Can you talk about when and how you got the inspiration for the premise of The Mountain and why you felt now was the right time to make this film?
Rick Alverson: I’ve had an interest that I’ve explored since The Comedy and Entertainment where I’m trying to comprehend what fuels this blind propulsion of American progress in today’s political climate, where we’re romanticizing the white male privilege era of the 1950s.

It’s also something often romanticized in American cinema; if not in its subject matter, then it’s romanticized in its formal depiction. I wanted to take that on and watch it deflate and see how it would hold up to a more nuanced and muddy immersion of the era.

You’ve described the film as anti-utopian. Do you think nostalgia is a dangerous thing?
Nostalgia is definitely a very rich intoxicant that’s difficult to pull oneself away from. Commercial American cinema peddles almost entirely on those triggers of compartmentalized representation and clean—marginally pornographic—singular dimensions. I find that troubling to some degree because it pretends to be something else.

The remake of The Lion King kinda sums that up.
[Chuckles] Yeah.

Toxic masculinity has been central to many of your films and it’s in many ways the enemy of the moment right now. You’ve been ahead of the game in a way. Is that always your starting point? What influenced you to focus on men at their worst?
I was raised at a time with influences that come from particular periods so there was a binary presentation of masculinity and I think it’s something that men are mired in. That has been problematic for men in a way that stripped away the wholeness of an individual.

As a working American filmmaker, do you feel it’s your social responsibility to use your medium to comment on and expose what you’re seeing happening in this country? Is this your version of political activism?
[Laughs] Maybe. I think that there needs to be a politics of form. It’s the responsibility of filmmakers to not be ignorant of this gesture and what it does to the population. There’s a responsibility of cinema to ask itself some very hard questions before it ends up wrapping into total irrelevancy. What is narrative? What value does it have? How is it destructive? How is it being used for destruction? Is it functional anymore? I think that a lot of consumer cinema doesn’t ask those questions because it’s afraid to expose its vulnerabilities or its potential irrelevance.

How did your experience with Entertainment affect your approach to The Mountain?
Entertainment was the first film that played with cinematic influences that I had. It played with things that kind of grossed me out in cinema, with the defaults of metaphors and symbolism to create false profundities.

With The Comedy, I was focusing on a subset of class privilege in nuclear centers like New York City that I find reprehensible. I wanted to engage with it, investigate how to understand it, and make myself uncomfortable. Suddenly the medium felt a little more vital to me. It wasn’t just a propagandistic grandstanding, where essentially I would be showing off my likes and dislikes. I try to play a cat-and-mouse game with my own comfort and hopefully the audience finds some vitality in that.

Your last two films have felt very surreal, stylistically. They’re more lush yet still quite detached. What’s compelling you to stray from the slice-of-life realism you were using with your first few films?
I had always wanted to have a career working with non-actors, but as I’ve gradually become more interested in the problems that make me uncomfortable I find myself engaging with them head-on, instead of just ignoring them for my comfort zone. The unreality of cinema has also become increasingly interesting to me.

There are some obsessive-compulsive approaches I took in The Mountain, which viewers might not see off-hand, that sort of heighten that falseness. Nobody leaves or enters the frame unless they go through a door. I’ve padded and loaded the film with limitations and, if I have any value now, my responsibility lies in nurturing the limitations of cinema and making them apparent.

For a long time we’ve been living in a fantasy land of unlimited potential and an abundance of opportunity, but the fact of the matter is we’ve been ignoring the beauty of the finite quality of the world. I think the same thing goes for cinema.

You’ve mentioned before that you don’t usually stick to a script but you did this time, though obviously the film utilizes a lot of long pauses and still imagery. Do you map out this sense of pacing in the script, or is there an element of you finding the film in the editing suite? How important is the sense of discovery in post for you?
Editing the movie is incremental in its own way. But for me, the film really becomes alive during production and I find the pacing there. As far as mapping out those things in the script goes, it’s an obligation that I find tedious sometimes. My scripts used to be very short but they’re longer now because they’re a little bit more traditional on the page.

In what way?
He wanted to subvert expectations of the audiences of how they’ve considered him and what he does for them and we utilized that. He’s really keen and smart and I think he understood that it could have a potency in the film. This is one of his more muted performances, even though the personality of Goldblum percolates out of that. He restrained himself in a way I found really refreshing.

We really want to commend your location scout on a fantastic job. What were you looking for in the production design and the sets? Especially for the final shot.
The final shot was its own kind of nightmare. We shot that on Mount Baker on the Canadian border in Washington and we isolated the location based on this expanse that’s usually full of four or five feet of snow most of the year. The night before we shot, they plowed all that snow for the parking lot underneath. Those sorts of things drive you crazy.

My production designer Jacqueline Abrahams—who worked on The Lobster among other great films—is an incredibly keen, hardworking person. We wanted to neuter some of the romance of the era, to make it muddy and give it a bland complexity. Obviously when making a period film, the production design and costume design are the most difficult but nerve-wrecking and exciting tools in the whole toolbox. I think we came at it obliquely enough that it became interesting.

Are you still hoping to make your KKK film soon? Now should be the time, right?
I’d like to move back to it, but I’ve moved onto another project for now [a horror movie and a comedy series, according to IndieWire]. It still fascinates me, but I don’t want to be too reactionary. It’s a tough time now, for a lot of things.