Darkon interview: Andrew Neel and Luke Meyer

You were not intending to make a documentary when you began this project, is that right?

AN: I was making a film in college and got interested in virtual worlds. I did research for a feature film about Dungeons & Dragons, then found out about live action role playing and got charmed by it, and went to see an event and got sidetracked into wanting to make that movie instead. I met Luke several years later. Despite a lack of funding, we decided to go down and start shooting. Reality is often much better than fiction. We met Skip [Lipman, one of the movie's main characters] and stayed in touch with him. We tried to gain the trust of the entire group, a group of people who are all marginalized to one extent or another.

How do you gain their trust? You got them to speak frankly and revealingly to you about very personal things, even Danny (Daniel McArthur), who seems very open about his shyness, if that is not a contradiction in terms.

AN: When you go into an interview, there’s a license to speak and a reason to talk and work things out. In everyday life he might not have the skills to talk about himself, but this was different. For example, the cardboard guy, who talks about how he showed up with cardboard armor and was rejected by everyone. It was a social learning experience, getting rejected and having to atone for that. Darkon can be a place for developing social skills for some people, a slightly safer fictional universe, like high school, the latitude is a little greater.

LM: It's like a testing ground to try out facets of your personality before you own that.

One thing I particularly liked about the film was the way you allow the audience to enter into the world of Darkon through your staging of the battle scenes. Can you tell me a little about how you did that?

AN: The battle scenes were filmed subjectively. It is a very subjective film. We were not trying to stand back. Obviously there’s an anthropological element. A lot of people would have stood back a little bit, looking at the battle going on in that field with a wide shot, but we wanted to indulge in their fantasies and get into their point of view. We broke a lot of documentary rules in a way, working with the participants to get into their fantasy. So you’ll notice that a lot of the footage in the fantasy is more in a fiction style of film-making, which is inherently not truthful. We went back and forth between those often diametrically opposed approaches. We might have them charge a few times before their actually fought, but we did not stage the winners and losers, and the actual game play was never staged.

LM: The closest we came to staging was in the scenes with the dark elves, in the caves, and walking through the dark woods.

AN: Our goal with the film was to make a fantasy epic within the construct of a verite documentary which is a counter-intuitive thing to try to do.

How is the outcome of a battle determined in Darkon?

AN: Last man standing.

LM: The more armor you have the more hits you can take.

AN: The number of events you’ve been to dictates the level. The more experience you have the more armor you’re allowed to wear, but you actually have to make the armor and put it on.

The movie's score is terrific -- it suggests something grand and epic without overdoing it.

LM: It was an original composition by Boston-based musician-composer named Brad Turner, devil music (ensemble), kind of tongue in cheek.

AN: We were riding a weird line where we wanted to invoke the fantasy-epic genre but didn’t want to re-create that because it would create an ironic silliness. We had to create some kind of ideocyncratic reality that would not just be a remake of fantasy. It allowed audience to experience the music in a fresh way and not replicate the music from movies like "Conan the Barbarian," which would remove the audience. We were always walking this irony line, we did not want to make fun of them but wanted to note the quixotic sensibility of the story.

What's next?

AN: We made "Alice Neel," about the artist (and my grandmother). We’re co-directing the next film, "New World Order," about conspiracy theorists, and we’re going to move into fictional stuff in the next couple of years.