"I had nine months of intense culture shock and then suddenly I was in love with Chicago:" An Interview with Director Rob Christopher

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes (1937 words)

Rob Christopher is a Chicago-based director who was captivated by David Lynch movies and Barry Gifford novels, especially the Lynch film “Wild at Heart,” based on the Gifford work of the same name. 

In 2020, Christopher released “Roy’s World: Barry Gifford’s Chicago,” which explores the city in the 1950s and 1960s through the lens of Gifford’s semi-autobiographical collection of stories. “Roy’s World” uses extensive archival footage of the city from that time and moves the narrative forward through a series of vignettes narrated by Gifford and actors Willem Dafoe, Matt Dillon, and fellow Chicago native Lili Taylor. 

Here, Christopher discusses his film background, the making of “Roy’s World,” and what he has planned next. 

Tell me a little bit about yourself. What’s your background and how did you get into filmmaking?

I moved to Chicago for college. I grew up mostly in suburban Denver and didn't really know anything about Chicago before I moved here outside of the “Blues Brothers.” So I had like nine months of intense culture shock and then suddenly I was in love with Chicago. 

I have more or less lived here ever since I went to film school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and then later transferred to Columbia. I went to school for film but after graduation I became a little disillusioned and just turned to other things. For one thing, I realized that writing was a lot cheaper than making a movie so I concentrated more on writing for a while. 

I got back into film around 2015. I had started a feature film during college and never completed it for various reasons, mostly financial, and I was just feeling creatively burned out. It was called “Pause of the Clock” and it always sort of bothered me that I never finished it. So suddenly I got an inkling of how creatively it might be able to work. I launched a Kickstarter and finished the film 20 years later. It screened at various theaters and premiered at the Denver International Film Festival. 

Not that many people saw it, but I think the right people saw it because Barry Gifford liked it. We'd gotten to know each other because I interviewed him for this blog called Chicagost. I had wanted to make a movie about Chicago but I didn't really know what my angle was going to be or what the focus of it was. The more I got to talk with Barry about his childhood in Chicago in the 50s, the more it struck me that this would be a really cool way to tell the story about Chicago in a different way.

We talked more about what my vision for the documentary was going to be and he was totally on board with that and didn't try to steer things. In one way or another he trusted me to tell it my own way. And that's how I got started on “Roy’s World.”

What was the inspiration for Roy's World and where did it come from?

To back it up a little, I became obsessed with David Lynch and Twin Peaks when I was in junior high. I'd always been a huge fan of of David Lynch and his work. Later on, I saw Wild at Heart, which was the film he made, based on Barry Gifford’s novel with Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage and Wilem Defoe, and I loved that. 

A little bit later, I discovered some of Barry's other writings, specifically, the Roy stories, which focus on a milieu of his childhood from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. A lot of the stories are set in Chicago. It was really fascinating to me that they were so different from the world of “Wild at Heart,” which was kind of like a very violent, Gothic, Southern world with over the top violence and stuff like that. The Roy’s World stories are a lot more — I don't know if you could say they're gentle — but they're very stripped down and bare. They're really short little pieces, usually not more than three or four pages. 

I was fascinated by the difference between them and also reading about a Chicago that I didn't really know about. I feel like a lot of people know about the Al Capone side of Chicago from the 1930s and Prohibition. A lot of people know about the later Daley years like the 1968 Democratic Convention and the riots, but the period between the two, I feel, was under explored, and that's exactly when Barry's stories are set. 

I realized that if I could use that as a lens to look at that period, that it could be a really interesting documentary.

What was the production process for Roy's World? What was it like working with Barry, Willem Dafoe, Matt Dillon, and Lili Taylor?

One of the beautiful things about doing a documentary is that you have a lot more freedom in a lot of respects than when you're making normal narrative fiction. You can really start out as a one man band and dive into the topic and explore without really committing yourself to a thing, which I think is increasingly hard to do in the film world. 

Film is naturally a collaborative process, which is great, but when you have a lot of people looking over your shoulder it leads to a lot of stress and tension because everyone is pushing you to come up with a definitive answer or direction. 

With “Roy's World,” I really did just start out on my own thinking about what I didn't want the film to be. And what I didn't want the film to be was a normal talking heads documentary, where you've got a bunch of people talking about how great and amazing a person is. You get your celebrity endorsements or whatever and then it becomes an infomercial. 

I didn't want to put Barry on screen. I just wanted his voice because if he's on screen, then it's easy to just see it as well: “Here's another old guy, talking about the past.” I wanted to really keep the audience in that world of the late 40s to the early 60s and immerse someone in that world. 

The film grew out of those structures that I put into place. That meant that it was going to be very archival based. I dove into collections all over the place. You can find one interesting photo and that can lead you down a path to find something similar from a different archival repository. It was just a very long organic process of letting all the pieces come together.

Did you have an overarching theme you were trying to accomplish or did you see this more as a composition of vignettes of different points of Berry's early life? Was there any other overarching theme or that you wanted to hit throughout the film?

Because Barry has written these stories over a period of more than 40 years, they're not in a particular order. You can really read them in whatever order you want. 

I knew that as a film, there did have to be some sort of structure or through line. It seemed to me that his decision upon graduating high school to leave Chicago was a natural sort of climax or endpoint of the movie. That suggested that it needed to be in a vaguely chronological structure of some kind. 

I'm a big believer in the old fashioned analog way of doing things, so I just got a deck of index cards and if there was a particular piece of the story that I loved, or a line, I started to gather some archival images and stuff like that. I just wrote all that stuff down on index cards, and then laid them all out on the floor until there seemed to be a sort of flow going. 

I took those and then I put them into actual scripts. Then it was just a matter of paying attention to the flow and paying attention to the juxtaposition and the way a mood can change from one mood to another. It was just a constant revision and tweaking until things felt correct.

The two scenes that really stood out to me were the two animated ones. One is Barry recounting the semi-autobiographical story in the cab with his mother and the other scene is where they're walking through the cemetery. What made you want to change from the archival footage and put in those two animated scenes?

Although I knew that the film was going to feature a ton of archival material, I also knew that for a feature length film, you have to keep your audience surprised. There were also a couple of stories that I knew would work really beautifully as sort of standalone pieces. 

An acquaintance of mine made a suggestion that I might want to think about putting some animation in because a lot of other documentaries were using that approach. Then somebody else here in Chicago, a wonderful filmmaker in her own right, Lori Felker, recommended that I get in touch with Lilli Carré, who did the black and white segment. We had the color segment done by a guy named Kevin Eskew who Lilli recommended. 

That was another example of how organically things just ended up that way. Lilli and Kevin worked completely independently of each other. I didn't want them to see each other's work because I wanted each piece to feel really unique and individual.

What was Barry's reception to it when he saw the finished film?

When we had reached picture lock stage Barry hadn't seen anything, but I knew that I needed to show it to him personally to just be there for his reaction. I hoped that it would be positive, but I had no idea. 

Barry lives in Berkeley, California, so I flew to San Francisco with the film on a Blu Ray, and we rented a screening room. Much to my amazement, and shock, Barry decided to bring most of his family to the screening, and his oldest friend — a friend of his who he's known since he was a kid in Chicago. It was an extraordinarily high pressure screening. 

We queued up the movie and played it. After the film was over, there was a long pause, and then Barry turned around and looked at me and said, “Well, I don't know how you did it, because you're not that smart, but you pulled it off.” Of course, he was pulling my leg there. That was just amazingly gratifying and I knew that I'd made a good movie.

What are you working on next? 

I'd really like to do more of a traditional narrative film. I've been working on this project for a little more than a year now. It's an adaptation of this amazing novel by the writer Gary Indiana, who's based in New York. It's called Depraved Indifference. It's a jet black comedy about a family of con artists who specialize in identity theft. The matriarch of the family is Evangeline and she's sort of a cross between Elizabeth Taylor and Cruella Deville. This story is about their exploits. You've got this glamorous sociopath and the way that she ruins everyone's lives around her. 

It's a really exciting project but it's a very challenging time for the indie film world. It's just really hard to get anything off the ground these days. Nevertheless, this is a project that was really exciting to me, so I'm plugging ahead on it and hopefully we can pull it off.