Greetings, all. Ambush Bug here with another special AICN HORROR: ZOMBIES & SHARKS column. This time around I talked with Chris Fisher, director of MEETING EVIL, a new film starring Samuel L. Jackson as the evil Luke Wilson meets. The film is available on Video On Demand now and will be released for a limited run in theaters May 4th. Here’s what Chris said about MEETING EVIL!
CHRIS FISHER (CF): Hey, Mark.AMBUSH BUG: Hey, Chris--how are you doing today?
CF: I’m good, man--how are you?
BUG: Great. Well, I usually cover the AICN horror beat, and with your film it’s kind of…well, what genre would you consider your film in?
CF: You know, when I set out to make it I was trying to do three things, and hopefully I was successful. I was trying to create a magical realist film, I was trying to create a sort of suburban western and I was trying to create a sort of noir thriller. I was trying to do all three of those things and then of course the book, the novel, the source material is this sort of kind of fucking funny and so I had to try to fit in comedy as well. So it’s sort of hard to stick in a specific genre.
BUG: Yeah, it does seem to have some really thrilling and kind of scary moments. I mean, Samuel L. Jackson seems to play a very scary character. What was it like having those two actors in your film? Samuel L. Jackson and Luke Wilson?
CF: You know, they were good friends. They had known each other pretty well before coming to New Orleans, before I even met them. I didn’t get a chance to meet Sam or Luke before they signed on. I was deep in New Orleans doing preproduction and I met them both sort of the same day at the read through and they already had a language between them, which was great. They had a familiarity and were very comfortable playing these potentially uncomfortable scenes. They had a sense of familiarity already and they were golf buddies, so during their days off they would hit the golf courses out in New Orleans. I think they really enjoyed working together. Honestly, for me, you know for a low budget genre movie, to have Sam Jackson and Luke Wilson playing the key roles was huge for sure.
BUG: And so just for people who haven’t seen the film, how do you describe it? What’s the elevator pitch that you give to people to kind of clue people in as to what the film is all about?
CF: You know, I’d say it’s a story about the average reasonable guy who is having the worst day of his life and gets a knock on his door and gets into more trouble than he’s ever imagined. I guess it’s sort of a wild ride, that’s the best way I would put it.
BUG: Definitely, and Samuel L. Jackson in particular. He seems like…I’ve never met him, but he seems like a force of nature. What’s he like in particular?CF: You know, he worked so much. I mean he was working up until the day he got there. He had another project the day he left. He’s been working nonstop since then. I’m in New Orleans right now for something else and he’s actually here in town working on another project. So he’s just nonstop and as we were a fairly low budget movie we really didn’t have time for rehearsals, and so the read through…we had a read through a couple of days before we shot and he was off book at the read through. He knew every single word of dialog to a T for it in the first day, so he’s this hyper-professional. It’s sort of intuitive in a way. I’d like to think of myself as professional, but I’m definitely sort of loose and relaxed on set, as is Luke. Luke has sort of my style on set, and Sam shows up to play ball. He gets to set and he wants to get into character and he wants to do his lines and he wants to nail it, so he’s got such a high level, professional sort of concern. You’ve just got to be on your A game with him. If you’re not on your A game he will eat you alive, especially with a younger director like myself--he has been known to terrorize if you’re not at your A game.
BUG: So you’ve heard stories before coming into this knowing that he takes people to task?
CF: Yeah man, you know he certainly in every possible way is an artist, so his reputation precedes him. He’s an intense guy and he loves what he does and he wants everyone else to love it that much too, but luckily I did and he really loved the script. He more than did his homework. He knew the novel extremely well. He was so inside of the character. He brought so much to it and really just inspired me. He inspired me and the whole crew to really move quick and fast and get what we needed. This movie was shot in 17 days, so we didn’t have a lot of time to fuck around.
BUG: Yeah, so working in New Orleans, was that a new experience for you? Are you from that area?
CF: My girlfriend at the time who was a costume designer on movies, she is from New Orleans and we dated for about five years before we started shooting and so I had spent a lot of time here, but I hadn’t worked here before. The whole sort of tax incentive thing started happening about two years ago, so right now it’s boom town. Other than Toronto and New York I’d say New Orleans is probably the go to spot right now for filmmaking, especially lower budget type stuff. Actors love coming out here, the locations are good, and the crews are good. It was my first time working here, but I had spent a lot of time in the city.BUG: Cool. So you talked about it being a book before going in there. What were the challenges as far as adapting it into a film?
CF: Well, I think the challenge always for an adaptation is this sort of profound level of respect you have for the source material, which I had. I mean, Thomas Berger is an incredible novelist. I think he’s a vastly underrated novelist and I really loved the book and the book was written in 1992 as sort of pre 9/11 sort of take on what evil is. It very much is a treatment on evil and the nature of evil and I think the book, when I read it post 9/11, I felt like the book had a completely new meaning as 9/11 was a world event for so many people and tapped into what I felt like the vision of this novel was. My jumping off point for adapting the novel is that I wanted to take another look at the meaning of evil post 9/11, post sort of real estate bust, post sort of war on terror, and to the current perspectives to take a different reading of the novel than even the author could have imagined in 1992. So I wanted to be respectful to the source material; however. I really wanted to take a different read at it that was timely and current with the times.
BUG: So was New Orleans always the setting for the story?
CF: You know, if you remember where the novel was set it was very much this anywhere, anyplace kind of Americana vibe, and one of the things that really attracted me to the novel was it just had this…it was very surreal and John Felton, the lead character, was just your average ordinary guy and he lived in an average ordinary place with an average ordinary wife. It was a very unusual protagonist. He’s not a hero. He’s just this dude who everybody knows who kind of…he’s hit grounders his entire life and he dies and no one notices and I just thought that was a really great and challenging point of view for a film with how could you…of course the answer, which the novel did and what I felt the movie did, is you are intrigued, because this average ordinary guy is faced with extraordinary evil. You know Richie is just this dramatic, perhaps supernatural sort of entity. So that’s what kind of gave life to this narrative, and it could have been set anywhere, and funny enough, we got to shoot around New Orleans, because New Orleans has so much flavor and character that in order to give it that white bread sort of nothingness that the novel had, we had to really look hard to find places near New Orleans that didn’t have the flavor that the city has.BUG: Yeah, I mention that because you mention that 9/11 had kind of factored in and I just didn’t know if you had factored in any of the Katrina stuff that was going on down there in New Orleans as well, but if it wasn’t…
CF: I wouldn’t say necessarily consciously, but certainly the suburban wasteland which I was trying to suggest was sort of the modern ghost town in the current West certainly made it more dilapidated and visually interesting, because of Katrina.
BUG: So you suggested that Jackson’s character might be supernatural in nature. How did you dance around that subject?
CF: Well you know, one of the things about the novel that’s just really interesting, and again I can’t speak for Thomas Berger, but I can speak from my reading of the novel, and my reading of the novel is that he was coming from a point of view post-Vietnam, post-Korean War where there’s just senseless violence on television and violence seemed to be everywhere and had no meaning or no sort of rhyme or reason and Richie was so much more amorphous in the novel than he is even in the movie. There was really no explanation for what he was doing, why he was doing it, where he was coming from, or what he was. I wanted to make a slightly different point. I wanted to say that evil comes from within us. Evil comes internally and Richie does come from somewhere, but he comes from ourselves and so in a very literal sense I mean the movie can be read literally, and yes, Richie is a hit man and he’s been hired to kill John. I hope that the movie has that logic, but that’s not really what I found really interesting.
For me, I sort of had this Buddhist take on Richie, that he was sort of this tulpa. A tulpa is a being or an object that’s kind of created through willpower and so Richie was sort of a manifestation of these life choices that John’s made. John has sort of unwillingly made this creature come to life and for so much of the movie I think I wanted to play with the red herring that Richie wasn’t real and that it was kind of FIGHT CLUB, which gave me this opportunity to toy with the audience. I think so much of our audience will have watched FIGHT CLUB that they are kind of predicting that Richie is all inside John’s head which was really fun for me to play with knowing that’s what the audience’s expectation is, but Richie of course does exist and Richie is a real entity, but he’s real only insofar as he was created through John’s mind and the evil that exists within John’s own mind.BUG: Very cool. So now that you’re all finished with this film, what’s next for you? What are you working on now?
CF: I’m the producing director of a TV show called WAREHOUSE 13 up in Toronto, so I’m up in Toronto working on season four right now, so I’ll be directing six of the next twenty episodes of WAREHOUSE 13, which is a kind of cool steampunky SyFy show.
BUG: I didn’t know you were involved in that. That’s very cool.
CF: Yeah, yeah, it’s amazing. It’s this incredible set to be involved with. The showrunner, Jack Kenny, just creates a really rad atmosphere up in Toronto, so I’m really stoked to be involved with that and then I do that until mid November and then I’ll direct a couple more episodes of PERSON OF INTEREST, so I do that as well. So I’m trying to balance my TV career with my hopefully beginning film career and just trying to balance that out.
BUG: It was a really fun film. I really liked it. I think that it will be…I will be reviewing it in the horror column even though it kind of teeters on the brink of horror. I’ve reviewed some thrillers before, so it’s definitely not completely out of place there, but congratulations on the film.
CF: Cool man. Thanks.BUG: Yeah. Is there anything else you want to tell the readers on Ain’t It Cool about the movie?
CF: I hope they like it, and I appreciate your time talking to me, and yeah--I think it’s a fun movie to watch. I tried to keep it short and exciting and heart pounding. The movies that really inspired me were the RKO movies from the 40’s and the 50’s and those are the movies I want to make, unabashedly fun B movies.
BUG: Very cool. I definitely love those types of films. Well, congratulations on the film. When can people check it out? Do you know when the release date is and when people can see it?
CF: Yeah, it’s on Video On Demand and iTunes right now. It’s been available since I think the 30th on iTunes or Video On Demand and it comes out in limited release in theaters on May 4th.
BUG: May 4th? Okay, and then will it be on DVD later on?
CF: Yeah, you know they haven’t really given me a DVD date yet, so I’m not sure when that is. That market is so floating away anyways, but I think probably some time late summer.
BUG: Okay--sounds great. Well, congratulations on the film. Best of luck with it and thanks for taking the time to talk with me today.
CF: I appreciate it. Thanks a lot.
BUG: Look for MEETING EVIL in limited release May 4th and on VOD now!
See ya Friday for our regular AICN HORROR Column, folks!
Ambush Bug is Mark L. Miller, original @$$Hole/wordslinger/reviewer/co-editor of AICN Comics for over ten years. He has written comics such as MUSCLES & FIGHTS, MUSCLES & FRIGHTS, VINCENT PRICE PRESENTS TINGLERS & WITCHFINDER GENERAL, THE DEATHSPORT GAMES, WONDERLAND ANNUAL 2010 & NANNY & HANK (soon to be made into a feature film from Uptown 6 Films). He is also a regular writer for FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND & has co-written their first ever comic book LUNA: ORDER OF THE WEREWOLF (to be released in October 2012 as an 100-pg original graphic novel). Mark has just announced his new comic book miniseries GRIMM FAIRY TALES PRESENTS THE JUNGLE BOOK from Zenescope Entertainment to be released in March 2012.
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