Red Eye Media
"Cheap Thrills" is a nasty little piece, a black comedy that's both bleakly nihilistic and pointedly diabolical.
Taking a thought experiment to its most radical extremes, it's the kind of genre film that uses moments of humour and violence to provide withering critiques of its characters' behaviour. Whether this tale of dares gone too far is an indictment of our voyeuristic tendencies, a diatribe against increasing class divisiveness, or simply the logical extension of certain network game shows, "Cheap Thrills" is the opposite of its ironic title -- a rich, illuminating and at times incriminating look at the extremes of human behaviour.
Moviefone Canada spoke with the film's director E.L. Katz via Skype from what appeared to be either his lair or his arbitrary hotel assignment deep somewhere in Northern Europe.
Moviefone Canada: This is your debut feature, and it's a hell of a flick. How did the project come your way?
E.L. Katz: I've been a working screenwriter for a while and it's been my main thing for the last 10 years. I used to throw these dinners where we had 30-40 horror, crime, and genre screenwriters. We'd just be really bummed out and angry. We were jaded guys with food, and some of the conversations that came up were like, "The studio system's not letting us do what we want to do, man, we can change things!"
There were a lot of optimistic ideas, and one of my friends had the idea that we should start a production company by and for screenwriters. My job was to go out and find these really subversive, low-budget genre scripts that we could do and really change s--t up, man. I went out and started looking for stuff and realized that a lot of these amazing screenplays that are going to change things aren't really out there. I've been really getting into a lot of Tracy Letts' stuff and I love what Friedkin did with "Bug" and obviously later "Killer Joe."
That's become a Letts trademark: the incredibly bleak mixed with the theatrical, all while being darkly funny.
You hit the nail on the head. I really responded to that kind of material and it was interesting to think what could be a stage play that straddles a couple of different genres, and doesn't necessarily live in one. And the tension is in where it's going to land. I needed something I could make for lunch money, and it seemed like the ideal thing.
Do you see genre cinema becoming more sophisticated and more relevant given the fact that, at a low budget, you need some sort of narrative hook for ideas films to cut through to a wider audience?
My brain doesn't even latch on to that stuff as a salesman. It was only when I started having people pitching me my own concept as this big idea and I was like oh, yeah, that's not really what I'm thinking about, I'm just thinking about how weird these people get and the atmosphere. I never really saw the pitch as clearly some people have described it to me.
What's interesting now is it seems like people can get their money back for movies that don't cost that much because of VOD. We're starting to get some really fun stuff produced because if they're at such a low budget, that can hopefully get people to do more stuff that doesn't just fit the parameters of genre ... like we can only do found-footage or we can only do a sci-fi monster movie ... we should be able to play around a bit, and I think there are some really fun people that are doing stuff.
If you just do movies for the film festival circuit in the United States at [a low] price point, you can never really achieve a certain amount of ambition. There's a ceiling to what you're trying to pull off in order to pay rent, but for a while it's really cool. So I think there's some really fun stuff that happens because there's a platform that supports it.
As a former critic, do you find yourself overthinking things, or are just preoccupied with getting the shots in the can on the day?
I was overthinking it for six months, where I was basically outlining. I wrote a short novel with the DP of why every single thing was to be done a certain way because the whole approach was [that] we're going to shoot it handheld, everything's going to feel arbitrarily shot, but we're really going to think about why we're doing it. You really plan everything out, but then on the day you barely have time to do anything you want, so then you're just shooting everything you can.
There was definitely a lot of homework and a lot of planning, and then you get there, and it's like I really have no time, all of this conceptual, theoretical stuff really does nothing for me right now, so only a couple of frames that I ended up shooting were done that way. Maybe the preparation helps in some ways, I don't know, but I do tend to overthink everything, and then fight or flight takes over.
Can you talk a bit about working with the cast?
When I talk about people becoming their characters, these guys are like live wires. There's a f--king energy between them on set. Everybody took this really seriously even though there's stuff in the script that's kind of silly. We all approached it like we were shooting a drama.
It was the best experience I ever could have had, because this kind of stuff becomes schtick if people don't feel it, so then who gives a s--t because you're not feeling people's pain, you're not feeling any of it, it just kind of washes over you, just violence porn. And that's not what we wanted to make. They're real f--king actors, man, I was blessed.
So once again you're looking to the likes of Tracy Letts, you're not looking to "Saw" for inspiration.
Exactly. As much as I like it and will watch the horror film, that's just horror and not trying to be anything else. For this specific screenplay, I was like no, the only way this can function is if we play it like it's real life. And that was their guideline for the whole thing. But that just means that it's really art.
Would it bother you more if a regular audience didn't respond to it or if a regular audience responded or the genre audience did not?
I think it would feel weird if the genre audience didn't respond to it. Both would be problematic, but I'd feel more like I'd failed to some degree if I didn't reach the audience I grew up being a part of, so that was my first thing. I didn't know if horror fans would like it, because it's not a scary movie. There's a lot of dialogue, and a lot of broad comedy too. It's not really fast, so there's some violence but I don't think it's a gore fest. But I did want it to be a stage play that horror fans would get a kick out of even though it's not a horror film.
But that particular audience is so fickle in terms of what they expect.
Yes, and there are two horror audiences. There's the horror audience that goes to websites and is up on the film festivals and then there's the horror audience that is just going to the movie theatres. They're both different and who f--king knows? People respond really negatively sometimes to movies that played really well on the festival circuit, and then sometimes something that played on the festival circuit or the art house scene, we look at it and we're like f--k this movie, it's not doing anything for the genre, and then it plays wide and makes tons of money.
You can't predict that s--t, so you shouldn't really try.
"Cheap Thrills" opens in theatres on February 21 in Canada and on March 21 in the U.S.
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