What would you do with pure, unbridled freedom in every aspect of your life? Freedom to spend the days how you wish and love with such abandon without anyone telling you to stop or that your desires are wrong. That kind of paradise exists within the sun-kissed realm of Andrew Chappelle’s alluring, perilous erotic thriller I’m Gonna Kill You. Can that expression truly evolve, grow and be sustained, and can we ever fully turn a blind eye to the past? There is an elusive, disquieting tension seeping into Chappelle’s short film. It’s a sexy, thoughtful exploration of the hunt for happiness. It feels like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go being told by Leopold and Loeb.
There are many elements in Chappelle’s film that feel familiar to things we have gone through in the last ten or fifteen years. Set in a distant future, the film opens with Mikey Graceffa’s Spector and his partner, Cal (James Cusati-Moyer), discussing moments of the past as Cal reads a worn copy of a book about the civilization that came before theirs. Spector noisily and hungrily snacks on an orange. Chappelle’s inspirations didn’t wholly come from the pandemic, but parts of it are automatically familiar to us.
“There was a moment at the beginning of the pandemic when no one was flying anywhere and everyone was talking about how they thought nature was healing,” Chappelle says. “I was living in Los Angeles at the time, and I have always been super connected to nature and the earth. What kind of set me off, especially in terms of the setting, was looking at what we have done to this beautiful place where we live. You can go to a national park or you travel to the beautiful gardens in Europe, and there is so much beauty today.
One of the many layers to this was that I don’t think these characters don’t consider the beauty of the world around them–that they are gifted. Awful shit has been happening for a while, so I always felt like this film existed at the intersection of light and dark, the beautiful and the ugly. Even though there are so many wonderful, lovely aspects to our community, there’s a lot of darkness too. I wanted to set this in a remote place in the way that we have always had to set our vacation destinations. If this was truly the end of days, I wanted this movie to answer the question, ‘Where are the gays?'”
Sometimes an idea for a project can be planted, and you don’t even know it. I mentioned to Chappelle how thrilled I was to see Graceffa in a different kind of role after Broadway’s Death Becomes Her and Emily Everhard’s No Experience Necessary, and the filmmaker told me how an interaction between them (on a beach, no less) was an inspiration for the darker moments of the screenplay.
“Mikey and I met up one day playing volleyball on the beach during COVID after everyone had been vaccinated and people were beginning to socialize,” he says. “I didn’t really know any of these boys playing the game, and Mikey and I weren’t as close then as we are now. The whole day, someone kept asking about someone who was supposed to be there. ‘Where’s Kyle…where’s Kyle,’ they kept asking. When Mikey and I were getting sun, someone brought up Kyle again and I turned to Mikey quietly and said, ‘What if I killed Kyle and he was in the trunk of my car right now?’ He was immediately obsessed, and the film was born out of a sick, dark joke. I knew I needed Mikey in that part.”
I’m Gonna Kill You is about found community, but Chappelle’s characters have been paired together after a catastrophic moment nearly decimated the population and the world itself. Even though many people would love to find a group of friends that includes Angus O’Brien, Brandon Black and Johnny Silbilly, we might wonder what kind of purpose these characters are given. Narratives that force people together romantically often have family planning attached to it, and I mentioned to Chappelle that before Marriage Equality, I was asked why I wanted to get married anyway. ‘Are you going to have a family?’ was something that has been lobbed towards queer people for generations.
“There’s another aspect to this world where I conceived that the population has dwindled down to extinction levels previously,” Chappelle says. “The whole focus of mainstream society is procreation, so this colony of people are the descendants from the ultra elite class of today. They are not forced to procreate, thus they have been sequestered off due to their queerness. I am sure many people felt this way growing up, but as a kid in the ’90s in the closet, I felt that, somehow, my contributions were automatically diminished because I couldn’t have children in the traditional sense that society deemed valuable At the time, I would see queer people in the media and see that they were the tastemakers, and I wanted to sprinkle that throughout the story as well. We have seen time and time again that our country doesn’t care when gays come and go. Whether it specifically affects me as a gay man, I still feel that my life doesn’t mean as much to my country.”
Chappelle resisted the urge to set his film in a familiar place. In some establishing shots, it feels like he somehow found a corner of the world unseen by human eyes–even the sunset felt different. That natural element that he spoke of previously feels fresh and pure like you can feel the wind on your face on the beach even though danger is lurking around the corner when members of the colony begin to disappear. The more it happens, the more ominous it feels.
“I didn’t want anyone to know where we were, but a lot of people asked me why we didn’t shoot on Fire Island,” he says. “It’s instantly recognizable, and I wanted it to be set in a place where no one had a reference point for it. In my mind, this colony is on the western coast of the former United States of America, but it was important to me that it was reminiscent of a place that so many people love. I didn’t want to isolate my audience by showing a place that so many people have never been to. When I was working through the pre-production process with my DP, Madeline Leach, I told her that I wanted every frame to look like a piece of art. That opening car montage was such a challenge to shoot, because where can you go where there’s no signs, no cars, and no people?
In the house, we had to adjust for the taste of the visual landscape of the story. My idea was that everything in the house, like the paintings, existed from the past. Everything is analog and everything is reclaimed or recycled. There is a Rothko painting on the wall, and I wanted these boys to not even realize how priceless this piece of art is even though they see it almost every day. Spector doesn’t realize how good he has it: they don’t have to work and they only have to enjoy life. Even with that’s their baseline, there’s still tension, and there’s still emotional hardship.”
Towards the end of the film, there is a burst of violence that ends with the camera settling down with its gaze on two characters sitting on the floor. We feel the urge to move our bodies backwards, as if we have witnessed a heinous act, and we don’t want to be associated with it or be claimed if another bout of violence breaks through. It’s impressive how Chappelle resists the urge to cut quickly. So much of I’m Gonna Kill You is about the dangers of watching or how desire is first transmitted by our eyes, and he was interested in stillness and that tension in the calm.
“I wanted to see the action play out,” he says. “My filmmaking mentor, Rafael Casal, told me that in the gym scene, he kept thinking that I was going to cut away. I wanted to create a specific style with Madeline, so that device is used throughout in different ways. You see it in the kitchen, the gym and then the ending. One could argue there’s this voyeuristic idea of watching beautiful gay men, but I knew that I had to earn these moments.”
In a moment of exhaustion, confusion, and heartbreak, Sibilly’s Jordan expresses to Spector that they need to be there for one another. That is something we have heard time and time again when we feel like our community is threatened by those on the outside. How novel it is then to see characters who have no reference point to some of our darkest moments in history speaking that truth out loud once again. It’s almost like we are born with that sensibility built in our DNA.
“I wrote this during the Trump administration, so there is a bit of a commentary on what happens when there are cancers that exist in society,” Chappelle says. “These men are living harmoniously until that Spector-like aspect invades. It is our responsibility as a community to look out for one another–it always will be. At the same time, we’re only as strong as our darkest moments. There are so many demons lurking.”
I’m Gonna Kill You will next play the Provincetown International Film Festival before it plays Palm Springs International Shortfest.
