Chatting with Director Brad Michael Elmore Part 2
Part II: Paxton vampire legacy, Wolfmen of Mars, and M.C. Gainey trickery
Welcome back for the second half of my conversation with Brad Michael Elmore! If you missed part one, you can read it here. Without further ado, here’s part two of our chat.
You mentioned James Paxton. He’s in both Boogeyman Pop and Bit. Were you friends with him before casting him in your films, or did that grow out of working together on Boogeyman Pop?
No, I had written Boogeyman Pop and it was with a a studio. Then that development went under after a few months. There was also a movie called Snap about a paparazzi photographer that went under. I had sort of met a lot of young Hollywood during that time. When I decided to just make Boogeymen Pop with my own money and a couple other investors—I had to try and take this movie that I wrote to have a $3M budget after having two movies fall apart in development—I said, “What if I just try to make a movie like I did with The Wolfman’s Hammer?” Obviously this was going to take more than ten grand, but I could still use that execution style. Somebody just recommended James to me because they worked with him on a show called Texas Rising. At first I was like, “This is just another wiener kid of some actor I like.” Then I met him, and we hit it off so well. He’s so good. I’m like, “Oh shit! This guy’s perfect for the role.” He was so down to do it any old dirty way we had to do it. You know? Real indie filmmaking. He was so gung ho about it, and he’s incredible. I consider him family now. It was a long trip making that movie, and so I want to—like Greg—put him in everything I do. So then in writing Bit, I wrote that role expressly for him.
He is very impressive. His characters in those two films are so different.
They really are. The status of Boogeyman Pop is a shame because there are two performances in that movie in particular that I think are so good. People should see those performances. James is so good in that movie, and he’s so different from what people would expect. He’s very rough here and believable as this kid from the wrong side of the tracks who is a bit more moody, brooding, and internally conflicted. He’s sort of like the All American Boy gone wrong. In some version of the world, that guy is the captain of the football team. Instead he’s just this outcast, outsider, fringe kid, and I think he’s incredible. The other performance I really like is Sam (Jadzak) who plays the main young boy in the last section. That kid is so fucking good. None of those kids had ever acted before. Almost nobody in the movie had done much acting before. Geez Louise, you wouldn’t know it by watching him. He was so good, and he was so good in weird ways. Usually with non-actors, you have to teach them how the frame works and to look one way but gesture the other. With him it was so instinctual. I would say, “Pivot this way and step this way and deliver your line over your shoulder.” He would be like, “Like this?” And I’d say, “Yeah. Exactly like that. How the fuck do you know that?” It was like working with a sixteen-year-old Matt Damon.
That’s high praise!
I love his performance. I think it’s unimpeachable.
I thought he was great in that as well.
And he’s hilarious! He delivers his funny shit really well. His timing is impeccable.
Yeah, what’s that line? “We can’t just sit in here and wait for it to come to us!” Turns into a great comedic moment/jump scare.
He just understood certain things. He understood that the moment that he’s on his bike and tells the girl to hop on that it’s a hero moment. He got all of the little things. Like him telling the story where he’s clearly lying about the neighbor girl. He just nailed it.
Something I thought about with James is that his dad (the legendary Bill Paxton) is in one of my favorite vampire movies of all time: Near Dark.
One of mine too.
His performance as Severen in that film is an all-timer. I think it’s actually my favorite Bill Paxton performance. Then you’ve got James in your own vampire movie.
It’s up there. Fun story: when I was eight or nine I was Severen for Halloween, and nobody knew what the fuck that was. This was at the time when my mom would help me build my costumes. We took one of her coats, some jeans, and the black sunglasses with blood running down my shirt with the fangs and white makeup and longer hair. It was a pretty good little costume. People were like, “Oh, you’re a vampire?” “No, I’m Severen!” “Well what’s Severen?” Eventually I just started saying I was a modern day vampire. The whole thing with Bill Paxton is if you’re even a casual movie fan of a certain age, or even now, he’s so woven into the fabric of popular cinema and independent cinema. He’s got just an indelible quality both as a character actor—he pluses up everything he’s in—and as a lead. I became friends with the guy who would shoot the first two movies I did in high school because we quoted Aliens in class and became friends because of that. When James was coming up to do the movie, I had to be like, “Hey guys, we can’t be quoting Aliens all the time. That’d be weird because it’s his dad.” It was almost prophetic to be working with James. I’m sure you know this, but the glasses at the end of Bit is a nod to his father in Near Dark.
Ha! I had that written down. I was going to ask if that was intentional. I assumed it probably was, but that’s actually where I was going with bringing up that James was in a vampire movie just like his dad was in a vampire movie. That is very cool.
Yeah, I had the prop master go find me those glasses. I knew at the end that he’d be in this white t-shirt with the blood all over him. He found the glasses, and I went up to James and said, “Hey, you can say ‘no’ if you want, but what do you think about this? It’s a silly little grace note in the movie, but most importantly it’s a nod to your pop.” And he was all about it. He really liked that idea. I would have been totally fine if he had said no, but it was a nice, neat little thing to do, and it makes me smile anytime I see it or think about it.
I love that. That’s great. I kind of figured that was probably intentional, but to have it confirmed? I’m just happy to know that.
So I'm kind of curious about the budgets of your films. I believe you had said The Wolfman’s Hammer was $10,000 of your own money. Then earlier during this call you said that Boogeyman Pop was originally supposed to have a $3M budget?
Yeah. I was developing this movie called Snap, which had some pretty decent names attached to it, and it just fell apart as things are wont to do. But this is a long process, getting movies made. Right? The Wolfman’s Hammer was a nice little calling card because people would watch it and go, “This is pretty fucking good for $10k.” So I was able to get some traction on some scripts I had, but all along the way I kept hearing, “Do you have a genre script? Those are easier to sell or get made.” I didn’t because I didn’t really want to do genre, and finally I had an idea: what would I do if I did the type of typical teen horror film? How would I approach that? What could I bring to it that I don’t think I’ve seen yet? So I wrote that. What’s funny is the company that was interested in it—I'm leaving all these names out, but it is a pretty big company and it was was not Blumhouse because they eventually picked it up when I was midway through actually shooting it—kept giving me notes that they just didn’t see it when it came to the last section with the kids on bikes. I just thought that was so funny because midway through me editing Boogeyman Pop is when Stranger Things came out, and then everything became kids on bikes for the next few years. I’m just like, “You stupid motherfuckers. Everyone’s going to love that part!” That’s the big pressure release. The first two-thirds of Boogeyman Pop are so lived in and arid. In the $3M version that was supposed to be shot, I never wrote a single scene that was supposed to be a scary scene. It’s just not a scary movie to me. It’s a hangout movie, and I wanted to shoot it initially like what if you made one of these types of movies like Boogie Nights? Well, when I decided to make it myself that just wasn’t on the table anymore. It had to become a much more subdued, almost Ken Loach approach. What could you actually accomplish with almost no money, right? But yeah, it was originally supposed to be a $3M movie. But eventually, like all things, it just started falling apart. I kind of lost my mind having two movies not get made. I even went and wrote the genre one that was supposed to make it more sure fire, right? That still had the same thing happen as the other one: three months of development, everyone’s excited, and then shit just doesn’t work out. I could have kept going down that pipeline and possibly gotten it made at that level, but I just said, “Fuck it. I’m going to raise some money and sell my car.” I took what I had to Chris Weitz and asked if he could match it, and he did (which was very kind of him) because he believed in me. So we went and shot the bulk of the movie, and as we were doing that we sent an assembly cut to Blumhouse. They said they weren’t going to give us much, but they’d give us enough to finish it the same way we were doing it at that point. Which is fair. The first two-thirds was made for about $60-65 grand, and then Blumhouse gave us about $50 grand to do the final third plus what was done in post. In total, it became about a $150k movie. Somewhere in that wheelhouse.
That's obviously significantly less than the the original intent, but it still looks really good. I’m a little surprised by that.
Well, looks of movies have less to do with what people think. I mean people often don't know what they're talking about when they talk about the looks of movies. Often when the general public, even the ones who think they know they're talking about, talks about photography and cinematography, what they're actually talking about is what the camera is pointing at, right? That’s typically production design and all these other things. But photography is lighting and lenses, and with DSLR—my first two movies being DSLR (digital single-lens reflex cameras)—one of the things my director of photography and I really understood was we weren't trying to make it look like film. I think that’s a mistake a lot of movies make. If you don’t have a lot of money and try to approximate things that do, you’re just going to end up with a cheap looking version of an expensive thing, right?
That’s a great point.
But if you use your limitations as if they are the brush that you want to use, then you can focus more on creating compelling and good looking digital images. Things like lighting, lenses, ISO, and things like that are important to me and my director of photography. Shooting as much in true color on the day is something we like to do. A lot of people like to shoot in open 4K, and I feel that’s a mistake. It makes the workload really hard. The files are so fucking massive. You sit down looking at everything you’ve shot and have every option in the world in post, but you’re looking at gray soup because it's all you know. Because you haven't actually decided what you're going to do with the color timing, you've now shot yourself in the foot because now you're trying to pull like, what color of red on that brick wall behind the characters there and skin tones, all that stuff. But in our case, we really focused on trying to make the images look good on the day in the monitor with shooting through color as opposed to open or 4K or raw. We'll make it look good here and then color time should be about finding neutrality between the images, so there's a consistent flow between them as opposed to trying to build the look in post.
It’s funny. I had written down to ask what kind of camera you use and then was just going to say, “Just talk about that stuff because I don't understand it as well as you do.”
So The Wolfman’s Hammer was a Rebel T2i, and Boogeyman Pop was a Canon C300. Bit was an ALEXA MAP. This is actually what I was going to say when I was talking about lighting, lenses, and things like that. When I initially wrote Bit, I wanted it to have a very lived in look and feel to it. But once you cross a certain budget level, it’s actually harder to make things look lived in. That’s why CW shows look like CW shows. You’ve now crossed a union contract level where your money is basically going to the crew, so to get that realism you almost need more money to get it. I realized pretty quickly that wasn’t going to be possible if I wanted vampire effects, so I leaned into more of an artificial pop look. I thought, “Well if it’s going to be a CW episode, it’ll be the best looking one you can do.” And I’ll make it the most lurid and gory one you can make.
I think it really works aesthetically.
When you’re dealing with actors who have television contracts, you can’t touch their hair. I couldn’t shave anyone’s head. Diana was originally supposed to have this fucking gnarly mohawk. It’s the same thing with wardrobe. I designed all of the looks of the characters in my first two movies fully. I served as all of the department heads myself except for Gneel Costello, who was director of photography. In Bit, you're cramped for time, so it's like I had these looks in mind for these characters and I ended up having to streamline them because it’s like this shirt you can't have because it’s too expensive to get five of these shirts if we’re going to do scenes with gore. Then you can’t get clearance on this brand or this thing, and suddenly you realize that with the budget you have—which Bit was about $2M—the money actually makes it harder to get things to look really distressed and lived in. Artifice had to be a strength. Everything became super streamlined and super pop. I had to make it the simplest iconography I could. Each character has a color palette. Duke was always supposed to have a white leather jacket and mohawk. Her design changed to be a much more streamlined, simpler, pop art version. A CW version of what I initially intended.
I never would have considered any of that.
Wolfmen of Mars do two of your film scores (Boogeyman Pop and Bit). How did you get involved with them?
With Boogeyman Pop I was putting together a show reel trailer that we were going to send out, and I knew what I kind of wanted for the score. So I just went to SoundCloud and dug around for a couple weeks, and I found this song collaboration they did with another band. I reached out to those two artists and asked if I could use it for the trailer. That started a conversation. We started talking about them doing the score, and I just got along with the person who is Wolfmen of Mars—Luke, who is the coolest—who was giving me really fun stuff. Initially Boogeyman Pop was written to have a very mixed score of classic horror punk and arena rock because Richie (the masked killer played by Kyle Cameron) is from the ‘70s and he’s sort of this exemplary late-‘70s teenager, and he was going to be this arena rock driven thing. That was going to be the score, and some of it stayed in for sure. I mean I got the Cactus cover of “Evil” that’s coming from his car, there’s the Blue Oyster Cult record that brings him to life, and of course “Godzilla” is in the opening credits.
I loved that.
When you make a tiny little movie, you realize you’re not going to have access to a lot of this music. So I needed a score, and at the time it wasn’t the most popular thing in the world to do an ‘80s Carpenter score. By the time everyone sees Boogeyman Pop now, Stranger Things has come out and it’s no longer as special. The whole impetus behind Boogeyman Pop was I wanted to do something like Slackers in the horror world. Another big influence was The Virgin Suicides. Like instead of these boys trying to piece together the mass suicide of these girls, what if they were trying to figure out what the fuck happened to Laurie Strode? What do the neighbor kids think in an A Nightmare on Elm Street movie? What does it look like for people who aren’t in on the plot? Like they’re not part of the plot of the movie. They’re just sort of there. You’re just sort of peeking through the keyhole. You’re never in the center of the plot. The sort of jumping off point was this will function as a slice of life hangout movie in suburbia. Put the horror stuff at the edges and peripheral. So when the movie came out at festivals, I was really bummed about the Blumhouse trailer because they put all of the flashy stuff in the trailer. The shitty thing about that is the movie is this $150,000 grungy little slice of life hangout movie, and the whole point is you wouldn’t expect anything like that to happen. If you’re watching the movie and getting invested in this sort of low budget feel and look, when an animated hand drawn butterfly comes out, or a slasher killer pops out, or a demon car comes alive, it’s like, “Well shit! I didn’t think that movie was going to do this, and it looks pretty good.” But when you put it all in the trailer, my big fear is that now it looks like a thrill a minute but done in a cheap way as opposed to being a more subdued thing that would have peaks.
I will say that the third act especially has some impressive effects with the squibs and reanimation sequence.
The big influence on the third act is The Road Warrior because it’s all somebody telling a story about something that happened. I even steal that shot from The Road Warrior when they’re driving away.
I hadn’t pieced that together, but it’s so obvious in hindsight.
I like the idea of somebody who survived something and talking about something major that happened to somebody else, and then that element becomes mythic. Like to these kids now, this is a mythic thing. And in world it’s mythic, but now it’s taking on these tremendous proportions because they’re not in on the plot. They aren’t part of some inciting incident with him. They aren’t part of some bloodline. He’s not really after them. They’re just kind of running up against it. Have you ever read the Paul Pope comic 100%?
No, I have not.
It’s one of my favorite comics of all time. It takes place in this sci-fi universe in this futuristic version of this crazy over the top New York. It’s about these young interlocking people and their slice of life stories that could take place in a modern setting, and the reason it’s called 100% is that each story is true but just set in this sci-fi backdrop. Each story in Boogeyman Pop is based on something very true, and then I just kind of dialed it up to mythic. Obviously there’s no ancient incubus that I ever ran into, but that character is very much based on that type of guy who would host parties for teenagers so he could scam on the young people. The Tony character (played by James Paxton) is based on a friend of mine. In real life, when he came home his mom was beating his stepdad in the head with a fish bat. I can’t film that. That makes it so absurd that it almost becomes comedic. I was there for that. We came home and that was happening. Just fucking crazy.
That must have been a sight to see.
So these things are all kind of based on people I knew or things I saw and dealing with them or processing them in a way that would make them interesting and then dial them up in a way where the peak elements take on a mythic horror proportion.
M.C. Gainey appears in two of your films (Boogeyman Pop and Bit). I love that guy. He’s been in so many things over the years. How did you get him?
I love him too. He’s a fucking great dude. He was friends with James. James said he would be great for the role of Ed in Boogeyman Pop and he likes the script. I was like, “That’s great, but we have no money.” He said if we put him up in a nice hotel and pay for his plane ticket to come film for three days at scale that he would do it. I said I’d love to have him in there, and he was great to work with. We became friends. We got along great because I love to talk, and he had the best fucking stories about all of the old character actors that I love. He has the greatest getting-high-with-Warren Oates stories you’ve ever heard in your life. We got along great, and I wrote the role in Bit for him as well.
I love that character in Bit. He’s perfect for that role.
I remember sending him the script and telling him I wrote the character for him. Within two hours he called me back and said, “This is a great script. I love it. I’m in.” There was a little conflict while we were shooting. He got this big role he needed to do, so he asked if he could go early. So what ended up happening is I had to use the tricks of the trade of what I did on my first two movies and cheat his presence. A lot of the stuff that’s there we filmed all in one day. Like he was never in that club. He’s never in the club, and he never grabs Laurel. Never happened. That was all trickery.
Well, it’s effective because I didn’t notice.
I had the whole production a little nervous. They were like, “What the fuck are you doing?” Nah, I got this. This is how we had to make my other movies. Always cheat when you don’t have the thing. You got to draw the eye. People only know what’s in the frame. You might be scared that he's standing in front of a piece of cardboard painted black with a light thrown on it, but I'm not because I know nobody will ever think twice.
Well, I will let you get back to your evening. Is there anything you’d like to plug before you go?
Listen to the Bronze-Age Monsters Podcast. It’s really cool. I love those guys.
I will plug them as well. Matt and Jacob are the best.
Thanks again to Brad for being so generous with his time. Hopefully everyone enjoys our exchange as much as I did. Be sure and watch The Wolfman’s Hammer on Brad’s YouTube channel, and Bit is available to stream for free on Pluto TV and Vudu and available to rent or purchase on YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, and Apple TV at the time that I’m writing this.