In director Joe Begos’s latest, VFW, a group of friends’ plan to celebrate a birthday is interrupted by the arrival of a young girl, Lizard (Sierra McCormick). She’s stolen the drug stash of a local kingpin, who unleashes his entire army of drug-addicted mutant punks to get it back. As the mutants descend on the local VFW post, they’ll find that the aged veterans inside are a lot more capable and dangerous than they expected.
Stephen Lang (Tombstone, Don’t Breathe) leads the cast as VFW post owner Fred Parras. Two of Fred’s closest friends and allies are Walter Reed and Lou Clayton, played by Martin Kove (The Karate Kid series) and William Sadler (Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight), respectively. The trio of veteran actors and their director explain the guts and glory that went into the making of VFW, in an interview with Bloody-Disgusting.
“It’s a good story. The bottom line was these people were accomplished people, and you don’t get a chance to work with a lot of New York people who are accomplished and have a background in the New York stage. I mean, we all have done movies and stuff, but it’s a big treat to work with that kind of foundation because all those people could improvise. You can do all kinds of stuff, and it’s very fulfilling for an actor,” Kove shares on what drew him to the project.
When it came to creating these characters, improv proved to be essential. “Yeah, we made it our own,” Sadler explains. “I realize it’d be fun to go through the script and compare the script to the movie now. And Joe was great. He was very good about the changes that you wanted to make. If you had a strong opinion about your character, Joe was great about, ‘Try it. Go, do that. Let’s do that.’”
Kove, specifically, had strong opinions about his character that dramatically altered Lou from script to screen. “I wrote the whole character because he was weak. I didn’t want to play a weak guy,” Kove shares. Spoiler warning for those that haven’t seen the film yet: “I wanted to go down like a hero, because I couldn’t facilitate anything. They were going to handle it as the way the script was structured, so that’s fine. So, when I go out, I want to go out trying like The Wild Bunch and go down in a blaze of glory.” Kove’s input transformed Lou from a coward to heroic.
The on-screen chemistry and camaraderie among the cast came easy. Sadler elaborates, “The behind the scenes stuff. We were sitting in our chairs waiting to do shots and things, that was some of the best. There were stories; we would go around, and around, and around. Steve Lang has done 800,000 projects, he’s got great stories, and you have great stories. You really kind of felt like we were in the trenches. That became more important than the movie, was how much we loved each other.”
Lang has built a lengthy, enduring career on playing tough men. On what drew him to VFW, he shares, “In a way, it’s a matter of personal fulfillment for me to be able to kind of add another chapter to my own experience of playing military men. As long as it’s new, as long as it’s different, as long as I’m learning something from it. And so, that was a great attraction. Also, the concept of shooting a film quickly with practical effects was very attractive to me, too, because I’ve been immersed in the world of Avatar for a long time. And as much as, as deeply, as I love the world of Avatar, it’s very refreshing sometimes to get out and do something where there’s an actual schedule where you’re shooting eight pages a day, and you’re working with practical effects. Hit that mark, and the blood’s going to spurt; it’s good, it’s good. So, it was refreshing for me.”
To emphasize the heavy usage of practical effects and blood spurting, Lang describes Begos’ directing in a scene, “The one where Billy [Sadler] has a freaking concrete saw, and Joe goes into the middle of that, kind of with plastic wrap all over himself, and the camera. When he finally calls cut, he’s got this shit-eating grin on his face, and he’s completely covered in blood. Then says we had to cut because the lens is completely covered in blood! But, he was clearly having the time of his life, so all I’m saying is the energy was good.”
Begos adds, “It’s almost like you’re a character because the camera does have to be a character. And I like being there in the shit, and being in the middle of all this explosive blood going on. They’re doing all the fun stuff, like getting covered in blood, and I want to be there shooting it. Because I like shooting, but I want to be covered in blood; I want to be in the action.”
It’s that evident passion for horror and practical effects-heavy gore that drives Begos forward in an extremely time-limited production. Aside from spending his days covered in fake blood, he recounts one of the trickier effects of the film, “There were quite a few. A character gets a flagpole through their head; it was complicated to figure how we were going to do that. That was probably the biggest one, and then there was the opening scene where a body explodes — trying to figure out how we were going to get that effect. I have a lot of experience with effects, and I’ve worked with the same team, so we have a shorthand. I’ve found that if you can figure out the more complicated aspects of the effect, and you know who the actor is going to be, so you can plan and sculpt and mold beforehand. Because I always want to do practical stuff. I want to avoid anything CG if I can, especially on a low budget.”
VFW is in limited theaters and on VOD platforms February 14th.
