Director E.L. Katz’s debut feature film Cheap Thrills packs a serious wallop.
The movie follows Craig (Pat Healy), a down-on-his-luck auto mechanic who loses his job and receives an eviction notice, all in a few seriously crappy hours. Faced with the prospect of homelessness for himself, his wife and his new baby, Craig’s dragged into a bar by a ne’er-do-well of an old high-school pal named Vince (Ethan Embry) to drown some sorrows. At the bar, the two reunited friends meet Colin (David Koechner), a boisterous party animal with a seemingly bottomless wallet and a hot wife named Violet (Sara Paxton) in tow. Then Colin begins goading Craig and Vince into an escalating series of increasingly nervy dares ($50 to whoever downs that tequila shot first, $200 if you slap that stripper’s rump). Soon, though, all four parties head to Colin’s house in the hills, where the money and the stakes escalate to extreme levels.
Don’t let the Jackass-on-ultraviolence-steroids premise put you off: Cheap Thrills is terrific, less torture porn or sniggering gross-out than an effective film noir that squeezes its dark spirit through a jet-black comedy filter. The end result represents a compact, blood-spattered, hilarious, and tense gem of a genre flick, steered with confidence and ragged energy by Katz’s direct, sucker-punch hand. It’s the kind of movie willing to graphically show one character chopping off the pinkie of another one, while deeply investing you in the fates of both.
I interviewed Katz shortly after viewing his feature-film bow last June during SIFF 2013. He discussed his directorial debut with laconic wit, peppering his deep genre-geek knowledge with occasional expletives and a healthy sense of perspective. Much to my regret, the interview got shoved to the wayside by other writing assignments, and I worried that I’d never get a timely excuse to post it. But with Cheap Thrills opening at SIFF Cinema Uptown tonight after several months of overwhelming critical and festival success, fate opened up that opportunity once more…without me having to hack off a digit to make it happen.
You’ve written a lot of screenplays, but this is your first time in the director’s chair, isn’t it?
Yeah. The only thing I’ve directed that’s close to a feature is a jokey short part of this movie called Pop Skull. It was one of the first movies by the director of You’re Next. It’s a weird film-within-a-film thing, sort of like a fake vampire movie. But other than that, [Cheap Thrills] is the only thing I’ve ever directed. I haven’t directed any music videos, I haven’t done shorts. There’s no reason anyone should’ve hired me for this [laughs]!
That really surprises me, because Cheap Thrills feels so accomplished.
[laughs] You don’t feel that way when you’re shooting it! When you’re directing a movie the first time and it’s a 14-day shoot, you feel like you’re on the back of a car, holding on as it goes downhill. It was really hard to do.
Looking at it now, why do you think it’s been perceived as such a confident debut?
Well, you have to do your homework before you shoot, and I made a couple of choices that really covered my ass. I think one of them, for sure, was choosing actors that can do what they need to do, who fit those roles and looked right and acted right. It was also knowing our limitations. Knowing that I only had a certain amount of time, I was only gonna do hand-held. [I] choose an aesthetic that was an aesthetic and tried not to overreach. A lot of it is trying not to fuck things up.
People have called this a horror movie. I don’t think it’s a horror movie: In my mind, it’s a film noir/jet-black comedy…
It’s totally cool that you get that reference. There are a lot of those tropes. Violet is totally a weird, distilled femme fatale, and even Vince’s character is such a noir heavy. I love that stuff. It’s one of my favorite genres.
The actors are really effective, and it’s interesting because I had a lot of them typed in my mind. I’m used to Ethan Embry playing a more likable guy, and Koechner’s known as a comic actor thanks to Anchorman and Talladega Nights. What was it like for them exploring those characters?
I think it was exciting for them. Ethan told me it was one of the first good roles he’d gotten in awhile, and he is never afraid to get his hands dirty in any way. He’s super-physical, he does a lot of his own stunts, and he always wants to push things harder. He was just really excited to have fun, and he had fun.
Koechner’s always wanted to do darker movies. He’s definitely a successful actor, but even when I met him the first time, he was like, “I’d love to be working with the Coen Brothers, but they won’t hire me, so I’ll work with you [laughs]!”
He’s so good in the movie because he plays one of those noir archetypes to the hilt.
Yeah, he totally fits in with that sort of psycho-noir vibe. I love noirs that were kind of informed by a druggier, weirder view…
…Like Sam Fuller or Seijun Suzuki.
Yes! Seijun Suzuki is one of my favorites. Branded to Kill was, honestly, a huge influence on me. When [Jo Shisido’s] in the ring at the end, screaming, “YEAH!!” and throwing his arms up after he’s shot…It’s great that you bring up Seijun Suzuki. Nobody’s actually mentioned that, but Seijun Suzuki was actually an influence. We didn’t shoot in beautiful black-and-white or amazing garish color, but I love that stuff.
Pat Healy is terrific in the lead. He’s this decent guy who’s forced to go to these horrible places to protect his family.
Pat’s really good. I mean, he’s worked with a bunch of people like Herzog and Paul Thomas Anderson… He’s a real actor. He does improv constantly, he writes. But all those guys were great. David Koechner is a vet. Ethan’s been acting since he was a kid. I’m learning from them. I like working with people who are smarter than me: I want to be there someday. And it’s cool to work with somebody like Pat. He’s a fucking artist, and he was always pulling out fucking great things.
Any words of advice to aspiring screenwriters or directors out there?
If you want to be a screenwriter, you have to sacrifice a decade of your life and not have much of a social life. You need to be OK with doing nothing but staying in your place and writing. A lot of people aren’t. So you need to be a hard worker, you need to have a lot of stuff written, and you need to read a lot of scripts. You can’t live in a bubble, and you have to network, but you also don’t want to freak people out and be all over them. You’ve got to understand the rules of networking, and not be too pushy.
For directors, I don’t have the first bit of advice, because I think it’s crazy. That is a lottery. Who fucking knows [laughs]? The one thing I would say is: Get a good script first. You need to be able to look for good material that’s worth filming, because you’re bringing nothing to the table if all you can do is bring something that looks pretty.