TIFF 2015: Midnight Madness opens with Patrick Stewart & tense, tight “Green Room”

“A lot of people are at a party; they think they’re at the opening night party. How wrong are they? This, at the Ryerson, is the opening night party!”

The speaker was Colin Geddes, programmer of the Midnight Madness section at the Toronto International Film Festival, talking to the already pumped-up crowd at the Ryerson Theatre before Thursday’s late-night screening of Jeremy Saulnier’s “Green Room.”

“This film was engineered for you,” was Saulnier’s introduction to the film. He was joined onstage by cast members Patrick Stewart, Alia Shawkat, Imogen Poots, Anton Yelchin, Macon Blair and Kai Lennox.

In the film a hardscrabble touring punk rock band agrees to a show at a remote roadhouse deep in the Oregon woods. What they find is a white supremacist stronghold. When they stumble on a murder scene in a backstage dressing room, things go from bad to worse. The band must figure out a way to get past the villainous leader (Stewart) and his henchmen.

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Tense and tight, the film held the audience rapt during the screening, a simple siege picture that nevertheless unfolds in unexpected ways.

Around 2 a.m., Saulnier and the cast came back for a Q&A. Saulnier noted that after his previous film, “Blue Ruin,” he had some idea of what he was aiming for.

“It had to be artsy enough to get some festival love, but genre enough to get some audience support,” Saulnier said.

Asked how he got involved with the project, Stewart said the script was sent to him at his country house in England.

“I was about halfway through the script and I closed it. I got up and walked all around my house, locking all the doors and windows,” Stewart said. “And I have outside lights and I turned them all on. I was so … scared that I poured a large malt whiskey and I finished the screenplay.

“The fact is these are the movies, the only kinds of movies I wanted to see when I was a kid,” he added. “I love these movies and suddenly I had one in my hand.”

Saulnier was asked about the influence of 1970s American cinema from the likes of John Carpenter and Sam Peckinpah.

“It’s grounded and it’s not too glossy for me,” said Saulnier, also mentioning the ‘80s movie “River’s Edge.” “My way into filmmaking was very tactile, it was special-effects makeup and blowing … up in my backyard and making dioramas. So I always loved Carpenter movies; ‘The Thing’ was huge for me. I did makeup all my youth. So I just like movies that have a real texture and gut to them and a human element. Artificiality in lighting and the aesthetic just doesn’t feel real to me.”

Saulnier added that he had never seen John Carpenter’s 1976 siege movie “Assault on Precinct 13” before writing the script and waited until he had finished a second draft before doing so.

“‘Green Room’ was designed to be intuitive,” he said. “Just what the hell are these idiots doing, making wrong decisions, trying to make their way out of it and failing the whole time. It was really fun for me to focus on something that was not so smart and more gut-level.”

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