Midway through June, I was sent a screener of Septien and asked if a piece on the film could find a home in ESPN the Magazine. Septien is an uneasy watch by design, and unfurls its tone out of the gate (sports!) with a series of disturbing drawings under the opening credits. The art is warped but captivating (in large part the latter because of the former), and by the time the screener ended I had Googled and emailed the artist, Onur Tukel, who also stars as a brother of the prodigal gridder.
The publicist touted its sports themes, which wasn’t entirely inaccurate: The film tells the story of a former high school football star who returns to his family farm 18 years after running away. But it tells this story in about four minutes. The rest of the runtime is spent navigating themes of depression, repressed homosexuality and pedophilia, making it less of a fit for The Worldwide Leader than for IFC, which started showing it On Demand on July 6.
Tukel’s an East Villager by way of Durham, North Carolina, and has produced everything from feature films to educational children’s DVDs. I was able to get a note about the movie in ESPN, but only about 50 words. Appraising the art to be worth at least 50 more, I called Tukel back for a longer talk.
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The Rumpus: Considering how much of you and your art the film contains, I’m assuming you got involved early in the production process. How did it all come together?
Onur Tukel: I met Michael Tully, the writer and director, 10 years ago at New York film festival that was showing my movie Ding-a-ling-LESS. After I made my short The Wallet in 2009, I emailed him a link. Based on that, he asked me to be in a movie he was planning about three brothers on a farm. Once he had cast Robert Longstreet, an actor who had been in Ding-a-ling-LESS, as the last brother, the three of us started exchanging emails about influences and ideas. A few months later, Michael took our hundreds of emails and wrote the script.
Rumpus: Tully plays Cornelius, the football standout who ran away because (late-arriving spoiler alert) he was molested by his varsity coach and then returns home to sort himself out. Longstreet is Ezra, the cross-dressing brother who has taken it upon himself to care for the property and everyone on it. Your role is as Amos, an angsty, sexually confused artist who spends all day drawing and smoking in a barn. What inspired those personalities?
Tukel: Tully encouraged us to create our characters any way we wanted. He’s a good athlete, so he wrote Cornelius as a guy who sneaks off and hustles people in sports because he wanted to see himself compete on film. It has no place in a movie like this, and shouldn’t work in a movie like this—especially since Tully had Cornelius look like the Unabomber—but Septien’s sports scenes ended up being some of the best ones.
Rumpus: They add a nice shot of levity to a film that was otherwise pretty bleak.
Tukel: Yeah, they’re amazing. So that was his approach. Meanwhile, I’m drawn to movies about artists—Pollock, Basquiat—and I knew I could draw reasonably well, so that’s how I conceived Amos.
Rumpus: There are a lot of drawings in Amos’ barn—and, for that matter, on your website. When did you start creating all those pieces?
Tukel: By May 2010, Tully had raised enough money and scheduled the shoot for July, giving me six weeks to create the art. The script introduced elements of emotional damage and sexual confusion among the brothers, and that informed the artwork and enabled me to create it quickly. My method has always been sketch-like pastel drawings with black India ink outlines, but I had never done anything this demented. I sent Tully a few of my first images, which were all really sexually deranged. He said, “Yeah, it feels like that would be cool to put in the movie. Go with it. The most deranged things you can come up with, do that.”
Rumpus: Much of Amos’ art has a frenetic quality to it; in the movie, we even see that his method is chaotic, as though he can’t purge these thoughts from his mind fast enough. Did you take a similar approach when creating his portfolio? Six weeks hardly allows for precision, but I imagine you were trying to hit certain notes.
Tukel: I had the context of the story in my head, but I tried not to think much about the pieces as I was making them. I would normally knock out three a day, and could do five or six if they were simple. Tully was worried that I wouldn’t finish 25 by the time we started shooting, but I was really inspired. I had seen Tully’s earlier movies and knew he had a lot of friends in New York who would see the film. That motivated me. After the six weeks, I had about 65 pieces. It’s strange; now I look at the work and feel removed from it. I worked so quickly, and the pieces were all so deranged that it was as if I was operating outside myself. I would finish one, and a few days later barely remembered creating it.
Rumpus: For someone trying not to think much, you returned to a lot of specific themes when creating the Amos catalogue. The football player and people with mismatched genitals have an obvious connection to the movie; the rabbit and dismemberment, less so. Was there an over-arching philosophy behind the art?
Tukel: I wanted it to match the mood and structure of the movie. With Septien, you never knew what’s going to happen from one scene to the next, and the characters all get progressively more insane, so I tried to create an explosive, chaotic look. When it came to specific themes, I wanted to convey the idea that the brothers were being torn apart. That’s where all the dismemberment came in. Then there are elements tied to particular plot points: the rabbit represents both Wilbur, the dim-witted farmhand, and, in a larger sense, innocence. There’s a tree in the movie obstructing an old field goal post, and in the art it stands for both death and regrowth. The sex acts of course symbolize what happened to Cornelius. It’s funny—after we finished the movie, I thought I was going to be too embarrassed of the artwork to promote it, and I worried about my family being ashamed of it. But since the movie’s release, all these artists in New York have told me, “Onur, this looks like you didn’t care at all what people thought.” That’s as good of a compliment as you can get.
Rumpus: Aside from some tenuous sports connection, I didn’t know what to expect from Septien. Then the movie opened with your art under the credits and immediately grabbed my attention. Did you know going in that it would be used that way?
Tukel: That decision wasn’t made until halfway through the edit process. Originally Tully didn’t want opening credits; just the name Septien, and then boom, into the movie. I like it when films do that, especially when they don’t have any stars, because no one’s going to see the actors’ names and say, “Oh, they’re in this, yay.” Then, during the edit process, we started discussing a beautiful 1970’s Spanish movie called The Spirit of the Beehive. It’s about a little girl who sees Frankenstein and becomes traumatized. The opening credits of Beehive are a montage of images the little girl had drawn. The style and colors are childlike and serene, but the drawings themselves are unsettling. Tully liked the tone that created, and we realized we could accomplish something similar in Septien using Amos’ art.
Rumpus: You clearly spent a lot of time in an emotionally grim place while producing the drawings. Was it hard to recalibrate and get back to creating work that doesn’t involve a guy crapping into the mouth of a many-breasted man who is cutting off the head of a shark-man who is sodomizing a fellow who is crawling into a woman’s vagina?
Tukel: I was lucky, because my next project was a children’s book. I can’t talk about it, in part because of concerns about some puritanical parent seeing the Septien art and protesting, but it’s coming out next spring. So I’ve spent the past nine months thinking “rated G” all the way. When I look back at the Septien art I see negativity, which is going to happen when you have a decapitated person bleeding into the mouth of a pregnant woman. But there’s a comical aspect, too. Now the only thing that troubles me is watching my performance and thinking how much better Septien would be if Tully had used a real actor.
