Interviews
[SXSW Interview] The Cast & Crew of ‘Most Likely to Murder’ Discuss Douchebag Characters and Raunchy Women
Writing duo Dan Gregor and Doug Mand made a name for themselves working on the hit CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother. Since that series concluded in 2014, they have contributed to the CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which stars (and was co-created by) Gregor’s wife Rachel Bloom, who also has a role in their debut film Most Likely to Murder (my review). The film had its world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival on March 12, 2018. I had the pleasure of speaking with Gregor, Mand, Bloom and the film’s lead Adam Pally (Happy Endings) about the film.
Most Likely to Murder sees Billy (Adam Pally, Happy Endings, The Mindy Project), the former most popular guy in high school, return home for Thanksgiving to win back his former flame Kara (Rachel Bloom, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend). After she rebuffs his advances and reveals that she is now involved with former high school weirdo Lowell (Vincent Kartheiser, Mad Men), Billy goes on a bender and thinks he witnesses Lowell murder his mother (they are across-the-street neighbors). With his best friend Duane (played gamely by Mand), he goes on an investigation to prove to Kara that Lowell is a murderer.
The film is first and foremost a comedy, so you might think that it isn’t the type of film that Bloody Disgusting should be covering and you would be mostly right, but I chose to cover the film at SXSW because it shares some DNA with film noir and classic murder mysteries (Rear Window and Disturbia were big inspirations, according to Gregor and Mand).Well, that and I really wanted to interview Rachel Bloom because I stan Crazy Ex-Girlfriend…so here we are.
Story Origins
The idea for Most Likely to Murder had been brewing in the minds of Mand and Gregor ever since How I Met Your Mother ended, but it began with a very simple premise: “We really started because we were obsessed with trying to come up with a story around finding your old VHS tapes with your old pornos,” Gregor said. “It was just something that made us laugh and the inability to find a VHS player nowadays was truly the only aspect of the story we had. We quickly realized there was no movie there. But that emotion of having sort of nostalgia that you are desperate to re-live but unable to actually get back became this sort of emotional cornerstone for trying to tell a story.”
That initial idea did make it into the film, as Billy comes across a VHS tape in his bedroom that contains footage of him having sex with a former classmate (this plays a part in one of the more successful running gags in the film), but the overall plot of the film evolved into something more capable of supporting a full-length feature.
After some more brainstorming, Gregor and Mand widened the scope of their film. Gregor elaborated: “We were like ‘Okay, it’s Thanksgiving weekend, but then how do we make that a more intense, interesting thing so that those emotions are coming through in a much more heightened way?’ That become sort of the puzzle to solve.” Thus, a murder mystery was born.
An Unlikable Protagonist
Billy is a bit of a douchebag, so finding a way to make the audience care about him became one of the bigger challenges for the film. “We wanted him to be a dick and unlikable,” Mand said, “and then we talked with Adam about it a lot. I know one of [his] father’s biggest notes, or at least what he told me, is that we had to make sure that Adam is likable.”
Pally laughed at that, replying: “My dad gives notes a lot. He’s a doctor. But I was excited to play a character like this. I like those characters that are on the border of unlikable and likable because I find that most [real] people are on that border. If you can convey that one way or the other and really make the audience go a second deeper to think about whether or not they like this person then you’ve done your job. Because then you can laugh with them and you can be angry with them. It feels like you get to know them a little more.”
As I stated in my review, your affinity for the film will be based on how funny you find Billy. The film never once tries to excuse any of his past or present behavior, but relating with Billy is a lot to ask of your audience. Luckily, Gregor and Mand’s screenplay has fun with Billy’s dual role of the hero and the villain. “I love that he’s both the hero and the villain of this movie,” Bloom said, “because it gives me something very realistic to play against. As opposed to being the charmingly boyish protagonist who ultimately gets the girl, he’s an entitled ass who actually needs to be taken down.”
Female Raunchiness
Pally may be the star of the film, but Bloom gets her fair share of material to work with as Kara, the straight woman to Billy’s crazy ex-boyfriend (sorry). Not being strangers to using sexual politics in comedy, Gregor and Mand’s script gives Kara one exquisite moment of revenge against the man that jilted her with one raunchy threat involving female ejaculation. It is one of the biggest laughs in the film and not just because it is a woman being crude. “She’s a raunchy girl who fucked the wrong guy,” Bloom said, “and sure there are some things that are gratuitously raunchy that aren’t grounded, you know? Just being like ‘pussy, pussy, pussy’ for no reason is pointless…but saying “I’m going to squirt all over his face” to stick it to someone? It’s raunchy but you’re basing it off of people you know.”
That element of realism is vital to the success of the film and it often prevents the characters from becoming caricatures. “As long as you humanize every character,” Gregor said, “then you’ll be fine. That to me is the biggest thing that I always hope we approach it with. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend does this very well. You just have fully fleshed characters, and you have fun with all of them. Just don’t shortchange your characters.”
You can find out if the film is successful in that regard when Lionsgate’s Studio L releases Most Likely to Murder on VOD on May 1, 2018.
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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