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'Man In the Silo' Pays Homage To Hitchcock
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Director Phil Donlon’s latest short ‘The Man In the Silo’ premiered Monday in Los Angeles. Word on the street has been decidedly silent about the film, which tells the story of Marcus Wells, an African- American man (Ernie Hudson, ‘Ghostbusters’) who cares for his racist mother-in-law after the death of his wife and son. The action takes place mainly on her farm, where the Wells believes there is a man in the grain silo who is out to get him.
Donlon likens the short to a Hitchcockian psychological thriller.
“If I had to nail down one film that influenced me more than any (and there are a lot) its Hitchcock's 1958 film ‘Vertigo’ starring Jimmy Stewart,” the director blogs, “I chose Ernie for the lead because I felt he had in him that same actor quality that Jimmy Stewart had... Ernie is known for playing the same type of roles, comic types, the hero, good guy, y'know the kind of guy you'd love to be friends with. And in early discussions with Ernie I told him I wanted to flip his "image" on its head.”
The director has picked an interesting, if obvious, metaphor for the lead’s emotional breakdown. His attire.
“[O]ver the course of the film, we break the suit down, as we break down the persona of who this character think he is,” he continues, “Marcus Wells... goes through a crisis, and he goes through it alone. So as he starts to ‘crack,’ the tie comes off, the shirt comes un- buttoned, the suit coat comes off, until we really destroy the suit. The suit was an important visual metaphor for me. My costume designer Jennifer Soulages (‘Saw’) and I had many talks about Ernie's suit. It was a big deal.”
When a filmmaker goes to such lengths to put this kind of imagery into his work deliberately, it always feels a tad inorganic. The audience can almost hear the director screaming, “Look! See how I’m using visual cues to tell you what’s happening inside the character? Aren’t I brilliant?”
These motifs are always more effective when they’re almost unconscious, as if the director himself isn’t aware of what he’s doing. But then, that’s what shorts like ‘The Man In the Silo’ are for. To help a director learn when he’s gone over the line.
