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.”
Nothing is the same when two crewmates return to shore in Rose of Nevada, the latest by Enys Men filmmaker Mark Jenkin.
Time and reality blur for stars George Mackay (Wolf, 1917) and Callum Turner (Green Room, “Neuromancer”) in the hallucinatory time travel mystery releasing in New York and Los Angeles theaters on June 19, 2026.
But this isn’t your standard time travel movie.
Rose of Nevada bends time and genre in its exploration of Cornish identity and community, upending the lives of Nick (MacKay) and Liam (Turner). There’s a listless, dreamy quality to the time travel, and for inspired reason: Jenkin approaches it like a haunting.
While time travel was on his mind early in the writing process, Jenkin’s partner and collaborator asked a question that unlocked Rose of Nevada and inspired the filmmaker.
Jenkin explains, “I remember saying to Mary [Woodvine], my partner, who’s in the film, I said to her, ‘God, it really seems like I’ve fallen into this thing of either making films about ghosts or films about time travel,’ and then she said to me, ‘Yeah, but aren’t all ghost stories just time travel films, and aren’t all time travel films just ghost stories?’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, great. So I’m not making two types of films. I’m actually always making one type of film.’ But that was ultimately liberating because I thought there’s a nice gap or a crossover in the perception of genres, there’s a lot of room to play and to be free within that.”
“Once I’d abandoned the idea that I was going to master quantum physics in any academic sense,” the filmmaker continues, “It was incredibly freeing because I thought, ‘Well, I can just set my own rules here,’ and it really doesn’t matter what the rules are as long as you stick to them. You can’t bend them for the sake of the plot or for the sake of a character arc or something. You have to establish those rules upfront and stick to them, which made me really think I’ve got to limit the time travel element. This film can’t be about time travel.“
Bearing the brunt of the time travel disruption is Mackay’s Nick, a man struggling to support his family before the ill-fated voyage upends his entire world. It’s the type of role that was an easy yes for the actor, simply because of the filmmaker behind it.
“I saw Bait at the cinema when it was first out a few years ago and was so struck by it,” Mackay tells BD. “I just hadn’t seen a film like it. I want to work with the best directors. I want to work with the best directors and people who have a singular vision. As an actor, the process of work is almost my biggest draw, as well as what a story’s saying, but I think you learn by doing, and if I can do my bit in as many different ways as possible. The physicality and the discipline of Mark’s filmmaking, how that is so entwined in the DNA of the film, and therefore in the way that I work within it, that was the biggest draw. I’m just a fan of Mark’s. I was just very pleased to be involved.”
That reflects in Rose of Nevada‘s unique casting; Mackay initially was eyed for Liam.
“When I first got the call to meet Mark at the audition stage,” Mackay said, “We didn’t wind up reading scenes, but they said, ‘There’s a project. There are two roles in it that you could be right for, and Mark is leaning towards you for Liam.’ So, I had a look at Liam, Callum’s role, and had my interpretation of the script ready to talk about it and what I thought that character was, who he was, and how I’m thinking about how I might inhabit that or what I saw in him. And when we met, we didn’t talk about the film at all. We spoke about everything else. But following that meeting, I got the message, said, ‘Mark would like you to be part of the film, but he thinks you’re definitely more of a Nick,’ which I think I just may be a complete sheep because I went, ‘Of course I’m Nick.’
Mackay continued, “But it’s funny, I do have in my own life, I just started a family, and so much of my last few years of being has been trying to figure that balance and what that means and how you navigate that. So with family being at its core and all the kind of conundrums that come with staying level with that, that rang true. So I felt like I understood objectively, I have my interpretations of what both men mean to each other and within the story, but then once I was playing Nick, I just became about a very present focus on who he was and what his situation was. What I liked about him is that he’s a very straightforward bloke. In the best possible way, he’s quite a simple man. It’s just he’s in an extraordinary situation.”
Jenkin wrote Rose of Nevada during the pandemic lockdown that had forced a halt in production on Enys Men. He’d return to rewrite once Enys Men had been completed, creating overlap between films. “They are even more in conversation than you’d think because the first draft of Rose of Nevada was before I’d made Enys Men, and then everything I learned through the making of Enys Men, I fed into Rose of Nevada. But also the reaction to Enys Men, all the critics and writers and audience members who are telling me what Enys Men was about. I’m always the last to realize what I’ve done, I think like most filmmakers. You don’t really know what you’ve made a film about until the audience tells you. I was able to feed that into Rose of Nevada and also scale it up a little bit. So, yeah, in some ways it predates Enys Men, and in some ways it follows on from it,” he said.
Jenkin’s latest caps what’s unofficially been dubbed his Cornish trilogy, a moniker that initially surprised the filmmaker, but he’s come to embrace it. A recent revisit of Bait made it even clearer. “I can now understand why people are linking the three films together. I’d forgotten how linked they are, which is amazing, really, considering the first draft of Bait was written in 1999. So, most of my adult life has been one way or another making this trilogy. I am quite looking forward to starting the next chapter.”
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