Interviews
‘Novocaine’ Directors and Star Jack Quaid on the Practical Gore Effects and Prosthetics [Interview]
Jack Quaid’s Nathan Caine becomes an unwitting superhero of sorts in action-comedy Novocaine, from directing duo Dan Berk and Robert Olsen (Significant Other, Villains). Or perhaps more accurately, Nate Caine sustains an insane amount of gruesome bodily damage, all in the pursuit of love.
In the film penned by Lars Jacobson, “When the girl of his dreams (Prey’s Amber Midthunder) is kidnapped, everyman Nate turns his inability to feel pain into an unexpected strength in his fight to get her back.”
That inability to feel pain yields no shortage of bone-crunching, ultra-violent carnage that induces laughs and sympathy pain in equal measure. It also leaves star Jack Quaid doused in blood and viscera yet again. The Boys, Scream, and Companion actor frequently finds himself coated in the red splatter thanks to his recent genre work, so much so that it does play a factor when reading scripts now. “It is a calculation now for sure,” Quaid says. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s a lot of fake blood. And I know what that means. I know the cleanup process. I’m shooting the final season of The Boys right now, and in my shower caddy is shaving cream. Not for shaving, just for taking the blood off because that’s what does it the most. Shaving cream and Head & Shoulders shampoo, for some reason, is the best to get fake blood out of it.”
It’s safe to say that the actor spent a lot of time cleaning off fake blood after shooting Novocaine; Nate’s injuries increase with alarming and steady speed throughout the action-comedy. Quaid is quick to praise his directors for their careful tracking of the elaborate physical trauma his character experiences, including a deep-fried hand. “I have to give so much credit to Dan and Bobby for that. They were constantly having discussions of like, ‘Okay, what would hurt him but not necessarily kill him immediately? What is the line of believability? I think they wrote a really good way of saving a lot of those major injuries for towards the end of the movie, where there’s not a lot Nate can do to come back from that.”
It wasn’t the visceral violence that spoke to Quaid, though, but the unique action angle and inspiration from a Blockbuster action sequel. “I just love that I read the script, and I immediately gravitated towards it because I’m such a fan of action movies and I have been for such a long time. I had a religious awakening watching John Wick 4; I remember just thinking Keanu Reeves deserves an Oscar. I believe that. His physicality is unbelievable. He’s doing it in a way that’s specific to John Wick and not any other character he’s played in his action pantheon. And he’s pulling off all these insane moves while still staying in character, and it’s just so inspiring and cool to watch.”
Of course, John Wick feels pain. That Nate can’t might’ve let Quaid explore the comedic side of Novocaine’s premise, but not without working against everything he’s been trained to do when it comes to stunts and action choreography, which is selling the impact of every punch thrown.
Quaid explains, “Actually it was scary at first, to be honest. Because it’s something that they drill into you. As soon as I was doing Hunger Games, my first major movie, I remember doing stunts for that. They really try to say, ‘Hey, sell the pain.’ Because that’s what also makes the audience believe that a hit is real when it’s fake, the reaction afterward. I realized that okay, I have to be really good at selling like my head hit when like I get punched, it needs to feel real. First of all trying to fight like the guy was a challenge at first because if I get punched in the face, my head’s going to move but I just can’t react. But then I realized it’s, without getting too hoity-toity about it, it’s kind of like what silent film stars used to do. Like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, where their whole shtick kind of was crazy things happening around them and happening to them, but with no real reaction from them.”
Whereas Quaid’s job was to tell the lack of pain, prosthetics designer Clinton Aiden Smith, from COSMESIS advanced prosthetic studio, had the task of creating realistic injuries that continue to wreak havoc on Nate’s body. Olsen told Bloody Disgusting, “Clinton was unbelievable. He was just this, he was an absolute wrecking crew, the whole team over there at Cosmesis. From the very beginning of the prep process, he walked us through it. We would have wound meetings where we would go in, and he would pitch us things, and he would show us these graphic images of real wounds that he’d be like, ‘I found this image online. You can see the woman’s arm has snapped in half.‘“
“He seemed to enjoy it a lot more than he should,“ Berk jokes. “We can imagine what a giant gash on someone’s arm looks like. We don’t need to see 12 references from crime scene photos.”
Olsen continues, “We were all just like, whoa. Looks good. You’ve got the thumbs up from us. Go ahead. So, they did this incredible thing where he built this wound story if you will, where we would walk into the room, and he would have 12 heads of perfectly 3D printed Jack Quaid heads laid along. And here’s the first stage after the first fight, here he is after the second fight, here he is after the third. We would go through with him and be like, ‘Okay, this stage is too similar to this stage, so what can we push off from that fight and put to the next one? Or what can we pull up into this fight from the next one? This one is lacking. So, you could really step back and look at the wound progression from this 10,000 feet up kind of view. That was really cool.“
“He was quite committed to the realism of the wounds, and sometimes we had to pull him back where it’s like, okay, he’d be hemorrhaging blood from that wound, but we can’t really have that happen now. We don’t want the costume to be affected, then we’d have to be tracking that continuity for the rest of it. It was this little push-and-pull, all amicable, of course, but it was always a little bit of just a calculation of the production needs versus the want for the wounds and lacerations to feel real or as close to it as we could get,“ Berk adds.
Because of this, Novocaine was filmed more in sequence than usual. Quaid explains, “That was also just for a practical reason, a lot of the injuries you see on me are done practically. We had an amazing team led by Clinton, our special effects supervisor. He’s the guy; he had to basically take a 3D scan of me, and they printed it out. It’s this green bald bust of me that’s hairless. It’s so odd. It’s basically the first thing I saw coming into South Africa; it was just this very uncanny image of me. But that’s so they could when I wasn’t there, apply all the different wounds to that bust and make sure they worked with the dimensions of my face. Then so many makeup tests for not only the wounds but the tattoos that I have. I just became a canvas, essentially. But I loved every second of it, and it looks really good in the movie. I love that most of it is practical; that’s the stuff that I love.”
Novocaine is now playing in theaters.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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