photographs and video images. The psychoanalyst Dr. Max Shinoda (Sab Shimono), who narrates the film in flashback, has the more daunting task of restoring his memory. Clay, a caring, working-class laborer, is presumed by everyone to be Vincent, an amoral, hedonistic killer.
The film is a dazzling reversal of Hitchcock’s “wrong man,” the falsely accused everyman who must prove his innocence and apprehend the actual killer. “Suture’s” themes of character and identity are ironically counterpointed because Vincent is white and Clay is black, a fact that goes unremarked and unnoticed.
“Our idea was to make a film about identity, about the construction of identity,” David Siegel says. “In a more general sense, the film is about social circles and social groups more than it is about racism. It’s clearly not about the experience of African-Americans or anything related specifically to the black experience but more about how does an exterior that is different function differently from a cultural environment that is completely opaque,” he says.
The filmmakers drew from a disparate pool of stylistic and literary sources for their work. McGehee says, “David and I were watching a lot of paranoid thrillers, Japanese art films and mid-’60s black-and-white films. There’s a Japanese film by (Hiroshi) Teshigahara called `Face of Another’ that was a real inspiration.” Siegel says they wanted to cull the best elements from these prototypical works, where fear and paranoia are taken to their logical extremes. “In a way, we took plot devices that we kept seeing in those movies, films using devices such as amnesia, plastic surgery, and the idea of doubles, or twins,” he says.
The notion of twins is further complicated by everyone in the film’s apparent inability to distinguish between black and white. “In a weird way, it’s a suspension of disbelief,” Siegel says, “but it’s also breaking the fourth wall, an alienating effect that makes the whole process of cinema ultra-real, because you get to experience something outside of the narrative itself.”
McGehee and Siegel pulled out all the stops for their first work, making the risky decision to shoot the film in black-and-white and the widescreen process called Cinemascope. Cinematographer Greg Gardiner, a protege of Dutch photographer Robby Muller, uses gradations of blacks, silvers and grays. Shot entirely in Phoenix, Ariz., the flat, ennervated landscapes conjure a distinct location.
The physical look is integral in conveying ideas and relating different emotional states. “We talked to (Gardiner) a lot about white-and-black, as opposed to black-and-white,” McGehee says. “When black-and-white is used in independent films, it’s generally used guerrilla style, 16mm, gritty. We wanted a pristine, studio look, or as much as we could get one on our budget,” he says.
McGehee and Siegel met 10 years ago in San Francisco when Siegel was involved with McGehee’s sister, Kelly, “Suture’s” production designer. The filmmakers both grew up in Southern California, McGehee in Luguna Beach, Siegel in Newport Beach.
McGehee studied English literature at Columbia University and received a master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley. He was pursuing his doctorate in Japanese film history when he met Siegel. “I never would have taken the leap or believed I could have made it in that environment if I hadn’t have been talked into it by (Siegel),” McGehee says. Siegel, a prominent San Francisco artist, studied architecture at Berkeley and earned his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Siegel and Kelly and Scott McGehee formed a movie society that sought out unconventional programs and historical retrospectives. In 1989, McGehee and Siegel collaborated on their first short, “Birds Past,” a 37-minute riff on Hitchcock’s “The Birds.” Their next project, a 22-minute short, “Speak Then, Persephone,” about a young student’s odyssey through the San Francisco underground art scene, followed the next year. “Suture” represents a fusing of their personalities and skills.
McGehee says, “David is slightly better with technical things. He has a photography background, he understands camera, exposures, lenses, in a way that I don’t. In postproduction, his background has really paid off.” The words are barely out of McGehee’s mouth when Siegel says his technical prowess only slightly eclipes his partner.
On “Suture,” McGehee says, “there really wasn’t a dividing (of responsibilities). We have a kind of consensus agreement. We never make deals, you give me this if I give you that. We try to agree on everything.
From the start, we talked about ideas that interest us. We both start reading and then talk about what we’re reading. We outlined the whole story before we ever started writing the script. We revised other scenes. On the set, it works in a similar kind of way.”
Siegel believes a certain serendipity has transformed their work. “I often say more than anything else, it’s just the fact we’ve always worked together making films. It’s been kind of a lucky accident in terms of our personalities. We know a lot of people try this and it doesn’t work. We’re just lucky our working styles jell.”
Having the other to lean on was important in maintaining balance and perspective during the film’s long gestation period, when the filmmakers tried to raise the necessary production costs. With their reel, two shorts and a completed script as calling cards, they attempted the conventional Hollywood route, and walked away depressed by the exprience.
“We got some responses from producers,” Siegel says, “but playing all of those things out, there were people who didn’t want us to shoot the film in black and white, in ‘scope or didn’t like the central conceit. They also didn’t want us to direct the film.”
McGehee and Siegel raised two-thirds of the approximately $1 million budget by putting together a limited partnership in California. They calculated they had enough money to complete production and finish the first rough cut of the film, and they shot the film very quickly over 31 days. Haysbert, the star of Jonathan Kaplan’s “Love Field,” got involved with the film because of his friendship with the casting directors Sally Dennison and Patrick Rush. The other “name” actors, Mel Harris, Sab Shimono and Dina Merrill, committed to the film because they liked the script. “If we had gone over budget, we had no contingencies; it was really kind of a reckless move,” Siegel admits. Adds McGehee, “We didn’t tell any of the actors we didn’t have the money to finish.”
During postproduction, the filmmakers got a break when filmmaker Steven Soderbergh (“sex, lies and videotape,” “King of the Hill”) learned about the project from co-producer Alison Brantley and agreed to represent the film as executive producer. Even with Soderbergh’s imprimateur, the task of raising the money was a slow, agonizing process. After five months, Soderbergh introduced McGehee and Siegel to Michele Halberstadt, who operated ARP, a French distribution company. Halberstadt presold foreign rights to some western European territories to secure the rest of the postproduction funds.
“Suture” was unveiled on the festival circuit last fall, earning strong notices following its showings at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals. The Samuel Goldwyn Co. acquired worldwide rights after Toronto. The film was invited into the dramatic competition at Sundance, where Gardiner was honored for best cinematography.
Whether it was their intention or not, “Suture” has transformed McGehee and Siegel into players in their own right, though they want to operate at their own pace and scale.
“We’re living in Los Angeles right now, and we’re not very happy about that,” McGehee says. “We hope we can find a place where we can continue to generate our own projects that are the kind of movies we want to make on a modest enough scale so that it makes enough sense financially for industry people to get involved.”
Siegel says the relocation is a concession to the exigencies of the Hollywood system. “Marty Scorsese says you can’t be an American director and not be a Hollywood director. You need validation to some degree by that (Hollywood) system. If that comes to us now, it will just mean getting another film made will be that much easier,” Siegel says.
The two don’t have any projects lined up. They’re looking over some books to option. They will continue their collaboration, but they want perspective and distance. They abhor the kind of hermetically sealed existence the film industry fosters, where people have no outside relationship to other disciplines or interests.
“It’s nice to have had a fairly long period of life experience that had nothing to do with making movies before we stated making films. We believe in influences, hopefully one can transform influence,” Siegel says.
McGehee gets the last word. “For us we’re really interested in how culture works. For us our film is less about the world and more about culture as a phenomenon.”
