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[Sundance ’12] Interview: ‘Black Rock’ Director and Star Katie Aselton

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Black Rock (review) sold to LD Entertainment immediately following its first midnight screening in the Sundance Film Festival’s Park City at Midnight Category.

Directed by Katie Aselton, the film stars Aselton, Lake Bell and Kate Bosworth as three friends on a camping trip who run afoul of three hunters who turn violent. It becomes a gritty fight to survive in the woods.

By Thursday of Sundance, Aselton was as exhausted as we were. She even offered to have a snuggle session instead of an interview, but I wasn’t smooth enough to take her up on it so I just went with a normal interview. Some spoilers follow in our talk, but they’re good spoilers about violence and nudity! Q: For a long time, man has been the most dangerous game. Is woman taking over as the most dangerous game?

KA: I think women secretly have always been the most dangerous, the most dangerous beasts. We’re fierce. Men have it all on the outside. We’ve got some fierceness on the inside. When push comes to shove, I think we can take someone down pretty quickly.

Q: Were you a fan of that story in all its incarnations?

KA: I loved The Most Dangerous Game. I remember I read it my freshman year in high school and was obsessed with it. It was I think our very first assignment in English the very first day of school freshman year. I love that story. It’s amazing. I love survival stories. I love when humans are sort of forced to go primal. It’s exciting.

Q: Kate Bosworth’s character jokes that she has cancer but then she’s just messing with her friends. Did you ever consider really giving her cancer so she’d have nothing to lose when it really went down?

KA: No, that just felt a little melodramatic for me. I liked the idea, because that’s what friends do. You f*** with each other. She knew how to get her friends on board and she knew, as ultimately happened in the movie, when push comes to shove, the petty stuff falls away which is what she was sort of initially doing. I didn’t want anybody to have nothing to lose. I wanted everyone to have everything to lose.

Q: In a movie like this these days, do you have to explain there’s no cell phone reception?

KA: I think you do. I really do. It’s really frustrating. Cell phones have killed our sense of isolation, but in the state of Maine it’s very possible that you have no cell reception. Although I will say ironically, when we were shooting on the mainland, we had horrible cell reception and we would take a 30 minute boat ride out to the island where we were shooting, and I had 3G. Isn’t that weird? I could watch movies on my phone.

Q: It’s an easy enough thing in one line, because everyone is thinking it now.

KA: And Lake handled it so effortlessly. It was such an easy throwaway.

Q: In old movies they still had to have someone cut the phone lines.

KA: Yeah, exactly. For us it was did the phone get water on it in the boat? What exactly happens? Where are the other cell phones? It’s a stupid thing to have to overcome but you do because then you’re like, “Why didn’t you just call someone?”

Q: Thank you for the body warmth scene with you and Lake Bell. Is a little nudity a must in horror movies?

KA: Yeah, that’s the thing we were sort of playing with. There are certain thriller genre rules that we followed but I made sure to do them on my terms. So yes, I show boobs but I do it in my way and a way that I feel comfortable with.

Q: And you don’t expect it in a movie with A-list cast because they all have contracts.

KA: No, Lake was totally down for it which was great. She’s like, “I’ll go as far you will. You’re with me. Let’s just do it together.”

Q: Did you have any mixed feelings about making soldiers with PTSD the villains?

KA: I did. I was actually really concerned that we did it right and for me it wasn’t that they all had PTSD. It was that I think that one guy really was damaged emotionally, but the loyalty, the fierce loyalty between those guys bonds them together and gels them so tightly that Alex, played by Anslem Richardson, goes along with it because, you know, you follow your seniors. That’s what you do. So for me, I was really inspired by Restrepo and the guys in Restrepo. There was one in particular who had the little wool beanie cap and he looked a lot like Jay Paulson. He was like this wirey thin boy who leaves a boy, a video game playing boy who’s shy and sweet and comes back from that experience a changed human being. He’s not a boy anymore and he’s not a man and he’s just sort of vacant in the face and he’s not okay. That really affected me a lot because it was important for me that these guys were not just random psychopaths, that there was a reason why they were doing what they were doing. And the fact that they were this so tightly knit tribe of boys, when something happens to one of them it really sets the other one off. That is how he knows how to handle things now.

Q: I would even imagine the motivation for the guy who attacks you first is some form of PTSD.

KA: Yeah, you know, I mean these guys were back for 18 days. The fact of the matter is, not to get super political or opinionated about the whole thing, but we bring our boys home and we dump ‘em. We don’t do anything for them so the fact that their backstory for these guys is their way of assimilating back into social culture was to get a weekend away just the three of us and be alone. It’s too much to be back in society right now, elt’s all go on a weekend. But yeah, it’s not surprising that their triggers are really quick.

Q: Was shooting on the island like a real camping trip?

KA: Well, we didn’t shoot the whole movie on an island. We used a lot of the mainland which that coast is so beautiful.

Q: But out in the woods.

KA: Out in the woods, yeah, Lake and Kate and I peed in the woods. That’s just what you do.

Q: And the night shoots?

KA: Those were tricky. It was physically and emotionally a very demanding film. The nights were cold and dark and wet and you’re in the woods. The scene where we’re crawling through the woods when we’re looking for our boat, Kate was in the lead and we’re in the woods. She had no idea where she was putting her hand down. It was dark and creepy and disgusting, so they were pretty brave.

Q: How cold was it?

KA: The night we shot the water scene, the water temperature was 45 degrees. The air temperature was 43. It was cold.

Q: When you’re shivering after that, was that more acting or was it real?

KA: Oh no, it was freezing. It was freezing cold. That month of June, I have no idea what happened. The whole spring last year in Maine was so cold. We went to go location scout in April and there was a blizzard. In April. It was like April 4 and we got a foot of snow. So all of our pictures of location scouting, everything was covered with snow. I was like, “I’m pretty sure I remember this being a beach but I don’t know if there’s rocks under it. I think it’s a beach.” So then we got there in May and it rained the entire time while we were in preproduction. June 1 our first day of shooting the sun came out, thank God, but it didn’t get any warmer. We were freezing. What we’d set aside for wardrobe didn’t work for us at all. We were frigidly cold. It was crazy. June was freezing and then July, as soon as we left, it was like 80 degrees every day.

Q: The guys still are physically muscle-wise stronger so you have to work really hard to win. Is that another frustrating cliché? It’s a good thing to empower women that they can beat up guys, but sometimes unrealistic when these skinny girls take out musclemen.

KA: Yeah, and I think what we showed is you really kind of couldn’t kick a guy’s ass. The first death was by chance. The second one was against an injured guy and the third one was two against one and barely, barely, barely we pulled that one out. For me it was really playing with the idea of who wants to live more. I think that was the girls in this case.

Q: Congratulations on the sale.

KA: Thank you. We’re taking over the world.

Q: What kind of release are they giving you?

KA: You know, I haven’t sat down with them and really hashed out all the details but I know they love the film and are really behind it and are excited for a lot of people to see it.

Q: Have you gotten to see anything else here?

KA: I just saw California Solo last night. I saw Safety Not Guaranteed. Now that things are starting to slow down is when I get to see some movies which is great. What’s really fun is that there are a lot of people that were here in 2010 when I was here with Freebie back with their next film. It’s like we’re in the same class.

Black Rock

Interviews

“I Don’t See Retiring from This” – Joe Bob Briggs Talks New “Last Drive-In” Format and the Show’s Future [Interview]

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Hey everybody, have you heard the news? Joe Bob is back in town!

The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs has returned for its sixth season on Shudder. While the show’s format has been slightly revised adopting a new biweekly schedule with one film instead of a double feature the beloved horror host’s approach is much the same.

“It didn’t really change anything,” Briggs tells Bloody Disgusting. “We were crowding all of our movies into 10 weeks once a year and then having specials, and we found that people would rather have more weeks. It’s actually more movies than we had before.

“And some of the people on the East coast fall asleep in the second movie,” he laughs. “It’s about a five-hour show when it’s a double feature because we talk so much. Also, it’s hard to get thematic double features every single time. So our specials are still double features, but our regular episodes are single features.”

The season kicked off last week with The Last Drive-In Live: A Tribute to Roger Corman, celebrating the legendary filmmaker’s first 70 years in Hollywood with a double feature of 1959’s A Bucket of Blood and 1983’s Deathstalker. The special was filmed live in front of a fervent audience of Briggs’ fan base lovingly dubbed the Mutant Family at Joe Bob’s Drive-In Jamboree in Las Vegas last October.

In addition to his usual hosting duties, Briggs conducted a career-spanning interview with Corman and his wife, fellow producer Julie Corman. They were also joined by one of Corman’s oldest friends and collaborators, Bruce Dern. In a heartfelt moment of mutual admiration, Briggs and Corman exchanged lifetime achievement awards on hubcaps.

“I’ve known Roger for about 35 years, so I’ve only known him for half of his career,” Briggs chuckles. In his long history of reviewing, interviewing, and talking about Corman and his legendary work, one emblematic encounter sticks out to Briggs.

“I remember the very first time I went to the Corman studio, which was a lumber yard on Venice Boulevard. He had a standing set for a spaceship control room, a standing set for a strip club, and I think he had one other one, and then he had all of his editing facilities there, but it was still a lumber yard. They had not really changed any of the buildings or anything.

“He’s showing me around the studio, and we were walking past a pile of debris, and I said, ‘Roger, is that the mutant from Forbidden World?’ It had just been thrown over in a corner. And he just said, ‘Yes, Joe Bob, I believe that is. He was apparently no longer needed.’ I said, ‘Roger, you gotta get with it! That stuff is worth money.’ But he was like, ‘When the movie’s over, the movie’s over.’ That was Roget to a T.”

At least part of Corman’s longevity can be attributed to his shrewd business practices and pragmatic approach to the industry, which has included working in every conceivable genre of cinema. “I couldn’t think of a single genre he has not made,” Briggs says.

“When we did this interview at the Jamboree, I said, ‘I’m gonna name the genre, and you tell me what you love about that genre,’ and every comment that he made involved money and box office performance,” he snickers. “None of it was involved with love of cinema, although I did get him to say that his favorite genre is a genre that he didn’t dabble in much other than his first movie [1954’s Highway Dragnet], and that was film noir.”

While the fourth annual Drive-In Jamboree is still in the planning stage, Briggs is delighted by the event’s continued success. “The Jamboree is something that we literally just threw together. We’ve had three of them now. It’s something where we just show up and try to come up with programming for each day.

But I really think the Jamboree is more about the mutant family meeting the mutant family. It’s more about people who know each other online gathering and partying with each other in person. It’s not so much about what movies we have. I mean, we always have an anniversary movie, and we always have some special guests and everything, but it’s more about the gathering of the mutants. It’s fun from that point of view. They’re exhausting, I can tell you that.”

The zeal among Briggs’ audience has only grown over the years, from hosting Joe Bob’s Drive-In Theater on The Movie Channel from 1986 to 1996, to MonsterVision on TNT from 1996 to 2000, and The Last-Drive-In on Shudder since 2018. “I’m amazed, having been in the business for this many years, that I still have a show at this time, because they say you can’t repeat TV,” Briggs notes.

“Nobody wants to see old TV, and yet I’ve done the same show three times on three different networks, and every time I try to change it everyone says, ‘No, no, don’t change it! That’s the part we love.’ I always want to do something new, and I’m always told, ‘No, you’re the CEO of Coca Cola who went to New Coke.’ You can’t do that. People will revolt. So we’re still doing it.

“It’s one of the few shows that I know of that’s just sort of grown organically over, gosh, almost 40 years. We’ve just added elements to the show. We try things. If something doesn’t work, we throw it away. If something works, we do it forever!”

The mutant family will be happy to know that Briggs plans to continue hosting and writing about movies for as long as he’s able to. “I don’t see retiring from this or retiring from writing. I’m primarily a writer, and the good thing about writing is long after they don’t wanna see you on TV anymore you can still write.

“The difference today, though, is I was pretty much the only guy doing genre films when I started. Now, there are academics that do it. There are entire books written about Dario Argento and Tobe Hooper and even lesser names than those, and there are, of course, a massive number of websites, including your own, so that when something comes out today, there’s immediately a hundred reviews of it; whereas in 1982, I was sort of the only guy, because the movies were considered disposable trash. So I have been surpassed in my deep knowledge, because who can keep up with all that? It’s impossible!”

Diana Prince, who serves as Briggs’ co-host Darcy the Mail Girl and was instrumental in getting him back in the hosting chair, has been promoted to an associate producer this season. “She was sort of always the associate producer, but I guess they finally gave her the title,” Briggs explains.

“Diana Prince is in on all the decisions about programming. I always listen to Austin Jennings, the director, and Diana Prince, the mail girl, because they come from opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of what kind of movies they wanna watch, and we try to strike a balance between. You know, she’s not gonna vote for Possession, and he’s not gonna vote for Mountaintop Motel Massacre,” he chortles.

“They’re probably the principal advisors, as far as what we show. Of course, [Diana] has a lot of social media clout, and she’s extremely knowledgeable about pop culture. Wow! She has seen everything. She’s seen more than I’ve seen!”

While surprises are part of the fun of The Last Drive-In, Briggs previews some of what’s in store this season. “The place we normally live is the neglected ’80 slasher, and we still live there,” he assures. “But we’re gonna pay a lot more attention to the ’70s especially. I’ve always thought the ’70s are more interesting than the ’80s anyway. And we’re gonna pay attention to some really recent stuff.”

He teases, “We’re gonna bring back Joe Bob’s Summer School, which is something that we used to do at MonsterVision. And we may have a marathon. There’s a possibility of that. But I’ll be digging this new format of being on every other week between now and at least up to Labor Day.”

While Briggs’ hosting format hasn’t changed much across four decades, the world around him certainly has and that’s why The Last Drive-In remains relevant. He points out, “In the era of streaming, where everything is menus and there are thousands and thousands and thousands of choices, we are that thing called a curator that can direct you to the fun places on the spectrum of streaming.

“Streaming is very confusing for people, and a lot of people don’t like it for that reason. I hope what we’re doing is cutting through the weeds and bringing things into perspective. And, you know, it’s just more fun to watch a movie with us!” he concludes with a Texas-sized grin.

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