Interview: A Chat With Director Adam Egypt Mortimer About ‘Archenemy’, Superheroes, And Genre Film

Adam Egypt Mortimer (Daniel Isn’t Real) is known for his success in making innovative supernatural films in the horror thriller vein, but with his new film Archenemy the filmmaker is breaking ground in a different genre entirely. A novel take on the superhero genre, The film follows a teenager who meets a mysterious man named Max Fist (an excellent Joe Manganiello), one whose current hardship flies in the face of his claims to have been a superhero on another world.

The film sports stunning visuals and action sequences along great central performances, anchoring a larger-than-life story. I spoke with the director about Archenemy, its themes, and more.

JE: With Some Kind of Hate and Daniel Isn’t Real, your career in the past has been associated with a more horror-thriller genre territory. It’s a shift for you to do action, and especially a gritty superhero-style film, so why the genre switch?

AEM: There are a lot of things at work, but I think one of them is that what I really love is genre. I love what you can do with genre movies. Daniel Isn’t Real was a possession movie, like The Exorcist, and I’m [asking] ‘how can I take that genre and do something with it that’s really about very personal things… but it’s also cosmic and psychedelic. How can I create this aesthetic around it? And for Archenemy it was the same thing to me. I’m all about [giving audiences] a sense of the world, its style, that immersion and how it’s going to be cinematic, and then ask ‘what does a particular genre have to say?’

So whether it’s a horror movie about being possessed or a superhero movie about a superhero in a broken down state, these are both similar to me in that they’re [grounded in] these genre tropes. They suggest this [particular] world and then I [explore] taking these characters in the genre really seriously, I really believe in their emotional lives and then I build a visual container for them. One of the things I’m really excited to find out when Archenemy comes out is if people will look at it and be like, ‘oh, that’s clearly the same director as Daniel Isn’t Real’ . Even though they’re totally different genres, do they speak to each other? Aesthetically, do they have similarities? 

It’s funny, they [also] do have similar aspects… in both cases there’s a kid, and now he’s made friends with this kind of bigger, more powerful person and seems to become increasingly dubious about what their state of reality is.

JE: What inspired you to make Archenemy?

AEM: It was a couple different threads. I was thinking about the movie The Wrestler and about what it would be like to make a movie like The Wrestler but it’s about a superhero. It’s that same sense that his glory is behind him and he’s broken because of it, and then being curious about the nature of reality. Having grown up with comics and really loving how far out comic books can be, and how cosmic they can be… it starts with The Wrestler but by the time I’m done I’m playing with the multiverse and cosmic adventures, and the toll it takes to go through a black hole, and it became very different from The Wrestler. 

One other thing I kept thinking about is… what if Wong Kar-wai made a superhero movie? What he did with Ashes of Time was ‘here’s my kung fu movie’ and it’s totally experimental and romantic and strange and mysterious, [the film] sort of had that idea aesthetically. How do I make a superhero movie that doesn’t feel like a superhero movie, but that feels like another kind of thing?

I also keep thinking about… there’s 20-year-olds alive now where the only movies they’ve ever seen have been superhero movies. They’ve walked into theaters, say Batman Begins, and by the time they’re fully functional kids it was every Marvel movie, and now they’re an adult and it’s all that’s ever been out there. How can I get in there and play around with what a movie is in that world?

JE: I can see that. It’s also an interesting visual choice to include mixed media, such as animation, in the film. Tell us a little about how that choice came to be.

AEM: We want to show that he’s having all these adventures and that he’s a superhero, but then we also wanted to show the idea of these are in his memory, we’re not seeing them in the present. There’s a real slipperiness to them, they’re always changing, and maybe he’s lying. He’s misremembering, maybe… we don’t know what the reality is. With this style of animation, I wanted it to sort of feel blurry and increasingly outside the possible, and thought about the comic art style that Bill Sienkiewicz did with Daredevil in the 1980s where it feels so dreamlike and strange. And Pink Floyd – The Wall is one of my favorite movies of all time, definitely a movie that is one of the most disturbing to me, in the way it uses animation to show the insides of a man losing his mind… it was also really important to me.  

JE: In some ways it seems like the film is a repudiation of sorts on the whole ‘gritty, violent hero / antihero” trope.

AEM: One thing I’m really always fascinated by, in everything I do, is the fetishization that we have of nihilism… Escape from New York is one of my favorite movies. At the end, he walks off destroying the tape recorder and presumably starting WWIII as a result… [it’s awesome] but it doesn’t really offer us anything. It’s like, ‘okay, now the movie’s done and it’s back to actually living in fear’, because it’s 1981, that movie came out in the Cold War. Where do we take our nihilism? Where do we take this ‘lone wolf’ thing? So, yeah, there’s an idea in Archenemy that you’re totally putting your finger on that… it has a bit to do with the young and the new replacing the old, and the colorful energy and hope battling with… with the old guy who’s drinking whiskey and punching people to death. There’s definitely a dialogue between those two points of view, and I think you really have to have that dialogue.

JE: Joe Manganiello seems born to be a superhero let alone play one. What was it like working with him?

AEM: You’re 100% right. …There’s a part of the movie where we shaved him, did his hair, and put on a shiny superhero costume… it was the thing we had to shoot on the very last day, and I remember looking at him and just being like, ‘Oh, my God, you just are Superman,’ he [just] has that on the inside. I mean, part of his actual career back story is that they wanted him to play Superman. I can’t remember which version, if it was the Bryan Singer one… they wanted him to do it but he was on contract with True Blood.

So there’s [really] that feeling of ‘I was like Superman and now I’m not’ [which is] what this character is going through. It was really kind of was an emotional reality for him. He’s a huge comic book nerd and we were, you know, hanging out all day talking about our favorite comics, and he really understands the Superman mythology… so much so that sometimes he’d improvise lines and I’m like ‘Joe, that’s Superman, that’s not Max’… but yeah, I think he wrote a book on how to do the best weightlifting and be ripped and stuff. He definitely wants to be out there saving the world with his super biceps.

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Archenemy is a fun, trippy, novel take on the modern superhero tale, and you can catch it (and Joe Manganiello’s super biceps) in select theaters and on VOD today, December 11th.