Interviews
[Interview] Horrific ‘Downrange’ Takes Aim at Social Fears
Downrange, a high concept thriller about a sniper who targets a SUV full of College kids on a deserted highway, made its debut last September at the Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness and will now stream on Shudder this Thursday, April 26th. The film hails from director Ryuhei Kitamura (The Midnight Meat Train, Versus) and stars a number of up and coming young actors, several of whom are making their feature film debut. I had the chance to sit down with Kitamura and his cast in advance of the film’s world premiere to chat about crafting a Hollywood pitch, working with an SUV as a co-star and how the film taps into topical American fears.*
Kitamura kicked things on by describing how the film came about: “This idea came to me five years ago. We [he and writer Joey O’Bryan] were focusing on coming up with an idea – something high concept, ’cause in Hollywood it’s all about the pitch…We were talking about what scares us. The big guy with the axe or the machete wearing the mask, he doesn’t really scare me – I can fight him. Sixteen years ago I made Versus because I wasn’t afraid of the zombies. Ghosts? They don’t scare me. Then Joey came up with this idea: what if you were targeted by a sniper? And that scared me. Because if I can’t see him, I can’t fight back…Three hours later, we had the idea.”
The young cast was attracted to unorthodox characters, whom they praise as strong, smart, and resourceful. They like that these kids have depth and aren’t stereotypical. Rod Hernandez (Todd) explained: “Being a minority actor, it was nice not to have to play the typical immigrant role,” suggesting that the casting was a deliberate attempt to break free of preconceived Hollywood moulds. Kitamura went to great lengths to find his six leads, calling actors back for multiple auditions to chat about the character. Jason Tobias (Jeff) felt that this was a way for Kitamura to get a feel for the actors and ensure that they were the right fit. In the case of Anthony Kirlew (Eric) and Kelly Connaire (Jodi), both of whom were students at the time, that meant taking a chance on first time actors for integral roles in the film.
It was important to Kitamura that the characters weren’t “a bunch of stupid kids [who are] crying and screaming.” Anthony praised the fact that everyone tries to survive, even if not all of their attempts work out for the best. “We’re all fighters” Stephanie Pearson (Keren) chimed in. This includes the SUV, which Rod joked should be considered “the seventh character”; the viewer that protects the characters for the majority of the film also provided the cast an opportunity to perform their own stunts. One memorable sequence occurs when the group tries to push the vehicle backwards in neutral to find a cell signal. Kitamura cited that sequence as his favourite scene of any of his films.
Filming in a single California location with wildly varying temperatures created its own share of challenges. Stephanie explained that the characters wear jackets during the day (when it was sweltering) and only t-shirts at night (when the real life temperatures plummeted). The outdoor shoot also garnered some unwanted attention: the fake blood makeup attracted both bees and wasps, the memory of which elicited groans and laughs from around the room.
Downrange makes unorthodox narrative choices by opening the film in media res. Kitamura explained that this was a deliberate decision. “One thing I don’t like about most horror movies,” Kitamura explained, “is when the first 15 minutes (sometimes 20, sometimes 30) is boring, meaningless conversation…[filled with] bad direction, bad acting. We made the decision: we’re not going to do that. So one of the first things Joey and I decided was to open the film when the tire goes boom. We open with a bang!” This, however, presents another challenge: how to introduce the characters without setting the scene? It is for this reason that the characters are strangers carpooling together; the introductions that follow the blow-out allows Downrange to establish relationships and create tension around how they will work together to survive.
Kitamura and O’Bryan also wanted to subvert expectations around preconceived expectations of who lives and who dies. Alexa Yeames (Sarah) believes that this requires audiences to pay closer attention: “You can’t just be a passive audience because you don’t know what’s going to happen next.” One thing audiences shouldn’t expect, however, is answers. Both Kitamura and the cast felt very strongly that the identity and motive of the sniper are best left unknown. Referencing classic 80s horror films like Duel and The Hitcher, Kitamura believes that leaving details about the villain unexplained makes it scarier. As Alexa stated: “It is closer to reality. There’s no bow at the end to explain why it happened or why it won’t happen to you.” Stephanie ventured further, suggesting that the film taps into a prevalent, topical concern for US viewers:
“That’s the great American fear – that people can pick you off for no rational reason. You go to the mall or school and that’s on your mind.”
So how does Kitamura feel now that his passion project is finally being screened for audiences? He and the cast are incredibly pleased with the finished product, calling it scary and thrilling.And even if audiences don’t like the film, Kitamura has faith in his ending. “The ending sells it. This is the ending that people will be talking about for years.”
*Portions of this interview have been condensed and paraphrased.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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