Interviews
‘Shell’ – Max Minghella Reveals Surprising Cinematic Influences in His “Nostalgic Homage” [Interview]
Director Max Minghella (Spiral: From the Book of Saw, Horns) wears his cinematic influences on his sleeves with sophomore feature effort Shell, a body horror dark comedy written by Jack Stanley (The Passenger).
Elisabeth Moss (The Invisible Man) finds herself embarking on a scary new beauty treatment as aging actor Samantha Lake. She quickly befriends Zoe Shannon (Kate Hudson), CEO of health & wellness company Shell. When their patients start to go missing, including starlet Chloe Benson (Kaia Gerber), Samantha realizes Shell may be protecting a monstrous secret.
The escapist love letter to ’90s cinema leans into dark comedy, but embraces everything from Paul Verhoeven to Soapdish, Species, and Sliver, if that’s any indicator of genre range here. Bloody Disgusting spoke with Minghella, who made his feature directorial debut with 2018’s Teen Spirit, about the genre-bender out of TIFF, where the film had its World Premiere.
The filmmaker revealed more about his influences, but mores o his salute to the quickly disappearing middle ground in film.
Between the body horror turned full-blown horror, Hudson’s femme fatale, and the ’90s style humor, Shell exists at a distinct intersection of genres that don’t typically mix. Minghella uses the perils of aging plot as a vehicle to pay tribute to the films that shaped him as a filmmaker.
“Jack’s script was really inspiring to my imagination, and yet I think the film that we’ve made probably bears quite little resemblance to that original draft,” Minghella says when asked how much of the eclectic genre mix and tone was in the script. “But all of those things you’re speaking to, I think were triggered in my brain as I started to read it. I thought a lot about a moment in film history that I feel like is lost a little bit. I think nowadays we tend to make movies either on a giant tent pole scale to sell toys or we make these much smaller movies for prestige audiences. And the middle ground, it has almost completely disappeared.
“So, while you just mentioned quite a wide variety of genres in Soapdish and Species and Sliver, they all stem from a period of time when there were these movie star-driven genre movies, which were really also designed as popcorn entertainment. Yet if you look at the credits on those films, they were shot by some of the greatest cinematographers in the world and greatest craftsmen in the world. Our ambition with Shell was to deliver something that is completely unpretentious but made by, I’m completely excluding myself from this, but made by some people who know what they’re doing and have put some thought and care into it.”
Shell cycles through genres with ease, largely due to the heavy emphasis on comedy as a grounding force.
Max Minghella and Elisabeth Moss on the set of ‘Shell’ Courtesy of Range, Blank Tape, Love & Squalor and Dark Castle Entertainment
Minghella explains how he found the balance between horror and comedy. “Honestly, with hopefully a sense of fun and playfulness. Drew Daniels, my cinematographer, and I really were determined to make the movie as practically as possible, to limit ourselves to the resources we would’ve had 30 or 40 years ago and not go beyond them. That just required a lot of inventiveness and almost Roger Corman-like approach to certain things. We just had a lot of fun.
He continues, “We really did want the film to feel mischievous. And the balance of comedy and horror was innate actually just to the agenda of the film and how we all saw it. I had to do remarkably little explaining to people of what the film might look like or what the tone of the film was. It seemed that people understood quite quickly what we were going for just from reading the script. I always felt like we were all making the same movie, which is not to do with me, that’s just to do with I think how maybe loud some of the intentionality is on the page.”
Also contributing to the infectious sense of fun is a vampy performance by Kate Hudson, channeling Death Becomes Her‘s Isabella Rossellini and Basic Instinct‘s Sharon Stone for her villainous role. Hudson understood what Minghella was going for here, and the director credits her for pulling off a Herculean task.
“It’s so important to me in all movies that the villain, it speaks truths because it’s so much more interesting and compelling to me if there’s real conflict for the protagonist of the story,” he reflects. “I agree that Zoe is incredibly cynical, and much more cynical than I am, but there is painful truth sometimes in what she says. The reality is that Zoe Shannon is a task for an actor, it’s a massive part, and it requires a level of magnetism and charisma and most of all I think self-confidence that I’m not really convinced you can teach somebody. I think you have to innately have those qualities. Kate’s the only person I’ve met actually who has that level of self-possession and ease in her own body.
“I couldn’t really think of anybody else that would seem quite as fun. I’m so relieved that she said yes. I don’t think the movie would work without her. I think no matter how hard we all tried. That performance is so central to the story making sense. She delivers something quite extraordinary. And Zoe also speaks in her own melody and cadence. There’s almost a musicality to how she speaks. Kate understood that inherently, it was never something we actually talked about. She just really knew how to say it all. It’s a thrill to watch her play this part.”
With Verhoeven’s output at the forefront of Minghella’s influences, among a few aforementioned ’90s titles, were there any deeper cuts or less obvious film references for Minghella? The filmmaker’s answer was surprising.
“No, there isn’t, although I will mention a very surreal thing that happened,” Minghella tells us, “which is that about three or four years into working on this project, I discovered a Michael Crichton film called Looker. I’d never seen Looker before. But there are quite a lot of parallels between these two films, especially in the aesthetics of these two movies. So, that was quite a surreal discovery for me. In fact, the opening sequence of our movie is almost identical to a sequence that happens in Looker. Yet, I was not conscious of the other movie when I wrote it. So that is one of those beautiful discoveries, and a rather fun one.”
He continues, “Then there’s a movie called Look Who’s Talking, which was a pivotal movie to me when I was growing up. It’s not a horror film, but the Este Haim character in Shell is almost directly lifted from Look Who’s Talking. Actually, quite a lot of the framing in especially the first act of Shell is pulled directly from the Amy Heckerling movie. So there’s probably 50 to 60 things that I looked at, and it really is, I mean, I know people hate this sometimes, but it is a shamelessly nostalgic homage film.”
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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