Alum’s film explores family relationships, food sources

As a child, Jason Kohl thought movies were made by space aliens.

“(Growing up in Michigan), most successful adults were either doctors, lawyers or businessmen,” Kohl said. “I had no idea that a human being could have that job; cinema was just totally alien to me.”

But once he made this discovery, Kohl quickly made his way into the film industry. “The Slaughter,” his graduate directing thesis at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, had its world premiere at this year’s South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas.

“The Slaughter” is about a pig farmer and his unemployed son, who hopes to join the family business. The father tests his son’s determination by forcing him to slaughter a pig. Kohl said the film holds many parallels to his own life experiences.

“It was a situation I saw a lot in Michigan,” Kohl said. “A lot of friends, because of the economic crisis, were moving home from college and a lot of them tried to join their family businesses, even if it didn’t really work for them.”

As he was developing the second draft of his script for “The Slaughter,” Kohl said he immediately thought of his next-door neighbor, actor Michael Shamus Wiles of “Breaking Bad,” for the leading father role.

“He (and a roommate) lived in my courtyard,” Wiles said. “One day I stepped outside to actually indulge in a bad habit and have a cigarette. Jason was having a cigarette, and we started this conversation (about ‘The Slaughter’).”

After Kohl sent the script to Wiles and told him they would shoot the short film in Michigan, Wiles said he was on board. The actor, a Michigan native himself, had worked in a slaughterhouse at the age of 18.

Wiles said he was impressed by the poise Kohl had when taking actors who were struggling with parts off to the side, and correlating their scenes to moments in their own lives to help them bring out their emotions.

“He’s got a really good sensitivity in terms of expressing what he wants you to do in terms that are accessible to you,” Wiles said.

Producer Larissa Michel did most of her work from California but said she got a lot of feedback from the crew about Kohl’s positive contributions on set in Michigan.

“Everyone would take little videos and send them to me to show me how the set was being run and managed,” Michel said. “He just made what the subject was a very comfortable thing for everybody involved.”

Although Wiles and Michel allude to Kohl’s current professionalism, his first encounter with film was only about six years ago. After completing his undergraduate studies at Kalamazoo College, Kohl received a Fulbright scholarship to work in Dortmund, Germany, where he began to experiment with movies.

After a few years working for different film companies in Berlin, Kohl got into UCLA’s graduate directing program.

Kohl said his years at the film school were valuable because it was the first time he felt like he was learning rather than experimenting.

“Obviously I made tons of mistakes and people get into little fights on set and stuff,” Kohl said. “But it was the first time I realized how much of a community industry the filmmaking one is.”

Kohl said that much of “The Slaughter” was based on his own experience and interests after becoming politically aware of what eating meat entailed. In 2011, Kohl attended an event called Pigstock in Traverse City, Mich., where an Austrian expert took the audience through the process of slaughtering a pig.

“In a weird way it was kind of comforting because I understood what it meant to eat an animal, and I’d never experienced that before,” Kohl said. “I’d been eating meat for 20 years and I’d never seen an animal die or what parts the meat came from.”

Kohl said he feels very passionate about the issues he bases his movies on, and that some of his favorite moments as a director are the long discussions he has after viewings, particularly those for “The Slaughter.”

“For our grandparents’ generation, this movie wouldn’t really be shocking because they were less removed from their food sources,” Kohl said. “I’d like to spark a conversation about that, about where food comes from, and about how relationships can heal in strange ways.”