Until the Light Takes Us – Interview with Filmmakers Aaron Aites, Audrey Ewell
Interview conducted by Marc Patterson – December 2009

Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell are the two filmmakers behind the recently released documentary Until The Light Takes Us, a riveting and arresting foray into the early days of the Norwegian black metal scene, which at the time was dominated by church burnings, murder, suicide, and countless crimes in the name of Satan. The film focused on two primary characters within that scene, Varg Vikernes and Glyve Nagell who were there from the beginning. You can read our full review of the film here. Aaron and Audrey spent two years in Norway getting to know these individuals amongst others within the scene, in order that they be able to present a viewpoint on these events as of yet unheard; the story directly from the individuals at the heart of the movement.

I spoke over the phone with Aaron and Audrey who were at their home in Brooklyn, replete with the friendly sound of their dog in the background. (They are a couple, and not just partners in filmmaking) Almost immediately there was a natural connection as Audrey originally hails from a neighboring town from mine here in New Hampshire, which if you live where I live you’ll realize that our small region is really just a series of interconnected villages more than anything). We chatted briefly about local stuff before cutting into the interview and even after the interview proper had ended our conversation continued for several minutes.

As a forewarning, we typically shy away from any sort of political discussion on BrutalAsHell.com. We are first and foremost a genre film site. Given the strong political overtones of the film, and the clear political motivations of the individuals at the core of the film, some discussion of politics could only naturally come into my conversation with the filmmakers.

Brutal As Hell: First off, I would like to say how much I enjoyed the film. When I first heard about this film I thought this would fit well within the scope of our site. Black Metal, Satanism, church burnings, violence. These are subject matters not foreign to our readers. As I got into the film I was surprised to see so much more at play and indeed this film is about as far removed from my initial preconceptions as I thought it might be. As a lifelong musician, and participant within the American punk rock culture, I started to be attracted to the film through a different set of eyes. Not just that, but I love experimental/noise music as well, and have recorded with a variety of groups, so in this aspect the film really resonated on a very personal level.

First, can you tell our readers about the film and your intentions when you went to make the film, because I think it’s very unique film as the first of its kind for black metal?

Audrey: Sure. The movie is a documentary about Norwegian black metal, which is an offshoot of the metal genre that shot up in the early nineties in Norway. It rose to international notoriety after a wave of church burnings and murders within the scene and within Norway. And from that point it’s also interesting that the media ran with stories of these Satanic musicians burning down these churches for Satan, which was not entirely accurate. And kids around the country saw these reports and made that the reality. They said, hey that sounds great and formed quote unquote “Satanic black metal bands” and proceeded to burn down churches. So for us a lot of the interest, a lot of the appeal, is in this idea of simulation and simulacra the basic sort of post-modern idea that often times, if a thing is copied enough times, whether or not the thing is accurate, the copy becomes the reality and the original meaning and intent is lost forever. So, that was a lot of what drew us to the story.

Brutal As Hell: Now you spent two years, which is just unbelievable for any filmmaker almost, interviewing and documenting. When you both went over there was there anything set up ahead of time, or was it just like – hey we’re going to go over and dig stuff up while we’re here?

Aaron: Well it was definitely longer than we thought we were going to spend over there [laughs]. But no, we had researched it for a full year and we had a fairly detailed fifty-page design doc for the film in place before we went there. We knew who we wanted the main characters to be and the focus of the film. So it was definitely not let’s go over there and do what we can do. It was a very focused project from the get-go, which is how I think we got the participation of Varg and Gylve.

Audrey: A lot of the reason why I think we were over there for so long was because it was a process of building trust with the people in the film. They were fairly closed off and not interested in the film or participating with media after what had happened in the nineties where they had been branded as something they weren’t. So for us it was a challenge as we weren’t interested in doing a film that was going to skim the surface. We wanted to be really candid and we just wanted to go deeper than what we would just find by going over and winging it or not getting to know the people involved, so we just spent a lot of time hanging out and getting to know them and I do feel like it allowed us to get more behind the veil than if we hadn’t spent the time. So it was worth it, but I know it was a little bit unusual.

Brutal As Hell: We briefly touched on this a couple times, but one thing I really loved about the film was how it explores how reality is not the same. What the media perceived to have happened, what the musicians perceive to have happened, or even what was intended to happen, and what their followers heard in the aftermath, and subsequently acted upon, seem to be all very different stories. And you bring them together well. Can you talk about dealing with all these different realities and the construction of the film? Or is that an abstract question?

Both: No, No.

Audrey: We’re good with the abstract. We actually constructed the film around the basic principle that we’re going to weave together two timelines. And through the weaving of these two time lines we were going to be able to give the complete picture that we wanted to present. So on one timeline we have the sort of historical documentary of what happened. Who was where and did what, and when. And on the other thread we’ve got sort of this idea of re-contextualization and the recreation of the reality that’s being explained in the other timeline. And so as far as methodology in how we did that? One of the big things we did was to use two different types of music for the narrative construct of the film, where on the one hand you’ve got black metal in where they’re talking about the formation of the scene and the crimes. And on the other hand we’re talking about re-contextualization. Well not really talking about it, but really showing it with the work that was done in the galleries and taking it to this high art kind of context, wherein we used electronic music. And because a lot of the black metal bands actually use and make their own electronic music, though most people don’t know this, it worked in almost a kind of organic way within the logic of the film.

Brutal As Hell: That was one of the things that I kind of liked about the film as well, in that I’m not particularly a fan of black metal. I wasn’t sure I wanted to sit down and watch a film that was going to be ninety minutes of non-stop black metal, and when it opened and WASN’T that I was like [huge sigh] “Thank God!” you know?

Audrey: [Laughs] It’s always fun for us, you know. In a lot of our festivals, screenings and whatnot there’s been a lot of mixed audiences and sometimes we get an audience that really is a lot of metal fans and of course the expectation is that it’s going to be all about black metal and it’s going to have blaring black metal for ninety minutes and of course we open with this sort of soft and ethereal pretty song by this Icelandic band called múm, which has this female vocalist, and sometimes it’s just kind of fun for us to watch and react to that because it’s an expectation blower right off the bat.

Aaron: You know what, we get asked what that song is by like metal fans all the time, because they end up liking the song.

(Editor’s note: The song is ‘Ballad of the Broken’ and if you like experimental electronic music you should go purchase yourself some múm right after you’re done with this interview!)

Brutal As Hell: We’re not a particularly political website. But, one interesting observation in watching the film is that globalization and social politics play into this as a big motive for the actions these musicians took. Not really Satanism. And they chose a path of extreme protest to burn churches and things of this nature. But because they were so young it didn’t seem like they had a full grasp of what it was they were protesting, or perhaps even doing at the time. Did you get a sense amongst them that they were cognitive of what they were really doing at the time?

Audrey: Yeah, it really varies person to person the degree of awareness about that and the degree of intentionality about it. With Varg, who was basically the ringleader of the church burning, you know as he talks about in the film, the first thing he did was to shoot in the window of a McDonalds. He was able to draw the line, and I think a lot of the others were following his lead, but he was very much drew the line between the cultural imperialism of Christianity in 900 AD and the cultural imperialism of globalization and Americanization, with corporations coming in and changing the landscape of the country in the early 90’s. And I have to say as someone who’s been to a great deal of Europe, the amount of Americanization in Norway is hugely astounding and so much more prevalent in Norway than in other European countries, which is surprising. And I think that was a pressure that they were reacting to. But I don’t think it was all conscious at all.

Aaron: No, but even in the amount in which is not conscious we get into a lot of post-modernist ideas in the film and I do think the Americanization, even in the amount that it wasn’t conscious was like inspiring them to try to look back at the past of their country and find this sort of historical through-line that wasn’t present and led them in that direction.

Brutal As Hell: Interesting. Back in 1992 I actually went over to, at that time what was very recently the former USSR to basically spend a summer in the Ukraine doing humanitarian type work. And I only spent two months over there. But when I came back to the United States I saw things with a very different set of eyes. And I think that you come back to America after two years of immersing yourself in not just the Norwegian culture, but this scene, so how did your perception of American Black Metal and our anti-establishment youth culture change? Or did it?

Audrey: I think youth culture is youth culture and I think that every once in awhile something happens that makes the scene coalesce. And you know, people talk about grunge, and why did grunge happen when and where it did and things like that…

Aaron: I would say no, because there was a punk rock/anarchist collective over there. And the black metal scene was closed off, but it’s a small country and everyone knows each other. There was an indie rock scene there and a folk scene there and it didn’t really strike me as all that different. The black metal scene did though, and one of the things that intrigued us about it, like before we even had the idea to do the movie and we were just listening to it, was that there was really a heavy methodology that went into every record and every one of the bands and the black metal scene is a little bit more constructed, and less organic in a way than a lot of the other youth culture scenes of various kinds.

Brutal As Hell: Again, and we joked about this earlier, you go into the film with the perception that it will be ninety minutes of black metal from beginning to end, and along that same thought you think it’s going to be a music documentary. The film turns out to be so much more than a music documentary. Was that something that was intended up front or was that something that naturally evolved as you began interviewing the characters?

Audrey: No it was made intentionally. Aaron and I aren’t big fans of documentaries in general. We tend to be more interested in thrillers and suspense films and science fiction and 70’s new wave and things like that. So, we don’t watch a lot of documentaries and the reason is most documentaries drive me nuts. And I’m not very interested in this plodding point-to-point explication of this that and the other. We don’t like narration. We aren’t interested in concert footage. I mean, how interesting is that? If you want to see concert footage, by God it’s out there. There are five hundred DVD’s of black metal concerts, and that was just not the film we were interested in making. For us it is more interesting to do a portrait of people in a scene in place and time and sort of crystallize what was the feeling of the moment and the people who were extraordinary in some way.

Aaron: Yeah it was pretty much the intention to make the film the way it is. We took inspiration from filmmakers like Chris Marker and…

Audrey: …and Chris Marker is and was a brilliant filmmaker who pioneered the idea of a film essay. And so in some ways our film is somewhere between a film essay and a film portrait. It’s not an encyclopedia. You’re not going to learn everything there is to know about black metal by watching our movie, but that’s not the type of movie we wanted to make.

Brutal As Hell: And I think it worked the way it was presented

Audrey: Thank you.

Brutal As Hell: So that really does it for questions for me.

Audrey: Well thanks a lot!

Aaron: Well thank you for the interview. Thank you very much.

Keep an eye out as Aaron and Audrey’s next project will be a bizarre suspense-filled thriller that I’m sure you all will dig on. In the meantime keep your eyes open for when Until The Light Takes Us hits a theater near you. You can follow developments as they occur via their official Facebook page.