Talking With Nick Frost of CUBAN FURY

April 12, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Interviews Tagged Cuban Fury, Hot Fuzz, Interviews, Nick Frost, Shaun of the Dead, Simon Pegg, The World's End

You might know him as the schlubby, stoner, best friend burnout from Shaun of the Dead or the hoodwinked, adolescent dunce of a cop in Hot Fuzz but you don’t know the real Nick Frost. Sensitive, kind and sharp as a katana, Nick dreamed up an unlikely passion project in Cuban Fury, a workplace/sports comedy orbiting around the world of salsa dancing. As the film’s hero and salsa dancing extraordinaire, Nick may not be the first person you’d think of with a name like Cuban Fury but, according to him, that’s the point. It’s all about going against expectations. After all, there’s something inherently funny about watching a man of his stature throw his body around like a 120 pound Latina woman.

Nick and I sat down to discuss the process of making the film, working with best friends Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, what they might all do next, cameos, writing, Ant-Man, and the big Fox pilot he’s filming this month.

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The press notes claim that the roots of the film came from a drunken email you wrote pitching the idea of you doing a dancing movie. But when did that idea come to you and made you think it would make a great movie?

 Nick Frost: I think I had that idea about three years ago, but it could have been five fucking years. I think after doing Shaun of the Dead and then Hot Fuzz and Paul, the genre specific, fanboy films, which I’m very proud of and that is me, I always kinda wanted to do a dance film where I was a dancer. If you want to do something completely different and out of left field of you as a performer, doing a dance film is it for me. So I harbored that idea and my gut instinct was that it was a good idea. Because it was a good idea, every time that it knocked on my consciousness, I would say, “Fuck off” cuz it’s a good idea. I’d drive it away with a pitchfork or a flaming torch back into my subconscious. I got back from a party at like 2am and sat there and was a bit belligerent and was like, “I’m gonna do it,” and just pitched. I wrote what I imagined the film would be in a big long email and pressed send. I woke up the next day and didn’t remember but had this weird unease that one might have if you’d french-kissed an aunt. “What have I done?” So I put my computer up and saw a message in my inbox, essentially saying, “This is a great idea. Let’s have a meeting.”

So you came up with the idea but you did not want to write the screenplay. Why was that?

NF: I couldn’t be bothered, to be honest. The thing about writing a screenplay is that you are taken out of circulation in terms of acting. Paul took so long to write. It was bitty and piece-mealy. As much as I did like writing Paul, and I’ve written two since, I found my love for it again but the thought of sitting in a room on my own writing a screenplay held noi joy for me at all. So we found John Brown who wrote the thing and we sat down and I gave him a little bible of what the story should be and my character and potential other characters and that was it. John just went and did it, he was amazing. I don’t want to overestimate my part in that, it was not much at all. John went off and delivered a great first draft and we’d give it notes or not, because it was so nice. I’m not sure I could have been like this as a younger person but if you’re getting people like John Brown in, you let him write it. You don’t fiddle with it. He’s a craftsman, a skilled writer. You have to trust these people or shut up and write it yourself.

Do you see yourself writing another screenplay in the future sometime soon or are you kind of turned off from the writing process? 

NF: I just finished. I guess you never really “finish” but I’ve finished the first draft about a thing called Cockney Lump, which is about a British wrestler being induced into the hall of fame.

  Are you gonna play the part?

NF: Yeah. So that’s something I’ve been working on with Studio Canal for a year or so now. There’s a nice script now. I was in Boston over Thanksgiving this year and last year and I was shooting a film with Vince Vaughn and James Marsden and I have eight days off from shooting. I don’t know anyone in Boston. I’m in a hotel like this with a bar downstairs. What I didn’t want to be doing is everyday at lunchtime going out for something to eat and a drink. What kind of life is that? You’ve got eight days off in Boston. I set up alarm at 6am and I got up and wrote for ten hours every day. I just sat there and wrote. It woke up in me the love of doing that. Since that point, I’ve kind of finished a children’s book that I was doing and I’ve written a short film that I’m gonna direct later on in the year. Just kind of got it going again.

This being a dance movie of sorts, obviously you had to cut some dope moves on the rug. How much dance rehearsal did that demand of you? I’m gonna go ahead and assume you didn’t pull the front flip off the car?

NF: I did not pull the front flip, but that’s not technically dancing. I would say that 98% of all the dancing in the film is me. I trained for six or seven hours a day for seven months before we shot a roll of film.

So are you really comfortable as a salsa dancer now?

NF: We shot that before World’s End to be honest. I had a week between wrapping that and starting World’s End and I’ve done bits and pieces here and there too. If you’re doing it seven hours a day everyday, you’re an expert for that point. But it’s like language, the longer you don’t use it, the rustier you get at it. In terms of specifics, I’m kind of pretty bad at this point. But the fiery heart of beating Latino culture is kind of there for every.

It’s just the technical aspects that fade away.

NF: Yeah, I think I’d be better than most but I couldn’t do the dances I was doing.

So you’re not gonna go do Dancing with the Stars next?

NF: I wouldn’t want to to be honest.

I wouldn’t want to see you there.

NF: On a Saturday night my mother-in-law and father-in-law will come over and my baby loves it and the whole family will just sit there and eat a curry and watch Dancing with the Stars. I think it would spoil if it had my fat, horrible fucking face gunning over an American smooth.

Talking about The World’s End, that’s the last film that you’re doing in the Cornetto trilogy with Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright. I know that you guys had this idea forever of doing the three satire, action, genre movies and now that you’ve finished that out, I hate the idea of you not collaborating again. I’m sure that you do as well since you guys are such a fantastic team. Have you tossed around ideas of when you’re gonna work together next and what it might be on?

NF: Yes, we had a great idea on the plane, as we often do. Flying from Wellington to somewhere else or Sydney to here. I’m not gonna tell you what it is, but it’s a good idea. The fact is, Simon has Mission Impossible and he’s gonna do that this year. Edgar is doing Ant-Man. I’m doing a Fox pilot with Justin Long. If that gets picked up, I’ll be out of the game for a little bit. We could of made a decision just to make a film a year that go down in terms of quality because you’re just pumping shit out because you need to feed an audience’s expectations or you can sit on an idea for four years. If we only make a film every five or six years but it’s something that people really dig, I think that’s probably better than people going off you because you do too much.

Would the next thing that you guys work together on be a sort of thematic sequel to this or would it be a whole new direction?

NF: I think it’ll be completely different.

I’m so curious. I would have to see what you guys do next. Speaking of Simon, you guys have this great onscreen chemistry but in real life, you’re also dear friends.

NF: (Shows tattoo with SP (for Simon Pegg) and EW (Edgar Wright).

Well that is just fantastic. Anytime when you’re doing a movie, you other one cameos. Is that an unspoken agreement or is that a pact. Like, “If I’m in the movie, Simon is showing up.”  

NF: This just seemed kinda right for it. It took us a while to shoot that you know because we did a bunch of different versions of it. There was a version where he slowed down and said to me, “What are you doing here? Who are all these people?” And you could see the crew. I think in the edit we looked at it so many different way and the best way was the fact that he quickly drifts through frame.

It seems like you’ve got a lot on your platter coming up. What are you most excited for?

NF: Well working with Justin Long. I’ve been a fan of his and we’ve known each other for a bit. I got sent this pilot script and it was great. This is something completely different for me. I’ve never done anything like this before.

So what’s the character?

NF: His name is Robert and he’s a high-functioning alcoholic who happens to be a powerful lawyer.

Lovely.

NF: He does something quite bad and is assigned a sober companion for 90 days.

Played by Justin Long?

NF: Yeah. And this is the story.

So are you still in the development stage?  

NF: Well we’re shooting the pilot at the end of the month. It’s part of the pilot season machine and then we’ll find out in May if it gets picked up.

I’m assuming that that’s also more on the comedic side?

NF: Yes it is, absolutely but when the main character is a struggling alcoholic, you can’t ignore the fact that that destroys life and affects people around him. That will be given the screen time it deserves and not just do a wacky, balls-to-the-wall “here comes the drunk guy again.” I think it’ll work if both are.

Will you be playing a Brit?

NF: Oh yeah, I’m English.

Yeah, I’ve never seen you do an American accent.

NF: “Hey man, you want a hamburger” (in an “American” accent).

It just wouldn’t feel right.

NF: There are a million America actors if you want to give it to an American actor. This is probably a limitation in me as a performer but I kind of have that weird belligerent streak of “I’m an English actor!” I think if something is set now, there’s no reason in the world why they couldn’t be English. I get if it was set in 1860 but it’s now.

Have you ever thought about going straight drama, for example Chris O’Dowd, who you co-starred with in this, just did Calvary which was very dark and grim.

NF: Absolutely. I never was trained as a comedian. I’m not a comedian, I’m just someone who has always been a funny dick and now I just get to do that as a job. In terms of people and human beings, you can be both and that’s where a lot of truth is. The crossroads between tragedy and comedy. I call it putting the fun back into funeral. A lot of the funniest times I’ve had in my life are at funerals and after funerals. One minute, you’re crying because your grandmother has died and the next minute, a group of relatives are drinking Jamesons and howling at her memory. That’s real and that’s a really real place to be.

Obviously your collaborator who you’ve worked with quite a bit, Edgar is going off to Ant-Man. There was some talks that Simon might be in a leading role there. Did they ever approach the two of you?

NF: No, it was all bullshit. We knew that it was just Edgar’s thing. When we were doing press tours for The World’s End, the joke that the three of us would share is whenever someone would ask Edgar about Ant-Man, I would take the question. “I’ll take this Edgar. I’m really pleased to be playing Hank Pym.” It would really make him laugh. But it’s Edgar’s project really. Scott Pilgrim wasn’t a lesser film because me and Simon weren’t the vegan police.

Maybe it was…

NF: That film was fantastic without us in it and the same with Ant-Man, it’ll be fantastic without us in it.

Would you do maybe a high-budget, tentpole, Marvel-type situation? Could you ever see that in your future?

NF: Who would that be, if I’m just being pragmatic about it.

Well maybe not necessarily in the starring role.

NF: Well yeah, absolutely and I would love to do it. It would be a lot of fun. But in terms of playing a lead in something like that, who would it be? The Rhino?

Paul Giamatti’s already got that one.

NF: I think I need to be aware of my limitations as a human being and Hollywood’s expectation of what they’re willing to spend $150 dollars on.

Talking with Zeek Earl of PROSPECT

March 27, 2014 by Chris Bunker Posted in Interviews Tagged Callie Harlow, Interviews, Prospect, Q&A, SXSW, SXSW 2014, Zeek Earl

After premiering at SXSW 2014 in the Narrative Shorts Competition, Directors Chris Caldwell and Zeek Earl have been generating a lot of buzz around this mysterious story and the possibilities for a new series. Following it’s online release on Vimeo yesterday, Prospect has garnered a lot of attention from filmmakers and fans alike and the reaction is near-unanimous: it’s definitely good enough to merit a feature.

Prospect takes concepts from various sci-fi: within you can find some Star Wars, a fistful of Gravity, even a touch of Elysium. While the lush green landscape might seem friendly, the goings-on within are anything but. Prospect imbues the film’s scenic indie beauty with an ominous threat, a mystery. There’s something out there that we can’t touch. This is a new frontier, a place full of mystery and madness.

The 13-minute short, which feels more like a preview of something greater to come, follows a father-daughter combination living on an unidentified foreign planet. They seek a mysterious “Orolack,” a goopy gook that perhaps hides some terrific power. Certainly, it has some greater value, but that isn’t what they’re here for. Something deeper spurs them onwards: a dream of a better life back home, who knows? They’re spatial forager, but bigger monsters are on the hunt.

The story is mysterious and just oblique enough to engender a curious inquisitiveness. Earl and Caldwell have created a short story that’s vividly complex. The truth behind everything is hidden beneath a layer of cosmic dust. It’s got that Jumanji feel to it: you’ve come across a strange story in the attic—your curiosity urges you to open it despite an ominous feeling of imminent danger.

“This is not our world. We are aliens here,” says the father. Prospect aims at humanity’s underlying fear, the hidden: where are we welcomed, if not here? What is our home? It may look friendly, but Prospect‘s visuals instill serene discomfort. Floating dust particles create a sense of rift, like this world was torn apart long ago. Maybe an alien race once lived here. Something terrible happened in this forsaken place: ravaged, all that is left is an element whose power is unknown, and the people who risk their lives to discover it. There is something here we have yet to see that needs salvaging; something in the depths and core of this landscape that tremors, leaving behind a world broken and decomposed.

Complete with a forested space-planet, cool space suits and a Cthulu monster, Prospect is absolutely worth the watch. There is much more than meets the eye with Prospect. So believes Director Zeek Earl, who has great passion for the project and even bigger dreams to achieve: a potential feature that might come of it. Read on to learn more about the local director’s genre exploration, filming on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, and the endless possibilities Prospect has to offer.

Q: The main thing about Prospect is the fact that it takes place on this “alien” world that we don’t know too much about. There’s this distance between us and them, there’s this strange existence on this planet. How much do you think it was an exploration of the beyond, and how much do you think it was an exploration of our own planet, of our own humanity and interaction?

ZE: I think you’re going the right places. It’s definitely an exploration of humanity. We’re playing around a lot with genre, in a certain aspect. To me, it’s really a Western… My personal definition of a Western is—or at least Western’s I like—there are environments where the absolute extreme ends of humanity end up, and why they’re there is really interesting to me. You have these really hostile environments that people go to for all sorts of reasons. So, in Prospect we obviously have the “prospectors:” people going there to get rich, who are willing to make that risk. But there are all sorts of people in that environment: they’re there for religious reasons, they’re escaping. That’s something that we’re excited to explore, perhaps with a feature version.

Q: A lot of people see Prospect as a Sci-Fi but I didn’t see it as fiction as much as it was an interpretation of reality.

ZE: Yeah. What we associate with Science Fiction now, or in general, are sort of big concepts. “In the future it’s going to be like this.” But our movie, I wouldn’t even necessarily say it is in the future. It’s in a different kind of world altogether.

Q: What kind of moral or ethical questions do you think that raises?

ZE: [Laughs] I mean it’s a short film, so you only get to do so much! I always feel limited. I feel like we started and let’s just think, it could get a lot more interesting. I think the essential crux is that there’s this girl who’s been dragged to this planet by her father, and at a certain point he’s taken out of the picture. Where we kind of get to in the short film is that she’s put in the driver’s seat. She’s in the position where she’s now making the decisions. She decides to go for the gold, and kill this guy, but where does that get her? We just start to tease at that. Again, hopefully in a larger film we can do a lot more.

Q: Why did you choose a girl, choose to have that father-daughter relationship? Obviously that’s been trending a lot currently, with stories like Divergent and the Hunger Games, just an exploration of the feminine side and their handle of social structure and loss. Why do you think you went that direction?

ZE: For us it goes back to the Western angle of it. It creates some more interesting situations, to have a young girl in this crazy environment. A lot of it is hard… [Laughs] It’s hard because there’s this whole feature thing that we’re trying to make too… I guess in a larger world—we only get to tease at it in the short—she’s an unusual character there. You generally have these rough, violent characters, so when they interact with her you can have these surprising things happen because she’s not the norm in that environment.

Q: You talked about these violent characters. One thing that I really liked is the antagonist in this, the kinda “Cthulu” character that you guys had—

ZE: [Laughs] Interesting that you mention that.

Q: What was the process behind creating the design and who this character was?

ZE: Yeah, his backstory. It’s a short film—[laughs] it’s the third time I said that! I just need to own it, it is what it is! [Laughs] We wanted to create this character that had been on the planet for a really long time. You don’t know why. Perhaps he’s not struck it rich as he hoped to, perhaps he got stranded there, perhaps he lost a partner or something. He’s been there too long and he’s turned to desperation. A lot of where our design nods were coming from is that his suit is less fresh; it’s been slowly eaten away by the environment. He has a much more complicated filter system because he’s had to alter it and do all these other things to it. Again, none of this is explicitly in the movie, it’s kind of queued in the production design. We wanted to create this more desperate character. He has that filter, he has a different air system. He’s sick, he’s not well. He’s trying to get off this planet and trying to get rich like everyone else.

Q: I actually thought he might have been the best acted of the group. He did a really good job with the suit and in general giving off that really ominous feeling.

ZE: [Laughs] It was a big endeavor to make that suit, for sure.

Q: Really?

ZE: Yeah! There’s not a huge film industry in Seattle, so we got lucky to run into a guy with some really amazing production design experience. I would say that, [laughs] possibly more production design was put into that suit than everything else combined. It probably wasn’t wise even, but we just got carried away, it kept getting more fun and we had more ideas and we got more of this built-out world. It took months and months. The father and daughter, they have space helmets that we bought off Ebay. They’re high-altitude Chinese flight helmets. But, the prospector’s helmets, and everything else is all custom-made. So, you know, we were making molds for his helmet pieces, he has this one “power arm” as we called it—the arm was like an accordion type apparatus—that was all hand-sewn. It took ridiculous time and effort but the two guys who were making it—Matt Acosta and Nick Van Strander—just went all out.

Q: That’s definitely what I’m most excited about if you guys do get to make a feature, to see all the different space-suits for all the different “Sectors” or atmospheres that come together and make this world a different place. You talked about production. $28,000: was that spent mostly on the costumes, was it spent on cameras?

ZE: Pretty much, it all went into production design and production support when we were actually shooting. My producer Chris and I, we run Shep Films which is a commercial company here in Seattle, so we actually have access to all the technical tools for the most part. Cameras and stuff were things that we already had invested in as part of our commercial business. Really, all of that money went into buying materials to make everything, we had to pay location fees, we were putting up transportation and housing and feeding our crew—which ranged from 18 to 25 people for four-five days. It’s funny, things pop up all the time. For example we only budgeted so much for radios, so we got these cheap radios that you get from REI or something, but then we tested them and they worked terribly in the forest. It was really important that our crew be able to communicate over distances in the forest, so then we had to rent these nice radios. Just little things that you don’t anticipate really add up.

First-time actress Callie Harlow plays a rogue Prospector seeking wealth alongside her father on a far-off planet.

Q: What was the biggest challenge? You said you didn’t have much experience in After Effects, or at least making the dust particle effect we see in the movie. Was that the toughest thing or was it more the production itself?

ZE: When I think through making the film, it’s definitely a matter of what stage you’re in. We had really big challenges with production design: making little things, running out of time, running out of money. But then we completed that, so then we went to production. And that challenge was hugely logistical. Getting all these people organized and getting on set, managing time and everything. The weather was an obstacle, so we had to coordinate with all the weather patterns. We did all natural lighting, so that was challenging. And, as you pointed out in post-production, it was very tough to do this dust stuff. It was a very different type of challenge. It involved me sitting down, weeks on end, by myself, in front of a computer, not freaking out in the forest in a matter of hours. We edited in Premiere, color graded in Resolve and the dust and stuff were made in After Effects.

Q: You shot on Blackmagic Cameras. What did you like about that camera, what didn’t you like?

ZE: I really like the camera. We didn’t have the bones to shoot on Alexa, which is my favorite camera. But the Blackmagic is a good second: it has really great dynamic range, a really great texture. They’re crazy cheap for what they deliver. The cost difference between a Blackmagic and higher end cameras is just incredible. We jumped on them right away. I like the color profile better than the RED cameras, which are extremely more expensive. I prefer to shoot on Blackmagic than on a RED.

The challenge with Blackmagic: it has a pretty tight sensor, which turned out OK in the forest because you can generally just keep backing up as much as you need to. In the tent scenes, which were really tight, I felt like we weren’t in complete control of those. Now they make something called a Speed Booster—which we have, but it didn’t exist back then for this model—that widens the whole angle, makes it more similar to a 35mm perspective. That’s really awesome but we didn’t have that back then.

Q: When did you film this?

ZE: Uhh… [Laughs] April of last year. A long time ago!

Q: Well there you can get a perspective of how long it takes to make even a film this short.

ZE: Yeah, interestingly our first short film that we made actually took like two weeks to make and cost like no money. It’s totally based on the type of film you’re making. It’s interesting seeing the comments on the film. There are a lot of people saying, “Why did you make this film? Why did you take so long to make this film?” and they’re right. You can definitely make cool stuff for less money and less time, and we’re hoping to do that with a feature. But we are really trying to do something original with the production and design.

Q: How tough was it to film on the Peninsula?

ZE: The funny thing about filming in the rain forest was that it was supposed to rain the entire time we were there, and instead ended up being freakishly sunny. We had planned for rain including building custom rain gear for all the equipment. With the crazy weather change we decided to film at dawn and dusk instead… so the challenged turned from escaping the wet to having to get up really early. It was a lot of driving and long days, but it was such an incredibly beautiful place to hang out in we didn’t mind at all.

Q: What do you feel you learned the most from this project, going forward?

ZE: Oh man. For us, this was so much bigger than anything we had ever done. It involved so many more people, so much more planning. I can’t believe how much we burnt on every single facet. Assembling a crew, approaching production, approaching post-production, the whole thing just really showed us new stuff on every single level. I can’t even plant it. It was so across the board, we feel much more confident about making a film now than we did a year ago.

Q: What advice can you give to somebody who may be looking to make a short or a feature, who maybe has some lofty goals but doesn’t have money, or the time, or maybe the ambition? What would you say?

ZE: Well the ambition, I can’t do anything about. [Laughs] You’ve got to have the ambition. When you’re making a film, you have to have a tremendous amount of drive and perseverance. It’s not a casual endeavor. Our first short film, which really launched our career, was made for practically nothing. It’s called In The Pines and it was us just hiking around. We had one actress, and we hiked around in the woods for a couple of days. We built a concept around our limitations. We didn’t have money. We had a camera that could do limited things. We had this idea and it was a simple idea and we were able to execute it with practically nothing.

I’ve never been to film school, but you can’t just “Dream Big.” [Laughs] That might be the antithesis of what your goals should be for the future, but don’t dream big. You’ve got to figure out what you can do, and then do that really well within those limitations. People will admire what you can do with those limitations.

Another little bit of advice, the internet has been hugely important to our career. Our first short being a “Picked By Staff” on Vimeo really opened up a world of opportunities for us. Film festivals have been awesome and great but where we really see things happening now is online. Find your audience, find your niche, and make something for that niche. They’ll buoy you up.

Q: You’ve raised a lot of money on Kickstarter, would you like to stay grassroots, raising money online or are you looking forward to working with a budget maybe more studio-financed?

ZE: Both? We built up with Kickstarter, one of the bigger things that we got from it were the volunteers, the people who offered their services, time and connections that were even more valuable. I don’t think we could, very easily at all, raise the money for a feature on Kickstarter. We actually met with some people from the company down at SXSW. What they suggested to do was raise part of the money online, maybe for one element of production. We want to stay in control of our films, and the types of films that we want to make, we can make them very inexpensively from an industry perspective. We want to make a movie on our own terms, and make it in Washington.

Be sure to check out Prospect and other projects from Zeek Earl at ShepFilms.com, and don’t forget to catch the short online.

http://vimeo.com/90049558

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Patrick Brice Talks CREEP

March 24, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Interviews, Uncategorized Tagged Creep, Found Footage, Horror, Interviews, Mark Duplass, Patrick Brice, SXSW

At the premiere of his debut horror/thriller Creep, director and star Patrick Brice took to the stage to put some A’s to some Q’s and give some context for his found-footage creeper. But Brice’s film;s greatest accomplishment lies in the performance eeked from Mark Duplass. He’s magnetic, unpredictable and an absolute joy to watch. From our review,

“No matter how valiant his intentions sound on paper, Joseph (Duplass) is an unreliable character from the get go. From his startling first appearance to the unsavory wolf mask, ironically called Peach Fuzz, he keeps stuffed in his closet, he’s a hard guy to get a read on. But that’s half the fun. Throttling between waxing on his own mortality and jumping from behind a doorway to startle Patrick (and by extension us), one thing is for certain: Joseph’s a weird dude. He’s always quick on his toes to offer some soundbite explanation for his abnormal actions but his backstory is about as reliable and consistent as Heath Ledger‘s Joker.”

Revealing his long standing friendship with co-star Duplass, Brice talked stalker behavior, the colloborative nature of Creep and how he went from an artsy filmmaker to directing a found footage horror movie. Read on to hear all he had to say.

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How did you get Mark involved in the film?

Patrick Brice: Mark Duplass and I are close friends. I just graduated from Cal Arts film school in 2011. He was kind of mentoring me and trying to figure out what the next project would be. We’d talked about working together on something. This project came out of those conversations. He just said, “Why don’t we go do something together?” So we went up to a cabin in the woods for five days and filmed an initial cut of this movie and ended up showing it to friends, doing some test screenings with filmmaker buddies – kind of refining it and toning it into the film that it is now. Eventually Jason Blum, from Blumhouse, watched the film, liked it, and agreed to kind of help us make it a little darker.

When you were writing it, was it tempting to turn it more into comedy and change the ending? Or did you know that you wanted it like this?

PB: We had no idea. There was like seven different versions of that ending. And I’m sorry I’m totally low blood sugar today. I’ve only eaten tacos for a meal. I can’t (EDITED FOR SPOILERS). I’m having an existential crisis. There was sort of a weird test, because we knew we wanted it to be funny and Mark’s insanely funny and gifted with improv. Jason saw it and was like, “You guys, this is teetering on the edge. Let’s bring this a little more into the realm of darkness.” It’s kind of a weird balance but hopefully it will work for some people.

Your movie reminds me of someone I know. I’m not even kidding.

PB: Mark and I, we love weird people and we love people that you can’t really get a serious beat on. We also are both the type of dudes who end up being friends with those people. This was kind of our exploration into that.

His behavior was kind of textbook stalker. How much research did you do on stalking behaviors and stuff like that?

PB: I didn’t do research whatsoever. One discussion we did have was talking about people we’ve known in our lives who are like pathological liars – just thinking about traits of those type of people and trying to express that.

I find it thrilling, because it’s clearly so stripped down and just like you have a great idea and a great story. You made it happen. I would love to hear what you shot on. Was it literally you and Mark? Did you have a small crew?

PB: We had a small crew and actually one of them is here, Chris Donlon, our editor. This guy’s a story genius and we wouldn’t have been able to do what we did, without him. We shot it on one of these Panasonic cameras that compresses to a small card. It was a great exercise for me. Coming out of film school, I was like, “I’m going to make very defined, formal films.” This was just like throwing that all by the wayside and saying, “Let’s just go run completely on instinct, and forget about aesthetic as much as we can and just try to make something that’s compelling and focused on characters.”

Were you holding the camera the whole time?

PB: Yeah. It was either me or Mark holding the camera the entire time.

How much of this do you guys do in tandem? Did you direct each other?

PB: Yeah. The film was a collaboration. When Mark was on screen, I was directing him and when I was on screen, he was directing me. Neither of us had any ego with that sort of thing. A lot of these takes were initially six or seven minute takes that have been cut up. So we would just run each take. We didn’t have a script. We had a ten page outline, we were just improvising all the dialogue, so we would run one of these takes, watch it, figure out camera placement and what we should say when, go back and do it over and over again. Because it was just a small group of us, we could do that.

Were you developing the characters as you went along?

PB: I had never acted before, so I was relying on Mark in terms of what was working and what was not. It’s super hard to be objective when you’re directing yourself. We kind of went scene by scene. It was a story we develop, in reaction to whatever nuances happened in the last thing we shot. We shot it all in continuity. But we still have that outline that was like, “This needs to happen within these parameters.”

All the paintings of the wolves, who did those?

PB: My best friend since I was 11 years old, his mom did all those. She just paints multiples of those wolves. That’s like what she does. I was so happy I got to include them. That’s something we used to always make fun of his mom about when we were kids. Now it’s like, “Jason, can I get like 50 of those paintings?”

I love how the end opens up all these side possibilities of what happens before and what happens after. One of the things I’m wondering about Mark Duplass’s character is: when you were developing a backstory for him, does he have a similar approach to all his victims? Does he take them all to the heart springs? Is this something you talked about at all?

PB: No. Not really. I think there’s a world of possibilities there. I don’t think he’s done this before. In my mind I like to think that he has something special for each person. Or maybe he doesn’t (SPOILER) everybody. Maybe it takes a special someone, to want to (SPOILER) them.

How did the concept for the movie come about?

PB: At first this movie was like a relationship movie, I guess. We weren’t necessarily thinking that it was going to go as far as it did, in terms of evil. We wanted it to be a balance between the two of us. I do think there’s something wrong with Aaron. Don’t do that.

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Talking with Jack Plotnick of SPACE STATION 76

March 18, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Interviews, Uncategorized Tagged Interviews, Jack Plotnick, Space Station 76, SXSW

“Never give up, never surrender,” Alan Rickman famously peeped out in Galaxy Quest. “Live long and prosper,” the wise Spock gently reinforced. “The force is with you,” Ol’ Ben loved to chime in every now and then. But it’s the iconic words of a toy, “To infinity and beyond,” that have come to describe the sci-fi space explorer mantra: that there are no limitations, no furthest reaches. But what if you were content just floating around space? Not conquering anything, not plotting any universe-saving diplomatic truces, not battling off malevolent, oddly-shaped aliens? That’s the question Jack Plotnik asks in his endlessly funny Space Station 76 and the results are blisteringly good.

Though always quick with a joke, Plotnik’s film works so well because it seeks to understand rather than mock its motley crew of characters. From our review,

“At the forefront of this final frontier are an unlikely cast of characters, each representative of the many uncertainties and insecurities of the era. There’s the boredom weary housewife, Misty, who spends her days slurping down Prosacs, her down-on-his-luck everyman husband, Ted, new co-pilot Jessica who is at her core representative of the shifting winds of the feminism movement, and Captain Glenn (played by Patrick Wilson with startling sensitivity), the pinnacle of Plotnik’s satirical heights.”

Jack sat down to talk about the appeal of the 70s, the indefiniteness of space, the process of writing as a team, the challenges of making a low budget sci-fi flick, and whether he could ever reasonably see Space Station 76 as a TV program.

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I think the most burning question here is where did this idea come from?

Jack Plotnik: To set a movie in the future, but imagined from the 70’s? Is that what you mean?

Yeah. The concept is wonderful but it’s so wacky. How did you cook it up?

JP: I came up with this idea. It was about eight years ago. I had wanted to write a play that would explore what it was like to grow up in the 70’s in the suburbs. I just thought it would be more interesting way to go about it, to set it in this future that we dreamed of that was never actually realized. It symbolized, for a lot of people, what it was like to grow up at that time where you thought things were going to be a certain way and they didn’t quite turn out that way. I’ve always been obsessed with this 70’s future. My family went to Disney World in the 70’s and I rode the monorail. I just thought, “We’re going to be on Moon colonies soon.” Everything was possible in the 70’s. Of course, now looking back, my parents divorced in the 80’s and I can see now the trials and tribulations they had in the suburbs. You look back and see things didn’t quite turn out the way you expected.

This film also seems like it would work really well as a series. What made you decide on the format of a feature film?

JP: Well it’s really easy to say, “Why don’t you do a series?” It’s actually really tough to get a show on the air. If you don’t have experience as a show runner, what tends to happen is you sell your ideas to somebody who has already created a TV show and then they run it. This was a very specific story that I wanted to tell, a very personal one. A lot of what was in my life as a kid was in this movie. So I wanted to tell this particular story, however, before a movie I was thinking of a show and I would love that to happen. I’ve already been thinking about what adjustments I would have to make to have this be a TV show. I love that you said that.

In the film, there’s all these kind of absurd, goofball, ridiculous concepts going on, but they frame some really potent issues. What for you was the launching pad of for going, “We’re going to make this futuristic, sci-fi, low-brow comedy, but at the same time bury these important issues within it?”

JP: That’s the type of artist I am. I love mixing genres, because I think the human condition is: life is really hard but it’s also really funny. Life can be painful and sometimes people can be mean. To me, my favorite kind of comedy comes with a pinch of sadness or devastation. Some of my favorite artists, their movies are uncomfortable comedy. They’re comic drama. I always have had an appreciation for that. In terms of the heavy messages going on, I can’t help that I want things to also be funny. There were some things I wanted to say about the pain of growing up in that time in the suburbs. At the same time, I didn’t want it to be a straight up drama, because I’m a pretty silly guy and I like to laugh. This seemed like a fun way to explore that without being too heavy.

Patrick Wilson in this film is absolutely brilliant. His character is hysterical and heartbreaking at the same time.

JP: Now that you say that, I think that’s a nice way to put the movie.

What was writing his character like, for you personally?, He’s dealing with this issue of coming out and concealing his homosexuality and it’s clearly not acceptable at the time. What kind of statement did you want to make with his character?

JP: To me, sometimes it’s just a matter of just showing, and that’s all the statement you need to make. We’re sort of examining what it was and what that would be like, for people who don’t know what that’s like to see it and have some empathy. I co-wrote this film and a lot of Glenn’s work came from one writer, Sam Pancake, and he did a beautiful job. Glenn’s more suicidal tendencies came from me. I thought that would be an interesting way to deal with the very real pain that people go through with that kind of self-hatred. So the idea is that Glenn wants to kill himself but the ship won’t let him.

That’s hysterical but it’s also so real at the same time.

JP: Patrick Wilson is just so not this guy. He just walked on set with this, I think, iconic character I’ve never seen him play, yet I feel like this character has always been around. I’ve never seen a character quite like this, yet you feel like, “Oh I know this guy.” I love what he did with it.

Let’s talk more about the writers, because you just mentioned that you worked with a whole team of writers. There were five of you credited with the film. What was that writing process like? Why so many writers? In the future, would you go with such a collaborative effort again, or would you rather just focus on your own project?

JP: Well I love working with other people. I’m a collaborative writer. I co-wrote and directed the off Broadway musical, Disaster, that we hope to bring to Broadway later this year. I just like to do it that way. What happened was that I came up with the idea for Space Station 76 and I just jabbered around my favorite actors at the moment – funny, funny, smart people. For three months, I would direct them and through improv they created these characters. I would record the sessions, type them out, and then I would sort of sift through it and pick the best stuff. Then I would try to give that back to the actors. So the scenes grew out of improv. Then, in order to turn it into a movie, we needed to open up the world, and I added some characters, and did some more work on it. I love writing with other people and creating as a group. At the same time, it was very important that I also look at it from the big picture and keep the focus, so it’s one work of art and not five. I do think it’s all very much one voice coming through that film.

I definitely agree with you. It actually kind of surprised me when I saw so many writers on it, because typically you would think it would be more jarring, but no not at all.

JP: I think everybody understood what I was going for and I handpicked people who are smart and funny and have the same sense of humor as I do. They nailed it and I just love those guys.

Speaking of that sense of humor, my favorite character in the film is Dr. Bot. That was such a hysterical role.

JP: He’s a very small android. He’s a robot therapist who lead characters can see, but only Misty, the frustrated housewife, tends to go to him. I’m glad you liked him.

Totally. He’s the cult character to pull from the film. With Dr. Bot, was there any kind of statement that you were trying to make about the mental health community, or is this more just playing it straight for comedy?

JP: Everything in this film is commenting on a specific time and place of what it was like in the 70’s and what people were doing, what they were up to. There’s a few things going on with Dr. Bot. One of the big things about this film is it’s really about people who can’t connect, in general how hard it is these days to connect with one another. I just find it interesting that this character who is a frustrated housewife in the unhappy marriage, the only person she connects to in the film is this tiny robot. And to really connect with him, she ends up having to turn him off. One thing I love about him is that the sound effects were done by Denny Bird at Skywalker Sound. His father did the sounds for the original Star Wars movies. Denny did an amazing job. He added so much to this film. One of the things he did is he added a wonderful sound of Dr. Bot thinking. Whenever someone said something to him, you hear this looping sound. I believe it’s the sound of an old fashioned printer from the 70’s or 80’s. It’s so fun to watch Dr. Bot think and to see how his brain works.

This being your directorial debut, at least on the big screen, can you tell me about a couple things that were surprisingly hard that caught you off guard by how difficult they were? And then other things that you thought were going to be really hard but ended up being surprisingly easy.

JP: In terms of how hard it is to make a feature, my friend Richard Day who wrote and directed Girls will be Girls that I produced and starred in, he said, “Doing this film is going to be the hardest thing you’ve ever done in your life.” And then, “You’re going to want to immediately do it again.” He said it’s going to miserable and horrible and everything is going to look like all is lost. There’s definitely those moments. Specifically, there are just so many moving pieces. I had a great team around me, amazing producers and the whole crew. Actually shooting went fairly smoothly. The hardest part, I would say, was pre-production, getting everything ready. We had to build a spaceship on a soundstage in the valley. But the actual shooting went incredibly smoothly and I think the thing that surprised me was how they come and they’re just ready to play, if you get the right actors. It was just amazing to watch them show up on set and do what they do. It was just facilitating it. Especially that little girl, the girl Kylie Rogers played, she is a genius. She was just the one-take wonder. She somehow knew what every scene was about and would really get it in never more than two takes. She astounded me. That was a real joy to discover her and we were lucky to find her.

She was lovely in the film. Obviously, you were under budgetary constraints, this being a little independent feature that you’re then doing in space, the CG is not astounding. Would you want it any other way, though? Would you rather have had big production values on the asteroids and space station, or do you feel like this was kind of perfectly suiting for what it was?

JP: Well I would have loved to have millions of dollars, yes. A film like this it’s not quite the tone people are used to. You come to a spaceship, you tend to think, “I’m either going to get a goofball comedy like Spaceballs or a space-adventure comedy like Galaxy Quest.” People don’t quite expect to see a science fiction movie about suburban life in space. Hopefully people get that. Sometimes the characters can be mean to each other. You can also laugh at it all. I personally love comedies that are uncomfortable, like the British Office. In terms of the budget, we had enough money and also the mother of invention is necessity. So it was always exciting when we didn’t actually have the millions of dollars to build what we wanted to build. It was exciting to find the other way to do it and we always were able to. I’m just proud of what my set designer pulled off and the costumes. There’s really nothing I would change. The sets are gorgeous. I’m really thrilled. I mean maybe with a little extra money we could have been 3-D.

Earlier you mentioned that when you made this film, someone told you that it would be the hardest thing you’ll ever do but you would want to get right back on that horse. Have you already started thinking about a new project?

JP: Absolutely. I have several things. My immediate plan is to direct my musical, Disaster!. You can read about it at Disastermusical.com if you want to see it in New York. The plan is to direct that on Broadway in the fall. So I’ve got to do that. But then, yeah, again I love that you said Space Station as a TV series because we have already kind of been thinking about that and talking about it. And there’s a couple film scripts that I’m working with other people on.

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Talking with Leigh Janiak of HONEYMOON

March 17, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Interviews Tagged Honeymoon, Horror, Interviews, Leigh Janiak, Sci-Fi, SXSW, SXSW 2014

When you think of filmmakers from the sci-fi or horror genre, the first thing that pops into your mind most likely isn’t a young female director. Leigh Janiak though is here with Honeymoon to challenge that assumption. Crafting a modern sci-fi/horror film actually worth remembering, Janiak showcases her razor sharp ability to cull great performances while demonstating a kingpin-level status of economic filmography.

With only a few weeks of shooting (many of which were under threat of rain), four actors and a tent-sized crew, Janiak has wrung all the best elements of a genre film out, rinsed and refused to repeat, offering a genuinely eerie, wholly engaging body snatchers narrative. From our review of the film,

“Though Honeymoon may take place at a cabin in the woods, the camp has been left at home. Janiak’s take is fatally humorless, devoutly sobering. Instead of harping on frights, she’s left us with a steamy atmosphere so thick you could cut it with a butter knife and serve it at as a wedding cake. Even the hollowed out bride and groom toppers wouldn’t be missing.”

Debuting in the midnight section of this year’s SXSW festival, I had a chance to speak with Leigh about where Honeymoon came from, the challenges of working on a tight budget, and whether or not she believes in aliens.

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Firstly, I really enjoyed Honeymoon. What was your inspiration for writing this, I know you co-wrote it, was it mostly you that came up with the idea?

Leigh Janiak: Phil (Graziadei), my writing partner, we met when we were freshmen at NYU, a long time ago. When we come up with ideas, we don’t really keep track of whose idea it was first, our process is so intertwined. Basically what happened was, in 2009 or 2010, I saw Tanya Hardinger and Monsters within a couple months of one another. It jolted me out of a scriptwriting process, because we had been spending four or five years writing scripts, meeting people at production companies trying to break into the business that way. Seeing these movies inspired me. “With the next film we write, let’s actually make a movie.” If we don’t take things into our own hands, it’s going to be forever before we actually get hired to do a studio-level movie. You know, years and years and years. We went into writing Honeymoon with this idea that it was gonna be a contained genre movie, that we thought that we could get made. The idea itself grew out of this idea of exploring how something very familiar can become other, or monstrous. Picking this idea of a relationship and destroying it. Connecting to that, we thought about bigger budget ideas that we really loved, and the audience could understand. What we wanted to do was make this small, rounded, intimate version of that.

You work with such a small cast. There are four people credited working on it, but only two are you really dealing with for the most part. How does that effect the dynamic between yourself and the crew, and does it make it more of a collaborative effort between you guys?

LJ: Certainly. An interesting thing: Rose and Harry had met once before in London before they arrived on set. They got to set, maybe five days before production began. The three of us had about four days where we could maybe spend some time working together. I wouldn’t say it was rehearsal, it was more like talking through the characters, making sure we were all on the same page about where their head spaces were at certain points through the script, and really going through that process together which I think was invaluable. Rose approached Bea from a very outside perspective. Really analyzing who she was, how she thought Bea would react in a situation, there was a space between Rose the actress and Bea the character. Whereas Harry is very much more like method and he explored who Paul was from the inside-out. Initially that was a bit challenging, because when you only have two actors and they have such different approaches to their craft, you kind of have to negotiate that difference. But I think ultimately it ended up working really well with the dynamic of the characters because they are slowly drifting apart so to speak. It’s just such an intense environment when you have pretty much only two people the whole time. That took a lot of screen time for both of them and they really didn’t have a lot of down time. We shot six-day weeks so they didn’t have much time off, so the whole thing became very intimate. We all spent a lot of time together. I think it was very collaborative because of that and I just felt very lucky: they’re both so talented and they really elevated everything that they touched.

Their performances were undoubetly fantastic throughout the film. You haven’t yet released an official budget on this and probably can’t because it’s still in acquisition, but I think we can assume it was somewhat modest. Can you tell me some of the biggest challenges you ran into working on a tight budget?

LJ: Any time you’re making an indie movie, your biggest challenges are going to be time. Because you always want more time to shoot. We actually had a really nice schedule. We had 24 days which is a lot more than a lot of indie movies do. I felt that 24 days was quite comfortable except that we were shooting in North Carolina in the Spring, and we only had eight hours of darkness a night. Because we had so much night shooting, that became a real challenge. Instead of doing a twelve hour day, when we had our night work, we only had eight hours to shoot. That was difficult, because your schedule just shrinks a bit. The other main thing was that we had terrible rain, I mean it was horrible, it started raining maybe four or five days after we started shooting and then it didn’t stop for about two and a half weeks. The water levels rose, it flooded our docks, all of the roads to the cottage were completely muddy and my first VD was like pulling out his hair, we had no idea what we were going to do because we had some exterior scenes that we still needed to shoot. It was supposed to be a “happy, funny Honeymoon” and the rain just kept going. We got really lucky, because two days after we needed to get out of the location, the skies kind of cleared and we prescheduled this long shoot day where we started our night shooting at 6pm and shot all the way through the morning until like mid-afternoon so we could clean up our sunny outside scenes.

Seriously, you don’t usually hear about people complaining about not enough darkness. Before you mentioned that you grew up on horror movies. What were some of the movies that scared you and stuck with you?

LJ: It’s interesting, because I consider the genre that I like more than anything else to be sci-fi, more than horror. I have a lot of gaps in my knowledge of horror, generally, but it’s funny because my first horror movie I saw maybe in like 5^th grade, and I was having a sleep-over party and I really wanted to have a horror movie because that’s what all my friends were doing, like people would be watching Chucky and I really wanted to compete with that, so my Mom said “I’m not showing a horror movie, you’re at our house.” It wasn’t just that we were a little young for it, but, what she did was she rented Psycho, which is like, way worse than any of those 80’s slasher movies, this is like 1988, 1989. She’d say “those are just slashing for gore! I’m gonna rent you Psycho” so that was extremely traumatic and awful. So those were the kind of horror movies that I began to appreciate, the Hitchockian or Palanskian, which I watched a lot in junior high and stuff. Those I still consider my biggest influences horror-wise, like Palanski for sure, Kubrick, even Hitchcock as well but I don’t really see that applying to my style. But I certainly do aspire to do more like Palanski and Kubrick and stuff.

You say that you’re more of a sci-fi person and even if it’s not ever explicitly stated in the movie, we’re led to believe that there are some kind of extraterrestrial creatures who are starting some inklings of an invasion or something. Did you do much research into alien life-forms, or did you talk to any people who maybe claimed that they had been abducted?

LJ: No, not really. I’d say that mostly I have a preoccupation with aliens, personally. Like I said, in really thinking about those bigger invasion movies, even things like Independence Day, it would always happen: there would be this big giant bang and suddenly all of the ships are overhead and everyone’s leaving. I love Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it’s one of my favorite alien-invasion movies because it does feel more grounded. I like the way Richard Dreyfuss’ character begins, it feels like he’s just going crazy and just with the dirt making the mountain, I love that shot so much. So, for Honeymoon it was really just trying to put myself in the position where most realistically we could capture that this began on a smaller, slower scale. In the movie, the idea is that Bea and Annie are thought to be first beginnings of this wider invasion .

The last project that you worked on was the Europa Report, even though you weren’t directing that, it also deals with life outside of what we know. Regardless of what you might refer to it as, do you believe in “aliens?”

LJ: I absolutely believe in them and in extraterrestrial life. Obviously, I don’t know what that could mean, it could mean a variety of things. Whether that’s a bacteria or arsenic-based life form, but I certainly believe that it’s naïve to not believe that there’s something else that exists.

Looking forward on your career, do you want to stick with the sci-fi genre or would you like to maybe try something new? What’s next on your plate?

LJ: We’re working on a few different ideas right and they are all sort of like walking this sci-fi, horror space. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t be interested in trying something else too, but I grew up reading sci-fi. The Wrinkle in Time books, are the first books that I really remember affecting me in a way, from then on I really became obsessed with thinking about how science can really affect narrative and open up imagination. Often in a terrible way, which I like to explore. I think that I’m going to stick with this genre, but it’s not like I have any kind of rule. If any other projects or ideas came up that I liked, I would obviously open to doing that too.

One of the things that you do really well in the film, both from a writing and directorial standpoint, is that you don’t really set out to scare us, so much as just create this really moody, really eerie atmosphere that’s anchored by these really well-written, fleshed out characters. That’s a really nice surprise in a horror or sci-fi movie because at this point we’re so used to shallowly-written characters and a jump-scare every fifteen minutes or so. With Honeymoon do you see this well written character drama as the response to this slew of horror characters that are so often under-written and under-developed? Is this your “solution”?

LJ: Definitely. For me, you can watch people get splattered across screen, starting from minute two to the end, and that’s entertainment, and it’s great and it does a very specific thing, but for me when I am just aiming for more is that creeping awfulness. I really just wanted to make as much as possible, the audience feel uncomfortable and bad, just that sense of incredible eeriness as you described it. To me, that’s achieved most easily if you can bring your characters in close. Let your characters interact with the audience and understand who they are, so it will mean more when they’re falling apart.

Are you actively working on a next project right now? Do you just have a lot of balls in the air?

LJ: My writing partner and I have two ideas that we’re really working on right now, and those are in the early stages. We’re not almost done with the script or anything like that, but definitely I’m hoping that one of those will become my next film. But hopefully sci-fi will open up a lot of opportunities since we’re also playing at Tribeca. We’re also exploring other projects as well.

Can you tell us anything about those two project ideas?

LJ: Not right now. I hate talking about things until I’m 100% confident in the iteration that it’s going to live in!

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Talking With the Zellner Bros of ‘KUMIKO THE TREASURE HUNTER’

March 16, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Interviews Tagged David Zellner, Interviews, Kumiko the Treasure Hunter, Nathan Zellner 1 Comment

This may not be the Zellner Brother‘s first rodeo but it’s likely to be the one to put them on the map. In addition to acting in small supporting roles across a sprawl of independent features, David and Nathan Zellner have stirred up a tight knit circle of fandom with their earlier works Goliath and Kid Thing that have gone on to tilt their filmography in new and interesting circles. But neither of those features quite inspired the near unanimous support that Kumiko the Treasure Hunter has and here to tell us about the process of turning an urban legend into a stunning feature film are the sibling twosome themselves. Read More

Talking with Aaron Paul and Scott Waugn of NEED FOR SPEED

February 7, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Interviews Tagged Aaron Paul, Interviews, Need for Speed, Scott Waugn

Doing press tour rounds for their upcoming film Need for Speed, star Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad) and Scott Waugn stopped by Seattle to sit down and talk about what it took to bring the popular EA Sports video game to the big screen in a big way. They touched on subjects from stunt driving know-how to the advantages of practical effects over CGI, their first cars, driving recklessly and how they hope their film won’t be seen in the same vein as the massively popular Fast and Furious franchise. Although I’ve seen the film, my words are still under lock and key but rest assured, it’s certainly the brand of light-hearted car romp one would expected from a movie called Need for Speed.

Q: Aaron, tell me about an occasion in your past when you were driving recklessly outside of a film set.

Aaron Paul: That’s never happened (smirks) I don’t know what you’re talking about. Be safe kids. When you’re young and you get your license, it’s all about the freedom of the road. My first car was an ’82 Toyota Corolla, goldish color, stick shift, anytime it rained the trunk would fill up with water but I loved that car.

Scott Waugh: Don’t we all remember our first car and have such an emotional relationship to our first car?

AP: Yeah, I do think about that car. Anytime I see that car on the road, it kind of puts a smile on my face.

SW: Man, the things I did in that car. I grew up out in the country and my dad was a stuntman. We grew up on a private road so it was like a mile dirt road so my dad taught me to stunt drive on that road. I had a Honda Civic, that I had for four years, and my parents used to send me down the road to go get the mail when I was young to learn how to drive and I started drifting the car and spinning it around. It was private so we were allowed to do whatever we wanted. It was our own road. My mom was always mad if I did that so one day I was in the car and driving down there thinking to myself “I wanna throw a 180 and come back up the hill.” My mom would never know. So just as I’m getting it up to speed and drifting it sideways, here comes my mother around the corner. I was committed though so I did it. I got so yelled at and reprimanded. The only reason I could do that though was because it was private.

Q: Are you guys are hoping to expand this into a franchise?

SW: We hope. We want to work together again.

Q: Do you worry that people are going to compare this to the Fast and Furious franchise?

SW: No, not at all. I think when they see the movie, it’s gonna be obvious that it’s nothing like it.

AP: Once you watch it, it’s so apparent. When I saw the script on my desk, I instantly thought of Fast and Furious. Once I started reading the script, I was so excited about the story behind all of these cars. It was very character driven and story driven, I was instantly invested in these characters. It’s an homage, Scott wanted to do a throwback to the classics.

SW: It was all about the car classic movies that started the whole thing.

AP: Bullit, Vanishing Point.

SW: Bullit is the best car movie of all time. We don’t quote Fast and Furious, we quote Bullit.

AP: Fast and the Furious are fun movies but this is a completely different thing. They didn’t start the genre and they’re not gonna end the genre. Car movies have been around forever.

Q: Having your experience being mostly in stunts and coordinating stunts, did you find you were able to get better action scenes than traditional action directors would get and Aaron did you notice the difference in that when Scott was directing you?

AP: It was such a perfect marriage with Scott and this film because he was born into a stunt family. That was his world. He was the perfect guy holding the reigns and driving this film.

SW: I was lucky. You’re only as good as your experiences and you can only show what you’ve seen. So I was just lucky as a child and until 35, I was doing stunts. I’ve just seen so many things from my perspective. So when I direct my action movies, I’m trying to show the audience what I’ve seen and been lucky enough to see. So there’s no other directors that have done what I’ve done so that’s probably why it feels different to the audience. I’m showing you and hopefully giving you the experience of what I’ve been so blessed to have done and bringing that to the film.

AP: The first thing he told me was “I do not use CG, all these stunts are gonna be practical and I’m gonna need you to be behind the wheel in a lot of it. You need to know how to drive.” We’re so used to being lied to. Movies with CG are such fun movies and are great because they’re in such a fantasy world but he doesn’t want to fool the audience. He wants it obviously that I’m driving the cars and these stunts actually happened, which I thought was really great.

Q: Scott given that this is your second movie and Aaron since you have a background in such an iconic character, what did you guys do differently to prepare for this?

SW: I did documentaries before these and with every movie you do, you find out what the voice of the movie is and the style of the movie and you stick to it. When I gravitated towards this material, I always wanted to do a car movie. I had my sights on doing a car movie after doing Act of Valor and be careful what you wish for because it came to fruition. I wanted to do a throwback. So I stayed true to that. The next movie will be different. That’s the wonderful thing about directing movies, every single one is different…or at least I hope so.

AP: Same. For me, I always try to do the polar opposite of what I’ve just done. In terms of preparation, it’s the same thing but you’re prepping for that particular film and that skin you’re about to zip on.

SW: I was just so excited as a filmmaker to work with greatly talented actors. It’s tough as you’re scrapping your way up as a filmmaker and then to get to work with people like Aaron Paul was fantastic. It was a director’s dream. The whole cast was so good.

AP: It really was. It’s ridiculous how much fun we had. It just doesn’t seem fair.

Q: Did either of you have a favorite scene in the movie?

SW: I’m personally proud of Moab because I don’t think it’s anything that anyone’s seen before and I haven’t done it before. With the helicopter and the car, doing that practically and for real was super challenging.

AP: We shot that towards the end of the film and I kept saying “Are you really going to [hang a car from a helicopter?]” When I read the script, I was like “Ok, we’re gonna do everything practical but you’re not gonna drive a car off a cliff and have it caught by a helicopter? That’s not gonna happen, right?” “No, that is gonna happen.” I could not wait to see that happen and it was fantastic.

Q: Did you actually get to drive that car or would the legal team not let you?

AP: No, they would not let me drive that car.

SW: We’re not reckless. I knew that safety was a huge factor and there are wonderful, professional stuntmen that would take over and execute those scenes so that Aaron could stay safe. It’s not even a safety factor, sometimes you need people who have that experience and expertise level driving in that kind of situation. In case something went awry, they’d know how to handle it immediately and keep it going straight. So we put professional stunt men in.

Q: Did you just do that stunt once?

SW: Yeah. I’ve found in my career there’s just no reason to do those stunts over again. I’ve seen so many accidents in my life and I’ve seen people get killed in stunts by repetition, doing a stunt over and over. For some reason, the director wanted to do something again and I was like “Why? The stunt was great. Why are we doing it again? The only thing that could happen is something bad.” We just did it. So every time we would do a stunt in this movie, it was only once.

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Jake Paltrow, Michael Shannon, Nicholas Hoult, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Elle Fanning Talk YOUNG ONES

February 4, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Elle Fanning, Interviews, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Michael Shannon, Nicholas Hoult, Sundance, Sundance 2014, Young Ones

In this final installment of talks around 2014’s Sundance, we touch base with the creative brains and cinematic brawn behind Young Ones (full review here) – a dystopian future Western that pits mechs and humans against draughts and standoffs. A bit like slamming The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly in the midst of Tatooine, Jake Paltrow‘s sophomoric effort is a fascinating and engaging experiment in genre that worked wonders for me. Joining him, stars Michael Shannon, Nicholas Hoult, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Elle Fanning helped guide us through why they came to the movie, what it was like working under the heat of a South African sun and the use of modern day robotics in Young Ones.

Q: Talk about what inspired the film and what were some of the stylistic influences?

Jake Paltrow: There were two particular news articles. One was about moving the capital of Yemen due to a lack of water, in the next ten years. And another one was about the driest town in the world in Chile. There’s a story about all these people who stayed behind because of these odd personal reasons and needing water to be pumped in. And I’ve always been interested in robotics and I spent time in 2008 with Big Dog at Boston Dynamics. Anyway, I was very interested in trying to do a story with a robotic character that would work and explore its sentience, it had some sort of soul, or it would be a character, a character that would have some sort of sense itself. And those two things came together and it went from there.

Q: Talk about how you sort of fused some of the stylistic elements, the science fiction with the Western bounds?

JP: That sort of just happened. I don’t know if that was such a premeditated thing, it just came together. Giles, who photographed the movie, and I really didn’t look at very few things we talked about. We talked about Silent Night, the only one we ever talked about, the way it was lensed I think. We loved that movie, it looked so great. But we were always trying to do our thing beyond that.

Q: How did you select the instruments, the electronics vs. the harmonica?

Nathan Johnson: A lot of that was working with Jake, we would sit down and we talk out ideas, stylistic references. And we pulled out music boxes and harmoniums, and we were talking a lot about wind actually, and the idea of wind instruments and what it sounds like when wind blows over something, and just that point where it turns into a tone. So we thought that was kind of interesting. The idea of combining traditional orchestral instruments with these wind instruments and also these synthetic elements just piqued our interest and felt maybe part of the world this place was in.

Q: What did it feel like to live through this movie, the people who worked in it.

Michael Shannon: Well, it’s really disturbing to think about what might be heading our way. But at the same time, we are making a movie. Now, in NYC we’re much more afraid of water than not having water. So it’s all relative.

Q: Can you guys talk about what first attracted you to the role?

Elle Fanning: Well, I read the script a really long time ago. I was twelve when I first read it. And I met Jake for the first time and we went out to lunch. And I thought I was something that I’d never read before, and right when I read it, I thought ‘Oh my God, I have to do this’. I knew that for my character specifically, I’m really into details and all the little things and quirks of Mary or any character I do, and I knew with her I could put a lot of those in there. And after talking to Jake, he was so open to those. We spent so long on that hot pink nail polish color. We were picking it out, the right shade, “That’s too salmon, that’s too hot”, that was a big deal. And I love that, I like picking out the details, and I just love Jake and the movie so much. So that’s kind of, the nail polish drew me to it.

Kodi Smit-McPhee: I was also kind of really attracted by the nail polish. No, I was also with the project for a long time, it went through a lot but then it got through again. And I was in LA, just Skyping Jake, reading the script again, did my tape, sent it off, and next thing I was in South Africa melting.

Nicholas Hoult: The script was the most original thing I’d read for ages but also that Flem role was the most interesting, with all the dynamics he had with each other character from the film, and I was fascinated by him, it was really well written. That’s the reason I wanted to do each scene. And I had the same experience that Elle had with nail polish, but I had a fake tan. So I got to wear a lot of that.

MS: It’s kind of like what we were talking about earlier. It was relevant and it was a story that needed to be told. I don’t think a movie’s gonna fix a problem but beyond just reading something from a newspaper, if you put it in a movie, it may have more of an emotional resonance, it may inspire someone to do something. It did occur to me when I read it that that might be one result, yes.

Q: Why did you choose to use chapters versus acts?

JP: We talked about that a lot, we talked about approach, acts or chapters. The third thing that really inspired the movie, besides those articles and interests in robotics, were the SE Hinton books that I revisited. I reread those books when I was writing, I hadn’t read them in such a long time and I loved them so much and I loved them again as a kid. And I loved the way a science fiction book version of those books could feel like. So I was really leaning towards that. And those books were always sort of short and I thought how could I make this movie feel like one of those short books. And so the chapters thing, I thought it was a way to keep the entertainment relevant, that you would know that you were moving into the next thing. You close this story, move into Flem’s chapter, you could get more energy back as an audience. I think to try and entertain, certainly the chapters had to do with books, but we do play with parts and acts at other points to. And the important thing at the end, in a way it is to sort of, the movie, even though the performance is sort of naturalistic, has this sort of storybook element to it, and I liked the idea of sort of ending it. I mean, I look at the movie and I feel like it’s a tragedy, and I like revisiting these characters and seeing them all as a little bit removed from the movie.

Q: The science fiction elements felt really organic when they came into the story. I thought it was a really bold choice to create classic western meets futuristic science fiction and I wonder were there things about it that you were worried wouldn’t work?

JP: Everything. The way we did the simulation, we had two puppeteers and that was one of those things, the movie, I’d prepped once before and it didn’t happen, and so we got down to South Africa we started doing it this way, but we never had a complete proof that this would work. We’d done it once before, in Spain, and it seemed like it would work perfect, so we kept moving that way. But we hadn’t really tested it, doing a whole movie, so we just kept going, thinking it would work. But sometimes it felt like every single thing just wouldn’t work. It was 115 degrees the first few days of shooting, it felt impossible to get through the day, literally just taking it one step at a time. We felt like we’d never get through the shots. Sequences like that were very worked out, so we knew we had to get that amount of shots to make the scene work, so we somehow adjust. I really credit Mike. But truly we felt like we couldn’t even finish it. It was a very difficult movie to make and we were so far away. I’d never been in a situation where you couldn’t shoot because the lights would go. And then the lights would go, and you’d be standing there saying ‘Well that’s it’. And they’d go and drive seven hours to Cape Town to get new lights and come through the next day. We didn’t have a schedule where we could get things picked up, certain people get dropped along the way. Thinking, what do we have, what do we have? Trying to fit everything together, and somehow we got lucky, or at least seemed to.

Q: What was the idea behind the plane in the film.

JP: That was just the idea that there was a world going on around the movie, this sort of supersonic passenger jet is back, the new Concord is back and they’re flying from LA to New York in 45 minutes or whatever it is, and there’s this whole world where in fact, you know our world has this sort of regressive nature to it, and the rest of the world is great. You know, a world where Google Glass, or the next, all those sort of things are happening, all those utopian urban things, people migrating from urban areas from rural areas, all that is going on, just not where these people live. So that was the idea, that there’s a big world out there.

Q: From a production standpoint, the robot you used, was that on loan from the military?

JP: No, it’s totally fake. The torso is made of fiberglass tubing.

Q: Did you try and get the actual robot?

JP: Oh yes, I tried. They were great, but there was no way to do it. They’re developing. Now they’re on to Cheetah, and all these things. I mean it was a fascinating experience to spend time with them to do this test, but in the end they’re not a movie tool. They have much bigger fish to fry.

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David Wnendt Talks Stunning WETLANDS

January 30, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Interviews, Uncategorized Tagged David Wnendt, Germany, Interviews, Sundance, Sundance 2014, Talking, Wetlands 1 Comment

The biggest surprise out of Sundance came in the form of a German sexplotation film so aptly named Wetlands. It’s a film that surged with raunch, comedy and genuine drama that had me wincing, bursting out laughing and deeply feeling for all at once. Simply put, it’s a stunner. So all the better that director David Wnendt came out and had a chance to briefly speak with us about his divisively awesome film. Talking about how he skirted around censorship, being a man making a feminist film, German cinema and Quentin Tarantino, Wnendt goes into up the skirt on the making of Wetlands.

Q: So how did you come up with the story? What were you thinking?

David Wnendt: There’s a novel which this film is based upon. A German novel, it’s very popular in Germany, this film is an adaptation of that novel.

Q: What decided you to direct such an intensely feminine story as a man?

DW: That’s not the first time I heard that question. But I do believe that a guy or man could direct a female lead role and vice versa. So I think it would be very strange for men to only direct men’s stories about other men basically. So I think it’s pretty possible to do it. You work with the actors who brings their own view into the whole thing. It’s a collaboration with her of course.

Q: What kind of conversation did you have to have along the way, in terms of getting the movie to how explicit it was? Were there any memorable battles you had to fight, in terms of showing things or not showing things?

DW: Well, we were in a very lucky situation. The author who sold the rights…usually a best seller like that is auctioned off to the company with the most money and that’s in Germany…one or two production companies, if they would had done it, they would have done it very old fashioned, it would have turned very differently. But she decided to give it to not to the producer with the most money, but the one whose films she admired. So it was kind of like, for Germany, an independent producer. And that decision alone made it possible to create a completely different kind of film. But of course along the road, there were like many challenges because of course even if people hadn’t read the book, they knew of the book. And we had all kinds of problems, for example, even finding some locations, like finding the location of this one small church scene was nearly impossible because people were really scared with the title of the movie.

Q: Why do you think the character was so comfortable with bodily fluids?

DW: There’s no real easy answer to that. Y see her background, you see her trauma of her childhood, but the good thing is you can’t reduce her to that, so it’s not such an easy explanation, like that something happened to her in her childhood and that’s why she’s like that. That’s just one small part of her. But in the end, she finds herself. She also enjoys sex, she enjoys her body and she’s interested in everything that has to do with her body, and she doesn’t understand why this should be so taboo.

Q: I was wondering how much Charlotte Roche, the author of the book, was involved in the movie or the post production?

DW: She decided she didn’t want to be involved at all but she was really just wanted to see the final product in the cinema, and that was fine. But what she did was she took that decision I told you about, she chose that producer. There she set us on a path, which allows us to create the film in the way it is right now so that was really a very important decision she made. But other than that she was not involved in writing the script, so she really only saw the final product at the end.

Q: Where did you find the actress who played the main character, Helen?

DW: Well we had the regular, normal casting process. We had also a casting director, who made suggestions, and we looked all around. And she’s actually from Switzerland, so we didn’t just look in Germany but in other German-speaking countries. And we had them come to Berlin and we did regular casting sessions. And in these sessions I tried to find out if they were able to play all the different aspects of that character. For example, one aspect was the language, because the language of the novel and the dialects was a very special kind of language, and it was not a natural language in a way, so the actor had to be able to bring it across in a natural fashion. That was one thing. She also had to have the courage to play this role. She had to have the courage to be nude in front of the camera of course. And she had to be able to act with the other actors of course. So we set up casting sessions to find out exactly that. And so, in the end, Carla Juri, the main actress, she was the one who convinced me in these sessions.

Q: Is Quentin Tarantino a popular director in Germany?

DW: Yeah, very much so.

Q: Member: I’m not familiar with German cinema, but this film strikes the same nerve that Tarantino does.

DW: That’s a very big compliment so thank you very much. And we have many American films in our cinemas.

Q: I really like the animation sequence towards the beginning, that was really nice. Two questions, can you describe what metaphors you were trying to describe in there, and, also, how was that done?

DW: Well, one part of her quest, for her freedom to express everything about her own body, but of also she’s against too much hygiene basically. So to show this, in a bit of an exaggerated and kind of ironic fashion, we came up with this animation short in the beginning. And it was just a very good animation artist who could bring this to life, so we just delivered the shot of the toilet and with that he did all the rest basically.

Q: How long ago did you read the novel and then actually want to develop it into the film? Then how long was that process?

DW: Um, the novel itself is I think six years old, it was published six years ago and I read it four years ago. And at that time, I would never have thought of doing this film. I was still in film school at that time, and actually, the rights were with the producer, and then he chose a director for this film. He liked my first movie, my graduation film from film school, and that’s how we got together. But I really liked the book long before I was about doing it, turning it into a film.

Q: Is this your first feature?

DW: It’s my second feature, my first feature was my graduation one.

Q: I’m just curious, what were some movies that you drew inspiration from?

DW: Well, the producer has the vision when he talked about the film, but that it should be a mixture of Nine Songs and Trainspotting. That was the goal.

Q: Was the author happy with your interpretation?

DW: Lucky for me, she was. So I was really, extremely nervous when she was finally there, in the cinema. I was really, very, very scared. Because she’s very much known to my generation. She was a TV presenter on MTV basically. As a teenager, I grew up with her on TV. I really admired her. So it would have been really terrible if I were to have disappointed her in a way. But luckily she saw the film and was very, very happy. Even the things we added on, we invented some scenes, some scenes are in the book, they’re really just one line, very, very short, we turned into an actual scene, let it play out, she was really happy with that. She, in the end, wasn’t sure what was actually in the book and what we invent. That was a really great compliment.

Q: Was there any point when you thought we can’t actually go that far or show this in a movie?

DW: Yeah. Obviously that wasn’t the biggest concern. From the start it was clear that I didn’t want to make the most provocative of the movie, it’s not what the movie’s about, for the only point to be shocking. And actually during the shooting, I was busy with all other problems there was, work with the actors, all kind of problems that just come up, I wasn’t constantly thinking about that aspect. So there was a little more in the editing, where we just found a way to do it in the best sense of the shooting. I was occupied with other stuff.

Q: On that same note, the film with all the in your face movement , in the scenes you happened to do it, did you do it several different ways, then edit it and figure out what you wanted to go with?

DW: It’s really different from the scenes. Some scenes which we storyboarded, especially if it had an effect or so, were very much planned. Other scenes where we had an emotion or it was about feeling the chemistry between two actors we tried to find something to give them freedom. So complete freedom to move around on set, we had the camera on the shoulder, most of the lighting was done on the windows, so they could move everywhere and the camera could see everything. And with this kind of shooting you have more material, you develop the rhythm and the scene itself in the editing room. But other things, they were really much planned ahead.

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Adam Wingard and Cast Talk THE GUEST

January 27, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Interviews Tagged Adam Wingard, Dan Stevens, Interviews, Simon Barrett, Sundance, Sundance 2014, The Guest

I’ve added another of my favorite films from Sundance, The Guest, to this delightful series of Q&As that’ll give you a peek into the process of how these great works are pieced together as well as what you can expect when these films eventually hit theaters. If you appreciated Adam Wingard‘s early work (You’re Next, V/H/S) be sure to slot The Guest high on your anticipated movies list, as it’s easily his best yet and a snarky splatterfest thrill ride from start to finish. Listen to Wingard and his cast, including Downton Abbey‘s Dan Stevens, talk about writing the piece, inspiration from 80’s movies and getting pierced by exploding shrapnel.

Adam Wingard: We actually explored doing an action film in South Korea, and we went down the road of that a little ways, and it didn’t really work out because the whole film is just one nonstop action scene, we thought that would be kind of the experiment of that movie. Ultimately, it just never came together because, you know, when you’re doing a nonstop action scene there’s not really character development, things like that.

Simon Barrett: I said I’d wasn’t able to make it.

AW: So this one night I was just sitting around, I had a stack of Blu-Rays at this new office, and I just happened to watch Terminator and Halloween, the original, and I was watching it and I called Simon up the next day, I mentioned I’d seen those two, and I told him I wanted to do a Sci-Fi, action kind of thing, with an android and stuff like that. And Simon’s like, I have an idea that could fit into that. Maybe you can pick up from there…

SB: This is actually unique to our process, because usually Adam comes up with the type of movie he wants to make and I come up with the story. I’d started an old script that was going to be a really depressing drama, with kind of the same premise as this film, but it was a PTSD drama. Ultimately, we’re pretty big believers in the idea that art, unless the point of it is not to be entertaining, that art should be entertaining. So I stopped at around page 35 because I was like, literally no one in the world wants to see this film. (Laughter) I’m not enjoying writing it, and it’s not good. It was about this guy who comes back from the war and kills his friends and family. Ok, cool. And so Adam called me up and I was like “You know, if for some reason he was kind of bit of a malfunctioning robot, suddenly that script is actually awesome.” Not only awesome, but it’s funny, if we’re playing it for the laughs of it, and it’s not just like punishing. And then I just completely started at page 1.

AW: Well, no, it was literally like, we had that discussion, I mentioned that stuff to Simon, Simon said all that stuff, he’s like and then we’ll call it “The Guest”. I said, “Ok do you want to write that?”, and he said “Sure.” And he just went off and did it. It was like suddenly after all this time we spent on this other idea, when we really sat back and said what kind of story do we want to tell, not just saying we want a bunch of cool crazy shit, you know, it was like, you know, it was just took like a little moment, to kind of rest, and there it was.

Q: How long did it take you guys to film it?

AW: It was a thirty one day shoot, I think.

SB: And we did a 2 day reshoot in Los Angeles. Because of corporate stuff.

Q: I’ve noticed that music is pretty essential in a lot of your movies and it seems like with “You’re Next”, you have a little bit of a sort of Carpenter-ish driving electronic music, and with this it was just like a totally different kind of grittiness. I was just wondering, do you curate that or do you work with someone who does the music?

AW: Well, “You’re Next” was a totally different group of composers. It was a little bit more hodgepodge. One guy did the synth stuff really well, and one guy did atmospheric stuff. This film, for me, just spoke to me that it was like an 80’s Cannon action film, as a matter fact we wanted to actually just put the Cannon logo at the beginning of the film, you know, that’s why we do the Snoot logo kind of in that style. So, it tried to process the way to go about that. I feel like after Grindhouse there’s a lot of really good imitations of 80’s films and 70’s films. I really like Grindhouse but the post effect of that is that it’s become a sort of parody almos.? And that’s exactly the opposite of what I wanted from the music out of this. Actually going back to my very first film I did, called Homesick back in 2003, I worked with a band called Zombie. And we had a really good experience working together, they’re very prog rock, very Goblins inspired, John Carpenter stuff. Since then, one of the members of Zombie, Steve Moore, he started a solo project, and the solo project is still kind of him doing that old school thing, because Steve uses all vintage synthesizers and all that stuff. The interesting thing is that he’s just making his version of whatever music he wants to make. It’s a very modern kind of thing, but since he’s using vintage synths, then it has that quality to it. But it’s still something new and it’s not pretending to be it. From the beginning I called Steve up and we had a lot of conversations. A lot of the soundtrack, the starting point was basing it on Halloween 3 and the original Terminator soundtrack, both really great, incredible 80’s synth scores. And it kind of just went from there.

Q: In a couple of scenes, it seems that the camera angle is just really focused on David’s stare. Did you intend to make the audience feel like he was trying to break through the fourth wall in a way?

AW: Um…no, not really, I mean, I felt like those are just key moments that stood out to me. To me, I just wanted to be able to watch David process, because we never really know what goes on in his head. And I felt like I liked the idea of picking these moments where the movie’s not telling you what he’s thinking ever, but I wanted to give the audience that moment to be able to kind of put that on there. I think Dan has such brilliant physical acting that he can hold on screen just a bit longer than necessary, or would normally be done. That just kind of came out of that.

Q: Actors of course have to have physical training. Was there any other physical training, like martial arts, involved?

Dan Stevens: Yeah, there was actually, training for well over a month. Doing like weights and stuff in the morning and martial arts in the afternoon. It was a big old transformation for me actually.

SB: Our action choreographer, Clayton Barber, who worked on “You’re Next”, worked out with Dan. They like hit you a lot. We don’t really know what happened.

DS: I don’t want to talk about it.

Q: Dan, did you have a favorite action sequence to shoot in the film?

DS: Yeah I had my ear pierced by a door.

SB: Yeah, when Dan is running by things that are exploding, that’s not a stunt double sometimes.

AW: Yeah, early on, we did some shots were Dan is running by some splintering wood being shot to pieces. For some reason, I felt like that was important that you be in that shot. And that was the last time, because a piece went through Dan’s ear. It basically made a perfect little piercing in your ear.

Q: Where did you find this guy (Dan)?

AW: On this little known show, Downton Abbey. When going through the casting of the film, I knew I wanted someone who had a very calm, cool aesthetic to them, but who was naturally likeable. I talked to a lot of actors going through the casting. And Dan was actually one of the first people I talked to. He was just so nice. I could just see the character in him. From the very get-go he was my top choice.

Q: How long did it take to write?

AW: Probably two months.

Q: There’s a lot of scenes that you guys got laughs for, that, if done a different way, could have been straight up creepy. How do you find the balance between those two?

AW: Yeah man, it’s hard to say. I don’t know, it was weird. Going into it, I wasn’t sure. The first few days of shooting, how much I did want to play into the creepy side or more the humor of it? Because when I first read the script I was laughing my ass off the whole time, especially when it got to the bar scene the first time. I just really enjoyed going through that. It was just one of those things, as soon as I saw Dan on set and everybody interacting. Because the very first scene that we shot was, you know, the sequence where he gets the guns from the guy and ends up shooting a long distance, impossible missile shot. But it just instantly kind of clicked that it was a funny movie to me, and that’s the direction that we took. And the movie kind of plays homage, by the end of the film, to our roots, coming from horror and stuff, there’s even a jump scare but it’s a manufactured way. It wasn’t se-f referential but more, yes, this is where we come from but now this is a different context. Instead of playing out a horror film throughout, now suddenly we put you in this ridiculous haunted house at the end.

SB: I’d also say that everyone, and definitely our producers, we all have a sarcastic sense of humor. Finding jokes that aren’t really winking at the audience, just kind of assuming you’re smart enough to get it.

Q: For the ladies, or for all the actors really, what was it about Adam that said ‘Yes I want to work with this guy’?

Sheila Kelley: Just so much about him. I was offered the part and I got on the phone with him. He’s not a simple director. He has a lot of layers for the way he wanted the character played and how he wanted the film to unfold. And that was really exciting for me, personally.

Maika Monroe: I went through the auditioning process and I remember the first time meeting Adam. I think Jess was in the room, one of the producers and, just how he would work on the scenes with me, how he would direct me and change things I would never have even thought. There was just something so special, I was like I have to work with this guy.

Brendan Meyer: I was huge fan of Adam and Simon for a long time, so working on this was a huge dream for me, it was really surreal. It was so much fun, I had the best time. Adam’s the best what can I say.

Leland Orser: I can’t add much more than that, Adam was really really good. He really knew what he wanted and the direction was really specific and great but not in the way that he was giving you a ‘No’ or you felt like you were doing it wrong. But in a real collaborative way and you could tell he had a vision. It was really exciting and cool. You could tell he could see the movie in his head.

Lance Reddick: The funny thing for me is that I don’t remember exactly what it was about, because I was also offered the role. I was in New York at the time so Adam and I met on the phone and I told him one of my hesitations was, I don’t want to be the same Top Cop in a suit because I’ve done that for so long. I didn’t want to be the guy just doing exposition and on the page I wasn’t sure if it was going to play like that. I remember we talked a lot about film. I can’t remember exactly what it was that he said, all I remember is we ended the conversation and I said “Let me sleep on it, I’ll get back to you.” As soon as we got off the phone, I called my agent and said, “I’m going to do this film.”

AW: I just told Lance you’re going to wear a really cool trench coat and he said “Alright man, that sounds good.”

DS: Adam just cast a spell on me man. It was one of the funniest scripts I ever read, I was laughing my ass off. As soon as I read it, I made phone calls, some to people who mattered, some just phone calls. And within days we were talking, and I saw You’re Next and watching You’re Next blew me away. I was like I wanted to work with that guy. And I realized it wasn’t that guy, it was these guys. All these guys, the whole Snoot team is unbelievable. Really special bunch to work with. Obviously I didn’t know that at the beginning but I know now.

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