Interviews
10 Things We Learned On the Set Of “From Dusk Till Dawn!”
Back in May, Robert Rodriguez’s new(ish) television network El Rey treated Bloody-Disgusting to a day on the set of the From Dusk Till Dawn TV series. Filming took place in a private studio in Austin, TX, and the episode that I was able to see shooting was Episode 207, titled “Bring Me The Head Of Santánico Pandemonium.” I, unfortunately, had not watched a single episode of the show so I spent the night before the visit binging the entire first season. I really love my job.
After arriving on set, I was ushered along with the rest of the press to the area where filming was happening. It had been raining most of the week (we had some sort of strange monsoon season here in Austin that month) so shooting the scene was delayed a little. While we all waited for the crew to set up the scene, we were able to talk to Jeff Fahey, who plays the Gecko brothers’ Uncle Eddie, a new character in the second season. As Fahey finished up answering our questions, we were called back to the set.
The scene being filmed was a fight scene between newly transformed Culebra Richie Gecko (Zane Holtz), Santánico Pandemonium (Eiza González) and The Regulator (new cast member Danny Trejo). Unfortunately, all of the filming involved stunt doubles, so we didn’t get to see the actual actors in action. That being said, it was quite nerve-wracking watching them try to get the fight choreography just right before the squibs went off, for if it went wrong they would have to take the time to clean up before they could shoot the scene again. I have a lot of respect for stunt actors, because they put in a lot of hard work without much of the credit.
Once the scene wrapped, we were able to grab lunch with the entire cast and crew of From Dusk Till Dawn and have a sort of casual interview with the cast members, including Eiza González, Zane Holtz, DJ Cotrona (Seth Gecko) & Danny Trejo. It was a refreshing change of scenery, as interviews are typically a bit more formal. With this setting, we basically got to go on a group date with the cast. Below are some of the best pieces of information we found out while on the set!*
*Some of the following quotes also come from my interview with additional cast members Madison Davenport (Kate Fuller), Brandon Soo Hoo (Scott Fuller), Jake Busey (Professor Tanner/Sex Machine), Wilmer Valderrama (Carlos), Robert Rodriguez and showrunner Carlos Coto at the From Dusk Till Dawn press conference at the ATX Television Festival on June 7th, 2015.
1. There Will Be A Lot More Action & Gore
It’s no secret that the first season of From Dusk Till Dawn took a few episodes to really get going (they didn’t arrive at the Titty Twister until the end of episode 5), so now that we’ve reached the end of the story that the movie told, the writers can really branch out with new stories and action set pieces. In Danny Trejo’s own words: “It takes four Bs to make a good show: Babes, bombs, bullets and blood. We’ve got all of it.” If that isn’t enough to sell you, I don’t know what will!
2. It’s The “Official” Sequel To The Movie
The second season pretty much ended where the movie ended, albeit with more people left alive (Richie, Santánico, Scott, etc.). There isn’t a blueprint for the season anymore and the writers had to come up with completely new material for the story. “Everything is a surprise because there’s nothing to go off of anymore…it definitely feels like the sequel” Holtz said. I asked Robert Rodriguez if he viewed the second season as an official sequel to the movie, he said “the first season was about re-telling the movie in a new way in order to open up the story to new possibilities for future seasons…in the movie we killed off pretty much everyone, but we changed that for the show so that we could take these characters on a new journey. This is where the fun really begins.”
3. Expect The Unexpected
Mexican actress Eiza González (who was in full makeup as the vampire version of Santánico when I interviewed her) was extremely excited about this second season.”Fans are going to be very excited…..it goes in a direction that I wasn’t expecting, and I don’t think the audience will expect it either,” she said.
4. Sex Machine/Professor Tanner (Jake Busey) Will Be Back!
I was a little confused when I saw Jake Busey at the press conference, considering his character died at the end of the first season at the hands of Gonzalez (Jesse Garcia). “We don’t do interviews without Jake Busey,” joked Davenport (Kate). While Busey could not detail the specifics of his return, he did mention that “death is definitely something that is open to interpretation on this show.”
5. Santánico Will Be An Even Bigger Badass
“Santánico gets much more baddass this season…she gets taken out of the [Titty] Twister for the first time in centuries….we get to learn a lot about her backstory,” explained González. Since she is paired with Richie, there will probably be plenty of mayhem that they get themselves into this season.
6. Richie Will Learn How To Be A Culebra
“You’ll see Richie struggling with the pros and cons of being a Culebra…he still kind of has rules and morals about who he will kill,” Holtz said. Santánico is “coaching me on the lifestyle of being a Culebra…she’s on sort of a revenge path this season and using me to help her achieve that goal. She teaches me how these Culebra figureheads all interact and operate.”
7. Danny Trejo’s “The Regulator” Will Be A Force To Be Reckoned With
The Regulator was a role that Rodriguez wrote specifically for Trejo. “I regulate, I don’t negotiate,” Trejo said on his new character. “When The Regulator is after you, just pack your bags because you’re going home…The fact that he came back from the dead makes him a little more than Dog the Bounty Hunter.” Surely this character can’t be invincible, though. On his character’s weakness, Trejo did let us in on this little secret: “You can’t kill him unless you kill him with his own gun.”
From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series, for El Rey Network and Miramax. Danny Trejo as The Regulator.
8. Uncle Eddie Will Play An Integral Role
Jeff Fahey’s Uncle Eddie is a new character this season, and might be stirring up some trouble for the brothers. “Uncle Eddie raised the brothers when their father passed away,” Fahey said. “He’s a little misunderstood by elements of the law.” There is a rift between the brothers this season, since they were separated in the finale of season one. “The brothers are only complete with Uncle Eddie. Without me, they are only part of the whole,” Fahey said. “It’s an intricate character within the arc of this season.”
9. Practical Jokes On Set Were Common
After recounting a sequence where Cotrona screwed up a shot where he and Davenport were supposed to have been sprayed with blood (he ducked out of the shot at the last second, leaving Davenport to be the only one sprayed), they got it right the second time and decided to walk to the convenience store across the street (still covered in fake blood), while Rodriguez followed them with a camera. They completely freaked out the clerk, who thought they had just come in from murdering somebody (they later came in and told him it was fake blood).
10. Machete Kills In Space Is Definitely Happening!
Trejo had to be rushed back to the set to continue filming, but I managed to squeeze in a last-minute question regarding the second Machete sequel. When asked about the status of the film, Trejo said “We have got Machete in Space in the works! It’s going to be different…something that you’ve never seen…It will definitely be in space though…James Bond went to space? Machete changes it.” Word on the street is that they will be filming later this year, though this was left unconfirmed by Trejo.
“From Dusk Till Dawn” premieres on Tuesday August 25th on El Rey Network, but is currently available from many OnDemand providers.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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