Weather can be a formidable character in movies, especially those in the horror genre. We have “The Fog” (John Carpenter’s original, not the dreadful remake), “The Mist” (talk about an infinitely devastating climax), “The Wave” which proved to be the best disaster flick I have seen in a long time, and there’s even “The Day After Tomorrow” which dealt with climate change although in a highly unrealistic way.
Now we have “The Wind,” a horror western which takes us back to the untamed Western frontier of the 1800’s. The wind here has a supernatural force inhabiting it almost in the same way those ghosts inhabited “The Fog,” and you are left wondering how anyone can rise above such a common weather element especially when it is always around. In the process, we are sucked right into a horror movie which fearlessly turns a number of tropes on its head especially when it comes to female characters.
Lizzy Macklin (Caitlin Gerard) is forced to fend for herself in the lonely wilderness when her husband, Isaac Macklin (Ashley Zukerman), is forced to leave her and travel into the nearest town with their friend Gideon Harper (Dylan McTee) for reasons which will quickly become clear. From there, she is stuck in the loneliest of places and in a house which looks like something out of Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven.” The old west Lizzy resides in is not the least bit glamourous, but we quickly realize she is resilient and strong even after she is chased back into her house by a pair of ravenous coyotes.
The wind of the movie’s title first presents itself as a natural element, but it quickly becomes very ominous as it has hands reaching out at its victims who have little hope of escape. But after a while, one begins to wonder if Lizzy is really being attacked by a supernatural force, or if she is instead descending deeper and deeper into madness. Either way, you are in for an unsettling ride which won’t let you go.
The first thing I should single out is Caitlin Gerard’s performance. Right from the start, she holds our attention as she makes Lizzy into a formidable character who doesn’t necessarily need a man to see her through dangers of any kind. Furthermore, she has many scenes in which she doesn’t utter a word of dialogue and has to get things across with her face and body. It’s a lot to ask of an actor to communicate with just their face as they could easily fall into the trap of emoting to where they overdo it and turn in a performance which is inescapably laughable. Gerard, however, never falls into this trap as she almost succeeds in turning this movie into a one-woman show. Throughout, she succeeds in conveying so much while saying so little, and she completely sucked me into Lizzy’s horrifying predicament which could have easily done in a weaker character.
Co-starring alongside Gerard is Julia Goldani Telles who plays Emma Harper, Isaac’s pregnant wife who befriends Lizzy. Emma is pleasant at first, but she soon complains of how something is out to get her, and she becomes possessed by a force which does everything except turn her head 360 degrees. Telles also could have fallen into the same trap, but she makes Emma’s possession fierce and believable to where her transition from sane to insane is all the more terrifying.
From a distance, “The Wind” looks like a movie which will employ the usual variety of horror tropes such as the last woman standing, heroic and moronic male characters and a murderous villain looking for a long-running franchise which will eventually see a reboot. However, this horror western feels unique to many of its ilk, and it is great to see such strong female characters inhabiting it. Honestly, it feels like it has been a long time since I have seen a horror movie with female characters like these as they easily dominate the male characters without any doubt.
Director Emma Tammi makes her narrative feature debut here after having made several documentaries including “Fair Chase.” It is a very assured debut as she balances out all the cinematic elements in equal fashion. In addition to getting excellent performances from the cast, there is also beautiful cinematography from Lyn Moncrief and a terrific film score composed by Ben Lovett which sounds like something out of my childhood nightmares. The fact Tammi had only 30 days to film “The Wind” makes her work here all the more impressive.
If “The Wind” does run into any problems, it is in regards to its non-linear story which gives the movie a lot of power, but also generates some confusion. The screenplay by Teresa Sutherland is strong, but the more it shifts from one place in time to another, the more I lost track of where the characters were in the story. Granted, a lot of my confusion was rectified before the movie’s climax, but being thrown off like that did take away from my viewing experience.
I also have to say that the ending was a bit of a letdown. As much as I enjoy ambiguous conclusions, this was one I wanted spelled out for me. I usually hate it when filmmakers try to spell things out for audiences, but this time it would have helped as “The Wind” felt somewhat incomplete when the screen went to black.
Regardless, I very much taken in by “The Wind” and found it to be a highly unnerving horror film. It’s coming in under the radar and is easily being smothered by bigger movies, but I hope fans of the genre will give it a look. In the meantime, I will be waiting for the next weather disaster movie, “The Smog.” That one will be worth it just to hear its characters have the following exchange:
“You don’t understand! The smog is here and it’s trying to kill us!”
There’s a movie coming out this weekend which is coming in under the radar which is worth your time. Once you have gotten through “Shazam” and the “Pet Sematary” remake, be sure to check out “The Wind,” a horror western which turns many of the clichés of scary movies on their heads. It also features some of the strongest female characters you could hope to see in a horror film in this day and age, and they are not your typical last girls or scream queens.
We are introduced to Lizzy Macklin (Caitlin Gerard), a plains-woman living in the untamed western frontier of the 1800’s who is forced to fend for herself when her husband, Isaac (Ashley Zukerman), leaves her alone to the needs of a close friend. From there, we watch Lizzy dealing with the elements which include a pair of fierce coyotes and a sheep that won’t stay dead. But when the wind of the movie’s title comes around, she is driven to near madness as forces beyond her control mess with her head, and she is forced to hold on to what is left of her sanity to live another day above ground.
I had the great opportunity to talk with “The Wind’s” director Emma Tammi and actress Caitlin Gerard recently. Tammi is known for her documentaries “Election Day” and “Fair Chase,” and “The Wind” marks her directorial debut of a narrative feature. Gerard portrayed Imogen Rainier in “Insidious: The Last Key,” and she is known for her work on the television series “When We Rise” and “American Crime.”
I want to thank Gerard and Tammi for taking the time to talk with me about “The Wind,” and I would also like to thank Rama Tampubolon of Rama’s Screen for being my cameraman on this interview. His help and tripod were very much appreciated.
Please check out the interview above, and be sure to check out “The Wind” when it arrives in theaters and VOD on April 5, 2019.
He has made a place for himself in the horror genre with the “30 Days of Night: Dust to Dust” miniseries and the web series “Chosen.” Now with “Beneath,” Ben Ketai breaks into the feature film realm with a story about a bunch of coal miners who get trapped several hundred feet underground after a catastrophic accident. The movie stars Jeff Fahey as veteran coal miner who spends the last day on the job with his co-workers and his daughter Samantha (Kelly Noonan) when the accident happens, and they have to work together to escape the mine before madness and toxic gasses kill them.
I got to speak with Ketai over the phone, and it was great fun talking with him as he explained what it was like working with Fahey, the challenges of maintaining a strong level of suspense for ninety minutes, and the research he did on coal miners for this movie. “Beneath” might look like your typical horror movie, but in many ways, it isn’t.
Ben Kenber: I thought this movie was very riveting and I like how you managed to keep the suspense up until the very end. How much of a challenge was it to maintain that suspense from start to finish? It could not have been easy.
Ben Ketai: One of the challenges when doing a horror movie like this where you are stuck in one space for the entire film, and I give all the credit to Chris (Valenziano) and Patrick (Doody), the writers, is figuring out how to build a proper level of escalation that keeps the story moving without breaking the suspense until the very, very end. It definitely makes my job much easier when you have a creative group of people like that.
Ben Kenber: This is definitely an interesting story for a horror movie. There have been a lot of stories in the news over the past years of mines collapsing and miners being trapped for an agonizing period of time. Was there a specific event that inspired the story for this film?
Ben Ketai: It was really, for Patrick and Chris, the Chilean coal miners and what they went through was the first seedlings of the idea. And then while they were working on it, I think there were a couple more incidents that came along and so we had a lot of different unfortunate happenings that allowed us to draw inspiration from. A lot the inspiration for the film also comes from just coal miners who haven’t been in collapses, and Chris and Patrick did extensive research while writing the script talking to coal miners and visiting coal mines in West Virginia. We had a recently retired coal miner talk to our cast before production. It was like a little seminar on what it’s like to be a coal miner. There were lots of wonderful sources of inspiration.
Ben Kenber: Where exactly was this movie shot? It looks like a real coal mine, but I came out of it not knowing if it was actually a movie set or not.
Ben Ketai: We actually shot it on a soundstage in Culver City, and pretty much everything you see inside the mine was constructed by our brilliant and very resourceful production designer Michael Barton.
Ben Kenber: At times, I thought it looked so real.
Ben Ketai: I had to remind myself sometimes when we were actually on set. I would start to get claustrophobic, and I had to remind myself that we were on a soundstage and that there was sunlight outside.
Ben Kenber: While watching “Beneath,” I was reminded of a number of other movies like “The Descent” where a group of women went cave dwelling and encountered a bunch of vicious monsters. Was there any movie which inspired you or played through your mind while you were making “Beneath?”
Ben Ketai: We actively tried to avoid “The Descent” and other movies like it because we knew it would draw such strong comparisons just because of the subject matter. But of course we watched “The Descent” and we looked at what works best in that movie, and then also what signifies what that movie is and what that movie looks like it feels like. It sounds too derivative, but while making the movie and immersed in the experience I tried to pull from movies that aren’t actually entirely of the genre. I wanted to try to put something more human to the horror experience. Honestly, one of the movies that my crew and I watched the night before we shot was “Friday Night Lights” simply because it’s a film to me that just does a great job of capturing real camaraderie, and also it has a very piece of life feel to it. That was something that we wanted to bring to a movie like this and to try to make the characters feel like real people that we love and care about, and if we can do that then the horror is going to take care of itself. “The Wrestler” was another movie we watched, and it did such a great job of getting the camera to capture the world of wrestling in such a personal way. I wanted to do that same thing with coal miners and have that same sensation.
Ben Kenber: I’m assuming that you did a lot of research on coal miners and mining accidents, and I imagine that when you have a lack of oxygen down there beneath the earth that you start seeing things that may or may not actually be there. What kind of research did you do in preparation for directing this film?
Ben Ketai: All sorts really. The writers had a great head start obviously and they worked on the script for about a year and a half. When I came onto the project just a couple months out from production, they kind of dumped all the research into my lap and I had to do a crash course and catch up fast with them. We were developing the script through craft and with the actors. We just gathered as much information as we could about what happens to your brain during oxygen deprivation, and not only that but what happens when you were trapped in a coal mine. It’s not just that you are running out of oxygen, but the air itself is becoming toxic. There are always toxic gasses that are leaking into the coal mine, and usually if the mine hasn’t collapsed there is stuff that extracts that from the working environment. When the collapse happens, it basically cuts off their flow of fresh air, and things like methane and poisonous gasses continue to build up. All the crazy things that can happen to you like hallucinations to total personality changes, that was really the most exciting thing to me. We had this great device that creates a real-life thing that could explain away all those supernatural things. We really wanted to make it all ambiguous, and we did.
Ben Kenber: The cast for this movie is really spot on. All the actors look like they have worked in a mine for a long, long time. What was it like casting this film?
Ben Ketai: The casting process on this movie was awesome. It was probably the most enjoyable process that I ever had working on movies because we didn’t have a studio looking over our shoulder and we didn’t have foreign sales companies to answer to. So we really just got to do it the old school way and we just had auditions. We really took our time to figure out who were the best people to embody these characters, and we managed to assemble what I felt was a cast of just all incredibly talented and incredibly realistic people/actors.
Ben Kenber: What was it like working with Jeff Fahey?
Ben Ketai: It was a really, really incredible experience. I’ve always been a fan of his. I was probably 12 years old when I first saw “Lawnmower Man.” I grew up with Jeff Fahey. It’s kind of a dream to get to work with a guy like this, and not only that but he’s got so many years of experience under his belt and so much passion for his craft that working with him is sort of like… You turn him loose in a scene and his energy and his expertise kind of permeates to the rest of the cast. I think it really helped pull everything together. I feel like, as a director, I’m just lucky to be able to put that in front of the camera.
Ben Kenber: Robert Rodriguez once said having less money to work with forces you to be more creative. Was that the case for you on this movie, and did you have to cut any corners to get the shots that you wanted?
Ben Ketai: It definitely forces you to be more creative, and I really actually think in many ways it’s what gives the movie its voice and personality. We had to spend so much money building the set itself because we couldn’t film in a coal mine. There really wasn’t much left for anything else. When I came onto the film as director, my first role was to try to make everything feel as real as possible. Myself and Tim Burton, my cinematographer, we wanted to make it feel like we were down in the coal mine with flashlights and headlamps. So what you actually see onscreen is lit with practical lights. Instead of spending our time and our electric budget on a huge lighting truck like you would get on a big studio movie, we were at Home Depot looking at different kinds of flashlights.
I want to thank Ben Ketai for taking the time to talk with me. “Beneath” is now available to own and rent on DVD, Blu-ray, and Digital.
Actor Jeff Fahey is one of those actors in Hollywood who has never been lacking for work. Ever since his first major role on the soap opera “One Life to Live,” he has appeared in an endless number of movies like “Silverado,” “Psycho III,” “White Hunter Black Heart” opposite Clint Eastwood, and more recently he has starred in Robert Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror” and “Machete.” On television, he has left his mark on such shows as “Miami Vice,” “The Marshal” and “Under the Dome.” No matter what year it is, Fahey is always busy appearing in something, and it’s always great to see him onscreen.
Fahey’s latest film is “Beneath,” a horror movie from director Ben Ketai which is now available to watch on VOD and will be released in theaters on July 25. In the film, Fahey plays George Marsh, a veteran coal miner who is retiring after many years on the job. But on his last day which has him taking his environmental activist daughter Samantha (Kelly Noonan) on a tour 600 feet below the ground, a disastrous mine collapse traps them and a couple other workers. They wait to be rescued but as time runs out and the air becomes more toxic, each slowly descends into madness and starts turning on one another.
I spoke with Fahey on the phone as he was in Mexico shooting the movie “Texas Rising.”
Ben Kenber: This is a very gripping film where you didn’t know how things were going to turn out, and the suspense was very well maintained from beginning to end. How did this project come to you?
Jeff Fahey: My manager actually had read the script and said, “There’s a film, they are interested in you.” I said what’s the genre and he said, “Well it’s a horror film but…” And I said I’m not interested at the moment but he said, “No I think you ought to read this one.” So, I read it and right away I called them back and I said I’d like to meet with the director and the producers because this is a nice piece. It was the psychological horror, the psychological drama that drew me to it, and it didn’t have the gore that other films of that genre would have. It read more like a short story and a psychological drama, and that’s what attracted me to it. Then when I met Ben, he very clearly showed his vision and what he wanted to do with it. That made it even more interesting.
BK: Yes, the psychological trauma is what really drives the movie I think. On the surface, “Beneath” looks like your typical horror movie but it isn’t.
JF: Yeah, and the performances those other cats brought in… Kelly’s performance was amazing, and she had to carry that film on her shoulders and she pulled it off in aces.
BK: I think all the actors in this movie were perfectly cast because they all look like they have spent a lot of time in the mine.
JF: Yes exactly, and the sets and the production design were top, top quality so you had the sense that you were really in a mine. That was a character in of itself and was equally important as the script and the performers.
BK: The set design was excellent and I really did feel like I was in a mine while watching this movie. Ben said it was shot on a soundstage but it never feels like you are on a soundstage in the slightest.
JF: Yeah.
BK: In regards to your role, did you do any of research before shooting began?
JF: No, this all happened pretty fast. We had a real miner come in and speak with the cast the day before we started shooting for a couple of hours, and then we were on the sets and everybody was getting to know each other while we were filming. That was another thing that made it so easy, that everyone got along so well.
BK: I imagine this movie had a very tight shooting schedule.
JF: Oh yeah.
BK: Was this a role where everything was on the page for you?
JF: Yeah it was there, but then the magic happens when you get with the actors and especially when you get along. So, when you’re on a tight, limited schedule or budget, you spend a lot of time together especially in a film like this where we are all in a cave together. Everybody in between filming the scenes was sitting around talking and getting to know one another or going over the scenes and talking about the scenes and the relationships. That I think helped the fact that it was a tight schedule, and we all had to be together for the duration. That created that group ensemble feeling.
BK: There are scenes where your character has some breathing problems, and they are like a ticking time bomb in this movie. How did you go about acting those scenes?
JF: Well that’s a process. Everybody has a different process and you have a process that you build up and deliver on, but a lot of the coughing I was able to lay in on post-production which I discussed with Ben. I told him I will cough, but I won’t put the full pressure on because at 12 hours a day for three or four weeks would get to you especially with that real dust. So, we were able to lay all the coughing, that heavy, heavy breathing, in post-production. Knowing that we’re able to do some of this in post-production, I didn’t have to hyperventilate 12 hours a day while I was doing the film.
BK: Have you ever been in a movie before which has had a setting that is as claustrophobic as the one in “Beneath?”
JF: I don’t think so, certainly not for the whole duration of the film. I’d have to say no. This would set the stage right now for the most claustrophobic film I’ve touched thus far, and certainly the most dusty. They had to have that real dust blowing around in a confined area hour after hour, but out here you can ride away from it sometimes.
BK: You have had a very strong acting career to where you have gone from project to project with what seems like relative ease. You don’t seem to be lacking for work at all. What’s your secret?
JF: I think it’s no great secret. I think everybody has it. You just go forward and take it project to project and grow a little bit with each one and hopefully understand the interpretation of story and the interpretation of the development of your craft and moving through the industry. But just moving from story to story and group to group, now I’m at the place where the greatest joy along with a good story and the good directors is the relationships working with people you respect and enjoy. That seems to happen more and more. I am with a wonderful group now down here in Mexico doing “Texas Rising.”
BK: One last question, I have to ask you about “Grindhouse.” What was it like filming that one?
JF: Well I love Robert Rodriguez. There were times when Robert will be operating one camera and Quentin (Tarantino) will be operating the other. So, it was fascinating that you got these two world-class filmmakers operating the two cameras while you’re doing a scene. It was fascinating. I’ll be working with Robert again. I just spoke with him the other day. And hopefully I’ll be working with Quentin. It was a great joy to be working with those guys and watching them work.
I want to thank Jeff Fahey for taking the time to talk with me. “Beneath” is now available to own and rent on DVD, Blu-ray, and Digital.
Filmmaker Josh C. Waller has led a very interesting life so far. Born in 1974 to a cattle rancher/businessman and an actress mother, he spent his youth going to theatre rehearsals and watching movies on the weekends where his interest in filmmaking began to peak. After graduating high school, he joined the Marines and eventually worked for a private educational center which dealt with children afflicted with learning disabilities. This job ended up taking through different parts of the United States before he finally settled down in Los Angeles where his career as a filmmaker started to take off.
Waller’s film “Raze” stars Zoë Bell (“Death Proof”) as Sabrina, an abducted woman who wakes up to find herself imprisoned in a bunker where she and other imprisoned women are forced to fight one another to the death. On the surface it looks like another exploitation movie, but it soon becomes clear Waller had a lot more on his mind than that as he takes the characters and their story more seriously than you might expect.
I got to talk with Waller about “Raze” and what it was like to make the movie. Considering it was done on a very low budget, I was curious to see how he managed to pull off all he did with the little he had to work with. We also talked about what fighting styles were used in the movie, how his time in the Marines has influenced his work as a filmmaker, and he told a great story about how he managed to get all the sets for “Raze” built in just one day.
Ben Kenber: From the poster “Raze” looks like a typical exploitation movie, but it ends up going a lot deeper than that. What inspired you to make this film?
Josh C. Waller: To be honest, I had been working for years on another film completely different that I directed called “McCanick” with David Morse and Cory Montieth. That was something that I had been developing for about nine years with my producing partner who also wrote it, Daniel Noah, and it’s a tough project. It’s a drama with some very heavy subject matter and it was a bit of a bitch to get made, but it finally got green lit. But about the same time my friend Kenny Gage, he wrote a little short film called “Raze” which was like maybe seven or eight pages, I can’t remember exactly. He just asked me if I would take it home and he was just like, “Hey man, take a look at this thing and I’d love to hear your thoughts.” It wasn’t like, hey take this home, I think you should produce it, I think you should direct it. He was just like, hey take a look at this, I’d love to hear what you think, and I did. So I took it home that night and checked it out, and I thought there was something there. It was essentially the first fight between Jamie (Rachel Nichols) and Sabrina (Zoë Bell), then that was the short. It was a tad more exploitative of what the film ended up eventually being. Women were wearing a bit more revealing clothes and I think it mentioned something about it being particularly busty, and I brought it back to Kenny the next day and I was like, “Dude, there’s something here. I don’t know if I’m down with all the exploitative stuff, but there’s something here.” It got my mind going, so Kenny and I just started like bouncing things back and forth immediately, and the way that he and I were working together was so organic. The ideas just kept flowing and flowing and flowing, and I think that I really was interested in being a part of it and directing it because it’s not the kind of film that I would normally gravitate to nor is it the type of film that I would normally direct. I didn’t really watch the women-in-prison exploitations films from the 70’s and 80’s stuff, not at all. In fact, I was never really a fan of any of the exploitation films like “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” It just wasn’t my thing, the Roger Corman films. So I was like okay, if I am going to do a film that kind of fits within that world, I’m going to have to take it as seriously as I would take “McCanick” or any other film, you know? I think that that was in my mind, then and still now, the only way we could possibly deal with something like this. And also it was incredibly exciting for Kenny and I. Kenny, before he got in the industry, was an undefeated professional boxer, and it was important for him and I and Zoë to try to show the most visceral, intense female fights that we had ever seen on the screen. And because every time you see women in a movie in some kind of fight, it seems to be all over the place in the trades and everything like that. That fight scene from “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol” (between Paula Patton and Léa Seydoux), people were like, “There’s the biggest catfight of all time in it!” And I saw it and I was like, “They what?! Man, you guys could have gone like so much further on this!” So we were like let’s see how far we can push this, and trust me when I say that we have so much more footage that we could’ve put in the movie.
BK: Regarding the fight scenes, Zoë said there were different fighting styles used in the movie. Were you looking to employ any particular fighting style or were you just open to whatever worked?
JCW: No, in fact we wanted to avoid looking for fighting styles. But what was interesting to me was to try to use the action… It was a little bit of like an experiment to see how much we could use the action to propel the narrative forward as opposed to dialogue or like emotional sequences. That said, the fight sequences themselves are pretty damn emotional, so being able to use those fights to like propel the movie forward emotionally and the narrative, that was something that was super interesting. So it wasn’t so much about looking for specific fighting styles in terms of like, this girl does Muay Thai and then this girl does Brazilian jiu-jitsu. That didn’t really work. We just needed to make sure that their fighting styles, however their fighting styles were, were a physical representation of who they were as women and what they were going through because they’re supposed to be normal women plucked from society. So occasionally you’ll have like one of the characters that knows how to fight. In the case of Sabrina, she has a military background and is well versed in hand to hand combat, so that’s the way that she fights. She fights very efficiently and she fights like a soldier. But if you start putting different martial arts styles on it… We didn’t want it to be like the female edition of “Best of the Best” or something like that like “Bloodsport” or “Mortal Kombat.”
BK: I read that you served in the Marines for a time, and thank you for your service by the way.
JCW: You’re welcome.
BK: Did any of what you learned in the Marines influence the making of this movie for you?
JCW: The guards down below I definitely fashioned after Marines. They’re most obvious trait are their Marine haircuts. All of those haircuts I maintained. I was the one who was like, “No, no, no,” and then I’d run outside with clippers and be like, “Sit down, sit down while I cut your hair!” Their uniforms, making sure their boots were polished, making sure that their haircuts were clean and not like all nappy and plain looking. Bruce Thomas who plays Kurtz, he and I had a lot of talks about his performance and how he could mimic the sound and the essence of a Marine drill instructor, so we would talk about a lot of stuff like that. I would put all the guards through a little closed quarter drill or boot camp over in a parking lot outside the set. In terms of fighting styles, not really; the military thing didn’t inform too much of that stuff. I can definitely say that, in terms of being a filmmaker, I would not be the filmmaker that I am today without it. Whether people think that’s good or bad, I would not be who I am as a man without the Marines. Almost every day, so many aspects of my life are informed because of my choice to join the corp.
BK: Absolutely. I bring that up because I have a family friend who was in the marines, and it has definitely influenced him in how he lives life today, and I think in a very good way.
JCW: It becomes one of those things because the Marine Corps is so daunting, and you end up graduating from boot camp and when you earn that title, you are filled with such an immense sense of price and accomplishment for earning that title. You feel a little bit like, “Well if I can do this, I can do anything.” So when you look at other tasks throughout your life, you’re kind of like, “This is lame. This is easy!”
BK: Zoë said that the total budget on “Raze” was less than a million dollars, but it looks like it cost more than that. The thing I continually find fascinating about low budget filmmaking is how it forces you to be more creative as a result. Would you say that was the case on this film?
JCW: Absolutely. I mean a perfect example of like how you’re forced to be creative is that like… Zoë was right, the budget was below a million, and if we had 19 action sequences, the shooting ratio on action to straight drama is like 10 to 1. It’s so drastically different. So to say that the shoot was an ambitious shoot is like stating something stupidly obvious. I think in terms of getting creative, there was one time where I was trying to figure out how the hell we were going to be able to afford… Because all of our sets were built, we shot everything on a soundstage, everything. We didn’t know how we were going to be able to pull that off with the money that we had, and I went home one night and I was sitting with my younger brother, and the flipside is as a youth I was the product of a divorce. On the father’s side, I was raised by a Marine cowboy father, and on the other side my mom and stepdad were into theater and dance and jazz and all of that stuff. I would go with my mom to movies on the weekend and I would watch movies like “Arthur” and “Zorro the Gay Blade” and stuff like that. I went home and I was hanging out with my little brother, and we were watching “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” and there’s a big musical number in the movie where all the brothers get together and with people in the neighborhood, and like an Amish community they have a big barn raising, dance and a big party, and I was like, “Holy shit man! That’s it! We’ll basically do a barn raising for all of our sets!” So I told the guys, “Look, all we have to do is throw a party, we’ll invite our friends, we’ll make teams of four people each and our production designer will be our foreman. And we’ll give a cash prize to whoever finishes their part of the build the fastest.” We had a DJ, we had food and beer and all that kind of stuff, and we built all of the flats for all of the sets in three hours on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. We all drank beer and barbecued. We never would have been able to do it (the regular way). It would have cost us 2 to 3 weeks of labor costs, so that was one of the creative ways. It was fun.
BK: That’s amazing! IFC Midnight is promoting this movie. How does it feel to have them promoting it, and what can you tell us about IFC Midnight?
JCW: IFC has been amazing. The person that I’ve been particularly involved with at IFC Midnight has been Mike Winton, and I have to say that it’s been an absolute pleasure. IFC Midnight also put up “Maniac” which my producing partner Elijah Wood was in, and they function within the same world that I function and we function in. Working with them is like working with our friends. It’s been a pleasure. I love it and I can’t wait to work with them again.
I thank Josh C. Waller for taking the time to talk with me, and I again want to thank him for his service to our country.
The Ultimate Rabbit 