Tag Archives: cult movies

An Interview with Detention Director Joseph Kahn

June 8, 2011 Tony Kay

Director Joseph Kahn has been working in music video for twenty years, directing big-time efforts like U2’s “Elevation” clip and Britney Spears’ “Toxic,” among others. But he’s managed to combine that experience with his love of 1980s and ’90s pop cinema to create one of SIFF 2011’s left-field surprises, Detention.

Kahn’s sophomore feature enjoyed the last of its enthusiastically-received SIFF screenings on Sunday June 5. The movie follows Riley (Shanley Caswell), a wisecracking Square Peg of a high school girl who deals with her infatuation for slacker dreamboat Clapton (The Kids are Alright’s Josh Hutcherson), even as a masked killer runs around making mincemeat of her classmates.

Very quickly, the movie branches off into a dozen different directions, augmenting a very sharp bird’s-eye view of the little nightmares that comprise adolescence with sardonic humor, a time-travelling stuffed bear, aliens, slasher cliches, and so many meta-movie references that you’ll need to see it a second (and third, and fourth…) time to absorb all of ‘em.

But it’s more than just pastiche. All of those disparate threads intersect by the movie’s end, and Kahn delivers the entire sensory-overloaded package with pinpoint accuracy. By backing up its relentless MTV-stoked pace with a distinctive sensibility (and a heart), Detention just might signal a sea change in music video-influenced moviemaking. As The SunBreak’s own Josh Bis said, “I left feeling won over by something that I probably should have hated,” and I too came out of the screening seriously, mightily impressed.

Not surprisingly, Kahn talks like he films: fast and precise, but with so many interesting tangents and layers that it’s a fun challenge to follow along.

You were saying at last night’s Q&A that Detention was made outside of a major studio’s involvement…

Yeah. Detention is pretty much like me writing a check…I found a few people that invested in it, but it was a weird financing deal to where I had to pay them back; so it wasn’t really like investment as much as it was loans. There was no studio involved; no studio executives. There’s not even a formal producer [on the film]. I mean, I had my music video producers on, but there wasn’t anyone on who’d made movies before, or had a [film production] company or anything like that…. I think it’s about as indie as it could possibly be.

The movie looks incredibly polished. It speaks to your background in commercials and videos. There are a lot of filmmakers who’ve been working in the last twenty years in music videos and commercials, but in a lot of cases they’ll downplay or dismiss that background. You embrace that experience. That’s a relatively new notion.

What I’ve seen in the last twenty years, in terms of the whole transition of music video and commercial directors is, when they finally go into the feature-film world, they always want to prove that they’re “serious filmmakers.” Every fucking single one of them toned down the style, and stopped doing what they do in terms of music videos. They almost want to emulate filmmakers, which I think is really strange…. I think there’s wonderful work being done in videos and advertising; groundbreaking stuff in terms of montage theory and structure, and how audiences process information. You can’t translate it one-to-one, but there’s a lot of stuff you can take that can push the art form a bit more.

To me, Detention really feels like maybe the most seamless absorption of those influences into a standard motion-picture format. In its own crazy-quilt cartoon way, it feels like it’s expanding the art form with those elements; which is almost a first to me.

Wow [laughs]: That’s a great perspective.

But that feeds off of you embracing this background that you’ve had in commercials and music video. That said, could you talk to me about some of the cinematic influences on Detention?

[In] a lot of what’s done in cinema right now, especially mainstream filmmaking, commercials specifically have affected movie-making to the worst. They’ve pulled in all these commercial directors, but what they really wanted was this “Coverage Concept” of filmmaking, where you shoot medium/close-up/wide, shoot a ton of angles, you shoot with multiple-cameras. It’s sort of like the Jerry Bruckheimer style of shooting something. It looks slick, and it’s lit slick, because you can light things from certain sorts of angles and stuff with your cameras. But ultimately, it’s shot for coverage, and then you piece it together in the edit. Producers and studio executives love this style.

That’s actually not what I do, personally, in music videos. It’s harder to do in commercials, because it’s all sort of boarded out by the agency, but when I personally do my music videos, I always try to do a construction that is often blocking-intensive; where people move inside the camera space, and there’s a mise-en-scene to the thing and you can’t really edit around it.

Going to your question, a lot of that is influenced [by] the filmmakers that I loved that were doing pop movies in the eighties…specifically Steven Spielberg; the way he blocks his camera and the actors. Whenever you see a Spielberg film, he always does these long takes–I call them “mise-ettes,” light units of mise-en-scene. If you look at an average film, it’s always, like, one thing happens visually: Someone turns his head, or a person walks up to something. It’s one unit of screen space happening. And Spielberg ties it together; you could have fourteen mise-ettes happening, where one person walks in and suddenly the camera pans; another person walks in–rack focus to his hand, rack focus to someone’s head. It’s like these long layers and planes and things like that.

So Detention, if you look at its main influences, is like this weird fusion of hyper-editing here and there; also constructed with these intricate mise-ettes. That’s heavily influenced off Spielberg, and some Scorsese theories of smash cuts and things like that.

Although Detention has a pretty wicked, jet-black sense of humor, there’s actually a certain amount of sweetness to it, especially at the end. Could you speak a little about that?

Well, even though I have a pretty jaded sense of humor, I’m not a jaded person. I have a lot of hope for humanity. Also, as I get older, I’m not one of those people that looks at the younger generation and goes, “They’re all screwed up, and nothing’s ever gonna happen.” […] What’s really interesting is that I feel like, having done music videos and pop videos for the last twenty years, I’ve seen how kids today are so much more integrated than ever before; the idea that white kids love rap music, and black kids love rock music, and there’s fusion things…. It’s just such an interesting, integrated perspective of the world. I see nothing but positivity.

There are always gonna be missteps and things like that. But we elected a black president. That’s an incredible statement. So from my standpoint, humanity’s only getting better and better. I feel like maybe, in the 21st century, we are really seeing the emergence of this really sweet new culture where everybody is really, really getting along; and I like it. So I can’t make a high school movie and lie and say, “Everyone’s fucked up.” I don’t see it that way. I truly like the kids today.

It’s interesting that you talk about that duality. In Detention, you see a lot of the pains of high school and the pains of not fitting in that we all felt. But there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

There’s no question in my mind that everyone shares the pain of growing up. And I felt it was really important to put a universal message out there that, no matter how hard it is, it’s just high school. Not that your problems aren’t big, but…if you notice in the movie, it’s like every problem that happens to everybody is, like, the worst problem ever. So you have titles [in the movie] like “The Terrible Ultimatum of Clapton Davis,” “The Lonely Ballad of Billy Nolan.” In high school, everything is just so magnified, ’cause you’re experiencing all these things for the first time. And that’s really where it comes in for me. It’s like, can these kids really experience all these things, and how the hell do you survive that when the emotions are so powerful?

The visual language of all the horror scenes is quite effective. Are you a horror movie fan?

Yeah, especially from the eighties. One of the ways that I learned how to do filmmaking was reading Fangoria magazine…. When you saw all the blood and guts and effects [in the magazine], they would break it down and show you behind-the-scenes. You’d see there was a logical construction to all this stuff, how the illusion was made. And if you think about horror movies for a filmmaker, on a certain level, if you study [the genre], it’s a very clean way of saying, “How do I achieve a [goal]?” which is to scare somebody, or to make them think that someone died…. You reverse-engineer that stuff, and you start becoming a filmmaker, because you realize that one shot must lead to the next. You have master shots, you have close-ups; how do you arrange that stuff? Then that opens doors to very specific filmmakers like Hitchcock….

So as far as Detention goes, what’s the exhibition trajectory like? Is this your first film festival screening?

This is my second one; I had one in Austin [at South by Southwest]. The weird thing is, every time I screen the movie, it seems to get stronger and stronger reactions. I don’t know if it’s like a wine that’s aging–I haven’t done anything new to it since Austin–but this [Seattle screening] is one of the strongest screenings that I’ve ever seen. I can’t figure it out, except that maybe it’s because people in the Pacific Northwest are just so damned smart [laughs]. They got every reference. I’ve never seen anything like it.

It’s a high-school movie, so it’s going to skew towards that demographic. But I think it’s distinctive enough, and smart enough, and there’s enough going on, to where you don’t have to be a kid to enjoy it.

Yeah, it was a tricky balance, too, since we have this big time-travel thing and all these references to the ’90s…. The reality is, if you’re a nineteen-year-old kid, a lot of those ’90s references may not really register. Then if you’re older, a lot of the new lingo that the kids know may not really register, either. So it was a weird balance of trying to hit the older and younger target [simultaneously]. Maybe the sweet spot might be someone around 25 that doesn’t hate people who are 18; and that’s a tough one [laughs]!

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

A Talk With the Guys Who Filmed H.P. Lovecraft’s The Whisperer in Darkness

June 7, 2011 Tony Kay 2 Comments

The name of H.P. Lovecraft looms large in horror literature, but the road to adapting the early-twentieth-century author’s weld of gothic horror and science fiction to the screen is littered with crummy movies.

Ironic, then, that a ragtag troupe of independent California filmmakers have succeeded in capturing Lovecraft’s distinctive brand of all-encompassing cosmic terror–where so many others have failed–on a dime, and shot on video, no less.

Director/co-writer Sean Branney, co-writer/actor Andrew Leman, and cinematographer/editor Dave Robertson all hit SIFF in support of their first full-length feature, The Whisperer in Darkness.

The grandly old-school horror flick follows the ill-fated adventures of Miskatonic University professor Albert Wilmarth (Matt Foyer) as he journeys to the remote Vermont farmlands to investigate rumors of strange beings roaming the countryside. Wilmarth soon discovers that those strange beings, a mythological race of aliens known as the Mi-Go, may be much more than fabrications of folklore.

Branney and company have stayed true to the vision of their revered source material on two fronts. One, they’ve crafted an impressive period piece, evocative of something that could’ve readily been playing in theaters in the early 1930s (when Lovecraft was still alive); and two, they’ve tapped into the mounting dread and creepy ambiance endemic in the author’s best work with their interpretation of Whisperer. It’s a deliciously atmospheric movie, and a rich contrast to the more graphic horror features that have populated SIFF 2011’s Midnight Adrenaline series.

Talking to these three horror-nerd amigos proves to be a kick. This is their second time working on a filmed Lovecraft adaptation together (the first, the excellent silent version of The Call of Cthulhu, can be seen on Hulu), and they’ve got the easy camaraderie of brothers-in-arms.

They’re great characters, too: Branney serving as the ostensible leading man in our conversation with his rich baritone; Leman, with his owlish features and wide eyes, the endearingly-dotty mad scientist; and the soft-spoken Robertson, the stoutly-built nuts-and-bolts guy you want on your side in an onscreen brawl.

Plus, they know their stuff: When I bring up the location of one of Whisperer‘s cave exteriors (California’s historic Bronson Caves, the original Batcave and a popular site for horror and sci-fi film sets over the decades), they light up like Christmas trees. We reach, Whisperer in Darkness creators: We reach.

Why did you choose to adapt Lovecraft’s Whisperer in Darkness as your first full-blown feature?

Sean Branney: When we made our last film, The Call of Cthulhu, it was a bigger success than any of us ever really anticipated, and that was a terrific surprise. Not long after we released it around the world, we realized we wanted to make another film, and…after making a silent film, we were eager to make a film with sync sound. We made a very long short–or a very short feature, depending on how you want to make that determination–[and] we wanted to do something with sound; a feature film. So with those…as sort of the driving decisions in terms of the form, we started thinking through other Lovecraft stories; and very early on in the process, settled on The Whisperer in Darkness.

Andrew Leman: It’s long been one of our favorite stories. The Mi-Go are…very fascinating villain[s]. Sound is an integral part of that story–the sound of the wax cylinder, the sound that they [the Mi-Go] make–so it seemed like a natural fit. And it’s also a story that has not been previously made into a movie, so we felt we had a clear shot at bringing our own ideas to it without being encumbered by previous adaptations.

Welcome to our nightmare: Dave Robertson, Andrew Leman, and Sean Branney (left to right)

Call of Cthulhu and Whisperer in Darkness were both shot on video…one thing that really impressed me about both movies is that they don’t look shot on video. You’ve done a very good job of making them look of-the-time. How was that accomplished, technically?

Dave Robertson: It’s less complicated than you think. It really starts in the camera itself. It’s a lighting process, really. Modern movies don’t really light that way, anymore: [We used] very direct-source lighting. And that’s the way both movies were lit, really…. It’s very much the way I like to light, anyway, so it really suited me.

Call of Cthulhu was a bit different from Whisperer. Call of Cthulhu did have some filter processing that made it look like a distressed film. Whisperer didn’t, as much. Whisperer was more native, in-camera. We didn’t do much to change the image imposed, other than turn it black-and-white. It was actually shot in color.

AL: We also shot Call of Cthulhu on standard definition, and we shot Whisperer in high-definition video. We sort of invented the Mythoscope process. We originally invented it as kind of a funny name; and then it actually turned into a very serious technique for taking standard definition video, which Call of Cthulhu was shot in, and trying to make it seem as much like old film as we could. Mythoscope is sort of the whole package of how we shoot video in color and try to make it look like an old black-and-white film.

There’s a very careful crafting of atmosphere in both of these movies. What are some of the other challenges involved in mounting a period piece on peanuts? And what about elements or things you’ve had to resist in terms of plot or structure, to maintain that period atmosphere?

SB: How to make a period picture on a low budget is really, first and foremost, the producer’s challenge. Andrew and I did the screenplay together, and in writing it, we told the story we wanted to tell. Then we had to take off our screenwriter hats and put on our producers’ hats and go, “Arrrg! How are we going to do this?”

DR: I’m glad you did that [laughs]…

SB: Well, David perhaps screamed louder than the rest of us. And one of the things was: We had to find period vehicles, so we needed a plane, we needed a train, we needed a car, we needed a 1930s New England university…and it became about trying to invest the time into figuring out the solution. Where are we going to find the types of locations that we need so we can pull this off, and do it within the budget that we have? And when you have limited means, it forces you to be creative. It forces you to find solutions where, if we had a five-million-dollar budget, we could just go [claps hands] “Buy one! Rent one!” And when you can’t do that, it forces you to go, “Okay, let’s think through a way that we can achieve what it is we’re going for.”

DR: That’s really true, and I think the way we’ve done it is pretty counterintuitive, actually. Most people [who] are doing low-budget movies would write what they know they can do. These guys consistently write what we know we can’t do. But what’s interesting about that is that we don’t ever approach it like we can’t do it. We say, “What is the solution? How are we gonna get it done?”

AL: I would say, Sean and I have a background as role-playing gamers, and from the time we were in high school, we were writing grandiose scenarios far beyond our abilities as high-school or college students to fabricate. And yet, somehow we managed to figure out ways to fabricate them. So when we approach a screenplay, it’s kind of with the same spirit: I know what I want to do, I’ll figure out how I’m gonna do it later. I also would say that H.P. Lovecraft himself deserves some of the credit because he has fans in the film community. Dave Snyder, who did the special make-up effects for the movie, is such a Lovecraft fan. He really wanted to work on this movie because he loves the material. So we have been lucky to find team members who want to work on this stuff, because they love Lovecraft. It’s not anything to do with us, it’s because Lovecraft himself is a beloved character. And people want to work with Lovecraft [material].

DR: That’s a huge point, because there are so many people who love Lovecraft, and the fan base is so devoted. We’ve gotten so many talented people who’ve helped us on the film that we could’ve never have afforded if we paid them in full–or in some cases, at all [laughs]!

A lot of much more established filmmakers have been royally tripped up when adapting Lovecraft to the screen. There’s a profound lure to making Lovecraft films, but not a lot of people really get it right…what, if anything, have you learned from the missteps of your forebears?

SB: When we look at the source material, [H.P. Lovecraft is] a writer steeped in atmosphere and tone. I think that’s one of the things I personally enjoy about reading his stories. It’s this pervasive sense of creepiness and unease that it brings to you. And just like Poe’s writing, the style is evocative of a certain world…. For me, there are other adaptations that may deal with a Lovecraftian concept, or sometimes only a Lovecraftian title [laughs] where, really, they chuck the Lovecraft out the window; or chuck out a lot of parts of it, and just deal with with plot elements or something like that. Because the atmosphere and tone is part of what I enjoy about the writing, that’s something I actively want to work to keep alive in our adaptations. So it feels like a Lovecraft movie. Yeah, it may be a little verbose; it may be a little wordy. But that’s who he is, and that’s part of what’s seductive about his writing. We try to walk a fine line to not bore the audience, to not make it slow. Both movies very slowly build at kind of a deliberate pace, but then they get going faster and faster. Then suddenly you find yourself in an action movie, but it still feels Lovecraftian.

DR: I think Sean covered it. I cut the movie as well, and it moves at a very deliberate pace: It’s [about] not being afraid to have some scenes that run seven or eight minutes of dialogue. That’s pretty unconventional for modern movies. But in older films, it’s not. They’re…I don’t want to say theatrical, but…they’re a little stagier, the older films. And we really blocked these that way; to have the actors moving the camera, rather than the other way around. In modern films, the camera motivates all the action.

So what’s it been like taking the movie around the world?

SB: That’s been one of the neat things about [doing] this. We don’t have any movie stars: Lovecraft really is our movie star. It’s his name, not Brad Pitt’s, that opens a lot of doors for us. Lovecraft is a very international writer. Andrew and I run the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, and we do a lot of our business overseas; people geting Lovecraft T-shirts and Call of Cthulhu mugs and things like that. We’re shipping all over the world. We had our world premiere in Athens, Greece. It was a packed cinema full of Greek Lovecraft fans! They knew the stories; read them all. They were really excited to see this work. In Amsterdam, it was the same thing. The material has a following, and fortunately the success of Call of Cthulhu has also helped paved the way for us. People go, “Oh, you’re the Call of Cthulhu guys; can’t wait to see what you’re going to do with another Lovecraft story.” It’s been really a lot of fun to share a new picture with audiences and get as enthusiastic a reception as we had here in Seattle at the midnight screening last night.

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

Six-pack of SIFF: The Cult Schlockologist’s Guide

May 26, 2011 Tony Kay

SIFF 2011 offers an embarrassment (in more ways than one, ladies and gents) of cultish-schlocky riches. Looking for wild and woolly subversions of established exploitation genres? Or are you just seeking several industrial-strength shots of action, titillation, absurdity, violence, horror, and cheap thrills? Either way, this Dirty Half-Dozen represents what looks like the Fest’s most left-of-center and warped bag of cinema tricks.

Karate Robo-Zaborgar
Japanese exploitation auteur Noboru Iguchi scored one of the most enthusiastically-received entries of SIFF 2010 with RoboGeisha (go to ye olde SunBreak archives for a concise assessment). Karate Robo-Zaborgar loosely re-jiggers a joyfully-ridiculous old Japanese Ultraman knock-off, so it’s likely not to be as violence-laden as the director’s other action titles. Still, it’s got the outrageous primary colors, hyperkinetic action, and demented twists on cliche that’ve earned Iguchi a fervent cult following.

Revenge: A Love Story
South Korean action flick Yellow Sky’s generating the biggest action-film buzz of SIFF 2011, but this Hong Kong action/exploitation midnighter possesses a grittier, more brutal patina.

The Last Circus
It’s a Spanish Civil War allegory; bathed in blood; populated by two hideously-scarred, homicidally-jealous circus clowns; and it’s the recipient of two very public Quentin Tarantino thumbs up in the form of Venice Film Festival jury prizes. No-brainer.

We Are the Night
Ah, sexy female vampires doing sexy female vampire things; it’s a noble grindhouse tradition. The metaphoric torch gets passed from Ingrid Pitt to Daughters of Darkness to this Teutonic Lost Boys in drag.

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
This lavishly-appointed, Tsui Hark-helmed martial arts costume drama is ostensibly a mystery about a forensics genius (Andy Lau), solving murders on the eve of the ascension of China’s first female Emperor. But any movie sporting kung fu, log fu, disembodied-limb fu, and spontaneous combustion definitely edges into cult territory.

The Intruder
Like We Are the Night, The Intruder is descended from another beloved drive-in sub-genre: The Batshit-Crazy Killer Animal Movie. A band of disparate characters gets trapped in their apartment complex with a killer cobra or two; or four; or a thousand. Again, no-brainer.

Curious Georges in a conversation with Seattle