Interview with Barrett Burgin Pt.1 – The Angel
I sat down with an indie director with a bold vision for the future of Mormon cinema. In the first of a two-part interview, we discuss the success of his award-winning short film, "The Angel".
For director Barrett Burgin, Latter-day Saint identity has always been at the center of his storytelling. From missionary thrillers to apocalyptic sci-fi, he’s found ways to turn the specific milieu of Mormonism into something relatable for mainstream audiences. (His romcom short Java Jive, for example, follows a young man on a date struggling to resist the temptation of a “hot drink.”) I spoke to Barrett about why he chooses to lean into his Mormon roots rather than skirt around them, and the risks and rewards of telling such stories. We discuss the nature of independent filmmaking and his latest short film The Angel, which crafts a suspenseful horror tale from a polygamist pioneer family’s encounter with an otherworldly being. In part two of our interview, which will publish next week, he’ll explain why he’s so passionate about creating the next wave of LDS cinema.
You and your producing partner, Jessica Burgin, are a husband and wife duo with a production company, Burgindie. Tell me about that. How do you find a balance between work and family when it’s so entwined?
I don’t know if we have a balance – I think we’re making it work and figuring it out. What grounds us and brings us balance is that we are both doing it together. It was so fun directing together [on The Angel], and typically we’ll do a sort of director-producer team. We’ve taken turns in the kind of work that we do. Right now, I am focusing more on my production company Burgindie and freelance directing. I just did a trip in Scotland for a documentary, and Jessica is working at a production company here in Knoxville. Before that, I was the chief creative officer of a media company in Utah, and she was working from home after she had Roxie, our baby. And so we’ve always found ways to keep a foot in different endeavors.
But there’s also just the romance of telling stories and it’s too much fun. I’ve wanted to make movies since I was a second grader, and I’ve done so. And Jessica found this with me when we were in high school together and she wasn’t sure that it was for her, but then decided for herself by osmosis by working on some of these productions. She didn’t go to film school like I did, and on paper, I’ve had more opportunities to direct and maybe a little bit more of the prestige that comes with that.
But Jessica has had a far more real career, in terms of working on bigger productions. She produced an entire Christmas special for The Chosen that really put them on the map. She’s worked with LG and BYUTV. She’s worked on stuff for HBO. And we have a daughter and we’ve involved her on our filmmaking pursuits too. She’s come with us to set, she’s been a featured extra, she knows the movies that we’ve made and has watched some of them. It’s an integrated part of our lives.
You’ve just finished a long and successful festival run for your short film The Angel. Tell me a bit about that and the themes you wanted to explore.
The Angel is Mormon pioneer folk horror: Two plural wives receive a mysterious visitation amidst the blood red stone of Southern Utah. So it’s almost exploitative, because it’s taking advantage of the thing that I know that the nonmember audience wants to see, and wants to hear about. Polygamy? Angels and visions? Blood atonement? It’s touching on all these things. And yet I have had several Latter-day Saints describe it to me as the most sort of “orthodox” or “rooted” LDS film they’ve ever seen — and it can do both those things, because it’s horror. With horror, you’re able to go really spiritual and really dark because of the subject matter. It makes you take the spirituality of the thing more seriously. And it doesn’t feel so devotional because it’s balanced out by those things.
Let’s talk about genre – why is horror, or sci-fi, or mystery-thriller, an easier entry point into telling these sorts of ideas?
I do think that Mormonism lends itself to some really interesting genre development. We have a cosmology. I mean, the whole Pearl of Great Price is a sci-fi book of scripture. And you’ve got a cosmology of planets and worlds and other peoples on other planets and the idea of time being continual before God. And people get into all this super intense, bizarre, deep doctrine stuff, and that is sci-fi waiting to happen. Actually, it’s sci-fi that did happen. If you know anything about Battlestar Galactica, the creator is LDS, and “Kobol” is supposed to be Kolob. And when it comes to a straightaway adventure film with Raiders of the Lost Ark, what LDS storyteller has not conceptualized the idea of all of our lost artifacts and civilizations? These things just lend themselves to really interesting potential stories.
The real problem is that like any filmmaking group, most of the attempts at those kinds of storytelling are camp. It’s just camp and kitsch. But I think especially in the world of Mormon literature, you have really, really good examples of how to navigate that. There’s The Book of Mormon to begin with, as well as that our theology is so creative and imaginative. It’s so richly based in story, in lost civilizations and tribes and people speaking from the earth, that Mormonism tends to be this creative culture where you see a lot of fantasy novelists come from this community.
Have you made a film where you specifically didn’t incorporate these sorts of elements of LDS culture or storytelling?
With my first feature, the sci-fi film Cryo, I went out of my way to try to make something that wasn’t religious at all, but the themes and ideas showed up in the script anyway. And at the first table read we did, everyone said, “Well, you should lean into that because that’s what’s making it interesting.” And so I went back and decided, “Let’s put those things back in. “ And so there’s these elements of The Divine Comedy — these characters awake from the cryo chambers for seven days and they can’t remember anything from before — and they refer to it as a veil of forgetfulness. And this inventor who has done all these things is quoting Dante, and he’s making references to ideas and illusions that are distinctly LDS, and I even had him quote right out of The Book of Mormon. And audiences had no problem with that.
What are some of the most challenging aspects of indie filmmaking for you? And what are some of the more rewarding elements of it?
Well, the challenging aspects are that you don’t have an institution that is footing the bill for everything. You have to just go out and make it happen. And the rewarding aspects are that because you’re the one going out and making it happen, you have control.
We landed distribution on Cryo; it was distributed through Saban Films, and it had a great festival run. We’re proud of the fact that we got distribution on it. And [it] was an interesting learning experience because it just taught me how much you really do sacrifice in distribution. And Saban made some good changes and some that we didn’t love, but we understood why they made the changes that they did.
We’re distributing The Angel through Alter, the YouTube channel. And that’s been a totally different kind of experience, distributing a short. Very, very positive! But it is nice that I get to hand over my movie and it’s cooked the way it is. It’s like a cake — sorry, I can’t change the ingredients now.
But quite frankly, the reason it’s all been indie is because I don’t have a choice. I want to direct, and I want to direct now. I don’t want to wait or to climb a ladder. And I would rather be directing something now than take a chance at directing through the studio system. If that came my way, I would take it; I’d love that experience. It’s not so much that we’re in love with independent film as much as independent film is what most filmmakers have to do.
Tell me what’s next for you. What are you excited about?
We are really proud of the festival run of The Angel and the reviews that it’s gotten. We are raising money right now for the feature version, The Third Wife. We have found a potential production partner and a lot of the capital, but not all of it.
The second thing that I’m developing is a TV show called Visions, about Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of the first television. And Angel Studios has expressed a lot of interest in this show. So I’m making a short film early next year that will reflect the larger, eight-part limited series.
Philo Farnsworth was an Idaho farm boy. He said that the idea for the television came to him in a vision when he was 14 years old, plowing his fields, and he later had this idea nearly stolen from him because everyone was in a race to try to create the television. And here he had solved it when he was 14 and finally invented it when he was 21. He got into a big legal battle with RCA, who wanted to say that they had invented it. So it’s a great drama. In terms of tone, think something maybe a little inspirational, dramatic, but also kind of pulling from Oppenheimer or from The Imitation Game or even The Social Network in terms of the tortured genius trying to create his vision.
I can only imagine if Farnsworth saw modern reality TV, he’d drop to his knees and cry, “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
Well, by his old age, he regretted it. He wouldn’t own a TV. And we deal with that journey in the show. I think it’s a relevant story for a relevant time. He was a Mormon boy, inactive for a lot of his life, and he struggled with alcohol. But he came around to changing how he viewed his spirituality in conjunction with his invention. Honestly, the story writes itself; I’m just excited to be pulling it together.
There are a couple of other features I have on my development slate. There’s a feature version of a short film that we won at FilmFest Knox last year called A Scout is Kind, which is just a straight drama. And I would really like to do a feature adaptation of The Next Door, my first short film which was a psychological thriller [following two missionaries.] I’ve always felt like there was a feature there, but could never quite hack how to do it. And then it came to me. So there’s a lot of stuff cooking — with this industry, it’s like betting on several horses, and then it’s whichever one takes off.
Talk to me about the reception to The Angel – this is a movie that really delves into the Mormon holy grail of touchy subjects. I know there was a great critical response. But I’m curious about the response you got from members of the Church.
Something I believe in wholeheartedly is pragmatism, and I think it’s a little bit of a lost art. And I think it’s very important to not be trite with things, especially things that could feel offensive to somebody. Nobody has been able to pin us down on the basis of not treating the subject matter with respect or the proper amount of care. So we were pragmatic in how we developed The Angel.
And what I mean by that is that Jessica and I were prayerful about the style and the tone of the things that we were depicting, just by approaching scripture. Doctrine and Covenants 50, 132, 129 – these are foundational inspirations for what we’re putting on screen. There’s a familiarity with certain concepts in the temple. There is a familiarity with a lot of folklore and a lot of rich, rich history. There’s stuff that we’ve referenced with the angel down to the color of his hair — he has sandy-colored hair, and that’s tied directly to something mentioned in the Joseph Smith Papers. For the sake of the art and for the sake of honoring our own tradition, our own ancestors, we were both careful and reverent. But I also wanted the Church to be aware that I was making this.
We did a screening a year ago in Springville through Angels and Seerstones, the folklore podcast, which is run by a BYU professor and two scholars, Christine and Christopher Blythe. And they hosted this screening where all kinds of academics and scholars and professors and journalists and the Deseret News were there, and we showed it and then we did a Q&A after.
And this is where [the idea] of identity and intent comes into play. What is [our] intent? We’ve been very vocal and public and clear about it. There’s certainly some people who have been offended or upset by The Angel, but at least they know what jersey we wear, I suppose. And when you are willing to do some work for pragmatism, for building relationships, for making your intentions clear, that goes a long way. I think sometimes we think that [LDS] culture won’t allow art, and that’s not true. I think we’ve just been so burned as a culture and are so constantly criticized that there can be a level of hesitancy or distrust. All that is to say that the Latter-day Saint response has overwhelmingly been positive.
But for our notes in the edit, we didn’t let any Latter-day Saints or ex-Mormons watch it at all. We only got notes from [nonmembers], because we had to get that edit perfect to where our nonmember friends could say, “That’s a damn good film.”
So it works for the general audience, but the LDS audience is having a bit of a different experience. I’ve compared it to both a litmus test and a Rorschach test because people interpret the film in different ways. But it’s a litmus test to the extent of how LDS-adjacent you are; you will read the film a little bit more intimately or differently because you’re picking up on the subtext. And what’s so cool about that is that it’s so unabashedly Mormon, and yet it has gone so far in the normal film world that [appreciates] that we’re unafraid of the identity.
It played at ScreenFest in LA, it was at Indie Shorts, it was at the Chicago Horror Film Festival, Cork International, it’s played in Istanbul, Chattanooga, and it even won at Knoxville, our hometown, and they forgot we were from there.
Do you feel like there’s a generational shift in the way that Latter-day Saints are responding to your film?
I think the excitement has been in the younger Latter-day Saints who say, “Thank you for making something that I feel represented by. Even if it makes me uncomfortable, it’s an honest discomfort and it’s a wrestle rather than a condemnation.” We’re not saying anything for or against anything. We’re telling a deeply LDS story.
And I have been able to share that with some older Latter-day Saints to say, “Look, we need a newer art scene. We need something that is willing to take risks and willing to own it and willing to do a more in-depth spirituality like we see in these other faith traditions.”
And we’ve had some ex-Mormons really dislike it, because they sadly have retained a particular part of Mormonism when they leave the Church, which is the certainty in the blacks and whites of their moral convictions. And so ironically, certain binary-thinking Latter-day Saints and ex-Mormons see the film similarly. “I thought this was going to be edgy and reinforce all of my views.” And it is edgy, but it doesn’t reinforce people’s views. It asks questions instead.
But really, we could not be more grateful [for] the response. Jessica and I made the film ready for the Church community to hate it, for the institution to hate it. But we felt like we had to make it because it’s true. It’s true to us, and it’s true to what we want to say. It’s true to some of the horrors of life, both spiritually and physically. And Jessica made such a great comment where she observed, “Life has horror in it. “ And sometimes we don’t acknowledge it. We don’t want to look at it because we want to stay positive, but The Book of Mormon talks about the bitter and the sweet, and sometimes you need to engage with difficult stories in order to have catharsis and in order to move past. Look at the Old Testament, even The Book of Mormon. They are filled with dark, complicated stories that are warnings, exhortations, and sometimes just tragedies. And that’s so powerful and beautiful.
We have this mythos and this mystic tradition of testing angels and diverse spirits and possession, and we don’t like to talk about it a lot. Yet Joseph Smith himself was so preoccupied by this that he was warning about it. To use that and utilize that in a philosophical way to make a comment on deception, that to me is Mormon cinema. That’s what Mormon cinema can and ought to do.
Wow, Isaac you are a masterful interviewer as demonstrated by this line- “I can only imagine if Farnsworth saw modern reality TV, he’d drop to his knees and cry, “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
Looking forward to Part 2 with Barrett Burgin!
Great interview! Thank you.