Based on the debut novel from author Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All The Time tells a haunting story of violence in rural America, post World War II. The shocking portrait of the lingering effects of trauma, violence, and the legacy it can leave behind is helmed by director Antonio Campos. Campos is known for directing Afterschool, Simon Killer, and Christine (2016); he spoke with Screen Rant about his experiences working on The Devil All The Time, leading a stellar ensemble cast, and how he brought Pollock's 2011 novel to life.
Part of Netflix's originals line-up and originally released on September 16, 2020, The Devil All The Time unites veteran actors who have portrayed some of the most iconic characters in modern cinema history such as Bill Skarsgård (IT Chapter One, IT Chapter Two), and other notable names.
While The Devil All The Time have been mixed, the outstanding cast carries a phenomenal story about the perils of getting sucked into violence, the moral struggles of blindly following religion, and the corruption that can plague even the most rural areas of the country. Campos had a strong backbone to work with in Pollock's novel, and the director spoke to the challenges associated with adapting such inspirational material, which drove him to create The Devil All The Time as a feature film.
How did you first get involved with the project?
"The book was given to me by Randall Poster, or Randy, is more well-known as a music supervisor. But we had worked together closely and gotten to know each other and he said, 'you know, if you like this book, I'd like to produce it for you', and I loved the book, and I said I really wanted to do it, but I wanted to bring my brother (Paulo Campos) on—my brother hadn't written a script yet, but he had written prose. I just had a feeling that he would love the book, and want to do it, and he did. And that's how it got started, Randy Poster really started the whole thing off."
What about the book inspired you the most?
"The way that Don Pollock found to create something that was both Southern Gothic in tone and felt like a hard-boiled crime novel, like somehow how he figured that alchemy out was amazing. Those are two of my favorite genres, so I wanted to play in that world. He had such incredible imagery, the book is very cinematic, I mean he—some of these ideas that are in play, in the book... the serial killer couple, the husband who takes photographs, that right there is the kind of visual element that's so exciting to try and create in a movie. But thematically, what really grabbed me was this exploration of faith and violence in the country, and this kind of generational story that was connecting it all, the story of a father and son, and the things that the son inherits from his father. How he lives with that trauma and how he processes it, and then how, you know, it informs all the actions he takes and the hope that possibly he breaks the cycle that his father has started. So that was what really grabbed me in of the story."
One of the things I loved the most about the movie was that ability to blend genre—at times it felt very much like a crime drama, other times it felt like a horror movie. What did you want to play with the most with genre?
"Of course, you just want it to work. To switch... like already, we're switching worlds, right? We're going from one character's world to another character's world. We're going from one place to another, we're going from one time period to another, so there's a lot of moving around. And then on top of that, we're switching tones, we're switching the mood, the genre, and so they all had to work as one, and all the actors that were playing very different characters had to work as though they all existed in the same universe, and there wasn't any special thing that I did to try to figure that out, I just tried to take it case by case, scene by scene. And that was how I approached it, I just approached it scene by scene and hoped that, if I did it that way, it would work out in the end."
How important was it for you to stay true to the source material?
"It wasn't so important to my brother and I that we did the scenes the way that they were written. What was important to us was that we captured the spirit of the thing, and that we did justice to this wonderful piece of writing... this wonderful book that Don had written. We were committed to being faithful to the spirit of the book, and to the spirit of his characters, and the biggest themes of the book. But we felt very free within that world to play around, and to even like... to even create characters or even sort of, not create characters, but take characters that were in the periphery of the book and make them people in the story. The example that I'm thinking about is BoBo McDaniels and Leroy. So, those are peripheral characters that you hear about, but we felt like... we really wanted to get a sense of the bad things that Bodecker is doing, and we felt that there was this kind of interesting underbelly to Meade and to Knockemstiff, so we started playing with that... creating those characters, bringing those characters that never really had scenes in the book. But we felt very free, we felt committed to the spirit of the book."
Conversely, where did you think it was most important to put yourself into the story?
"It's not one where it's easy for me to say 'oh, this was me' or 'that was me'. I can say that the elements... the thing that spoke to me most personally was the struggle with faith and struggle with religion, and you know... wanting to believe in something and being conflicted about it and also being at conflict the views of my parent and wrestling with that. Those elements were the ones that I think spoke the most to me and to my own life. But there's not a character in this that I can say 'oh yeah, that's the one... that's the closest to me' like I could do in some other films."
Which might be a good thing!
"Yeah! I mean, you don't really want to relate to Carl or Teagardin. Or any... I mean, they're all... they all have their negatives, to say the least."
There was a lot of really strong messaging and thematic material in the movie—why is The Devil All The Time such an important story for audiences today?
"I think that the exploration of faith and the way that people relate to faith is something that is universal and that is timeless and is always something that people are struggling with through history. I think that there is a kind of madness at the center of the movie that is a result of that intersection between faith and violence that is kind of at the core of the country, and I wonder if there isn't an aspect of that that would be interesting for people to sort of explore further and talk about. We made the film in 2019, I wrote the script from 2015 to 2017, and the book was written in 2011, so it's been a long time... you never know when a movie's going to actually come out. When you start working on something, you're in a different... when I started working on this, I wasn't a father yet, I wasn't even married. In the time from when I started working on it, I got married and I had a son who is now two, and I've changed so much. So I don't know, I hope that people find something to take from it that feels relevant today."
It's definitely a different world, too. The book was published in 2011, you wrote it in 2015—that's two different time periods, essentially. That's a huge thing to consider.
"Yes, totally. And 2015 is very different than 2020."
What was it like working with such a large ensemble cast?
"It was... you know, I had worked with a big ensemble on Christine, but that was a more contained movie and the ensemble was kind of all together. I think that the experience that I had doing The Sinner, which is a big ensemble and a lot of storylines that are separate that are all going to come together was probably good... it helped me prepare me for what it would be like to have to conduct this cast and to flow from one story to another and from one actor to another and one actor's process to another actor's process. Because on TV, you're dealing with a lot of different personalities and different stories that all have to kind of connect, and you're going to have a day, like on The Sinner I'd have my days with Jessica Biel and I'd have my days with Bill Pullman and then my days with Chris Abbott and that story. So I think that, in some way, that prepared me for what this was, which is just having to be very nimble, having to be very fluid in switching the way that I speak and deal with every actor because every actor, I find, speaks a different language and you have to... more than them learning your language, you have to learn their language, and you have to see what they need and what they don't need from you. To do that with this many actors, it just requires the ability to change your approach day to day, and sometimes within the day."
I got that sort of serialized feel from the movie in the fact that, with each character shifting focus, it almost felt like different movies, and it all was cohesive, but there was definitely a shift in focus. How did you approach that?
"We just had... because there is that jumping from one place and group of characters to another, what we had to do was we had to create a very consistent language—visual language—we had to create a consistency to the look and to the look of the wardrobe, the look of the design, and then we needed that unifying voice that the narrator provides, and that was sort of... those were the keys to try and make it all feel like one thing. So, the focus was just sort of making that the language—the visual language of the film—was consistent from one piece to another, and the worlds all worked together."
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced during production?
"The biggest challenges? I mean, there was a lot. We shot in Alabama, Northern Alabama, and Northern Alabama is... Alabama's an interesting place because of the weather's so unpredictable. Like, they have this saying in Alabama which is like 'if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes', which is the worst if you're on a film set and you need consistent cloud coverage, you need consistent... you want to make sure you know when it's going to rain, and that when it says it's gonna rain, it rains. And that, if it's gonna rain, that you have a covered set, but then with Alabama, it was like... it was cloudy, and then it was sunny, and then it was cloudy again, it was sunny again, then there was a tornado—tornadoes came randomly—and then on top of that, there was poison ivy and poison oak in all these woods that we were shooting. The environment was a challenge to work with. Then, scheduling-wise, a movie like this is challenging because you're dealing with a lot of actors who have very specific in and out dates, and you have to accommodate those and make your schedule work to them. And the film was very ambitious from the beginning, and we had to do a lot with a limited amount of time, and we weren't a huge budget movie. We were still what I would consider an independent movie, we're in the Netflix indie division. It still had the same kind of, the same kind of approach that I have with anything I do, maybe it wouldn't matter what the budget is, because I come from indie film, I always try to think of everything in of being very economical and try to be as efficient as possible."
How long was the shoot?
"It was somewhere around 40-something days."
What are some of your favorite moments and memories from making the film?
"My favorite, um let me see, there's some good ones—shooting the final showdown between Arvin and Bodecker, Sebastian Stan came in so mad, like not angry, but like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, it was like on another plane, and I loved that. I loved that day, it was like, his performance, there was one take in particular that was really inspiring. My other favorite scene to shoot, which we had like a day and a half to do, was the scene between Tom Holland and Rob Pattinson in the church—that's probably one of my most favorite things I've ever shot. Those two actors are so good, that scene is so well-written, and it feels so satisfying to finally get these two guys together and I really had to, because it was like theater, it was just two people sitting across from each other. The challenge was really using the camera to build the tension and to capture the performance, to do justice to those performances, so that was the most... that was my favorite scene to shoot in the movie."
That was a very intense scene. The whole time I was watching it, I was thinking not only is it so intense, but it's such a different side of both of those actors.
"Yes, yes, yeah."
What is the biggest message you want to give to people watching this movie? What is the one takeaway you hope that they'll have from this?
"I would hope that, going into it, that people aren't looking for a conventional story. Just allowing the film to go where it's gonna go, and not trying to predict where it's going to go. I want people to sort of have this sort of surprising experience, and go along with the ride. So, it's more for me it's sort of like... I always think whatever someone takes from a movie is what they take from the movie, and I know what the movie needs to be, and so much of what I love about the movie is the experience that I have watching it. It's almost like I could get to the end of the movie and not know exactly what it is that I'm feeling until the next day, but I love the fact that it's taking me someplace. So I hope that when people turn this movie on that they go along for the ride and kind of let the movie happen."
