This article contains spoilers.
Reptile is the kind of gritty, cold-blooded, calculated thriller designed for genre lovers who don’t like every story detail neatly handed to them. Writer/ director Grant Singer (The Weeknd featuring Daft Punk: Starboy, Lorde: Green Light) sets out do achieve just that in his dark crime thriller where nothing and nobody should be taken at face value.
“There’s a duality to each scene,” says Singer of his storytelling. Chief Marty Graeber (Mike Pniewski) is driving to a crime scene he helped orchestrate. He’s confessing to Tom Nichols (Benicio Del Toro), who upon initially not being able to pull the trigger on his gun, is now able to do so.
“I love that we’re telling the viewer what exactly is happening and what is going to happen but it’s veiled through language. Through multiple experiences of the movie, you can glean new things from the storytelling every time you see it and interpret things differently.” There’s an ambiguity and deception to the story. “Truth is very elusive and it’s almost like the more you learn about something, the less you know about it.”
Needless to say, this cryptic, opaque, meandering mode of storytelling underpins Reptile. There are many silences, pauses, gestures, and contemplations in the film to further give the audience and characters space to process the narrative.
Creating The Right Atmosphere
“One of my favorite movies is Vertigo. I rewatched that movie over and over and over again, not just because I want to watch Jimmy Stewart obsess over Kim Movak, but also to recreate the trauma in order to heal oneself of one’s past.”
Atmosphere has to feel very heavy
“I think that it’s just finding that right balance of calibration of what a scene needs. I always try and make things feel real and lived in.” Singer spoke to many police officers to ensure that the dialogue and action in Reptile were real so he could remove anything that seemed unnecessary.
Grant Singer
“Working with such fine actors who can evoke so much emotion non-verbally is a blessing so that we can rely on these quiet moments. I want to have the audience lean in and question what it is that they’re seeing, as opposed to being told what it is that they’re seeing.” Or what they’re seeing may not be real.
It’s the difference between having a sense of something happening than having a fully evolved thought in the cerebral cortex.
Apart from the mention of Scarborough, Reptile isn’t set in any particular state. “Originally, Reptile was set in Maine, but Singer later decided to set it in Anywhere, USA. We know Tom Nichols comes from Philadelphia, but the actual state is never mentioned in the movie. We want to evoke a sense of deep Americana, the serenity without ever getting specific, but it’s the placelessness and timelessness that feels tactile, aspirational and beautiful. And you have this very unnerving, dark crime taking place in this very serene environment. I love that counterpoint,” elaborates Singer.
Writing Reptile
Grant Singer co-wrote the original draft of Reptile with Benjamin Brewer (The Trust) and presented it to some of the producers of Sicario (in which Benicio Del Toro) stars.
“Benicio read the script and immediately responded to it so we began having conversations about what we wanted this movie to be and what my vision for the movie was.”
“Then we began deepening the character and the story. Between three of us it was really exciting because we each approached the story with our individual unique style. Everyone brought something to the table,” he continues.
The oblique plotting was also a main consideration given that fans of this genre have sophisticated palates. The ending needs to be organic and expected. The crime was an inside job, but the audience can’t guess too soon. It’s a delicate mix of dropping several well-chosen breadcrumbs and pulling the rug from under the audience’s feet just as they felt they figured out the story.
“You have to find new, inventive, or clever ways to what you’re saying, so that the viewers engage. It’s a little bit like a card trick. We had more and different hints in the edit that we either removed, we subtracted or added, depending on what we felt the film actually needed,” mentions Singer.
“So it’s also not just a script writing thing, it’s also an editorial thing. One of the things that the movie does, is that it begins and presents itself as an investigative thriller/ procedural in the first half, and then becomes a very internal unraveling of a character’s psyche in the second half where Tom Nichols is putting the puzzle together through his own internal experience and then deals with his own morality.”
Singer harnessed the thought of “not knowing” in Reptile much like the film Zodiac where the story slowly untangles without revealing anything material. It both confuses and delights the audience.
“That’s not an easy task, and so we knew that the film needed some sort of a adrenalinized, propulsive climactic things, with a bit more resolution even if single dot doesn’t connect. You still see a constellation,” states the filmmaker.
“It was a calibration of how do we end the film with a viewer who might still have questions and could come up with their own interpretations and conclusions as to what they saw, but still feel satisfied.”
Grant Singer adds that earlier drafts of Reptile were more enigmatic and abstract which may have left a viewer out on a limb. Eventually he landed on a movie “that provided a little bit more clarity and was more appealing to a broader audience, but still satisfies that tone and that feeling of unanswered questions that I personally am more attracted to in movies.”
Grant Singer employs subtext in much of his dialogue which often comes off as innocuous banter. He cites the scene in the cafeteria where Wally asks Tom, “What’s the difference between you and me? You talk a good one, but you don’t do what you’re supposed to do,” in reference to a song. “He’s communicating everything without saying it. He’s penetrating, softly, but hard at the same time. It’s playful, it’s fun, it’s very ambiguous. And then there’s this aggression there.”
“You have two characters feeling one way, speaking something completely different, and communicating through code. And you don’t know where this is gonna end because there’s so much tension.”
Theme
Grant Singer started with the idea that good people can do bad things. “We’re portraying the bad guys as very likeable. Wally (Domenick Lombardozzi) is so charming in the first half. He has a couple moments where he’s a little sinister.”
“Captain Robert Allen (Eric Bogosian) is a really wonderful character. He’s done really nice things to Tom and gave him a second chance when he messed up. But then he’s also involved with something that’s very corrupt.”
“Good and bad are not black and white. The whole film is not black and white. At the start of the movie, Tom’s ‘s got a cut on his hand and you think he may be a murder suspect. And then you learn about his past and he becomes the hero of the movie. He ends up doing something very moral and ethical at the end. But he’s not a perfect person.” The more accurate representation of the human condition might be that good and bad operate in tandem.
