Hi folks, Precious Roy here with an interview for AintItCool… I was given the chance to speak with Brian Taylor, co-writer/director of the CRANK films, and director of GHOST RIDER: SPIRITS OF VENGEANCE, and the driving force behind SYFY’s HAPPY!, which is my best new show of 2017. I really enjoyed this experience. Brian was so full of love for his cast and so referential. We’re talking about MOM AND DAD, his pandemic film about family disconnects and a sudden crisis that causes parents to have a powerful urge to murder their own children. (http://www.aintitcool.com/node/79163) This interview contains spoilers for the film.
MOM AND DAD stars Selma Blair and Nicolas Cage as the titular mom and dad, and introduces three young actors: Zackary Arthur as their mischievous youngest Josh; Anne Winter as their slightly-in-her-own- world Carly; and Robert Cunningham as Damon, Carly’s PSAT-focused boyfriend.
Wheels has a great review of it up (http://www.aintitcool.com/node/79257), so I won’t need to review it, but what I’d like to say about MOM AND DAD is that it takes all the tensions of the family: a daughter disconnecting, a handful of a boy, and two dynamic adults who sacrificed their identities to become parents and settle down… and adds a potentially world-ending mental health crisis. As Carly points out to her mother in an early scene, everyone in the family is in their own little bubble. Selma Blair’s Kendall is battling serious depression and is stoic-ly keeping it all locked in, but it cracks a little when dealing with her time-diminished relationship with Carly. Josh is reaching a point where his dad is starting to feel threatening as the disciplinarian. And Nicolas Cage’s Brent is getting tangled up in his own depression, bucking against his own stability and shutting his wife out. They are all decent people, and loving, but struggling to maintain themselves in close proximity to each other. All this family lacks is an event to unify them, and unfortunately for the Ryans, Brian Taylor’s event pits the parents against their offspring.
But fortunately for us, Taylor handles this event smartly and in a really entertaining way. One look at the new dads staring into the maternity ward or one poor little kid named 'Kevin' making it over the school fence to the safety of his mother’s arms will tell you that. It’s just a fun, funny, twisted nut of a movie.
Here’s the interview!
PRECIOUS ROY: Hi, Brian!
BRIAN TAYLOR: Hi, what is up…?
PR: I just want to say, right off the bat,-- I’ll keep this short because I know we’re here to talk MOM AND DAD-- but HAPPY! is the new love of my life!
BT: Nice!
PR: Thanks for delivering something beautiful and messed up in equal amounts. It’s GREAT!
BT: Aw, man—wait ‘til episode 7, that’s all I can tell you…
PR: I’m behind, I’ve only seen the first three episodes, but I can’t wait to see catch up!
BT: Episode 7 will hurt… it will melt your brain!
PR: Hee hee! I just want to say that I also loved MOM AND DAD! It felt very much like a grindhouse comedy, very gritty… you build tension so well!
BT: It’s true Grindhouse, yeah… (laughs) it’s a fun movie to make!
PR: Yeah, I can imagine! I’m hoping it will grab a teen market who are less into superheroes now and more aware of that they’re IN dystopia, but also grab the adults dealing with mid-life crisis, where they’re not sure they want to be parents anymore….? There’s so many touches in it that geeks like me will love in MOM AND DAD… The cameos were so fun! Grant Morrison as a pundit, and the Bokeem Woodbine thing was just beautiful…
BT: Right, yeah….
PR: How hard was it to get those guys involved in the film?
BT: Well, I’ve been working with Grant for awhile now because of HAPPY!...
PR: Right! Of course! (Ed.: Yeah, that’s a lie, I had totally forgotten this despite it being one of the first things I discovered when researching HAPPY!)
BT: …that’s based on a Grant Morrison thing, so we were looking for experts to be the talking heads on the news, and I said, “Grant, you gotta be in the movie…”
PR: (laughs)
BT: And he’s great… I just love that he’s flop-sweating through the whole thing, and all that stuff about the wild animals, that was his improv, and we actually just did a lot of him improving. I told him what the basic concept was and what he was supposed to say, and I kind of let him run with it…. So all that stuff where he was like, “So let’s just pause through it… someone wants to wipe us out…” …that was just all Grant!
PR: (laugh) Bokeem Woodbine’s delivery is just really chilling in that moment and his deadpan was perfect! (me doing bad Woodbine impression) “I’m just trying to conjure the tears…”
BT: Every time I see it, it makes me laugh! (laughs, does a better Woodbine impression) “…but I just can’t!” Yeah, he’s awesome.
PR: This film has a great cast. Cage, Blair, and Henricksen…
BT: Yeah, man!
PR: What was the casting like on this film?
BT: Well, Nic was the first guy, who was just like… this was the kind of Nic Cage we want to see… Nic has a lot to offer, and he’s definitely… we love the unhinged Nic Cage? But, he’s a great actor, he’s capable of playing everything in the movie so well, and what I love about him and Selma is they both kind of have that… they’re both parents…
PR: Right…
BT: But no matter how much you dress them up as being conservative, suburban, American, “normal” parents, you never quite buy it. And you always know there’s punk rock underneath… and that they’re a little off… and that they’re not fully comfortable/will never be fully comfortable in that persona. Which is exactly what (Brent and Kendall) needed to be… because these two people, when they became parents, they lost who they used to be. They’re not comfortable in their own skin anymore. They don’t know what the hell they’re supposed to be doing.
PR: (laughs) Yeah!
BT: I think both of them are great in the movie… One thing that’s amazing to me is their chemistry is so good, and they have similar spirits in a lot of ways… it’s hard to believe they’ve never done a movie together before.
PR: Right, yeah…
BT: Shouldn’t Selma and Nic be like our Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, or Fred and Ginger, or something like that? There should be six or seven Nic and Selma movies.
PR: Maybe they’re the next Tom and Meg…
BT: Totally, yeah.
PR: Joe Reitman: thank you for casting him! He was great as the teacher!
BT: You’re welcome! And Joe’s great in HAPPY!, too!
PR: YES HE IS, I love his Santa! (laughs) Was Damon a hard role to cast?
BT: It actually was a hard role to cast! We read a million people, and I think Robert Cunningham is so good, and would you believe this is the first thing he’s ever done? All he’s done is plays at school…
PR: Wow…
BT: He’s never done any t.v., he’s never done a movie, just completely out of the blue.. we saw his tape, and we were like, “Man!” This guy’s just got a great smile…
PR: Oh, yeah!
BT: …he’s so likeable… but he’s really good! I mean, he’s just like… he’s amazing! We kind of just rolled the dice on him… can you imagine just going from never doing anything except school plays to acting across from a full-intensity Nicolas Cage?
PR: (laughs) Right!
BT: I mean, wow, talk about jumping straight into the fire!
PR: I’ve loved Nic Cage since VALLEY GIRL, and of course you worked with him on GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE… he seems like one of the nicest guys to work with on a set, because he’s so gracious and gives room for other actors to make their (mark)… and he can also go totally off the deep end… as a writer/director, what do you enjoy most out of working with him, when he’s on one of your films?
BT: He definitely transforms it. Anything he does, he elevates it in a way that no other actor does. And sometimes, he can elevate it in unpredictable ways.
PR: Right…
BT: He’s just so additive to anything you do, and so creative… he’s got a million ideas, and you want that flow of ideas, you want him to feel really open, and you want him to feel like his ideas are really welcome, because they are, right?
PR: Yeah!
BT: You can’t do all of them, but the ones that work, they make the movie so much better. When he’s destroying the pool table, the Hokey-Pokey, that’s all Nic…
PR: (laughs)
BT: And it’s awesome, and it kinda put us in a situation, did you know that the Hokey-Pokey is not a Public Domain song?
PR: Oh, is it not?
BT: That’s actually a song you need to buy… you need to clear it… so we find ourselves imposed with this AMAZING scene, and it was kind of nervous time to see if we could get it cleared, and if we could afford it?
PR: (laughs) It’s great that you did, Wheels will love hearing that.
BT: So that worked out… Nic is a force. But he’s so professional. He’s probably the most professional actor you could ever work with. So even though it seems like he’s a lunatic, I guarantee you, everything is precise, very controlled, and he doesn’t do anything randomly—it’s all motivated, and sometimes with a precision that would surprise you. He’s attentive to the precise rhythm and timber of individual words in a big block of dialogue in a way that I think more actors should do.
PR: If Marvel decides to pull Johnny Blaze into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and wanted Nic, would you be willing to come back for another Ghost Rider film?
BT: (pause) Well, that’s never gonna happen…. (laughs) They did bring Ghost Rider back, they brought him back on one of the t.v. shows, right?
PR: Yes! But it wasn’t Johnny Blaze, so there’s still room for him to possibly be in the MCU…
BT: (skeptical) Yeeeeaaahhhh…
PR: (laughs)
BT: As much as Cage, what I really miss, that we did really well, in the Ghost Rider movie-- which is an uneven movie, it has its plusses and minuses-- but I think one of the coolest things in it is the design of the actual Ghost Rider, which we did as this sort of black, smoking skull, with this bubbling tar for a leather jacket… he looks so cool, he looks like a horror movie character… he’s a monster—
PR: Yeah!
BT: —and I was really disappointed that they went away from that when they brought the character into the t.v. world… he looks kind of plastic and clean, and kind of cheap, to me…? So, I definitely miss that version of Ghost Rider, I wish they had at least gone with that visual take.
PR: For a grindhouse-type film, MOM AND DAD has surprising moments of warmth and humanity… in particular, Anne Winters as Carly has this great transition from a bratty narcissist to the tiny thread keeping the family alive and together. I love that you resisted the temptation to make her a badass cliché and instead made her what she already was: deviously clever and still very much the last person who wants to be in a fight to the death with her own parents...
BT: Yeah, I mean, teens are sneaky—if they’re gonna beat you, they should beat you by being sneaky—but, the thing about the kids, and both those actors (Anne Winters and Zackary Arthur) are great, they really bring it to life, they’re both really good kids! They haven’t done anything to deserve this…
PR: Yeah…
BT: I know the temptation… I know she steals a little money, or something like that, so that’s kinda bad, but it’s really not something that she should DIE for, y’know what I mean?
PR: (laughs)
BT: That’s really not something you should DIE for! I really wanted the kids to be good, you know… the two Ryan kids are good, Damon is a good kid, these are really nice kids, and none of this is their fault—
PR: Yeah!
BT: -- and it’s really not ABOUT them… It’s all about the frustrations and delusions and anxieties of the parents.
PR: Right…
BT: The last thing I would want to do is have you come away from the movie going, ‘Yeah, those little bastards, they had it coming!”
PR: No! In fact, one of my favorite bits is when the son throws that ball, and hits the back of Brent’s head, and he turns, and there’s that moment of death stare from Nic that breaks the tension. And there’s this underlying thing in Nic’s performance, that adds so much to the character… “why are you picking on me”, the parent feeling this about the child… but he’s not picking on him, he’s just being a kid… and in kid logic, ‘you tickled me, so I’m gonna throw this ball at you…’ I love how that plays--
BT: Yeah, I love the way Nic plays the first part of the movie… I think all dads, even without going homicidal and crazy like the parents do in the second part of the movie… I think, just by being a parent, there’s a certain level of insanity, that you just live with, every day. It’s like a part of you, it’s this slow-grinding insanity that’s just a part of your life… like, “Why am I eating this Fruit Roll-Up off the bottom of my car seat...?”
PR: (laughs)
BT: Like, “Who am I?” “What am I doing? Is this really me? Am I really wearing this tie? I don’t understand who I am…” I think he plays the first part of that really well, and I love those subtle moments where he’s trying to be a good guy, he’s trying to be who everyone thinks he’s supposed to be, but underneath the surface, he’s just, like, hanging on by a thread.
PR: Is there any chance we’ll see a sequel to MOM AND DAD from you?
BT: I dunno, we’ll see if people like it!
Thanks to Brian Taylor and his people… he was really kind with my fanboying about HAPPY! in the short time we had for MOM AND DAD. Some of his comments about the chemistry between Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair still make me grin when I think of them; I hope if they got along, that they do become the next Tom and Meg, or perhaps the next Ryan and Emma.
I'm Precious Roy, and that's my courageous story!
MOM AND DAD will be released in theaters and available on VOD and Digital HD on January 19th.
