May 25, 2012

Black Metal Music Revealed in Until the Light Takes Us

by Michael Gerali | Published December 2, 2009

Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell are making their moviemaking debut with Until the Light Takes Us, a documentary about the Norwegian black metal scene. The film gives an inside look into black metal’s origins and subcultures. In order to dig deep into this world, both directors lived in Norway, at times with different black metal musicians, for two years interviewing and filming several prominent figures of the music genre.

Through different interviews and footage, Aites and Ewell attempt to clarify the rumors and negativity that have surrounded this misunderstood music genre since it began in the early 1990s and examine the beliefs leading to the rebellion of religion and present culture. Aites and Ewell spoke with MM about the process of making this film and why they chose to focus on black metal.

Michael Gerali (MM): Until the Light Takes Us is the directorial debut for both of you. How did it help to have a co-director? Were there ever times where it seemed to hinder the process?

Aaron Aites (AA): It really helps to have someone else there who’s as all in on the project as you are, who you can discuss things with as you make the film. It can be difficult at times as well.

Audrey Ewell (AE): On the one hand, I don’t think that either of us felt totally fulfilled in getting to do just what we would have done alone, but on the other hand, we have different strengths and weaknesses and balance each other. I hammered on story, story, story and character and research and getting what we needed to make the game plan work; Aaron was the one to tie it into a postmodern context and that sparked us both to look at in ways that tie it into the larger world and ideas that make the film more than just a scintillating story of murder and arson and Scandinavian metal. He also has the ability to talk to musicians in their language, and to connect to people and engender trust in a way that makes them feel comfortable on camera.

I am very result-oriented, and worked a lot on mapping out questions and even strategies that would lead to the results we wanted. In general, Aaron was more dominant when we were shooting and I was more dominant when we were editing. I was the more logical of us, Aaron the more intuitive—at least on this film. We have different roles on the narrative that we’re now writing. Our creative partnership is as fluid as our real world relationship. There is a lot of conflict, but we get excited about a lot of the same things, and we feed on that to build worlds.

AA: Trust is the key not only to making it work, but making it work for you. And we trust each other.

MM: Why did you choose to make black metal the focus of the documentary? How have your views changed since living with them?

AE: Our friend who owns a record store introduced us to it, and as people who were not previously into a lot of metal, we were fascinated by the music and the story and were looking for a doc on it, purely as consumers. It didn’t exist yet. The schism between the evil parody of their words and the actual violence was compelling; it was a puzzle that didn’t quite fit together. When we looked further and realized that they drew a connection between the cultural imperialism of Christianity in the first and second centuries AD and the wave of globalization that occurred in the late ‘80s early ‘90s, and that they chose churches as an almost purely symbolic target, it was just too much. We had to make this movie.

As far as the guys themselves, we researched it all so extensively that there were fewer surprises than one might guess. We were surprised that Gylve, one of the originators of the genre, counts Jesus Christ Superstar among his favorite albums (as do we) and that he regularly visits museums. We shouldn’t have been surprised, because we knew that he was into house music and breaks the mold in many ways (while still being the quintessential and totally authentic metal dude), but he was truly a complex character and is a very interesting and well-rounded person. Which maybe surprises others now more than it surprises us.

MM: What was it like living in Norway for two years while you filmed the documentary? What were some of the challenges of filming there?