‘Destroyer’ Is A Harrowing Look At Time, Trauma And Bank Robberies

Let’s get this out of the way: Nicole Kidman looks very different in Destroyer.

If there was one word for it, it’s ‘eroded’. In a Golden Globe-nominated role, Kidman plays Erin Bell, a seemingly hard-boiled LA detective who has gone rogue to investigate a John Doe murder she’s overtly invested in.

As the film plays out, we alternate between flashbacks and the present day to slowly piece together the person she once was — and the person (and mother) she could’ve been, if not for a series of traumas, mistakes and economic frustrations.

Yet we never fully understand Erin, which makes Kidman’s transformation that much more effective: like her best roles, there is a sense that there is so much withheld underneath her surface from the audience.

It’s a role that asks more questions than it answers, but, thanks to Kidman, always remains real — even when we watch her stumble around in a suspect wig, speak in gravelly tones as if her throat was coated in dirt, limping from suspect to suspect with possible broken bones.

Talking to Destroyer‘s director Karyn Kusama over the phone, she tells me that it was the unknowable nature of Erin that drew both herself and Kidman to the film.

“She sort of starts as a mystery — you have to uncover, unearth her secrets in a way,” she says. “And then, over the course of the film you truly do become closer to understanding the way she thinks and her psychology…. I thought that was just a really interesting experience for an audience, to be so immersed in this woman’s life and her mistakes.”

Kusama’s career as a director has been fraught. In 2000, her debut Girlfight was a film festival hit, landing her two massive big-budget films, 2005’s Æon Flux and 2009’s Jennifer’s Body, both of which flopped critically and financially, though the latter has been re-examined in recent years, and turned into somewhat of a cult classic.

Like Kidman’s best roles, there is a sense that there is so much withheld underneath her surface from the audience.

The film was marketed towards male audiences, with lead Megan Fox sold as she continually was at the time: sexy, and nothing else. But Jennifer’s Body, if not entirely successful, aimed to deconstruct the very thing it was marketed as. Rather than the sleazy sex thriller it was sold as, it was a horror-comedy rape-revenge written by Juno‘s Diablo Cody and submerged in ’00s pop-punk culture.

In it, Needy (Amanda Seyfried) tries to stop her murderous best friend Jennifer (Fox), who turned into a boy-crazy demon after an indie band sacrificed her for fame, mistakenly thinking she was a virgin. Retrospectives have analysed how the film played with Fox’s persona, and highlighted the sapphic tones between the two leads — tones which were largely ignored at the time, despite being anything but sub-text. It’s a testament to how terribly the film was marketed, and how wilfully we wanted to impose expectations onto it.

It makes sense then that Kusama was attracted to Destroyer, a genre film which refuses gendered conventions, or expectations of  a conclusive ending. Rounded out by a cast that includes Sebastian Stan, Bradley Whitford and Orphan Black‘s Tatiana Maslany, Destroyer is a grim film that examines how the world erodes women, then blames them for their fault lines.

— Mild spoilers follow in this interview. —

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You’ve said before that the circular structure of the film is “essentially female”. I was curious as to what you meant by that?

We have this idea about storytelling as literally as a straight line. As literally a linear construction — and yet, maybe it’s equally reductive of me to say something as general about a circular narrative having a female quality, but somehow to me there is something true about that.

Just the notion of the forward trajectory of the hero’s path is a more conventionally masculine construction — and that the notion of setting up story and meeting up back at the same place that you thought you started has qualities that might also be called female.

Erin is such a mystery as a character, even her odd gait is undefined. Do you feel like you completely understand her?

I love that question. I think that’s a big part of why I wanted to make the movie was that, like a lot of people in life who I’m close to and who I am constantly making an attempt to understand why they behave the way they do, Erin invokes those same feelings for me. You know, that same sense of frustration, and anxiety, and at times, pity, but more than anything like a curiosity around.

I think the reason I wanted to tell the story is I didn’t feel like I knew her entirely, and I didn’t know if I ever could.

Honestly, I think the reason I wanted to tell the story is I didn’t feel like I knew her entirely, and I didn’t know if I ever could.

I think there is something kind of interesting having the opportunity to explore a character that you have to brazenly say, “I don’t get everything she does, because I wouldn’t necessarily do it myself.”

Her choices would not be my choices. Yet, I don’t doubt that she has, within the wall of the story, has made the kind of mistakes that humans make.

There’s a lot about her past in the film that isn’t explained completely. Did you and Nicole, and also the writers, map out her past? And also, her day to day? I can’t really imagine her eating or, I don’t know, having a shower.

Yeah, [showering] almost seems more [foreign] than eating.

Nicole asked [screenwriters] Phil [Hay] and Matt [Manfredi] for their idea of her history. They wrote a long document, really put it together quickly.

They didn’t have to think very hard about who they imagined she was: what her history was, what her family structure was, or lack of structure, what her trajectory might have been into law enforcement, perhaps out of a stint in the military. How she has  arrived at this first flashback that we see, already as a person somewhat vulnerable to corruption.

They said, “Please, take whatever you want, leave whatever you want”. I think, for Nicole, it was actually really valuable. She took a lot of it and internalised it and talked about a lot of it on set about as what was driving her.

And yet, in the day to day stuff… I mean, I, too, had the question about seeing her eat. I had asked for that scene, particularly when it wasn’t in an earlier draught, and we had a scene of her sitting alone at home at night, drunk and eating. Shovelling food into her mouth.

There was something so amazing about the scene, but in the context of the movie it felt like we were pausing to look at her, and we were already deep enough into the movie that we couldn’t be looking at her anymore. We had to be with her.

I only just now figured that out, by the way. I took the scene out feeling like we were just simply pausing, but now I realise that part of what’s happening is that you’re getting closer to her as you get more information about her.

There’s something about pausing also on getting close to her and being observational that felt [like] the wrong step in the film.

It must be hard to kill your darlings like that, though.

Oh my god, I think about that scene — that’s the kind of scene that keeps me up at night in my dreams.

I’m just like, “I wonder what the movie would have been like if we could have had that?” But, at the same time, I sort of do know. But you have to kill your darlings a lot in the [post-production] phase. That’s something I’m getting more and more used to.

Early in the film, Erin jerks off a dying man for information. It’s such a stark difference from the usual, “I’ll do anything” scenes in genre films — normally there is a big act of violence or a moral complication really early in. What did that scene mean to you? I found it quite funny, in a weird way.

We’re in a time where images like that need to be contextualised and, in my opinion, you need to have a strong point of view about what it means when you see something like that scene.

I, Nicole and James [Jordan], the actor, had always known this wasn’t really a scene about power or humiliation. It was meant to be more cold and depressingly transactional.

[There] was almost this disarming or complicated, merciful, energy around it, because part of what we communicate is that she did have some kind of relationship or even friendship — even if it was all an illusion — with this guy in the past.

It was really important to me that I just film the scene in which there were really no victims, but just people with competing agendas or just agendas that require unpleasant things of one another.

There’s a line that really stuck out to me where Bradley Whitford’s character says, “You know what successful people do? They get over things.” Do you agree with that?

[That character’s] idea of moving on is moving past accountability and beyond personal responsibility — as if every day you start afresh and clean.

I don’t actually believe that at all. There are certain things I’m really thankful to have moved on from, certain ways of thinking or patterns in my life that I’ve worked on.

I’m more interested in what happens when you wrestle the psychic load to the ground or carry it. What is that like?

But in terms of the way he’s framing that idea, I think he’s somebody who’s pretty close to moral corruption all the time. It seems like that’s just a thing you’d tell yourself when you want to accept that you live in denial, you know?

But I’ve been told by audience members that they sort of agree with him. You know, that they sort of feel that there is something right about what he’s saying.

I get why we like these clean ideas about, you know, cutting loose your baggage and lightening the psychic load. But in a way I guess I’m more interested in what happens when you wrestle the psychic load to the ground or carry it. What is that like? [And Erin], she’s just carrying it all the time.

When I heard it, I thought, “successful doesn’t mean good”, you know?

Yeah, that’s true.

That’s the other component to all of this: for some people, the status and the markers around their life that tell the rest of the world what kind of life they have, that’s the value they’re looking for.

Part of what I think the movie is about is watching this woman who is, in many respects, so motivated by just sheer hunger and greed, come to the terms with the fact that she has some kind of moral code. And the fact that she has had [that code] has been destroying her, because she can’t reconcile herself with herself.

This might be a bit of an obvious question, but who is the destroyer in this film?

In some ways, it’s up to the audience.

To me, the destroyer was always time. Just the process of time passing, the process of ageing.

If you do that without wisdom or self-reflection, time is pretty cruel, pretty merciless. That’s the lens from which I was making the movie and how I was trying to think about what characters looked like and how they moved.

I also think you can make the argument for the destroyer [being] greed and power. But for me, I always go back to big old time.

I watched the director’s cut of Jennifer’s Body recently in Sydney. It was the film’s theatrical debut in Australia, let alone the director’s cut.

Yeah, I know! I thought it was so crazy.

You were just talking about time then, and obviously you’ve been able to see that film be reclaimed by critics. How does it feel to go back and create the film that you, perhaps, more envisioned?

Part of the pain of making movies is that, in the case of the director’s cut, that was the movie that I wanted to release.

But I came to terms with what was going to end up in the theatres and I was relatively happy with it. When it came out in theatres, it was rejected by both some fans and many critics, and all of that felt like such an avoidable problem given the way the movie had been framed by its ill-conceived marketing campaign.

I feel a sense of great thankfulness that anyone’s reassessing the movie now again — and that people are getting the chance to see the director’s cut. [It] was much more tonally- I don’t want to say much more tonally complicated, but it was more an even bigger swing between the despair of, say the families of those [demon-slayed] boys, and the recklessness of Jennifer.

I’d love to see the director’s cut on the big screen, because since I’ve made it I haven’t gotten that opportunity. I’m happy you did.

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Destroyer is in Australian cinemas now.

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Jared Richards is a staff writer at Junkee, and co-host of Sleepless In Sydney on FBi Radio. Follow him on Twitter.