This interview contains mild spoilers.
Have you struggled with isolation? Don’t fit in with your peers? Compulsive eating habits? Don’t play well with others? Bones And All is a film that speaks to you. Screenwriter David Kagjanich (Suspiria, The Terror) spoke with Creative Screenwriting Magazine about adapting the bet-selling novel by Camilla De Angelis into a coming of age, road movie.
“Take the compulsion of cannibalism as a metaphor of a long list of things that can act as an “othering agent” in a young person’s life, whether it be addiction, body dysmorphia, class and race, and puts them outside societal norms when youths are most vulnerable,” said the screenwriter. As adolescents, you haven’t yet fully-formed your sense of identity and code of ethics. Few people breeze through this transitional stage of life and bear the scars for decades. They have no clear plan, no clear future; only a desire to make it through another day intact.
Bones And All is about the trauma of hitting walls and being pushed aside at this stage of your life
These feelings of alienation are heightened by mapping them on a horror framework of cannibalism. In a literary move, Kagjanich sought to make the audience feel the same way, by giving them a grisly reason to. The subject matter deals with an extreme subgroup that is deeply-hidden in society. The screenwriter treated these scenes, not with disgust, but as atmospheric artistry. Cannibals aren’t presented as monsters in Bones And All, but as wretched outcasts with feeding urges they can’t control.
David Kajganich. Photo by Danielle Venturelli/ Getty Images
The writer contends that Bones And All is primarily a love story as the key driver of the narrative. It’s also a road movie about a young girl Maren (Taylor Russell) discovering herself while she’s crossing the great American landscapes with her beau of sorts, Lee (Timothée Chalamet). “The horror genre is in the most tertiary position,” he continued. Their love story suffers its fair share of obstacles and setbacks as they keep moving. “There’s a way to negotiate love without honesty and that leads to its own ruin,” mused Kagjanich.
Since Bones And All is a tragedy, Maren and Lee explore the potential of love through vulnerability and lack of judgement. “Even though theirs is a doomed love story doesn’t take away the fact that the ingredients that these two characters find in on another aren’t the things that make love last.” Maren allows Lee to keep his secrets and traumas to himself and gives him the space to unpack them when the time is right. She doesn’t insist that she needs to understand it right away. “She’s not going to compromise her well-being by needing to know too early. She trusts Lee’s timing.”
Camilla De Angelis’ novel has been categorized as a YA novel, which didn’t sit well with David. It’s not clear whether such books simply examine young characters and their issues or they are written in a way so that young people can receive them in a more satisfactory manner. Kagjanich discarded this moniker.
“I took the fairytale grammar from the novel that would be very difficult to translate into a visual medium. The cannibalism scenes are treated almost magically in the book.” The cannibals eat people entirely – bones and all. Kagjanich opted for a more naturalistic approach to this in his film. He took great care to migrate the emotional core and the tenor of the various relationships in the book without passing judgment on them. “I committed to the characters playing by the rules of our world rather than that of a fairytale.”
He grounded his story so that these people walk among us, but are ultimately unable to fully integrate into society. “They are nudged to the edges where they sometimes find one another to find solace, or even danger.”
Kagjanich wrote his characters as being alone because “they had nowhere to go for advice or guidance.” This is especially true of Maren who’s father sends her away with a wad of cash because he truly doesn’t know how to deal with her anymore.
It was consciously reset in the eighties in a pre-mobile internet age where information could be readily accessed. Therefore Maren couldn’t easily research her condition and its mythology.
The eighties was the era of Reaganism and trickle-down economics. There was a lot of disenfranchisement and social dislocation as more people moved down the economic ladder then up. “There was a loss of faith in institutions that were meant to protect us.” Maren and Lee could traverse the country and witness disenfranchisement other than their own. “Maybe they could blend in to it somehow?”
Brad (David Gordon Green) & Brad (Michael Stuhlbarg) Photo by Yannis Drakoulidis / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures
Bones And All is about “escaping from the rigid expectations and scrutiny that society holds young people up to before they’re adults.” It’s about “becoming a friend to oneself without need validation and guidance from others.” Maren and Lee could take off their masks and pretence that they’re like others and be just honest with themselves.
Coming of age involves changing expectations by letting go of the old and embracing the unknown new. “It’s about losing a sense of the path you thought you should be on and gaining a sense of the path you should actually be on.” It’s a time when both Maren and Lee find their power and their place in the world. In some ways they’re star-crossed lovers destined to doom and in others, they’re kindred spirits.
David Kagjanich realized the importance of the secondary male characters. “They either evolved or devolved Maren’s story.” The writer chose three men that make a meal for Maren during the film – her father (André Holland) makes a meal in the first act, Sully (Mark Rylance), her mentor of sorts makes a meal in the middle, and Lee makes her a meal in the third act. These moments were strategically positioned to put Maren in the center of these dynamics to demonstrate “what she needed from them and what they needed from her.” Despite the hardships Maren encounters, she’s going to be all right. She can co-exist as both cannibal and human. She discusses with Lee, “Let’s be people for a while.”
Maren (Taylor Russell) & Sully (Mark Rylance). Photo by Yannis Drakoulidis/ Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures
“She’s not going to be another Sully who’s so cut off from human relationships, that he doesn’t know what they’re for or how to exist in them.”
Sully acts a signpost for Maren. “He appears three times during the story and alters the course of it with each appearance. He’s the harbinger of doom. He’s been without human connection for so long that he’s curdled like a tragic Greek figure.”
Bones And All clearly focuses on the humanity of Maren’s non-humanistic situation. David Kagjanich deliberately omitted the entire cannibal mythology in Maren’s backstory. We never find out whether she was born that way or became a cannibal.
She’s a cannibal from the start and the story gets on with it without further explanation. “I didn’t include a lot of direct exposition for the audience in the film,” said David. He only wrote enough backstory to illustrate the character relationships. “I didn’t want the audience to feel too comfortable. That would deprive them of discovery in the story.”
David Kagjanich braided several genres into his screenplay, but he used the tone of the road movie to guide its rhythms. “I wanted to capture the sense of isolation, the sense of wonder, and the unexpected things that happen during a road trip.” Road movies typically contain people that you meet. You may never see them again or you may meet them again down the road. There’s often a lack of closure. “You go the wrong way, you get lost, you get bored.”
The pacing of Bones And All felt slightly unnatural, unstructured, and disorganized. The road is a place where you don’t stay in one place for long. It’s a place where one becomes road-weary from the tedium of travel.
He watched the road movies, Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and Badlands (1973) to help shade his own story early in the process. He listened to a lot of eighties music while writing, particularly uncanny songs with a “weird pop pressure to them” like Here Comes The Rain Again by the Eurythmics.
The wide open road was a place Kajganich could explore vagabonds, drifters, and lone souls leading invisible lives off the beaten path without placing too much emphasis to their compulsions.
