Feature Category: Article

To celebrate the recent VOD release of the horror film Come Play, we sat down with writer/director Jacob Chase to talk about the legend of Larry and adapting his short film into a feature.

STARBURST: Congratulations on the film. This is a feature-length version of your short film LARRY from 2017.

JACOB CHASE: Thank you so much. Yes, I shot the short film and had no idea it would become a feature film – I feel very lucky that I got to make this.

Did you at least have a plan to eventually make it into a feature?

It sort of evolved naturally – I made the short to prove I could make something suspenseful and get together with my friends to make another short – I happened to have this monster costume in my garage from a haunted house I used to run.

When you’re making a short film, you’re trying to do it as cheaply as possible so the costume came in handy [laughs]. Of course, I look up to those filmmakers who’ve taken the leap from short to feature in the past like Andy Muschetti with Mama and David F. Sandberg with Lights Out – but never in my wildest dreams did I think it would happen to me. I focused on making a cool short and luckily people responded to it and I got the opportunity to expand it.

Let’s talk about Larry himself – obviously, the design was based on the monster costume you had, but how did he evolve when going from short to feature?

Creating the monster started as something I made with foam and latex, etc, including me on stilts walking around scaring people for the short – so for the feature I wanted to keep a similar silhouette so as the creature evolved, Larry evolved too and it was important to me that he wasn’t just a creepy monster but was also someone who was pained and lonely in their internal psyche – so I developed the look with the Jim Henson Creature Shop who ultimately made Larry.

I always wanted him to be a practical monster because I love practical effects, especially in horror movies as it really lends itself to making you more afraid because its really there but also I was going to be working with young actors so giving them something to act off of to get genuine reactions. It was an incredible challenge but awesome to watch all the puppeteers work with the creature on set. A brilliant team effort.

We mentioned how Larry is more than just a monster, he’s also a physical representation of loneliness amongst other things (we really connected with that), was that core narrative always the plan to adapt?

Yes, it’s certainly expanded in the feature but I do think the seeds of that idea are planted in the short. I set the short in this parking lot with a simple guy working as an attendant as that is a job that seems really lonely – I’ve never had that job but I’ve often thought that it seems lonely so that connection between the character and Larry has always been there.

I was very much inspired by Frankenstein – a monster who people are afraid of but he’s just trying to find his place in the world. I wanted Larry to be something that people would be scared of and also empathise with and I think we achieved that from his mythology, the way he interacts with characters and the sound design.

Larry interacts with the world through technology, specifically the Tablet that Oliver, the lead character, owns. How was it bringing that relatable realism to life with the cast?

I think modern horror movies are using whatever is around us to scare you and what may have been in the past a VHS tape is now a phone or tablet – for me, it was wanting to get the technology out of the way as quickly as possible and making it primarily about the monster.

I would do things like shoot a scene through the device so that we would forget we were in the tablet world and instead be in the monster looking out. I think all three stars, Ahzy, Gillian and John, all really embraced this wonderful mixture of technology and the practical monster. We all use our devices all the time so I don’t think we can say ‘technology is bad’, but it can also be used for good [laughs] – a very helpful communication device, in the terms of Oliver within the story, but it can also be used to spread hate and evil – we all connected to that on a human level.

COME PLAY is out now on VOD the UK and US.

No Man of God is based on the book written by Bill Hagmaier, an FBI agent who struck up a relationship with serial killer Ted Bundy while the latter was on death row. Actor Luke Kirby plays the notorious murderer opposite Elijah Wood. We caught up with him to discuss the role…

STARBURST: What was it that attracted you to the role?

Luke Kirby: Honestly not much. More than anything I felt a sort of repulsion, because of the nature it. One does wonder about the potential for things like this to be made overly salacious or sensationalised. There’s clearly a market for this kind of stuff that can exist in the realm of the ghoulish, but given that this is about a real history, there’s a delicacy that I feel needs to be dealt with. And so when I read the script, it read very smoothly and had a swiftness to it that was appealing, but I still felt a reluctance to get involved. Then after meeting Amber Seeley, our director, she and I were able to have a great meeting. It was a day before New York went into lockdown, I happened to be in Los Angeles, so we were able to meet. I got to shed all of my hesitations and fears with her and it turned out that she shared some of them and had a really fantastic take on how to deal with this material in a way that was clearly driven by intrigue to the story, but also felt like she was going to address some of the other feelings that we had alongside it, and try to figure out how to parallel those forces together. So it was just a matter of adopting her as an authority and following her wherever she demanded we go.

What sort of preparation did you do for the role?

There’s obviously a lot of footage of this guy. You know he was clearly somebody who had an appetite for the camera and was an early arbiter of self-promotion and seems to fancy himself a bit of a strange celebrity and clearly loved the malleability of optics. He’d love to try to manipulate them as much as he could so that was the best research that I could do in terms of any mannerisms or the physicality of those things that can inform the early stages of things. Then there were numerous documentaries, and Bill’s book has some appeal because of their relationship. But it was a matter of how much I could consume or stomach in a day’s work. We were in lockdown and I came out to Los Angeles to shoot the film was put into a two-week quarantine, so I really didn’t have much else to do so I just went into a dark room every day and came back out dismayed lacking in appetite, and went on to the next day.

Was it hard to shake the character after the day’s filming?

These things do loom for the duration of the work. But I feel like if you’re doing things safely and responsibly, they don’t loom in a way that’s detrimental or damaging. Thankfully, I had my wife alongside me and she has a wonderful sense of humour and we were able to observe the absurdity of the whole thing. While we were there, there were wildfires around the corner from us, so Los Angeles was filled with smoke and with Covid, everywhere we looked seemed to ring ‘End of Days’. That kind of alarm and we couldn’t help but laugh that this was how we were choosing to spend the time: invested in this kind of this person who reaped so much havoc and was so monstrous towards other people. So yeah, little degrees of humour helped and then when we finished it, in some ways it really confirmed that this man was gone and any sort of shadow that that lurked at the bedroom door for the duration of the shoot was gone.

What was Elijah like to work with?

Awesome. He’s also a tremendous actor and a great dance partner. He also carries a great sense of humour. When you’re doing something like this, looking into something that has so many opportunities for repulsion, you want to balance it out, he was just a great, fun person to be around.

What was it like working under the Covid restrictions?

In some ways, I think we were granted a bit of a gift because of the size of the show. It was a small crew and small cast. All of my stuff was shot in one room. So it made a lot of the protocols easy to follow. And because we’re such a small group of people, it made it easier in terms of testing and stuff. It was one of the first things that were shot in LA, so it really felt like an experiment. For us, I think more than anything, it just satisfied an itch that had been present and increasing over the four months prior, because we’d all been living much more restrictively under the mandates of the lockdown and so it was the first time we got to be around people aside from our family in months. It was just a joy to be around new people and get to get to know them and ask them questions about what they liked and what is life like where you live, like that kind of thing. It was very fun and I think in some ways informed the story, certainly from my perspective, of a man living in isolation, just delighting in the opportunity to be with someone who felt like they were going to listen to them.

Did you read Bill’s book before going into the role?

No, I didn’t read anything Bill has written but I spoke with him over the phone a couple of times and he was a great resource. A very kind and generous man. It informed a couple of things: just being able to hear the voice of somebody who was present for the life that we’re trying to make real just affirmed a humanity that I wouldn’t have otherwise been sure was there. It also was great to have him as a resource for making sure everything that we were doing was authentic. There were aspects of the script I think that on the page felt sort of overzealous, but Bill was there to kind of say that was what happened.

Why do you think that serial killers have a cult following and some people idolise these idiots?

I don’t know what that’s about. I sometimes wonder about its relationship to the doldrums of reality. I wonder about the yearning that we may have to feel more excited when more endangered in life. I know that whenever I absorb that kind of story or material, like if I’m watching a true-crime TV show or something, taking the dog out for a walk always feels a little more precarious than it would have otherwise. I think it awakens something kind of old, an old sensation of what it is to be awake to the danger. But in terms of the personality stuff and the celebrity aspect of it, that’s a real peculiarity. I just don’t know, I find it a little odd but you know, hero-worship of any kind is odd; celebrity of any kind is really peculiar.

You played Lenny Bruce recently as well [in the Amazon series The Marvelous Mrs Maisel]. Was there a difference in your approach with the two characters?

While they’re obviously very different, they share a thing that there were real men with books written about them and all that sort of stuff. The biggest difference for me is where I felt if I had any responsibility at all, which was with Lenny. My biggest concern was that we would do anything that would hurt his daughter, and she came on as a support. She has been been very supportive about the work that we’ve done and with this movie, I didn’t really feel that kind of responsibility to any legacy, because it’s not really a legacy, It’s a wake of destruction. I didn’t have that concern; I had other concerns, obviously because there are people who are still reeling from loss as a result of this person, and that’s a conflict that I still live with.

101 Films present No Man of God on digital platforms from September 13th. You can read our review here and our interview with director Amber Sealey here.

Fresh from the UK premiere at this year’s FightFest, the superb film No Man of God is heading to digital platforms. We caught up with the director, Amber Sealey, to find out about the film that looks at the relationship between FBI agent Bill Hagmaier (Elijah Wood) and mass murderer Ted Bundy (Luke Kirby).

STARBURST: What was it that made you want to make a film about Bill Hagmaier’s book?

Amber Sealey: Well, the script existed before I came on, and SpectreVision, the production company, already knew the story they wanted to tell because it was a part of Bundy’s life that hadn’t really been told before. How Bill Hagmaier related to Bundy in there, you know the whole forming of their friendship and we felt like Bill’s life story had never really been told. From my side of it, I just felt like this was a perspective that I hadn’t seen on the Bundy story before and it was a way of both looking at Bundy and looking at Bill and also looking at our own interest in this kind of film and this kind of story.

Bill was an executive producer on the film; how hands-on was he during the production?

He wasn’t hands-on, but he was very involved in terms of giving us information. He was a wonderful resource and a friend, and he was there to give information and support. He was very much like “this is not my world. This is not my business. You guys go and do what you do and want to do”, and so he was really great. So, in that sense, he was the best subject, because he didn’t put in place any demands. He gave us his recordings, photos, and videos and I had so many long phone calls with him, so he was just really like a great resource and friend.

What were those tapes like to listen to?

Not fun. There’s a lot of them; each time Bill and Bundy would sit down, they were talking for two to three hours at a time. It was hard to listen to. It was obviously really interesting, I felt like it was just really raw. You’re getting to know Bill and Bundy so much from those recordings, both how they are professionally and personally. It was interesting but I wouldn’t call it pleasant.

We can imagine. How did you go manage to cleanse your system afterwards as it must be something hard to listen to?

Wow, good question. I should have maybe done some lighting of candles or things. I think that the thing that was cleansing was that at the end of each day, I was coming home to my kids and my husband and our home and that was very cleansing. I think because our industry had shut down because of the pandemic for the six months before we got to film – we were originally in prep when we got shut down – and the fact that we were getting to be up and filming again was really life-affirming for many of us when we came together on set. That was the first time that we had all been with anyone else outside of our homes in like six or eight months. We were feeling like our industry might survive, so that was a nice counterbalance to the subject matter of the film. The subject matter was so painful and so dark and atrocious, so we have this other side of it.

Your film is probably the only one that doesn’t glamorise Bundy, you allow the horrendous things to come out of his own mouth rather than show them. You’ve got Luke Kirby, who is a very handsome man yet it still shows him as a monster. How intense were those scenes to film?

Yeah, it was certainly emotionally intense for all of us. It was really important to me from the beginning that it was not about recreating his crimes. I have no interest in seeing that and that’s been done before, and I didn’t see the purpose of it. I think it was really important to me to show how I saw him when I listened to his tapes and I watched the videos that are out there of him. I see a deeply insecure, really narcissistic guy and certainly as you say, you know, Luke is a good-looking person and people always say Bundy’s good looking, but I find him just average looking. I think Luke is certainly more handsome than Bundy is! But Luke is such a good actor that I still wanted to cast him. We tried to ugly him up a little bit so you know, we couldn’t maybe make him as unattractive as Bundy was. I was not at all interested in glorifying Bundy or making him appear as a kind of rock star, sexy super-smart charismatic guy like some have done. I don’t see that, I see him as average intelligence, I see him as really desperate to please. He wants everyone to like him. He’s always trying to perform for whatever room he’s in. So that’s who I saw when I did the research and that was really important to the writer as well. Luckily, Luke could still tap into that insecurity and desperation and portray that really well.

What was the biggest challenge during filming?

Probably the pandemic. I was like ‘no one’s going to die on my watch!’ When you’re the director, and for the producers as well I feel this but we all feel like, you know, it is our job to keep everybody safe and I was not down with anyone getting sick. We worked really hard to ensure everybody’s safety. We stopped filming every 15 minutes and we re-ventilated the room so we only picked locations that had both ingress and egress to flush out the air. We also had an amazing health and safety manager and we hired air specialists; we just constantly made sure we had fresh air in any location, and we had everything outside that we could possibly have outside. We were really strict about all the health and safety measures, and I’m really proud of it, no positive cases. This was before vaccines, it was eight months into the pandemic. So that was the thing that scared me the most honestly, you always care so much about your cast and crew and keeping them safe. At the same time, we had crazy wildfires out here in California where we were filming. So the air was really in danger, both in terms of the air quality from the fires and also the pandemic so that was intense

That must have taken up a lot of the budget too.

It did, for sure. Now people understand that that’s going to take up something like 30% of your budget, which will be spent on testing and PPI. That’s just the new reality of filmmaking but for us it was we were a really low budget film so we certainly had to make some different creative choices, because we had a lot less money to spend on the production. So even though it was maybe a bummer that we couldn’t have more cars in the background or something in a scene that if it meant we could properly test everyone and properly mask everyone, then it was worth it.

You’ve touched on this slightly but what were Luke and Elijah like to work with?

So great, I just can’t say enough good stuff about them. I love the two of them. They’re both so just kind, humble, smart, and talented and I’m not making this up, they’re just wonderful, wonderful people, really good guys.

Why is it do you think people are fascinated by serial killers?

I think it’s a bunch of different things. It can both be healthy and unhealthy that we’re interested in serial killers, I think it’s unhealthy that we know Ted Bundy’s name and we don’t know the names of all his victims. It’s unhealthy that we put so much time and focus and attention on him certainly and I’m as guilty of it as the next person because I also made a movie about him. So that’s unhealthy. On the other hand, I do like to think that there is something at the core of our interest in serial killers. It’s like when you’re driving on the freeway and you see a car accident and you turn to look. I think that interest in turning to look comes from a place of worry and concern about other humans, I think we’re going “Oh no, what happened to them?” I don’t think we’re looking going, “Oh, I hope I get to see something really gory”. I think we’re thinking we hope it doesn’t happen to us. So it comes from a place of concern about other people. And I think being interested in serial killers, is connected to that. And I also think we like to feel love and sadness and fear, and horror films or serial killer films make us feel fear and feeling those things sometimes make us feel really alive. It’s a human thing to want that emotion and to want to be entertained in that way. One thing I was trying to do with this film was point out that we have this interest in this person and it’s curious that someone could be so evil, and we want to understand so hopefully, it doesn’t happen again. And at the same time, we hope that interest in him will just die down, and we can start making films about other more interesting people. I’m also really trying to point the camera back at us and say why are we interested in these people and why are we looking at him so much and not looking at the victims or not looking at the woman in the room, what does it feel like for her? She’s the one who knows what it’s like to walk down a dark alley and hear footsteps behind her and get scared; half the story is hers.

How easy was it to go from acting to directing?

It was easy for me, it was a seamless long process. I was living in England at the time and I was acting and was really inspired by the Dogme 95 films that were happening in Europe, and I just wanted to make a no-budget movie with my friends and that’s what I did. I acted in it my first two films, and so it was kind of an organic process. And as I became more and more of a director, the acting sort of fell away. I mean, acting is my first love, I’ll always love it. If friends ask me to be in things, I’ll happily do it but I don’t audition or pursue acting in the way that I used to.

101 Films present No Man of God on digital platforms from September 13th. You can read our review here and our interview with actor Luke Kirby here.