Interview: Zachary Wigon on Embracing Artistry and Artifice in Sanctuary

We might as well foreground what looms large over this discussion with Sanctuary director Zachary Wigon. He has many bylines on this site. It’s easy to see the formalistic rigor of a former critic on display in his latest film, which he developed in close conjunction with screenwriter Micah Bloomberg. And yet, there’s also a distinct sense of a directorial sensibility in his vision that has evolved beyond intellectualizing cinema.

Wigon displays a keen understanding of genre in this single-location erotic thriller about the twisted relationship between a dominatrix, Rebecca (Margaret Qualley), and her hotel heir client, Hal (Christopher Abbott). As fantasy and reality begin to uneasily mingle between the two, Sanctuary pinpoints the blurred boundaries between the boardroom and the bedroom for these role players engaged in an intense bout of gamesmanship. Wigon’s direction is locked in a pas de deux with his two leads, matching their volatile dynamics with a control of mood and style that’s responsive to Rebecca and Hal’s ever-shifting power struggle.

I spoke with Wigon shortly before Sanctuary’s theatrical release. Our conversation covered the challenge of keeping the film interesting while confined to one location, what paradoxes about the story fascinated him, and why he disagrees with some of his own film criticism.

It’s not uncommon to find filmmakers who have a background in criticism, but I’m fascinated that you kept doing it even past your first feature. How do you see the two as working in tandem?

I haven’t written film criticism in a number of years, and I started when I was finishing up in college. I don’t know if I would have thought about it this way at the time, but looking back on it now, it was helpful as a way of being able to grapple and intellectualize with the way in which various movies work—contracts that different genres have with the audience, ideas that movies are holding, and how they express them. You know how sometimes you know something intuitively, but then someone asks you to explain it and all of a sudden you realize that you don’t know it as well as you thought you did? In the process of explaining it, you do get to know it better. I think that writing about movies worked that way for me. It was a way for me to try to move deeper into understanding the art form and medium. If you’re going to be a storyteller or film director and do a good job at it, you have to understand the medium down to the bone.

Obviously, these are very different projects, but in a full-circle moment, I could ask you something that you once asked Steve McQueen about Hunger in relation to Sanctuary. “How do you conceive of the relationship between bodies and physicality, and politics?”

Hunger is so much about the way that a body is physically being used as a political action, and you’re watching it happen. That’s the center of that movie, and it’s done so effectively. With Sanctuary, I guess it’s less about bodies and more about minds. There are bodies in the story, but Sanctuary is more about this very strange mystery of human psychology and the human psyche. These two people are trying to figure out what makes one another tick by pushing one another’s buttons, and the audience is trying to understand what makes them tick.

How do you balance what seems like, at least from the outside, the competing demands of achieving precise technical direction without repeating setups with keeping things fresh for your actors?

As far as keeping it fresh for the actors, that’s basically a function of a couple things. One is making sure that everything in the script feels true, and I think Micah wrote a wonderful script. The script feels true and isn’t repeating emotional beats. I would imagine that where things get rote-feeling as an actor is when you feel like you’re playing the same beat over and over again, and your character doesn’t have a progression. What I think was really essential for the performances was giving them a screenplay that enables them to always be somewhere new. Then they’re always fresh, regardless of what’s going on with the camera.

On the visual side, it’s exactly as you said. It’s trying to make sure that you’re never repeating blocking or shots. That’s more of a technical challenge, which was really exciting to me. But in very practical terms, that was figuring out, “Okay, this physical arrangement I’m gonna save for this section.” You have a bunch of different physical and visual ideas that you can almost just write them down in a list. And then you’ll be like, “Alright, that matches well with that scene,” and then you figure out how to do it and make sure that you’re not repeating at any point.

Each “scene” in Sanctuary has its own angle or shooting style. How did you handle the pivots between them so the experience feels seamless? It’s those sinews that ultimately make or break a film.

I feel like whenever you make a movie, you’re learning more about the medium as you go. One of the really interesting things that I learned is that you can travel between aspects, atmospheres, or tones that are as different as you like if you do this: You basically have to like drop the stimulation or atmosphere down to zero for a rest beat. For example, if you have a sequence that is comic, and then you’re going to try to transition into a sequence that is suspenseful and scary, you can do that. You just have to have a little moment in the middle. On a scale of one to 10, if you’re like a seven for comedy and you want to travel to a seven for suspense, what you have to do is go from a seven for comedy to down to like a one or a zero. Then when you’re one or zero, it’s so low that it’s not comedy anymore. It’s just nothing. And then you can go from that zero into anything! You can go to a seven for suspense, or a three for suspense up to a seven. Dropping it down enabled you to go in these other directions.

Within that framework, do you think it helped that there is an echo between the actors and their characters, finding empowerment through confinement and defined role-play?

I think the movie is about performance in so many ways. There are so many lines in the movie where characters say, “Say the words that I told you to say, the words don’t matter,” or, “I wrote the scenes, all you did was say the words, this is the question that you’re supposed to ask me next, I want you to stick to my script.” It’s funny because when I was developing the script with Micah, there was never any conversation where we were like, “Oh, this is about filmmaking or acting!” That never came up, but in retrospect, gosh, that is all over the story. But it’s not for me to say what it felt like for Margaret and Chris. It’s certainly fascinating to watch and could only work if you had exceptionally talented actors. I’m so grateful that we were able to get them. They just ran all the way with it. It was so cool to watch.

A lot of your previous work has found ways to make modern technology cinematic. Even though this film doesn’t really foreground that, were strategies of working through that visual challenge helpful with the constraints of Sanctuary?

In The Heart Machine, there are a lot of phones, technology, and laptops. I feel like every movie has its own distinct visual challenges, and that’s one of the things that makes film directing exciting because you want to be challenged. The primary challenge with this wasn’t so much about technology. The visual challenge here was about the confines of the space and being able to make the movie feel cinematic—to make it feel like it was meant to be one and not a filmed play. That was a that was the central challenge of it, and it was really exciting to tackle that.

How people separate sexual and emotional intimacy is the crux of The Heart Machine. Is that something you see yourself as still exploring in Sanctuary?

It’s funny, I’ve thought about the connection between the movies. What I think of as the connection between the movies is that they are both stories about people who are trying to compartmentalize an artificial fantasy where things are really great from a messy reality where things are not so ideal and people are not the version of themselves that they want to be. It is interesting to see that through line between the stories.

It’s tempting to overinterpret a film, and when asked what Sanctuary means or says, Christopher Abbott usually offers the answer to “just have fun.” I’m not sure if you agree with that sentiment, but even if so, do you see that resistance to its hyper-analysis as its own message?

It wasn’t so much that there was a statement that I was trying to convey with the movie. What I was interested in doing was just exploring the strange paradox of the situation that the characters find themselves in where they’re not happy with who they are in reality, and they’re basically being a version of themselves in real life that feels fake. Then they go to a space where they do something fake, and that’s where they feel real. The meaning of that irony and paradox, I think, is for the viewer to decide. But, for me, it was just absolutely fascinating. I just feel like you could keep diving deep into that, and you would never hit the bottom.

I cringe at having to hear what I wrote years ago, so would you be okay if I quoted yourself back at you and see how you feel now as it pertains to Sanctuary?

Sure!

As I was digging through the Slant archives, I found a piece written in relation to No Country for Old Men…

That was a long time ago! I wrote that in college.

You wrote, “Susan Sontag was correct when she argued against excessive interpretation of artistic work, a smothering practice that often ‘killed’ the mystery, the essence of those works. However, the critical practice of ignoring content entirely would be just as problematic.”

It’s funny, I don’t really agree with anything that I wrote in that essay. There are so many things that you write when you’re young and figuring out how you feel about everything. Back then, I was less of a believer in the importance of style, and I’ve done a 180 since then. I think that style and the aesthetic significance of a work of art are enormously meaningful—and, at times, it can be everything. I think that I probably disagree with pretty much everything I wrote in that!

Do you think that’s a function of being behind the camera and having the understanding of the medium as a creator, not just a consumer?

At the time that I wrote that, I don’t think that the beauty and significance of style really resonated with me yet. I don’t think that I had gotten to that place in my life. I was much more fixated on the idea that the intellectual meaning of the movie was the sole merit of the movie. At this point, I feel like style and beauty on their own can be very meritorious.