The tagline for Deadgirl—a film co-directed by Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel—posits that "every generation has its story about the horror of growing up" and Deadgirl successfully monitors the disturbing grunts and groans of that growth. As they synopsize: "We were interested in making a film that explored the pain of being young and the confusion of growing up, but in a way that felt altogether new. What excited us about Trent Haaga's script was the way it told a story that felt familiar at first, but then took a dramatic and terrifying turn into a direction no one could possibly anticipate. It touched upon typical teen fears—intimacy, abandonment, uncertainty—and spun from realism to the surreal, and then back again. We felt the very nature of the script embodied what it was like to be a teenager—uncompromising and rebellious, while at the same time maintaining an earnestness, even in the most desperate of circumstances. That emotion, as well as some pretty dark humor, was important to keep us connected to the characters, even when their actions turned horrifying or uncomfortable. There's a point in life when many see for themselves a disappointing future that differs greatly from the one they always expected. It can be a painful moment—what we see as the 'horror of growing up'—and as filmmakers, we were excited to explore the theme through such an uncompromising, unique, and hopefully unforgettable story."
High school misfits Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) and JT (Noah Segan) decide to cut school to explore the crumbling facility of a nearby abandoned hospital, where they get lost and come face-to-face with a gruesome discovery: a woman whose body has been stripped naked, chained to a table and covered in plastic. Both react to the situation in extremely different ways and the boys soon find themselves embarking on a twisted yet poignant journey that forces them to decide just how far they're willing to stretch their understanding of right and wrong.
Deadgirl capped off this year's edition of SF Indiefest and—though Marcel Sarmiento had to fly out immediately the following morning—I did have a chance to speak with his co-director Gadi Harel while Gadi was still in San Francisco. This conversation is not for the spoiler-wary!
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Michael Guillén: So, Gadi, how was your San Francisco audience at the SF IndieFest closing night screening of Deadgirl?
Gadi Harel: Deadgirl's not for everybody and Marcel and I understand that.
Guillén: But then what movie really is?
Harel: Exactly; but, what's really great about it is that half the people who come up to you want to hug you and half the people don't want to look at you—and there's something exciting about that—but, usually, at the Q&As the people who the film wasn't for tend to leave and the people who stick around are usually the ones who really responded to it and they have the same sort of questions every time, which is nice. But this was the first audience where people who didn't respond to the movie stuck around and wanted to talk to us about it. That was really great. I don't know San Francisco very well but I feel that had something to do with the type of people who see films here?
Guillén: I've frequently heard that we're one of the best audiences in the world.
Harel: It was really exciting for us.
Guillén: You might know that—along with administering The Evening Class and freelancing for various venues—I'm a contributing writer to Twitch. I know that Todd Brown spoke with you when Deadgirl premiered at Midnight Madness in Toronto, and that Rodney Perkins has championed the film.
Harel: Rodney's great.
Guillén: Interestingly enough, between the two of them and their write-ups, they've somewhat encapsulated the conflicted and often divided reactions to Deadgirl. It was Todd's politely qualified review that made me want to talk with you today. He prefaced his review by cautioning "ladies" that the film might have some distasteful elements—as if Deadgirl would be offensive to women—and yet while doing my research, one of the best and most erudite reviews has come from a woman: Sophie Mayer at Little White Lies.
Harel: That's a great observation. Wow. We usually have to point that out to people. We get certain reactions from guys. We have the guys who come up to us and say, "I liked it; but, women are going to kill you." And we're always replying, "But the women respond to it; they get it." They understand that it's really not about what you think it's going to be about. For some reason, the biggest detractors tend to be men who see the film in a simplistic way: "Oh, you're just saying that guys are dicks." They break the film down and try to put it in that box. By contrast, women tend to be open to everywhere the film goes. So we're always telling people, "Don't tell us that women are going to hate it. You are wrong." You're absolutely right.
Guillén: Sophie's take on the film was great, especially her critique of gender constructions within genre. And I also very much enjoyed something Noah Segan (who plays the despicable JT) said onstage at the Midnight Madness Q&A.
Harel: What was that?
Guillén: When asked why he wanted to be involved in the project, or what it was about the script that he liked, Noah recognized the story as an allegorical fable, which I consider an important discernment. A literal reading of this film will instantly polarize an audience into politicized stances.
Harel: Absolutely.
Guillén: Whereas—if it's an allegory or a fable—a mythic allowance is introduced. The instant I knew I was in mythic territory in Deadgirl….
Harel: …was when you saw the dog?
Guillén: Exactly! In interviews I've read with you and Marcel the word that constantly keeps coming up is "edge" as in edgy or being on the edge, that liminal place, which for me is the environment of fairy tales, fables and myths. So when the dog showed up….
Harel: …you knew where we were going?
Guillén: I knew that we were at the entrance to Hell. Was that a conscious scriptural turn?
Harel: It was. It's funny to be asked if it was conscious. Now it's easy to say that it was. There were certain things that we did throughout the making of the film that made me feel that maybe Deadgirl was more conscious than I even realized at the time. There's a scene in the movie where Rickie's talking to his teacher in the library about the dead and then there's a slow fade and you see the dog, which deliberately tied the dog into the underworld. When we started doing things like that, we realized that this is what we had been thinking about even though we never really planned it that way.
Guillén: If that mythic interpretation can be thought of as true, then the structure of the abandoned insane asylum can be thought of as a psychic template.
Harel: Sure.
Guillén: These two boys who are rummaging around in the depths of this dilapidated insane asylum—their version of Hell—come across this creature, this denizen of the underworld. I don't like to think of her as a zombie. She's not what I really think of as a zombie per se.
Harel: We don't refer to her as a zombie; but, we know that's shorthand and we won't correct anybody if they call her a zombie. We never thought we were making a zombie movie. It isn't.
Guillén: Orientational metaphors are usually fairly basic in myths. You either go up or you go down. You have myths of ascent or myths of descent. You can either hold ideals aloft like a banner or you can discover them in the depths of your being, often riddled with darkness. And this is exactly what I think Rickie and JT experience. They go down, into themselves, to discover a somewhat perverse reflection through the body of the dead girl.
Harel: Yes. She is the genesis for what they do to each other and what they do to themselves. The film is more about that interaction than what they do with her. She is the catalyst by which the movie plays out.
Guillén: Deadgirl likewise has resemblances to the themes of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, insofar as he often likes to show how an individual is transformed by moral degradation. Or more exactly, the potential contagion of being in the presence of moral degradation. Kurosawa often creates disturbing portraits of individuals adjusting to moral degradation rather than being flat out undone or overwhelmed. What I found most intriguing about Deadgirl was not its corpse violation erotics nor its morbid humor, but how each of the boys individually adjusted to this infernal situation. Ultimately, by film's end, Rickie has a much different attitude than JT's when his girlfriend substitutes in as the dead girl.
Harel: We always say that Rickie is our hero; but, he idolizes JT. The way in which he objectifies his girlfriend JoAnn is really no better than what the other boys are doing to the dead girl. Rickie does not really know JoAnn. He just thinks she's the best thing ever. She's as much a girl in a magazine to him as when JT says the dead girl looks "like a girl out of magazine." They're doing the same thing to a degree. It's interesting that a lot of people don't see that, which is something Sophie Mayer brought up. Sophie wrote that what Rickie is doing to JoAnn is shades of the same sort of thing JT is doing to the dead girl.
Guillén: But it's done with more love. [Laughs.]
Harel: Look, I can relate to Rickie much more than I can relate to JT. Let me put it that way. So, yeah, my definition of love is perhaps more what Rickie's is; but, there is an overlap and that's what's exciting. We didn't want Rickie to come in and say, "This is wrong and I'm going to go do the right thing." It felt like that's not what happens. It happens in degrees. Especially when you're dealing with your best friend. What seems really clear on the outside suddenly seems absolutely not clear. When we look at it now, we think, "How could he do that? That's wrong!" But the truth is that people try to find a way to make these choices work in their world.
Guillén: Commensurably, misogyny works in degrees. That's what I found intriguing and brilliant about Deadgirl. You present degrees and layers of misogyny. There are some that are instantly despicable—JT is fairly despicable because he doesn't really care one way or the other—
Harel: But he's a kid.
Guillén: Okay, he's a kid. He's a big, hormonally-charged despicable kid.
Harel: One of the women in the IndieFest audience said that the scariest part of the film for her was towards the beginning when Rickie reaches over and pokes the dead girl's boob. Because that's what a kid would do. She said it was scary to see that in a film because she expected them to talk about it more—"What are we going to do?"—rather than reaching over and poking her. That surprised her. She hadn't seen that before. It was a small thing but it seemed such a violation. But that's what a kid would do and then, of course, that's just the gore way.
Guillén: Well, what I was inferring a bit earlier is that you can have an idealized banner that you hold aloft; but, a dead girl in the basement of an insane asylum is also a frustrated teenage boy's ideal, albeit a dark and misguided one. You see Rickie trying to deal with this in a way that he feels is right and—for himself—he perhaps makes the ethically-right decision.
Harel: Yes. He's living with it.
Guillén: My roommate and I watch a lot of genre flicks together and one of his favorite lines is, "Ah! The guy got rejected by that girl. That means he has to kill her."
Harel: [Chuckles.] But in this instance, he saves her.
Guillén: In some ways substitutes JoAnn for the dead girl.
Harel: Some people would rather JoAnn just die; but, Rickie loves her. At least he thinks he does. People have asked us, "What does Rickie do with her down there?" And that's not for me to say. He's reading poetry?
Guillén: You approached Trent Haaga looking for a script and it's my understanding that Deadgirl was the one he didn't want to show you?
Harel: He wrote the script a long time ago for Troma because they had this abandoned hospital they wanted to shoot a movie in. So he said, "I've got an idea; I'm going to write you this movie." They rejected it because it wasn't campy enough; it was actually tough material. So he said, "Okay" and put it away. It sat in his desk for a number of years. Marcel and I grew up together so we were like, "Let's make a movie"—we had worked on all these shorter things together—and so we went to Trent's house, because I knew him. And yeah, you're right, he didn't want to give the script of Deadgirl to us. But I don't blame him. He's written a lot of material that he hasn't cared about and that material doesn't matter to him. He very much understands, "I'm the writer and I'm going to give it to you and then it's no longer my movie and will never be what I want it to be." Trent accepts that and he's come to terms with that for every project … except for this script. Trent has said, "I just don't want that to happen to this movie." A lot of that is because it feels personal for him. It reminds him of what his childhood was like. There was a "JoAnn" for him at a time when he felt half-Rickie, half-JT. It felt true to him and so he didn't want to give it to anybody. But I'm his friend and I said, "Please trust me. I don't want this movie never to get made." It did take us a while to convince him that we were going to make it and we were going to make him proud and that he would be with us every step of the way. Because his script was a first draft, there was a lot we had to do to it, and Trent was very much a part of that. We'd run things by him and allow him to revise our revisions. We wanted at the end of the day for him to say, "You've made my movie."
Guillén: Which, hopefully, he has?
Harel: Oh yes, he's very proud of it.
Guillén: Via Colin Geddes, I understand you were originally an assistant gumshoe?
Harel: Yes, I was a private eye in New York.
Guillén: So going back just a bit, when Trent showed you some of his scripts and none of them were quite what you and Marcel were looking for, was it your gumshoe sense that made you keep pushing until Trent brought out the script for Deadgirl?
Harel: [Chuckles.] I didn't have to dig too deep. It's more like there was a script left remaining on a shelf. He handed me a pile of scripts and there was one left behind. I asked, "Why not that one?" Then he stood in front of it and said, "What script?" And I said, "The one behind you." He made it very clear that he had something he was not going to give to us. It became a matter of wearing him down. Maybe that was his plan? Because then it made us feel like we had to deliver. Maybe he played us? That's fine.
Guillén: You adjusted the script while pursuing financing, and it's my understanding that one of the first edits was to ratchet down the bullet hole sequence?
Harel: First of all, the script itself is a tough read because nothing was left to the imagination. Marcel and I wanted to make a movie that was disturbing but not one that was hard to watch.
Guillén: By any chance, have you seen Bruce LaBruce's Otto: Up With Dead People?
Harel: No. It's usually playing at a lot of festivals we play at; but, we haven't seen that one yet though.
Guillén: Because there's an explicit wound fucking scene in that film; but, it's excused because they're just gay zombies and they don't know what they're doing.
Harel: They're confused? [Chuckles.] Yeah, so the bullet scene was an example of where the script went further and—as filmmakers—we had to play with how far we wanted to go. We don't look at Deadgirl as a horror movie. We don't look at it as a movie that's meant to hit those notes. In order to tell the story we wanted to tell, how far did we have to go to satisfy that? We realized we didn't have to go that far.
The movie brings out some disturbing people. [Chuckles.] Every once in a while you get somebody who says, "You should have gone much further. You guys are pussies. More gore." I was talking to one guy at the Roxie who was complaining about the film and I said, "I have to ask you: what did you like about it?"—because, despite his complaints, he had said he really liked it—and he answered, "Oh the raping and the beating." [Harel raises an eyebrow.] I thought, "I didn't make this movie for you then. I don't know what to tell you." Trent wrote a tough script. He's a great writer so it was evocative. For Marcel and I it was—not so much a matter of toning it down—but, trying to translate it into something that still drew you in.
Guillén: Keeping the darkness intriguing and not completely repulsive? I suspect that why the film has been receiving such well-deserved praise throughout its festival run. It transcends its own genre, it edges out of it—to use that word again. With so many genre films being made these days all moving down the conveyor belt, most are formulaic and smooth as industry, easily glossed over. For a movie to pop out it has to have an edge, preferably a serrated edge, so that it snags on the psyches of the audience and disturbs them once they've left the theatre. And that's not just about bigger and bloodier. Too explicit gore, in fact, cancels itself out.
Harel: Besides, these days you can see everything. Everything's out there. If that's what you want, it's already available in many forms so you can't just deliver that anymore. I don't think so. Apparently some people disagree. I totally agree with you. We knew we wanted to make this movie and we knew we didn't have all the resources in the world; but, we also knew that we wanted this movie to matter. We wanted to make something that wouldn't go ignored because we've all worked on things that you think will make something happen and nothing happens. So how could we make a movie that would help us get noticed but also make us proud? Not just something awful and extreme that people would notice but something that people would say, "It got under my skin. I want to talk to you." That was what we set out to do. It's great to hear you say the film did that for you.
Guillén: Deadgirl is profoundly disturbing. It genuinely creeped me out. Even moreso when I went to the website and found all those flies buzzing around there. Yeesh. It made me realize that one of the things that disturbed me most in the film was the evocation of smell. Not much is said about smell in the film but I couldn't help but think, "What must that room smell like?"
Harel: It doesn't smell good.
Guillén: Or what do those people smell like who have been messing around with the dead girl? How desperate must these boys be to leap over putrefaction and all its attending odors to satisfy lust? Talk about adjusting to a dark fantasy. That image really bothered me.
Harel: There is at least one reference to smell in the film. There's a scene where she has the photo of her face and if you look in the background—it's subtle—you see rear view mirror deordorizers shaped like pine trees hanging off the bed. In actuality while filming the basement was an awful place to be so you can only imagine in the world of the movie how awful it must have been.
Guillén: So Deadgirl has been on the festival circuit. It premiered in Toronto for the Midnight Madness crowd, which made Peter DeBruge at Variety concede: "judging from the raucous reception during its Midnight Madness preem at Toronto, twisted auds clearly do exist for such blatantly 'wrong' material."
Harel: It's funny because Variety's review is like, "I don't stand behind this movie. It's wrong. But it's well-made and it's scary."
Guillén: The most telling backhanded compliment I noticed in the Variety review was DeBruge's closing comment: "Digital footage looks better than the material deserves." So let's talk about the camera. You used The Viper?
Harel: We used The Viper, which is a high-def camera that David Fincher uses.
Guillén: As in Zodiac?
Harel: Right. Zodiac came out about a month or so before we started shooting and when we were still trying to figure out which camera we wanted to use. Marcel and I responded to the look of that movie. Our DP enquired and we found a Viper that was available, did some tests, and felt it has a unique look to it. I don't think you'd shoot a comedy with The Viper—there's something inherent in the camera, it responds to certain colors and darkness….
Guillén: Is it bluer?
Harel: Yeah, sort of bluer or greener. It's definitely got its own texture too. But it was perfect for this movie and probably for a lot of movies it'd be great. Fincher knows how to use it perfectly. But what was interesting in the way we shot it—and what's new with this movie—is the device that captures the footage. It ran through the camera, which is one thing, but it went into this thing called The Codex, which is a machine that directly takes footage—there's no tape—it becomes digital immediately and goes right into a hard drive. You're not editing with a tape at all. We never had any tape until we had to have something to project. It was purely digital. Deadgirl is the first film to do that from beginning to end, which is why we were able to do it. We've tested it out. Since then, Speed Racer and the new James Bond movie have done that and maybe some others too. Now The Codex is probably so much more advanced than when we used it, even more easy and lightweight. What all this means is that—when you stop a day's shooting—you push a button and then you all walk away with the footage on your laptops. The three of us go home and watch our footage and we immediately start editing with what we have. We can output the footage in different resolutions. You can use low-res for editing and high-res for archiving and [he snaps his finger] it's like that.
Guillén: So not only were you the first film to use The Viper and The Codex from beginning to end, but—again, according to Colin at Midnight Madness—that was their first time to project a film from the box?
Harel: [Chuckles.] The box that I brought to Toronto was actually from Dolby who packaged our film for projection. They did the sound. They did everything and put it in a box on the very morning of our screening….
Guillén: And here poor Colin is waiting for some kind of tape….
Harel: That was awful. I was crying. It was so scary.
Guillén: But all's well that ends well.
Harel: And I'm sure this is not unusual. I'm sure this happens all the time. You hear stories like, "Oh, the filmmakers running the thing" but you don't ever see yourself in that position. But the box makes things possible. We found some issues in the very last week with lines in certain frames and we were able to simply take that frame, open it up in PhotoShop, color in the line, save it, drop that one frame back in the box. It's amazing. There are no lab costs. You don't have to book an hour at a lab to do last-minute edits. You can do it all at home. And what's great is that the final result looks like a movie. It doesn't look like video.
Guillén: Now that you've sung their praises, will you continue to work with The Viper and The Codex?
Harel: Yeah. Our feeling is if the texture and quality of the picture matches what we envision for the project in a second. It's a great camera. And the thing we're working on next—now that we're actually hired and working for a company—
Guillén: This is the remake of the Danish film Mørke?
Harel: The translation is Darkness. Mørke is a little film that Gold Circle wants to re-imagine. We had a take on it. For our take, yeah, The Viper would be perfect. But again, it's probably not our say at the end of the day. They might say, "We want you to shoot on this." We can only make an argument for The Viper.
Guillén: Would you like to shoot on film?
Harel: A few years ago I would have said yes; that there was still prestige to shooting on film; but, I feel we're past that. I don't know why, but, it seems like a hassle to work with film.
Guillén: So where are we on the Mørke remake?
Harel: We are writing it now and we have to turn in a draft at a certain point.
Guillén: Is it going to be scary?
Harel: It's a thriller with a lot of scares but it's probably not a horror movie. It's more like a high tech medical thriller.
Guillén: Can you speak about Deadgirl being picked up for distribution?
Harel: Yeah. MPI/Dark Sky picked it up for domestic. They love the movie and want to do at least a minor theatrical release. Landmark Theatre chain is also interested in the movie. They contacted us and said they had had a lot of success with Teeth. They felt they could hit the same markets and were interested in working with our distributor regarding exhibiting the film for a week or two in select markets where Teeth performed. So that's the plan and I hope that still is the plan. If not, there are some other independent theaters around the country who are also really excited about Deadgirl. We might do those too. It's definitely going to come out on DVD this Summer.
Guillén: Any DVD extras I should know about?
Harel: The usual stuff. Defnitely some deleted scenes. I'm trying to figure out if these are going on this DVD or the 25th anniversary DVD. [Chuckles]. There's a special effects behind-the-scenes gallery and a 15-minute long "making of" featurette.
Guillén: Commentaries?
Harel: Marcel and I do a commentary. The sound designer and musician do a commentary. And the actors do a commentary.
Guillén: Speaking of the actors, then. Noah Segan, I understand, has been cast in local production All About Evil directed by Joshua ("Peaches Christ") Grinnell. Have you met Peaches?
Harel: I waved to Peaches. Noah pointed at him in front of the theater. And I knew producer Darren Stein from L.A.
Guillén: Since the guys mainly took stage at Midnight Madness, and I've heard what they've had to say, I'm more interested in the two actresses in your film—Candice Accola who plays JoAnn (and has likewise been cast in All About Evil) and Jenny Spain who plays the dead girl—can we talk about them? When you showed them the script, how did they respond? And how have they worked with your vision of Deadgirl?
Harel: Great question. There would be no movie without the dead girl so let's start with her.
Guillén: Variety said that—even if she never makes another film—Jenny Spain has achieved cult iconicity with this role.
Harel: Exactly. This was her screen debut! Several of the reviews mention her and I always email them to her, "Jenny, you got another great review." She obviously has a lot to do in the movie even though she does very little. It was a really rough part to cast. We tried to cast traditionally and had casting calls in L.A. You can imagine the kind of women that came to audition for the part, and they weren't exactly what we wanted, we needed a woman with a natural physicality, unique, and probably Jenny's inexperience helped. It was an uncomfortable shoot and we needed someone who was like, "I don't have any other experience so this is exciting to me" instead of "I've never been treated like this before." Jenny was really gung-ho and that made it exciting.
Guillén: She didn't know to be constantly demanding Red Bulls on set?
Harel: We were so accommodating to her. She was so easy. But she was also chained down. [Chuckles.] Anyway…. We got so lucky with Jenny. Not only because of her performance. She's a sweet girl. A friend of her's in L.A. had read the script when Jenny was still living in Michigan and they recommended her: "I know someone who would do this; who would be really into it."
Guillén: And I have to compliment Jenny Spain for the hard work called patience. I recently interviewed Doug Jones for Hellboy II regarding the time required for make-up before even getting to the set.
Harel: Obviously the first time you see the dead girl, she's still somewhat clean so not that much make-up was necessary. As she slowly deteriorates and becomes worse the make-up work intensifies. Towards the end there were roughly four to six hours worth of make-up. Anyways, Jenny read the script and contacted us straightaway, saying, "I get it. I want to be part of this. It sounds like I'll never get this opportunity again." There was no convincing on our part. She responded to the role. Somehow she was just one of the people who read the script and saw what we wanted to do right away. We were a little nervous because we didn't know her and she had never acted before, so she offered to put herself on tape, set up a Beta camera, acted like an animal and got down on the ground. Her instincts were very natural. We didn't give her much direction. Jenny's just so interesting looking. She has those great eyes.
Guillén: And Candice Accola who plays Rickie's love interest JoAnn?
Harel: Candice got called in from one of our casting agents. She's the type of girl who would have broken my heart in high school. She's so natural-looking and immediately you understand why Rickie would be in love with her. Her role doesn't have a lot of character development so we needed someone who didn't feel that she'd been pulled out of a magazine or pulled off of TV; but, someone who would be this beautiful, sweet girl that Rickie would fall in love with. She just has to do it all right away. She has to exude that. With Candice it was easy. Again, she read the script and her feeling—like a lot of the other actors—was, "I want to be part of this. I don't know why. But I read a lot of stuff, I do a lot of stuff, and I might not get the chance to do this for better or for worse. I want to be part of this."
Guillén: Have you been surprised by the film's relatively favorable reception? Or did you have a deep-seated instinct that the film was going to work?
Harel: That's a great question. I wonder if you ever know if a film is going to work? We knew the movie we wanted to make. We worked on it for a year before we started shooting. Our reference point were movies we really loved growing up. We knew why those worked.
Guillén: Over the Edge? River's Edge?
Harel: Yeah, Over the Edge. Top to bottom; loved that movie. Even The Outsiders. Films that appealed to us. Stand By Me. We knew that's what we wanted to do and were so focused on that. Did we know it was going to work? No, I don't think we or anybody knew it was going to work; but, everybody wanted it to work. Going back to your question about shooting extreme material, we shot material that's much more extreme, like the scene where the jocks go down to see the dead girl. The effects in that scene were very extreme where she bites him. We had prosthetics. A lot of it we did over the top because we thought, "If we completely fuck this up, and this isn't the movie we want it to be, this isn't the character study of adolescence and teenage fears, then the worse case scenario is that we'll make a gory genre movie and we'll sell it."
Guillén: That scene where the jocks get their comeuppance reminds me a bit of something Kiyoshi Kurosawa said when asked why his ghosts were female. He answered that a female ghost would be angrier and more vengeful, having put up with being a woman while alive. I could sympathize with the dead girl's pent-up ferocity.
Harel: Absolutely. She gives Rickie a look in that scene when he comes into the room and he's so angry or jealous of this jock when the jock's flaunting it that he suggests, "Why don't you go for the mouth?" That point is a kind of make or break with the dead girl. She becomes a weapon for him and a device for payback. She turns her head and looks at him and it's like, "Really? You are doing this to me? Even you?" Ricky looks away; he's so ashamed.
Guillén: What is it you hope people will walk away with from this movie? Now that you've asked them to enter and experience this depraved, perverse version of Hell?
Harel: This is probably not the answer; but, one thing we always want is for people to give Deadgirl a day. To let it really sink in. We never once want to watch it and then engage in conversation. It's the kind of movie you think about the next day. You take it in, go to sleep, and think about it the following day. We really wanted to make a movie that got under your skin and didn't just leave the room when you walked out of it. What do we want people to get out of it? We want people to have an experience they've never had before. We want to surprise you so we don't want this to be the movie you thought it was going to be. Come see it; it's not what you think. For many different reasons. Hopefully, we pulled that off.
Guillén: Another reason Deadgirl caught my attention is because I'm researching a piece on the number of films that use a dead girl or a corpse to create a matrix for the narrative. In Stand By Me, that corpse has everything to do with those boys growing up a little. I also really love The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada where Barry Pepper, likewise, comes to maturity through his responsibility for the dead man. There's also Karen Moncrieff's The Dead Girl, which measures the effect of a dead woman on the local community. Brian DePalma's The Black Dahlia with its disfigured corpse comes to mind and—of course if not pertinently to your film—the body of Laura Palmer in David Lynch's Twin Peaks covered in plastic. The fecundity of a dead girl is an amazing trope and you've done something different with it that hasn't been done.
Harel: Oh wow, and you've seen them all.
Guillén: So I want to congratulate you and thank you for taking the time to talk with me today.
Harel: Are you kidding? This has been a thrill. I'm so tickled.
Cross-published on Twitch.
Hindsight, some say, is 20/20. Thus—though last month's San Francisco Silent Film Festival has come and gone—Michael Hawley has nonetheless taken the time to clearly recapitulate the festival's rewards and has generously offered his insights to The Evening Class. In tandem with Frako Loden's previous entry on lost female directors, Michael Hawley's focus on Alice Guy Blaché segues nicely.
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The weather outside was frightening. An overdue winter storm was pounding the Bay Area—and inside the unheated, cavernous Castro Theater, the temperature might have been a few degrees warmer than outdoors. But that hardly mattered to those celebrating the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's (SFSFF) 4th Annual Winter Event. We were movie lovers spending our entire Valentine's Day in the chilly bosom of our favorite silent movie palace.
The SFSFF Winter Event started four years ago as in interim fix for silent film junkies—a bonbon to tide us over until the main festival in July. This year's affair packed plenty into one day: four outstanding features, a tribute to a pioneering female director, live musical accompaniments, an informative and well-researched program guide, pithy on-stage introductions and last but not least, door prizes!
The program began with the first of four shorts by Alice Guy Blaché, the world's first female director. Between 1886 and 1920, Guy Blaché directed over 300 films—first for Gaumont in France and then for her own studio, Solax (the largest pre-Hollywood film studio in the U.S.). In the first short, The Detective and His Dog, we saw an example of the "Dog Rescue" film, an allegedly popular genre of the era. It contained some pretty sophisticated cross-cutting for 1912, and might also be the first film in which someone is tied up to a rapidly approaching buzz saw. Three other Guy Blaché shorts were screened throughout the day and evening, including Matrimony's Speed Limit (1913), Falling Leaves (1912) and a fragment from The Pit and the Pendulum (1913). It's worth mentioning here that The Detective and His Dog (and the entire afternoon's program) was accompanied on piano by the talented Philip Carli. This was his SFSFF debut, and everyone agreed he's a great addition to the festival's rotating line-up of musicians.
At 12 noon there was a packed house for Buster Keaton's first "real" feature, 1923's Our Hospitality. The film got a heartfelt introduction by SFSFF Board Member Frank Buxton, who showed the audience a 1949 publicity still from a summer stock production of Three Men on a Horse. The photo depicts two men; a bartender and his customer. The latter is obviously Keaton, "and the young man on the left is me, at age 19," the now 79-year-old Buxton reminisced.
Our Hospitality is pure Keaton genius. Set in 1830, it's the story of a man who returns home to claim an inheritance, oblivious to the fact he's at the center of a Hatfield-McCoy type family feud. Among its highlights are an outrageous stunt at the edge of a raging waterfall, and hilarious (but historically accurate) depictions of the earliest bicycles and passenger trains. One gag in particular encapsulates Keaton's imaginative powers for me. When his character first learns of his inheritance, the image of a grand antebellum mansion appears in something akin to a thought bubble above his head. A half hour later, a disappointed Keaton is seen standing in front of his real inheritance—a rickety old shack. The mansion appears above his head once again, and we see it get blown to smithereens! A brilliant cinematic moment in 1923 or any other year. Finally, it was a joy to hear howls of laughter coming from the kids in the Castro audience. After 86 years, these images still have the power to delight a new generation.
Up next was A Kiss From Mary Pickford, a Russian comedy from 1927 with an interesting history. In 1920, Pickford married Douglas Fairbanks and took off on a European honeymoon. They had become so insanely popular that in London, Pickford was dragged from her car and trampled by a riotous mob that tore at her hair and clothes. A few years later the couple visited Moscow—where they were equally the rage—and during a film studio tour Pickford was encouraged to plant a kiss on actor/comedian Igor Ilyinsky (Aelita: Queen of Mars). That simple moment was captured on camera and became the nucleus for director Sergei Komorov's film.
In A Kiss From Mary Pickford, Illynsky plays a klutzy movie theater usher with an aloof, Douglas Fairbanks-obsessed girlfriend. He becomes a film stuntman, and Pickford's ill-fated smooch results in him also becoming an object of deranged idolatry. The film is a madcap satire of celebrity worship, and it was interesting to see 1927 Muscovites portrayed not as dour proletariats, but as full participants in the Jazz Age. Illynsky is an adept physical comedian, and Komorov packs his film with some great sight gags. My favorite occurred when a fed-up Illlynsky wipes Pickford's lip prints off his cheek, and a mob of eyewitnesses simultaneously faints to the ground in disbelief. Full disclosure—I slept through the entire mid-section of this film and missed all the archival footage of Pickford and Fairbanks' visit to Moscow (including the titular kiss). As a result, however, I was fully rested and alert for F.W. Murnau's Sunrise.
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) is one of several iconic films that have eluded me over the years. It's considered the supreme representation of silent film art and I always hear gasps of incredulity whenever I admit to never having seen it. Thanks to the SFSFF, I can finally count myself among its fervent devotees. Its storyline is uncomplicated. A wicked City Woman convinces a Simple Farmer to murder his Adoring Wife by drowning her en route to an outing in the Big City. But instead, the excursion rekindles his love, and a sea storm on the return journey becomes the ultimate test of his devotion.
Volumes have been written about this film's greatness (this Wikipedia entry is as good a place to start as any), so there's really little to add. But indulge me while I recall some of the things that transfixed me as I watched from my seat in the Castro: The revolutionary fluid camera movements. The heartrending lead performances by George O'Brien and Janet Gaynor (winner of the very first Academy Award for Best Actress). The moody and iridescent cinematography in the nocturnal marsh sequence. The stunning dissolves and superimposition of images. The imaginative and vaguely futuristic art direction in the Big City carnival sequence. The drunk pig chase. And best of all, the scene where they walk arm-in-arm into a tangle of street traffic—oblivious to everything in the world but each other. This screening was greatly enhanced by Brian Darr's program notes and Dennis James' spirited accompaniment on Castro's Mighty Wurlitzer.
The SFSFF Winter Event came to a wonderfully comic/horrific close with Paul Leni's The Cat and the Canary (1927). After a rousing introduction by Midnight for Maniacs' Jesse Hawthorne Ficks, we set off to experience Leni's German Expressionist version of a haunted house movie. The Cat and the Canary is credited for setting the template for this kind of film, in which a group of strangers are forced, for one reason or another, to spend the night in a spooky mansion. It was always my favorite kind of movie as a kid, with films such as James Whale's The Old Dark House, William Castle's House on Haunted Hill and Robert Wise's The Haunting.
In this early rendering, we encounter many tropes of the genre: a maniac on the loose, bookcases that move and lead to other rooms, a gallery of suspicious characters and an austere, malevolent housekeeper (here amusingly named Mammy Pleasant). I was intrigued to see an archetypal gay "sissy" character amongst the houseguests, particularly one who ultimately reveals himself to be the bravest of the bunch. This film was also vigorously accompanied by Dennis James on the Wurlitzer, along with Mark Goldstein's live sound effects. We heard creaking doors, gushing winds, ticking clocks and lots of eerie, theremin-ish musical accents. I found it a bit overdone; a classic case where less might have been more. But it was scarcely enough to ruin the experience. And at the end I rushed out onto Castro Street, where after 11 hours indoors, a real dark and stormy night laid in wait.
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Another highly anticipated event for Bay Area silent film lovers is the SF International Film Festival's annual pairing of live rock music and a renowned silent film at the Castro. Past combinations have included Deerhoof and Harry Smith's Heaven and Earth Magic, Lambchop and Murnau's Sunrise, and Yo La Tengo with the nature films of Jean Painlevé. This year, however, festival programmer Sean Uyehara has truly outdone himself. On Tuesday, May 5, Bay Area club favorites Dengue Fever will world-premiere their newly composed score for Harry Hoyt's 1925 dinosaur epic The Lost World. Based on the novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the film stars Bessie Love, Wallace Beery, Lewis Stone and Lloyd Hughes. But most famously, it features the stop-motion animated creatures of Willis O'Brien, the man who gave the world King Kong in 1933.
Dengue Fever are a Southern California band best known for their cover versions of Cambodian garage rock classics from the 60's and 70's. They first came on my radar with a Khmer-language version of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now," which appeared on the soundtrack for Matt Dillon's directorial debut City of Ghosts. In recent years they've expanded their sound to include surf, psych-rock, klezmer, funk and Ethiopian jazz. I've seen them perform live several times, and can only imagine what they've concocted for The Lost World score. The 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival takes place from April 23 to May 7. Tickets for this one-time experience are currently on sale to SF Film Society Members, and General Public tickets will go on sale April 2.
Cross-published on film-415 and Twitch.
Lately I've been thinking about the lost careers of female directors. Watching Barbara Loden's Wanda (1971) can do that to you. Despite our common surnames she's not related to me that I know of, but watching that film makes me think of long-lost sisters. Lost in that I don't know them—I never got to know them—and lost in that they have become unmoored from something stable and sure, struggling for footing in a male-dominated world.
The heroine of Wanda is an extreme version of the heroines I've discovered in the films of Ida Lupino (1918-1995), another actress who turned to directing mid-career. Lupino herself can't exactly be considered lost as a director—she has a decent body of feature-film work and an impressive television resume. But seeing what she left behind, it's tempting to think how many more films she might have helmed had she the opportunity of, say, a Don Siegel, to whom she's often compared with the condescending "poor man's" prefix.
According to Lupino's biographer William Donati, a conversation with Roberto Rossellini had a profound effect on Lupino. Complaining about Hollywood, he asked her, "When are you going to make pictures about ordinary people, in ordinary situations?" He meant it rhetorically, but perhaps she took it personally.
Lupino's directing career began in her early 30s, when she was starring in Columbia productions like Lust for Gold (with Glenn Ford) and her husband Collier Young was a screenwriter and assistant to Harry Cohn. When Young resigned in a fit of anger, the couple joined up with a B-movie production company named Emerald. A few days before shooting began for Not Wanted (1949), director Elmer Clifton had a heart attack and producer Lupino took over. The film, about an unwed mother, was the first of hers that tackled bold and controversial themes such as polio, bigamy and rape.
This Sunday at Pacific Film Archive the Film on Film Foundation (FOFF), which champions the viewing of non-digital works, brings us two of those rarely-screened films, Outrage and The Bigamist.
Outrage (1950), made by Lupino's production company Filmakers, explores the psychological effect of rape on a young woman (Mala Powers). When office sounds remind her of the assault and the neighbors' perceived stares start to drive her crazy, she runs away. Things may still be bad for rape victims, but to see what they underwent back then—incessant gossiping, names published in the newspaper, having to view a lineup of suspects face to face—is to appreciate the stigmatization that could lead to mental illness. Outrage steps into noir territory in its expressionist depiction of the assault itself, with long shadows on misty streets from high angles tailing a woman clinging to walls plastered with laughing-clown posters, as a blaring truck horn signals the nightmare half of a friendly industrial town.
The Bigamist (1953), another Filmakers production, was made the same year as Lupino's tense, Mexico-set The Hitch-Hiker, often cited as the only true film noir made by a woman. Bigamist (as well as Outrage)'s screenplay was written by Lupino's ex Collier Young, who was currently married to co-star Joan Fontaine. A meld of melodrama and mild procedural driven by an adoption agency investigator, the film has only a superficial noirish resemblance to Double Indemnity in that the confessional male voiceover constantly refers to a "Phyllis" living in Los Angeles. At one point it seems Fontaine's businesswoman wife, "in one of her executive moods," will be blamed for her husband's seeking affection elsewhere. But Lupino manages to keep both her and the second, tougher waitress wife (played by Lupino) sympathetic, while lending some compassion to a husband (Edmond O'Brien) whose traveling-salesman loneliness gets him into one fine mess.
I do hope the guys at Film on Film Foundation will consider screening Barbara Loden's Wanda someday. I know the print will be pretty hard to get ahold of. That's the curse of a real lost woman director.
The Bigamist screens Sunday, March 8 at 7:30PM and Outrage at 9:15PM at Pacific Film Archive Theater, 2575 Bancroft Way, Berkeley. Not part of the BAM/PFA program. Location and directions here.
Cross-published on Twitch.
Although Focus Features (who brought us Coraline) has—in a clever bit of marketing—scheduled the theatrical release of Shane Acker's feature-length version of his award-winning short 9 for September 9, 2009, animation director Joe Ksander and Elijah Wood (voice actor for the character 9) attended WonderCon to thrum up interest.
Ksander synopsized that six-seven years ago Acker made his short film while a student in UCLA's three-year animation program. That's when Ksander met Acker after being impressed with his short reel and offered his services. Four years later Shane Acker completed his short film, winning a student Academy Award® as well as being nominated for an Academy Award®. Acker showed his short at ComicCon, SIGGRAPH, and Sundance and—based on those screenings—the short caught the attention of Jim Lemley, who had been working with Timur Bekmambetov on Wanted. He pulled a team together to make a presentation to Tim Burton who agreed the short was exciting and worthy of turning into a feature-length version.
The major difference between the short and the feature film is that the short had no spoken dialogue whereas the feature has secured such voice talent as Elijah Wood, John C. Reilly, Jennifer Connelly, Crispin Glover, Martin Landau, Christopher Plummer and Fred Tatasciore.
Wood detailed that the project had been brought to his attention along with the short film and—though he found the script exciting enough—all he really needed to come on board was to see Acker's short. He immediately wanted to be part of Acker's unique vision. Ksander confirmed that the short has proved immensely helpful because it has such a distinct look and feel—"dark and unusual especially for animation"—and if they had tried to just pitch the idea, it might have proved difficult; whereas, since Acker had a finished product to show of what the film would look and feel like, it generated excitement all the way down the line, not just with the casting but when they were organizing the animation crew, several who migrated from other large studios specifically to work on this project.
Most recently, Danny Elfman has been brought on to write some music for the film. The reason Shane Acker couldn't attend the WonderCon panel, in fact, was because he was in London scoring the film.
A young boy asked Wood what it felt like to bring the character 9 to life? Wood replied that 9 comes into the post-apocalyptic world seen in the film a little late; ragdolls 1-8 have already been created and 1 moreorless rules over the others in the sense of protecting them from the machines. Without any knowledge of the others or the machines, 9 comes completely innocent into this world, which earmarks a certain courage and questioning spirit. He brings these qualities to the others who have stopped questioning and looking for answers and who have sequestered themselves. Thus, 9 is not hindered by the fears of the others and arrives open and searching.
When asked how he would compare his performance in 9 with that of Frodo Baggins in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Wood sighed wearily (though good-naturedly) and murmured, "This is going to happen for the rest of my life." But he rallied and conceded that there were parallels between the two projects in that they're both adventure stories. Though the characters are distinct, they are both similarly given a sense of questing responsibility. In 9 his character drives the others to search; his function is to put pressure on those characters. Interestingly enough, Shane Acker was actually one of the animators at Weta Digital who worked on Return of the King. Wood and he probably "passed each other in the hall" without knowing they would work together on the feature-length version of 9.
Ksander qualified that—when they were animating the film—they looked at Elijah's other films to see how he might play something and the performance they found specifically useful was the role of Patrick in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Asked how voice acting differed from physical acting, Wood admitted there are pros and cons either way; but, for him, voice acting harbors a certain flexibility, not the least of which is the freedom of not needing a physical cast or accommodating conflicting schedules. The down side of that is, of course, working solo with headphones, sometimes even without the voices of the other actors, which makes it more challenging not having someone to bounce off of. An actor can't rely on body and face and must imbue his voice with motion to fulfill action sequences.
Ksander and Wood then offered the thrilling world premiere clip of the scene where 9 meets the other 8 ragdolls as they combat a winged creature that—as IMdb synopsizes—is "a split-headed flying being that resembles both a bat and a manta ray in wing shape." Summer is going to be one long anticipation until September.
Cross-published on Twitch.
It must be absolutely thrilling for an enthused pop cultural maestro like J.J. Abrams to stand before a cheering audience of 5,000 fans ravenous for the world premiere of the Star Trek trailer and sneak peek footage of Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Entertainment's revisioning of the Star Trek franchise, complete with a young new crew venturing boldly where no one has gone before; the "before" being essential in that classic tagline as Star Trek is more prequel than sequel. Primed for a May 8 theatrical release, Abrams took to San Francisco's WonderCon stage with Star Trek producer Bryan Burk, writer Roberto Orci, and actors Zoe Saldana (Lt. Nyota Uhura), "heartthrob of the future" Chris Pine (Kirk), and—judging from the raucous audience reaction—the wildly popular Zachary Quinto (Spock).
Frequent copy has asserted that Abrams' intention with his version of Star Trek is to open it up to a wider audience, so naturally one can only wonder how he hopes to strike a balance between long-time fans of the series and prospective newcomers and just how much continuity he's maintaining with all that's come before? Abrams specified that long-time fans of Star Trek are savvy enough to know that if he were just making the movie for existing fans of Star Trek, he would be limiting his audience enormously. Because he is beholden to the fans of Star Trek who—in essence—have allowed the remake, he wanted to assure fans of the franchise that his version is, indeed, for them. "In many ways it goes without saying, though it's important to say it." Admitting that he has received some flak for stating to the press that he was making his film for future fans of Star Trek—as if he didn't care about the existing fans—Abrams adamantly asserted that nothing could be further from the truth. "We love and are beholden to existing fans of Star Trek and one of the ways that we made sure this movie was going to make you happy was that we had this great range of points of view with the producers, one of them being Bryan [Burk], who had never seen an episode of Star Trek at all." "It's at this point," Burk interjected, "where [J.J.] publicly and repeatedly tells everyone what a moron I am." Abrams continued, "Then we've got Bob Orci who is an absolute avowed Trekker. So we have this great balance of people who live and breathe Star Trek and people who…"—Abrams glanced at Burk—"are idiots."
To underscore his loyalty to existing Star Trek fans, Abrams said his film has a million references that only true Trekkies will pick up on and the story adheres to canon, as much as the original series adheres to canon, because "c'mon, you all know, even in the original series there are some contradictions." As someone who was not a fan to begin with, Abrams has come to appreciate and understand and—to a certain extent—even feel jealous that he didn't get hooked earlier because he's now aware of how amazing the TV show was. Orci briefly added that everyone on the panel respected and was inspired by what Star Trek was and Abrams' movie is in a unique position because it is both a prequel and a sequel. All of Star Trek that has preceded this movie was necessary within canon for this movie to happen. "If you're a fan, your knowledge of Star Trek is going to be rewarded. If you're not, you're going to learn why we were all inspired by it."
Asked why he decided to involve himself with this revisioning of Star Trek, Abrams answered, "Honestly, when they came to me and asked if I'd be interested in producing Star Trek, although I was not a massive fan, I could completely appreciate that there were so many people who were. The idea of investigating Kirk and Spock and how they came to be was very interesting to me so I said, 'Yeah.' I immediately called Bryan and Bob and Alex [Kurtzman] and Damon [Lindelof]—the other writer and producer—and we started meeting and talking about stuff. Alex and Bob went off and wrote the script and—when I read it—it was amazing and so much fun, full of characters and huge action and spectacle. [At this point Bob passed a $20 bill down to J.J., which Abrams quickly pocketed.] It had nothing to do with necessarily having been a fan. I suddenly was. And I knew I would be so jealous of anyone directing that movie every day on the set so I said yes to directing too."
One audience member spotlighted what he perceived to be Abrams' unique talent for blending action, drama and emotion throughout his work and he wanted to know how Abrams communicated with his actors towards achieving that blend? Vulnerability and strength at the same time? "My favorite movies," Abrams answered, "my guess is your favorite movies are movies that combine characters that are relatable, complex, that are broken in a way but you believe them and they're real and they make you feel. Then they're thrown into the craziest shit of all time and suddenly it's like the Reese's peanut butter cup and chocolate—fantastic stuff!—so, for me combining those two things is the key to having it work. Whether I'm writing alone, whether I'm working with Alex and Bob, or with David—and it's so much fun working with these guys because we've been working together since Alias—it's been amazing to work with people who inspire you to do exactly what you're talking about: to push you to try to find ways to feel deeper and more about characters and put them into situations that are increasingly unbelievable. The funny thing to me is that a lot of stuff that you think people might have problems with, they don't. Like, people will go anywhere—that's what's so cool about fantasy, sci fi, horror—people will go there willingly. When we did the pilot for Fringe, where Alex and Bob helped me, it was insane. The main character shares consciousness with her unconscious boyfriend who's turning invisible because of this chemical he's been exposed to. When people saw the show, no one complained about that. No one was, like, 'Oh, c'mon…. Invisible? Consciousness?' No one said that. Instead, they were like, 'Okay, wait a minute. Harvard is going to have a free lab?' The key is characters you care about so thank you for thinking we do that. I have to hand it to the actors who take these things we all write and bring them to life so you care. If not for people like Zoe, Chris and Zach, we would be unable to do anything."
For those in the cast and crew new to the Star Trek phenomenon, one audience member was curious what it has come to mean to them over the process of making the film? Quinto offered that one of the most rewarding experiences for him has been getting to know Leonard Nimoy, aside from working with the people on this specific project. Having Nimoy's involvement was integral and illuminating. "The appreciation I garnered from that was—not only to see the impact it had on his career—but on his life and the kind of man he is. I think that's an extension of what Gene Roddenberry set out to create 40 years ago. The times we live in necessitate that point of view and J.J. is such a great person to take it and move it forward. There's an optimism that lives at the heart of this film and at the heart of the franchise that's a really great thing for us to be able to share with the world right now."
Pine added that being involved in Star Trek has been a great opportunity for him to meet people he now considers friends. "J.J. has such an incredible ability to create absolute equanimity on the set. No one feels like there's a dictator shouting orders from behind Video Village, go here, move there, that kind of stuff. It was a family on the set and I feel so lucky to have been involved with people that I had fun with every day. That family that we built on set will, hopefully, translate to this bigger family out here that will accept this new version. What we've done—and this is where credit must go to Bob and J.J.—is we've created a great blend of action sequences and wonderful relationships between the characters."
Quinto responded that all three actors had just seen the film for the first time this week, the previous night in fact, and "literally, you guys, I couldn't speak for 20 minutes after. I'm not like that. I'm like [nonplussed], 'It was good. It was fine. It was all right.' But it is such a ride. It is so exciting. We're all excited to share it with everybody. For my money, it succeeds on a lot of levels and I hope you all feel that way as well." Invited to comment, Saldana admitted that listening to Quinto and Pine is, in effect, like listening to Kirk and Spock, which makes her so excited she can hardly speak. But she agreed with Quinto that the most exciting aspect of the experience was meeting the original cast members. Nichelle Nichols is "one elegant and sexy Uhura, I'm telling you that." To know how excited they were in this entire project from J.J. Abrams being the creator behind it, and the writers, the direction in which the story traveled, revamping and bringing it back for the fans and to make believers out of generations from the '80s and '90s who originally asked, "Star Trek? What's that?" This project is an opportunity for them to be introduced into this world that has been alive for over 40 years.
Abrams inserted that—though it was very kind of all three actors to call him and the writers the creators of this film—everyone was fully aware of Gene Roddenberry and indebted to him throughout the making of this movie. Having the "First Lady of Star Trek" Majel Barrett-Roddenberry—Gene's wife and the only actor to appear in all five live-action Star Trek series—contribute her voice as the USS Enterprise computer before her death in December 2008, as well as having other members of the original cast participate in the project, not the least being Nimoy—"a more elegant, thoughtful, considerate and caring man does not exist"—is something Abrams wanted to be sure to acknowledge. Without all the talent that has come before, his film could not have existed.
Asked how it felt to take on the relationship of Kirk and Spock, Pine stated it was daunting, to which Quinto quickly joked, "I was not daunted." After the laughter subsided, Pine continued that, yes, he was wary of accepting the role at first because he knew Trekkies were the best fans in the world and he didn't want to disappoint them. Acknowledging that he and Quinto had known each other before they worked on this project, he immediately felt a rapport with Quinto that went above and beyond the relationship in Trek. Added to the atmosphere Abrams generated on-set, and respectful of what had been done in the past, Pine felt their job was to find the life in the characters that this story told, with this particular journey in the journeys of these characters. This part of their journey has not been told or brought to life before. "Instead of feeling encumbered by the responsibility of doing justice to what had been done in the past, I felt a certain amount of freedom to bring my own take on the character."
Quinto recalled that when he first sat down with Abrams about potentially playing the role of Spock, they talked for about 45 minutes. Well, Abrams did most of the talking. About 43 minutes worth while Quinto tried to squeeze a word in edgewise with the remaining 2 minutes. "His vision was so clear," Quinto grinned, "I couldn't have been in better hands in terms of being guided through this. This was a $100-whatever million dollar movie but every day that we showed up for work it really was about what was going on between J.J. and the people in the scene. All of the forces fell in behind that."
Kevin Smith had an opportunity to go into the editing room with Abrams to see some of the Star Trek footage and on his blog Smith paid Abrams a compliment, saying Star Trek fans were not going to be disappointed. A young man in the audience wondered if Abrams had read Smith's blog entry and what he thought of it? "Well, it just proves that we pay someone," Abrams quipped. "Kevin is a friend and I asked him to come see the movie because, obviously, when you're making a movie it's best to have tons of points of view. Kevin is—in addition to many things—terribly funny, wildly talented, and he's painfully honest. I've shown him things in the past that he has ripped apart and destroyed while with other things he's been complimentary; but, he's got a wonderful point of view from a fan base that I care about deeply and so—among many people who were not just Trek fans but comics fans—I had him come to see it and I was thrilled that his response was what it was."
A young woman mentioned that one of her friends had been an extra in Star Trek and that Abrams was known for rapping on the set. She felt WonderCon deserved to hear some of that. "What's the name of your friend who will never work again?" Abrams laughed. "First of all, I want to say that the extras in the movie were spectacular. I'm not kidding you. We had the greatest extras. They were amazing and tireless." Abrams asked any extras in the film present to stand up for due applause. Then, with Chris Pine's assistance, he tapped out a hilarious rap rhythm on the microphone.
Pine was then asked if he had any favorite episodes of the Star Trek TV series that helped him nail his characterization of Kirk? He referenced the episode where Kirk is split into the good Captain Kirk and the evil Captain Kirk as "up there" in terms of influence. He also loved when Kirk fought Finnegan—"that was just hysterical"—and in the episode where Kirk wrestles the young boy, Pine admitted, "I don't think I would do that." What he found in watching the old series was that William Shatner was incredibly funny; the same humor that he brings to Boston Legal, but in a whole different way. "It's that twinkle in his eye, that 'anything can happen', that I couldn't try to re-create for the life of me, but which inspired me to bring my own thing."
The same question was posed to Zachary Quinto. Had he watched many of the TV episodes to get a feel for Spock and his mannerisms? "I did not watch the original series," Quinto confessed. "I had the advantage of working closely with Leonard leading up to the production so I took advantage of that. He and I met a number of times. He was such a valuable resource for me and he made himself so incredibly open and available to my questions. So I really used that initially. I started to watch the original series actually when we were shooting. I would watch them in my trailer. There was usually always an episode playing when I was hanging out in my room. That was really great because none of us—and J.J. was very clear about this from the beginning—this wasn't an endeavor to try to recreate what was created before us. That was certainly a template, a base line, a foundation for us; but, we were all encouraged and I think all of us did our own work and did our best to bring our own interpretations in a world that is not the same world that we live in now in which that show originally took place. For me it was a combination of those things, of utilizing Leonard and my own research. I read a lot about the world. I read a lot about the character. But I felt that the words that Bob and Alex gave us and the situations that the characters found themselves in were really the most important thing."
Quinto was then asked what had been the most difficult aspect of his career balancing between his role as Sylar on Heroes and now Spock in Star Trek? Conceding he's had a remarkable couple of years, "Heroes has been such a gift to me creatively and professionally and then to align myself with these people, there really hasn't been too much difficulty. Maybe a little less sleep but somehow I manage, with a lot of gratitude. I'm having a blast."
Abrams advised that—in addition to the actors being incredible—it was "so cool" working with Industrial Light and Magic on special effects. "They've been outdoing themselves every time and I'm honored to have had a chance to work with them."
Asked if there would be a Cloverfield 2 or some kind of sequel, Abrams offered that they're working on an idea. "The key to doing any kind of sequel—this film included—is that it better not be a business decision. If you're going to do something, it should be because you're inspired to do it. That doesn't guarantee anything. It doesn't mean the film is going to work. But, it means that you did it because you cared, not because you thought you could make a buck. So we have an idea for something that's pretty cool that we're playing with that—if it ends up coming to fruition—would mean that there would be something that could be connected to Cloverfield. But I hope it happens sooner than later because the idea is pretty sweet."
Cross-published on Twitch.
The tagline for Deadgirl—a film co-directed by Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel—posits that "every generation has its story about the horror of growing up" and Deadgirl successfully monitors the disturbing grunts and groans of that growth. As they synopsize: "We were interested in making a film that explored the pain of being young and the confusion of growing up, but in a way that felt altogether new. What excited us about Trent Haaga's script was the way it told a story that felt familiar at first, but then took a dramatic and terrifying turn into a direction no one could possibly anticipate. It touched upon typical teen fears—intimacy, abandonment, uncertainty—and spun from realism to the surreal, and then back again. We felt the very nature of the script embodied what it was like to be a teenager—uncompromising and rebellious, while at the same time maintaining an earnestness, even in the most desperate of circumstances. That emotion, as well as some pretty dark humor, was important to keep us connected to the characters, even when their actions turned horrifying or uncomfortable. There's a point in life when many see for themselves a disappointing future that differs greatly from the one they always expected. It can be a painful moment—what we see as the 'horror of growing up'—and as filmmakers, we were excited to explore the theme through such an uncompromising, unique, and hopefully unforgettable story."
High school misfits Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) and JT (Noah Segan) decide to cut school to explore the crumbling facility of a nearby abandoned hospital, where they get lost and come face-to-face with a gruesome discovery: a woman whose body has been stripped naked, chained to a table and covered in plastic. Both react to the situation in extremely different ways and the boys soon find themselves embarking on a twisted yet poignant journey that forces them to decide just how far they're willing to stretch their understanding of right and wrong.
Harel: That's a great observation. Wow. We usually have to point that out to people. We get certain reactions from guys. We have the guys who come up to us and say, "I liked it; but, women are going to kill you." And we're always replying, "But the women respond to it; they get it." They understand that it's really not about what you think it's going to be about. For some reason, the biggest detractors tend to be men who see the film in a simplistic way: "Oh, you're just saying that guys are dicks." They break the film down and try to put it in that box. By contrast, women tend to be open to everywhere the film goes. So we're always telling people, "Don't tell us that women are going to hate it. You are wrong." You're absolutely right.
Guillén: These two boys who are rummaging around in the depths of this dilapidated insane asylum—their version of Hell—come across this creature, this denizen of the underworld. I don't like to think of her as a zombie. She's not what I really think of as a zombie per se.
Guillén: Commensurably, misogyny works in degrees. That's what I found intriguing and brilliant about Deadgirl. You present degrees and layers of misogyny. There are some that are instantly despicable—JT is fairly despicable because he doesn't really care one way or the other—
Guillén: You approached Trent Haaga looking for a script and it's my understanding that Deadgirl was the one he didn't want to show you?
The movie brings out some disturbing people. [Chuckles.] Every once in a while you get somebody who says, "You should have gone much further. You guys are pussies. More gore." I was talking to one guy at the Roxie who was complaining about the film and I said, "I have to ask you: what did you like about it?"—because, despite his complaints, he had said he really liked it—and he answered, "Oh the raping and the beating." [Harel raises an eyebrow.] I thought, "I didn't make this movie for you then. I don't know what to tell you." Trent wrote a tough script. He's a great writer so it was evocative. For Marcel and I it was—not so much a matter of toning it down—but, trying to translate it into something that still drew you in.
Guillén: The most telling backhanded compliment I noticed in the Variety review was DeBruge's closing comment: "Digital footage looks better than the material deserves." So let's talk about the camera. You used The Viper?
Guillén: So not only were you the first film to use The Viper and The Codex from beginning to end, but—again, according to Colin at Midnight Madness—that was their first time to project a film from the box?
Guillén: This is the remake of the Danish film Mørke?
Harel: Great question. There would be no movie without the dead girl so let's start with her.
Guillén: And Candice Accola who plays Rickie's love interest JoAnn?
Harel: Absolutely. She gives Rickie a look in that scene when he comes into the room and he's so angry or jealous of this jock when the jock's flaunting it that he suggests, "Why don't you go for the mouth?" That point is a kind of make or break with the dead girl. She becomes a weapon for him and a device for payback. She turns her head and looks at him and it's like, "Really? You are doing this to me? Even you?" Ricky looks away; he's so ashamed.
