New York-based filmmaker and director Jacqueline Castel is in Montreal editing a feature film set to be unveiled in 2023. Details on this are yet to be released, but it will be the newest addition to Castel’s eclectic body of work, which includes shorts, feature length films, music videos, and numerous other projects.
An international award-winning director, Castel is also a screenwriter and producer. Her work has screened at SXSW, Sundance, and BAMcinemaFest and has found praise in The New York Times and Italian Vogue, among other publications.
Castel’s impressive resume includes working along icons of the silver screen such as John Carpenter, David Lynch, and Jim Jarmusch and directing music videos for artists such as Zola Jesus, Caleb Landry Jones, Uniform, The Soft Moon, Blank Dogs, and Alan Vega.
A childhood passion for film led Castel to NYU where she began her creative career. “I kind of really started to get into it when I was around 12,” she explains. “(First) still photography, and then at the same time, I was just incredibly obsessed with cinema, and I was watching movies all the time. Photography was the first form of art where I could actually express myself and what I was trying to say or communicate, naturally.”
Working within the genres of psychological horror and supernatural drama, Castel says she loved everything from silent films to action movies when she was growing up, but, “I definitely tend towards, like, darker content. I think a lot of the films that really stood out in my mind were, like, horror films—probably because they just scared me. So those are things that were really big touchstones or inspiration points for me.”
Spending much of her youth in Reno, Nevada, Castel says, “I was concurrently interested in cinema but also a lot of music stuff, too. There was kind of a big hardcore scene, so I was going to a lot of punk and hardcore shows, and I would photograph my friends’ bands…”
Castel’s interest in both coalesced. While working at WNYU, she hosted a show featuring DIY and small-press record labels. In her time there, she met Sacred Bones Records founder Caleb Braaten and began directing videos for many of the label’s artists.
Of Sacred Bones Records, Castel says, “It was just, like, these mysterious, beautiful records, limited editions of all these intriguing musical acts which also had this sort of air of secrecy to them. I was just really attracted to this mysterious little label.”
Working alongside legendary director Jim Jarmusch, Castel directed Sacred Bones artist Jozef van Wissem’s “Etimasia.”
The video was shot in an abandoned church in Brooklyn; Zola Jesus’ “Clay Bodies” video in an abandoned building in Detroit; Gary War’s “Highspeed Drift” at a defunct military base in Queens, and “The Itri Sessions,” a live recording session between Gary War and Zola Jesus, inside of an abandoned castle in Italy.
When creating music videos, Castel explains that every song is distinct in terms of the imagery she is drawn to.
“I think it just depends on the specific project,” she begins. “That was always my starting point. Just listening to the music and getting inspired by what I was hearing and then crafting a little, sort of, narrative or story out of that, even if it was abstract.”
Giving an example, she continues: “There’s a Zola Jesus song, and she’s got these operatic vocals, and I feel like it should be somewhere that feels crumbling and falling apart, somewhere that’s decadent and beautiful and destroyed at the same time. Detroit was very inspiring to me at the time, and so I would suggest we go and do that.”
Through her work with Braaten, Castel was connected with legendary filmmaker, musician, and Sacred Bones label-mate John Carpenter.
It was (Braaten’s) first collaboration with Carpenter, and he asked if Castel wanted to do a music video.
“I was like, wouldn’t it be cool if we did a short film that used his music? Sort of reverse engineer it from what he had usually done.” Carpenter agreed, and the result was the short film The Puppet Man.
She remembers, “I think I had to write the script in, like, two or three days, and then we sent it over to John. When he wrote back 24 hours later, it was, like, a one-word response that was just, ‘Yes!’”
When attempting to scout a location in LA, Castel admits to some challenges. “I found this area in North Hollywood or something that I was later told was, like, gang territory. (I was) trying to find somewhere I could shoot that I wasn’t gonna get caught!”
She recalls, “Then John showed up with his wife, and they were a little bit, like, ‘OK, what’s going on here?’ We shoot these very quick shots, and I was very stressed and nervous because John kind of seemed a little, I don’t know… he definitely seemed like he didn’t want to be there, and he was kind of giving me a hard time, and I was very stressed about it. So, I was just (going) through these shots as fast as I could because we only had three hours with him.
“I think I did it in an hour and a half because I was so nervous, and it was kind of tense. Then, basically, right when I was just about to finish, John looks at me, and he was, like, ‘You know I’m just fucking with you, right?’ He’d been giving me a hard time… I guess like a joke or something. After he said that, we all just had this huge sigh of relief, and we started laughing. They were reminiscing about the old days when they were doing indie filmmaking and stuff, and it was just a total ice breaker where we all instantly relaxed, and it was funny.”
Castel adds, “Later, I read this interview on when he was directing Halloween. It was his first feature and his first major, sort of, production, and Donald Pleasence was the biggest actor on the set. I guess Pleasence was grilling John and kind of making him agitated and pushing him a little bit, and John later talked about this in the interview.
“He (said) that later, Donald Pleasence told him that he did that to test if he could handle stress and to see if he could direct under pressure and just see what kind of director he was. After I read that, (I thought), it’s John just doing a Donald Pleasence on me. He’s trying to see if I had the stamina.”
She continues, “It was a very interesting learning experience for me because it was really stressful in the moment, but looking back on it, I was really proud of myself because regardless of that, I finally got everything I needed very quickly and kept a cool head the whole time. You know, it kind of gave me this interesting sort of confidence after shooting him.”
Castel has also released “13 Torches for a Burn,” a portrait of the Danish underground music scene, and currently in post-production, is a documentary based on Psychic TV titled “A Message from the Temple.”
Photo courtesy of Nedda Afsari
