Green Room: Callum Turner and Jeremy Saulnier Interviews

Just a quick note to say I was lucky enough to get to recently interview Jeremy Saulnier, the director of Green Room and Blue Ruin and also actor Callum Turner who plays Tiger, the lead singer of punk band the Ain't Rights in Green Room.

Here's a snippet of my review of the film:

"Punk band Ain't Rights are going nowhere fast, playing crappy gigs and siphoning petrol just to keep their clapped-out tour van running. After an interview with a local journalist and a disappointing take from their latest gig, they hear of a backwoods gig where they can make some quick and easy cash. The only rub is the clientele at the venue are far right (or are they extreme left?) nutters and Ain't Right don't help matters by opening with a cover of The Dead Kennedy’s Nazi Punks.

However, the poop really hits the fan when they witness a murder backstage in the green room and find themselves trapped in the venue by those who don't want them to get out alive. Led by Patrick Stewart's gang leader and venue owner, an army of skinhead 'red laces' are soon lining up to pick off the band members of Ain't Rights one by one."

The interviews with both Callum Turner and Jeremy Saulnier are both up at Starburst Magazine now and Green Room recently came out on Blu-ray and DVD so if you didn't catch it at the cinema (and not enough people did), then you should most certainly think about getting yourself a copy now. Or I'll send round Patrick Stewart to knock some sense into you.

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Interview with The Last Exorcism Part 2 Director Ed Gass-Donnelly

When The Last Exorcism Part 2 hit cinemas three years after the original found footage shocker that caused quite a stir and made a tidy profit off a very small budget, I got to sit down with the director of the sequel Ed Gass-Donelly and chat to himus about the influence of Rosemary’s Baby and working with star in the making Ashley Bell whose Nell is the only returning character from the original film.

Nell’s been through hell in The Last Exorcism already. What does The Last Exorcism Part 2 throw at her?

It starts directly after the events of the first movie and we find her out in the woods and nobody knows what happened to her. She’s put into a half way home and starts settling in and discovering who she is as a person. As she had such a strict religious upbringing and was home schooled, now she’s suddenly in New Orleans and can decide for herself what she’s going to wear or get tempted by things from make up to boys. It becomes this seduction where these seemingly innocent temptations start evolving and becoming darker. She starts slowly realising that whatever the force was that had a hold on her before is still with her and has darker plans in store for her.

You moved away from found footage for this sequel. Is this a statement on the sub-genre or just a better way to tell this story?

It’s less a statement about found footage in general but certainly I’m not a huge fan of that as a genre. I find it very limiting. I think it can be an effective tool for part of the movie. For me the biggest thing was the camera crew got killed at the end of the last movie. That style ended and now we’re into traditional cinema and following this character’s journey. Otherwise the whole plot would have had to be about another camera crew and it probably wouldn’t have been a movie I’d want to do.

You shot during the real Mardi Gras with a skeleton crew. Was there still a documentary vibe then when shooting?

We did like a splinter unit. Early on I spoke with the producer about doing the movie and we talked about there being no way we could be in New Orleans during Mardi Gras and not film it! Knowing roughly when the schedule was I wrote it into the script. We got a little delayed initially. We’d only been in prep for a week or two but we specifically planned it that we would use a skeleton crew and try and be a bit more indie in our approach so we could embrace all the production value. The story is so much about Nell discovering the world and herself. To have her actually walking through these crowds of people and we’d do these things like where she’s literally walking through and touching these peoples costumes and it’s a very like sensual experience of her having this tactile relationship with the world she’s never seen before. To actually throw ourselves hard core into the real thing was like harking back to my first film which was very guerrilla and we would just shoot without permits and throw ourselves into the real world. So that was definitely in my comfort zone. Then once we get into the actual movie, we had full crew and proper gear.

You write, edit and direct your films. Is that cost restrictions or a desire to keep control?

It started out initially that I was the best editor that I could afford. When I was doing completely no budget stuff, I didn’t know great editors that would come and work on the movie for free. More importantly, why I can do the multiple jobs is that at a certain point, I really don’t give a shit what Ed the director wanted. I’m like well how can I make the best movie out of what I have. There’s all these times when you make mistakes in any of your films and it’s like well how do I turn this into something completely different or how do I discover meaning that was never there. I’m willing to throw out my favourite scene if it makes the movie better. On Small Town Murder Songs I completely changed the ending in the edit suite. That just came out of being honest with myself. The ending I shot didn’t quite work and didn’t quite follow through on the thematic promise so I looked at it objectively and tried to make the best movie. Some people can get so caught up in something being exactly the way they had originally intended it. I think on my next movie I might work with another editor, hopefully with a budget to get an editor whose work I really love. So certainly initially financial limitations can be a big part of doing all those jobs.

Small Town Murder Songs was compared to the Coen Brothers’ films. Roman Polanski is one of your favourite directors. Who influenced The Last Exorcism Part 2?

Rosemary’s Baby was definitely a reference for us for this. We tried to make a very restrained, coming of age character driven story that is scary as opposed to a straight up horror movie. I really love Polanski and The Tenant and the sense of restraint and dread that he does so well. Rosemary’s Baby really is about dread and fear and holding back. I find that personally much scarier and more interesting than just straight up gore. When I agreed to do the movie I bought three original one-sheet posters and had them put on my wall and they were The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby and The Shining. You know even The Exorcist has 45 minutes go by before shit really hits the fan. I like the idea of restraint.

It’s a much bigger role for leading lady Ashley Bell, how was it working with her?

She was great! For me one of the key discoveries when writing the script was that we really didn’t get to know from the first movie who the character of Nell was. She was a supporting character in the first movie and also we never knew objectively whether what we saw was actually her or was the demon controlling her and putting on an act. So when Ash and I started talking, we were really just trying to get down to figure out who this girl is and just embrace this idea of this girl with such a big heart but who lived such a sheltered life and just experiencing this whole other world. Ash loves that character so much and just really wanted to do right by her. She worked so hard, it was really quite an amazing commitment. She’s in practically every scene of the movie so it was physically and emotionally draining but she was really such a trooper and a joy to work with. She was always throwing herself into it. 

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The Baytown Outlaws Writer Griffin Hood Interview

Griffin Hood is co-writer of The Baytown Outlaws, the action comedy starring Billy Bob Thornton and Eva Longoria released on DVD and Blu-ray on 26^th December 2012. Starting out writing and directing short films with his friend Barry Battles, the pair have now moved into Hollywood’s sights with the debut feature directed by Battles and written by both Battles and Hood. I sat down to quiz Griffin on how they managed to get the film made, what it was like working with Billy Bob Thornton and what advice he would give to aspiring filmmakers. Listening to his laidback Southern drawl is a great pleasure as he recounts his own Hollywood success story.

You wrote a short film called Mr. Extion on the difficulties of making films. What can you tell us about the process of getting The Baytown Outlaws made?

Barry and I had done that short film and then we went around to as many film festivals as we could and we tried to use that as a learning process and watched a lot of independent feature films. We then decided that we wanted to move up from that into a feature film because we’d always be at the kids table, you know making shorts. So we wrote this script based on surroundings that we have and something we thought that we would want to watch. Everything that we wrote in it, as far as location-wise were places around Alabama or Mississippi that we knew we would have access to. Our initial thought was we’ll just write it and then we’ll shoot it on the weekends. We’ll cast locally and do whatever we can to get the feature film made. We wrote it for Clayne Crawford, the guy that plays Brick. We got the script and he loved it and then he got into some representation and then after that Hollywood started to show interest in it. 

We went out to L.A., we took a bunch of meetings trying to see if anybody wanted to make it. Nobody was willing to make the sacrifice to shoot it because it’s kind of a gamble of a film. It’s not 100% commercial. So we came back to Alabama and we shot the opening basically. Barry was like ‘I want to be able to show what at least the opening would look like if I was given the opportunity to direct’. So we did that and then we signed with (agency) ICM and then it was about a month later, they had gotten it to (producer) Bill Perkins, the guy that paid for it. He got the script and the trailer that we shot and six months later we were making a movie. The whole process from writing to actually shooting was about three years.

You say ‘Hollywood came calling’, how much was that to do with your previous work or was that purely down to this script?

It was due 100% on the script of Baytown. People got a hold of it and then it started going around town and then it made it on the black list that year of unproduced scripts in Hollywood. So that gave it some heat and we’d met Bob Teitel, one of the producers, and he really wanted to make the film. He was trying to find money and he was kind of running into dead ends with Barry attached to direct because nobody wanted to gamble on a first time feature director. So that’s why we decided let’s just shoot the opening to the film as a sample as to how Barry wants the tone of it to be. And it was off of that trailer and the script that we were able to get the financing.

You mention the script getting on the Hollywood black list. I imagine it still has to be developed with the aid of producers even after that. What compromises does that process lead to?

We did have to make compromises in the process but we felt like at the end of the day we were happy with the end product. We picked our battles and we felt like for the most part we won the battles that meant something to us, things that we wanted to make sure we kept and were intact in the script because without them the integrity would be lost. I feel like that’s the way it would be with any notes process. You try your best to still make sure that at the end of the day that you come through or what you initially set out to do in that trip is what’s still seen at the end and you don’t lose your voice along the way.

You wear a number of hats on the film; writer, executive producer and taking an acting role. How much were you actually involved in the production of the film, being on set etc?

I was there on set every day. All during pre-production I was there. Me and Barry scoured through directors of photography and crew personnel, sat in auditions for actors and just made it as collaborative a process as possible. Then once we got to Louisiana this year for pre-production, Barry did his directing thing and then I was off doing more of the producer roles of securing certain locations and trying to make sure we got certain things at the right price because we didn’t have a lot of money to go around.

You mentioned auditioning and casting... what was it like to get Eva Longoria and Billy Bob Thornton involved?

It was phenomenal! We were able to get Billy Bob because Bob Teitel had just done the movie Faster with him and The Rock and so he took the script to Billy Bob and was just like ‘take a look at this, let me know what you think’. We originally wanted him and his band also to do some of the music for the film but right at the same time that he was doing Baytown, his film Jayne Mansfield’s Car, the one that he wrote and directed and starred in, he was heavily involved in that and then afterwards the editing process so he wasn’t able to have the time to do the music as we were hoping for but he was able to lend us his acting abilities and I think he’s phenomenal in the film.

There have been some flattering comparisons made between The Baytown Outlaws and the films of directors like Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie. What were your inspirations when writing it?

Definitely Tarantino and Guy Ritchie. Barry and I are huge fans of both directors. We’ve seen every film that both of them have done so we do have a lot of influence from those guys but we also really wanted it to have an Old West Sergio Leone type feel to it as well. We really wanted it to have that male bravado feel. They really had a texture to them, like it wasn’t just the story it was the movie itself had a certain feel and texture to them. That was something that we envisioned and that we also wanted to be able to show, that style of filmmaking as well which I definitely think, Tarantino especially is influenced in a lot of ways by those same films but I would say that those were our major influences.

Tarantino is of course making his own ‘Southern’ now with Django Unchained. You guys have set both your short film and this feature in the South now. Is that more to do with ‘writing what you know’ or is it more about budgetary constraints or an affinity for where you live?

Basically it was kind of a sense of writing what we know. Like I said we originally planned on doing it ourselves for as little money as possible. So we were trying to write locations that we felt we would have access to and like you say writing what we know. We knew these characters, we knew people like this. But it’s definitely we have a deep affinity for the South. We love the South, we both live in the South and hope to live here and spend as much time here as possible but we still would love to expand as well and not have everything we always do take place in the South.

You’ve done a lot of acting recently. You also write and exec-produce. Are there other things you want to try in the filmmaking process like directing perhaps?

No not really. It’s more writing and producing is kind of the focus at the moment. Staying on that and then just letting Barry do the directing or if he happens to be directing something and I am able to write something and have somebody else direct it, I’m okay with that. Directing is something that’s not really on my radar at the moment.

It’s an amazing journey Billy and yourself have been on from shorts to this feature in five years. What advice would you give to aspiring filmmakers?

My best advice is not to wait on other things to happen, not to wait on anything really. Just kinda do! When Hollywood first got the script and then nobody wanted to do it, we could have just said ‘ok’ and moved on to the next thing but instead we came back here and we shot a trailer and we tried to be as proactive as possible in the pursuit of wanting to get the film made instead of just going ‘ok well nobody wants to do it, I guess we should just forget about it’. It’s just staying the course. Anybody we’ve talked with in L.A. said it’s the ones that just stayed the course, no matter if it took five or ten years or whatever to get their break. So many people do drop out of the race, the ones who stayed the course and you know had talent of course that helps, but the ones who stayed the course eventually found their success in one way or another in the business. And I would also say be willing to be flexible. Don’t think that your words are precious or don’t think that your work is the be all end all because other people have been in this business longer and can definitely know what they’re talking about. And don’t shy away from an opportunity because maybe you think that your words if you’re a writer are going to be changed too much. Just find a way to do what’s being asked of you but still keeping it yourself.

Can you tell us anything about your future projects?

We’re up for a rewrite job right now that we’re working on and that’s gotten our full attention and then we have a couple of ideas that we’ve considered but nothing that’s concrete at the moment. We’ve been working on and attached to or trying to get attached to a couple of different writing projects that are already set up at certain studios. You know rewrites based on an article and that sort of thing.

The Baytown Outlaws is released here on Boxing Day but it’s not a Christmas movie. So finally what’s your favourite Christmas movie?

Actually I really like the movie Love Actually. It is one of my favourite Christmas movies. That and (National Lampoon’s) Christmas Vacation are my top two.

The Baytown Outlaws is released by Universal Pictures (UK) on 26^th December 2012

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Hello Quo Director Alan G. Parker Interview

Director Alan G. Parker was in London to promote his film Hello Quo and I got the chance to have a chat with the filmmaker about his epic rock documentary.

Alan G. Parker is a friendly and passionate man with as much to say as the stars of his rock-doc.  We talked about the inevitable Spinal Tap comparisons, the rumours surrounding a reunion tour for the original Frantic Four members of Status Quo and the difficulty in cutting 50 years of rock history down into a manageable length for a feature.  Parker also teased about his next project which looks set to be another definitive look at an even bigger international rock’n’roll band.

As the barricades were being erected in Leicester Square and fans started arriving long before the premiere would begin, I started by asking Mr Parker what it was like to finally be showing his film to a packed audience this evening.

With the Leicester Square premiere of Hello Quo about to kick off, I imagine you’re looking forward to the audience reaction…

AP:  What’s been fun is that so far at the press junkets and showing various pals in the industry the film, nearly everybody has said the same thing which is ‘did you sit down to make a comedy?’  Because it’s laugh out loud stuff.  There’s laughs all the way through it.  You start watching it and within five minutes, everyone in the room’s laughing.  Within thirty minutes some people’s sides are aching, they’ve laughed that much, and yet it’s a very serious story about a rock’n’roll band.  But I understand why it’s got that thing about it.  The lineage if you like is that everybody who’s spoken about this movie in print, within ten sentences has mentioned Spinal Tap but not in a bad way.

Comparisons to Spinal Tap are always welcome surely…

AP: Well Quo’s a funny beast.  It’s the dark secret isn’t it?  It’s Dad’s father’s day present.  It’s something that everybody knows a song by but is anyone wearing the t-shirt to shout about it?  And I think that Quo in that respect is a very, very big reason why we made Hello Quo.  Because Hello Quo at no point ever sets out to change anything that you know.  What it does set out to do is… one example for years we’ve been told the reason Alan Lancaster left the band is because of Marguerita Time… now that’s not true.  Well then here’s the real reason why he left the band.  OK fine great, that’s more plausible, I’m glad you did it that way.  That’s the way I see it. 

And it’s long but again how do you do a film about Quo in 90 minutes?  We tried for three months in the edit.  It didn’t work. 

How long was the first cut?

AP: Nearly six hours.  But that was just talking heads.  There was no archive in it, nothing.  Having said that, Who Killed Nancy? Which is my film, not the last one, the one before, was about four hours in rough cut.  And that’s about 100 minutes in cinemas…. The way I got taught to do it by Don Letts… always go big.  Because when you’ve got more, you can keep more.  If you’re fishing about trying to find something, that means you didn’t get it in the first place.  That’s when we have the sort of Eureka moment… well this is the first movie to contain the whole of the Frantic Four.  This is the first movie to have Francis, Rick, Alan and John on board. 

What is it that makes that original line-up such a big selling point?

AP:  So in the same way that there’s loads of people read The Dirt by Motley Crue who don’t know own a single Motley Crue album but they read it because it’s a rock’n’roll story.  It’s about sex, drugs and everything we all think we might do but not of us are gonna.  That’s the Frantic Four story.  It’s cocaine, it’s being in prison, it’s platinum albums, it’s the first band to have six straight UK number one albums.  It’s spending too much money, it’s being ripped off cause that’s how it worked back in the seventies and it’s a juggernaut of a story.  So what I did I went back to the band and their management and I didn’t want to diss the new band because they’re very successful and they do what they do.  And I said listen, we need to weight it heavily in the favour of the Frantic Four so I would say 85% of the movie is the Frantic Four story which is why we called it Hello Quo and why we used the iconography of the very early 1972 album for our poster.  Because we’re not feeding anybody a false myth.  Yes it does bring you up to date… but by the time we hit the new band there’s probably 30 minutes of the film to go.

And then you have the big reunion as your climax…

AP:  Then we always knew we had the ace card at the end… With this lot they’re probably going to carry on rolling for a while.  So I said we need something that’s big enough, we need a P.S. but it’s got to be a punch in the stomach P.S. It’s got to be like ok well if they do make a brilliant album next year, that’s not unfeasible, they made a brilliant album last year with Quid Pro Quo, probably the best album they’ve made in ages. So what we’ve got is what all the fans wanted to see which is Francis, Rick, Alan, John back together again.  And that has been a talking point online since about last Christmas.

There are all sorts of rumours around what happened at that reunion, what was it like?

AP: I mean the biggest thing is, like all these things, I know what it’s like cause I’m a fan of bands too.  But let’s be honest, the first rumour I read online which I thought was hilarious was ‘it was a two hour jam session’.  No it wasn’t.  I know that cause I was there.  I filmed the damn thing with 16 cameras.  It was about 50 minutes. Oh yeah ‘there must have been 50 or 60 people there’.  No there weren’t, there were about 20 odd people there and that included wives, girlfriends, the odd wife, the odd kid, management, our gang.  That’s it done completely.  There were just too many to me false rumours floating around and then of course came the big one which none of us can ever have control over.  Therefore two and two together make eight, they’re doing a reunion tour! Who says they’re doing a reunion tour?  Where’s it written down that they’re doing a reunion tour?  On Facebook?  Well that’s going to be reliable.  About as reliable as Wikipedia who for three weeks to begin with on this film said ‘following the rip-roaring success of The Commitments, Alan Parker makes Hello Quo.  And we got that pulled down and got my name right. So all this reunion talk seemed to be a house built on sand, not built on a good foundation.  Now that’s not to say that it won’t happen, that’s not to say that it will happen but it is to say that right now, it’s about Hello Quo.  What happens in the future, be it near or far, who knows?  I’m the only person in the entire world whoever shot that band together in 28 years so that being the case, you think I might have some insight on that matter.  But got none.  Sorry to disappoint. 

This is what fans do I suppose… speculate and jump to conclusions…

AP: You’re always going to get with any fan base; the people who post on the band’s forum are the hard core.  They’re the ones that probably have a jacket full of badges, three tattoos and someone’s changed their first name to Ricky Quo or whatever.  You expect that from people like that.  If I found out that Kiss were doing their last ever gig next week and it was on the top of Ben Nevis, I guarantee I’d be there.  I’m gonna be there and that’s it…  But it’s what fans do.  How does the movie end?  They get back together.  Oh well they must be playing round our way soon then.

The premiere is tonight in Leicester Square and then it’s released on DVD and Blu-ray next week.  Were there plans to screen the film around the country?

AP: I’m kind glad we did it this way because at least this way, we go in, we do our thing for one evening, they’re all about to go away and do that wild tour thing they do every year where it’s Europe, Europe, Europe, Australia, then here forever at Christmas and we’re about to have a very short break and a holiday and then start movie number eleven,  So I don’t think either of us are that bothered about, yeah we’ll promote it and yeah we’ll stand behind it but we don’t want to keep on talking about it till Christmas dinner.  We’ve done it now and it’s great and I’m glad it’s been well-received apart from The Times and Time Out but fuck’em frankly.  The Times didn’t like it, everybody else did…

You’ve done Sex Pistols, The Clash, Monty Python, what’s next for you?

AP: A fella said to me last week and I love this, I was doing an interview for some Japanese magazine and the kid said to me ‘well at least it fits in with your lineage’.  I said ‘my linage?’  What Sid Vicious, Monty Python, Status Quo?  I’d like to sit here all afternoon and talk about this lineage.  Where’s the lineage?  All I can tell you cause we’re under wraps is this: it is a massive, big, worldwide rock’n’roll band.  Potentially bigger than this even.  And we’ll be running on it pre-production wise this side of Christmas.  It will be out next year.  But it’s probably going to be late next year.  It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long, long time.  It’s neither Kiss nor Slade.  I know both those bands very well and I have talked to them about doing something but it’s neither.  It’s a great group and I’m flattered to be doing it and hopefully via Classic Rock magazine which is our normal first port-of-call, we’ll have that news story out this side of Christmas.

You’ve got some great talking heads in the film, was that difficult?

AP: Brian May didn’t need any persuading at all.  Cliff Richard didn’t need no persuading at all.  Scott Gorham from Thin Lizzy just went ‘where and when?’  He’s a mate of mine anyway but he was like ‘where and when, I’ll do it!’  To my mind that means we did something, we pulled it off and I’m massively pleased with that.

You talked about cutting it down to a manageable length, how difficult was that?

AP: When we got the cut down to about 2.25, K5 (International distributors) had said no longer than 2.20 deliverable.  And I’m going ‘show it to them, screen it for them now’.  And God bless Carl Clifton from K5, he came out of that room and he went ‘actually it works very well at 2.25 doesn’t it?’ I went ‘good’ because… I feel like it’s been through a butcher’s shop.  I don’t know where that five minutes would have come from.  The only thing we could have done was pull a story.  At the moment I happen to think all the stories in that film are important enough to still be there. 

So what was the worst thing you had to cut?

AP:  There’s a few things we pulled out that we knew were kinda good stories but at the same time maybe they’d been told a lot in previous Quo books or they’d been told a lot in previous doc’s that had been done for other TV companies.  That’s not to say that when you’re doing a story as big as this about a band as big as this, you’re bound to go over old ground.  What I tried to do when we were going over old ground was not to reinvent it but to revisit it.   Normally when you see a movie that says next to the band’s name ‘official’, it’s been stamped all over by management and lawyers who’ve gone ‘you can’t say that, that’s no good, why’s he slagging him off?’  We had none of that at all.  We were given a completely free hand so whatever else you can say about this movie, Hello Quo yeah but also Honesty Quo.  Everyone’s been dead straight about everything.  The fact that Alan Lancaster about 30% into the film is allowed to say ‘but after John left, it all went shit, we made shit albums after that’.  Normally that would get pulled straight away.  But we were given a great deal of breathing space.

Is this the definitive Status Quo documentary then?

If there’s a point in doing a Quo movie in ten years, then we didn’t do our job.  So let’s say this is the Quo movie and that’s it done and when Rick Parfitt and Bob Young who’s our consultant but also their best mate and worked for them and is tied in with them both  come back in 24 hours and go ‘this is the best Quo doco ever’, I go (mimes ticking) tick because who else is going to tell me?  Some bloke with long hair and denim might tell me tonight but it won’t make me any richer and it won’t buy me a drink…  It’s nice that the band think it’s a good doco and I think it is very honest.  I like that.

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