Light from Light INTERVIEW

Light from Light stars Marin Ireland and Jim Gaffigan, and is Paul Harrill’s second feature film. The film is a meditative narrative about a paranormal investigator (Ireland) finding her place as a single mother to a coming-of-age son, and helping a widower (Gaffigan) come to terms with the loss of his wife, whom he suspects may be haunting him. The film premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Playing in select theatres nationwide now.

Website: https://www.lightfromlightfilm.com/

Dawn: I know that it’s important to you to make films in your home state. I was wondering why that’s important to you and how that may relate to your creative process?

Paul: I think the simplest way for me to talk about it is just to say that setting stories there has allowed me to write about things in a way that feels deeper or truer to me than it would be if I was setting them somewhere else. That’s the really short version of it. For example, I lived in Philadelphia for like 7 years and I never felt a Philadelphian. I never felt like that was my adopted city. I feel a lot of affection for that place and I have a lot of dear friends there, but in all the time that I spent there I wrote one thirty page screenplay that was set there. For whatever reason, sometimes there’s things about yourself you don’t understand or you might even not want to over-intellectualize you know. Place is important to me and for good or bad, I know east Tennessee really well, and it lets me tell those stories. 

Dawn: Do the opening shots of the film…does that place mean something specific to you? What it made me think of, was when I need to heal, or am going through something, or have to make a big decision, I’m big into being outside in nature, and I always go take a walk, or sit by a river or hike on a mountain to sort of process things. I was picturing you doing that, and this place in the opening shots representing either a place you did that at, or perhaps that this was the exact place.

Paul: What you just said made me think of a lot of things, but first I’ll answer your question. Those specific three shots of the fog lifting were actually taken after a really long night of filming. It was the night we filmed the porch scene, and we were getting ready to leave the location. We were packing up, it was dawn, and this fog had rolled in and Greta Zozula, the cinematographer, was like, we have to film this. I think I knew then, like this is gonna be how we open the movie. So that specific place that was being filmed was not, before the film, special to me. But as a representation of the Smokies and the fog that you see in the Smokies, and how that makes me feel, and the sort of reflection that you’re talking about - yes absolutely. 

And the other part of it is that, what I find so wonderful about what you just said is that in a different way, you’re rephrasing what I wanted those shots to be for the audience. I wanted those shots to let anyone who’s watching the film know like this is the pace of the film, and I want you to feel it immediately. I would like for it to be the kind of movie that does what you’re talking about - that it is like a walk in the woods. Or a film that’s like sitting by the lake and the chance to reflect. Not just to see a story and for things to happen but also a chance to think about things. 

Dawn: The moment that I feel like spoke to what the film was about the most was when she asks “Do you think this is real?” and the pastor responds “I think this is real for him.” That really struck me and I was wondering if you could talk about those lines a little bit - where they came from and was there a scenario that inspired that for you personally? 

Paul: I think those lines weren’t inspired specifically by a thing that happened, or came out of an exchange that I had with a person, but they definitely drew out of my experience with watching people I’m close to go through things that are painful. Or kind of gone through myself. In the sense that, especially when you’re seeing it happen to someone else, as someone with some distance you see that there might not be a rational reason for someone feeling the way that they are. Maybe not over the loss of a loved one, but over some other pain in their life. Let’s just say theoretically a friend going through a breakup you can see that like wow, you’re really better off without that person. But the pain that that person’s going through, none of that person’s friends can understand that this is very real. We create our own realities. Our feeling, which we’re often not in control of, certainly not completely, shape the reality we have.

Dawn: Was there a specific moment that happened to you that made you want to incorporate a sort of paranormal or other-worldly aspect to this film? When he thinks that his keys had been moved to a place where she usually stands, that’s where I really connected with that, and thought about how people who have lost a loved one will say things like “oh I used to go crazy when their dirty socks were all over the floor and now I wish their dirty socks were all over the floor.” So I was wondering if there was a specific moment that happened to you, where maybe there was a glitch in your brain where something was missing or…?

Paul: Yeah, not tied to the death of a loved one, but I think we’ve all lost our keys someplace, or at least I have, and you come back and you’re like, I know I looked there and they weren’t there and now they’re there, those kinds of things. In trying to establish the mystery of her potential haunting, I was trying to think of really concrete things that I had experienced in my life, because that’s a way for me to try to get people to see it, see what he’s going through, connect with it. As opposed to just saying, oh, I feel a presence, but to like talk about things that are really concrete. 

Dawn: I know that you didn’t make a film about ghosts, however, I just happen to personally love ghosts, so I was wondering if you had any form of paranormal experiences yourself? And if that had any relationship to the film?

Paul: I haven’t had something that I would conclusively call a paranormal experience, and the film doesn't grow out of that part - the need to tell a story about whether ghosts are real or not. And certainly doesn’t come from a conviction of trying to tell anyone who believes in ghosts like oh you’re crazy. It’s not engaged with that as it’s first priority. 

To be honest, where this story comes from is, I’d had the most fragmentary thought years ago like, oh, I might be interested in telling a ghost story at some point. It wasn’t like a horror movie…I was interested in them only very tangentially. And then I heard this interview with a woman on the radio who was a paranormal investigator and I only heard it for a couple minutes while I was in range, it was on an AM radio station while I was driving through Virginia, and hearing that sort of like *snaps fingers* knocked something loose. It was was not like, oh I want to tell a ghost story. What I heard her talk about in the two or three minutes I heard her was just enough to make me realize, or to understand how I could tell a story about a paranormal investigator and use that as a way to explore other things that I care about and live with.

It’s not like I don’t care about ghosts. I did a lot of research in advance of writing the first words of the screenplay. I loved reading about these investigators...that was all really cool. I don’t want to suggest for a second that I was just like, ghosts are just a metaphor for something else so I don’t care about this. 

Dawn: I remember when I saw the film at Sundance your intro was like “if you thought you came here to see a horror movie you’re gonna be disappointed.”

Paul: I did say that. 

Dawn: I remember I was in the audience and I was like DAMMIT. 

Paul: And that’s exciting to me to think that you came to the movie seeking one thing and you got something else. 

You write something and you make something because you want to express something and you want people to feel something, but sometimes you don’t know what’s truly possible in a way that a film may affect people. And I’ve had these experiences where people came up and talked to me, or had some sort of confessional moment. Which sounds like a bad thing, but it’s actually a really beautiful thing. At these Q&As, at Sundance and Montclair, it happened Monday night in New York at the Quad. Jim, Elizabeth Moss and I did a Q&A and afterwards you know people were chatting around and this woman was visibly moved, and I could tell she’d been crying, and she was telling me about the loss of her father, and in that moment of watching the movie, it had done something for her or was giving her something that was helping her move forward. And sometimes when people talk about this stuff with me, they’ll be really apologetic. Like, “I’m sorry, I’ll get to the point...” And I’m like “no no no it’s ok.” I won’t say this is why we made the movie, I didn’t make the movie for people to have this therapeutic or cathartic experience, but like, if you had that, that’s wonderful. 

What you said earlier, to come full circle, what you said about going into nature to heal, I definitely do that as well, but I also do that with art. It’s not something that I, as a filmmaker, can engineer for people, but if it happens, it’s really beautiful.