Aaron Schimberg on A Different Man: “It's not a fable or a moral tale”

Aaron Schimberg programmed a film series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that he was hardly able to see. “The whole reason I programmed them in 35 [millimeter] is so that I could go see it,” he laughs. But instead of watching Opening Night or The Elephant Man or The Driller Killer, he’s in the A24 office in Midtown promoting A Different Man, his latest genre-defying film which stars Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, and Adam Pearson. 

Stan stars as Edward, a man living with neurofibromatosis who undergoes an experimental procedure that leaves him looking like, well, Sebastian Stan. A Different Man moves between science-fiction, comedy, and romance to plumb Edward’s psyche as he finds himself increasingly shut out from the life that he once dreamed of. 

But while the film has a satirical streak and sometimes feels allegorical, for its director, it’s personal. In conversation with The A.V. Club, Schimberg discusses how his career and his relationship with his body helped inspire A Different Man, and why he rejects the reading of the film as a parable.

The A.V. Club: A Different Man has been doing a festival run for a few months. Have you noticed any change in how audiences have received the film over time? Have you come to view it any differently?

Aaron Schimberg: Well, it premiered nine months ago, or whenever it was, at Sundance. And then it played at Berlin, but since then, other than a few staggered screenings, A24 has kind of laid low with it. So, I haven’t been constantly going to festivals, and in fact I haven’t seen the movie since Berlin. Eight months, or whatever. There have been staggered screenings in Europe, but I haven’t noticed the evolution yet of how it’s being perceived because it really has been quiet for the last half year. 

AVC: I’m surprised by how quiet it’s been. 

AS: (winces, then laughs) It’s a little nerve-racking. 

AVC: I watched your previous film Chained For Life last night, which also stars Adam Pearson. Did you want to make another film with him when you came up with this idea? 

AS: Absolutely. That was one of the starting points of the film. Partially, I just wanted to work with him again. Beyond that, I felt his performance was underrated in Chained For Life because people assumed he was playing himself. Generally, people with facial disfigurements, they’re usually shy characters in films, but also Adam had played a shy character in Under The Skin, so I think that it was sort of assumed that this was all he could do. And Adam is a very extroverted person—far more than I am—and that opened a sort of door for me to show a character that I had never really seen on film before. In fact, I have a cleft palate, and sometimes blaming my own social anxiety and shyness on that, it opened up possibilities for myself as well. Like, could I have been different? Could I have been a different kind of person? This sort of identity crisis was one inspiration behind the film. And I wanted to show off Adam’s range and show a different side of him. So absolutely, there is no Different Man without my knowing him and being inspired by him. 

AVC: Watching Chained For Life, I caught the line “They ask to see my face just so they can turn away in horror,” which is also in A Different Man. 

AS: Yeah. I didn’t wanna reuse it. It was sort of a placeholder in the script. [laughs] I just used this quote and I sort of forgot to take it out, so now it’s in there. 

AVC: I wasn’t sure if you were trying to connect the movies. 

AS: No, I wasn’t. They are certainly connected inherently just by my interest in the subject. And I do think that they’re connected in deeper ways, too. For one thing, Chained For Life didn’t do very well. I sort of wondered why that was and I had a sense—not to blame it on this… it was a well-reviewed movie, but it didn’t get seen. It wasn’t seen by a lot of people. And I had a sense that it was marginalized because of the subject matter, which, you know, was ironic because people with disabilities and disfigurements are marginalized. I always wanted to sort of break through that, but I felt that I couldn’t do that just by making a movie about the subject. You know, was I writing myself into a corner?

Part of A Different Man was me thinking about, how can I write about the subject in a way that will, for lack of a better word, be more palatable or commercial without compromising what I’m trying to say? So one idea was: I need a Hollywood star. But I don’t want to cast some Hollywood star as someone with a disfigurement. I’ve always wanted to show people with disfigurements—I wanted proper representation. At the same time, some people—not many, but some—when they saw Chained For Life said that the very presence of Adam in my film was exploitative. That I’m not allowed to use somebody with a disfigurement, which is counter to what we think of as representation. So it was really like there was no way to win. 

But all of this led to this film, because I took all these opposing ideas and I said, “Well, okay, I’ll do both. I’ll put somebody playing somebody with a disfigurement and somebody with a disfigurement in a film together and I’ll have them battle it out.” It also allowed me to cast Sebastian Stan. It came together in these different ways. I was sort of analyzing how to work around this. I mean, you have to work around the audience’s prejudices, not only about disfigurement, but about films about disfigurement, because usually these films take one or two forms that we’re all familiar with. The melodrama, or the horror movie, or whatever. I had to work through all that, and the film is actively working through it even throughout the running time. 

AVC: How much of the Edward play in the film is you commenting on the experience of getting these other films made? 

AS: It is about that, in some sense, but it was really inspired by… one initial idea for this film, I don’t know if you’ve seen this movie Wonder, but I watched this movie which had some kid who was in prosthetics playing a disfigured boy. I watched it, and I had mixed feelings about the film. But I went back and I read about the author of the book, and she tells the origin story of the book. She’s in an ice cream shop with her son and they saw this kid with a disfigurement and the son overreacted and she didn’t know what to do and she felt bad and felt like she was failing as a parent and didn’t know how to handle it. So she went home and she wrote this book. 

I started to think about a story about a kid with a disfigurement who’s watching the trailer for Wonder or a Wonder-like film and he’s a boy who looks just like him and thinks, “That’s me. I’m the kid in the ice cream shop.” But he never gets any credit for it. And he sort of becomes obsessed with, “Oh, everyone’s talking about this global phenomenon.” (In my film it turns into a global phenomenon.) “They’re treating this fictional character like he’s this great person, but I’m still being treated the way I’ve always been treated.” 

And so then the author goes on a talk show, and she brings this other boy on who also has a disfigurement but looks a lot less like the character than he does, and so it’s this other character who says, “It’s based on me!” And she says, “yeah, this is the boy from the ice cream shop.” This kid senses it’s not true… I started going down this rabbit hole and thinking this is what my next film was going to be about, but it was a little abstract or obscure, I didn’t know if people could relate to this rabbit hole my brain was going down. But the play, Edward in the film, was a version of this idea. 

AVC: In A Different Man and your previous work, there’s an aesthetic timelessness. It’s contemporary, but it’s shot on film, the fashion is a little ‘70s, there’s not really visible technology in the picture but it’s not not part of the picture either. What’s the thought process behind that? 

AS: There’s not an active thought process. Some of it comes out of my aesthetic preferences. I tend to prefer more earth tones and stuff like that, so the color palette comes out of my aesthetic preferences. I predate cell phones and I predate computers. When you start to add phones into a story, it often becomes, “How do you deal with this?” You know, they can just look it up on Wikipedia and then there’s no plot of the film anymore. So I try to just avoid it as best I can. Mostly, so I can just let the story unfold without these technological things getting in the way. If the story was dealing with technology or if it was useful, I wouldn’t avoid it. But I don’t make a conscious effort, I wouldn’t say, to make this look like the ‘70s or ‘80s or whatever. I’m looking at various costumes and saying, “This is what appeals to me.” It just sort of comes out of who I am and my preferences.

AVC: A Different Man is opening around the same time as The Substance. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to see it. 

AS: I haven’t seen it yet. 

AVC: Very different films, but both concerned with someone choosing to do something to their body to make them more conventionally attractive. It’s rare to see this desire from a man’s point of view.   

AS: I didn’t think about it in that sense. I guess I thought about it in my own self-consciousness and the fact that I, having a cleft palate, had many surgeries as a child. I’ve had over 60, 70 surgeries, and I’ve seen my appearance change over time, often without my blessing. A lot of this happened when I was a kid, and it sort of left a mark on me… The face I see in the mirror, on one hand, it’s my face, but on the other, it’s a face that’s been created by doctors. I don’t know what I was supposed to look like, or is this what I was supposed to look like? If I had been born 10 years later, 20 years later, with medical advancements, would I look a little better? These are questions that are very personal to me, so I’m coming at it not from a masculine point of view, necessarily, but just from questioning my own identity and how this has affected me. It’s personal, in that regard. 

AVC: But you also include a number of literary references: Beauty And The Beast, The Bluest Eye, Jekyll And Hyde. I walked out thinking of it as a parable, and I don’t think I was the only one. What do you make of that interpretation? 

AS: Many people do, but to me, it’s not really a moral question. I’m not thinking about it in those terms. I make a very conscious choice that when the doctor is telling him about this surgery, he’s saying, “You have to do this for health reasons.” It’s not really a question of doing it because he’s vain—he has to do this because the doctor is telling him to do this. He’s not making a moral choice. To me, it’s not a cautionary tale. It’s certainly possible that someone would get this fictional procedure done and feel differently about it and come out the better for it, or the worse for it. I was really thinking about Edward. The story is about this person. I don’t even know that I think of the transformation as the main event of the film. To me it illuminates certain things about him and the way that he feels about himself because of the way that he’s been treated and the way that he’s not able to change that. To me it’s not a fable or a moral tale in that sense, but it can be viewed that way and many people view it that way. But I’m not thinking about a lesson or how I can illuminate the audience. I don’t know. I’m only exploring my own feelings—often ambiguous or contradictory feelings—about these things. It’s not for me to tell anybody how to think about this. I’m really concerned with Edward and what happens to Edward.

AVC: Is this a topic you’d like to continue to explore? 

AS: I hope to make films about other subjects, for sure, but to me, it’s not a subject. It’s who I am. There will always be some aspect of these issues in my films. I have no plans right now to make a film directly about this subject, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens, if I get to continue making films. But my next film, for instance, the one that I’m writing, it’s not about this. At the same time, if I think about it, there are certain aspects of this theme that are woven into it. Just inherently. I feel like it’s part of me, so it’s part of the films that I make. 

AVC: Can you say what the next one is about, or is it too early?

AS: All I can say is that it’s a father-daughter story.