Image: The less you know about The Death of Dick Long the better, which is to say: If you plan on seeing it, I highly suggest you close this tab now to keep yourself pure because there are—major spoilers—in the interview below with the movie’s director, Daniel Scheinert. Not all will love this movie or necessarily think it’s worth sitting through to get to the reveal, but I did—so much so that I wondered if I should even cover it at all.
But ultimately, I couldn’t resist talking to Scheinert about his bonkers movie. He was initially reluctant to discuss the twist and only after assurance that this interview would be flagged as containing spoilers did he relent. The film concerns two friends living in Alabama, Zeke (Michael Abbott Jr.) and Earl (Andre Hyland), who after a night of partying, drop dump their friend Dick (played by Scheinert himself) off at a hospital. Dick soon dies while Zeke makes bumbling attempts to cover his tracks from everyone around him including his wife Lydia (Virginia Newcomb) and the police who are investigating Dick’s death, Officer Dudley (Sarah Baker) and Sheriff Spenser (Janelle Cochrane). The movie makes you assume the worst, but then makes you see you had no idea what was coming.
Scheinert previously co-directed Swiss Army Man, which you may remember as the movie in which Daniel Radcliffe played a farting corpse. Though not exactly devoid of sophomoric humor (see: its title), Dick Long is decidedly grittier and less whimsical. It exists in flux: it mocks its Southern characters while asking its audience to take them seriously. Via a storyline that many would consider to be gross-out at first blush, it attempts to foster compassion. Via phone earlier this month Scheinert discussed his film, its big reveal, its considerable debt to Fargo, and his use of “redneck” stereotypes. The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity and oh yeah one more time: This interview contains spoilers.
JEZEBEL: Who did you envision the audience identifying with? I had guessed that it was Lydia, Zeke’s wife, since she and the audience learn the secret basically simultaneously.
DANIEL SCHEINERT: A lot of my favorite films are kind of empathy games that kind of open the audience up to empathizing with someone they didn’t think they could. That’s what’s fun about foreign films and people that are different than you—by the end you’re like, “I relate.” In a way, I wanted to make a movie that in the beginning gives you permission to laugh at people who you think you have nothing in common with and then by the end, kind of scare you with how relatable they are. But it’s a real rollercoaster there, in the middle. The hope was kind of start where you’re laughing at rednecks and then take them on a journey where you’re starting to relate to this guy who wants to be a good father and then pull the empathy rug out—but the movie’s not over! And then spend more time with him, and hopefully by the end you’re like, “I’ve never been through what you’re going through, but I relate to how he feels and how his family feels and that’s what’s kind of scary.” You know, that there’s a universality to the least universal twist in the world. That was our point of view, constantly tracking so the audience had someone they liked and someone they could relate to, but not letting them get comfortable.
You grew up in Alabama. Did you have a particular agenda or strong feeling about the portrayal of “rednecks” on film and playing with these tropes?
I do have strong feelings, and it made the movie scary, but I kind of like diving into a movie that scares me a little. I don’t really like sermon films. In a lot of ways, I grew up embarrassed by how the rest of the world thinks of Alabama. This movie’s not exactly me trying to counter that, but I kind of grew up pissed off the actors weren’t getting the accent right whenI watched Sweet Home Alabama, which was shot in Georgia. I watched movies about racism in Alabama and I get kind of upset at how two-dimensional the racists are. The scariest thing is that they’re humans. I didn’t grow up around people who were screaming racist slurs out of the back of their trucks; I grew up around people who were getting elected into office and secretly redlining the town. I don’t know how much that applies to this.
In a lot of ways, I grew up embarrassed by how the rest of the world thinks of Alabama.
Well, maybe not redlining, but there are are people of color in your movie. You cast Sunita Mani, and from what I understand, she grew up in Tennessee. Your Alabama is not entirely white.
Birmingham is one of the most diverse places I ever lived. It kind of shocked me when I moved to Boston for college, like, “Damn, Boston is segregated. And Alabama gets the bad rap?” It was important to me to fill the movie with people of color because that’s true. There are certain bars you walk into where it’s like, “Whoa, this bar is all white truckers with a beard,” but it’s a really colorful place and it’s a bummer that the news the rest of the world hears about Alabama is the horrible, embarrassing shit that white men are doing, and occasionally Kay Ivey, our governor. In a way, I see this movie as a metaphor for that: There’s some really embarrassing white guys in the center of this movie, but I also wanted it to be a love letter to the ensemble of women and people of color who clean up their mess. They’re the part of Alabama that I think people don’t see much or hear about or talk about.