Interviews
‘Tone-Deaf’ Director Richard Bates Jr. on His Social Slasher That Demands to Be Heard! [SXSW]
This weekend, Richard Bates Jr., director of Excision, Suburban Gothic and Trash Fire, will see his horror-thriller Tone-Deaf hold its World Premiere at the ongoing SXSW Film Festival.
Bloody Disgusting talks to Bates Jr. about the film that follows millennial Olive (Amanda Crew) who, after losing her job and imploding her latest dysfunctional relationship, leaves the city for a weekend of peace in the country, only to discover the shockingly dark underbelly of rural America.
“Tone-Deaf was initially inspired by Norman Rockwell’s painting, The Connoisseur, which many believe sets out to satirize the artwork of Jackson Pollock,” Bates Jr. reveals in an exclusive pre-SXSW interview. “A gentleman wearing traditional business attire stands alone, inside an art gallery, staring off into a void of abstract expressionism. But the closer this director looks, the more I see a portrait of a frightened and confused old man at odds with modernization.”
In the film, Amanda Crew’s Olive rents an eccentric, ornate country house from Harvey (Robert Patrick), an old-fashioned widower who’s struggling to hide his psychopathic tendencies.
“With Harvey, the most important thing from the script stage onward was not to give him some specific motivation, directly interwoven into the mechanics of the plot,” he explains. “I wanted to make it entirely character-based, without a practical sense of purpose that’s easy to wrap your head around. Hate and anger are interwoven into the fabric of who Harvey is, quietly festering inside him for many years as a result of the values impressed upon him during the time in which he was raised. At a point of desperation, these repressed emotions rise to the surface and result in him bringing to life a “John Wayne fantasy” from childhood – his own distorted spin on the archetypal “last stand.”
Furthering the background of the antagonist, Bates Jr. says he’d “call it a Trump era film,” while further explaining:
“Harvey hates the youth generation for being self-obsessed, but it’s his preoccupation with him himself and his place in the world that leads to his unraveling.
“Olive wants to live in a better world but she’s not really doing anything about it,” he added. Harvey’s plans backfire by giving her the ultimate growing experience – opening her eyes to horrific realities she’s only seen or read about from behind the safety of a screen.
“Olive exists in her own personal hell but doesn’t fully realize she’s in a horror movie until the third act.
“And like so many others her initial response is one of disillusionment… until she decides to do something about it. Olive reaches the conclusion that it’s time for Harvey to get outta the way and stop hogging the screen – this is her story moving forward.”
Bates Jr. adds this interesting bit: “I made a concentrated effort to show the hypocritical aspects of both the hero and villain – even poking fun at myself. We’re all hypocrites in one form or another.”
Harvey is meant to be a villain that’s representative of the times, Bates Jr. continues: “Tone-Deaf is the first time I’ve directly broken the wall, making the audience a part of the movie. In the digital age, everyone has a platform – it made sense to me that the characters should have one too. I really wanted to make Harvey a villain representative of the times, forcing his beliefs and opinions on the viewer. He demands to be heard!”
As for what genre Tone-Deaf touches, he’d call it a slasher as “most all of my horror references were slasher films.” He explains how it all ties to what he hopes viewers take away from the film.
“Whereas my previous films deal with very distinct characters and the details of their emotional traumas, with Tone-Deaf I felt it necessary to take a different approach. Fascinated by the troubling times in which we live, and how they’ll be perceived in the context of history, I decided to take a broader, more observational approach. And in doing so, the film serves dual purposes.
“First and foremost, the film exists to entertain and provide social catharsis for modern viewers. I created a heightened reality in order to hold a magnifying glass up to various aspects of the current generational divide, while still providing a sense of midnight movie escapism.
“Secondly, the movie exists as a cultural artifact – something to be re-discovered and gain perspective from, as it relates to a small but important piece of a much larger puzzle.”
Tone-Deaf premieres this Sunday at SXSW and will be released by Saban Films later this year.
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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