Penny Vozniak's 'Despite The Gods' Interview: 'Raw, Intimate, No Bull****'

If you are a horror fan annd heard about Jennifer Lynch's film Hisss, and then wondered, "What the fuck happened to that film Hisss?", you need to see another film called Despite the Gods, a documentary about what went wrong with Hisss.

Despite the Gods, as a behind-the-scenes documentary was unplanned and organic. Filmmaker Penny Vozniak was in Mumbai, India for a few days en route to Kabul where she had a film in development. In Mumbai, coincidentally, Jennifer Lynch had started shooting her Bollywood horror film about a woman who can change into a snake. In an unlikely twist of fate, Vozniak ended up meeting Lynch and being asked to stay and shoot some footage.

"I was asked to babysit the daughter of Jennifer Lynch as a favor to my old friend Govind Menon," explains Vozniak. "After only a few days with Jennifer we became fast friends and she convinced me to stay for the shoot... and she suggested that I shoot an EPK (behind-the-scenes) for the Hisss dvd."

Admittedly, Vozniak wasn't really into the project at first, and it was Lynch who convinced her to stay on. "I did have this delicious idea to shoot an observational story about Jennifer’s experience on this shoot. I crossed my fingers that her unique personality and blunt honesty would still come across on camera. And it did."

Watch the trailer for Hisss:

Now, watch the trailer for Vozniak's film about Hisss to see what really happened:

"This film has legs," says Vozniak, "because Jen takes me and the audience deep into her personal experience on the set of Hisss. From the start I had intended the story to be told from her perspective, her experiences both personal and professional making a movie in another strange land, far far from Hollywood. But I did initially plan (in that first fateful week) for a more ‘Bollywood meets Hollywood’ angle. It was after a few weeks of pre-production that I realized most of the great footage I was getting wasn’t strictly about movie-making.Iin fact, not much of what was happening was about movie-making; it was about relationships, cultural differences, personal crises that triggered deep seated fears for everyone involved. It was Jennifer’s personal odyssey that I was witnessing and documenting."

By negotiating a deal to direct the behind-the-scenes for the DVD, Vozniak made it so that she could stay in Mumbai as long as she needed for the project and she even ended up rooming with Lynch, which provides some great moments in the documentary. She produced a behind-the-scenes featurette for the DVD as well.

Shooting this documentary with no plan, no preparation, and no research was a risk. "I think being a fledgling filmmaker makes these kind of flash decisions easier because you have no template of the 'right way' to make a film! It just felt right so I went on this. I postponed my trip to Kabul and stayed in India for what was to be three months…but it turned into 8."

As far as realizing she had more than just a DVD featurette on her hands, Vozniak "knew pretty fast that there was a great story to be told. But it would mean being there every moment because many of the things that were going wrong seemed to be being pulled by invisible strings. It was near impossible to put you finger on why things kept going wrong. I had to capture this somehow. It’s too easy to blame production, Jennifer, India, the crew, her daughter, but really, it was non and all of these things. All films sets have their issues, but this film seemed plagued.

Despite everything that went horribly wrong with Hisss in those first two months, Lynch and her crew decided to press on regardless of all the signs they received to stop.

"One of those defining moments was in the first couple of weeks of production in the conversation about the lack of stunt insurance in Bollywood," explains Vozniak."I was hoping to just get a conversation about insurance in India that unfolded naturally at the breakfast table as we sat down. These kind of scenes are the backbone of the film: scenes where they’re talking about the nuts and bots of movie making, but there’s a subtext underlying every scene that says so much more about the people having the conversation. These are my key scenes in the film."

Ultimately, it is Jennifer Lynch herself who makes the film worthwhile. "She was so willing to share every experience as she was having it was such eloquence and clarity, and she wasn't afraid to be embarrassed, to lose her shit, to look small, to look a little crazy, too."

And Jennifer does look a little crazy. That's what makes this film appealing. First, we know Hisss ended up as a terrible film. Second, we get to see Lynch having a meltdown on set and we sympathize with her and we actually like her because of her blunt honesty and her direct approach to life and conversation. This is not some pitiable woman genre director who doesn't know what she's doing: this is a self-aware, smart woman with a sharp wit and a strong understanding of who she is and what she's doing. That alone is unspeakably refreshing.

"Anyone who came into contact with Jennifer was bewitched," agrees Vozniak. "They responded so positively to her openness and self-effacing manner (and her crudeness too!). She’s not just making a movie when she’s on set; she’s spilling her blood and sharing her soul when she makes a movie. It’s more than meets the eye."

Lynch isn't in any way upset that the documentary shows such raw and candid moments. In fact, she's in on it and was, every step of the way.

"I don’t make any efforts to hide her breakdowns or intimate moments because she made no efforts to hide them from the camera and me. I have showed her rough cuts along the way and she was happy for me to share these moments because ultimately it’s a part of her journey; these moments are a part of her personal journey. When she arrives in India she is like a fish out of water: repelled by the chaos, the culture, the heat, the noise, the lack of organization, the ‘way things are done’ in India… but then throughout the course of the film she learns how to let go of her fears of failure and go with the chaos. And ultimately, that's what the film is about: this journey.

"I feel that the documentary shows Jennifer as an incredibly strong, creative, independent, freethinking woman who is not afraid to share how she feels about a range of subjects from her sex life, shortcomings, feeling lonely, and her inabilities to cope. All the things that most of us aren't comfortable talking about, she brings them up and is a startling mirror.

"I see Jennifer’s vulnerability as her greatest strength, not a weakness, there’s no bullshit, no cover up, that rawness is so endearing."

This Herzog/Kinski relationship involved Lynch trusting Vozniak; letting go to her and allowing a cathartic experience to happen, no matter how she ended up appearing to audiences.

"Jennifer trusted me implicitly," verifies Vozniak, "and in a way, my presence on set served a confessional for her and a record of the indefinable madness she felt herself spiralling into. It was a symbiotic relationship indeed. I like to work this way with the people in my films. It is very intimate."

The disasters that plagued the set of Hisss also plagued Vozniak.

"I had my own series of technical disasters throughout the shoot such as sitting on generators under a tarpaulin in cyclonic rains in the jungle trying to dowload my one precious P2 card onto my laptop so I could continue shooting. And having to shoot many scenes underneath ceiling fans: they menace top microphones but if you turn them off people get cranky very fast in 40-degree-Celsius heat."

Jennifer Lynch, who largely hasn't been in the public eye as a personality herself, seems to share the brutal honesty and expressiveness of her father, David Lynch.

Like her father, Jennifer Lynch "has the qualities of being brutally honest and having an unorthodox artistic vision and using colourful language. Jennifer is very comfortable talking about her past failures. She doesn’t have a trace of pretence. Her humour is at its peak when she is talking about her shortcomings. That’s just how she is. She doesn't pretend to be anyone other than who she is in that moment. And she makes no apologies for it. I love that."

Ultimately, Despite the Gods serves to both vindicate Lynch from the disaster that is Hisss and to bring her back into the spotlight. It is truly "despite" the setbacks that this film brings forth a new way of experiencing Hisss and understanding why the film went through three years of hell before being released. Stories floated around that it was a simple battle between a director and the producers over the final vision. But Vozniak tells us it was never that black and white.

"What the papers also don’t tell you about is the joyful, crazy, strange cross-cultural experience that was making this film. It wasn't all a nightmare: parts of it were pure celebration. Sure, there were differences of opinion and heated arguments, but ultimately everyone worked together as a team to get the film over the line under very difficult circumstances. It was quite a distilled version of the truth in the papers. What really happened behind the scenes of Hisss and who is to blame is a question I have not tried to answer.

As the film's title alludes, there is a sense in this documentary that not everything here is caused by human error. Is this an ill-fated or damned project? Why is this so hard? The truth is that the finger of blame can be pointed at everyone and no one."

And there is a side of Jennifer Lynch that most people never get to see that they will in Despite the Gods:

"She is a renegade filmmaker, a devoted mother, that she is a hands on and passionate director. I hope that this film shows Jennifer is Jennifer, not 'Jennifer Lynch as the daughter of David Lynch.' Jennifer Lynch as filmmaker, mother, beautifully flawed and very human."

Vozniak is also working on a documentary called Ordinary Wonderlands about "real-life superheroes."

"As the name implies," she says, "they are people who lead true double lives as real life superheroes. They dress as superheroes of their own creation and they go out and do good deeds in their community. They don’t do it as a full time job, or for money, they have no delusions, they’re intelligent, but they feel this is their path... It’s in the same style of Despite the Gods, observational, intimate. I have never seen them without their masks and capes and don’t know the names on their birth certificates, but I don’t need to. This isn’t an exposé."

Despite the Gods is premiering at the Hot Docs Film Festival in late-April 2012.