Interviews
[Sundance ’12] Interview: ‘Grabbers’ Filmmakers Jon Wright and Kevin Lehane
The Sundance Film Festival midnight movie Grabbers can claim at least one thing we’ve never seen before. There has never before been a movie where the secret to beating the monsters was to get totally drunk. Sure, Shaun of the Dead had heroes defeat zombies despite being drunk, but this is the first time it’s actually a strategy.
Irish writer Kevin Lehane and director Jon Wright made a film about bloodsucking aliens invading Ireland, and the local cops figure out if they’re drunk, the monsters won’t touch their blood. Partied out by the end of the week, Lehane and Wright chatted with me Wednesday afternoon over waters and Diet Cokes, but still a lively discussion about drinking, movie monsters and good CG. BD: Why didn’t anyone think of this sooner?
KL: Well, the way it came about is I was backpacking. I was backpacking in 2006 and I was traveling around the world and everywhere that I was heading to, I would get bitten by mosquitoes. It was getting a bit out of hand because I was just tearing myself alive with all these bites and bleeding. People were giving me advice to eat lots of marmite. I don’t know if you have that here, do you? Marmite or vegemite? It’s quite an acrid sort of spread that you have on toast. Apparently if you eat it, the vitamin B in your blood makes you inedible to mosquitoes. It’s an old wives’ tale, it’s an urban legend but I believed it. Then one night when I was having a drink in Aitutaki in the Cook Islands, I spotted a mosquito on my knuckle. I made a joke that I hope it would get drunk off my blood and die. It was that. The next morning I woke up with a hangover and mosquito bites and wrote in my travel journal “Get drunk to survive.” That’s where the idea came from.
BD: Why hasn’t anyone thought of that to fight vampires?
KL: Well, that was the thing. When I had that thought, I thought it would be quite good to do that with vampires, but I wanted to do a whole new monster. Yeah, the minute you come up with an idea like that you think somebody must’ve done that before and you start googling and trying to make sure that it hasn’t been done. I was shocked, and then I spent the whole time anticipating that a film would sneak up and just steal the idea.
BD: When you thought of calling them Grabbers, were you thinking of Graboids?
KL: No actually. Maybe it was in my subconscious but it didn’t come to me. I had forgotten that they actually called them that. Because they don’t really settle on calling them that. I think maybe the sequels do but there’s a conversation. No, Graboids didn’t reference for me. I wanted to sort of get around it by having one of the characters name the creatures. Therefore if it wasn’t cool, then just blame Paddy. He’s the one that came up with it. So they’ve got tentacles and a tongue that shoots out. You have to call these movies after the monster because that’s what they are.
BD: Do you just embrace the stereotype of drunken Irishmen?
JW: Well, its’ a stereotype for a reason in that Irish people do have a culture of drinking.
KL So do the Norwegians and the French and the Spaniards.
JW: Any culture.
KL: Especially the Americans. Americans drink more than Irish do.
JW: No, I don’t think that’s true.
KL: Of course they do. All their Bud Lites. Maybe there’s not as much alcohol in it, but.
JW: Yeah, there’s not [as much] alcohol in it. And it’s not so much the mad drunk. I think all cold countries have a drinking culture because it’s cold but the Irish have a different attitude to it. Like for example, on the film, there’d be crew members going out and getting really very, very drunk in the evening, like massively drunk and they’d turn up to set, they’d do a very good job, excellent job but they were hung over. The difference in the attitude was that’s not considered to be too big a deal amongst the Irish. They’re more permissive like that and I just think if you’re being honest, that’s part of Ireland. It can be a fun part as well as a negative.
KL: That’s why it’s based in Ireland because who else would think up that sort of scenario but the Irish, but it’s just having too much of a good thing. It just so happens that that’s how they come up with that solution. They’re not drunken characters. There’s only one drunk in the film. It’s just that they have to get drunk to survive and have too much of a good thing. It’s just being kind of ironic about it all.
JW: I mean, we tried to show both sides of it so you’ve got the alcoholic character who’s pretty miserable. So alcohol is bringing him nothing except sadness. On the other hand you’ve got the kind of, I’d like to see it as when they’re rolling about in the kitchen fighting the [monster], there’s a kind of joyful craziness to that stuff that is kind of saying this is a great life, isn’t it, really?
BD: How did you come up with the design of the Grabbers?
PW: Well, they kind of evolved. It started off Kevin had a notion, he described things within the script. I think the descriptions are fantastically evocative. They’re very unspecific. Medusa on a bad hair day and all this kind of stuff.
KL: Slimy black spidery mess.
PW: So we started with that which is fairly nonspecific. A ball of tentacles. That just evolved and we worked out the ecology of the Grabbers so that was quite a big thing for me. We wanted to know exactly how they lived on their home planet so that all of this has a kind of rigorous logic underpinning it. If you’re aware of that or not, I think maybe that just kind of percolates that you have a sense that this is being thought out and there’s a kind of logic to how they’re behaving. They’ve come to earth and they’re trying to work out what’s going on. What is a police chief? What should they eat, what shouldn’t they eat? Where should they lay their eggs? That’s all very considered and thought through. I suppose the design of the Grabbers partly came out of the fact that I knew we weren’t going to get a certificate PG, or a certificate where anyone could go. Because of the drinking and the swearing, it’s going to be a certain age and upwards. So I thought well, let’s put everything into the monsters that you don’t typically see in monsters. So they’ve got all these scatological references to the human body. They’re kind of reminiscent of assholes and cocks and vaginas. You kind of look at them and think that’s just revolting on so many levels, I don’t want that anywhere near me. Then of course we shove it into the actors’ face and we get right in their face. It’s just trying to be transgressive and sort of weird and have the monsters feel, whenever they ruck up, that you feel that they’re really just peculiar and strange and not something you want to be around.
KL: And yet very defined as well, like the fact that they’re aquatic. They only come up when it’s raining. They need water and they feed off blood and they lay their eggs on the beach. It just felt like if we could pin it all down almost like nature where turtles lay their eggs, they’re chasing the female and they present bait to lure the females out, then it all feels specific to Grabbers.
JW: Like it’s evolved. I suppose the other thing is I wanted a sense of intelligence. I wanted the alien to feel like it had a mind. Quite often in films they can feel a little bit mindless and that they’re doing things because it serves the plot. It’s more that they do. It’s trying to work out what it’s doing. It’s a very sneaky creature by nature, so part of the ecology was on the home planet there’s a creature that was 200 foot high that you could describe as vaguely looking like a stork. And it plunges down and plucks the Grabbers and eats them. It’s way, way bigger than the big grabber.
KL: That was not in the script.
JW: So they’re always sneaking about thinking about they don’t want to put themselves out and expose themselves too much because that’s not their nature. You look at the size of a grabber and what it can do to the police chief, it can just take the roof off the pub and just pluck everybody out and eat them like hors d’oeuvres but it doesn’t because that’s not how it operates. It wants to reach in through the backdoor and pluck somebody out without them knowing that it was doing that. So we’ve overthought it.
BD: How did you pull off CGI when most American CGI looks like crap?
KL: Paddy Eason and Nvizible.
JW: Yeah, Paddy Eason who’s our visual effects supervisor is a genius.
KL: We had no money as well, really small budget.
JW: Basically, there’s two reasons I think. Well, there’s lots of reasons but the company’s called Nvizible. They came on board and really bought into the film and it became a labor of love. Also, I insisted that Nvizible took the sole credit for the visual effects because I feel with a lot of modern movies, you go down and you get to the visual effects credits, there’s 10 companies, maybe more. 1000s of people. You’ve got no sense of who did what effect so you watch a film like Clash of the Titans and you think the Pegasus is amazing and that other thing is absolute horseh*t. But you don’t know, did D-neg do the Pegasus? You don’t know.
KL But this is an Nvizible movie.
JW: So Nvizible takes the sole credit so if someone watches Grabbers and they like the monsters, they like Nvizible and they like Paddy Eason. I felt that was one of the things that made the effects look good in District 9, I don’t know if this is true or not, but that Image Engine got the entire job. So it takes on a pride thing for them that they want to show what they can do. The other reason the effects are so good is we’re just at a different point in time with digital effects. They’re just hitting a point where you can do them differently and they are extremely photorealistic. What clicked for me was watching the making of Moon. I thought GERTY was a model, a built thing. When I saw the shots where GERTY was CG, I just did not know. It never occurred to me. And also in District 9, some of the close-ups of the aliens I really did not know whether they made a rubber physical alien that was very realistic or if they’d done that via CG. It turned out to be CG. So you just think okay, we’re at a different sort of point, and I could get very technical about it. There’s reasons.
BD: Does keeping it dark and rainy help? But District 9 was all daylight.
JW: It’s all single point light. So District 9 is all sunlit from one point. It’s a very bright sun and that helps.
KL: Get those hard shadows.
JW: You get hard shadows so that’s a reason why it’s very effective and Grabbers, when the grabber leaps on his face, we use 50% prosthetics so he has an actual rubber thing on his head that’s flailing about of its own accord.
KL: And they’re pulling at real tentacles.
JW: And then we add the CG tentacles to tracking markers and they flail about in a complementary way with the tentacles that are already flailing about but they look more alive. So you’re just trying to pull the trick off like in Jurassic Park.
KL: Which still holds up fantastically and that was CG.
JW: Well, it was a mix. Look at the tyrannosaur through the window and it’s a model, then you pan around and in the same shot it’s been changed to a CG. If you’re constantly flipping the technique, your mind stops being able to break it down, to deconstruct it.
BD: Another reason CG sucks is they show it full frontal. They never showed a model head on, they obscured it with camera angles and such. You should present CGI the same way.
JW: I met with John Landis before we shot Grabbers. I wrote him a letter and said, “Will you be an executive producer on the film?” because he was in the UK for some reason. He met with me and that was one bit of advice he gave me was never show all of your monster and try and keep it as shadowed as possible. I thought that was actually pretty good advice but then he’s very clever about monster movies I think.
JW: One thing we did which I don’t know if many films do is they presented the CG back to us and then we recut the film. Quite often the shots were a lot longer and what we were doing, and what I hope we’ve achieved, I don’t think we’ve fully achieved it. I think we’ve 98% or 95% achieved it, is showing it for long enough that you’re still believing it, it’s still real and then we’re away. So we’ve given you long enough to see it so it doesn’t feel choppy or too fast but not long enough for you to go, “Oh hold on, I can see how it was done.” For me there’s four shots that you can see how it was done. It does fall apart but the majority of it you can’t.
KL: At some point you have to stop teasing the audience. You do have to deliver so I think that we do that.
JW: It’s interesting because a lot of people think there’s a lot of the monster in the second half. There’s actually not. There’s actually compared to most films very, very few shots. It’s sort of a sleight of hand thing. We make you feel like you’re seeing the monster a lot when you’re actually not hardly seeing it at all. I’d like to take that forward when I do a big budget film to still do that. I say if, when.
JW: I think we’ve been a bit stupid as well because we’ve talked about our references too much. So people are going, “Oh, it’s Tremors” but it’s not really. It’s just influenced by those films.
KL: And the reason for drawing comparison to Tremors is because you can’t really call Tremors a horror film. It’s a monster movie and Grabbers is the same thing. That’s where we’re getting it from.
Eli Roth is a formative name in the “Splat Pack” of ultraviolent filmmakers who first came to fame during the 2000s.
Roth’s Cabin Fever was a great statement piece, but he’s managed to continually top himself with gory gems like Hostel, The Green Inferno, and Thanksgiving. Roth has always been a filmmaker who strives to push boundaries and embrace a passion for genre cinema.
His latest movie, Ice Cream Man, is a project that’s been 20 years in the making. It’s a twisted take on the Pied Piper parable that’s arguably the most gruesome film from Roth’s career and an exciting turning point.
To celebrate the gory film’s summer release, Eli Roth opens up about the luxury of shooting a horror film with hundreds of enthusiastic kids, bypassing the MPAA to deliver the most outrageous kills of his career, and why he intentionally avoided Weapons before filming.
BLOODY DISGUSTING: You’ve described Ice Cream Man as “The Birds but with children” and cited Who Can Kill a Child? as a reference point. Were there other “killer kid” movies that you’re pulling from for inspiration like Children of the Corn, the French film Them, or even Weapons?
ELI ROTH: Well, Weapons I purposely didn’t watch until after I was done with my cut because I had people on the crew that went to see it because I wanted to make sure that there was no crossover. I didn’t watch it until after I was done with the film, but The Children from 1980 was a big influence. That trailer scared me as a kid, watching the kids on the bus go through the gas and then turn into killer kids. When the girl killed her mom in the original Night of the Living Dead was a big reference point. But definitely The Birds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but also other movies like Bad News Bears and those early Amblin movies. Those coming-of-age films. There’s also a lot of references to Bird with the Crystal Plumage in there, too. It’s kind of a Pied Piper story, so that was really the starting point for it.
There must have been serious hurdles to not just filming a movie that involves so many children, but also in terms of its rating and censorship. Was there anything you shot that had to be cut or toned down?
ER: The whole reason I started The Horror Section was to completely bypass that system and go directly to the theaters. Now that Terrifier 3 kicked the door open for the rest of us and you can have an unrated movie go out in 2000 theaters, you know that fans want to go see those movies in theaters. Before, you could never release an unrated movie like this, but now after what Damien Leone did, you can. So I set up an independent studio, I went right to the theaters, I’m self-releasing it, and I didn’t even deal with the MPAA. I just made the movie the way I wanted to make it. We shot it, cut it, and we’re putting it out in the theaters raw and unfiltered.
Every movie I’ve ever made, at some point someone has said, “You have to take this out, or we’re not releasing the movie.” I just didn’t want to deal with that anymore. I’m just tired of it. I think they’re wrong. I think Terrifier 3 proved that they are all strong. In the past, I’ve been like, “I shouldn’t have taken that out. I shouldn’t have cut that down,” but you’re dealing with a corporation in a studio. That’s what they do. They’re so afraid, and it’s an abstract argument. There’s no proof that they’re right or that you’re right, but that’s where I know great horror lives. It’s got that bit of danger to it. You go, “You’re not supposed to do that,” “Should I be watching this?”
Even Evil Dead II, Faces of Death, or whatever it was when you get a tape. Whenever you’re going, “I shouldn’t watch this,” it becomes the most exciting kind of horror. Even The Ring. It’s got to be great. It’s got to be original. There has to be an incredible story that people have never seen before, but I faced no issues whatsoever other than my own budget. The whole purpose of starting my own studio is that I could take an idea like Ice Cream Man, that I’ve always wanted to do and that everyone told me I couldn’t, and just go for it.
On that note, there are so many amazing kills in this movie. What’s your favorite and which was the most challenging to pull off?
ER: There are a few, yeah. My original idea was the mother waking up and seeing her daughter just standing over her; she picks up a hacksaw and just cuts her head off. The dad wakes up, looks over, and the daughter is just smiling and cutting the head off and like, “Hi, Daddy.” Then the kid bashes his face in. So actually doing all that was extremely satisfying. There were a couple other ones that I don’t want to give away that really turned out great. I was just really lucky. I sat down with Steve Newburn at Applied Arts FX Studio. They’re incredible. I told them, “I want to do more kills. I want to basically beat every kill I’ve ever done and do more kills in this movie than all my other movies combined.” Adrian Moreau was incredibly genius. We did Thanksgiving together, and she did some very specific effects for me on this one. She won the Oscar for The Whale, so we had an incredibly talented team and just went for it. The kids in the movie, their parents are all horror movie fans, so we talked to them about everything.
Once you put the kids in the gore and in the makeup, they go right into it. They get it. They understand that this is like Halloween and pretend. There’s the bit where they’re pulling apart a body — they call it a “taffy pull” — we did this fake trailer, “The Piano Killer,” with Hailey Kittle. I also worked with her in Trick VR Treat, and she was in Thanksgiving. I said, “I’m going to drop a piano on you,” so we had her fake body and thought, “Let’s kill Hailey, and then we can use the body from “The Piano Killer” and pull it apart in Ice Cream Man. I recycled the same body parts.
It was unreal doing it all with the kids, though. You can’t believe what you’re watching, and the kids were having a great time. It was Christmas morning for them. Justin Harding, who was my Second Unit Director, his son Bowen is a baseball player. So it made sense to give Bowen the axe so that he could really give a good swing to cut Hailey in half. He is so good and so athletic, so he could really go for it. He’s just gleefully swinging the bat, and we’re just on the ground pumping blood at him. The kids were just laughing and having the time of their lives.
The main actors are so good, too. I really didn’t want “kid acting.” I wanted the same acting as when you’re watching Stranger Things or the ’70s Bad News Bears. These kids are real kids, and I didn’t want it to feel like movie dialogue. I wanted the kids to swear and talk the way that real 12-year-olds talk to each other and the way that bullies talked to me in the ’80s. I verified it with all the kids to know that this is exactly what the bullying in schools sounds like. This is how they’d talk and what they say when the adults, parents, and teachers aren’t around. I wanted it to feel naturalistic, and like you’ve just been dropped into this small town that has all this drama. Then you’re just with these kids, trying to survive this “kidpocalypse,” and trying to figure out why this is happening and how to get out of it.
I’m a huge fan of the Clint Howard Ice Cream Man from 1995. There’s also a great Tales from the Crypt episode with Bill Pullman and Brad Dourif that plays in this space. Why do you think there’s this ongoing connection between ice cream men and horror?
ER: It’s interesting; I’ve never seen the Clint Howard film. I’m certainly aware of it. But this all came about from just watching this ice cream man handing out ice cream. It was during the Cabin Fever press tour in 2003. I was just watching this ice cream man and thinking, “We just trust them.” It could be a serial killer, you know? What if they just rolled into town and poisoned the kids? I thought that might be too fucked up, but then I thought of it as if it’s the Pied Piper. There’s something with the music. Kids just want to run out into the street and buy ice cream when they hear that ice cream man music. It’s such deep programming. So what if that was used to turn the kids against their parents?
Having a new daughter myself — having a baby — all you want to do is protect them. And you know that no matter what you do, you can’t. The outside world is going to get to them somehow. You can prepare them, but you can’t fully protect them. Some evil force will get into their head, and so what if that was turned against you? This thing that you loved and put everything into now wants to kill you. It’s the most horrible thought as a parent. After 20 years, it was kind of great to go in and re-approach it from that direction.
But I think ice cream men just have this inherent trust behind them. You see them, and you trust them. They come into the neighborhood, feed the kids, and then they leave, and you have no idea who they really were. Sure, they were an ice cream man, but what were they like? They were wearing a white hat, and they drove an ice cream truck, but anyone can do that. It was such a perverse, sick thought. Like, “What if you turn Thanksgiving into something awful?”, “What if backpacking in Europe became a nightmare?”
That’s where great horror lives. It’s when you take something that’s seemingly innocent and then make it dark. “What if the kids are playing jump rope, but then they get turned, and they’re playing jump rope with guts?” At the beginning of the film, they’re playing “Pin the Tail on the Donkey,” but then it’s “Pin the Knife in the Teacher.” Or you’re playing little league baseball, but now you’re bashing your dad’s head in with the bat. It’s taking all the fun, innocent things from childhood and then twisting them with a horror spin.
Ice Cream Man is in theaters on August 7.
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