On October 5, NYC art house cinema Metrograph held a screening and Q&A for the 2013 film Kill Your Darlings, which was co-written by PMA Professor Austin Bunn. The Q&A featured director John Krokidas, actors Daniel Radcliffe, Dane Dehaan, and Ben Foster, and producer Christine Vachon, and was moderated by filmmaker Ira Sachs. Bunn, who was in attendance, spoke to us about the original idea for his screenplay and the experience of seeing the film 12 years later.
“The inspiration was the 70th anniversary of Allen Ginsberg's first reading of his poem "Howl" at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on Friday, October 7, 1955,” said Bunn. “Our story takes place long before then — it's really an origin story of three literary titans: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S Burroughs, when they became friends in New York City in the early 1940s. The film tracks young Allen Ginsberg's coming of age as a freshman at Columbia and the murder that catalyzed their friendship.
“I first imagined Kill Your Darlings as a narrative non-fiction book — the little-known story of the murder that brought the Beat Generation together. As a gay, young wannabe writer from New Jersey, I held up Allen Ginsberg as one of my idols. I used to read his poetry in the campus bookstore, and that led me to the other Beats and eventually their biographies, which all mentioned the same strange story of Lucien Carr, the "missing" fourth Beat, his "honor killing" of his friend David Kammerer, and how he changed all their lives. And oddly, since Allen was such a gay icon, he nearly betrayed his own identity to rescue his best friend. I think we've all had these kinds of transformational friendships, especially in college, ones that bring out your best but also test your values and challenge you. We always said the film was about the violence that comes with the birth of the self. Anyway, my college roommate John Krokidas had just graduated from NYU's film program and convinced me it would make a better film. Voila!
“In the intervening years, I've gone onto make several short films of my own and have come to really appreciate the difficulty of making film that engages and moves audiences. The script for Kill Your Darlings was insanely ambitious (period, literary, NYC) for a first-time filmmaker, on an indie budget. But we did it. The quality of cast — Daniel Radcliffe, Dane DeHaan, Michael C. Hall, Ben Foster — really brought this story alive in ways I could have never ever imagined. I can still remember vividly sitting down at a cafe and writing the monologue that begins the movie. Kill Your Darlings is like a dream I had that somehow got captured on film. I feel so lucky.”
Read more about Bunn’s work.
