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If you look at Tony Krantz's resume, he is one of the most unlikeliest candidates to have a career helming horror. Krantz began his career as an agent and soon ventured into television, becoming executive producer of such shows as FELICITY, SPORTS NIGHT, and 24 (to which he received three Emmy nominations). His first film was meant to be a TV series, David Lynch's classic MULHOLLAND DRIVE, and he hasn't looked back since. Krantz started up Raw Feed, an independent film company geared towards genre films, and under this label makes a sophomore directorial effort with OTIS, a horror/satire about a serial killer/kidnapper with an odd repertoire who just happens to pick the wrong family to mess with. To promote OTIS, which has just been released on DVD, Krantz entered the Crypt to discuss in detail his latest film as well as his Raw Feed company, the transition from producing television to directing film, and offers some possible future paths for Otis in this Crypt exclusive.
COLONEL’S CRYPT: What attracted you to direct OTIS? TONY KRANTZ: I developed the movie and worked very closely with Erik Jendresen to essentially take the script that was initially written by Thomas Schnauz and add a lot of satire and black comedy to it. The truth is that I wasn’t planning on directing it. I kept trying to find a director to direct it. I would meet with director after director and they would have all sorts of thoughts and ideas but none of them were really quite right. The budget of this movie was tight and the production schedule was very quick so I was nervous as a producer about these directors I was meeting because I just didn’t feel that they were on the tone that we were trying to get with the movie. Six weeks out, I kind of said “I know this movie backwards and forwards so screw it, I’m going to be the director,” and I never looked back. It really was a thrill for me because the first movie I had directed, SUBLIME, was a very hard hitting, surreal, psychological thriller/horror movie. It was very dark and unrelenting in many ways. OTIS was a complete change up from that given its very strong comedic core. It was such a pleasure for me and directing is really the thing I’ve discovered is what really makes me happy. I hadn’t directed a movie since SUBLIME and although it wasn’t that long before I directed OTIS, it really was a thrill to get back on the floor and jump in. CC: Would you call OTIS the protagonist or the antagonist of the film? TK: That’s a really good question. He could be both but I would call him the antagonist. I would call Kate, the Illeana Douglas character, the protagonist. They don’t appear that way until later in the movie. Kate is really the driving force of the movie. She’s the one who says “We’re going to go over to his house and get revenge.” She does it in response to Otis’ kidnapping of Riley which is one would argue in strict storytelling terms the inciting incident. Riley escapes and the things that happen to her don’t really get Kate going until she makes the decision that with the FBI being inept, she’s going to ultimately take revenge. She is the motivating force of the second half of the movie, so in that way she is the protagonist up against the force of Otis, the antagonist. CC: Is that the reason why there’s an alternate ending on the DVD, the Birthday Party, because it felt in that ending that it hinted at the family being the antagonists of the film? TK: The Birthday Party was a little too broad and too comedic, bordering a little bit into spoof and farce. We wanted to stay with satire and black comedy. We thought we could do that as an alternate ending because we loved it, we thought it was hilarious. We were cracking up on set when we shot it but we wanted to make the ending to the movie that’s a little more consistent with the tone of it to make an opportunity to make this lady or the tiger type of ending. Is it Otis or is it not Otis with the Lawsons back at it again, blowing away some perfect stranger through the front door without any concern on whether or not that pizza deliveryman is really Otis or isn’t Otis, it’s Reed taking matters into his own hands in a rather lame-brained way. The pizza deliveryman is going to be Otis but he doesn’t bother to check first. CC: You do have a potential franchise with the Lawson family. TK: (Laughs) The crazy Lawsons going after the neighbors one after another. You look at them wrong and they’re going to blow you away. CC: How did you go about casting the film? TK: It starts with the script. You have to have a good script because no matter who you go after, if the script isn’t good, the actors I was going after, the level of Illeana Douglas, Daniel Stern, Kevin Pollak, and Jere Burns and so forth, they’re not going to pay any attention. We put together a list and submitted a script to their representatives. I have a reputation in the business having being around for a while as a producer and I pretty much know everybody. SUBLIME was a movie that got a lot of people’s attention. They liked it, they liked the artistic integrity of it, the community, and they thought I was this interesting director all of a sudden having been an agent and then a producer. I was coming out of nowhere and popping up as a director so people began to say, “I can put my actors with him and they’ll be protected, maybe more than protected they will be in an interesting movie and it’ll be good for their career.” We submitted and I met with Daniel and I met with Illeana and it was really just a meeting where they wanted to make sure that the kind of movie that I was wanting to make, given the fragile nature of horror and comedy co-existing together, would be where they wanted to be too artistically and we were all on the same page. I wasn’t looking to do a gratuitous torture porn movie. I was looking to do a satire of that. The way that you do satire is by playing the comedy straight and you’re not pushing for jokes and really letting the reality and truth be the thing that pulls the audience forward. They liked that and agreed to do the movie. With Bostin Christopher who plays Otis, Ashley Johnson who plays Riley, and Jared Kushnitz who plays Reid, it was purely a casting process. We had an amazing casting director named John Jackson, who had cast ELECTION and ABOUT SCHMIDT. That’s why we hired him and he had a really interesting eye for great actors and that was really to me the most critical thing because the role of Otis is a complicated role. He has to be at once menacing, horrific, scary, and vulnerable, and it was that vulnerability that really is what Bostin has brought to the part and it’s why he’s being singled out the way he is. He’s got a depth, a sense of emotion, and a sensitivity that audiences are responding to. It was a casting process with those three actors and I think we got unbelievably lucky. CC: You had mentioned that OTIS is a satire of torture porn films, with it mainly being an anti-torture film in its satire. What are your feelings toward the torture genre? TK: I think that the genre is a legitimate genre of movie but it’s sort of like everything if it tastes good and becomes successful, you could overdose on it. Too many scoops of ice cream taste good but at the end of it, you could have a stomach ache. The feel of OTIS was to satirize that genre. It felt like the torture porn genre had run its course. We had probably seen one too many of them. I think maybe CAPTIVITY was the one that put it over the top into stomach ache territory a little bit. So here are a bunch of crazy filmmakers saying “Let’s do a comedy but a sophisticated comedy as well as a political comedy.” There are some political subtexts to this movie and they’re there intentionally. We thought there would be an opportunity to make a satire to talk about what’s happening in society, what’s happening politically, so we thought the time was right for a movie like that. We made the movie and hopefully people would love the sense of humor that it has. CC: I’d like to talk about your TV career because you’ve had a highly successful career as a television producer. How was it about making the change from producing television to film and what are the main differences in working the mediums? TK: There really aren’t many differences. The process isn’t any different. As my career hopefully continues, the budgets are going to get bigger. The stakes are going to get higher. The talent I work with is going to get better so that will have its own challenges and excitement to it. It’s really about the same thing on a certain level, just the scale is bigger. A television pilot has to do certain things dramatically. It’s got to establish characters, set up a serious franchise, and demonstrate a typical episode. A movie doesn’t necessarily have to do any of those things so there’s more freedom in terms of the structure of it, but the making of it is essentially the same thing. It’s camera through a film or a high definition tape through a camera, whatever that may be. From going to being a producer to a director is a big transition because even though I hired a lot of directors and being the guy who was the boss on a lot of television shows I was doing, I never got down to the granular level of making a movie. The truth is before I directed SUBLIME I had never looked through a movie camera more than five times my entire life. I had never been on the set from the beginning of production all the way through the completion of production on anything. As a producer, I would go visit the set, stay for a couple of hours and then go back to the office. The dynamic of being there from the beginning of prep all the way to the delivery of the final answer print was a completely new experience for me and required me to understand the granular nature of making a movie different than I had as a producer. The experience on the set is a completely different thing when you are not just a visiting producer but when you are the director. I must tell you it’s the most fun I’ve ever had. The opportunity to, and it sounds crazy and maybe it’s because I’ve come to it later in my life, but the opportunity to sit there with the makeup people, the craft services people, the camera operators, the cinematographer, to me it’s heaven on Earth. It’s operating on 3000 feet. The crew, these men are the true artists, these are the people who make movies. A producer has his role obviously but for me the moment of creation was really the most exciting experience I’ve ever had. It’s sitting there with an actor, looking at an actor’s performance, and knowing where you want that actor to get to in a second take and being able to in a very terse, clear, precise way, give that actor a piece of direction that isn’t overly verbose, that is clear and specific so that the actor can take it and make it his own to give you the performance that you are looking for. It’s being a creative collaborator. It’s being a partner. It’s being an artist. It’s being doing a job that I consider myself just absolutely tickled pink to be fortunate enough at this point in my career to be lucky to do. CC: With your television career, you’ve done a lot of comedies, but in the films you’ve directed thus far as well as produced, it’s been primarily horror. Why horror? TK: Why does somebody climb a mountain? Because it’s there. In this particular case, I directed these two movies because they were available for me to direct. That’s really the truth. I produced all six of these movies that we did under the RAW FEED brand. I really love the horror/science fiction/thriller genre and the RAW FEED movies are kind of a mash up of those three different things given one of my partners was one of the executive producers of THE X-FILES and the other one is the writer and co-director of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and I was an executive producer of 24, so you take 24 being a thriller piece, THE X-FILES being sci-fi, and BLAIR WITCH being horror, so these movies have been a mash up of all three of those. I love it as a genre but I’m a guy who loves everything and anything that’s good and that is interesting. I’m producing CG animation movies with the Jim Henson Company and the Weinstein Company that are fairy tales with an indie animation studio as we speak. I am directing horror/comedies and the next movie I’m directing is going to be the next NASCAR I-MAX movie. I don’t know if there’s anybody with as wide as range as me and it’s probably because when I was an agent, I packaged television shows, not dramatic TV shows or sci-fi TV shows, just television shows. Then as a producer when I was a producer at Imagine, I produced everything from FELICITY, a college drama, to SPORTS NIGHT, a single camera sophisticated comedy, to THE PJS, an animated satire, to WONDERLAND, a strong drama, to 24, a thriller, and to MULHOLLAND DRIVE which was a David Lynch series that turned into a film. I have just been fortunate enough, and it’s unusual I think, to be able to do just entertainment. I think that too often people get pigeonholed as horror directors. You look at certain directors who are famous in the horror area and no studios are going to hire them necessarily to do a comedy. You wouldn’t think about Rob Zombie doing SEX AND THE CITY. He would do his version of it and maybe these guys like Van Gogh, he painted paintings in a certain direction, they would pull it off. My idol is Mike Nichols. You look at the movies he’s made from SILKWOOD to CARNAL KNOWLEDGE to THE GRADUATE to CLOSER to THE BIRDCAGE, these are amazing movies and they’re all different. I look at his career and I look at Sydney Pollack, may he rest in peace, he directed one of my favorite movies, OUT OF AFRICA, and he directed one of the greatest comedies of the last 25 years in TOOTSIE. CC: I have a pitch for you. Are you ready? TK: Okay? CC: OTIS VS. FELICITY! TK: (Laughs) I love it! I think FELICITY would win that one. CC: I always sensed violence within FELICITY just waiting to come out. TK: OTIS would be so beguiled by her charm that he wouldn’t know what to do. She would probably be able to walk all over him. CC: OTIS vs. Jack Bauer? TK: Jack would kick his ass in two seconds. CC: OK, so there’s not much of a film there. TK: I think Reed versus Jack Bauer might be a draw. CC: Where do you see horror going within the next few years? TK: You know where I think it is going? Have you seen THE STRANGERS? CC: Yes I have. TK: I thought it was really interesting. I scratched my head at the end because I didn’t understand why those three people did what they did to Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, but I thought it was a very interesting, sort of the next first step in the horror genre because it felt very artistic to me. It felt like an original filmmaker’s expression as opposed to a formula. There are a lot of movies that are formula, PROM NIGHT being one and HOSTEL being another, they are movies where you know what you are going to get. You are going to get a certain degree of story that is going to be familiar and predictable and that’s it. I think that audiences have said that they’ve had enough of that. I think that there is an opportunity for original voices to come forward. In the same way that THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT was in my opinion of the greatest movies that I’ve ever seen, I shake my head at how fantastic that movie was, that there will be opportunities for original voices to come forward because you’ve got to do something different because what’s happening currently is just too formulaic. What that will be, I don’t know but I think that truly horrific movies can be horrific organically. You don’t have to necessarily be derivative of things that have worked in the past. CC: With that, I leave the last word to you. TK: Thank you so much and I really appreciate the time. CC: Thank you very much Tony. TK: Take care. OTIS is now available at your local DVD retailer courtesy of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment. (Special thanks to Leif Helland at MPRM) |
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