|
|
|
 |
||
|
Larry Fessenden is one of horror's most overlooked and underrated filmmakers who puts his love for his native New York far above the Hollywood spotlight, despite being able to get the most acclaimed actors for his thought provoking films. At the forefront of the east coast independent scene is Fessenden, whose latest release THE LAST WINTER, an eco-cautionary tale about global warming, hits DVD retailers on July 22nd (and has been a Blockbuster and Netflix exclusive since May). Going for intelligent, realistic thought above gore, Fessenden is an auteur all his own and the very definition of independent. He distributes most of his films himself under his Glass Eye Pix banner and runs every aspect all his own. Later this month, Fessenden makes his TV debut as the director of an episode of NBC's FEAR ITSELF titled SKIN & BONES. While on the set of SATAN HATES YOU, which Fessenden is executive producing and starring in, he took time between scenes to sit with the Crypt to talk about his career, his role on SATAN HATES YOU, filming THE LAST WINTER, his love for monster movies, and many more in this Colonel's Crypt exclusive.
COLONEL’S CRYPT: How are you today? LARRY FESSENDEN: I’m awesome dude. CC: What inspired you to become a filmmaker? LF: I loved movies when I was little. I always thought of the actor as the centerpiece, I didn’t think about directing when I was watching scary movies as a kid on TV, they had the old black and white movies. When I got older, I just loved acting so I really wanted to be an actor and only by high school did I start directing plays. I got a Super 8 camera and I realized how important the camera was to telling a story so all of that became my progression and now I love all aspects of filmmaking. CC: And what were some of your favorite horror films? LF: It was really the stuff that was on TV when I was a kid. It was the old Universal movies. FRANKENSTEIN, THE WOLF MAN, THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, and a lot of B movies that we don’t think of so much anymore such as THE CURSE OF THE FACELESS MAN, all the Karloff and Lugosi movies like THE RAVEN. Then I loved THEM of course, the giant ants, and all the GODZILLA films were on in those days, and if you were really lucky you would see PLANET OF THE APES on TV as the special Friday night movie. Remember this was before VHS even, this was before there was such a thing as renting movies. You were really involved. Every day you would look in the newspaper to see what was on because there were only thirteen channels in New York City. Only two of them, Channel Eleven and Nine, and Five I guess played the old movies. It was all about this precious experience of curating your own show. I did grow up in New York so I had the ability later on to see the double features in the rough houses. CC: What was the launching pad that set you to pursue a career in filmmaking? LF: In the schools I went to I was able to do theater and in 1978 and 1979 I started making short films in Super 8 and in those days you would splice them together and play your sound on a boogie box. I just became obsessed and I think any of my friends and family would tell you that’s what I was always doing, playing around with Super 8. I must’ve made 50 to 100 Super 8 movies and some of which are still worth seeing as far as my style already developing and so I just continued on. I went to a fancy prep school and I got kicked out. All I wanted to do was go to NYU which was the only film school at the time so that’s where I ended up going. I showed them my Super 8 movies and got in. CC: Your films all have a deep social and in the case of THE LAST WINTER, an economic message. What is about your films that make them intensely personal for you? LF: I guess my horror films are very personal because even though I grew up watching all the classic, mythologically based films like FRANKENSTEIN and THE WOLF MAN, I also as I grew up took an interest in social issues. I’ve always been sort of an anti-authoritarian guy. Through all my schooling, I realized that all of the teachers had power but they really didn’t have the smarts to deserve that power. This happened when I went to this prep school. I was an idealist as a kid and I think because my parents raised me as a thinking person, I started realizing that in this world a lot of people were totally bogus and they were clinging to power and all of these issues started to affect me very personally. For one thing, I got kicked out of that school but I always had a fondness and appreciation for nature. I always had a suspicion of religion, so all of these things combined so that my films as I made movies about monsters which I still loved, I had to find these themes that were very important to me just as a kid, this rebel kid growing up in the 1960s listening to rock n’ roll, knowing about the Vietnam War, knowing about social strife and the civil rights movement and all these things. It all makes sense to me that the horrors in life are the self betrayal that happens in our personal lives but also in our society. That’s just what my movies are about. I don’t really think “Oh, I’m going to change minds,” or “It’s going to be this great blend of social commentary,” it’s just that that’s the stuff that interests me. If you look at FRANKENSTEIN as an example, that story is political. It’s about humanity betraying itself. It’s about deep themes. I’ve just grew up being taught about literature and deep themes and that’s all that interests me. I’m not interested in empty entertainment. I think the arts have themes and it’s actually a problem of the critics in that they don’t discuss those. In the old days, when you critiqued the film, you were talking about what the director had to say. What was the point of this film? Why did I waste two hours watching this film? I still work under that principle. CC: HABIT is considered your breakthrough film in which you wrote, directed, produced, and starred. How did HABIT come about and why did you decide to cast yourself in the lead? LF: HABIT is very much a personal film. It really is in a sense a portrait of myself with of course the delicious trimmings of vampirism thrown in but it’s about how alcoholism can lead to a delusional life and how we’re alone in the world and no one understands us. It’s a rather mopey, sad little picture with a sad, little character. I did try to cast it with another actor but I realized that a lot of quirks and the personal qualities in the writing were just myself. I knew it would be a drag to be telling an actor “Can you do that a little bit more the way I would do it?” It just seemed silly so I auditioned some people and eventually came to accept that I wanted to play it. I’m an actor and I thought that was reasonable. I really found that directing from the inside was a great way to make a film. I could challenge the actor by throwing little curveballs in a scene. I found a level of naturalism that I find hard to achieve on someone else’s set. Honestly it was a great experience for me and I’m never troubled by anyone thinking it’s an egotistical move. I did the right thing for that film. CC: You were one of the first filmmakers to begin self distributing your films, which you did with HABIT and NO TELLING. What did you want to say in these films and why did you want to self distribute them? LF: I finished HABIT and I thought it was a really cool independent film that should get some recognition. I applied to festivals and got no attention whatsoever. Sundance snuffed me. One of the reasons I do believe is because Michael Alamereyda’s NADJA and Abel Ferrara’s THE ADDICTION had both come out the year before and had been celebrated as a new take on vampirism. I accept that except that I had made my film before theirs. It’s just because I was an independent it took me longer to finish mine. Unfortunately I came into a marketplace where my film seemed stale compared to the other two so that’s one reason why my film was overlooked I believe. Anyway, it’s a year later and I realized that I invested a lot of money into this film, let alone my time, my heart, and my passion. I probably won’t make a better film for some time and so I said it was worth it for me to take it to the next level. Invest more time and more money to in fact put it into theaters. I think that you have to make that determination when you have an independent film. Is it good enough to warrant yet more effort and investment to self distribute? Sometimes the answer honestly is no but certainly putting HABIT out there was the right thing for me at the time. CC: You have your own company, Glass Eye Pix, which you make your own films as well as produce other films. As a producer, what are the qualities you look for in a project that will make you want to produce that film? LF: I just believe in supporting home baked talent. I mean Hollywood is going to do fine. It’s snatching up talents that are going to conform to a certain model of filmmaking. Of course I can’t compete, I’m not interested, I have no role to compete in that, but what I do believe in is supporting auteurs. I do believe in that concept. I do think that certain directors and writers bring a certain voice, a certain point of view into their work and you can see it replicated in each of their pieces, even when the themes may be different or the setting and the story. I’ve enjoyed knowing a small pool of artisans, filmmakers, and actors. We’ve formed a little family and we each work on each other’s films. It’s been a very organic community building. It has gotten bigger. The thing to know is that I don’t claim to be finding the very best talent out there. There’s probably a guy in Minnesota making great movies and in a way I wish I could have the resources to go discover that guy but that hasn’t happened. People do send me scripts. I don’t always have the time to read them but that doesn’t mean a thing about whether they’re better or worse than anything I’m doing. What I have done is a very organic process and I do believe in a regional if you will cinema. We’re making movies out of New York and hopefully for the world market but the reality is they’re homegrown and that’s really where I come from. CC: Out of Glass Eye Pix comes Scareflix, which is the banner you’ve used for films you’ve produced. How did Scareflix begin and how has the transition been from project to project? LF: Scareflix started with James Felix McKenney actually. He knows me well enough. He was working with me, he still does. He was scheming and saw my kind of impatience waiting around for my next project to take root. He said “Why don’t you produce a no budget film? I have a cast. I have a crew. I have a script. I’ll do the real hard work, the heavy lifting. Give me a small amount of money,” he proposed and I couldn’t resist following this dream of being kind of a Roger Corman for the 21st century. So I said “Let’s try it.” It was a very small investment and something we had in the bank account of Glass Eye Pix so we started producing his film. We got Angus Scrimm involved and it was cool. Jim is the model director for these kinds of projects. The other model director is Ti West who’s also incredibly resourceful. Ti came to me shortly thereafter. He had interned for me years ago and he came and said that he wanted to do a Scareflick. We went through our process. It was a little more involved than Jim’s movie but that resulted in THE ROOST and that was also a good experience. Both movies made their money back, twice their money back in different environments. They both got interesting reviews and then Jim’s third movie AUTOMATONS got stellar reviews and that’s something we’re all proud of. It’s just been really fun. I don’t know that I can keep it up. I would need a new kind of financial structure but I think we proved that we know how to make low budget features. They’re unusual. They’re not just cynically gorefests. Each one comes from a very special, specific place. Each one is very different. Actually, SATAN HATES YOU is only Glass Eye Pix but it’s in the tradition of that kind of film. CC: This interview is being conducted on the set of SATAN HATES YOU, to which you are executive producer and play the role of Glumac. What was it about SATAN HATES YOU that wanted you to produce it? LF: I’m a great fan of James Felix McKenney and I trust all of his instincts as a filmmaker. I was going to sit this one out but as time went on I became more and more intrigued with his script. I think what’s interesting about it is he’s riffing on these Christian horror films of the 60s and 70s but the best thing about Jim is he’s smart and earnest and he’s not spoofing them or making fun of them. He’s really trying to capture the essence of religion. It’s a violent and crazy film and yet it has a redemptive message so it’s going to be far more interesting for the viewer to sort of discern where the filmmaker is coming from. It’s not a New Yorker sarcastic take on these films which were made with great sincerity by the Christian faith of the time. CC: Why were you going to sit this one out as you said? LF: SATAN HATES YOU is an unusual beast. When I first read, I was confused and a little turned off. The thing is that Jim was talking about it for two years I think and he has all these nifty little chotskis that ramped us into the project. There’s something rather straightforward about it which is not quite what one expected and that became I think ultimately what’s interesting about it. I think it will be very interesting what the Christian community thinks of it. It’s part John Waters. It’s part of the wackiest group of New Yorkers but it also tells a message that they would espouse which is that all of the sinning leads to one’s demise and only through taking Christ and all the rest of it you be redeemed and I think that’s an interesting movie and that’s going to be its strength in that nobody will be able to quite figure it out. I think that it’s going to be aesthetically delicious. In a way, it’s the ultimate horror film. It’s got so much violence which the fans will enjoy and so many crazy conflicting images because it’s got religion and violence clashing. It makes for extremely twisted entertainment. CC: Who is Glumac? LF: I am one of two devils. We’re henchmen of Satan and we’re observing throughout the movie so it’s a really fun part. We have to show up on every set so we’re either commenting or egging on the characters as they encounter their demise. CC: James Felix McKenney has said that Glumac represents the “amoral” center of the film. Would you agree? LF: I’m happy to represent the amoral center of the film. Yeah, we’re delighting in every misery that the people in the film go through. We’re giggling and toasting and it’s fun. I asked film what kind of vibe he wanted for the character and he said he wanted a Sinatra vibe, Peter O’Toole in BEDAZZLED, just generally mischievous. It’s been great working with Bradford Scobie, who plays my partner Scadlock. We just start riffing off each other and Jim is the kind of director that you give him something and he makes small adjustments but really you’re on your own so I hope that it comes together. It’s important to modulate and not just do everything over the top but you have free reign to do so. CC: I have to talk about THE LAST WINTER, which I think was one of the best films I saw this decade. How did you come up with the concept for THE LAST WINTER and why did you decide to bring the timely message of global warming across to filmgoers? LF: The simple reality is I tried to make a snow movie. I’ve been obsessed with snow movies ever since FARGO. Perhaps just in my own heart of hearts I’ve always loved the winter, grew up in New England, going to Vermont. WENDIGO was in fact a series of recollections of that youth and that emotion of being a kid and wondering about the unknown outside in the wintery woods. The reality is when we shot WENDIGO in upstate New York, the snow started to vanish and a lot of the sequences are not as white and wintery as I had wanted. Hopefully the audience doesn’t notice that but I certainly do. I just said “God, I gotta make a movie where there’s gonna be snow.” So I thought about Alaska and I thought about what I know about Alaska which is that they drill for oil up there. There’s the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that people are arguing to drill in and actually I must admit more than ever, literally now as the film comes out on DVD that issue is absolutely fresh. That was one thing. I’m also obsessed with the land, the endless raping of the land, the obtuseness of mankind and the inability of partisan arguments to ever, ever come to terms with the truth and instead they have to each see reality from their own side. I wanted to have two characters stuck out in the middle of absolutely nowhere sticking with their story. It’s unbelievable just how we can’t use reason and the elegance of an argument to agree on the best way forward in life solving problems. Instead we have people with preconceived realities and they do not change. I was trying to express that in the writing of the script about the two characters. I don’t intend to villainize Pollack altogether, he’s the Ron Perlman character. It’s fairly obvious my politics from the film but that’s because I’m honestly saying I think he’s wrong but I also make it clear that Hoffman is not entirely right in his communicating and that there’s problems on both sides. That was the premise of the film. We went to Alaska. We tried to imagine shooting there but clearly we couldn’t shoot in the place where it was set so we ended up in Iceland. It was an amazing shoot. We used all Icelandic crew members and it really was a very, very special experience. Editing the film was cool. I did come up against my usual problem of how to depict the monster, what to show, how much is suggestive, how much is not. Obviously a lot of people don’t get what I’m after which is that there’s this subjective alternate reality living with all of us that’s sort of a dream world and if we think there are demons out there than they do appear to us. That’s what happens to Hoffman. People like Pollack don’t see that reality and in a way they’re not sensitive enough to see the demons, they’re also not sensitive enough to see the opportunities to respond and coexist with nature. It’s a subtle and peculiar agenda that I’m bringing to a genre that’s becoming increasingly blunt and just gore-oriented which is something that I have limited affection for. I like gore when it’s shocking like in movies like MAN BITES DOG., HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER, some of the recent zombie films, I love George Romero’s DIARY OF THE DEAD. I just saw TURISTAS last night. I was amazed, I thought it was OK. It’s just this sort of fetishizing of gore in the mainstream films I just find utterly depraved and pathetic and has no real content behind it. Anyway, I make these oddball films and I can assure you that I’ve managed to push enough buttons that I get hate mail from partisan commentators who make fun of the film for its politics and I just think “God man, I hope you’re right. I hope global warming is the fantasy and fetish of the left wing and wouldn’t that be a wonderful world if all of this was not true,” but honestly I don’t see it that way. I see the climate collapsing in everyday news. CC: Being you were talking about today’s gore fetish, I have to agree though one of my biggest faults are comedies disguised as horror. There’s too many of that and it’s ridiculous. LF: I think the first SCREAM is a cool movie and it’s smart. Smart is always helpful. I love SHAUN OF THE DEAD, I think it’s one of the best horror movies or just plain movies ever made. CC: Because they played the comedy straight, that’s what is so great about it. LF: Exactly and it was actually just a very sweet family movie. It’s just like a buddy picture basically. That’s the thing, any movie that’s smart and honest can play with the genre and do all kinds of special things, but this smarmy, wise ass tone feels very corporate to me where you’re nudge, nudge, wink, winking at the audience. That is the most brutal undermining of even just life’s experience. It’s all just a nudge and a wink. There’s no truth being revealed or there’s no search of it at all. This to me is the most contemptible trend in any kind of art form, basically in our culture. You know what it is? It is people hiding and people too afraid to be honest in any guise. It’s the same with the news, these schmucks on the news who make everything a sarcastic comment. They’re just hiding from the real conversation. CC: Where do you see filmmaking and especially horror going within the next five years? LF: I have an opinion, I’ll tell you what. I bet it will be ironically about global warming. Look at THE HAPPENING, M. Night in his silly way trying to address the issues of the day. CC: Screw that film. LF: Good gracious, let’s not even get into it. I feel bad for him. He’s made such a fool of himself. I do believe that unfortunately these issues are starting to take over our consciousness. I don’t know if they’ll all be nature revenge movies but they’ll be about the collapse of the systems that we hold dear. I mean that’s why the zombie movies are very popular now. The world is going to just be a zombie movie soon enough. That’s one genre that will continue but there will be other things, other ways. There’s a movie called THAW that I’ve read about now and again and it’s the tundra melting and there’s a wooly mammoth that comes up and spreads a disease so on it goes. There are just many, many stories to be told. The beauty of horror is that it’s always trying to express the cultural anxieties and believe me, the cultural anxieties will become more and more potent as we head into this century. Things are always going to get worse. CC: With that, I leave the last word to you. LF: I think that was the last word. CC: Thanks for your time Larry. LF: Alright dude, take care.
(Special thanks to Larry Fessenden, James Felix McKenney, Jeremiah Kipp, and the cast and crew of SATAN HATES YOU) Stay tuned for a special on the set video report of SATAN HATES YOU featuring interviews with McKenney, Fessenden, Reggie Bannister, and Debbie Rochon. |
HOME
BLOGS
|
|||
