Seventh Wanderer: Writer/Director/Songwriter Geremy Jasper Talks ‘O’Dessa’
Photo by Nikola Predovic, Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
by CHAD KENNERK
Following the 2017 debut feature Patti Cake$, writer/director Geremy Jasper returns with an ambitious, genre-defying sophomore feature that blends music and mythology into a dystopian fantasy. The sci-fi fairy tale O’Dessa is inspired by Jasper’s adventures through the video store growing up and the music of the 70s and 80s. A musical odyssey into a warped, post-apocalyptic world, the mythic rock opera echoes the vibrant, dreamy aesthetics of filmmakers such as Terry Gilliam and Alejandro Jodorowsky.
In collaboration with long-time musical partner Jason Binnick, Jasper brought the world of O'Dessa to life, ensuring the music, story and characters work as one. The original music, ranging from folk to rock to avant-garde, was crafted in alignment with the story’s themes of hope, self-discovery and transformation amidst a bleak world. O'Dessa Galloway (Sadie Sink) is a young troubadour on a quest to reclaim a family heirloom and fulfil a prophecy passed down from generation to generation. Jasper’s own creative storytelling journey seems in some ways to mirror that of the titular wanderer. As the film arrives home on Hulu (and Disney+ in the UK), Film Review speaks to the visionary multi-hyphenate about creating O’Dessa’s lyrical dreamscape and finding freedom from the fever dream.
In conversation with writer/director/songwriter/co-composer Geremy Jasper.
Film Review (FR): Take me down this rambler’s road and into the process of bringing your rock opera to life.
Geremy Jasper (GJ): It's been a very long road. I feel like it's been most of my life, taking this thing, making it real, and bringing it to life. It's been a long process. It feels quite surreal that it's complete. I had the initial idea, maybe 20 years ago, if not more. It started just as an idea. I could see the character. I could see O’Dessa. I saw this young woman with a pompadour and a guitar. At that stage, I didn't even know that I was going to be a director or filmmaker. I was just a musician figuring out what I was going to do with my life. My dream was to put together a stage show based on this character. She didn't have a name yet, but I knew what she looked like. I used to draw pictures of her. I found one when my mom was cleaning out a basement in New Jersey. I found this little drawing that I'd done in a notebook. It was just O’Dessa's profile, and it looks exactly like Sadie Sink. It's insane. I'll try to dig it up and send it to you because it's pretty nuts.
Before I made my first movie, Patti Cake$, I thought, ‘I'm going to make that idea.’ I told my friend, who was one of my producers, and he said, “That's too crazy. That's too ambitious. No one's going to give you $1 to make that.” So I put it away, and then after Patti Cake$, it was like, ‘Well, what's my dream project? What would I want to make?’ It became O’Dessa. It's sort of a collage of everything that I love all in one place. All the music I love. It was an excuse for me to write that kind of music. It was all the worldbuilding I love. Romance, adventure, wine, women, and song. It was everything all tied into one. Then it took a couple of years to write it. Then Covid hit, which knocked us out for another two years, but we built it from there. A year and a half ago, we were finally able to shoot it in Croatia. It's been quite a long, ramblin’ road to make.
(FR): As an artist, having the opportunity to bring something that you've been thinking about for so long to life must feel really rewarding.
(GJ): It's a strange feeling. It feels good to have exercised this thing because it really does drive you crazy when you're dreaming about it, when you're almost hallucinating it during the day, and you want to make it so badly. It becomes such a pull on you that I only equate it with first love, where you get in a fight with your first love and it breaks your heart. You can't believe it, and you feel like your life is going to end. Or you pine for it so deeply. That's what it felt like. It was a roller coaster. The film would fall apart. It would come back together. You can ask my wife; it just tore my heart out. It was a manic-depressive process, so to be on the other side of it feels healthy. It feels like I can be a human being again.
(FR): You mentioned that it’s a combination of everything that you love. What were some of the specific influences that shaped this world and story?
(GJ): The jumping-off point was, I'm a David Bowie and Tom Waits fanatic. Those guys are my invisible mentors or something. They're just the North Stars for me. I wanted to make something that, in an imaginary universe, David Bowie and Tom Waits might star in, in 1976. What would that movie be? What would that 70s dystopian sci-fi movie be that could hold both of those guys in place? They had a big influence. Tom Waits did an album called The Black Rider. That's a major influence on me. And David Bowie's Diamond Dogs, which is a dystopian concept record. Those were the cornerstones that started getting me going. I also love American roots folk music, and that was a big, big influence. And then 80s sci-fi—Star Wars and Escape from New York.
Even films I've never seen. When I was a little kid, I used to go to the video shop and Italian exploitation and sci-fi movies had the most garish, unbelievably imaginative covers. I think the films were probably really low-budget shit, but just seeing those covers put me in another world. How do I bring my love of the psychedelic Pink Floyd, PJ Harvey, Terry Gilliam, City of Lost Children, and Jodorowsky and put it into one pot? To me, it comes very naturally because it's all the things that I really am obsessed with, but [it was about] finding a way to let them blend together into one story and world. It was a very disparate group of influences.
(FR): This might be me as a viewer adding this overlay, but I also felt a lot of The Wizard of Oz in the film. Then I read later on that you love David Lynch, who of course loved The Wizard of Oz.
(GJ): The Wizard of Oz is a cornerstone for me. I think it's one of my favourite films. I try to watch it once a year. It has a certain magical pull on me. I saw it when I was a little kid. I was very into cartooning when I was a kid. Some of the first pictures I ever drew were the characters from Star Wars and the characters from The Wizard of Oz. Then I saw the Lynch/Oz documentary. It's fantastic; I love it. I think there's just something very elemental about those characters from The Wizard of Oz and the imaginative psychedelic world that it brings you into that is always full of surprises. The songs are fantastic. It's a story of innocence into experience, which is the same with O’Dessa. It's a surreal adventure that has elements of Americana and European fairytale surrealism. I like that combination, and it's very potent to me. The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, David Lynch—those are my favourites. There's something sort of hallucinatory and dreamy about it.
(FR): It sounds like the story came first, or at least the idea of this character. Your background is in music. When did you decide to make it a musical and bring that element into the story?
(GJ): I always wanted to make a big epic musical film. I put the tag of a rock opera on it later, but for me, it was [about] using my skills as a songwriter to tell something that's not musical theatre style but comes from my rock background and is an excuse for me to write and record again. There were two things running parallel: you get this worldbuilding and these characters, and then I have these songs that I am constantly writing. They started to weave together, and one side would influence the other. I would go through six-month periods of writing and then hit a wall. I was like, “Okay, I gotta get into the studio, because I'm getting very frustrated and it's just not coming.” I'd go in the studio with Jason [Binnick], my music partner, and the songs would start to come to life. Then that would colour everything, and that would open things up. I could feel the movie. I could live inside the movie in a different way that sometimes, when it's just typing or pencil and paper, you just can't. Suddenly the colours started to come to life, and it became this audio experience.
I would bring that back into writing and then do a couple of months. I would pendulum swing back and forth. It was a really nice way of doing it—it's a long way of doing it, but it was helpful. Because I'm a singer originally, I would be able to sing all those songs as the characters first. So I got to wear their skin a little bit, which was a really good experience for me, getting to know these characters a little bit more. Obviously, we would re-record all that stuff, but I got to play-act as O’Dessa a lot. I got to play-act as Plutonovich. I got to feel what that would be like. I'm seeing the movie in my head as I'm recording or listening to it. God bless Jason, my music partner. I'm just throwing all this weird shit at him, and he really had no idea where it was going. He would just go with me on that journey.
(FR): Were there things that you worked on together that didn't make the final cut?
(GJ): Oh, so many. We went down many blind alleys, or I wrote songs that I thought were going to be scenes. There's some beautiful stuff that ended up on the cutting room floor. We worked long and hard on it. We have a whole little O’Dessa box set that we could put out. There were songs that even Sadie recorded with us that just didn't make it into the film. You just never know what's going to fit until you're in the editing process.
(FR): Your cinematographer Rina Yang talked about this as a dream project, but the natural elements of the shoot also made it a hard journey.
(GJ): The dream can be so much sweeter than the reality sometimes. We went to Croatia and found some pretty evocative locations. What was so interesting about shooting in and around Zagreb is that it's a really pristine city. It was hard to find fucked-up, grungy little alleys. We had to hunt for them. In most cities that's the majority. I'm from New Jersey; I'm used to little gnarly alleys. There was a big abandoned hospital that looks like it's out of A Clockwork Orange or something that’s right outside the city. I think they started building it in the early 90s. It's all glass, and they just abandoned it. It looks really sci-fi and dystopian. Luckily, we had that to work with, which was a great thrill.
(FR): What was the process of finding the look of the world on set and also in post-production?
(GJ): It was an interesting marriage. We found some really cool locations and built some really great locations. Scott Dugan, who was our production designer, really went above and beyond with his Croatian crew to build these worlds that were really unique, but then we needed to finish them in post. The lion's share of stuff is in-camera, and then we added VFX, just to give it a little tweak here and there. Obviously, the colour was super important. From the very beginning of when I started writing the project, having a sort of infrared, very vivid dystopian look is what I wanted. Most sci-fi and dystopian worlds have a rusty sepia tone, with dirty browns and yellows. I wanted this one to be psychedelic.
We did a lot of experimentation with how we morph the colour of the greens into a magenta or a purple. We played a lot with that. We worked very closely with a French company called Mathematic, who were a real partner in bringing that stuff to life. It was a really great marriage because I'm not sure that we did any green screen work. It was all done in-camera, and then we just added a little salt and pepper here, and little spice here with the VFX. Which is something that happens less and less now, it seems.
(FR): Sadie Sink is fantastic. What was your collaboration and process like together?
(GJ): She's a bit of a dream come true miracle for me. It’s a very strange process. It was a long casting [process] and a very difficult role to cast. To find someone that young who could carry a movie like this, and then there's a lot of singing and playing [guitar]. I had met with Sadie during the process, and I thought she was lovely, but I thought, ‘She's not going to have time to do this. Stranger Things is such a giant endeavour.’ I didn't want to fall in love with that idea. She obviously has the physicality and looked the part—I always really wanted O’Dessa to be a redhead.
She got her hands on one of the songs that I had written, and she shot this video, without me knowing it, of her playing the song, ‘Yer Tha One,’ on guitar and singing. Just a verse and a chorus. One random day I was a bit depressed because it looked like the film was just not going to happen. It was on one of those down days, and someone texts me this video. It's Sadie strumming and singing the song in an apartment. It knocked me out. My eyes started filling with tears. It was the first time I had ‘seen’ the film. It had been four years by then that I’d been working on it. I was in a desperate place, and it just blew me away. I was like, ‘There's the film. I found her. There's O’Dessa.’
From that initial little clip until the finished film, it was a joy. It was a pleasure working with her. She does her homework. She learnt to play guitar on all those songs. She goes deep. She's an intuitive artist. She's the best natural singer I've ever worked with. She's unbelievable. She just embodied O’Dessa. It got to a point where, on set, I couldn't tell the difference between Sadie and O’Dessa. It was just one entity for me. I was hallucinating the film off-camera. She's really special.
(FR): You share a lot of information by having characters look at themselves in the mirror. There's a scene like that in Patti Cake$ as well, where she's giving herself a pep talk.
(GJ): It seems to be something I go back to quite a bit, and I think it's because both those films are very subjective films without narration or voiceover. They're both films about young people finding themselves, checking themselves, and seeing what they're made of. There's a certain loneliness in both of those characters. I think both of those mirror scenes are them checking in with themselves or giving themselves a pep talk. They're so alone in the world that they need to communicate with themselves in an outward way. There are two of them, and they're kind of similar. I'd never thought about that, but they're in similar places in the films. There’s a mirror scene, and then at the end, they kind of check in again with themselves. I guess it's a motif of mine.
(FR): You mentioned a lot of 80s films, and we talked about The Wizard of Oz, but have there been any other foundational moviegoing moments that shaped you as a filmmaker?
(GJ): I moved to San Francisco for a short while when I was about 22. I took a Greyhound from New Jersey and landed in San Francisco. The first week I was there, I saw City of Lost Children. It was an unbelievable experience for me to see something with that artistry and imagination on that scale, on a huge screen, with Angelo Badalamenti’s music. It really spoke to me, and it's a huge influence on O’Dessa. It made me want to create another world. Leave it to the French to do it, and it is very influenced by Terry Gilliam, but I always wanted to go into another dimension. I wanted to create new worlds, and that experience really stuck with me. I remember leaving the theatre and feeling like I was floating. I was in this dream world, which all comes back to these sort of dreamy places. We don’t have those films, like I had growing up, that bring you into another world and break some rules. That don't stick to a formula, that get weird, and are colourful, strange, and surreal. I missed those films.
O’Dessa is available from Hulu and Disney+ 20 March.
GEREMY JASPER is a writer, director, composer, and songwriter. Jasper’s feature film debut, Patti Cake$, was released by Searchlight Pictures in 2017 to critical acclaim, following its world premiere at Sundance and subsequently at Cannes and SXSW. Jasper received a DGA nomiantion for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in First-Time Feature Film and an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Film. Jasper wrote and recorded all of the original songs, which went on to be shortlisted for the Academy Awards. That year Jasper was included in Variety's 10 Directors to Watch. In addition to O’Dessa, Jasper has directed award-winning music videos, including VMA-winning videos for Florence + The Machine and Selena Gomez. His work on the Target “Kaleidoscopic Fashion Spectacular” won a Cannes Golden Lion, TED Prize, and was inducted into MoMA’s permanent collection.
