Interviews
[SXSW Interview] Fede Alvarez Talks ‘Don’t Breathe’ and What’s Going On With ‘Evil Dead 2!’
Director Fede Alvarez (Evil Dead) blew audiences away at the 30th Annual SXSW Music, Film and Interactive Conferences and Festivals with his latest film Don’t Breathe (read my review), which was the festival’s first Midnighter. I was lucky enough to sit down with Alvarez and chat about the film (and maybe a little bit about Evil Dead as well). Check out what he had to say! You can also check out my interview with the films stars Dylan Minnette and Daniel Zovatto here.
Bloody Disgusting: Hi! Nice to meet you.
Fede Alvarez: Nice to meet you as well.
BD: First I just want to say that I loved the film, and I was very happy that I didn’t know anything about it going in.
FA: Thank you I’m glad you watched it! Yeah this was interesting. Nobody knew shit about this movie and you never know what people are going to expect. With this, my goal was that no one would expect anything.
BD I definitely think that’s the best way to watch the movie though. I feel like nowadays trailers spoil so many things that to go in blind is nearly impossible so this was a real treat. But moving on to the film itself: What made you want to write this as a follow-up to Evil Dead? What gave you the idea?
FA: It was just me and Rodo, my co-writer on Evil Dead and this one too. We’re friends and we were just driving from Comic-Con in San Diego back to Los Angeles just trying to think about what we were going to do next. We knew- we kind of imposed some rules based on our experience with Evil Dead.
1) We knew we didn’t want it to be a remake. We wanted to do something fresh and original and new.
2) Because we used so much blood on Evil Dead. It was so much about that, you know? It was for shock value. So we said “Okay, let’s do a movie with no blood.” That was our rule: to not make a bloody film.
3) Let’s make it about suspense. Evil Dead didn’t have a lot of room for suspense so we wanted to make this one all about suspense and not related to the supernatural at all. That was and still is the trend for thrillers and horror right now. It’s always supernatural. We can tell great stories in the world that are not supernatural. If you go back to classics like Psycho, there’s nothing supernatural in there. There’s definitely enough real scary stuff in the world to make a movie out of.
So that was definitely what we wanted to do.
BD: I mean slashers are my favorite sub-genre so I like the reality of the situation.
FA: Cool
BD: So I may be wrong, but I feel like I read an interview after Evil Dead with Jane Levy where someone asked her if she would do that again and she kind of skirted around the topic. You put her through the wringer on Evil Dead so it must have been tough on her. Did it take convincing on your part to get her back for this film because she gets put through the wringer again.
FA: She said yes right away. She had read the script as soon as it was done because we are good friends, but no one had made an offer to her yet. So I called her out of the blue one day and asked her if she wanted to make this movie and she was like “Fuck yeah, let’s do it!” But I think once she got on set and she started to realize what we were doing she asked herself ” Shit, why did I get myself into this mess again?” I think she did an amazing job though. I was watching her on the screen and I was so proud of her. She really delivers.
BD: Yeah she’s two for two with you. I watched her on Suburgatory when it was on and she’s definitely got range, what with being able to do comedy and horror so successfully.
FA: Yeah, definitely.
BD: So was this an easier shoot for you? Or was it more stressful?
FA: [hesitates] No shoot is easy and if it is then you’re probably making a shitty movie. Like when you watch Evil Dead and you see all of those effects you know that it’s not easy to do and it pays off in that way for the audience. Don’t Breathe had a lot of that too where it wasn’t an easy shoot at all. That doesn’t mean that it’s a negative experience or anything like that. Some of the best movies ever made were very hard to do and have nightmarish stories about how they made them but the audience doesn’t care. They want to see a good movie. That’s all they care about. I don’t mind making things even harder in order to give the audience a good experience.
From Left, Fede Alvarez, Rodo Sayagues, Daniel Zovatto and Dylan Minnette
BD: That’s good that you have your audience in mind when you’re making a movie. I feel like it can be easy to forget about them during production.
FA: You can’t make excuses when you’re making a movie. You can’t say “oh we didn’t have enough budget to do this” or “we couldn’t do this because we didn’t have time.” The audience doesn’t want to hear that. You get the shot. You get the moment. You want them to see something unique. Don’t Breathe definitely had many challenges though.
BD: I imagine one of those challenges was telling a story with so little dialogue. What did that script look like? Was it a really short script?
FA: No, it’s probably a 90-page script. It was always the idea that were were going to do something that was almost a completely silent film. It was ambitious though. At first we didn’t want to have any music, but changed our minds. And I think that Roque Baños did a great job with the score. It’s very simple with great moments here and there to hit you with tones but he never overdoes it. Wait, we were talking about the script weren’t we?
BD: Yes.
FA: Right. Well it was a proper script. Everything that you see in the movie was actually in the script. Most of the film’s beats are definitely in there.
BD: Did you have a lot of blocking instructions in the script? Or is that something you thought ahead and brought to the shoot?
FA: Before shooting we sat down at my house with our production designer Naaman Marshall, cinematographer Pedro Luque and costume designer Carlos Rosario and put a big map on the table and drew the house. We made it like a chess game and put the characters on the map and moved them around as we were reading the script to illustrate what we wanted to happen.
BD: So basically it was your version of storyboarding?
FA: Yes, exactly.
BD: I’m getting the cue to wrap up, and I have to ask that question you’re probably tired of answering.
FA: [Looks down] Oh, man. Don’t even start.
BD: Are there any plans for Evil Dead 2?
FA: [Laughs] There are no current plans. We’re not talking about it with Sam [Raimi] at all. Like I know right now it’s all about the show and everybody is very happy with that and that’s it.
BD: What’s next for you then?
FA: I don’t know.
BD: Nothing?
FA: I have no clue, man. There are probably things but I just finished this movie. Literally just finished it a few weeks ago and the way I work is I don’t pay attention to any other projects while I’m making a movie. I think I owe that to the audience to really give them the feeling that they’re being taken care of and that I really care about every moment in my film. That’s why I don’t start thinking about doing anything else until I’m done with what I’m working on. Now that we’re finished I’ll go back to Los Angeles and start thinking about what I’m going to do next.
BD: Good! Well again, I think it’s a great film and I’m really excited for people to see it.
FA: Thank you so much.
Check out Don’t Breathe when it hits theaters on August 26, 2016!
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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