If Charlie Polinger’s mother hadn’t asked him to clear out his childhood bedroom after lockdown, his debut feature, The Plague, might never have existed “I was going through all my old stuff,” he recalls, “and I found these journals from a summer when I was at an all-boys sports camp. I had written down all these little tiny details, things that felt so important to me at the time, and I would write things in all-caps. It was like a lightning bolt; all these memories came flooding back. I started calling up a lot of my friends, my male friends in particular and asking them about their experiences at camp, and a lot of them had some really similar ones [to mine]. And from there, I took it into something fictional.”
Poliger’s film stars newcomer Everett Blunck as middle-schooler Ben, who is spending his summer at a water polo camp run by coach Daddy Wags (Joel Edgerton). Things seem fine on the surface, but when the coach is out of the way, Ben begins to realize that there is a hierarchy within the group — egged on by the cheerfully sinister Jake (Kayo Martin), the boys have ostracized one of their number, Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), for a serious body rash that gives the film its title. Caught in the middle, Ben tries to stay out of it, but his attempts to be kind to Eli backfire horribly, putting Ben squarely in the ringleader’s crosshairs.
Having premiered in Un Certain Regard in Cannes this year, and opening this week in the US, the result is one of the most imaginative genre films of the year, like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies as made by David Cronenberg. “It came together pretty quickly in the script phase,” says Polinger. “I wrote the first draft in my childhood bedroom, which was pretty interesting and historic.”
DEADLINE: It must have been a difficult project to get off the ground — you’re working with young, unknown actors and it’s not really a star vehicle.
CHARLIE POLINGER: Oh, it was incredibly challenging to get off the ground. Many people told me that this would be a really exciting calling card, but it would never get made. They said it would be impossible unless we made the kids twice their age and cast actors from Stranger Things, or set it in college, or made it become a movie about zombies. But I felt it had to be this exact version of it. So, yeah, it took a very long time, and things didn’t really start moving until the script got sent over to Joel Edgerton. He connected really personally with the story. He called me and said, “I want this movie to see the light of day.” And so, he came on as a producer as well as playing the role of Daddy Wags, and that was the turning point. Suddenly we were able to put together just enough financing to go and shoot it.
DEADLINE: Where did you shoot it? It’s a very, very specific location.
POLINGER: I love films where the location feels like an extension of the protagonist’s psychological interior state and has a life of its own. We shot in Romania, actually, in Bucharest. For a few reasons. The main one was that there was this incredible swimming pool there, and the team that normally uses it was in the Olympics that summer. We had one week where the pool was empty, and we had this giant, incredible space to ourselves. As soon as I walked in there, into that room, I remembered what it felt like to be 12 years old. I couldn’t figure out why, but just looking at those insane, gigantic glass windows with those crosses and stuff, I had a really overwhelming feeling that just took me back. So, I felt like we had to shoot it there.
‘The Plague’
Steven Breckon
DEADLINE: What kind of casting process did you go through?
POLINGER: So, Joel was on board, but other than that we were starting with a blank page and essentially, we brought on this casting director named Rebecca Dealy. She’d worked on Hereditary, so I knew that she’d cast the young girl in that [Milly Shapiro]. I said, “I don’t want them to seem like polished actors, and they have to be 12- or 13-year-olds.” Even though that would make it a lot harder for the amount of hours on set. We would see the occasional 15- or 16-year-old, and they seemed way too old. Or we’d see a 10-year-old, 11-year-old, and they seemed way too young. Getting the exact age was vital, where these boys were right on that threshold of still having a young boy’s vulnerability but also becoming really aware of themselves, in the way that happens in early adolescence.
Rebecca brought in probably thousands of tapes, from people who had done a little bit of acting to people who had never done anything at all, and she would have them read for one of the three main roles. She sent me her selects, but I’d watch every single tape. Some of [the parts] took a long time to cast and some of them didn’t — like Kenny Rasmussen who plays Eli, who was in among the first 10 tapes we saw. Both of us, independently, were like, “This is Eli for sure.” There was just something about him, physically, and the way he said the line was perfect.
Kayo Martin, who plays Jake, is someone I found on Instagram. He has a big following, and I saw these videos of him going around New York being a little bit of a menace — he’d go into pizza shops and bagel shops and knock things off the shelves, or go to Mike Tyson, Jake Paul fights and get on the mic and harass them. He was just meant to be on camera — he’s a lightning bolt of chaos. He hadn’t really acted before, but we brought him in and it was immediately clear that he had to play that role. There was a certain quality to him. You could never tell if he was joking or if he was serious, and it felt perfect. To me, it was exactly how a bully would behave and it’s not something I’d really seen portrayed on film before.
Ben was played by Everett Blunck, and I had recently seen him in an early cut of Griffin in Summer. It could not be a more different role — in that, he plays this very flamboyant, very gregarious theater kid who’s putting on a play that he calls “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf meets American Beauty”, and he’s sort of bossing all the other kids around. I thought he was incredible in it, and everyone who saw the early screening was like, “Oh my god, who is this kid?” I was like, “He’s the opposite of this role, it’s never going to work.” But he came in and he blew us away, because he created a completely different role. He really thinks about story and character, like an actor twice his age. He just totally, clearly understood what the character was calling for. He brought this whole physicality in from the beginning, a kind of simmering anger that felt really electric. So, I think we just got lucky once we saw each of the three of them read, and it became very clear that those roles belonged to them.
DEADLINE: How did you run the set, with so many kids around?
POLINGER: Each of them was a little bit different and we had this rehearsal period where they would work together. We had an acting coach named Jackie Brogan who would help us work with them. Lucy McKendrick, my partner, who’s a producer on the film, was also very involved. We’d read the script over and over with each of the kids, reading the whole thing from start to finish, just getting them to really think about the whole story. We’d ask questions more than trying to do scene work. Like, “Why are you at this camp?” “Do you think you’ve met any of these kids before?” We were just getting them to start thinking.
Then, when we were on set it would be about trying to create the energy. I tried to just keep things feeling really alive, and obviously some scenes were a little more intense than others. So, at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day, we’d hug and say, “We’re all friends here.” Fortunately, everyone I got along really well, I think, and they were all hanging out at the hotel together. They were probably having too much fun. But, for me, it was about trying to create a little bit of chaos, giving them props and little things that would keep things surprising, like telling one of them to do or say something that might throw the other one off, in a way that just keeps it exciting. But they were so prepared, they all knew their lines really well, like any professional actors. I know Joel felt the same. He’d come to me at the end of the day and be like, “Holy sh*t, these kids are amazing.”
Everett Blunck and Joel Edgerton in ‘The Plague’
Steven Breckon
DEADLINE: What kind of interaction did Joel have with the boys?
POLINGER: He’d spoken to some water polo coaches who’d done some of these camps and just was watching them a little bit. And then the kids would do real water polo practice, since they weren’t that experienced, and he’d come and help coach and start kind of getting into it. That naturally created a dynamic, and the kids obviously looked up to him as an actor. But I would tell them — especially Kayo, for example — to try to throw Joel off in some takes. I mean, Kayo’s a master at doing that, and you’d see Joel, who’s always so in the moment, getting really frustrated and trying to just get through his lines. And so, he’d come down really hard on Kayo — like, “You need to get it together” — and you’d see how that would electrify Kayo and make him push back even more.
And so, they naturally fell into a dynamic, but then they’d also get along really well, and he would always stay there next to camera when it was time for their coverage. He treated them as equals, and I think that was really meaningful to them as well.
DEADLINE: He’s an actor who can really, really do a lot with not very much at all.
POLINGER: He felt perfect to me, in that Daddy Wags is completely in over his head, but he’s doing his best, he’s trying to connect with them. You often feel that way about men who are a few generations older, trying to connect [with someone younger], and they have absolutely no tools to work with. But you see him trying to reach across the aisle. He didn’t play it him as just sort of a doofus coach, or a guy screaming all the time. And even though he seems like a guy who’s maybe not turned up in the place where he wanted to in life, he didn’t bring judgment to that role. I just feel like there’s an earnestness there that’s both a little bit tragic and a little bit dryly humorous. He just makes everything feel so lived in.
DEADLINE: One of the most striking elements of the film is its score…
POLINGER: I worked with a friend that I’ve known since I was 18, who I met in college, named Johan Lennox. He has a classical music background, and he works in the music industry now, as well doing pop and hip-hop. He’s an artist too. He’d never done a film score before, but he read the script and said, “I know exactly how to do it.” He started sending me all these tracks at 3am of himself chanting, making noises and pitching his voice up and panning it around. He said, “This sounds like the voice in your head, questioning yourself and questioning everything you do, when you’re 12.” I started listening to it and reading the script, and it was so unexpected, but it felt perfect. It added a whole new dimension on top of a movie that’s sort of exploring boyhood, with these often very quiet scenes. He ended up making a few hundred cues, and I’d put them into the edit and shape them. He didn’t even watch the cut. It was a very un-traditional scoring process.
DEADLINE: There are elements of horror, particularly body horror in your movie. Were you thinking of genre when you were putting it together?
POLINGER: I was, in the sense that I think a great psychological horror film is a film that immerses you in the subjectivity of a character who is in peril or who is having some sort of psychological freakout. This completely fits the bill in that sense. And even though the things that Ben is going through are somewhat common for a middle-school boy, for him, it’s the first time he’s going through them. It feels like life and death, and he’s really having a meltdown over the course of the film to some degree. And so, I felt like, if we’re going to put the film inside of his perspective and not make it feel nostalgic or feel like I was looking back, that it should feel like a psychological horror film, or a war film. Or at least one of these films where the music and the sound and the space are creating an internal state, and that’s going into a really intense direction just as [the main character] is going into one.
So, definitely, I was watching a combination of things, from Full Metal Jacket and Beau Travail all the way to Superbad, Freaks and Geeks and some of the great hangout movies from the early 2000s. And maybe because I watched those movies for the first time when I was 12, they felt very connected to me. So, it was really about synthesizing the humor and the anxiety to go hand in hand when you’re a 12-year-old boy.
DEADLINE: Your next film is an adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death. Is there any connection with The Plague?
POLINGER: Well, there’s sort of a biblical level plague in the new story, and so it is connected, I think. I don’t want to say too much about it, but it’s similar in that it involves group dynamics in a claustrophobic setting. It’s very different from the short story, but, obviously, it’s building from that. Anyone who knows the story knows that it’s exploring what happens if you put a group of people together in a castle during a plague. And so, there’s naturally going to be some connections. At the same time, it’s a full-on medieval period piece. It’s very darkly comedic, and it’s leaning into the maximalism of that kind of medieval hero genre more. But thematically, I do feel there are some similarities.
