2009 Interview with After Last Season Director Mark Region

Below is a link to a Filmmaker Magazine interview with After Last Season’s writer/director/etc Mark Region from June 2009, when apparently, the film was still playing in the four theaters it was actually distributed to; (the cities are listed after the article’s introduction just before the interview commences).

The intention was to edit down the content, as it is rather long for an IMDb post, but deciding what to cut or keep just proved too difficult. An IMDb reviewer pointed out that the movie has something of the morbid fascination of a car wreck – the interview does as well. While a number of the assumptions some people have made in IMDb posts and reviews are confirmed, (the actors were essentially unrehearsed, in some scenes only one light source was used, and so on), other things remain as much of a conundrum as ever.

Region states that the film’s investors were family and friends, that his budget while shooting was $30k-$40k, (which seems to be much more in line with the film’s production values), and that the other $4.9+M went for special effects and post production expenses…but it doesn’t add up really. For example, (and not surprisingly), the computer effects were not done by professionals but by “People who knew things to do things on computer. Unknown people. We put [the effects] together from scratch.” (The quote is from almost the end of the interview.)

This, and other parts of the interview, make Region sound very much like a sincere, not particularly sophisticated man who was given limited control over some aspects, and may well have been the unwitting accomplice in a plan for one or more of the investors to funnel some significant cash into some places it was not intended to go.

On the other hand, at other points Region avoids providing clear answers, (e.g. near the beginning, when discussing influences), in ways that make it impossible (for me at least) to get a sense of whether he’s a bit simple, his thinking is unclear or if he’s being evasive. In short, this interview was of no help in actually deciding whether After Last Season is just what it seems to be, something more…or something even less.

I will say that the movie puts me in mind of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). After Bowman disconnects HAL’s higher brain functions, the information, (in the form of a video recorded briefing), about the mission that until then only HAL knew plays. It reveals the existence and discovery of the monolith on the moon, and as near as I can recall, finishes with the lines:

“…the four million year old black monolith has remained completely inert. Its origin and purpose still a total mystery.”

Substitute “seven” for “four million” and “movie” for “black monolith.” Just what will the future of science fiction hold?


XYZ


Filmmaker Magazine

Interview : After Last Season’s Mark Region

by Scott Macaulay
in Filmmaking
on Jun 9, 2009

http://filmmakermagazine.com/4211-interview-after-last-seasons-mark-region/