DETENTION: Joseph Kahn talks about his candy-coloured cross-dimensional teen movie

Interview by Kier-La Janisse

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Joseph (Torque) Kahn’s audacious teen angst comedy Detention may assault your senses in every which way, but we’ll be damned if it doesn’t also make you die laughing.  Described by variety’s Andrew Barker as “Packing in more confounding slang than a Wu-Tang record and more gonzo subplots than a Pynchon novel” (I don’t know if this was meant to be a compliment, but being compared to Pynchon is never a bad Last week I have tried this medicine and would like to recommend you. Canadian online pharmacy no prescription needed, we also dispense your medications from international fulfillment centers that are approved by the regulatory bodies from their respective countries. thing artistically), Kahn brings more meta-weirdness to the table than even the most frenetic MTV-informed teen films can hope to keep up with. With a psycho killer on the loose, body-swapping, time travel, furry sex, mascot abuse and comedic suicide attempts, Kahn still manages to create a human drama about an accident-prone square peg (Shanley Caswell) who just wants to survive her final year of high school, and maybe have a shot at winning the levitra verkaufen im online shop boy she likes.

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You bankrolled this film yourself. What was it about this story appealed to lowest cost levitra no prescription canada you enough to take a financial risk? Or was it more a sense that studio-backing might compromise the film’s ideas too much?

Every producer and studio turned down the script. Nobody got it, so I really didn’t have any other choice than to find outside funding for it – most of which turned out to be my own bank account. But then I got to make it with zero interference. If I wanted to shoot more days or build a new set or blow up a dog, I just kept writing checks. As a result, what you see is completely unfiltered from my brain. There were no compromises.

The film goes off in many tangents – a masked serial killer, a high school crush, body-swapping, time travel – What kinds of strategies did you employ to keep everything in cohesive?

My co-writer Mark Palermo and I made a very conscious effort to ground all these fantastic elements with a human element. At the central core of all these tangents, they’re about people. And ultimately, as some people may be looking for a conventional plot through genre identification, I’d say they’re looking at the wrong place. The story is about a girl finding herself, and that’s what the movie is really about. Everything is designed to support that powerful core idea.

The film wears its influences on its sleeve – it’s kind of a meta-overload. How do you make a film like this transcend pastiche?

We actually studied films like Dance Flick to find the line where our movie could have turned into a pure cultural parody exercise, which we did not want. Again, it’s about the human element. We never try to force a reference just for its own sake. We try to motivate it through character and plot, so that each little piece is organic and integral to the story. We took the actual issues of our character’s lives seriously. Also, as opposed to emulating, we tried to deconstruct each influence and make them mean something very different than the original intent. Not better. Different.

Regardless of the film’s comedic elements, the film’s horror imagery is effective – what’s your personal background with the genre?

I was a huge horror fan growing up. Fangoria Magazine was actually my film school as a kid. I was fascinated how gore effects could be created and then edited to create an illusion. Reverse engineering that and then breaking down framing techniques in creating suspense was integral to me as a filmmaker. Getting to riff on that in Detention was a lot of fun.

It’s also very kinetic and the characters’ movements seem overtly choreographed, is that the influence of the many music videos you’ve done? It certainly elevates the film’s sense of the surreal.

This is going to sound arrogant, but here it is: my music videos don’t influence me, I influence my music videos. So Detention’s visual style comes from me, not my music videos, if that makes any sense.

Tell me about the use of onscreen text in the film – I find it interesting that text has become such a strong part of our aesthetics – your average person can recognize and name at least 10 fonts, for example – what do you think it does aesthetically to use the word as an image?

This aspect of the film is a riff on how we perceive the world, especially the younger generation. We live in a world that is constantly saturated with text and motion graphics. Most of us spend a good chunk of our day on the internet which is nothing but text and motion graphics, and we may hop off to reply to a cell phone text message, or walk past a plasma billboard that changes product and type. The attempt here is to create an integrated experience that genuinely reflects the totality of your everyday experience. You don’t think you walk around with text floating around your head like in the movie, but really, you do.

Is Billy Nolan deliberately named after John Travolta’s character in Carrie, or was that a coincidence?

Strangely, both.

Has the mixture of contemporary and 80s/90s references polarized audiences? I imagine it might be hard to find the perfect demographic. Do you feel you’re in a unique spot directing music videos for (often) young artists that keeps you in touch with the interests of contemporary youth regardless of your own personal nostalgic references?

Music videos are one of the few things a new generation can claim as their own artform. Music videos, street art, web art. Mainstream filmmaking is so expensive it’s controlled by corporations that need to move global product to everyone. As a result, films are still paced and constructed as they were 20 years ago. Critics even take pride in promoting this repetition as some sort of unbreakable ideal. But music videos are a great place the young can communicate to each other on their own terms – from technique to content. Detention plays more by the filmmaking rules of a music video in that it could give a damn whether or not someone older will understand it – from technique to content. That said, I think plenty of older people will get it, but they have to be young at heart. This film was aggressively made for young people and cool moms. And French people.

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DETENTION  has its International Premiere on July 22 at 9:10pm in the Hall Theatre . More info on the film page HERE.

About the author:

Kier-La Janisse

Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, publisher, producer, acquisitions executive for Severin Films and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She is the author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024), House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022) and A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and has been an editor on numerous books including Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015). She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), and produced the acclaimed blu-ray box sets All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror (2021) and The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle (2023).