Interview: Alireza Khatami Discusses Canada’s Oscar Entry ‘The Things You Kill’

With its surrealist flourishes and dark tone, The Things You Kill may not immediately appear to be based on real life. For director Alireza Khatami, this provocative film is his most personal yet. Centering a pair of mysteriously connected men aptly named Ali and Reza, it follows a Turkish professor’s unravelling in the wake of his mother’s death. Thematically rich and intense, the film has earned several plaudits since its Sundance debut, including a coveted selection as Canada’s Oscar submission for Best International Feature. As the film hits select theaters, we caught up with Khatami to discuss the film’s themes and why he approached it as “autofiction.”

Shane Slater: What was the inspiration for this film?

Alireza Khatami: The project started almost nine years ago. I was writing a script, and slowly I realized that my own personal narratives are coming in. My sisters are coming to the story. My mom is appearing in the story. And soon I realized that I’m experimenting with my own personal narrative. Stories that have happened to me and were very close to me. Some of them quite traumatic experiences, you know? And I took those experiences and I started shaping them into a cohesive piece, so that I can tell them as a fictional account of my own story. So that’s why I call it an autofiction. It’s not entirely fiction, and it’s not entirely documentary, but the truth of it is based on what happened to me and my family.

SS: Why did you decide to set the story in Turkey?

AK: We were trying to shoot the film in Iran, and the censorship office didn’t give us the approval to shoot the film. In Iran, you need an official permission to shoot a story, and they didn’t get it because of the killing of the father character, which is considered to be breaking a taboo in the Abrahamic religion. It’s always killing of the son. It’s the killing of Ishmael. The reverse is quite a taboo and, quote unholy.

So they didn’t want to deal with that. I speak a dialect of Turkish because I’m from an indigenous tribe southwest of Iran, and Turkey gave us a few great things. There are wonderful locations, because we wanted vast landscapes and vistas. I wanted great actors and similarities in history, in culture, in languages. It made it an obvious choice for us to go there, plus they were very hospitable toward me to come there and tell a story.

SS: Can you speak more about your personal connection to the story and its characters? Like the protagonist, you also left your home country for North America.

AK: For me, the story is about a character who leaves home and always thinks that they knew why they left. He left to study literature, but when he is forced to think on a deeper level and discover secrets are buried in his heart, and to challenge and face them is the task of the entire film, you know? And on another layer is the story of a man who whose narrative is challenged. He has this simple narrative and masculine idea of the world, and as soon as female stories arrive, cracks starts emerging in this narrative that he is desperately holding on to. Reza appears and promises him to protect your story at all costs. We have to kill. We have to bribe.

So he holds on to that narrative, but more female narratives come forward, and finally this narrative collapses, and he has to build a more expansive narrative, one that is inclusive of other people, one that is not in constant crisis, a narrative that is complex. That’s why Ali’s wife asks him, did your mom tell you bedside stories? And Ali says, “My mom didn’t like bedside stories.” He liked puzzles. That is to say, life is not a simple story. Life is so complex that sometimes you don’t have all the answers. All you have to do is to hold this mystery in your hand and leave it with all the unanswered questions that it poses.

SS: How did you approach writing these two central characters (Ali and Reza) in navigating the themes around masculinity?

AK: When I was the earlier versions, these were two separate characters, you know? But I was developing and realizing that these are two side of the same person. And then I thought, okay, basically, I’m writing a doppelgänger, right? Why don’t I wholeheartedly embrace it? Then I looked at what other people have done. If you look at the history, you realize that in the doppelgänger genre or the convention, there is only always one person who imagines the other, and at some point of the story, through a series of flashbacks, you explain it all to the audience, and the other one does not exist, and the other one, at the end of the day, doesn’t have as much agency. Here, I was sure that, let’s call it the shadow side, is the destructive side. He has agency. The destruction it brings, it’s immense.

So why don’t I take them both as separate characters, and cast them with different actors, right? And then I start the film with the social realist drama so audiences think, “Oh, I know this kind of movie.” I take them all the way to the middle point, and then I basically pull the rock from beneath them. Now it’s too late to walk out, but also it gives you this beautiful sense of disorientation for 10, 15, seconds that, “Oh, what happened?” Now, you have to fight your way back into the film, you know? And these are the kind of films that I love to watch. Films that respects my intelligence, respects my choice that I’ve come here to watch it.

SS: Could you speak to how you portrayed the violence in the film? For the most part, it’s unseen.

AK: In general, I don’t like to use violence as a bait. That’s a cheap way of playing the adrenaline game. Oh, let me show you how a brain is blown up, right? It’s traumatizing looking at it and we have made the audience numb by showing them this. So I decided that we take the camera as far away as we can at all moments of violence, or I completely don’t show it.

What I show is the aftermath of violence, right? What we see is what has happened to him when he has to struggle with basically himself. He has been beaten up by his own sense of ego. He has been brutalized by that, and he has to die. A version of him has to die first before he can rise and and face the world. That is nuanced, that is complex, that is not easy to digest, right? That’s why this movie is not one that you can just watch and go watch another one.

The Things You Kill is now playing in select theaters.