Interviews
Stephen Lang, William Sadler, Martin Kove and Director Joe Begos Talk the Guts and Glory of ‘VFW’ [Interview]
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.
Exclusives
‘Tarot’ Filmmakers Spenser Cohen & Anna Halberg on Practical Creature Effects and ‘Insidious’ Inspirations
An evil curse gets awakened in Screen Gems horror movie Tarot when a group of friends recklessly ignore a sacred rule: never use someone else’s deck. Writers/Directors Spenser Cohen & Anna Halberg unleash a variety of Tarot card-inspired entities on the group through practical effects, and create an unexpected connection to Insidious along the way.
The film comes exclusively to movie theaters on May 3, 2024.
Bloody Disgusting spoke with Cohen and Halberg ahead of Tarot‘s release, where the pair shared more about the film’s practical effects-driven horrors and revealed how Tarot drew from Insidious in a specific way.
To start, though, the filmmakers reveal just how closely their horror movie sticks to the source novel Horrorscope by Nicholas Adams. The short answer is, well, it doesn’t at all!
Cohen explains, “It’s so different. We never even read the book and took nothing from the book. The only thing, the studio had a title that they liked, and so that’s why there was an association. Then we changed the title. So, now there’s literally zero connection to the book.“
“Sony had come to us wanting to make a horror movie about astrology, but there’s nothing that’s inherently scary to us about Zodiac signs. So, we came up with the idea of combining tarot readings and tarot cards with astrology, and that’s what ended up becoming the movie. There’s such incredible iconography in these cards that we really had a plethora of amazing characters to choose from,” Halberg adds.
Adain Bradley ‘Grant’ and Jacob Batalon ‘Paxton’ in Screen Gems TAROT
With a group of seven friends, expect to see their fates sealed by a number of cards. In other words, expect to see a wide variety of Tarot-inspired creatures tormenting the protagonists. The filmmakers stressed the importance of practical effects for their creatures.
Cohen tells us, “From the get-go, we said every creature is going to be practical. We were thinking of [David] Cronenberg, of Alien and The Thing, and we want our actors responding to real things, not a tennis ball. It always just looks better. You get better performances. With the designs themselves, if you look at the tarot cards and these specific characters, there’s nothing inherently terrifying about them, even though we associate the cards with being supernatural and terrifying. And [it’s] why we partnered with Trevor [Henderson], who was the only designer we met with. We were like, this is our guy because he has this ability to make the familiar feel unnatural.
“His designs are really grounded. I am sure you’ve seen a lot of his stuff where it’s like a hallway, and there’s something there, and something’s off about it, but it really feels like it’s in the space. We knew that he has a special brain for creating unique creatures, and he hadn’t done a movie, which is just shocking to us. Then, we knew that in order to pull that off, we would need a design team with equal skill. That was Dan Martin and his amazing team who worked hand in hand with Trevor to bring those to life.”
Larsen Thompson ‘Elise’ in Screen Gems TAROT
Great designs and practical effects are one thing, but it also falls to the performers to infuse these monsters with personality to make them memorable. That was also at the forefront of the filmmakers’ minds.
“In order for the creatures to translate, underneath all the prosthetics, you have to have great actors,” Cohen confirms. “We met with a lot of people. We were looking for people who were talking to us about the psychology and the movement and how they could move in a way that we hadn’t seen before or incorporate dance. We were looking for those outliers, and basically, everyone we hired approached the part as if there were no makeup or prosthetics. It’s like, ‘I am the Magician, so this is what I want to do. I’m going to have a limp. My body’s going to do this. I feel like my head is hunched.’ And we would watch these actors just embody these roles. It was really just picking great people, honestly. It’s hard to act through prosthetics and create emotion and fear and other things. You have to have an incredible control to be able to do that.”
Halberg elaborates,” Even though we enhanced some of the creatures with visual effects, we didn’t want to rely on that. So we needed people, like Spenser said, who each brought their own unique feel to these characters. They were just as important as all of the other actors in the movie and are so crucial to making sure that these sequences are scary and believable.”
Humberly González ‘Madeline’ in Screen Gems TAROT
One of the many Tarot creatures in the film is the Magician, who comes with an original song by the film’s composer, Joseph Bishara. While Bishara has delivered no shortage of great contemporary horror scores, including The Conjuring and Malignant, horror fans are likely more familiar with Bishara as the Lipstick Demon in the Insidious franchise. Cohen and Halberg can be counted among Insidious fans, so much so that they wanted an original song from the Lipstick Demon himself.
They explain, “We actually, in prep, we called Joe, and we said, ‘Hey, we’re going to do some kind of an old-timey song there.’ We knew something creepy, very Shining-esque. Then we had the idea to do a song called ‘I Saw You’ to be a pun on that whole thing. And actually use saws as the instrument. We found these YouTube videos, and our DP, I think, Elie [Smolkin] had found these videos of someone playing a saw. We were like, that’s terrifying.
“So we called Joe, and we said, ‘You know Tiptoe through the Tulips, how that’s like in Insidious?’ That’s the thing you leave the theater thinking about, and it gets under your skin. We were like, ‘Can you do that for us with an original song?’ He said yes. What you hear in the movie is basically what he played for us the first time. He was just like, ‘I have an idea. I’ll talk to you guys in a week.’ And then that was what we heard, and it was amazing.”
With so many entities and horror sequences, Halberg can’t pick a favorite. Instead, she offers one last tease, “I hope people come away with the realization that each of the sequences is so unique and different, and that each of the creatures is so special because we took a lot of time trying to craft each of these kills or scares to be their own thing and to feel different.
“Hopefully everybody can choose their own favorite.”
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