Apartment Stories: Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson on Something in the Dirt

"I spoke with Benson and Moorhead about how their own living arrangements influenced production, their appreciation for English occultist Aleister Crowley, successful ways of blending fact and fiction and more."

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Filmmaker: I believe you both have an interest in the late English occultist Aleister Crowley, and have previously spoken about wanting to eventually make a film about his life and career.  Was your initial inspiration for Something in the Dirt also thanks to your fascination with Crowley as much as it was your physical location?

Moorhead: It definitely started more with Aleister Crowley than the space. We spent about a decade trying to make various movies and television shows about Crowley and got so far down the process, doing so much research and writing so many scripts [that haven’t materialized]. There are so many otherworldly ideas within his stories that we’ve wanted to tell for so long, and Something in the Dirt was an opportunity to express some of those ideas. If the film isn’t an exact [representation of his] ideas, it’s about how his ideas served as springboards for other ideas that were developed while we were trying to make a movie about him. 

We haven’t cannibalized the prospect of a movie about Aleister Crowley too much. That’s something we’re still chasing and it’s definitely our white whale. We actually just started reading a new book about him that’s really comprehensive, City of the Beast: The London of Aleister Crowley, by Phil Baker. When you read a tome about a particular figure, it’s usually either highly judgmental of the person or reads as though the author is a follower of them—it’s really hard to find an in-between. While this book is not that in-between (it’s highly critical of him), it’s amazing that a century later removed from his heyday, Crowley is still considered controversial."

https://filmmakermagazine.com/117337-interview-aaron-moorhead-justin-benson-something-in-the-dirt/