Roberto Minervini on Making His Naturalistic U.S. Civil War Drama ‘The Damned’ While the ‘Rust’ Shooting Tragedy Broke – Trailer

Nick Vivarelli
·3 min read
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Italian-born and Texas-based director Roberto Minervini is known for making hard-hitting documentaries that dissect the backwaters of American society, such as his so-called Texas trilogy comprising “The Passage,” “Low Tide” and “Stop the Pounding Heart.”

His most recent doc, “What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?,” about a community of Black people in New Orleans during the summer of 2017 – when a string of brutal killings of Black men sent shockwaves throughout the country – launched from the Venice competition section in 2018.

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“The Damned,” which premieres on Thursday in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard and is Minervini’s first fiction feature, is set during the American Civil War in the winter of 1862. The naturalistic war drama follows a troupe of volunteer soldiers tasked with patrolling unchartered borderlands in Western territories.

Below, Minervini speaks to Variety about his the transition from making docs to fiction with a very realistic war movie and how he worked with armorers to ensure there was no risk of repeating the tragedy that occurred on the “Rust” set while “The Damned” was filming.

“The Damned” is so naturalistic it feels like your docs. How did you approach making it?

My approach has never changed. I use storytellers, and I build stories around them. So, for me, going from what we can call documentary, just because the stories that are told were actually reenacted by the characters, to a story that is fiction – especially because it takes place in the past and in part does not directly belong to the actors – is the same. Methodologically and even philosophically, nothing has really changed.

In terms of the film’s subject matter, the Civil War, I can’t help thinking how it connects with America today. Is that what drew you to this subject matter?

When Jan. 6 happened, I’d long been following this sentiment of deep distrust. In the South, I’ve seen all of that, the shift to the extreme right with neo-Nazi groups like Atomwaffen. All of that was really troubling for me. It was really scary. So it was natural for me to go back to the times of a civil war when the country was obviously fragmented, and some of the values were still uncertain. It seemed natural to go back to the roots of a country that’s never ceased to be divided and never ceased to be at war with others, or with itself in a way.

There’s a lot of guns and rifles in “The Damned,” and it all looks very real. Were you aware of what happened on the “Rust” set?

Sure. We were very aware. The “Rust” incident happened while we were filming. I remember it happening and of course, that was a great concern. We had two certified armorers. One is Jeremiah [Knupp], the main character [in the film] with the red beard. The other one is his wife, who’s always hiding and shooting. So we had all the protocols in place on how to shoot and all that. That’s why, at the time, I got a VFX supervisor involved from the start because we knew we would have to rely on VFX to enhance the shooting activity since a lot of the activity itself was limited by the fact that we needed to take safety precautions. So, a lot of the fire you see was actually done in post-production. But a lot of the more distant fire is done with blanks on set. What took place on “Rust” are mistakes that cannot happen when all the safety protocols are in place, and there is triple-checking.

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