"BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE FOUNDING FATHERS AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT."

Stacy Davidson: Director

1. Tell us a little about your background, where are you from and when did you decide that you wanted to become a filmmaker? I grew up in Houston, TX, and I've lived both here and in Austin.  It was really the curtain going up on Star Wars at the Alabama Theater that did it to me to begin with.  I remember that it was the first movie  that had me asking "who made that?"  Someone told me that George Lucas had produced, written, and directed it.  I said "wow, he did everything!?"  I knew that's what I wanted to do.  Fast forward over 20  years later, and I'm just like all the other "aspiring filmmakers" out there with this idea that "someday" I'll be a director.. be a director?  I didn't even know what a friggin' director was!  I had studied films and  listened to commentaries most of my life, but I didn't even own a camera.  I didn't know where to start, I thought to make movies (interesting ones, anyway) I had to go to Hollywood and "be discovered" or  something, I don't know what I thought.  Figured I'd make some money in the game industry (where I was at the time) and one day fund my own flick, but I had no idea how to go about that.  One day I pick up this filmmaking article talking about how in the old days you had to constantly spend money on cans of film and developing, but now you can get a DV camera w/ firewire, a mic, a light kit and a good PC w/  Premiere for just a few thousand bucks and make as many films as you want.  Being a technically-oriented person, I was drawn to the idea.  Then I read his book recommendations at the bottom.  Most of  them were crap (there is no such thing as a relevant, up-to-date book on digital filmmaking), but the last one on the list was a book that would change my life: Rebel Without a Crew by Robert Rodriguez.  I  had heard about his El Mariachi venture and had always wanted to check it out, but this was the first I had heard about the book.  Well, I picked it up at Borders and skipped ahead to the "10 Minute Film  School" where he, as unlikely as it sounds, teaches you essentially every practical bit of knowledge you actually NEED to go make a film. Cameras, film, light meters, the works.  But the most inspirational realization was this: I wasn't an "aspiring filmmaker", I WAS a filmmaker. I had been doing it all along, I just thought it wasn't "real" filmmaking. I had been writing stories, recording audio drama, drawing  comics and basically telling stories all my life.  His advice was "congratulations, you're a film maker.  Go make cards and move on to the next step."  Which, for me, was to 1) switch to drama in my tutoring  job, studying Beowulf, Poetics and basic dramatic structure and screenwriting for six months or so, 2) quit all that and get a job working for an industrial video company for a year, doing the occasional short  film or music video and always learning the ropes with cameras and editing software, and 3) jump into filmmaking full time.  Since then I have worked on several music videos, over a half dozen short films, and  two features.  If there were two pivotal moments in my life as a filmmaker, those would be Star Wars and Rebel.  I think anyone who reads Rebel and does anything other than go make a film right away hasn't  an ounce of filmmaker in their blood.  That's the test.  If you can read that book and STILL come up with cynical excuses and 100 reasons why NOW isn't the right time to go make movies, my advice is to  move on to plan B: go sling garbage or learn a good trade, cause you ain't no filmmaker. 2. What has been your favorite project to date and why? Definitely Necrophobia.  It has been a monstrous amount of work, but the reward is in seeing it with an audience.  I made it because it's the horror movie I've always wanted to see, and to watch a flick like  this, basically an old-school drive-in splatter flick, with an audience and they're screaming and jumping and having a good time, it's more reward than I could ever have asked for. 3. Tell us about your latest directorial project "Necrophobia". What was your experience like writing, directing and shooting the film? "Let me 'splain.  No, there is too much.  Let me sum up."   The germ for this flick came in 2002 when my boss at the time drove by an enormous haunted house called Screamworld.  We had just made a  20-minute short, and we found that we could have made it much faster if we hadn't written in so many locations.  Larry figured that if we could write a movie that took place inside a haunted house, we should  be able to shoot a whole feature in there in a few days.  Well, I'm sure I could have written something that could have been shot in a few days, but instead I wrote Necrophobia.  I did a quick step outline, then  visited Screamworld and took a tour.  They were agreeable, and the interior looked great, so I made a bunch of notes and then went and hammered out the script in two weeks.  The casting was a long process, took months.  And in the end I actually replaced many of them. Without any money at all, we went into Screamworld in Nov. 2003 and started shooting.  After a week and a half, I lost everyone to  the holidays. During that break, Leo Wheeler (one of my actors) came up to me and said "so when are we starting up again?"  I said "hard to say, there's no money and the owners of the haunted house aren't  real flexible about our hours here." He asked if a warehouse and a few thousand bucks for set construction would help.  I said yes.  So about six months later we began to shoot what I like to call "the real  movie"  This time we had about a dozen sets.  We would shoot one out, tear it down or alter it and shoot out another, etc.  We usually had about 5 standing sets at a time.  Of course, this allowed me to shoot  exactly what was in the script, without having to me compromises on locations.  Not that never having exactly what you wanted is the worst thing in the world, sometimes that can push you to come up with even  better ideas that what you wrote.  On the cast side of things, quite a long time had passed at this point and I was starting to loose people.  Our lead actor vanished for a few weeks (and hadn't been quite right  to begin with), so I re-cast him with an enormously talented guy I had been working with from Austin (Jude Hickey).  One actress just disappeared off the face of the earth, another signed up for "Mr. Hell"  and "Late Coffee and Oranges" back-to-back and was in danger of over extending herself, so she had to bow out of Necro when we finally got back to the shooting.  Then there was one actor who just got  cold feet and didn't believe in the project.  This all led to a lot of re-casting, but in every case it was an enormous step up. In some cases we found people who were better suited to the roles, or had better  chemistry with the other actors, and in some cases we just plain found better actors.  Then there was my lead actress, who had been one of the strong ones in rehearsals with the original cast, but with all the re-castings she had slowly become one of the least experienced and more importantly her chemistry with Jude was non-existent.  That's when, by coincidence, I visited the casting sessions for "Late Coffee and  Oranges" with a friend and met quite possibly the greatest actor I've every worked with, Sawyer Davis.  I pretty much knew she would be my new Lisa from the moment we met, it was just a question of  details at that point.  In the end, she had to start with us, go shoot Coffee & Oranges, then finish with us in time to move to California and start school.  It was hard as hell, and she made a lot of sacrifices, but  we did it and the movie is 1000% better for it.  Morgan McCarthy had signed on as our makeup supervisor, and had neglected to mention that she also happened to the top award winning actress at St.  Thomas University.  So not only did I give her the role of Jesse Chase, but I made some re-writes that made her part more central to the story (when you have a great actor, it always encourages you to do  more with a character, and sometimes that can save the flow of your script. Actors are your tools for telling your story, use them!)  My 1st AD Melissa Bubela actually begged for the role of Sandra Storm,  and it took me a week to figure out that she was serious.  Once I realized that, I gave it to her instantly and I am proud to say she took the role to a new low.  She was already supposed to be a somewhat  scummy, drunken bitch character, but what Melissa did with her was pure gold.  Dave Maldonado was an actor who had been in the cast earlier and had been re-cast for chemistry reasons.  I had been  looking for a reason to add him back in, so when a hole opened up with DJ Dick Johnson, I knew I had him.  Add to this the always-switched-on adlibbing comedy of Jeremy Wasson as Melvin, the ranting  hillbilly antics of producer Leo Wheeler as Buferd, and a strong cast of supporters, and it seems as if my perfect "dream" cast just sort of materialized over that year and a half.  The funny thing is, once we  started shooting, there were only a handful of cast members left who had been a part of all our rehearsals, the rest of them just stepped onto the set and started acting (including both leads!)  In the end, we shot  on our sets, inside Screamworld, and all over Phobia (another fantastic, enormous haunted house at 290 & Jones Rd.) We also did quite a bit of greenscreen work on the set.  Once of our goals with this movie  was to try just about everything.  Mike Oliver (Special Effects, Visual Effects) and I wanted to leave this experience knowing that we had done it all: greenscreen elements on CG backgrounds, actor duplication, tracking CG actors on live backgrounds, using CG to enhance a live scene, paint out eyes, remove wires, create lots of fully costumed and wardrobed creatures, not to mention my own experience  editing a film this large, importing and exporting special effects elements, and mixing a full 5.1 score.  We didn't want to give anyone else these jobs, we wanted to soak up all the experience ourselves so that on  the next one we won't be afraid to try anything.   4. What do you think is the most important thing for a Director to bring to a set? If you're in Hollywood: a beer and a good book.  In Texas?  You gotta bring plenty of redbull and mountain dew, keep yourself awake, because you're going to be rockin' and rollin' so fast and things are going  to be getting done all around you so rapidly that you won't have time to sit around for 2 seconds.  On a practical note, I personally felt that my shots came out 1000% better when I showed up with  storyboards.  Since I was the DP, they were really just for me, but it helped me plan out my shots ahead of time, which is important because when you ARE 75% of the crew, the other 25% and the cast will  be all over you with questions the second you walk in and suddenly it seems like you don't have time to think, much less plan.  For me, creative ideas always hit better when I'm just sitting alone at the drawing  table.  But that may come from my interest in writing, drawing comics and game design.  Those are all very solitary crafts. 5. What inspired you to make a Necrophobia? both in story and visually. I think I gotta go back to Rodriguez again on this one.  I remember reading that he grew up feeling that the movies at the Mexican video stores never lived up to the promise of crazy action they always had on  their painted box covers.  He said he wanted to make Mariachi as a film that would live up to its cover.  Well, when I read that I realized I had been saying the EXACT SAME THING for years about horror  movies on the video racks.  They always have some crazy cover with a castle on a hill, a hand bursting from a grave, and its holding a skull with a dagger going through it and a snake wrapped around the arm,  and there's lighting in the background, and you're like "sweet!  this movie's gonna kick ASS!"  Only to find that it's some hour-and-a-half snore-a-thon where some dumb kids dare each other to stay in some  mansion over night, and someone is killing them, and it turns out to be some old man, and he would have gotten away with it if it weren't for "you darn kids!" etc. etc.  So when I set out to write Necrophobia, I  set out to make a flick that would live up to all those crazy 70s/80s horror video covers.  It would have ghosts, zombies, monsters, gunplay, a serial killer.. it would have everything.  Even if you didn't LIKE it,  you damn sure wouldn't get bored!  Stylistically, I wanted a real differentiation between the different worlds of Necrophobia.  This movie is about worlds. You have the outdoor world of daylight, the interior  of the haunted house, and we have the world of the dead (AKA "Deadworld").  When you're outside, everything is bland and colorless, washed out.  But then when you enter the haunted house, you're in some  Dario Argento nightmare of weird noises and vivid color washing over you.  You're in Suspiria.  Structurally, I wanted the three acts to have a very different feel.  In the beginning it feels like you've walked into  a classic horror film, maybe even a silent film. It's based very much on Vampyr.  Creepy, mysterious.  Then it gets into day #2, which is much faster, more hectic.  Suddenly you have crowds, bands, radio DJs  running around the haunted house and cutting up, and all along the film is laying down the seeds for the main characters to blossom. Finally, once all hell breaks loose and the remaining characters figure out what to do, you basically go into this action/horror bloodbath, a barrage of chainsaws and bullets, with a supernatural creature tearing through the halls around one corner, and the undead bashing down walls  around the other.  It's like an early James Cameron flick by the end. 6. Any other future projects in the works? Can you give us the scoop? Actually I have a few projects in the works.  My buddy Mel House just cameo ff of Witchcraft 13, and he's wanting to get into something else pretty quick, so we might be doing something together later this  year.  (you want to hear some good low-budge filmmaking stories, you should interview him!) 7. What is the biggest problem with Hollywood today? Oh hell, can of worms.  They need to come to me.  I'll really give them something for their dime.  I've been talking to LA distributors and they're like "man I can't even buy coffee for what you're making your films for!"

8. Do you have any advice to aspiring filmmakers? Read and watch films.  Read "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud, "Screenwriting 434" by Lew Hunter, "Aristotle's Poetics for Screenwriters" by Michael Tierno, "From Reel to Deal" by Dov S-S  Simens (so you don't get screwed), "Setting Up Your Shots" for shot ideas (gotta keep it interesting), "Rebel Without a Crew" for inspiration and practical advice, and Dune (just cause is a great friggin' book).   And watch great movies. Get on IMDB and look up DPs like Dean Cundey, Guillermo Navarro, Adam Holender, Winton C. Hoch, and directors: everyone from Akira Kurasawa and John Ford to John  Cassavetes, to Boaz Yakin.  Watch their movies, which ever ones interest you.  Soak up film.  Go get all the Robert Rodriguez movies and watch all the extras and listen to all the commentaries (make sure you  get the two-disc Dusk Till Dawn, it has a very candid documentary called Full Tilt Boogy).  Get the Lord of the Rings box sets and listen to all the Jackson/Walsh/Boyens commentaries and watch the extras.   You will learn more about cinematic storytelling than any teacher will be able to impart.  Watch "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse".  Watch "A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through  American Movies", and if you can find it, "AFI's 100 Years, 100 Movies: American Film Institute (Complete Edition)" (the black box, 3-disc set, runs 460 mins).  And to paraphrase the original Rebel, "be a  walking studio, and be scary." 9. When all is said and done, what 3 things would you like for people to remember about you? 1) He was a good dad, 2) he was a good filmmaker, 3) he could drink a carbomb faster than you, ooh snap! 10. Here's where we give you a word or phrase and you give us the first thoughts that pop into your mind. Hollywood: Bloated. Indie Film: The future. Toxic Shock TV: My new favorite website. Biggest Influences: Robert Rodriguez, Scott McCloud, George Lucas, John Carpenter, Dean Cundey, Wingnut Films and Weta (every last one of them), Spielberg, Ray Harryhausen, Willis O'Brian, and Major Havok! Biggest Regrets: I can't lie, there are a plenty of them.  But it's all a part of the process when you're making your first picture.  Preparation is key.  If I had it to do over again, I may have 1) written a slightly less robust script that  I could more easily shoot, 2) raised the right amount of money to shoot it from the outset, and 3) surrounded myself with proper production people such as experienced ADs, a UPM and line producer, hired  an assistant editor from the get go to dump footage as it was shot, and taken on some extra 3D artists a year ago.  We would probably have spent less money and finished the film a year earlier.  But now I  know, and all my future projects will be carefully planned out and prepped, and it will help that Odyssee Pictures is becoming a more solid entity with myself as creative director and Laura Bryant as my  producer.  Another funny thing is, when I started shooting this film I really didn't know any crew in town.  Now I have associations with great ADs, gaffers, DPs, sound engineers, and even other directors. The  next project will certainly be a whole new ballgame. Biggest Prick: I don't suck and tell. The funniest thing that has ever happened to you on a set: That would be the Jesus Puzzle, but it's a secret between me and Dave Gabriel.  A close second was watching Mike Oliver blast about 8 ounces of blood straight into this guy's eyeballs and nostrils with about  60lb of pressure using our blood cannon.  I think Spencer took over at that point. Anyway, needless to say, the shot is in the movie. Your biggest "break-thru" moment: Finding that flip-out monitor.  Thought it was a cup-holder. You can only watch three movies for the rest of your life, which three: Sin City, Seven Samurai, and Breakin' II: Electric Boogaloo. You can only listen to three ALBUMS for the rest of your life, which three: Paul's Boutique, Abbey Road, and Appetite for Destruction.