For dutiful son, Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe), Columbia University is a Mecca — a portal to art, intellect, culture and freedom — everything his home town of Patterson, New Jersey, is not. When Allen is accepted into Columbia, his father, Louis (David Cross), a working-class poet, urges him to leave his emotionally ill mother, Naomi (Jennifer Jason Leigh) behind and head to New York to pursue his own creative dreams. At Columbia, Allen first encounters Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan) atop a table in the university’s library shouting a shocking passage from Henry Miller. Lucien becomes an object of complete fascination for the shy, unsophisticated Allen, and he’s soon drawn into Lucien’s hard-drinking, jazz-clubbing circle of friends including William Burroughs (Ben Foster), David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall), Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston), and Jack’s girlfriend Edie (Elizabeth Olsen). Allen goes through a liberating rebellion as a member of the “Libertine Circle,” while the older Kammerer, who is obsessed with Lucien, finds himself on the outside looking in, which ultimately leads to a deadly confrontation. Kill Your Darlings is a true story of friendship, love and murder. The film recounts the pivotal year that changed Allen Ginsberg’s life forever and provided the spark for him to start his own creative revolution.
Before sitting down with writer and first-time director John Krokidas and co-writer Austin Bunn to talk about this provocative film, I sat in on the press conference with stars Daniel Radcliffe, Dane DeHaan, and Michael C. Hall. I had read about the hordes of Harry Potter fans that still follow Radcliffe wherever he goes and how he gamely tries to deal with these often obsessive folks (“Sometimes it just makes it worse when I’m nice to them!”) but on this day he was treated quite respectfully with very little Potter-based hubbub (despite the breathless TV report I saw later that day about the bright turquoise pants he was wearing at the press conference!). I couldn’t be more impressed by Daniel Radcliffe’s performance in this film or his efforts on the film’s behalf. When I met up with Krokidas and Bunn, we talked about how they were able to make such an authentic-looking film with so little time and money.
Danny Miller: I love the way you so beautifully captured the 1940s period in this film. I found it especially amazing considering you shot the whole thing in 24 days with an extremely limited budget.
John Krokidas: It was all about doing your homework. My production designer, Stephen Carter, really went the distance before we started filming. For this kind of movie, you’re casting your locations as much as you’re casting your roles. And we ended being very lucky in that we got to shoot at many of the locations were these events actually happened.
Austin Bunn: We were able to film the scene where Allen Ginsburg first meets Lucien Carr in the exact spot where that happened at Columbia University.
I know this film was a real labor of love and took a very long time to get to the screen. Were there times during that process when you worried it just wasn’t going to happen?
John Krokidas: Many times! When I first talked to Daniel about doing this part, he still had Deathly Hallows, 1 and 2 to do so he was unavailable for at least two years. That was that, I thought. So then I asked the other person I thought would be great in the role — Jesse Eisenberg. He wanted to do it, we had all our financing in place and were ready to go when our main financier pulled out and fled the country! Then we found someone else and were ready to go but that person ended up pulling out, too. Then Jesse got cast in The Social Network and became a household name. He called me after that film came out and said that since he’d just played the most iconic college student he could ever play, he wanted to play grown-ups now. I totally understood but now I had a movie with no star and no financing and I was back to the bottom of the pile on some producer’s desk.
How did it all turn around?
Well, at that point I realized we’d been struggling for two years to get this film made and that Daniel had said he’d be available in two years! So I just sat down one night and wrote him a personal email. I did everything you’re not supposed to do — I basically behaved like some kind of crazy ex-girlfriend stalker!
You hadn’t been in touch with him during all that time?
No, not at all. He was consumed by the last two Harry Potter films. I didn’t even know if he remembered meeting me but I asked him in that email if he still felt any connection to the material. I told him that if he still wanted to do the film, I’d be very honored. And then the very next morning I woke up to an email from Daniel saying, “Abso-fucking-lutely!”
Wow, that’s incredible! I so admire the choices that all three of those Harry Potter kids have made since that series ended. Such interesting projects. I assume having Radcliffe on board changed everything overnight.
Oh man, Dan’s a dream. He’s been beside me on this project now for about four and a half years — not just as the star of the film, but as someone who’s been fighting to get the film made and out there. He even made one our foreign sales himself while he was doing press for The Woman in Black!
Wasn’t he on Broadway doing How to Succeed in Business when you were getting ready to shoot this movie?
Yes. And the whole time he was appearing eight times a week in that musical, we’d meet during the week. We started off working on his accent but it turned into much more. I remember asking him what techniques he used in his acting and he said that he’d been doing it for so long he wanted me to teach him something new. He wanted to approach Kill Your Darlings like it was his first film. I pulled out some of my acting training from Yale and we broke down the script together. He’s so bright, such an intellectual, that he really took to it. The flip side of that was that he gave me many tips on directing from his experience with the people he’d worked with. There were many times when I started to think, “Oh my God, what the fuck have I gotten myself into?” and then he’d share with me what he thought made a great director. Many of his tips really informed my process on set — things as simple as getting to know everybody’s name in the crew. He told me you’re going to need everything they’ve got in order to make your dream come true. He also told me that in times of crisis, you have to just make a decision — even if it’s the wrong one that you have to go back and correct later.
There are so many great people in this cast, including the amazing Jennifer Jason Leigh as Allen Ginsberg’s mother. You mentioned in the press conference that you wrote a very long monologue for Leigh’s character and how Austin convinced you to cut it. I’m sure that was the right decision but I have to admit I’d kill to hear her perform that! I wish you had shot it so you could at least put it on the DVD!
Oh, but we did shoot it! I’m not sure if it will make the DVD but I remember thinking on set that it was like I had the most expensive violin in the world in front of me — I sure as hell wanted to see what it could play! I think it was something like midnight on a Wednesday when we were doing the close-up of Jennifer talking to her son on the phone. I gave her like 42 different directions and just kept rolling. “Jennifer, seduce him! Now terrify him! Now become his best friend!” And she did every single one! She later told me she had so much fun doing this film and that it felt so liberating — she got to play in a way on the set that she hadn’t gotten to do in a long time.
I was also very impressed with Dane DeHaan as Lucien Carr. I kept thinking if you didn’t get the right person for that role, someone with a kind of Sebastian Flyte charisma, it just would have killed the movie.
You should have sat beside me while I was casting this whole thing — Sebastian Flyte was definitely a reference point that I used! We did old-fashioned “chemistry reads” for this film. My boyfriend is the one who turned me on to Dane. He said, “You have to watch this guy on In Treament! So Dane came in — he was the first person to read with Dan — and not only did he look like the young Lucien Carr, he just exuded charisma, confidence, and seduction. I know you’re never supposed to cast an actor in the room, but when he came in to read, I asked him, “So what’s your life going to be like for the next couple of months, Dane?” He kind of leaned back against the wall and put his hands in his pockets and said, “I don’t know. You tell me!” It was such a bold, cocky move that was so in line with the character. I thought “Yes! That’s him!”
I thought casting David Cross as Ginsberg’s dad was a very smart move. Not only is he great in the role, but he looks a lot more like the Allen Ginsberg we remember so you can imagine that his son will grow up to look like that. Because, I mean, let’s face it, I haven’t seen many photos of Allen Ginsberg at that young age, but I’m guessing Daniel Radcliffe is a lot more attractive.
Oh, but Allen did look like that when he was in college! We got access to a lot of those photos and Dan really does have a strong resemblance to the young Ginsberg! We did end up changing Dan’s eye color, I don’t know if you noticed that — he had brown contact lenses on for this film. I worried about that! I kept thinking, “Am I taking away Paul Newman’s blue eyes?”
Radcliffe is so good in this role, and it doesn’t seem like he — or his handlers — had any issue with the gay sex scenes.
Not at all. First of all, Dan doesn’t really have handlers — he decides what he wants to do. And here’s the crazy thing. When we were first making our cast lists, you’d think it would have been difficult to find actors who were willing to play gay. The truth was that it was actually hard to find actors who hadn’t just recently played gay in a movie! People don’t really care about that anymore. Those two boys were excited to do it. This is a movie about falling in love for the first time. About meeting cool friends for the first time. About going to those cool parties where you feel awkward in the corner for the first time. Everyone was excited to make this film.
I found the story of David Kammerer’s murder fascinating. Were you at all worried about how that character might feed into the stereotype of the older gay predator?
No, we didn’t have any anxiety about that. As you watch that character’s arc over the course of the film, even though there are times when he seems fairly nefarious and scary, he also turns out to be more three-dimensional and sympathetic than we first presumed. And that story is also balanced with what happends to the lead who’s coming out of the closet and discovering his own sexuality which becomes the most victorious act in the movie.
Austin Bunn: I think what John and I kept coming up with was that David Kammerer fell in love with the wrong kid and ended up manipulating him. He was someone with all this talent who was used to being the brightest person in the room but he never found a way to translate that energy of desire and lust into something else, it just kind of imploded inside of him. And the fact is, if you look at the real story, the film is very accurate —we didn’t want to burnish the facts or change them just to make some kind of portrait of liberation — we wanted to make this story honest and accurate.
Were you in touch with any of the family members of the real-life people?
John Krokidas: The people we’ve been in touch with the most are the people at Allen Ginsberg Estate who read the script and loved it. Having the Ginsberg stamp of approval has meant everything to us now that we’re sharing the film with the world.
Austin Bunn: I know that Ben Foster was working with the Burroughs Estate during his research process and getting a lot of information from them. I’m proud of all the research we did that you see on screen (click here to read Bunn’s fascinating notes on background material and sources, click on “The Beats”), but, of course, we also didn’t want to make it seem like some kind of academic treatise on these characters.
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Kill Your Darlings, released by Sony Classics, is currently playing in New York and Los Angeles and will be opening in many more cities starting on October 18, 2013.