Interviews
‘Ash’ Filmmaker Flying Lotus Lives for Practical Gore Gags and Survival Horror Games [Interview]
Eiza González‘s Riya awakens on a distant planet with no memory and her crewmates slaughtered in Ash, the trippy sci-fi movie from director Flying Lotus (Kuso, V/H/S/99) and writer Jonni Remmler.
Flying Lotus doesn’t just helm the survival horror movie that’s releasing in theaters on March 21; the Grammy Award Winner also composed the score. Music, of course, is important to the filmmaker. In a recent chat with Bloody Disgusting, he revealed the unique role music played during production.
“The music was the most fun part of the process,” Flying Lotus tells us. “Of the whole thing, doing the music was great because I was in my little cubicle and riffing with the sound design department. They were in a little suite right next door to mine, so I got to just geek out with them over the sound through post-production. I would be writing a tune or a scene, and then I’d be like, ‘Yo if there’s a way you can make the medbot noises in this key or make the song in this key, it’ll match when I cut to this part over here.’ We were just going off because they’re musicians too.
“We were just having a blast making all types of noises, experimenting, and letting the alarms of the facility bleed into the music on time. What’s the BPM of the alarms? All right, well, I’ll match that, and then we’ll be able to transition all crazy. So, there’s a lot of sonic Easter eggs in the movie.”
It’s unusual for filmmakers to play music on set, but that’s exactly what Flying Lotus did. Why? The filmmaker answers immediately, “Absolute PSYOP, that’s what it is.”
“Playing music on set, I can manipulate the crew. It’s like an energetic thing. You need to move faster; it’s a morale booster. If people are having a rough time, I can play some tunes that everyone knows. I got that DJ sensibility so I can come through and be like, ‘Oh, I know this one is liked universally; I can play this tune, and it’ll go off. Everybody will work faster, and it’ll pick up the vibe.’ Those types of things were so key on our set because you could tell that there were a lot of music heads on set; our crew was really young for the most part. Obviously, if they were working on my movie, they were trying to have some fun; everyone was in the headspace to experiment, so I think it was a welcomed vibe.
“We also used it to set the tone for a scene sometimes. There were some times where we’re about to get into something really serious and heady, and I can just play some stuff before everyone just kind of starts talking like this,” Flying Lotus quiets his voice to a whisper. “That’s where we’re at. And it’s doing a lot for the gig; no one seems to realize how it affects them because I play some techno, and that’s like, what, 120? That’s the heartbeat, that’s the pulse, we’re moving, we’re going. So, yeah, let’s play more music on set.”
If music was one of the most invaluable tools on set, the other, perhaps, would be Flying Lotus’s love of survival horror video games. While the filmmaker pulled from a variety of influences, it was video games that inspired Ash‘s surreal, imaginative world.
Flying Lotus explains, “The one thing that people don’t ask me about, which I wish they would, is video games. Because to me, that’s such a huge inspiration, a super huge influence thing. There was another game that I thought of recently, Death Stranding. That game was pretty impactful. The Silent Hill series, Dead Space, and Resident Evil, I threw all those games into this movie. Resident Evil all day. All day. That was it right there. I was like, ‘I hope y’all get this.'”
In addition to scoring and directing Ash, Flying Lotus also appears on screen in a supporting role as chill crewmate Davis. It’s a role that the filmmaker was extremely hesitant to take on, though it wound up a beneficial move for production.
He explains, “I really did not want to be in this movie. I didn’t want to do it; it was one of the last decisions I made before we started because we were filming in New Zealand, and I was talking with Eric Andre; I really wanted him to do it. Because I thought that’d be really trippy if I have him do it, and approach it a little bit more on the serious side even. But we couldn’t make it work. It just got down to the wire. Casting found maybe two Black actors that could do it. I was like, ‘Man, ah, shit. All right. Okay, fine.’
“During the whole pre-production, everyone was like, ‘Yeah, I bet you’re going to end up doing the role.’ Then I said, ‘Yep, well, suit me up, y’all. I’m in it.’ But it was a lot of fun, and it was really helpful for me, too. It helped build camaraderie with the cast; just being in a couple of scenes with them really helped us to get comfortable. The scenes that I’m in, those were pretty much some of the first scenes we filmed for the movie, so it helped us to get to know each other and ease into the crazy parts that we had to do later.“
It’s clear, both in speaking with Flying Lotus and in seeing his films to date, that the artist is a massive fan of all things horror, especially practical effects-driven gore. That makes him acutely aware of audience expectations, and that’s a key part that drives his approach to the horror.
“Well, you know how it is,” he tells me. “When you make a horror film, there’s almost a promise you make for the audience members that you have to deliver on. Even though people want it- sometimes they’ll turn away- they’re ready. They’re bloodthirsty. Life is too crazy, they need a little release, and they want to see some shit they ain’t seen before. I believe it in my heart, and I think it’s always so much fun when you’re making these gags. That’s part of the reason why I do it, it just makes me so happy. I’m just always cracking up on set when these things are happening, just watching people squirm and making things a little more uncomfortable. It’s just so good.”
“There was a moment I just thought of when there’s a character that, he pulls Riya’s hair out in a scene, and there’s a clump of hair in his hand and he’s screaming with the clump of hair in his hand. We’re filming it, and I tell him, ‘All right, bro, eat it.’ You could just hear the crew gasp. It was so good. He ate it. He wasn’t ready for it, but you could see there was this moment, and he just took that like, ‘Fuck, I’m about to do this.’ It was super, super disgusting, a bloody hair clump, swallow it. And we had this really cool up-the-nose gag and a lot of it was actually practical with a dummy. We were filming that stuff with a dummy, and people were grossed out. Oh my Gosh. I was just cracking up. I live for that stuff; I live for it. If it makes me feel weird, then I know it’s worth it because I’ve seen a lot of these movies.”
So, is it safe to say that horror is the genre that speaks to Flying Lotus the most?
“It absolutely does. It does. I don’t know whose quote this is, but I always think of it: horror is the genre where anything can happen, and that’s true. I love that about it, I think it’s such an inspiring and reliable genre. I think horror films will be here forever, there’s not going to be a trend or the burnout that some people are predicting.”
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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