Set to have its World Premiere at this week’s Tribeca Film Festival, producer Ant Timpson (The ABCs of Death, Housebound) gets behind the camera for the absolutely insane Come to Daddy, which stars Elijah Wood as a man who, after receiving a cryptic letter from his estranged father, travels to his dad’s oceanfront home for what he hopes will be a positive experience. If only he’d known the dark truth about his old man beforehand.
While Come to Daddy delivers gleeful blood splatter and an onslaught of dark comedy, the film was birthed from the real-life loss of Timpson’s father.
“After my father died, his partner thought it’d be a good idea to bring the body back after embalmment to spend some time with the grieving family,” Timpson explains in this exclusive interview.
“I ended up living five or so days in his house with his corpse. I wore his clothes and talked to his body at night. It was very cathartic but also rather spooky at times.”
“During the day some weird things happened and then at night, I had some very vivid and unusual dreams. So time passes and as I’m still trying to process his death – an idea came to me that was personal enough to shake me out this self-imposed creative cocoon I was under and felt like something I could share with him.”
He later added: “They say you should make films for yourself first and foremost but with this one, I was making it for my father. That was the driving philosophy and that it would turn out to be a movie that we would’ve watched together back in the day.”
As personal and cathartic as Come to Daddy is to Ant, he also promises that it’s actually “a really fun and wild thriller.” He ain’t exaggerating. Here, he talks about balancing the chaos with the laughs.
“When I was much younger, I used to love the fuck-you nature of violence in films – stuff that thrived in its sheer anarchy and misanthropy – but as I got older, that stuff became rather boring to watch and the illicit thrills had diminished. So our adage, when it came to violence, was that less-is-more [and we] tried to adhere to that.
“Whatever small amount we had, I wanted to execute it well and make it work in context. But more importantly, maintain the tonal balance so it doesn’t feel like certain scenes are from another planet. So that’s why there’s always some dark humor undercutting the violence – even when it gets really violent – because we’ve established the film’s humor early on and it’s a natural extension of that.”
“I’m fascinated by scenes in films where they get it tonally wrong with violence – it tends to derail everything,” he adds. “You just can’t afford to fuck that stuff up. There’s a great book I read decades ago called Laughing / Screaming about the complex relationship between humor and horror – and so I went into this well prepared to not balls it up. Hopefully, audiences agree that we got it right.”
Rounding back to the death of his father, Ant speaks to the pressure of not only delivering on his directorial debut, but making his father proud.
“So coming back to your query about intimidation and nervousness, you could say I had more than a little ring rust and a healthy dose of self-doubt going into the production on this film. Pushing me was the impetus of my father dying and having the obvious realization that we get one shot at this thing called life and we better not leave any shit on the table. So yes, nervous but also completely thankful that I surrounded myself with talented folks and just grateful beyond all belief. I felt enormous pressure to deliver something good, not just for my pops but also for the people who believed in the project.”
Here are the Tribeca screening times for Come to Daddy:
- Thursday, 4/25 @ 9:00pm – SVA Theater 2 Beatrice (World Premiere)
- Friday, 4/26 @ 8:45pm – Regal Cinemas Battery Park 11-4
- Saturday, 4/27 @ 9:15pm – Village East Cinema-05
- Friday, 5/3 @ 9:45pm – Regal Cinemas Battery Park 11-10
Come to Daddy, directed by Ant Timpson, written by Toby Harvard. Produced by Mette-Marie Kongsved, Laura Tunstall, Daniel Bekerman, Katie Holly, Emma Slade. (USA, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland) Starring: Elijah Wood, Stephen McHattie, Martin Donovan, Michael Smiley, Madeleine Sami, Simon Chin.
