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Intricate sound design is a major element in your films. How crucial is this to the process? I think sound is definitely the guiding force in cinema. It tells you what to do, what to think about, how to deal with the image. You don’t have to have an image during sound or vice versa, but I feel like sound is always the narrator even if it’s totally ambient. It gives you instructions on how to watch the film.
Particularly working with an oblique cinema that’s at the edge of making any kind of narrative sense, sound is all the more important in terms of telling the audience what to feel and what to do with the collage of images.
Still from Hold Me Now featuring Little House on the Prairie
You use a lot of pop music including karaoke or instrumental versions of songs like ‘November Rain‘ in Victory Over the Sun and ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ in And We All Shine On. How did you come to use these types of songs? Over the past five years the inclusion of pop music has been a central motif in my films. I don’t really know exactly how that happened, only the more I did it, the more I felt it was getting to the heart of what I wanted to do. The music is meant to affect you with how familiar and potentially cringe-worthy a lot of it is, while also hitting you right in the heart. I’m interested in these songs’ artifice and their undeniable power.
Your most recent film, If There Be Thorns, gets its title from a sensational 80s trash novel by VC Andrews—usually sold with an embossed cover—that was popular amongst pre-teen girls. How did this come to inspire you? I’d found a copy of If There be Thorns in a used bookstore in Chicago and I loved the cover and the title. My sister had read all those books growing up but I hadn’t thought of pulling anything from the story until I started to edit the picture and realised everything I’d collected fell under this umbrella of incest/purgatory. I was a little surprised at how uninteresting the writing was, though the incest kept my fascination, just to see how it played out ostensibly to a reading audience of twelve-year-old girls.
And how did you come to use the Fleetwood Mac song ‘Storms’ in the sound design for If There Be Thorns? I was listening to a ton of Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac so it was in my head while I was editing. I found Stevie’s persona and the teenage mysticism she embodies was along the same lines as the teenage mysticism that VC Andrews was conjuring. Also a lot of her songs are about tortured, impossible love affairs and her witchiness felt like a right fit.
What are you working on now? It’s a project dealing with problematic versions of ancient Egypt, so both Hollywood versions of Cleopatra, the Michael Jackson video for ‘Remember the Time’, and this Dutch Cleopatra-based ice skating programme like Stars on Ice. People wearing super-glitzy Egyptian garb, dancing to ‘Walk Like an Egyptian’ and ‘She Drives me Crazy’. It’s terrible and it’s serious. 
Watch some of Michael Robinson’s films
Interview © 2010 Wheel Me Out. No part can be used for any purpose without prior consent. Please contact editorial@wheelmeout.com
