Bullying, gaslighting, and total paranoia: Director Charlie Polinger on ‘The Plague’

During the early days of the pandemic, writer-director Charlie Polinger found himself in his childhood bedroom at his parents’ house, quarantining after he caught COVID. That’s when he came across his journals from when he was a tweenager, things he scribbled down at an all-boys’ summer camp. “There was this idea of ‘the plague,’ which is a game we played,” he explains to Gold Derby in the aftermath of his Cannes-premiering feature directorial debut, The Plague, scoring three Independent Spirit Award nominations: Best Feature, Best Lead Performance (Everett Blunck as Ben), and Best Breakthrough Performance (Kayo Martin as Jake). “And it just brought back a flood of memories,” he continues. From there, Polinger was compelled to write a fictional story rooted in those memories, as well as the tactile feeling of boyhood anxiety. “It’s just the visceral experience of just navigating a single day when you’re 12 years old.”

True to Polinger’s memories, The Plague is set in 2003 at a water polo camp for young boys around 12 and 13 years old. Among the students is the anxious and quietly vulnerable Ben, who’s trying to find his voice and place in the group. Along the way, he befriends the camp’s outcast, Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), cruelly avoided by the other boys for carrying a made-up disease that the boys refer to as plague. (According to the campers, everything — from one’s changing adolescent body to tween acne — can be “plague sh-t.”) The lead bully of the pack? Enter Jake (played by instant-star Martin), who conceals his own insecurities by tormenting both Eli and Ben.

In other words, The Plague has all the ingredients of a perfect coming-of-age movie. But the unique twist is Polinger’s smartly playful use of horror and thriller tropes to steer those treacherous waters. “I had done a short at film school about boys at a water polo camp, so I was already interested in this environment,” Polinger explains. “I knew that the sport of water polo could have cinematic opportunities to explore group dynamics, themes of boyhood and being uncomfortable in your body and feeling like you’re always exposed. There’s an anxiety level that I think lends itself to horror or thrillers, particularly psychological horrors and psychodramas.”

Below is our conversation with Polinger, on The Plague, working with Joel Edgerton and Mikey Madison, the horror show of adolescence, and his cinematic touchstones.

Gold Derby: Congratulations on your Independent Spirit Award nominations, first of all.

Charlie Polinger: Thank you. It’s hard to believe and it feels amazing. To think that not so long ago we were watching the tapes of thousands of boys and trying to put together this cast. And then it all came together and became a real movie. And it’s getting out in the world like this, getting recognition. I’m super excited for Kayo and Everett in particular.

You’re using some horror-thriller genre cues to explore these weighty themes of adolescence. How did that come about?

I knew that I didn’t want to cast a nostalgic filter on this story. I wanted it to feel very present and very visceral. And I wanted to immerse an audience in a very subjective experience of being a 12-year-old boy. And so when I tried to tap into what I remember, it feels like there’s this paranoia and you’re clocking every glance and thinking about everything you said in your head, and you’re still kind of aware of yourself in a space. I started watching a lot of these kinds of older, psychological horror films from the 1960s and 1970s where you’re put inside the head of a character who is perhaps an unreliable narrator and spiraling out in some way.

What I love about some of those films is, the entire world morphs with the perception and the subjectivity of the protagonist. I think that was the biggest inspiration I took from some of these genre films. You wonder if there might be something wrong with you or you’re just being paranoid and there’s that uncertainty of almost gaslighting yourself. That feels very much like a horror film. I was also inspired by Todd Haynes‘s film Safe with Julianne Moore, just feeling that there’s something wrong with her and feeling sure about it, and everyone thinks she’s crazy. That’s one of the scariest films I’ve ever seen.

What other movies did you look at? In one of our chats last month, I recall you mentioning Full Metal Jacket.

Films like Eyes Without a Face, The Shining, Repulsion. And The Hour of the Wolf; these films where you have someone who feels like they’re going a little crazy. Carrie was definitely a big reference. It’s such an iconic film about bullying and teen anxiety. And war films as well were a big influence. Come and See was another big one. It’s obviously a really extreme movie, but I think it’s such an incredible psychological film and it utilizes the sounds of the war planes flying over and even when it’s not possible that there’d be planes, you keep hearing the sound. That was a huge inspiration for the sound design of all the ways that the film is putting you inside the paranoia and the headspace of the character. And Full Metal Jacket, of course. Such a powerful film about the hierarchies and conformity and the dynamics of groups of men.

What was it like working with this young ensemble cast of different experience levels, putting them into this psychological headspace?

It was easy because they read the script and I responded to it. They had their own experiences to bring to the table in relation to the themes of the story. And so from the first meeting with Kayo, with Everett, and all of them, they were bringing all kinds of ideas and personal stories and thoughts about who these characters would be and how they would carry themselves through this world. It’s easy to write off this character Kayo plays as a bully or villain. But he was interested to humanize this character of Jake and bring a more complicated dimension to him where Jake also has his own insecurities. He feels confident through never taking anything seriously or never letting anyone know he’s taking anything seriously.

Kayo really wanted to explore that he starts to form a place of friendship with Ben, and he feels betrayed by Ben in a way. He brought a really smart, sophisticated approach to that character, which could easily have been a two-dimensional bully. And Everett similarly really wanted to explore a character who doesn’t totally know who he is yet, and trying to put on these different masks in front of the different boys. He almost mirrors the behavior of different boys in different scenes or depending on who he is around. They both understood the characters and they brought so much to the table.

And on the other hand, you have a really experienced actor like Joel Edgerton in the role of their coach. I imagine he really was like a teacher to him, on and off camera.

The kids were thrilled to work with Joel, and Joel felt similarly. He would say to me after every day that he was learning so much about acting, working with them and seeing how spontaneous they were and how they would really just react in the moment. I think he leaned into that, and then it suddenly became a dynamic where he would really try to get Kayo’s character under control. And Kayo would, in return, start provoking him even more. And Joel would get really angry and they would just riff off of each other. [Laughs]. Joel would hang out with water polo coaches and learn the sport. And the boys spent a few weeks learning, teaching themselves how to play water polo and doing basically a water polo bootcamp. And so I think Joel became an actual coach for them in some ways.

There are several sensitive scenes in the film. Was there one that was particularly difficult? I’m thinking of this one where Kenny’s character Eli gets laughed at for having an erection in front of the girls.

We rehearsed that scene first because we knew that was a really sensitive one. And we essentially all talked about it as a group, the full ensemble, about how it would feel to be humiliated that way. And we worked with an intimacy coordinator and she’d actually have all of us take turns playing Eli in that scene. So I did it, all the producers did it, and each of the boys took turns being the person who’s standing there and everyone’s laughing at them. That was a really fun bonding exercise. It also created a sense of trust where the boys and all of us knew that we’re all in this together. That gave Kenny a lot of confidence to be vulnerable. And it made the other boys feel less worried about feeling guilty for really going for it when they’re laughing at him in the scene. And it created the boundaries between the scene and real life. So once we actually got there on the day and the girls were there and we were doing the scene, I think it was really straightforward. Jake basically calls out that Eli’s character is covering himself up and everyone just gets each other’s attention and it’s this huge pool, so you had to scream to be heard. Kayo just kept it going and Joel tried to get him away and Kayo would keep running away from Joel, adding fuel to the fire. It became a very organic thing.

I love that you set the film in 2003. Of course part of it is staying true to your own memories. But not having to deal with social media or excessive cell phones adds something to the narrative.

I don’t really know what it would be like to be 13 with cell phones. It’s a whole different world and all the dynamics at a camp like this would be different. Either they would take your phones away or everyone would be looking up the plague on their phone and trying to see what they could find online. I just thought that would be a really different movie. And to keep it personal to my experiences, it had to be 2003. I’m really inspired by these films like Lady Bird and The Squid and The Whale and Superbad. And those movies are all super personal to those filmmakers. And they set them in a time period that they knew well. And it’s not about trying to be a period piece, but I think it gives it this extra personal feeling when you’re telling a story like that around your own childhood. A lot of the clothes that the boys wear in the movie were clothes that I took from my attic that my mom had kept. I’d be giving them a certain pair of flip flops or a certain shirt, leaning into this specificity of time and place that I felt like I had some authority over.

You shot this on 35mm, which is increasingly rare. And your camera does move eerily true to the psychological thrillers we talked about. You also have a lot of impressive underwater scenes.

I have a really close relationship with Steven Breckon, my cinematographer. He and I have known each other from school and made a bunch of short films together. It’s been amazing to see people respond to his work in this and this is his first feature really. He was in the shortlist for the Critics Choice with all these incredible, extremely established cinematographers. So I feel really excited for him. It just started with us reading the script together and having this same conversation about wanting it to feel like you’re immersed inside of the experience of being this 12-year-old boy and talking through everything that he’s feeling in every scene and how we might be able to use the camera and the visual language to immerse an audience in that experience.

And Steven was talking a lot about how there could be subtle and perceptible ways that the space changes [based on] Ben’s relationship to the group. His space could shift in ways that dramatize or visualize what’s in his head at that moment. That became the guiding principle. If we feel like Ben’s feeling really excited, how can we get ourselves excited when we’re looking at the shot? Or if he’s feeling freaked out, how can we do the same? Steven works from an intuitive emotional level.

And add to the high-stakes nature of the themes, I’d imagine shooting on film perhaps brings something high-stakes and more discipline to the set too.

It’s really true. There’s this physical thing running and you hear it worrying, and it’s precious. And so you do the rehearsal, but as soon as you call “action,” everyone really locks in in a way that I think is different digitally. And the fact that no one can actually look at a monitor and see a high-definition image means that you kind of look through the eye piece and check the frame and then you trust in it. And then you’re really just looking at the performances. I was standing right next to the camera with these boys in these bunk rooms or in these locker rooms, watching them perform and focused on that rather than the lighting in the shot. And I think that that really helped me feel connected with them.

What were some of the things that the kids brought to the table that might not have been in the script?

I remember Kayo had the idea that maybe he’d be playing pinball in this scene where Everett confronts him and that scene used to be set in the locker room. Kayo thought if there’s something that’s more of an action where he can be focused on the game or pretending to be focused on the pinball game and ignoring Ben, that would be his way to get inside of his head. And then that became this challenge [for Ben] to try to get him to look at him and try to get him to actually pay attention to what he’s saying. And suddenly there was this whole other level of tension brought into the scene. They would constantly add new jokes about the plague. They created little code languages with each other and certain inside jokes that the characters had with each other. Like, a little glance that’s like an inside joke where they’re making fun of [someone]. And so there was history and inside jokes and group dynamics that were developed that live outside of the surface of the story. That made all of their performances feel really specific and lived in.

What can you tell us about the movie you’re working on next, starring Mikey Madison?

I’m actually currently in Budapest right now, doing pre-production scouts for it, which is shooting here in February. I don’t know if I can say too much about it, but it’s with A24 and yes, Mikey Madison is starring in it. It’s a very high-energy dark comedy, also about a plague in a way, but it’s extremely different. It’s set in medieval times and takes place in a castle for the most part. It explores some similar group dynamics. But it’s just a very different genre and it’s more comedic.

View this article at Gold Derby.