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Interview with John Maringouin, Director of Running Stumbled

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by Claire Fowler
About Running Stumbled: Twenty-nine years after filmmaker John Maringouin was whisked away from the father who apparently tried to kill him in utero, the son returns to New Orleans for a family reunion of the most dysfunctional kind. Maringouin’s father is Johnny Roe; a drug addicted failed Dadaist painter who resides in squalor with his combatant and common-law wife Marie; a faded addict whose preoccupations exclude all besides drugs and her own ever-imminent death.

CF: How did you get into filmmaking?
JM: I was always interested in filmmaking, I was like 5 yrs old when I told my mother that’s what I wanted to do. VHS came out, and I just started doing it, making films. I studied for a while, but dropped out… I just did my own thing.

What is Running Stumbled about? To what extent is it documentary and what extent fiction?
It’s about what happened when I went to visit my father and stepmother after not seeing either of them for twenty years. That’s one thing that it’s about- but it’s about 10 other things that I could easily mention… it’s about the final chapter of probably a twenty year war that was going on in that house… something not only to do with the forces between those two people, but also an energy in the house. I just happened to show up at a pretty good moment, or bad moment, however you want to look at it! I don’t consider myself a documentary filmmaker, so I didn’t proceed in a ‘documentary’ manner. I shot it like a feature film, to me it’s a real life, real time play- it’s a real situation, but you read it like it’s a film, and like it’s a picture. There’s a level of detachment there I guess.

Did you know what to expect before you arrived at your father’s house?
My father and my family from Terrytown were very well known as being the town crazy people, and you know that’s saying a lot of New Orleans… when people are afraid to approach the house that you were born in… I’d grown up with this sort of folkloric mystery about the family that I was from, and who I was, kind of like… if you knew that you were Jeffrey Dhamer’s son and he was sitting in his house waiting to be taken away or to die or something to happen… but you knew that whatever was going on, that it was bad… I knew they didn’t really leave the house anymore, I knew that he hadn’t painted virtually since I’d left, more than twenty years. I knew it was going to be bad… intense….

How did you feel once you arrived and saw the living conditions and the bizarre relationship between your father and Marie?
It’s funny… arriving… it was the most apocalyptic moment of my life, and also the most spiritually animated moment of my life… it wasn’t joyful, but there was such an energy… a dimensional energy like being captured into another place… this very powerful vortex. I didn’t have much time to experience grief and torment because I was immediately working from the second I stepped in the house… until ten days later…. I would shoot until there was no energy left in the room… and then I’d go away until the next day. They received me in the same way… as almost a mythological character, and the fact that I’d arrived making a movie was no surprise to them. In fact the whole situation had a real predestined quality to it; it was as if their movie had been building up and building up for a really long time, and my showing up was just this inevitable consequence of this energy being transmitted to me. And so when I showed up it was like ‘ok let’s do this’. I’d written a few fictional scenes in another movie I’d tried to do, based on my own life…and one of the things I wrote in the screenplay actually happened in the documentary. I wrote that Jonny would have no shirt on, and that he would have a medallion round his neck… when I showed up he did for real. I wrote that Marie would try give me pills, and as soon as I arrived she just went right into that. All the projection of what it might be contributed to this fantastical sense, this sense that I was actually creating a fictional story.
What made you take the decision to combine the reunion with your father with a film?
It’s funny, the last thing I wanted to do was make a story about my father or my relationship with my father… and I think my detachment from the situation was the only thing that allowed me to make the film in the first place… I was in such a state of…. depersonalisation… of the situation, that it wasn’t until after a yr after I shot the film, a year into editing, that it really hit me- this is my father and not just some creature from a black dimension… I was really in this zone of detachment… so I could get to the story that was the house and these two people… and let whatever was going on with me play out through what happened between them… to allow for this acting space to happen… so it could become something that gets dealt with in the room.

How long did it take you to make the film- from idea to festival screening?
I never intended to make it…. The idea was it was going to be the apocalyptic conclusion of this feature film that I’d been shooting for yrs, about 3-4 yrs, and the ending of that film didn’t work out. I shot it with Jerry Lee Louis’s family as my family, and it didn’t have the emotional power that I needed it to have, or the reality. I just couldn’t get out of them what I wanted, so I ended up going to the real house, just showing up and shooting… I put on a white suit, got into character and just walked right in and basically improvised the ending of the film based on the script, with Jonny and Marie no more aware of it than simply, ‘hey this is a movie’. That’s it. And that became the first scene of the documentary, the last scene I did. It’s ironic because the feature film is too personal for me to show; as soon as I finished it I put it away and never looked back at it…

I actually shot Running Stumbled in ten days and it took three years to edit. I collaborated toward the end, and at the every beginning with my girlfriend who’s now my wife. We met the first day of shooting really – our first date was her walking into that house, and it was just so weird… so intense that we had sort of no choice but to get together! I’d met her before on another job in LA, and then my camera person was ill and coincidentally she was in New Orleans and so I said, “D’you wanna come across the river tomorrow for a job?” She said, “well… what is it?” and I was like, “well… it’s the craziest people in New Orleans, and it’s my family!”


What was the strangest experience you had whilst filming Running Stumbled?
I had this sense that I was communicating with Ghosts on the Astral plane… demons and ghosts… the sense that there was a vortex of ghosts… of dark energy in the house… that was the most intense thing about it. In the film there are a lot of shots of the hallway, and at the end I keep referring back to the hallway… back to shots of empty rooms… there was a most chilling sense that there was something in those rooms with me… and also the feeling that I knew who it was…. At the end when Jonny starts dancing after Marie gets carted away to the hospital, there was this almost dancer like elliptical energy going on throughout the film which I followed in the camera movements. I remember thinking I needed to pan away from Jonny dancing and go down the hallway to follow this ghost, this energy, show what is animating this person… this person is not the vortex, it’s the house… I wanted to keep the house in the film as a character… I’ll never forgot going back down that hallway… you can hear this kind of swoosh like audio effects on the tape… it wasn’t an effect… it’s on the tape, haunted energy. The house did actually burn down and no one knows exactly why… not long after I left.

How has the film changed your relationship with your family? (If at all…)
The film left me closer to my family. It made them much more real to me that’s for damn sure… and the film itself sort of sorted out Jonny in a lot of ways… kind of reminded him that he was an artist, and he extracted himself from that situation and started painting again… and we certainly talk quite a bit more than we did before. If anything it created a relationship. He loves the film – he’s seen it 147 times, and the more unflattering the review of him as a character the more he likes it. He definitely occupies a certain legendary status in the town, but at the same time the camera encouraged him to step it up… to act… to become this character.

What are you currently working on, and what is next on your agenda?
I’m working on a film that’s similar thematically to Running Stumbled…. this fusion of narrative with reality. It’s kind of like taking the dark energy that’s been created by reality TV, and the undermining of the human condition by reality TV, and the dehumanisation of all of this corporate forest… pushing that energy back and taking those people or those stories that have been dismissed, or that we have been told should be dismissed, and pushing them and making them real.

But aside from that I just got back from three months in the Amazon following this Slovenian guy who swam down the Amazon, he’s got every world record for swimming on the planet and nobody knows about him because he’s this fat drunk guy! It’s being edited now, and believe it or not, even though I produced this film myself because no one would insure it, it’s been picked up by Discovery Channel… it’s definitely gonna be the freakiest thing Discovery channel has ever done…

Related Pages

Read our review of the film on DFGDocs/Doc Reviews.

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