[Interview] Jacqueline Castel for MY ANIMAL

The horror romance MY ANIMAL is now available on Digital, and it is a beautiful rumination of the outsider and the difficulty of being LGBTQ+ in a small town. If you are one of those people who wonder where all the werewolf films are in horror, MY ANIMAL is waiting for you.

The film, directed by Jacqueline Castel and written by Jae Matthews, uses the metaphor of the werewolf to examine the pain and loneliness that comes with accepting yourself as a queer person and coming to terms with the complex relationships in dysfunctional families, which is made more difficult when you don’t conform to their ideas of love and romance.

Nightmarish Conjurings’ Dolores Quintana spoke to director Jacqueline Castel about the creation of the film and how the style works with the narrative to facilitate the telling of the story.

I’d like to know more about the particulars of the imagery that you’re using, especially more about how the lighting informs the story. I’d also like to get to know more about how you worked with the actors and the cinematographer to bring this type of striking imagery to the screen and a little bit about your process and what it means to you.

Jacqueline Castel: I think that in all of my projects, I always approached them from a really strong visual standpoint in terms of how this enhances the narrative. How does this work off of this idea? How does everything come from this core concept? And for me, it was like this: this story, at its heart, is the story of the horror of the outsider. So I really wanted to think, okay, how does everything in the story reinforce that? Or how do we use color to reinforce that? How do we use cinematography?

I have a background of shooting a lot of my own stuff, [but] I didn’t shoot MY ANIMAL. I brought on my fantastic DP, Bryn McCashin, for the film. But I always have a very strong idea of the identity of the film early on, and in all the pitch books and all the work that I was doing in prep was really in developing that world and the universe and these cold and wintry isolated landscapes, contrasted with the warmth of the red, between these characters. This shows how they develop their relationship, and red is a metaphor for passion, desire, and even anger at the end when there is an eclipse.

How everything was, again, reinforcing these ideas. In the opening prelude, some of the imagery there was inspired by personal things that happened to me as a child. I really kind of connected with the prelude. Because when I was young, when I was like 12, I started to get migraines really badly. I had visual auras that came with them. I wanted to create that experience of what it feels like when you’re out of control of your own body. That’s what I really loved about MY ANIMAL was the sense of what happens when you feel like you lose track of your own physical autonomy because that used to happen to me regularly.

That’s something that’s inspired a lot of my work. [It] was this almost psychedelic experience I was having as a kid that I didn’t know a word [to describe them]. I didn’t really understand how to articulate it at the time, and then how to incorporate that visual world into my style as a film director. So that’s part of it, this sort of transformational element shooting, and these warping liquid mirrors as a way to, again, explore the core idea of transformation with this outsider perspective. All of it comes back to that same kind of idea.

Wow, that’s very interesting. My dad got really horrible migraines, and I had them myself; I still get ocular migraines, and it’s really kind of weird and trippy. Most people consider werewolf movies to be difficult to make because there always has to be a transformation scene. And you seem to have found a way to do it without having to rely on effects to show the transformation.

Jacqueline Castel: Yeah, again, what was interesting about MY ANIMAL was this idea that it was always treading this line. Is this happening to her? Is it not happening to her? What exactly was happening to her? I think that that was really compelling to me because I think that people have this immediate association when they think of a werewolf film. I had it too when the producer who handed it to me told me it was a werewolf movie. I was like, I don’t know. And I read it. I was like, Oh, this is actually interesting. It’s really cool. I don’t think this genre has been explored in this way. So that’s what made it very interesting to me. I think I wanted, and I knew there was going to be some degree of it, but I didn’t want to go full on because I think that again, there’s this sort of, I don’t know, magical quality of leaving the audience a little bit at a distance and exploring it, but exploring it by shooting with real wolves.

As an example, what’s really special about this project two is being able to have the opportunity to shoot with actual wolves and to show these transformations and stages without having to go into too much of a creature direction. Think about vampires and how [vampire films] have been done in these cool, stylized, sexy ways. You’ve got The Hunger and all of these very cool movies. But I think with werewolves, you end up feeling like you’re sort of like trapped within, [that] it has to be done in a certain kind of way. And think about how to subvert that expectation.

You really did that. So that was one of the most interesting things about the film to me is that you found a way to do it with that different perspective. And I really, really loved that part. And your two leads, Amandla Stenberg and Bobby Salvör Menuez worked together really well and gave really terrific performances. I was just wondering how they became involved and how you worked with them.

Jacqueline Castel: It was cool because the two of them were my top picks for who I wanted to be in the film. I do a lot of research into my actors. I really try to find people that can, that I think and hope will connect to the story personally, and that maybe have some personal aspect of themselves in the story. I do a lot of research on that. I love that. I knew that I had to anchor this all around Heather. I had to find my Heather, and the whole story had to be built around that character. But, as I was building that world out, and I saw Bobbi, and I [thought Bobbi] just seems like a really interesting kind of person to put in this film.

I was really intrigued by them, and it just was there in my mind for a little bit, for a few months before we actually started to reach out. There was a certain moment when I just knew they were the person for the role. We had a conversation, and I said that I really wanted Amandla Stenberg for Jonny, and Bobbi said, well, we’re friends. I had no idea. Oh, wow. They knew each other. In New York and LA, they actually told me at one point, that first meeting, they had a little bit of a crush on each other. And I was like, that is so cool.

[It was all about the] chemistry. There was already that friendship. There was already that trust, and that, to me, was really exciting as a filmmaker because we’re able to go to a deeper place faster because there was already that trust that was built between the two of them, and that helps a lot. Because there’s all the work to do with your actors before you shoot, but it was also really complicated by the fact that we were in heavy prep in the middle of the Omicron wave.

Were we going to be able to [take a] risk and start shooting? So it made it really hard, sometimes challenging, to always be in a room with people. So it was comforting knowing that we had that as a backbone. Then, once they both got to Timmins, Ontario, where we shot, we just worked a lot together in our hotel rooms and really just got down to, who are these characters? And why are they interacting with each other?

Hearing that is so wonderful and so serendipitous because they do have such a beautiful connection and chemistry right off the bat. It obviously worked great for the film.

Don’t miss MY ANIMAL, now available on Digital, and witness a gorgeous queer werewolf love story and a coming-of-age tale full of obsession, guilt, and love. To learn more, check our review here.

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Dolores Quintana

Dolores Quintana is an actor and writer living in Los Angeles. She has written for blogs as diverse as Buddyhead, Pocho.com, and The Theatre @ Boston Court. She works as an actor in independent film and both immersive and traditional theatre with Alone: an Existential Haunting, Screenshot Productions, and Native Voices at The Autry.

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