Interview: John Krokidas on His Beat Movement Origin Story Kill Your Darlings

Kill Your Darlings is a look at the young people who would go on to start the most famous literary movement of the 20th Century. We talked to director John Krokidas about how he pulled off an intimate, relatable period piece that feels completely current.

Basically an "origin story" about the Beats, Kill Your Darlings, which opens today, follows a few young writers - Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe), William S. Burroughs (Ben Foster), Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) and one Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan) - in 1940s New York as they attend Columbia University and try to find their artistic voices.

Radcliffe anchors the film as Ginsberg, seen here not as a the demonstrative poet with the expressive beard, but rather an insecure kid just trying to make some cool friends upon arriving at college. Theres something touching about seeing such larger-than-life literary legends reduced to human scale, but Kill Your Darlings pushes against the expectations of a more traditional biopic by Krokidas stylistic ambitions, which cover a gamut of film noir, French New Wave, and 90s music-video influences, forming an intoxicating melange that makes the film as vivaciously aggressive as the drugs its characters are perpetually ingesting.

Keeping things tense, Krokidas introduces a (true) element to his narrative that is often unremarked-upon in the larger narrative of how the Beats came to be: that Lucien Carr, who brought many of the movements figures together, was engaged in an obsessive and potentially dangerous relationship with an older man named David Kammerer (played by Michael C. Hall).

Combining mystery and suspense with a bildungsroman, Krokidas has created an arresting debut that seems bound to receive some recognition come awards season. I had the chance to sit down with Krokidas recently and discuss the film.

Tribeca: Whats the history of how the project came to be?

John Krokidas: My best friend and college roommate, Austin Bunn, was a short story writer and playwright. Right after I got out of film school he told me that he had the best idea for a play - the story of this murder that inspired the Beats to start their revolution. I had never heard the story before. As he told it to me I was seeing flashes of the movie version in my head, and so I used my evil powers of manipulation to convince him that it would make a horrible play but a wonderful movie, and that we had to write it together.

Tribeca: Whats it like, writing a story with such larger-than-life characters? To what degree are you trying to maintain fidelity to the mythology of these figures?

John Krokidas: We heavily researched this movie. We started off not just going through the biographies and the New York Times records of the murder back in the 40s, but we also went to the Ginsberg Archives at Stanford and even got into Jack Kerouacs old college apartment - the Columbia students living there didnt even know it used to be his place! So we got to really experience the feel of what their lives were like.

But it comes to a point when - you know, theres so much biographical information about these guys, we decided to not be overwhelmed and feel that we had to show who they would become in life. We wanted to just focus on the awkward phase that everyone goes through when theyre 18, 19 years old. We decided to cut the story off at 1945 and not do "Allen Ginsberg" with a double-underline.

As you get older, you realize its the artists you worship in high school and college that stick with you forever.

We wanted to look at a kid named Allen Ginsberg from Paterson, New Jersey, whose father was a poet and whose mother was emotionally ill, a kid who got into Columbia and didnt know what he wanted to do with his life until he met Lucien Carr. I even had these moments with the actors, because Jack Huston was like, wow, Im playing Jack Kerouac, and I said no youre not. Youre playing a guy named Jack whos at Columbia on a football scholarship, but he wants to join the Merchant Marines so he can travel the world and get life experience for his new book. Its an origin story.

Tribeca: What was the impact of the Beats on your life, personally?

John Krokidas: I was a closeted gay kid in the 90s in suburban Connecticut, and I remember the reaction to someone anonymously coming out to the school newspaper was, "Whos the fucking faggot? Were going to kill him." I knew I had to just pretend, I wasnt able to fully be who I wanted to be, and I was hoping that one day I would go to college and be able to be who I wanted to be then.

I remember someone mentioning Allen Ginsberg in a derogatory way, and I thought, who is this guy? So I went to the local bookstore and checked out his poetry for the first time. He was so brave with his sexuality and his passions and his politics, and I remember wishing I could be that brave myself. As you get older, you realize its the artists you worship in high school and college that stick with you forever. When you need that comfort music, you go back to those three albums you were obsessed with back then. So these guys have always held a special place in my heart.

Tribeca: The opening sequence of the film - the way you insert the title of the film in such a stylized fashion - was quite a grabber. In general the film has a freewheeling stylistic approach. What was your stylistic approach like?

John Krokidas: Well, I remember listening to the Criterion Collection commentary on The Ice Storm, and the DP Fred Elms was talking about how he made a huge fifty-page book about the 1970s in order to do the film. Everything from color palettes to fonts. I did that with the 1940s. The year that this movie takes place - 1944 - was the year Double Indemnity won Best Picture. Its the year of Laura and Gilda. Its the high point for American film noir. In the writing process, I turned to Austin and said, why not structure this

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