James Marsh On The King

The British director tells Ali Catterall about his controversial new drama starring Gael García Bernal and William Hurt

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In 1996, James Marsh's documentary The Burger & the King: The Life & Cuisine Of Elvis Presley shone a light into the roiling guts of Elvis, while highlighting the excesses of the US tradition. Three years later, the Cornish-born director followed it up with the acclaimed Wisconsin Death Trip, a morbidly comic, real-life account of 19th century small-town America, and the bizarre deaths and disasters befalling its often unhinged populace. Evoking the works of Ray Bradbury and Philip Ridley, it featured human grotesques such as rabble-rousing schoolteacher and coke fiend Mary Sweeney, the notorious window smasher of Black River Falls.

In the tradition of Badlands and Blue Velvet, The King is another foray into American Gothic. Marsh's first full-length feature, it was co-written with Milo (Monster's Ball) Addica, and developed in conjunction with FilmFour. Gael García Bernal plays a morally ambiguous young drifter named Elvis who, after being discharged from the navy, gatecrashes a conservative Christian family in Corpus Christi, Texas, led by William Hurt's pastor-with-a-past - and proceeds to make their lives hell.

The chickens have come home to roost, and as with Dennis Potter's Brimstone And Treacle, evil is shown to be a potentially redemptive force for good. It can be read as both religious allegory and a commentary on the state of modern America (one in which the Republicans have apparently determined to wind the clock back 200 years), and this intelligent and controversy-courting Cain and Abel fable has predictably divided critics. Comments have ranged from "a must-see for fans of uncompromising independent cinema" to "a noxious film morally and an aggravating one... this promises to be a major turn-off for audiences" (according to 'Variety').

With The King, Marsh is cementing his position as one of the foremost chroniclers of the dark underbelly of Americana - as in thrall to the iconography and mythical status of the territory as fellow outsider Wim Wenders.

You do seem to have a pronounced fascination for the American mythos
That's true - it comes from a curiosity about America, and as a British filmmaker I'd find myself going back there and making these odd pieces of work about the way America creates myths for itself. In the course of my documentary filmmaking, I'd encountered these Southern Christian communities and The King was a way of infiltrating and subverting them. This is something that presents itself to you very often if you're travelling in Southern America - you're very aware of a God-fearing Christian environment, and that presents certain questions. America's a staunchly religious country - it's one of its defining attributes. It was founded, after all, by refugees from England who were not tolerated because their views were so extreme. One of the reasons I'm sure Christianity appeals to Americans is that it allows them to start all over again, be reborn and have all your sins washed away. The idea of writing a story about those beliefs and testing them out was very appealing.

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