"I wanted to make a dog movie" is not something I ever expected to hear Todd Solondz say. One of America's most controversial, and arguably most misunderstood, filmmakers, his forte in features such as Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness, Storytelling and Palindromes has been to drill down into the darker side of everyday human experience, employing an uncomfortable blend of caustic black comedy, naked honesty, and fearlessness in tackling taboos that has divided critics and audiences, and earned epithets like "cynical", "mean-spirited", and "cruel".
"It isn't a pleasant thing to hear but I can't really dwell on this," he once told me when asked about being labelled misanthropic. "I think it's a very glib, reductive, and facile way of looking at what I do."
Solondz is right. His work isn't always easy to sit through, and can make you squirm in your seat, but it is never less than compassionate and thought-provoking. And so it is with his latest film, Wiener-Dog: a picaresque collection of four vignettes, plus a playful "intermission", linked by a cute, soulful-eyed dachshund.
Speaking to me on the phone from America, the Newark-born Solondz says he doesn't know why he wanted to make a dog movie. Possibly it was because he'd re-watched Robert Bresson's film about the strong bond between a farm girl and her donkey, Au Hasard Balthasar, although that might have been later. He can't remember.
Nevertheless, the '60s French masterpiece was a key influence: "It has a very oblique kind of structure", he explains, "and it gave me a certain confidence to put together a movie with this kind of structure of a dog going from owner to owner. And, of course, just through the process of writing it, one comes to understand what one is writing about."
The movie isn't really about a dog at all - the peripatetic pooch isn't a heroic Lassie or Rin Tin Tin saving Timmy from the well - she is a conceit, a window through which to view the humans. The "ultimate subject", he realised, is people "contending with mortality."
The stories' protagonists form an arc from childhood to retirement, and there is a feeling that comes from the movie - not that he'd necessarily agree - of a film-maker taking stock of his life and work. Now 56, Solondz is these days more likely to be perceived as a "dinosaur" (his word) by the film students he teaches at his alma mater, NYU, than as an enfant terrible. Is Wiener-Dog, then, some kind of intimation of his own mortality?
"I really don't know," he says. "I can presume, I suppose, certain things, but this is just what evolved through the course of writing. I didn't set out to make a film about mortality, but that's what I discovered I was doing."
In the opening story, a father gives the dachshund to his cancer survivor son Remi as a gift. Sickness and the dog seemed like a perfect fit to Solondz, because, he suggests, "it's often through pets that a child first has an intimate understanding of the nature of death. And this is a child that had already had a kind of brush with death… So it all seemed to weave together in a way that made sense."
Remi comes to the realisation that we'll all die one day, and I presume that Solondz was also young when he learned the same lesson. As he told me during an interview a few days after 9/11, "the Holocaust permeated my whole youth".
His mother and her family, he says now, escaped to America from Antwerp (his Russian and Polish grandparents had already fled from the Bolsheviks) a few months after the start of the Second World War. Although he wouldn't call his mother a "Holocaust survivor", he says the event heavily informed his childhood because "[the Holocaust] was so often referred to".
Solondz recalls his mother chatting to a woman in a supermarket and then whispering to him after she'd left: "She's the type who would have turned us in." So, he says, "it just coloured everything about the way in which I engaged with the world.
"But, at the same time, I grew up in a very American, middle-class home where I had none of the worries or fears of the generation prior to mine in Europe. And so that disconnect between the horrors of what had happened in the previous generation and the insulated kind of suburban safety net that I grew up in were so at odds with each other, that some kind of sense or nonsense had to be made of that connection or disconnect."
Perhaps this helped sharpen his antennae for the casual cruelty of which we're all capable and which his characters frequently display.
Even Dawn Wiener (resurrected in Wiener-Dog in the shape of Greta Gerwig after being killed off in Palindromes), the bullied Jewish protagonist of his breakthrough film, Welcome to the Dollhouse, wasn't immune. "There is cruelty out there in the world and there is cruelty inside all of us," says Solondz. "That is why it was imperative with Dawn Wiener that I didn't want her to be just a victim. I'm not interested in victim literature but rather in showing and dramatising those parts of ourselves that give the lie to much of what I think we see."
Because people often can't work out where he stands on certain issues (in Palindromes he made opponents on opposite sides of the abortion debate in America look equally nasty), he's frequently misunderstood. His films are made as dialogues with the viewer, not meant to be consumed passively, while there even appear to be dialogues going on between the vignettes in Wiener-Dog. In Remi's story, the dog is taken to be spayed, and in the following story we learn that a couple with Down's Syndrome have been sterilised, prompting questions about the rights of animals and humans.
"These are complicated, morally fraught kinds of issues," says Solondz. "I don't think there's ever much clamour about dogs being neutered. Not even a question of the rights of animals, but just of what that means to call a dog your best friend when you do that to an animal, and what that means that these things are done to those that are mentally disabled."
He isn't being didactic in the movie, he insists, "but it does open up certain questions, I think, about who we are."
I suggest that some of his questions have become more political in nature since the attacks on 9/11.
"After that event, I did become more politically attuned to the times than I had been before," he agrees. Thus in Wiener-Dog, when Remi's French mother, played by Julie Delpy, tells him a story about a dog called Mohammed that raped her pet poodle, Croissant, when she was a child, it plays almost like a Charlie Hebdo-inspired satire on the hysteria and racism surrounding immigration.
"All of that feeds into this," says Solondz, revealing that the mother was originally going to be American, until he "thought about the Mohammed thing".
"She had to be French because of the political realities of life in France, which are so different from those in the States and where these issues are much more sensitive, despite what one may read about in the press.
"There is obviously a satirical thrust," he continues. "You know, one wants to be open-minded and accepting, one never wants to see oneself as racist or bigoted, or anything like that, and yet it is hard to see how that doesn't infect a certain strata of society there."
In America, the obvious backdrop is Donald Trump, whose presidential campaign strategy appears to include whipping up racial tensions for political gain. Would Remi's mother be a Trump supporter?
"Well once you're living in the States, you're much more insulated," says Solondz. "France is much more a battleground. Here it's a little bit different because notwithstanding the lack of acceptance of immigrants here, those that are here are better integrated than they are in France. They are better integrated despite all the rhetoric."
Of course, Solondz himself is not unfamiliar with creating divisions with his work, and Wiener-Dog is unlikely to be an exception. Dog lovers will be horrified by some of the things that happen to the home-shuffling hound, but those who can see through the occasional shocks will find a provocative, darkly funny and even touching exploration of our relationship with death, and how knowledge of our own mortality impacts our lives.
