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
‘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.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.