Devon Johns · Poison Taster
A breathing painting
On finding Poison Taster through images, working notes, and a story that kept growing.
There’s a bear in Poison Taster that has destroyed a hedge. The gardener has spent sixty years on it. I wanted him to sound disappointed.
Before this bear there were a lot of other bears. One tearing the hedge open. One asleep in a fountain. One eating roses, one nose to nose with a bronze statue. As each batch came in, I wrote down what I liked and what I didn’t about them. Each note pulls the next batch a little closer to what I want, until one of them is the one.
A photograph made in Ancient Rome
The visual DNA of the film was built during long conversations about pictures. Early on we talked about street photography, and about the fraction of a second in which a scene explains itself. We talked about Renaissance and Baroque pictures and what makes them work, where the light falls and where the people stand, but none of them were used directly as reference images. The goal wasn’t to copy the paintings, but to capture their spirit. We translated what makes them great into language and used that language in the prompts where it could best support the story.
Painting named in the prompt
The selected frame
Places to get lost
There are a lot of places to get lost in this film. Palaces, kitchens, baths, streets. Each scene has its own page in Absurd. Within a page, the parts of the scene go in columns and the variations in grids. I can leave a chase half finished and go and work on a much quieter shot, knowing I’ll be able to find my way back.
The page knows where we are
A new chat, opened on a page, already knows where we are in the story. It knows how old our characters are by now, what they have been through, what they are feeling, and where things are headed.
The second half
Originally the film was going to end much sooner, with the death of the first emperor. The second half did not exist, even as an idea. I had generated and edited most of the first half before I started to see what could follow: his son growing up to become worse than he was, the taster witnessing all of it, outliving both of them and returning home.
The same is true, to a lesser extent, of the opening. When I started, the film began with the taster already in the palace, on his first day on the job. The pieces showing where he came from came much later.
I was still writing the film up until the very end. There is no clean division between pre-production, production and post-production in this medium. You can always continue to write. That much freedom can be overwhelming. It is also very freeing.