‘Green Room’: Inside the Skinhead Siege Thriller of the Year
Near the beginning of Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room, Anton Yelchin’s guitarist explains to an interviewer why his band doesn’t have a social media presence: “When you take it all virtual,” he says, “you lose the texture.” Not long after that, Yelchin’s band, the Ain’t Rights, find themselves barricaded backstage at a neo-Nazi compound in the Oregon woods, after a last-minute gig culminates with the discovery of a freshly killed corpse. A slow-burning, no-frills siege thriller, Saulnier’s follow-up to his 2013 breakthrough movie Blue Ruin has plenty of texture, but its long fuse is attached to a powerful charge: Once Yelchin and his bandmates discover the depth of the trouble they’re in — and the machetes, pitbulls and shotguns come out — this modern exploitation-movie insta-classic hits the gas and doesn’t ease up until the last body has dropped.
“I don’t listen to punk that much now,” admits Saulnier, a 39-year-old married father of three and Virginia native who used to frequent Eighties and Nineties hardcore gigs. “When you’re so immersed in a scene and it’s so definitive to who you are as a person — and there’s no archive of it other than your fading memories — it’s kind of disturbing.” When he was writing the script, the filmmaker spent months reaching out to comrades from his punk-rock past, collecting touring anecdotes and unreleased demos; much of the Ain’t Rights’ musical repertoire is taken from his old friends’ bands.
Creating that anarchic energy on set was another matter. Alia Shawkat, who plays the band’s guitarist and de facto road manager, says that the cast would do jumping jacks before takes, hyperventilating or forcing themselves to cry in order to work themselves into the properly beleaguered state of mind. “At the end of every night, we were tired,” she says. “But it felt great,” she says. “He really exhausted everything.”
In a sense, Green Room‘s protagonists could be any group of unsuspecting strangers from out of town — the latest version of the road-tripping twentysomethings in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. But for Saulnier, the movie is as much about the exhaustion of punk’s once-vibrant energy as it is the evils of the extreme political right. The Ain’t Rights, he explains, “are kind of scavengers trying to find the remnants of a once-vibrant subculture. When Pat says ‘you gotta be there,’ that’s 100 fucking percent true. Hardcore is about the experience and participating. When I was introduced to punk rock, it was skateboarding, clocking the T-shirts of the cooler, older kids, trying to remember band names, going home, telling my mom to drive me to the record store, please, picking out the band that I thought was the one that I thought I saw on the T-shirt, buying it, committing to it, taking it home — and then you’d fucking hear what you bought. This is an old man getting nostalgic, but that’s why the scene thrived. Now, you can just sit at home and click.”