John Krokidas directed the Beat-centric movie “Kill Your Darlings.”
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Director and co-writer John Krokidas spent 10 years getting “Kill Your Darlings” made, so it’s understandable if the experience of promoting it and seeing it released is a bit surreal for him. But don’t worry — he’s having a hell of a time. The film tells the true story of the murder that brought the Beat Generation together, starring Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg and Dane DeHaan as Lucien Carr.
At Sundance you had the stress of the first reviews, but now reactions are out, the film is done and you’ve been to a number of festivals. Is it less stressful now?
Knowing the fact that Sony Classics is distributing the film and we have a home and knowing that we have a release date — obviously I’m much more confident than I was when I first got to Sundance and showed this movie for the very first time. But at the same time this is still all a new experience. The one thing I have learned is to stop Googling myself. That happened after Sundance. I don’t know whether it’s me and I’m neurotic or it’s human nature, but all you do is focus on that one critical comment. At Sundance I told myself, “Everybody says it but nobody does it,” and then I’ve learned that no, actually people stop Googling themselves at a certain point. I’m sure having said that, there will be a weak point at four in the morning in three days when I’ll actually Google the movie to see more reactions.
What’s been the most entertaining moment you’ve had so far?
I won’t lie, they’re treating me very nicely here and my room has a fireplace, which is just for visual purposes. And one of the most entertaining things is when I wake up every morning, just turning on my electric fireplace just because I have one, that’s been kind of fun.
Have you gotten used to saying the same things over and over again?
Actually, what’s been really impressive is that I’ve been getting different questions every time. You realize that how much you want to promote your movie, if you talk about yourself for eight hours you’re the last thing that you want to talk about at the end of the day and you never want to talk about yourself again. Honestly part of the fun and the game and the challenge for me is trying to find these different moments of inspiration and different stories from throughout production to share, and I’m feeling thankful on this one that we had so many stories and that the relationships were so strong that I can not just repeat the same three lines over and over again in interviews. I’ve never seen anybody else go through this so I don’t know what the experience is like.
What sort of project do you want to do next?
You know, honestly the thing that’s most important to me is that the theme is something that’s resonant to me. Having gone through the 10 years it took to get this movie made, knowing that there has to be something so deep in its core that I care about, that I’m ready to wage the war if it takes another 10 years to get the next one made — and making sure that deep, personal connection is there to the material. And there is a short story that I found that I may be talking to a studio about developing and directing that has a theme in it that I really connect to and that I think would make a fascinating movie — which is completely different from this. It’s also a love story, but much more comedic in tone.
