Last month I got the chance to talk to writing/directing partners Dan Berk and Robert Olsen about their wickedly surprising new horror/thriller VILLAINS. The duo’s latest feature stars Bill Skarsgård and Maika Monroe as Mickey and Jules, a young couple on a drug-addled crime spree. When the quirky youngsters take refuge in a quiet suburban home, they soon find that their brand of crazy pales in comparison to that of their maniacal hosts George and Gloria.
VILLAINS is a perfect blend of dark humor and true sadism with a creepy air of false wholesomeness throughout. While Skarsgård and Monroe both turn in ironically grounding performances in the insanely offbeat film, it’s Jeffrey Donovan and Kyra Sedgwick who steal the show with their portrayal of the blissfully disturbed George and Gloria.
In case you couldn’t tell, I really dig VILLAINS, so I was super excited to get to chat with the team behind the deranged little movie. I hope you enjoy our interview.
Annette Kellerman:
I'm so excited to talk to you guys about Villains. Oh my gosh, I had such a great time with it.
Dan Berk:
Thank you so much. Thanks for watching it.
Kellerman:
Yeah. I have to ask right off the bat, did you draw any inspiration from other "couples-on-the-lam films? Is there a little, any Bonnie and Clyde or Natural Born Killers in there?
Robert Olson:
Yeah, sure.
Berk:
Absolutely. It's not hard to look at the genetics of VILLAINS and not be... I mean, yeah, you mentioned Bonnie and Clyde. We always talk about how we're big BADLANDS fans and how George and Gloria are like if Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek never got caught and somehow managed to settle somewhere across the country. That's like where those characters are drawn from.
Olson:
We're just always fascinated with the different ... How far those different films ask you to go morally, where you have something like TRUE ROMANCE where they're lovable the entire time in their spree and then you have something like Natural Born Killers where after a while...you start out really liking the characters and then after awhile, you're like, well they are murdering people left and right and so it challenges you a bit. We wanted to make a movie that pitted those two versions of that couple on the run against one another. Like, the more lovable altruistic one versus the more sadistic one.
Berk:
And just putting ourselves through the challenge of drawing characters whose love for each other would make them redeemable enough, so that the audience would forgive them for any of their onscreen transgressions and see how far we could push that and still have people rooting for these people that obviously committed a robbery one minute into the film.
Kellerman:
Right, right. That's one of my favorite parts about it is how, in the course of the drama unfolding, you always go back to their quirky relationship dynamics. Can you talk about that a little bit and how maybe each of the different couples have their own dynamics and how they keep falling back on that?
Olson:
Yeah, sure. I think with Mickey and Jules, we always felt that their love was supposed to be the healthy version of love, where they each have their own personalities that play off one another in a certain way. Whereas George and Gloria was a little bit more of the obsessive side of love and toxic side of love that can happen. We just wanted to do our best to draw that contrast a bit. I think that Mickey and Jules are the ones that you see arguing the most in the movie and George and Gloria constantly have this buttoned up version of love where they're appearing to be in concert the whole time. Yet it's Mickey and Jules we think who have the real version of love that we would be suggesting. George and Gloria's love is also real just, it comes from a darker place, you know?
Berk:
Obviously, the whole nature of this set up is one that asks that question of, love is this drug that you can either fall on the positive or the negative side of and perhaps George and Gloria, Georgia in particular, has such resentment issues towards this younger couple because they see themselves in that younger couple. But the years and all of the, as George says it, "As you get older, things get complicated," all of that has calcified in this really fantastic situation and perhaps there's a jealousy there of when things are so simple and you could just hop in the car and drive away.
Kellerman:
Right, right. Another really interesting aspect is that it almost reads like a play in a way, like a three act play with these wonderful monologues from each character. Can you talk a little bit about your process? Because I guess you guys wrote this together?
Olson:
Yeah, yeah. We do everything together. We did, we wrote this together and yeah, I mean that's just the way ... Our natural default as writers is to have our characters be very chatty. We really love nice long monologues and letting actors just take the work and run with it. We have to restraint ourselves sometimes and not have a bunch of really verbose monologues in our script. But yeah, this just seemed to us like we knew we wanted to make this kind of little chamber piece where it's just these four interesting characters that we throw into this pressure cooker and just let them rip. One of the tools you have as a screenwriter is basically having your characters opine about whatever they want. I think it just came out that way. We knew that initially that this movie needed to have a lot of heart and it needed to be really character driven and we wanted to tease at these extensive backstories and the monologues that we put in there was just our way of doing it.
Berk:
Yeah. I think something else that played into it feeling like a play I think was, it was catered ... The type of movie was catered to what we felt like we could pull off in a given budget. Right? In our first couple of films, we made ... Our first film, we made no money at all and then our second film was like a director for hire thing. This was going to be our first movie we wrote and directed that actually had some kind of a budget. We wanted to live in a world that we understood. Our first film was also kind of a limited location thriller and we really saw the benefit of that in terms of what it does for your day, not having to load in and load out every day and spend a few hours doing that. If you can have the story take place in one location, you can stretch that dollar and a lot more. We went into the writing process of this knowing it would be a limited location thing and so when you work within that, you start to think about, well what are the best kinds of stories that play out there? You realize that the play structure that you're talking about as a dialogue and structure is one of the best ways to handle that because if we're just in a house the whole time, it's just not going to be ... There's not going to be enough to just go on solely visually and not have a lot of dialog over the movie. I think all that stuff just plays into why this was the way that it was.
Kellerman:
Absolutely. Absolutely. You guys also managed to kind of make, I mean, not kind of, you did make it feel very timeless in a way. There's definitely nods to certain eras. Even though I'm sure that Mickey and Jules are more modern, I got even a 90s vibe off of them. Whereas, Gloria and George are more mid-century-ish. Can you talk a little bit about the choices in making it and cutting out any current day references and that sort of thing?
Olson:
Sure, yeah. Well I think that plays into, we wanted it to feel a little bit like a fairytale, a little timeless, you know? Yeah, we didn't want any of those temporal markers there. Same sort of thing, Florida, is the only location marker really in the movie. We just wanted it to feel like it was ambiguously Northeastern. Like this random house in the coniferous forests of New England, you know? I think we just wanted it to be ... We didn't want it to rely on things that could then later become dated and I think obviously cell phones are the bane for many filmmakers and screenwriters. This was a good opportunity we felt to have these two sets of characters who might not have those phones. In Mickey and Jules' case, perhaps they had like some burner thing, but they're living out on the street and then George and Gloria obviously have every incentive to be as off the grid as possible themselves. We felt like we had a good little excuse here. We didn't want to go and just say like, "Oh, this is in the late 80s or this is in the early 90s." That's why we felt like there was a way to do it where it could feel you might be able to watch this movie in 10 years and not have it feel dated or it's referencing something and it doesn't make sense anymore.
Berk:
Yeah. Also, that effect actually succeeding relies almost completely on our production designer Annie Simeone and our costume designer, Stacey Berman, who took the character blueprints that we wanted and dressed these characters up and made them feel like they were in a fairytale and on Annie's side, gutting a house completely and just making it feel like it was George and Gloria's and that gets to a character thing that motivated us. It wasn't just like, we didn't want them just stuck in the 50s- 40s or 50s- just because. We felt like it tied into their arrested development and more their nostalgia for a time that maybe never even existed. It's not like they were in their middle age. It's not like they were in their 40s and 50s, they were probably hardly born. But they look back and they've constructed these personas from movies and pop culture of the era and whatnot. That's what George thinks a man is supposed to look and feel like and this is what Gloria feels a wife and a mother should look and act and dress like and decorate her house like. All of those things just fit into a really nice cocktail that our incredibly talented craftspeople brought to life.
Kellerman:
Definitely lent to the overall creepy feel of everything.
Berk:
Definitely.
Annette Kellerman:
I'm so excited to talk to you guys about Villains. Oh my gosh, I had such a great time with it.
Dan Berk:
Thank you so much. Thanks for watching it.
Kellerman:
Yeah. I have to ask right off the bat, did you draw any inspiration from other "couples-on-the-lam films? Is there a little, any Bonnie and Clyde or Natural Born Killers in there?
Robert Olson:
Yeah, sure.
Berk:
Absolutely. It's not hard to look at the genetics of VILLAINS and not be... I mean, yeah, you mentioned Bonnie and Clyde. We always talk about how we're big BADLANDS fans and how George and Gloria are like if Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek never got caught and somehow managed to settle somewhere across the country. That's like where those characters are drawn from.
Olson:
We're just always fascinated with the different ... How far those different films ask you to go morally, where you have something like TRUE ROMANCE where they're lovable the entire time in their spree and then you have something like Natural Born Killers where after a while...you start out really liking the characters and then after awhile, you're like, well they are murdering people left and right and so it challenges you a bit. We wanted to make a movie that pitted those two versions of that couple on the run against one another. Like, the more lovable altruistic one versus the more sadistic one.
Berk:
And just putting ourselves through the challenge of drawing characters whose love for each other would make them redeemable enough, so that the audience would forgive them for any of their onscreen transgressions and see how far we could push that and still have people rooting for these people that obviously committed a robbery one minute into the film.
Kellerman:
Right, right. That's one of my favorite parts about it is how, in the course of the drama unfolding, you always go back to their quirky relationship dynamics. Can you talk about that a little bit and how maybe each of the different couples have their own dynamics and how they keep falling back on that?
Olson:
Yeah, sure. I think with Mickey and Jules, we always felt that their love was supposed to be the healthy version of love, where they each have their own personalities that play off one another in a certain way. Whereas George and Gloria was a little bit more of the obsessive side of love and toxic side of love that can happen. We just wanted to do our best to draw that contrast a bit. I think that Mickey and Jules are the ones that you see arguing the most in the movie and George and Gloria constantly have this buttoned up version of love where they're appearing to be in concert the whole time. Yet it's Mickey and Jules we think who have the real version of love that we would be suggesting. George and Gloria's love is also real just, it comes from a darker place, you know?
Berk:
Obviously, the whole nature of this set up is one that asks that question of, love is this drug that you can either fall on the positive or the negative side of and perhaps George and Gloria, Georgia in particular, has such resentment issues towards this younger couple because they see themselves in that younger couple. But the years and all of the, as George says it, "As you get older, things get complicated," all of that has calcified in this really fantastic situation and perhaps there's a jealousy there of when things are so simple and you could just hop in the car and drive away.
Kellerman:
Right, right. Another really interesting aspect is that it almost reads like a play in a way, like a three act play with these wonderful monologues from each character. Can you talk a little bit about your process? Because I guess you guys wrote this together?
Olson:
Yeah, yeah. We do everything together. We did, we wrote this together and yeah, I mean that's just the way ... Our natural default as writers is to have our characters be very chatty. We really love nice long monologues and letting actors just take the work and run with it. We have to restraint ourselves sometimes and not have a bunch of really verbose monologues in our script. But yeah, this just seemed to us like we knew we wanted to make this kind of little chamber piece where it's just these four interesting characters that we throw into this pressure cooker and just let them rip. One of the tools you have as a screenwriter is basically having your characters opine about whatever they want. I think it just came out that way. We knew that initially that this movie needed to have a lot of heart and it needed to be really character driven and we wanted to tease at these extensive backstories and the monologues that we put in there was just our way of doing it.
Berk:
Yeah. I think something else that played into it feeling like a play I think was, it was catered ... The type of movie was catered to what we felt like we could pull off in a given budget. Right? In our first couple of films, we made ... Our first film, we made no money at all and then our second film was like a director for hire thing. This was going to be our first movie we wrote and directed that actually had some kind of a budget. We wanted to live in a world that we understood. Our first film was also kind of a limited location thriller and we really saw the benefit of that in terms of what it does for your day, not having to load in and load out every day and spend a few hours doing that. If you can have the story take place in one location, you can stretch that dollar and a lot more. We went into the writing process of this knowing it would be a limited location thing and so when you work within that, you start to think about, well what are the best kinds of stories that play out there? You realize that the play structure that you're talking about as a dialogue and structure is one of the best ways to handle that because if we're just in a house the whole time, it's just not going to be ... There's not going to be enough to just go on solely visually and not have a lot of dialog over the movie. I think all that stuff just plays into why this was the way that it was.
Kellerman:
Absolutely. Absolutely. You guys also managed to kind of make, I mean, not kind of, you did make it feel very timeless in a way. There's definitely nods to certain eras. Even though I'm sure that Mickey and Jules are more modern, I got even a 90s vibe off of them. Whereas, Gloria and George are more mid-century-ish. Can you talk a little bit about the choices in making it and cutting out any current day references and that sort of thing?
Olson:
Sure, yeah. Well I think that plays into, we wanted it to feel a little bit like a fairytale, a little timeless, you know? Yeah, we didn't want any of those temporal markers there. Same sort of thing, Florida, is the only location marker really in the movie. We just wanted it to feel like it was ambiguously Northeastern. Like this random house in the coniferous forests of New England, you know? I think we just wanted it to be ... We didn't want it to rely on things that could then later become dated and I think obviously cell phones are the bane for many filmmakers and screenwriters. This was a good opportunity we felt to have these two sets of characters who might not have those phones. In Mickey and Jules' case, perhaps they had like some burner thing, but they're living out on the street and then George and Gloria obviously have every incentive to be as off the grid as possible themselves. We felt like we had a good little excuse here. We didn't want to go and just say like, "Oh, this is in the late 80s or this is in the early 90s." That's why we felt like there was a way to do it where it could feel you might be able to watch this movie in 10 years and not have it feel dated or it's referencing something and it doesn't make sense anymore.
Berk:
Yeah. Also, that effect actually succeeding relies almost completely on our production designer Annie Simeone and our costume designer, Stacey Berman, who took the character blueprints that we wanted and dressed these characters up and made them feel like they were in a fairytale and on Annie's side, gutting a house completely and just making it feel like it was George and Gloria's and that gets to a character thing that motivated us. It wasn't just like, we didn't want them just stuck in the 50s- 40s or 50s- just because. We felt like it tied into their arrested development and more their nostalgia for a time that maybe never even existed. It's not like they were in their middle age. It's not like they were in their 40s and 50s, they were probably hardly born. But they look back and they've constructed these personas from movies and pop culture of the era and whatnot. That's what George thinks a man is supposed to look and feel like and this is what Gloria feels a wife and a mother should look and act and dress like and decorate her house like. All of those things just fit into a really nice cocktail that our incredibly talented craftspeople brought to life.
Kellerman:
Definitely lent to the overall creepy feel of everything.
Berk:
Definitely.
Kellerman:
Speaking of this terrific team, can you talk a little bit about the incredible casting? I mean, I was so blown away by Jeffrey Donovan and of course Kyra Sedgwick and everyone, Bill and Maika. Can you talk a little bit about how you chose them or if they chose you or just how it all came about? Because it seemed like the casting was just so spot on. Whoever your casting director is, they're amazing.
Olson:
Yeah, Allison Estrin Henry Russell Bergstein, great cast directors. Yeah, the casting process, we're just so lucky to have ended up where we ended up. That's honestly the highest praise that we can get for this movie is that people are surprised by these performances. They didn't know that Bill Skarsgard could do that or Kyra Sedgwick would go that far. That Jeff Donovan could do that. That's the praise that we are proudest of more than anything else is just that this platform existed for these actors to go outside their comfort zones- far outside in some cases. Bill Skarsgard was the first person to dip their toe in the water and come onto the film initially and that was an enormous help because it started to ... A movie can be a million things when it's just a script and unknown directors, which is what we were and still are. To all these actors, they read the script and they're like, "That's a pretty wild script, but who the fuck knows what these guys are going to do with it?" Having Bill locked in, suddenly they start to ... Now it is something you can see through the mist. You can see the shape of the movie forming. After that, Maika came on very quickly and we were enormous fans of Maika. When we wrote the script in 2015, we wrote it with Maika in mind actually. But that's why we were even more nobody's and there was just no hope that we would ever be able to get the script to her. It was very serendipitous, one of the many elements of magic to this whole process with this movie. We were able to actually get Maika on board and once we had our Mickey and Jules, it was just then we had an idea what our younger couple is going to be. And then Kyra and Jeff came on and we were just so impressed with both of them, with all of them really. I mean, this movie, all four of them had to understand the tone of the movie that they were in and all in different scenes. All of them had to take turns quarterbacking that tone and ensuring that we were all making the same film and they obviously knocked it out of the park. It had such a narrow bull's eye tonally, so yeah, we were very, very, very lucky with the cast we ended up with.
Berk:
It can't really be said enough, like just how much trust they had to have in us because the script's strength was also a challenge for it, which is the tone. It's a little bit out there and it makes it stick out if you're an actor who's reading a bunch of scripts. But at the same time, once you go, "Oh. I like this scripting," you look into it, this is a very different tone from the other films that we've made. It took a lot of trust on their part to listen to us saying like, "Look, we know that we don't have some proof of concept thing that is this exact tone, but we know the story inside and out and this is the tone we've always wanted in our films and have just never had the budget to really pull it off." It takes a lot of faith on their part because you can fall on your face if you go for a tone like this and fail. It's not quite the same thing as if you're making a straight drama and you muck it up a bit. People will say, "The movie is bad," but they're not necessarily going to ... If you're an actor and you're in just a straight drama in the movie lines of thinking, you won't maybe catch that much shit. But in a movie like this where we're asking you as an actor to really go for it and to be almost cartoonish in places and operate somewhere just South of Mars, well if you do that and it doesn't come out well, that's a Razzie, you know what I mean? That's like a total Hindenburg disaster for an actor. They go out and put themselves out like that and the movies doesn't do well. I think that was definitely a challenge going in. Bill was just, being the first one in, he was just so confident that he would be able to handle this and to pull it off. We were just really lucky to get four actors that really understood the exact tone we were going for.
Kellerman:
Absolutely. Also, there's some pretty incredible effects and makeup in there. Can you talk a little bit about that too? I mean, without getting too spoilery I guess.
Olson:
Yeah. Bryan Speers and his effects team, they were just incredible. We've worked with them in the past and they were one of the ... When we first really started to get this movie going, they were one of the first people that we tried to lock in. It's not a movie that is wall to wall with gore. We wanted the moment that did have a bit of blood to really stand out and they're so great because they just immediately understood what we're going for and some of the things that were a little bit heightened here and there, they were the perfect team for it. It's one of those things where you start to describe something and they're like, "Yep, yep. Got it."
Berk:
Yeah, there's some funny anecdotes and whatnot, but any of that would spoil some of the big moments of the movie.
Kellerman:
Right. Let's not!
Berk:
I know! I wish we could talk about that stuff more without spoiling anyting. But yeah, working with Bryan and his whole team is great and to do it on all of our movies moving forward.
Kellerman:
Can you talk about that incredible credit sequence, the animation, and your choice to do that at the end? I absolutely was like, yep. I'm still sitting here. I'm watching all of this. This is so great.
Olson:
That's great. I'm glad you did that. Yeah, I shudder to think about when it comes out in theaters and people are just getting up and leaving because they think it's the end of the movie. Yeah. We worked with an unbelievable animator named Matt Reynolds, who some of the readers of your site may perhaps recognize. He's done the bumpers for South By Southwest.
Kellerman:
Cool! I've definitely seen them!
Olson:
He did them a few years ago. He might've done them a couple of times, but he's also had some short films that have done the festival circuit. But yeah, he's just super talented. Just has such a crazy kind of style with all the little creatures and death and gore and whatnot.
Berk:
Yeah, his work ... He has a series of short films that are online that are just unbelievable. It was funny because that sequence is just so ... It was originally at the top of the movie at one point in the edit and it just sort of kicked too much ass, where it was so high energy that the rest of the movie felt like it was struggling to live up to what this incredible opening title sequence was. Then we realized at one point that it worked so much better at the end because obviously the movie has a somewhat solemn ending and so at the end, it actually works even better because ...
Olson:
It's a celebration.
Berk:
Yeah, it's a celebration of what you just watched and it lets you still leave the theater with that "up" feeling. That was a big revelation for us.
Olson:
Yeah, and I felt it illustrated how much we learned on this movie in the editorial process. Like obviously everyone always knows you make the movie three times when you write it, when you shoot it, and when you edit it. But it was really true on this one. There weren't enormous character changes, but that's a really good example of where... like that sequence was designed and if you read the script, it was designed to be like the second scene in the movie. We put it in there and our heads were so ... We were so calcified with this idea of where that should go. But it wasn't until we had gotten very deep into post and we got notes from a friend who's a really talented filmmaker who brought that idea up to us, that there was this energy expectation. That that's a thing in movies. That if you're going to have a really kick ass thing like that, you have to ramp up to it.
Kellerman:
Sure.
Olson:
We hadn't even really considered that. Moving into the end, suddenly we were like, "Oh my God, the whole thing works now. Holy shit." That was really cool.
Berk:
Then also just getting that Courtney Barnett song. A big shout out to our music supervisor Rob Lowry who got together.
Kellerman:
I love Courtney Barnett. She is so great.
Berk:
Yeah, yeah. That was a song that, we were driving and it just came on. This is early on in the process. We were both just like, "Whoa. What is this?" Then we just dug through her whole discography and fell in love with this artist. We were really hooked on that song from an early stage and we never knew if we were going to actually be able to get it. But thank God she came on liking the project. Yeah, that was a huge one.
Kellerman:
That's great. That's great. I think we're about to get cut off. I think our 20 minutes is up, but thank you guys so much for taking your time to talk to me about Villains today. It was really great and I'm so excited to see what the world thinks about it.
Olson:
Of course. Thanks for the time. Ain't it Cool is one of the first film websites I ever started viewing. So this is really cool.
Berk:
Yeah.
Kellerman:
Well, thank you! That's really nice to hear! Well y'all have a great day and good luck with the rest of your interviews today.
Berk:
Thank you so much.
Olson:
Thanks!
I hope you had as much fun with the interview as I did. I highly recommend checking out VILLAINS when the film opens in theaters on 9/19- and definitely stick around for that end credits sequence!
Rebecca Elliott
Aka Annette Kellerman
