Interviews
[Interview] Director Steven Kostanski On the Practical Gore Effects in ‘Leprechaun Returns’
The Leprechaun is back in Leprechaun Returns, a coproduction of Lionsgate and Syfy. You can see the unedited version on home video and VOD as of today, but even if you watch it on the Syfy channel, you won’t be missing any gore, says director Steven Kostanski.
“Actually, it wasn’t even the kills that got cut out,” Kostanski said. “It was more just pacing stuff. I think most of that stays intact.”
One of those gore effects that Kostanski is most proud of is a body split in half. “It’s one of those gags as an effects artist, you always want to build some version of that,” he said. “The way that he’s bisected, from my horror movie knowledge, I’ve ever only seen in 13 Ghosts. So I wanted to push that as far as I could and really show the full effect. I feel a lot of movies kind of cheap out. They only show the first part of the split or the second part, but I feel like you see the whole thing happen. It’s pretty great.”
Leprechaun Returns is a practical effects movie. It’s not without any CGI moments, but Kostanski pushed for practical wherever possible.
“It’s all practical,” he said.
“For all the gags, the only stuff that had to be VFX was just cleanup. So rod removal, because we had to have people puppeteering the stuff. Just taking them out of the shots was the only VFX. The mandate on the movie was if we can do it practically, we do it practically. There’s a whole fire sequence at the end that has a lot of on-set fire. The actresses were really running around in this flaming house. We did not cheap out on doing things for real in camera. It just always looks better.”
So the producers of Leprechaun Returns are heroes for backing a practical effects movie, and Kostanski appreciates them.
“To be fair, a lot of problems are introduced when you decide to do things practically,” he said. “It ultimately does look better but it’s the kind of thing where we’re taking a risk of it not working and ending up having to do it in VFX anyway. So I understand the producer hesitation but the producers on this were really brave and accommodating. I feel like they really busted their butts to make sure I could get as much practically as possible. We defaulted to VFX only when we absolutely had to, when we just didn’t have a choice. I really appreciated that, them having my back on that stuff because it just helps with the overall vibe of the movie and makes it so much more convincing to me when you actually have stuff happening on screen for real, not just pasting it in after the fact.”
Some of the Leprechaun (Linden Porco)’s magical powers may suggest CGI, but even they were conceived practically.
“One of my favorite things in the movie is a melting Leprechaun,” Kostanski said.
“I really wanted to make this puppet version of him because I feel like puppets don’t get enough play in effects and movies anymore. Building the melting Leprechaun puppet was really cool. My effects friend Chris Nash built all the mechanics for that. I think it turned out really well.”
Even a scene with multiple mini-Leprechauns was as practical as could be. They’re still all played by Porco, and there is, in fact, only one Linden Porco.
“We shot Linden on blue screen,” Kostanski said. “There’s one shot where we have a tiny puppet that we use, a little mechanical puppet that one of the characters is holding. We did have mini Leprechauns on set as a lighting reference for the VFX guys. It is practical, just with compositing to achieve it. It’s all Linden. He had a full day of being thrown around on blue screen. It was a real testament to his professionalism. He was roped up on wires being thrown around and doing all this crazy stuff. He endured hours and hours of it. He’s a real trooper.”
Leprechaun Returns is out today!
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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