Tone-Deaf's Director Richard Bates Jr. Talks His New Film, Fine Art, Ray Wise, and Subverting Audience Expectations

Recently we spoke with filmmaker Richard Bates Jr. (Excision, Trash Fire, Suburban Gothic) about his new movie Tone-Deaf. The film stars Amanda Crew and Robert Patrick in a story about a quick weekend gettaway to an Airbnb that becomes a surreal fight for survival and a commentary on the cultural generation gap. Tone-Deaf is currently out now in select theaters and on VOD.

Andrew Hawkins: I’d like to talk to you about Tone-Deaf today, and the first thing I’d like to ask is how would you describe this film in a nutshell to folks?

Richard Bates Jr: It’s a satire about the generational divide in the United States of America as seen through one man’s eyes.

AH: So, would you say that Harvey is the focus of the film? Because Olive as the main character played by Amanda Crew is excellent.

RBJ: I guess talking through it structurally, the idea is that Olive doesn’t know she’s in a horror film until the third act.

AH: Right.

RBJ: And that was supposed to sort of reflect the idea that y’know, perhaps all these awful things have been going on for a long time but now that there’s a magnifying glass up to it. People’s bubbles have been burst. Now people are becoming more active participants in their lives the same way that Olive never breaks the wall. She doesn’t necessarily know she’s in danger or all these traumatic things are happening around her until it’s in her face.

And that’s when she breaks the wall and fights back. Because the idea is pitting this character Harvey as even to him, it’s his movie. I mean he even chastises the audience. As a character, I was trying to create like a cultural artifact from right now. I thought that would be interesting to watch in five or ten years with social media and the death of subtlety.

AH: Kind of the end of the 2010s and current culture?

RBJ: Yeah, yeah. Harvey, as a real representative of the times, could not be contained by a screen. Y’know everyone says how they feel very bluntly whenever they feel like it now.

Richard Bates Jr. behind the scenes.

For me, making a movie that has a sustained tone and the characters speak in vagaries; certainly, if you’re trying to document what’s going on now, that’s the wrong approach. Don’t listen to your film school teachers.

It’s a problem and it’s a problem with a lot of movies because they’re all being made the same. People are being taught how to do it now. If I can’t convince myself regardless of how delusional I am that I am creating art, then there’s no reason for me to be doing this in the first place.

Structurally, the inspiration for this movie more than anything is music. I’m out there every week pitching things and selling things, and truly there’s more content being made now than ever before but if you do want to sell something you really do have to work with five or six story structures. And you can’t deviate from them which is kind of sad, but with music there are no rules. It’s been around so much longer and no one complains about a rainstick being in the background of an indie-rock song. Experimentation is almost mainstream with music now. It’s limitless freedom.

So, the idea was to create a movie as if it were a dance track or a hip hop song and just create it through the use of sampling. We have this horror structure, but in equal increments we go from coming-of-age to slasher horror to absurdist comedy over and over and over again. The idea of that was sort of to reflect that with all the bombardment of information and everything over the course of 24-hours now; I personally can feel like I’ve lived in 15 different movie genres.

AH: Easily. And what you’re talking about with the absurdist comedy angle, you have so many moments of direct meta connection with the audience in your film. It’s a very broad canvas that you’re painting on here. I love the fact that you include so many moments where it’s like your almost spouting some prose and philosophy, even with Ray Wise. I gotta ask you, how was it working with him for his sequence because the LSD trip was fantastic.

Olive (Amanda Crew) tripping on her vacation.

RBJ: Thanks man, that’s one of my favorite sequences. That one was a really fun one to write.

AH: Yeah, and it makes the ending so much better. I love the punchline.

RBJ: Yeah! This was my third movie with Ray. Ray is my dude. I love Ray. Excision was the first one and he was supposed to be in Trash Fire as well but he wound up having to do this HBO project.

I love Ray and I just trust him. When you write a scene like that, and it was one of my favorite scenes, then you think who do I trust more than anyone to take it over the top and nail it and that’s Ray. That’s when you call ol’ Ray Wise.

AH: How did you get Robert Patrick on board to not only star but also be an executive producer?

RBJ: Well, it’s interesting right because I’m doing this thing. I grew up in the south and I’ve always been extremely liberal, and I moved to New York right after High School and now I’m in Los Angeles. I have a lot of friends from my childhood who are conservative and all this stuff.

Robert; A: he’s agent Doggett and X-Files is one of my favorite shows ever made so immediately I just love him, and then B: he’s much more conservative-leaning than I am. It didn’t feel right in any way to go after an actor that would just immediately want to make fun of Harvey. I needed someone that was gonna try to humanize him and understand certain aspects of the character and do them justice. I was trying to find an actor that wasn’t necessarily your more atypical Hollywood liberal I guess.

Harvey (Patrick) and Olive during the final showdown.

AH: What are your thoughts on subversive cinema. Excision is one of my favorites of yours and this film is subverting the expectations of the audience on different cultural levels. What are you thinking when you’re creating this kind of art.

RBJ: Well, I’m trying not to think about anything. I’m trying to just do what I want.

The more I think about doing something or the right or wrong way to do it; there’s no purity to it. It gets in the way of my voice, y’know. But I am always interested in subverting expectations, and story structures become so tired and repetitive that you almost in order to subvert expectations you have to make cross-genre films; literally switching from genre to genre within your film.

That’s the last bastion of subverting expectations. When you do that you can work from a more prototypical structure and you can really keep people on edge about what the fuck is going on. And there are real surprises.

AH: To wrap up, is there anything you’d like to discuss further? Anything about dream sequences?

RBJ: Well, the dream sequences are all inspired by Norman Rockwell. If you’ve seen his painting The Connoisseur, he has this sole man staring up at a Jackson Pollock work. Norman Rockwell, literally this god of the art world, when artists like Pollock were making art he didn’t get it. He tried to lampoon it and make fun of it, and to me it was just so representative of Harvey’s mindset.

So, I thought by having these nightmares about the changing world wouldn’t it be fascinating to put him in a performance art piece. Its sort of representative of that which I think is any parent’s nightmare is their kid not just going to art school, but working with art installations. You know what that means; that means you’re taking care f that kid for the rest of their goddamn life.

AH: Well thank you so much for talking with us, it’s been a great pleasure. Any final thing you wanna end on?

RBJ: Nah, but I did have fun. And thanks again for watching my other movies too. That’s really cool.