Slamdance Interview: The 23-Year Wait for Bliss

A story is ready when it’s ready. That explains the 23-year gap between Joe Maggio's 2001 indie crime drama Virgil Bliss and its sequel, Bliss. Yet this was a sequel Maggio never originally planned. “When we made Virgil Bliss, I thought it was a one-off."

The new film (which debuted this weekend at the Slamdance Film Festival) was just part of an ongoing creative relationship with actor Clint Jordan, who played the titular petty crook. The pair had known each other since the early ‘90s, when they met on the set of future Virgil Bliss and Bliss cinematographer Harlan Bosmajian’s graduate thesis film. “We were in Buffalo, New York, on a canoe in the winter,” Jordan said, and so inevitably they and some friends formed a theatre group. “Joe and I were penniless but we had a passion for movies and what was happening with John Cassevetes and Mike Leigh and Lars Von Trier, and then Thomas Vinterberg made The Celebration, and then we realized, ‘Oh, it is possible to make a movie.’”

Virgil Bliss was a critical success beyond their wildest dreams and nominated for two Film Independent Spirit awards: unheard of for a zero-budget debut flick shot on MiniDV. That success launched their film careers and opened doors for them. Indeed, very soon after it was released, Icelandic filmmaker Friðrik Þór Friðriksson approached him about reshooting it on 35mm, Maggio recalled, “and I very stupidly said no, because I didn’t want to repeat myself.”

According to Maggio, it was Jordan who kept the idea of a sequel alive. “At least once a year,” the director said, “it would come up that we should revisit Virgil and see where he is and what’s going on with him.”

So why didn’t Bliss happen 10 years ago? Maggio quoted the Frankfurt School philosopher Walter Benjamin: “The decisive blows in history and life are always dealt left-handed. I think what he means is that things never come from where you expect they’re going to come from. It’s the left when you’re expecting the right.” In short, he said, he just got busy: with making other films, with teaching at NYU and Emerson, with recording audio dramas with Vincent D’Onofrio and NYC indie cinema king Larry Fessenden for the Tales From Beyond the Pale series, with starting his own production company, Incidental Cinema. In short, with life.

And Jordan’s life got in the way, too. Referencing Benjamin again, he said, “The left hand is that my father got cancer, and I just had a crisis of faith.” He’d been auditioning for major projects like Breaking Bad and Sideways but not getting cast, and as a married man with an infant daughter, “I thought, what the fuck am I doing with my life? I’m pretending to be a detective?” He fired his manager, stopped taking calls, and the family moved back to North Carolina so that he could be with his father. But, much as he tried, none of that could destroy the urge to create. “An artist’s eye is almost like a curse,” he said. “We are inside our lives, going through a tragedy, and we’re also saying, ‘This would be a great scene to rewrite later.’ Because you want to tell people what you’ve found in these coalmines.”

After his father died, Jordan returned to acting and Los Angeles, where he mounted a one-man show about his father’s death. After each performance, people would come up to him and share their own experiences with grief and loss. “It was a moment that revived my faith in storytelling and why we do it. It’s not about me, it’s about them. It’s about us, sharing. … The whole energy started again.”

Even with that revived passion, it was around a year into the pandemic that those conversations between Jordan and Maggio started to take more serious shape, and a clearer story developed, one built around the sense of isolation everyone felt in early 2000. But for Maggio, this was about something deeper and more deeply rooted than just the lockdown. “Even before the pandemic, it felt like the world was moving into this interior place with our screens, and maybe not socializing as much, and really becoming slaves to our technology.” With the pandemic merely clarifying and amplifying those issues, “it just felt right to visit this very gritty, sweaty story,” Maggio said. “We wanted to jump in and do something very intimate, very tactile.”

That sense of growing isolation explains Virgil’s situation at the beginning of Bliss: 20 years later, still on the run, calling himself Duane after his dead cousin from the first film, working on a horse farm in Southern California, and with with his only real human contact being his dealer, the occasional desperate phone call from his uncle (Fessenden, who also executive produced Bliss), and oxy-fueled nights with his girlfriend/drug buddy, Amy (Faryl Amadeus). When Amy ODs, Virgil must contend with her highly religious and suspicious sister, Joe (Amadeus in a double role).

It was Jordan that brought Amadeus to the project, after they worked together on a production of David Harrower’s 2005 play Blackbird, and she joined him and Maggio in the writing process. “It was such synchronicity of our tastes and our work ethics,” she said.

The resultant script and the production deal with dualities. Take Virgil, who has spent years trying to bury his old life and become Duane (as Morgan noted, “The first line of dialogue is Virgil correcting his uncle on his name”). At the same time, Amadeus is both junkie Amy and pious Jo, but neither is as morally black-and-white as they initially appear. “It’s a real gift to play two different people, to make them different and give them different experiences, and build them with different parts of my body and different rhythms” said Amadeus, who said she based them on two different people. “When we wrapped Amy, I got really sad and I thought, ‘I’ll never get to be her fun, sparky self again.’ There was such an innocence and a sloppy funness to her, and I was sad when we wrapped Jo as well. … She’s this wildly fierce person, and I love playing that in people.”

For Morgan, those themes of duality are core to Bliss. “In many ways, it’s about him getting back to Virgil, getting back to things he’s lost.” However, even before they started shooting he realized that there was more to Virgil’s story that could be contained in Bliss, and so he and Jordan are already planning for this to become a trilogy. Only this time, it won’t take them 23 years to get it made. “Maybe this year, maybe next, but we’ll pick the story up right where we left off.”

Bliss screens as part of the Slamdance Film Festival.