Feature Category: Interviews

Writer-director David Gordon Green returns to the Halloween franchise with Halloween Kills, the second instalment in his planned trilogy of films. After Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), her daughter Karen (Judy Greer), and her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) leave Michael Myers caged in the basement of Laurie’s burning house, Michael survives and manages to free himself. With Laurie gravely injured, the people of Haddonfield take it upon themselves to band together and hunt the monster terrorising their town.

Ahead of its release, STARBURST spoke with David Gordon Green about returning to the franchise, collaborating with John Carpenter, upping the story’s stakes and the action, and Halloween Kills’ contemporary relevance.

This is now your second venture into the horror genre, following on from Halloween. What did you learn then, that you applied directing Halloween Kills?

David Gordon Green: I learned that what works about Halloween is its simplicity. And if we learned anything from the 2018 version, it’s that bringing together Michael and Laurie in that kind of confrontation between good and evil is what makes it so compelling. And then I ignored all of that and we turned that simplicity into a complex ensemble of chaos, and took the theme of fear as it relates to that intimate connection between Laurie and Michael, and we spun it out to permeate the entire community of Haddonfield!

Speaking on that broadening scope though, Halloween Kills is admittedly less intimate than its predecessor. How do you balance keeping the soul of the original, which is a very domestic piece of violence, with the need to expand the story and keep things from feeling repetitive?  

David Gordon Green: What you’re asking is actually an impossible task. The only think that I could say is that you have to do – or at least, what myself and my co-writers Danny McBride and Scott Teems do – is write from a place of love and appreciation, where we are honouring John Carpenter and Debra Hill’s characters and using them as a springboard to expand that world’s mythology.

And I’m just really lucky to have John Carpenter and Jamie Lee Curtis along for the ride. They’re not just consultants on the film – Jamie, she’s my very close friend and collaborator in this character, and John is a wonderful collaborator for the score as well as being the godfather of the screenplay, making sure that we don’t fuck it up too much. That’s a really amazing way to be able to work.

I sent John the latest draft of Halloween Ends two nights ago, and hopefully soon I’ll have some notes from him. And I’m always excited about that: sometimes it’s a curveball, other times it’s an inspiration. And I’m looking forward to the continuation of those relationships. To some degree, they’re why I wanted to make movies in the first place, and to get in the ring with your heroes is understandably amazing.

If you’re still finalising Halloween Kills now, you must have been relieved when plans were scrapped to film both films back-to-back.

David Gordon Green: I mean, I’ll still be finalising the story when I’m sound mixing. I’m a very open person, always evolving the story, always out to better what’s there. I’m very glad I didn’t do two movies at once because that would be exhausting – and these movies are exhilarating.

Part of the continuity established between Halloween and Halloween Kills is the intergenerational tensions between Laurie, Karen, and Allyson. Why was it important to keep that thread throughout?

David Gordon Green: Well, it’s one of the classic narrative momentums to find characters that we love, that have different objectives and different psychologies, and therefore have different approaches. They disagree, they butt heads, there’s conflict, and then it’s about how do we resolve that and come together, how do we join forces and overcome evil?

Would it be fair to say that Halloween Kills also sets up Allyson to take up that fight, almost as though she is taking on her grandmother’s mantle?

David Gordon Green: Yeah. And I think, if there’s one thing that Laurie has taught her daughter and granddaughter, it’s how to be a survivor. There is a strength of character there between those three generations of women and I love to study that, I love to challenge that and expand on that. And putting Laurie and Karen and Allyson to the next task is always a thrill to write and even when we’re writing it, we don’t know where it’s gonna go and we don’t know who’s gonna live or die.

By its very nature, this is a heavy film. But an interesting bit of levity comes from the dynamic between the characters of Big John and Little John [Scott MacArthur and Michael McDonald, respectively]. What was their role in bringing some tonal balance to Halloween Kills?

David Gordon Green: So, there’s nothing comedically written about Big John and Little John. But these are characters that come and go relatively quickly, without a whole lot of time to develop – I wrote both those roles for these specific actors. Michael and Scott are friends of mine and I just thought their chemistry would be interesting. I knew their beautiful humanity and that we could find a very unexpected journey to take these two characters on. Those were the days on set where I would be glowing with smiles, just because their sensitivity and sense of humour on set is really wonderful. And you know, there’s not any jokes or anything other than some wiseass conversations that they have. They like to sit around, smoke weed, watch Minnie and Moskowitz, and I think there’s just a pleasure we get from seeing characters be this affectionate.

I guess part of the comedy comes from the slightly absurd, mundane nature of their conversations being set against the escalating violence happening around them.

David Gordon Green: Yeah, they walk on set and everything immediately feels light, and lifted up. They’re great.

Speaking of those characters, they reside in what was the Myers house. What was the importance of revisiting that location?

David Gordon Green: There was nothing important. It was just selfish geek pleasure. But then at the same time, it serves as an engine for Michael – I do feel like in our 2018 storyline, it’s important to have something that drives him from A to B. And for us to be able to understand how important his home is to him, that it’s serving as a beacon… to see the house’s significance as it was to him in 1978, has value. But selfishly, I just wanted to walk into that house and hang out.

As a director, you can just do whatever.

David Gordon Green: I try! I try, until people yell at me. And then I don’t.

You’ve said before that Halloween Kills is about how fear spreads virally. Could you expand on that a little?

David Gordon Green: I mean that it’s one thing to look into the face of someone who tried to do you harm and that brings you anxiety, and you’re afraid of; it’s another thing to wake up the next day and tell someone what happened, and then them have anxiety for you. And then it’s another thing for that person to go and tell the community about what happened to you, and to tell them that we should all be afraid and on guard.

And the way that it’s communicated will be either represented or misrepresented. It can be very helpful and effective – and I hope good word of mouth spreads virally about Halloween Kills, that everyone and their mother goes and enjoys the show with some popcorn. But sometimes, the drawback to that is that people can say things that aren’t necessarily true, and then an evolution of the telephone game starts to happen. Misunderstanding happens and conflict is created.

It seems a very prescient theme to be exploring.

David Gordon Green: Exactly. It is strange that we made the movie two years ago, and yet it seems more relevant now than when we were filming it.

That’s the sign of good social horror, I think.

David Gordon Green: I like that!

And because this is a lot bigger and conflict involves the whole town, and you also explore this mob mentality, were you at all worried about losing that very intimate brand of horror which you get from a one-on-one, prey versus predator dynamic? How did you ensure it didn’t become an out-and-out action flick?

David Gordon Green: It’s a good point. Then, I think to some degree it did become out-and-out action [laughs]. Again, there’s several things I had in mind when I envisioned this movie: I said I didn’t want it to be gory, and I said I didn’t want it to be funny, and I said I didn’t want it to be an action movie. Yet in a lot of ways, it is all three of those things. So I tried to engineer a sense of tension, but there’s not many quiet scenes in this movie.

There are a few cat-and-mouse stalking situations, like Michael chasing Lindsey [Kyle Richards] through the woods or Big John and Little John looking for someone in their house. But there are very few moments of two people in a room talking, and there’s very little in terms of the traditional, domestic slasher movie clichés. It’s a bigger, more aggressive movie with more momentum, and I think at a point, the action genre does step into the slasher movie. I think that’s okay – I don’t know, I haven’t really studied what an audience brings to this movie yet. I’ve seen it with a crowd twice now, and I’ve really enjoyed watching two very different audiences go through that. But I feel like as I get to know the movie and as it’s unleashed and released, we’ll get to learn more about our movie and its effectiveness or lack of effectiveness, and it’ll be something to think about for the next one.

In fairness, the mob becomes another source of terror that almost rivals the fear Michael Myers elicits when on screen. How did you make those two sources of violence and horror feel different from one another, so as to avoid a pile-on of indistinct scary scenes?

David Gordon Green: It is a parallel action to some degree of those two approaches to terror, and it is a big of a pile-on… I don’t know. To me, the mob mentality is horrific and equally, it’s tragic. There’s a line that Sheriff Barker [Omar Dorsey] has where he says, “now he’s turning us into monsters.” And I believe that’s one of the great dangers of our culture today – when we find a collective with a common mindset, very often it’s a wonderful, supportive, celebratory congregation.

Yet other times, when people feed off of each other and that tribal mentality does start to permeate, and particularly when something happens that supercharges a crowd, it can be really dangerous and really scary. And even sitting on production, standing in the hallway at that hospital, being stampeded by people that were there – in theory between “action” and “cut”, we were just going to be documenting the flow of bodies in this abstract sea of people. But when you say “cut”, they would be so electrified that it took a long time before it went quiet again. With every take, it would take minutes to get that adrenaline under control and come back down.

Just as a last question, I recall your co-writer Danny McBride saying ahead of Halloween’s release that the two of you didn’t want to turn Michael Myers into some supernatural being that couldn’t be killed. Yet in this one it does feel like you lean into suggestions of an otherworldly evil in this villain. Did you feel you had to compromise on that as part of heightening the scale of the film, or does it also work to highlight how shared fear feeds into an abstraction of evil?

David Gordon Green: The answer is both of those things. I do feel like Michael is a human form that can be killed. I do feel like he is extremely resilient and doesn’t feel pain, perhaps, like you and I would feel pain. But I also feel like he, as the shark in Jaws has, transcended. It’s like keeping millions of people out of ocean waters… I think Michael Myers has transcended from mortal man and into this cosmic status, to scare the fuck out of people around the world every night.

Halloween Kills releases in cinemas October 15th. 

From a human hunting mission in Revenge, to a terrifying outing in A Classic Horror Story, Matilda Lutz is no stranger to playing characters that have to survive in a savage environment, and now, as AI creation Jane she is taking on something just as brutal in the gritty, cyberpunk-infused Zone 414. Alongside retired detective David Carmichael (Guy Pearce), they descend into the heart of the ‘City of Robots’ to find a famous missing person, and as the duo attempt to piece together this disappearance, they also try to answer crucial questions about themselves. We caught up with Matilda to find out all about her time as Jane, and what scares her the most about this deranged, yet very realistic idea!

STARBURST: Let’s talk about Jane; she seems sad and depressed, and maybe, just wants to know what it feels like to have a human relationship. How would you describe the characteristics of Jane?

Matilda Lutz: She wants to leave the city of robots. That’s her main goal. She wants to leave this dark, weird, and classist world. She’s struggling at the same time with the fact that she has emotions. She feels things, even though when she’s not programmed to feel. So that’s her struggle, understanding if she is human or not. That was pretty much what went into creating the character. I wanted her to always have a feeling that you’re not really sure if she’s human or not. That went from, when I started researching about Jane, I basically found out that there are real accounts with digital influencers that I had no idea about. Real influencers; with real agents; that make real money. They’re singing and going shopping, and going to fashion shows. Because of society today where you have all of these people putting filters on, Photoshop, all these kind of really pampered, beautiful worlds. Then you see this, and you’re like “Wow”. It’s almost like the world is flipping, androids are becoming human, and humans are becoming more robotic, in a way, and perfect physically. And the world they live in is perfect. It seems like there are no problems. So that’s what I wanted to bring to her. The fact that she’s a robot wanting to be a human, and she herself doesn’t know if she is or not.

Zone 414 itself reminded us of Blade Runner, with that noir-cyberpunk type of style. How would you describe Zone 414, and what attracted you to working in this world?

I like the fact that it’s scary. It’s a scary world because we are getting to a place where I hope it’s not going to get any further. I wouldn’t want to live in a city of robots. It’s scary. That’s what attracted me. The fact that we could explore that subject in these scenes. When I heard that Guy Pearce was playing David Carmichael, to me it was a dream come true. I’m a big fan of his. I really wanted to work with him, and then Andrew Baird had a very strong visual point of view of the film. That’s what attracted me to the project.

What would you say really scares you the most about the idea of Zone 414? Like, if this millionaire’s playground was real, and on Earth right now, what would worry you the most about it?

Well, first of all, you’re not able to recognise if robots are robots, or if humans are humans. That’s scary. I really got scared when I saw these accounts. Some of the videos and pictures that I was looking at, I knew that it was fake because they told me it was a fake influencer. Not because I could see it, so that’s scary. Then the fact that humans get to a point where they need android companionship, because they are so lonely and so disconnected from the world and themselves, that they need to go to a city and pay a robot to have companionship. That’s pretty scary to me.

There’s a great scene where you really get stuck into David’s past and David tries to figure out what Jane really wants. What was this scene in particular like to work on, and how important do you think it is for showing the relationship between the two?

That’s the first scene we shot, without rehearsal. That was scary in a way for me. The first days on set are always scary because you’re getting to know everyone and you’re still feeling the vibe. I met Guy for the read a few days before, but we didn’t really know each other. I think it’s a very important scene, it’s the scene where Jane uses her programme to hit David, and at the same time, she gets caught in her own game. Where she is using something to hit him, but at the same time, she knows that he is the one who can possibly take her out of Zone 414. So she feels trapped in the situation. She’s trying her best to get out of the City of Robots because her first option was that she thought the client was going to buy her out, and when she’s checking in they tell her “No, the client doesn’t want to see you anymore. He’s satisfied.” She thought it was her shot to get out. She starts realising in her apartment when David first arrives that he might have feelings for her, he might care for her. That’s what hits her first. It hits her, like if she was human, that someone can care for her, besides wanting what they want. She knows that David isn’t there for her, she knows that David is there for Melissa, and at the same time he is showing care for Jane and wanting to help her. So that’s the double thing. She sees David wanting to help her, but at the same time she is using her programme to hit him in certain ways, like talking about his wife, and she puts music on in the hotel room that’s meaningful to David. In that scene she starts talking about his past.

As you go through Zone 414, you meet a lot of interesting but damaged characters. So other than Guy Pearce as David, is there another actor that you really enjoyed working opposite?

Jonathan Aris – he is amazing! I loved working with him. He is such a gentle professional; a very detailed actor. The hard part of my scene with him was staying still and not blinking an eye but still feeling, because he says, “I know you can feel me”. So, that was a technically hard scene. I could feel fear, I was scared of his voice, and the way he was moving. That to me was a really strong scene for myself as well. You see Jane stopping because of a controller, but at the same time it’s like what happens when you are in a position of psychological or physical harassment, whatever the violence is when you’re surprised by it, and you don’t expect it, that’s kind of like what your body does. You freeze, you don’t know what to say or do. You don’t feel like leaving, you feel guilty. That to me was showing how that really happens. It’s almost like you’re frozen. She’s frozen because she’s an android, but that’s what really happens sometimes. So that to me was really strong emotionally.

Finally, why should STARBURST readers check out Zone 414?

I hope you have fun watching it! I hope we connect more to the world and ourselves, and we stop being on our phones.

Zone 414 is available on digital download now. Read our review here.

David S. Goyer attempts a feat that has long been thought impossible: to adapt Isaac Asimov’s monumental Foundation series into a visual medium. The audacity of such a project should be enough to warrant praise but, almost unbelievably, Goyer pulls it off with an assured flourish.

The premise of Foundation is that, in the waning days of a future Galactic Empire, mathematician Hari Seldon develops a theory of psychohistory, a mathematical sociology. Using statistical laws of mass action, Seldon can essentially predict the future of civilisation. He foresees the imminent fall of the Empire, followed by a Dark Age lasting 30,000 years. Although the Empire’s fall cannot be stopped, Seldon suggests a plan by which “the onrushing mass of events must be deflected just a little” to eventually limit this Dark Age of humanity to a mere millennium. It involves the creation of the Foundations: two groups of scientists and engineers settled at opposite ends of the galaxy, whose mission it is to preserve the spirit of science and civilisation in a compendium of all human knowledge. These so-called Encyclopaedia Galactica would then become the cornerstones of a Second Galactic Empire.

From the breath-taking cinematography and the show’s unwavering loyalty to the spirit of the novels, to its top tier cast and agile writing spanning planets and generations, there’s as much to respect about Foundation as there is to love.

STARBURST had the pleasure to speak with the people who made the series possible: David S. Goyer, writer extraordinaire (you can thank him for the Blade trilogy, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy and Man of Steel, to name but a handful), Lee Pace (The Hobbit, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Fall) who plays the Emperor Brother Day, Jared Harris (Chernobyl, The Terror, Mad Men) as  psychohistorian Hari Seldon, and relative newcomers Lou Llobell (Voyagers) and Leah Harvey, who bring to life Gaal Dornick and Salvor Hardin, respectively.

“Of course, there were sacred cows,” states Goyer. “I had to identify the core elements that make Foundation, the core characters, the themes; and I presented those to the Asimov estate to make sure we were on the same page.” Robyn Asimov, Isaac Asimov’s daughter, serves as executive producer on the show. “Any cursory reader of the books will understand that it could never be a line-for-line adaptation,” Goyer continues. “A lot of the books are about philosophy, about ideas, dialectics, and most of the action happens off-screen or in between sentences. And as this is a visual media medium, of course, we were going to dramatise those events.”

Expectedly, considering the novels’ stature in the science fiction canon, this isn’t the first time that studios have tried to adapt Foundation to film or television. Those who tried though, failed; Goyer’s series is the first time we will see Asimov’s epic saga adapted to the screen. “I think one of the differences between this attempt and prior attempts is that most of the prior attempts were movies,” the showrunner muses. “I myself was offered the opportunity to adapt Foundation twice before in my career, but I passed on it because I didn’t feel it could be condensed into two and a half hours, or even three films. Yet with the advent of these big, novelistic shows that we’re seeing on streaming, the medium and the audience have now evolved to a place where an adaptation of Foundation is possible.”

Jared Harris praises the ways in which Goyer balances Foundation’s grand ideas with its softer, character-driven moments. “It’s fantastically well structured and he’s dealing with some really big ideas; one on hand, something like the first scene can be as mundane as introducing a character and on the other, you have in mind these giant ideas and themes… those are fun things to play with.”

“The scale was always going to be big,” says Goyer. “It is intergalactic, but it’s also very intimate. For me the key was always grounding it in emotion. For every scene, whether we’re in the writers’ room or on set rehearsing, I wanted to make sure that if we strip away the spaceships, the robots, the nanotechnology, that the scenes still work as pure dramas.”

Even as Foundation stays loyal to Asimov’s story and ideas, adapting the tomes to television involved a number of narrative changes. For one, the inclusion of a wholly new character (or three): the Emperor Cleon, so little seen or discussed in the series, is here replaced with a genetic dynasty. Clones of the Emperor who rule as one individual for millennia and who call themselves Brothers Dawn, Day, and Dusk – played from youngest to oldest by Cooper Carter, Cassian Bilton, Lee Pace and Terrence Mann. Goyer explains that “because the show is so anthological, we needed to find a way for some of these characters to last over the course of 1000 years – and that’s what led me to the genetic dynasty.”

“In the books, Hari Seldon predicts the fall of the Empire,” he continues. “It’s an empire that’s existed on 10,000 worlds for over 10,000 years. They’re powerful, they’re resistant to change, they’re rigid. So, I tried to think, ‘What would be the purest expression of that theme?’ One man cloning himself over and over again and imposing his ego upon an entire galaxy. And that was a plot device that then led me to all sorts of wonderful character moments with the Cleon’s, because the show is also about legacy. They’re all desperate to individuate and to leave their mark on the galaxy, and the tragedy of them is that they’re all living in the shadow of Cleon the First. So even though they’re monsters, that plot device allowed us to tell stories that make it possible for the audience to empathise with them.”

Even the grandest themes can be made relatable when centred on complex, human characters. As Lee Pace says, “what I think is so interesting about this riddle posed about inherited power, is not the office of a God that [the Brothers] hold. It’s these individuals who are approaching it, and I think about it very much like how an actor approaches a role. I think, there’s Day looking at Dawn, who is the youngest of the dynasty, and Day is telling him: ‘These are the lines, this is the blocking, these are the costumes you’ll wear. It is imperative for the safety of the galaxy that you are exactly like me, that you believe what I believe, that you are an identical copy of me.’ And I believe Day looks at Dusk, the outgoing Emperor, and thinks, ‘You’ve made a lot of mistakes here. And now that I’ve got the power, I’m going to do it right. I’m going to be stronger, I’m going to be braver, I’m going to be distinguished among this line of clones.’ And that’s the contrary idea. When the fantasy is that they’re the same person. You see it in the first episode, when Hari Seldon delivers his mathematical certainty that the Empire will fall and all three of these Emperors respond in very different ways.”

“What was hard was the idea of sharing a role with other actors and figuring out how we could find a commonality between us,” Pace continues. “We’d play this game where we would physically mirror each other, try to catch each other’s cadence, copy gestures, etc. But when it really becomes interesting is finding how these characters are different, because I believe what the story teases out is not only their individuality – and maybe these are the same thing – but their humanity. There’s an individual sentience that they start to discover. The fantasy is that they are a God that lives forever, that they are one person, when in fact they’re human beings who will live and die. It’s yet another riddle; this show is about everything and nothing. It’s about the biggest thing, and the smallest thing. It’s about what it means to be human, how do you react to change, how do you grapple with the power you hold?”

It’s all part of an unspoken mantra for Foundation: the key to the story is for viewers to feel for and relate to the characters, for those figures to be fallible and fragile. For example, one of the things Harris wanted to address was “how to avoid there being a reliance on using the character as a mouthpiece for his theory, or as an expositional device. I wanted to figure out a way to make the character seem human, seem real and fully fleshed, and have stakes in the moment. You’re playing a character who supposedly knows how everything will turn out. There’s nothing at stake for someone like that, so I discussed with David in great detail what Hari Seldon knew and what he didn’t. I was more interested in what he didn’t know, because that’s where the character is fallible and vulnerable.”

The other way in which the series updates Foundation is by changing the genders of some of its key characters. Asimov, despite being a master of speculative science fiction, still had a mostly all-male cast of characters, so for the show, Gaal and Salvor were written as women. When Leah Harvey was asked how this changed their approach to the character of Salvor (though they first auditioned for Gaal, Harvey revealed), they responded: “It’s interesting because I guess that being non-binary, I see gender as something that’s nothing and everything at the same time. I’ve had experiences playing characters in Shakespeare who are typically male, and my experience doing that is that it doesn’t really change anything. Playing a man or playing a woman, what does that even mean? In my mind, I’m playing a character who has a vision for themselves, has aspirations, fears, goals, has loves and hates. And that’s what character is.”

“The writers created this character who’s really three-dimensional, who has been pulled from the books and made modern, who has been made so that she represents people all over the world,” they continue. “And I get the opportunity to put that across in my own way. I’m excited for people to meet Salvor.”

Meanwhile, Gaal is the character through whom the audience discovers the world of Foundation. Acting as an anchor amidst the vertiginous world-building, Llobell explains that her character fulfils a similar role as many iconic fantasy heroes: “Harry in Harry Potter gets thrown into a world he knows nothing about, and then has to deal with everything that comes with it. Gaal has the same journey, Frodo from The Lord of the Rings is kind of the same. I didn’t particularly think about them when I created this character but, looking in hindsight, it’s pretty cool that Gaal is amongst these characters.”

“How often do you get a character who experiences so much, and really has to delve into seeing who she is, finding out who she is and discovering parts of herself that she probably had no idea existed?” Llobell questions. “She comes from a tiny rural planet on the outskirts of the galaxy and all of a sudden, gets thrown into the hustle and bustle of Trantor, and meeting Hari and all these new, fascinating people. She throws herself into it and she’s open to a lot, and is still hopeful about the future, which is such a joy to experience.” All this undoubtedly makes Gaal the perfect chronicler character, in the books as in the show. “She is thrown into this whirlwind of a story, and she goes with it because she believes in the math. The truth is what drives her… Ultimately, she’s driven and pretty amazing. She goes on such a huge journey, but it’s one that’s relatable.”

That hope Gaal sustains is crucial to buoying a story in which the collapse of civilisation is inevitable. “I think her ability to trust so easily is a strength of hers, but it also gets her heart broken so many times. Just like the amount of hope she has – it’s a good thing overall, but it’s also to her own detriment,” states Lloubell. According to Harris, Gaal and Hari Seldon have that in common. “I don’t see him as tragic,” the actor explains. “I see him as hopeful. I see him as somebody who’s prepared to make sacrifices to achieve his goal but, in the end, it’s a hopeful prospect because he perceived a way of surviving.”

With science fiction so far removed from our reality, particularly for larger-than-life characters such as Hari Seldon and the Emperor, Harris and Lee Pace both found it important to source inspiration from real life. “I’m playing a series of men who, for a certain time in their lives, inherit the role of the Emperor of the galaxy,” says Pace. “Which is this absurd idea that one person could have control over the entire Milky Way Galaxy and have power of life and death over trillions of people, to control which planets prosper, which ones suffer. So, when approaching a character so absurdly abstract, I wanted to do some research to ground it – doing research is one of my favourite things that I get to do as an actor. Obviously, I looked at the Roman emperors that inspired Isaac Asimov to write this story, but I also looked at the Chinese dynasties, at the Incas for whom Emperors were basically Gods. I had a really great read of Kapuściński’s book “The Emperor” about the last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie. I found him particularly interesting.”

Harris, of course, is no stranger to bringing complex figures to the screen. “When you’re working on shows like Chernobyl or The Crown, you obviously have a historical record that you can access that can help you ground yourself in the reality of the story, and give you references to the character,” he explains. “With something like this, it’s a much more obviously imaginative process, but you still need references. To try to figure out Hari Seldon’s mindset, I went and did a lot of research into past scientists, men and women who made breakthrough discoveries. And the thing I realised was that on some level, they probably had huge egos and high opinions of themselves, but it’s also possible that they found their intellect isolating. There weren’t many people who could understand what they understood, which led me to understand what a rare thing Gaal represents for Hari: he finally has someone who understands him and can speak his language.”

Even something as seemingly outlandish as psychohistory, Harris found ways to tether it to reality: “One of the things I was considering when thinking of how to treat the proposition of psychohistory, and that made it very easy to accept, was what Cambridge Analytica have done. They’ve taken massive sets of data and crunched it, and they’ve been able to predict or manipulate the behaviour of individuals with it. That doesn’t seem to me like such a giant jump from what Hari Seldon was proposing.”

Beyond Foundation’s characters working as points of contact for the viewer though, there’s also a lot to explore and relate to thematically. As Pace sees it, “one of the opportunities you get with speculative fiction is that we can explore the experience of humanity outside the context of Earth in the 21^st century. These are characters who are in the far, distant future on planets you couldn’t see even on the clearest night, and yet it’s about us. It’s about us right here and now. We examine what it means to be human, what the cycles are that we continually find ourselves in, our relationship to change and to power. What does math quantify? It can count the minutes, but can it record everything between those minutes, or does spirituality better answer those questions? What we’re attempting with Foundation is to open an investigation and bring the audience on the journey with us… I think this gives us the opportunity to engage in a discussion of our collective values without the triggers that put us in those circular discussions we always seem to find ourselves in, in the contemporary world.”

Harris’ view is perhaps more cynical. Speaking about Seldon, explains that “the character is another one in a long line of scientists who’ve made discoveries that were inconvenient to the power structure, and who would rather they shut up or disappear. That seems to be a familiar story in the human story. It’s depressing that this fact is a truism: that we continually ignore the advice of people who spend their life studying something, who are able to give us heads up. We make it very difficult for them to succeed, I guess because we’re afraid of the truth and would rather ignore it until it becomes impossible to ignore. It does feel like, as a race of people, we have this 11^th hour habit where we wait until the last possible moment to do something.”

Still, even with the cyclical nature of histories, Goyer still believes there’s hope to be found. “The whole point of Foundation is that history repeats itself, that humanity is cyclical, and that a lot of the challenges that are confronting us now are not unique. They’re challenges that humanity has faced before. And so, I’d like to believe that we could learn from some of our past mistakes, and that was Asimov’s hope. I think the world could use a message like Foundation right now.”

Foundation begins streaming on Apple TV+ on September 24th. Read our review of the first two episodes.

Cult film star William Butler has faced off against Jason, Freddy, Leatherface, Ghoulies, and zombies and has written and directed numerous films over the years. He’s just published a book of his exploits entitled Tawdry Tales and Confessions from Horror’s Boy Next Door. We caught up with him at Manchester’s FAB Café to discuss his career and why he wanted to write his story…

STARBURST: How did you start in the business?

William Butler: Well, my parents worked for Barnum and Bailey Circus and the carnival and fair circuit, so I was around show business. We did catering for all of those companies like The Ice Capades when I was little, so I was around showbiz from a very young age. I was absolutely mesmerised by how important the people seemed. How exhausted they could be, but then when it came time to turn it on, I was always mesmerised when it became showtime how much energy they had. Then I started doing theatre when I was a little kid. When I was around 17, I decided to take the gamble and move to Los Angeles, and my first break was sweeping the floors in John Vulich’s Makeup Effects Lab. He did Troll, Re-Animator, and From Beyond, so I worked on all those films as a slime jockey, painting slime on all the hand puppets. Before I knew it, I lived in Rome for five years, working for Empire Pictures. I became friends with Charles Band, and he’s like, “What do you want to do with yourself” I said, “I want to become an actor”. So Charles and John Buechler shoved me in that direction. Not that I even knew what I was doing, but they, they sort of did and, and that’s how I got started and bridged the gap from painting special effects and sliming special effects to performing on camera for about 14 years before I switched to writing and directing.

Just being on the set of things like From Beyond and Army of Darkness must have been incredible.

I just saw Ken Foree at the Texas Frightmare, and we looked at each other like, “We’re the luckiest people on the planet”. Not only was I working with Stuart Gordon, who ended up being like a mentor and one of my closest friends, but we’re working on a film that we can tell was good while we were making it. We still to this day don’t think life has ever been that good because when Charlie Band had lots of money, he didn’t spare any expense. So we moved to Rome, and he put us in the best hotel and paid for it and paid for the catering, and here we are, these dumb 20-year-olds that love horror films. It was an amazing time. By that time Army of Darkness came along, I was acting. So I agreed to help paint the skeletons because I wanted to see Patty Tallman, who was playing the Witch, and the big pit set, which was a real pit, believe it or not! So yeah, I cheated, and I was like, “Oh yeah, I’ll paint skeletons for you”. I just wanted to go and hang out on that one. I am the luckiest horror film geek in the world because I watched the first Friday the 13th at the drive-in, and then I ended up being in one! It seems impossible for some farm boy from Fresno to crack the code somehow! I think there’s something to be said about the law of attraction – I willed it to happen.

You’re probably the only person who’s been on-screen with all the significant horror icons: Freddy, Leatherface, Jason, and zombies!

Yeah, and some of the cheaper icons as well, like the Ghoulies and the Watchers! The only thing I’m waiting for is for someone to invite me to have Michael Myers kill me, and then that’s it, I’ll have the whole collection!

William Butler at FAB Cafe, Manchester

What was it like working on Tom Savini’s Night of the Living Dead?

It was incredible. Viggo Mortensen and I were roommates at the time, and Viggo was doing Young Guns 2. So I went to New Mexico with Viggo and his little newborn baby – his wife at the time was a rock star, and she was on tour – so he took the baby to New Mexico, and I was going to watch the baby while he was filming and then next thing you know I was also in the movie! So, while we were filming the movie, I got this call from John Vulich. He said, “I just read the script for Night of the Living Dead, and there’s a part in it that you’re perfect for. I was like, “Oh wow, but I’m going to be here for a couple of months.” He asked if I had my camcorder. Tom Savini had seen my picture and saw that I had been in one of the Chainsaw Massacre movies, and he thinks I might be good. So they sent the script through the mail, then Viggo directed me in my audition tape, and we sent it to Tom. Then Tom called me and said, “Actually, I think you’re good for this”. I just kept thinking I’d never get it. And then, by the time we went back to LA, my agent called me and said, “They want to book you, and they want you to go to Pittsburgh”. I was very intimidated by Tom Savini and very, very intimidated by Tony Todd, who is such a great actor. I was just so happy to make it past day two. I thought, “Well, they’re going to fire me!” I had to do that six-page monologue that goes on and on, right when I come up from the basement – on my first day. George Romero was sitting close to me, like three and a half feet away on an apple box, watching me and all I was thinking was, “He’s going to fire me when I’m done”. But he gave me the thumbs up, so I thought, “Okay, I guess I’m doing a good job.” You know, the older I get, I appreciate the work that I did when I was younger, there are always things that you think you can do better but the older I get. At the time, I thought it was the ugliest person in the room; well, I wasn’t ugly. Why didn’t anyone tell me? I also thought I was a horrible actor, but I wasn’t. I was just as good as anybody else. I guess it comes with age.

Do you get imposter syndrome then?

Yes! Trust me; I’m having it right now and having it on this tour. I just said it last night! The older you get, when it comes to appreciating how much I starved myself and how much I worked out and changed my whole life to try to fit into that category of the boy next door, and that was not an easy task for me. I’m very proud of all the work that I do. Now I’m happy to be a lazy, fat, old writer, director. You know, you’re a writer, it’s like, “Yeah well, I’m a writer; I’m fucking brilliant, you can’t take that away from me, it’s the one thing I absolutely love”. Seriously, when I was an actor, I was starving for 14 years because you have to. Even then, they tell you to lose more weight.  I love being a writer and filmmaker because they can’t take your writing ability away from you. They can take your career away if you’re an actor; if you get fat and don’t think you should be fat, you can be a 100-year-old man as long as you’re still writing; you get better and better.

How did you move into writing and directing?

I had been starring in movies like one after the other as the lead. And then I started to realise that I had been in all the horror franchises, which I loved and was very proud of, but Hollywood did not know what to do with me because they were like, “Well, he’s the horror guy”. So I thought what I’d do was shift gears. I will have these roles in TV shows and movies called under five, which is you do five lines and under. And I said I would do under-fives in anything but horror films. So I got a lot of auditions for TV shows and sitcoms, where there were five or fewer lines. I loved acting so much, and I worked very, very hard to become an actor. But my whole life, I’d been a writer. I’ve been writing for National Lampoon magazine before it started sucking. So I thought I was willing to bet somebody would let me direct a horror film because I know at the very, very least what not to do. I remember I was auditioning for Murphy Brown, and the casting director was horrible, and she cut me off in the middle of an audition; she snapped her fingers and took a phone call. And then she slammed the phone down and was like, “go ahead”. And I said, “I think I’m done with this whole thing”. So I walked across the Warner Brothers lot and called my parents, and I said, “Would you be terribly upset if I started writing and directing instead of acting?”, My parents were like, “We’ve been waiting 15 years for you to say that!”

How did you come to write a book?

Well, I do a lot of comedy shows in Los Angeles – or I did before the plague hit. All I was doing was reading from my diaries, and they were pathetic. I was talking about being in love, talking about being addicted to drugs, all sorts. One day I was sitting at home, and the company behind Alamo Drafthouse instant messaged me: “Hi, we were at your show on Wednesday night, and we were wondering if you would be interested in writing a book”. I said, “Who in the hell wants to read a book by William Butler?” They’re like, “We think your stories are hilarious”. Well, they are hilarious, but I don’t think enough people in my middle-shelf-of-fame that I achieved will care. They said, “We’ve already done the numbers, and we know that every bookstore in America – at least in their genre section – will carry three or four books, and that’s enough to sell 20,000 books, and that’s what we need to do”. So okay! They gave me an advance, and I think that initially, they wanted it to be very fluff, just for each movie that I did, but as I started writing, I just loved it. I love it more than anything I’ve ever done. I purged every horrible, awful truth about myself, about the career, about some of the people I’ve worked with, and I have to say out of my 35 years in entertainment, it’s by far the most satisfying thing that I ever did. So then my book went to number one in the category of Film and Television when it came out. I can’t believe it. It’s insane.

What have you got lined up next?

I’m so excited. Well, I just did Baby Oopsie Parts One and Two for Charlie Band under protest. I did not want to do it! But he made it part of my deal for this new thing I will tell you about. I tried every trick in the book to get him not to let me do it. I said, “I want the lead leading lady to be 500 pounds”, and he’s like, “Okay”, “I want a whole new, fully-articulated puppet that’s like nothing that you’ve ever seen”. “Okay, we’ll pay for it” “Goddammit!” So then I wrote this crazy movie inspired by a TV movie called, The Girl Most Likely To with Stockard Channing.

We know it, yeah.

When she was fat, and everyone was mean to her. Then she’s in an accident and gets plastic surgery and gets pretty. Then she kills every one. I thought if we get some housewife type who everyone’s picking on, she’s a doll hoarder, and she restores one doll, and then the doll starts killing everyone and eventually, she starts liking it. Well, it turned out really funny I’m incredibly proud of it, which is hilarious because I did not want to be doing it while I was doing it. So, it turned out great, and now we’re doing four more of them. That allowed me to do this other thing that I’m doing right now, which I’m so proud of. So, as you know, I worked on From Beyond. Charlie asked, “What do you want to do?” I said, “I want to do something that’s from the Empire days. It’s pretty ballsy, but can we do something that’s inspired by the Resonator, the machine in From Beyond?” He cried, “You are asking for it! The fans are going to kill you!” So I wrote this TV series called The Resonator Miskatonic U. We did two episodes, and it was the highest rating thing that Full Moon Features have ever done. We made a beautiful Resonator. At the beginning of the episode, we made it very clear that Stuart Gordon inspired it; it’s not trying to rip him off. So while I’m here in England, I’m going to write four more episodes, and in writer language you as you know, that means a one half of one episode, and they’ll have a lot of coffee when they get home and write four episodes in a weekend.

I’m also on tour promoting this book, which is the proudest thing ever; I’m so happy that when I die, this book will be left behind because if anyone reads it, it will tell you, number one: that absolutely anything can happen. I am the last person on earth who should have gone around the world three times, star in movies, been skinny, been rich, been fat, been poor, slept in his car, slept in a $3 million house. I have tasted it all, and I’m so glad to have left that in the book to inspire anybody else that has just thought, “Well, could I try it? I don’t know?” The answer is yes; you should absolutely try it. Yeah, and all you have to do is know that it’s possible and make it possible.

William Butler’s UK book tour concludes at The Phoenix Artists Club in London on September 26th. You can order the book here.

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.