Interviews
[SXSW Interview] Roundtable Discussion With the Cast and Crew of ‘I Am Not a Serial Killer!’
I Am Not a Serial Killer (my review), based on Dan Wells’ novel of the same name, had its world premiere at the 30th Annual SXSW Music, Film and Interactive Conferences and Festivals on Sunday March 13, and we were fortunate enough to talk with several members of the film’s cast and crew. We spent about 25 minutes discussing the film and basically just shooting the shit so here is what all of them had to say about their film,* which had just finished production 8 days before the premiere. Members of the roundtable included:
- Director Billy O’Brien (Isolation, The Hybrid)
- Actor Christopher Lloyd (Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit)
- Actor Max Records (Where the Wild Things Are)
- Author Dan Wells
*Interview has been edited to remove spoilers concerning specific plot details.
Bloody Disgusting: Billy, what brought you on to the project? Were you a big fan of the book?
Billy O’Brien: Yes. We found the book when we were looking for projects back in 2009. It was serendipitous. I found the paperback on a shelf and absolutely loved it. Then I contacted Dan and that’s pretty much how it started.
BD: And you co-wrote the film, too?
O’Brien: Yeah.
BD: So I haven’t read the book-
Dan Wells: I forgive you
[everyone laughs]BD: I wasn’t expecting as much comedy in the film, which I liked. I’m not sure if y’all have seen John Dies at the End–
O’Brien: I haven’t.
BD: Well it reminded me a lot of the tone of that film. It’s got a very similar dark tone with gallows humor. Was that humor present when you were writing it?
O’Brien: It’s actually there in the book.
BD: Perfect! I’ll do my homework next time before I ask a stupid question.
O’Brien: Yeah it’s dark and funny. Two of the touchstones for me.
Wells: Part of the issue of telling a story about a sociopath is that he cannot identify with the audience, so it becomes hard for the audience to identify with him. So making him funny was one of the little hacks that helped overcome that. John is hilarious while also being kind of awful and dark and hard to understand. So you like him even because of that.
BD: Max that’s actually brings me to you. John is a very lovable sociopath. Sort of a sociopath with a heart of gold. Did you do any research on sociopathy before taking on the role?
Max Records: Honestly, no. Though that might have been totally inconsiderate and a bad move on my part. But no for me the process was just me deliberately putting myself in emotional distress and see what happens.
BD: Christopher, your exact role is very ambiguous for quite a while until a certain plot development happens. Did you find it difficult in the beginning scenes to hide your what character’s true intent is eventually revealed to be?
Christopher Lloyd: Not really. I just played him pretty straightforwardly.
Records: What I like is that whenever the big reveal happens then the film could become this cool coming-of-age story where our characters go fishing.
BD: That would have made for a great movie. Anyway, the shoot looked pretty cold.
Records: Yes! You’re right.
BD: How was the shoot? It was in Minnesota right?
Records: Yeah, Minnesota.
O’Brien: Let’s put it this way: the people in The Revenant are pussies compared to us.
[everyone laughs]O’Brien: That was our joke though. They had $130 million and we had $1.3 million and our hot water budget was proportional to our budget. It was very cold though. It was -20° C
Records: In Fahrenheit the cold season was like 15° F or less every day.
O’Brien: Yeah so we had Christopher Lloyd out there in the snow on the coldest night.
Lloyd: That poor guy who had to lie on the ground though. He had to lie on his back for hours in the cold.
Records: Oh yeah! That poor dead guy on the ground.
O’Brien: Well I must have a sadistic streak because I found it great fun. Since I come from Ireland, I’m used to a lot of rain. To be in small town America in the middle of the most beautiful winter, filming on 16mm, it was a dream come true for me. We had fun on the shoot. Max loved it!
Records: I mean yeah but it’s also really challenging and hard.
O’Brien: But it was so cold that in the scene where we used a phone box [booth, for Americans], it was so cold that if you took your glove off for a second and touched the metal of your camera it sent a shock from your front to your elbow and it around five minutes for you to even get your arm back to normal again. But things like that. The cold will kill you if you’re not moving around. Your feet just turn into blocks of ice. It’s debilitating.
BD: Yeah I can imagine.
O’Brien: Dan Wells had the best head gear ever.
Wells: The night that we filmed the truck scene I had a ski mask that looks like Cthulu. It’s covered in tentacles and stuff at the mouth and everyone loved that. I was the only one with a warm face on the whole shoot.
O’Brien: I remember one time my jeans had frozen into tubes because they had gotten a little wet for some reason. I thought I had a copper wire or something in my pants, and it was just that my jeans were frozen. But using 16mm and filming it in the cold like that gives the film a real “authentic-ness” I think.
BD: I actually want to come back to the 16mm, but first I have to mention the poor guy lying on the ground in the snow. I interviewed the director of another film showing here at the fest and he had a similar story about a guy who had to lie on the ground all day covered in sticky fake blood.
O’Brien: [sarcastically] Oh no! Stickiness!
BD: Stickiness is my least favorite tactile sensation. Like, I would love to get butchered in a horror movie but I can’t handle being covered in sticky fake blood.
[everyone laughs]BD: So from anyone here, was there a particular moment or scene where you were just like “Fuuuuuck this. I’m done?”
Records: We had a lot of them, actually!
O’Brien: The worst thing for me was the frozen lake scene because I imagine that as a really overcast, cloudy day. For some reason, that day was really hot and the ice on the lake was melting. We shot the scene from very far away so I kept having to run to the middle of the lake to direct the actors and then run all the way back to the shore to film. It was horrible but beautiful at the same time.
BD: It is a very pretty movie. Going back to the 16mm, I think the grainy look gives it sort of a dirty feel were you as an audience member feel dirty while watching the movie.
O’Brien: Really?
Records: [tauntingly] Ooooooooh.
O’Brien: That’s a first. Were you at the screening last night?
BD: No, I watched a screener.
O’Brien: Oh you should come to a screening. Seeing that image blown up on the big screen? Everyone last night was saying how beautiful it looks.
BD: Oh no! You misunderstand. I’m not saying that the film looks dirty. I think the film looks very pretty, but the textures of the grain give it an unclean and dirty feel.
O’Brien: Oh okay I’ll buy that.
Wells: I think you’re absolutely right. A big part of that is Virginia, Minnesota. The town is run by steam power, which is all of those billows of steam coming up out of the ground everywhere. It gave it this kind of apocalyptic, grungy look.
Records: That town was wicked.
BD: Was the intent always to shoot the film in 16mm?
O’Brien: Oh yes.
BD: What was the motivation behind that?
O’Brien: Because we grew up on American films. Digital is a bit antiseptic and it gets mushy. We wanted to make a strong film that felt a sense of place about itself. There is something organic about film. There is something organic about the town. We even recorded the music analog. Plus, I just love film. So that was always the intent.
BD: Christopher and Max, how did you two come on the project? Did y’all have to audition together?
Records: We were actually cast years apart.
O’Brien: Max was cast when he was 12. He is 18 now. We spend six-and-a-half years getting financing for this film. I made a short with Max in 2009 before Where the Wild Things Are came out and knew I had to work with him again. Then we watched Where the Wild Things Are and really knew. We just had to get financing and wait for him to get older. It all worked out and was meant to be.
Records: Yeah I couldn’t have played this role when I was that young. I needed to be a bit older. This role required a lot.
BD: Well you did a lot in Where the Wild Things Are.
Records: I did, but that was also a four-month shoot and a huge laborious process.
O’Brien: And you had a Revenant-style budget.
Records: Yes! Something like that. But even if I was 15 I think the set regulations would have prevented me from doing much.
O’Brien: Yeah we call them the “child catchers” because they come on set to yank child actors out of there to follow regulations.
BD: So you were 17 when you filmed this?
Records: 17 when we shot. Yeah. I got emancipated from my parents so I could be there independently.
O’Brien: That sounds so intense. I always think of the Civil War when I think of emancipation.
Records: I mean I still live with my parents. It was just a work thing.
BD: Christopher, did they pitch it to you?
Lloyd: I don’t know if “pitch” is the right word. They sent me the script-
O’Brien: And I’m not good at pitching.
Lloyd: I read it and wanted to do it. I also just really liked the character. It wasn’t like anything I had ever done before. So that appealed to me. Well, working appeals to me.
[everyone laughs]BD: What is the release plan for the film?
O’Brien: Well we just finished 8 days ago. We’re here at SXSW and we’re very interested in buyers. We’re hoping to secure an American distributor and we’ll talk to them about their release package and see what the options are.
BD: And now with things like Netflix there are plenty of options.
O’Brien: But this is a film with a lot of elements, so we need people like you to tell us what kind of film this is. We’re not really a “horror” film per se, we’re a lot of things.
BD: I feel like genre films with comedic elements can be a hard sell. Writing for a horror site, I love gallows humor, but mainstream audiences don’t always seem to get it.
O’Brien: And I like films that don’t fit in a neat little box. They’re not just one thing, and that’s what I Am Not a Serial Killer is. I completely understand what you’re saying, but I just hope that people seem to like the film and want the story to continue.
BD: I’ve talked to several people who saw the screening last night and they all seem to like it quite a bit.
O’Brien: Cool. Well it’s original and very different, you know?
BD: Right. You can’t really pigeonhole the movie. It doesn’t fit into just one genre.
O’Brien: I think we were even told yesterday that it was Donnie Darko meets Brick.
BD: That is an accurate description. I believe what I put in my review was John Dies at the End with a touch of Jeepers Creepers.
O’Brien: I vaguely remember Jeepers Creepers.
BD: I only mentioned it because of the villain. Anyway, are there any other stories anyone wants to tell before I get pushed out of here?
Records: Billy does.
O’Brien: What?
Records: Spirit in the Sky.
O’Brien: Oh! Yes. We learned while filming that the second most popular song to play at funerals is “Spirit in the Sky,” so the fact that we include it in a film that is centered around a family that own a funeral home-
Records: There’s going to be two morticians watching the film who will be really excited about that.
O’Brien: We’ll have to come up with another one for the sequel.
BD: Is there a plan for more of them? I mean, there are a few more books in the series.
Wells: There are five books published. I’m writing the sixth one right now. I was in the process of writing number five while we were filming and we filmed that super cold freezing midnight scene and Chris said “Never write a scene like that again!” So [sarcastically] book five is set in the summer in Texas. Book six will be in Tahiti. But yes there are more books but it all depends on how successful the movie is.
O’Brien: You know how it is: if I killed off every character and the film was a huge success then they would find a way to bring them all back.
BD: So assuming the movie is a success, is there interest between all of you to do another one?
O’Brien: Well I haven’t read the sequels because I didn’t want to read them during the editing process of this one so that I wouldn’t try to plant clues for sequels. But yeah we’d love to do another one because there’s plenty of material there.
Wells: One of the things that concerned me was the character of Brooke. Because she’s here but she’s not really a big part of this story. But she becomes a huge part of the story, arguable the second biggest character after John, later in the series. So I was just sweating that casting and when we finally met Lucy I fell in love with her. And Max too of course!
O’Brien: Oh Max played John perfectly.
BD: I agree, and this is clearly a credit to you Dan, since you wrote him, but film is littered with annoying teenagers and here we have a sociopathic teenager who is not annoying. It’s a testament to the film and how unique it is. But I’m getting the wrap-up wave over there so I’ve got to head out. It was great talking to all of you!
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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