Steven Soderbergh

What is Divinity about?

It’s about life, death, and rebirth – those are the main themes that surround it. It’s about a character named Jaxxon (Stephen Dorff), who ends up creating a chemical called Divinity. It enables people to become pretty much immortal, at least physically immortal. But it’s a work-in- progress, the mind aspect hasn’t been fully figured out, so minds are deteriorating the same as normal, but everyone is physically in their prime. Another side-effect is that you can’t reproduce when you’re taking the chemical, so people taking it must choose… either to live forever or give life.

Can you talk about the themes within the film?

I guess everybody has their own interpretation of the afterlife, what life and rebirth is. Mainly, I use these themes for people to think and ask questions about them, and kind of just dive into them deeper; not necessarily answering how it should be. It was mainly to pose these questions.

Can you talk about the sibling brother relationships in the film?

Between Moises and Jason – They’re star children, these brothers that were made from stardust, and they have one sole purpose. I don’t know if this is revealing too much, but pretty much they were created to maintain balance in the universe. They are sent to this planet where they sense something that is causing a disturbance, which is Divinity. They’re there to save the planet so it doesn’t self-destruct.

How did this amazing cast come together? Have you worked with any of the talent previously?

I like working with new talent to see where their instincts lie. We had a basic treatment and then we used storyboards. So, I put all these on a wall and then I brought these actors in that I admired, and that I thought fit well with the project, and then I kind of went through the whole entire film with them on the wall. So, they pretty much got a firsthand look at the film, not necessarily what you interpret from words but literal drawings of how the shot is angled and everything, from these storyboards. That created a conversation, and they were either down for it or not, but pretty much everyone that I wanted I was able to get for it, and they were excited to try something different.

Karrueche Tran as Nikita in Divinity (Eddie Alcazar, 2023)

What was the biggest challenge making the film?

Resources are always tricky. And I think, when you’re creating something like this film, which I feel hasn’t been done, we’re all kind of coming together to explore a new way of creating films, but also how we tell them. I think we were ready for it and we knew it was going to be challenging. It’s tough obviously when you don’t have a lot of money or resources to make things easier with time or added manpower. All we had was kind of persistence with people that were able to still see the end to the finish line and do whatever possible to get it there.

Was there a particular scene that stands out in your mind when you were shooting the film?

Not anything in particular. I mean, everything was just kind of equally nuts, but I think overall the creature transformation that Dorff goes through was pretty unique and different, and challenging at the same time.

Stephen Dorff as Jaxxon in Divinity (Eddie Alcazar, 2023)

Can you talk about the decision to shoot the film in black and white?

The last couple films I did, at least in short form, were also in the same aesthetic and I wanted to explore it in the longer form – wanted to see if it would hold up. I wanted to utilise all the stuff I learned with my shorts into something bigger. I’ve only heard of a couple of films that have ever been shot on our specific format – the black and white reversal, it’s kind of a unique stock that Kodak had to make specifically for us.

How did Steven Soderbergh become involved with the film? Was there any great advice he gave you during the production?

He was executive producer on my last film Perfect and from there our relationship grew and one day we were talking, and he just offered to fund my next idea. It was really just as simple as that. He didn’t really ask what it was about or anything specific, it’s just this amount of money and I can do just whatever with it, which was pretty amazing but also that’s a lot of pressure on your shoulders, to make sure it gets the money back and it makes him happy creatively. I always text him here and there about specific little things but as far as creativity I think he wants me to find it on my own, he doesn’t really influence any of that.

How did DJ Muggs get involved with the project?

So, there are two composers, DJ Muggs and Dean Hurley. Dean had worked with him on one of his albums before and he put me in touch with him, and we met. This is the first time DJ Muggs is really scoring a film, so he was really excited. I showed him some of the footage and it just seemed like it was just a perfect fit for him to explore some of these ideas and work with Dean again. I’ve been a big fan of his since I was a kid.

Thanks to Utopia

Weird Weekend present Divinity on Friday 28th June, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.

Sex Doesn’t Matter, But Size Does

This is the advertising maxim that arms Divinity throughout and is the plate on which it’s served: Modern Life Has Become Fatalistically Obsessed With Itself.

Set deep in the glistening, eerie hills of an unnamed American desert, Divinity is a film that feels so new and oblique, it feels weird to contemplate. Focusing on the story of two celestial brothers that arrive on Earth to kidnap and punish Jaxxon (a jittering, pissed off Stephen Dorff), the creator and researcher of Divinity: A product that enhances life to the point of immortality. To add to the rotating ethical quandries floating around his great research mansion – a neo-brutalist cave shaped like an isopod – is call girl Nikita with a perhaps seraphic fertility and Jaxxon’s turbo-shredded brother Rip, the face of the product.

Already, as I’m describing this to you, it feels like I’m straightening it too much. Rigidity doesn’t exist here.

Divinity’s world is one, twice removed and three steps in front of our future, but it feels there to goad us into copying its shape. An experimental mood-piece world where every advert is entirely sexualizing things like cereal, or selling you sex wholesale. A pulsing, horny, body-obsessed grotesquerie that wants you to have sex in front of the TV before you purchase. Chemical betterment to to a completely othered mass audience. A world where heavenly stars become inquisitors of Man, and reproduction is caged in a near-new-age etherea cult whose harem exist as apparitions in the opaque. Perfect beings that live in a chrysalis of purity. Of course, the story is told in the desert, the great Mecca for drug adventurism and cult retreat. Cities are so jejune when the glittering stars above aren’t able to locate the darknesses in Man’s heart as it commodifies aging (or lack thereof). Divinity the product is treated as a ubiquitous brand name, both accessible but luxurious. Free samples if you buy Laundry Detergent, and concentrated small-batch fineries for the wealthy. A decadence for every home, but a decadence nonetheless. To see characters defy the tides of time with the elixir, after we see a biblically-accurate angel in static in the opening minute, feels like we truly misunderstand aging. We are the crumbling visage of the universe and our beauty is returning to it.

Divinity (Eddie Alcazar, 2023)

The film exercises a dark looseness. It shakes its legs, stretches, curls an iron but it never feels that it has to deliver itself as a solid piece. There are small segments of lust philosophy, in which Nikita explains sex and desire to the brothers, set to a shimmering soundtrack. A great, utterly indulgent aural segment that lets us breathe in the dust rather than ingest it. There are biblical allusions to the brothers, especially in terms of their father’s work, how he passed and its effect on them. We’re given heady notes on medical research that considers human life and its origins as fertile grounds for moral manipulation, if you can bend your light around the FDA and highground naysayers. The sludging masses, reflective of Opioid crisis, Social Media influencers, the ’80s-body-obsessed-carryover and chemical abduction of the soul take hold on your attention throughout. A close cousin to Panos Cosmatos’ Beyond The Black Rainbow, but less evasive in its abstractions. Even in amongst this, there are stopmotion fights, depictions of heaven, souls escaping the body, muscle-bound butlers in shock collars and small sections featuring Scott Bakula. It’s all messy and curious but it never feels like we’re being lectured. It’s a fluid, experimental sci-fi body-horror that focuses on sharpening its body as a blade, not particularly its mind.

Divinity (Eddie Alcazar, 2023)

Speaking of which, Divinity is truly one of the great looking and sounding modern sci-fis. I can’t remember anything more stark and evocative in an age. High-grain monochrome Eraserhead-like 16mm film stock that’s been pushed with cheap developer. Something closer to a perfume advert for nightmares over anything else. Whirring, chittering primitive technology, robust in its texturing with a CRT TV tube softness and heavy keyboard shunking. Lots of oscilloscope scanlines raking across the screen. A true, monolithic colour grading that makes the stars look like glittering acne in the night sky and creates grey-blushed dusks. Such brutal textures making everything formulate forthwith from shadows like it’s unsticking itself from glue. The desert transforms at times into a dreamy coal beach, the score itself resting on the extremities of waveforms. Sometimes it sounds like shimmering alien-fires that lift you from within, and at times it turns into frightening industrial technique, overpowering your engine and threatening to turn you into metal. Dean Hurley, frequent David Lynch collaborator, and DJ Muggs, Cypress Hill producer (yes, that Cypress Hill), have such a sense of textural idealism, their work feels like it deepens shadows and licks whatever gritty highlights are available to it. An eerie, mystical soundscape that crushes philosophy and power into diamonds. To truly sand off the edges, there is also a closing credits song by a legendary sci-fi rapper that I won’t reveal, but please stay for.

Black and white image of a crouching figure in silhouette, walking across a forest landscape, fringed with white text, "Flying Lotus, FUCKKKYOUUU, a film by Eddie Alcazar" and logos for Vevo and Sundance. — *FUCKKKYOUUU* is age-restricted, so we can’t embed it here – watch on YouTube!

It would make sense that director Eddie Alcazar would collaborate with someone like Flying Lotus for a short film entitled FuckkkYouuu, which showcases his proclivities for shadowy strangeness, body contusion and frightening soundscapes, but what really puts my ears back is seeing Steven Soderbergh, Hollywood’s busiest man (I’m personally convinced there are three of him), nestled in the credits as Executive Producer. He has worked previously with Alcazar on his first film, Perfect (2018), but in Divinity I see things that Soderbergh would feel need championed, reflecting his own themes that dominate the politics of his films. Industrial capitalism, commodification of the soul, the deformity of gain and how people become products if we let ourselves be glamoured by vapid idealism. He’s always championed independent film, and with Alcazar it feels like he’s found his weird little guy to use as a reflector of himself: a proud visualist and always finding form to put light on a theme before it scuttles away like a cockroach.

In all the film’s notably and, according to Alcazar, fluid and improvised dialogue, there is one line that lacquers the film more than any. Nikita saying to the Stars:

“Live forever or give life. Pleasure over love”.

Please consider your future before it considers yours for you.

The Reptile House

Weird Weekend present Divinity on Friday 28th June, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.

The Reptile House is the alias of Findlay, which is the nickname of the author himself. A banner under which all collective writing, art, submissions and soon-to-be-screenings is nestled. Reflected in the dark terraces of The Reptile House is cinematic pain and oscillations coming from old Adidas brochures. Always open to collaboration. @antibloom (Follow Findlay on Letterboxd)