Interviews
[Interview] Catherine Corcoran Talks ‘Return To Nuke ‘Em High’
In Return To Nuke ‘Em High, a young couple, Lauren and Chrissy, face their worst nightmare. Their high school glee club has suddenly mutated into a vicious gang of psychopaths. With the clock ticking, Lauren and Chrissy have to fight off The Cretins and save their school at the same time. Actress Catherine Corcoran sat down with our man on the scene, Jorge Solis, to talk about her role as Lauren, working with Lloyd Kaufman, and her expectations with the movie’s upcoming premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.
Bloody-Disgusting: Tell me how you became involved in “Return to Nuke ‘Em High.”
Catherine Corcoran: Casting Networks. It’s a casting site that a lot of actors are part of it. It tells you postings to local castings. They did a post about Troma. I heard about Troma but didn’t know about the company. I did some research. Again, I was convinced that I was not their type and they were not going to hire me. The part I usually book are young, middle girls. Somehow it ended up working out.
BD: I understand you had to go through nine callbacks for your audition.
CC: Nine callbacks! Yeah! The first audition I booked myself, I was really nervous. I called, told them it was a family emergency, and didn’t show up. It’s so awful! So they rescheduled me and then I went this time. I had never navigated in Long Island City before and I got lost. I was about an hour late. I’m always a little late, but an hour late is a record. I was convinced I wasn’t going to get the part. I went in and did my thing. They seemed to like it enough. I ended up leaving and called my Mom. I told her, “I didn’t get the part. Maybe they’ll let me intern for them because they seemed kinda cool.” I ended up getting a callback and nine later, I got the part.
BD: Tell me about your role as Lauren.
CC: In the original, they have two protagonists, a jock and a cheerleader, Warren and Chrissy; typical B-movie style. We’ve modernized it a little bit. Because we’re in the 21st century, it’s now a lesbian couple, Chrissy and Lauren. Lauren comes to town and she is the new girl. She comes from a wealthy family. She comes in and shakes up Chrissy’s world a little bit. She ends up taking on Tromorganic Foodstuffs Conglomerate, who is the new villain in the film.
BD: Tell me about playing your scenes off of your co-star, Asta Paredes, whose role is Lauren’s lover, Chrissy.
CC: Asta’s the greatest! She’s awesome! Many times, we got the same callbacks. We became good friends right away. We actually kinda went through the process together. We just kinda went out on a limb, basically trusting each other, and started hanging out. I guess they saw the chemistry involved because they ended up casting both of us. It’s kinda fun to act with a girl who’s now my best friend, and also great to work with.
BD: Because the Troma films, such as Mother’s Day and Poultrygeist, are known for their trashiness, nudity, and low-budget, how did you prepare yourself for a role like this?
CC: Well, it was my first sex scene. I knew I had to prepare physically for that. I didn’t want to be on camera and not look my best. I’m already a health nut, so that worked out to my advantage.
Also, what was really cool about low-budget filmmaking is that we shot on the fly. Lloyd Kaufman is a big proponent on rehearsals ahead of time. We actually got to develop the script before shooting. It was nice to have a creative say in the writing process. A lot of the jokes, the little gags, developed through rehearsals. It’s probably the most creative I’ve ever gotten to be on a set. I actually really enjoyed it!
BD: Tell me about Lloyd Kaufman as a director.
CC: He is a fabulous director! He is really an actor’s director because he allows you to do the rehearsals. He allows you to excel and grow. He will say he actually doesn’t do anything but that is totally false. He leaves it up to the actors, which I think is great. It’s a really great style for the actors because everybody comes in with their own process, techniques, and ideas. We got very lucky we had a phenomenal cast who worked really well together. Lloyd was open to bouncing off ideas and playing with us.
In the shooting stage, everything was actually blocked out. Because this was the first film he shot on digital, everything went ahead on schedule for the most part. If we shot it on film, we’d have to get it on the first or second try. In digital, we have this room to do more. It actually worked to his and our advantage because the film is now in two parts, not just one. It was a cool experiment to go on a new frontier with him and also to work with someone who is so open-minded creatively.
BD: Tell me about the documentary, Occupy Cannes, which you participated in its promo video.
CC: We’re shooting it at the premiere of part one at the Cannes Film Festival. We will be attending, which we are very excited about. What’s going on with the Cannes Film Festival these days, what it wasn’t originally, it’s become a corporate haven where you need a lot of money to get there. You need a lot of money to show your film. It’s not so much an independent film festival anymore as it is a film festival now owned by huge companies. If you are a truly independent artist and trying to get your voice heard, you don’t have a shot at being heard at Cannes. We’re documenting our struggle at the Cannes Film Festival as a low-budget film company. We’re trying to see if we can get our voice heard, get some buyers out there, and some notoriety. It’s a stretch but we believe in what we did. It’s worth showing.
BD: What are your expectations with the audience when the film premieres at the Cannes Film Festival in May?
CC: I really have no idea! I haven’t seen it a finished cut of it. But I know I’m really proud of it. I know it had a few screenings, one in the School of Visual Arts in New York and the other at USC in California. I know it was received very well at both places. They specifically asked the cast and crew not to come; to not sway with the opinions. We got great reviews! The one I liked the best said it was the next “Superbad.” I don’t know if it’s that great, but I think it’s awesome somebody thinks that it is.
If you asked me a year ago, that I would be premiering my film at Cannes, I would have laughed in your face! I’m really excited about it! I’m sure the cast and crew are excited about it as well. It’s going to really great! I can’t tell you how blessed I feel it has this much of a following already.
BD: The “Return to Nuke ‘Em High” poster was created by Justin Osbourn, from Slasher Design. Tell me about seeing yourself on the poster.
CC: That was crazy! When the poster came out, that’s when it started to sink in. This is real! The poster is stunning! It reminds me of the “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi” poster. I think it’s so cool how it’s setup. It’s so cool to have Asta and I on the cover. I never would’ve have guessed we’d look like that.
I will say all the ladies got a very nice boob job on that poster! I’m pleased with that. I’m sure all the other girls on the poster are too. It’s a beautiful piece. He’s incredibly talented.
BD: What are you working on now?
CC: I am working for Troma. I have a couple other indie films, television series in the works. Nothing finalized yet. I can’t really say. I’ve been working with a great management team, who really understand where they see me going and where I want to go as an actress. A lot of my fondest memories is still with this film, which again I’m still proud of. I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen with it.
Interview by – Jorge Solis
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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