The Dancing Outlaw: Dominic Murphy and Edward Hogg on White Lightnin'

After a directorial career spanning twenty years, filmmaker Dominic Murphy has finally made his first feature: White Lightnin’. The director has the air of a seasoned professional - a slightly intimidating, shaven headed man with two of his fingers taped together (the cause remains a mystery). He is just the kind of person one imagines directing this film; a semi-biographical tale of Appalachian dancer Jesco White. Born and raised in rural West Virginia, the real Jesco has led an extreme life filled with drugs, poverty, depression and loss. Scriptwriter Shane Smith’s version of the documentary Dancing Outlaw shares this past, while turning his future into a twisted revenge fantasy loaded with religious subtext and self-sacrifice. “I met Shane about ten years ago and we became friends" recalls Murphy, "He was a writer, I was a director, and we decided we wanted to make a movie together. Years later he sent me a short story that was a kind of dialect narration of this guy’s life. I didn’t know anything about Jesco at that point; it was just a mad story, told in a way I’d never seen before.”

Visually, Murphy’s film is a low-budget, muted piece of cinema. It verges on monochrome, jumps violently and mixes hellfire and brimstone preaching with black pauses and quiet narration. It portrays hick life in an uncompromising manner, while its violence is suggested more frequently than shown, and all the more brutal for it. “I wanted it to be very cinematic, but not Hollywood”, states Murphy. “I wanted it gritty, with a sort of trash, dated, kind of kitsch, slightly crude flavour, because that made sense to me. That would fit with the material and the people. I wanted to be true to Jesco, to capture the spirit of him. Jesco has a kind of naivety. He sees himself as weak, and I could imagine myself in his shoes, as it were. I didn’t want to be judgemental and portray him as a nasty character”, says Murphy. Make no mistake, White Lightnin’ is a violent film, and onscreen Jesco is a violent man. He spends his childhood being shunted around asylums, lashing out and jacking up, consumed by anger at the murder of his father, D Ray White. Portraying this man - even on a semi-fictional level - in a non-judgmental way, is a delicate affair. Enter Edward Hogg, the man chosen to portray the cult figure. Having spent the majority of his career on stage, this is Hogg's first leading role in a feature film, and what a role to choose. Jesco, in Murphy’s words, is a combination of “childlike innocence on one level, and psycho on another”. Hogg, in his own words, is “green”. In person he is a quiet, unassuming man. The effeminate hillbilly twang is replaced with his natural Yorkshire tones, the tightly-wound, barely restrained insanity on screen gives way to a humble, genuine and unavoidably likeable character. Watching White Lightnin’, it is very difficult to imagine anyone other than Hogg portraying Jesco. A lanky man with delicate features, his onscreen persona is very much one that only a person with diminished capacity would consider challenging. This contrast between the external image and the internal anger is what makes Jesco an intimidating, yet empathetic character. As Hogg reiterates, “He’s a very sweet man. He’s not an evil person, but he’s got that side of him”. Jesco has not seen the completed film, but he’s fully aware of its existence. He allowed Hogg a meeting, during which much alcohol was consumed. “We got very drunk and then shot his guns in the woods, which made me very nervous”, admits Hogg. “I shot his gun once and felt very powerful. I had to phone my mother and tell her I’d shot Jesco’s gun! He shot it maybe twenty times - he obviously feels good with power”.

The latter half of Murphy’s film may be fictionalised, but Jesco’s past needs little exaggeration. “He told me stories about his life”, says Hogg, “and he danced a bit for me in his living room. His sister came around with her friends and they all took their clothes off and danced in their bras and pants. There’s things in the film he hasn’t done, but there are bits of his life more extreme than the film. He’s kind of wonderful”. Following in his father’s footsteps, Jesco’s dancing is a therapeutic, spiritual event, without which he would not be the cult figure he is. Typing his name into Youtube provides a few hundred clips of him, and this is where Hogg went to learn the moves. He had a choreographer on occasion, but both Murphy and Hogg felt there was more to the dancing than perfect timing. As Hogg says, “In the end we were less worried about getting the steps right, and more about capturing the showmanship of it. He’s putting on a show. It’s his rock ’n’ roll moment.” This is what White Lightnin’ is all about. It’s not important to capture every second of Jesco’s life accurately, or to make distinctions between the real and the fictionalised moments. Jesco once said, “My past is coming up into my future and messing with my good life”, and this complements both his life and Murphy’s reinvention of his life. If the aim of White Lightnin’ is to capture something of the essence of Jesco as a person, it appears to have succeeded.