Jason Lei-Howden’s Deathgasm is one of the most ridiculous and entertaining films currently playing the festival circuit. Our writer Felix Hubble caught up with the director and two of the film’s producers, Ant Timpson and Andrew Beattie, during the film’s Sydney Film Festival run to talk about the state of New Zealand horror, Black Metal and practical effects.
So Jason, what gave you the idea for the film?
Jason: To be honest, the title came first. I wanted to do a splatter-film called Deathgasm solely because I liked the title. I was doing a short film and I had these metalhead characters; it was just a drama, it wasn’t even really a horror film. At one point, I don’t even really know when it happened, I just decided to put those characters into the splatter movie and went “ah, that makes sense”. And yeah, it just kind of went from there. I had a synopsis that I did for the Make My Horror Movie competition; I didn’t really know what I was doing with it.
When we eventually went through it all, the film totally changed at a script level. Originally it was a lot more like Napoleon Dynamite, a kind of…
…awkward horror teen…
Jason: Yeah! It did change a lot during the script phase.
Cool! Now Ant and Andrew, this may be a bit more directed at you guys – how difficult was it to secure financing? Because it seems like it could potentially be a bit of a hard sell…
Ant: Actually, I think it’s really a relatively easy sell in this market. I mean internationally horror is traditionally quite a good seller, although it’s definitely dropped off in certain territories. In Australia horror faces a tough market…
…yeah, The Babadook released here for two weeks and had virtually no box office…
Ant: It’s crazy, The Babadook is the best Australian horror movie in years… but in terms of this, we had the financing secured before we started. Half is US money from a great company called MPI,1 and half was from the New Zealand Film Commission… it wasn’t a lot of money but it was double what we had for the first round when we did Make My Movie. We thought “ah! Jason will have so much fun!” and then we saw the script and were like “oh shit, we’re going to have to cut this down”.
Andrew: Just my experience pitching recently, if it’s half a million bucks for a crazy, crazy idea that no one is sure will work, people will take the risk. It’s not a lot of money for them to lose… if the idea is cool enough, but risky.
Ant: Well if it’s spread amongst a few parties the risk is diminished. I still think, even though it’s chump change, if you have an off-the-wall fringe project, $500,000 is still quite risky the way numbers are today – it’s still unknown. You make something that’s completely without an audience – which is kind of nearly experimental or art-based – it’ll be a hard road, I think.
Andrew: People are making films for nothing. People are going out there and making their crazy, crazy films for fifty-thousand bucks, and we’ve got to compete with that same group.
Why do you think New Zealand are absolutely annihilating Australia when it comes to producing killer genre film? I mean, The Babadook is good, but it’s not really a splatter film…
Ant: Yeah but, you guys… I mean we always hear this, “New Zealand’s on a huge roll”…
Jason: There’s Wyrmwood – I still haven’t seen Wyrmwood, but I heard it was great…
Ant: Andy’s a big fan of 100 Bloody Acres…
Andrew: I love that film. I mean, Wolf Creek… Wolf Creek 2; Wolf Creek 2 is better than Wolf Creek –
Jason: Three’s coming out soon (laughs)
Andrew: It’s the craziest film, the most bonkers film I’ve seen in years. And Wolf Creek actually created a horror icon.
Jason: That’s the great thing about it, because we just don’t have that sort of thing in New Zealand; that’s what I want to do next, because New Zealand still doesn’t have the… they don’t have their Jason Voorhees…
Andrew: There’s no action figure – we don’t have an action figure yet…
Ant: …and without that you don’t have a crossover. You can’t even sell out down the line…
Andrew: …we can’t have a PG TV series
(all laugh)
Ant: We had one, The Ferryman, but nobody really jumped on it… that was our last chance at a horror icon.
Andrew: [mimicking Ben Fransham’s Ferryman] “pay the toll”
(all laugh)
Jason: I’d say a lot of it’s because New Zealand’s genre resurgence is very young… and a lot of it has been driven by Ant; I mean, Housebound and Deathgasm… Turbo Kid… Yeah, it’s great, I’m all for it, but it is very early days I think. We had a drought of 10 years or even more where we only had one or two genre films…
Andrew: [talking to Ant] I think you’ll hate this, but you are enormously responsible for this, because you managed to tenaciously bully the film commission, just for a while… you managed to just keep at them until they said “fine”. You showed them the numbers for ABCs… told them “it can work”, and kept at it. You did that and then all of a sudden, we’d been given some freedom.]
Ant: Well, thanks, but I definitely think it’s the fact that it’s a global market, and prior to the funding New Zealand was just really focused on New Zealand audiences going to see New Zealand films – we lived in this bubble. We celebrated the odd breakout success over the years, but nowadays young filmmakers from New Zealand are just thinking “fuck it; the world is my oyster. I’ll make films for the people watching them on VOD and Great Britain or America” and that’s kind of given people a lot more freedom in and of itself. They watch films that they dig now and think “oh, I can make that film, I can make Cheap Thrills” or “I can try to make Cheap Thrills”…
Andrew: But also, there’s a new way of thinking, getting back to what you said, where people are thinking “I don’t have to make the New Zealand film”…
Jason: Yes…
Andrew: …because they always thought… to get funding, they had to write the disabled solo mum smoking crack in South Auckland…
Ant: We’re good at that.
Andrew: They thought they had to make that film, but now they’re going “oh… shit, we don’t have to make that? The film commissions actually telling us we don’t have to”. It’s that weird thing about being given permission, and we hadn’t given ourselves permission.
Ant: I mean, the film commission… now it’s doing both… it’s spreading it out, whereas before it was really just a small group of people grabbing a chunk of money to make that same type of ‘super-high-quality-and-nothing-else’ or a sort of kind of high quality that they were aiming for sort of film (and they didn’t really get there all the time). But now it’s kind of like “here’s $75k if you think you can go and make this thing for that”. So you’ve got all these different pathways now – they call it “pathways”… it’s sort of like Oprah Winfrey’s The Secret…
Jason: (laughs) Yeah.
Ant: They set up all these different ways to make it accessible for new blood to come through, whereas it was like Everest in the old days – you came to the base and were like “ah, fuck it, I won’t even bother climbing up”… now we’ve got a little archaeologist waiting…
Andrew: The commission was actually a really big part of it – it was actually about cultural imperatives, and hitting all sorts of…
Ant: Oh, mandates!
Jason: For Light Harvester2 I literally did a run past the script, and there was stuff like the Four Square sign,3 and a buzzy bee… he walks past a buzzy bee.4 I didn’t have any of that in the film because it’s cheesy as shit, but I was told to by the film commission to submit it like that. At least someone took me aside and said “chuck some Kiwi shit in there, submit it again” and then, yeah, we got funding. It was bullshit.
Andrew: Did you put it in quotations, and bold it, and underline each word that’s Kiwi…
Jason: (laughs) Yeah…
Andrew: I had exactly the same experience with my film The Hunting Party. It was set anywhere and it was very English, and then all of a sudden it was not. It was very Kiwi, it had a Kiwi bush – definitely in capital letters…
Kind of on the topic of financing, I absolutely love Jim Hoskings’s G is for Grandad short in The ABCs of Death 2…
Ant: Thank you – I love it too
…I’ve noticed you’re a producer on his debut feature The Greasy Strangler, what is the project and can you tell me anything about it?
Ant: The Greasy Strangler has just finished shooting in LA and, um, it’s… yeah, we still can’t believe what we’ve been shooting to tell you the truth. It is a really messed up film. If this group of friends had not come together to make this picture, there’s no way this film would be made. It was written a few years ago, and it did the rounds to financiers and money people, and everyone was just like “hell no! We can’t. We’re not going to touch this thing.” It was kicked underway once I connected with Elijah Wood’s company… he read the script and loved it, and once they came on board we had UK, US, Drafthouse Films and SpectreVision (which is Elijah’s company). It was a really cool team behind it, and Jim is so well known in the ad world and LA that he called on all these big guns to be his support team… to make it. So, we’re going to have to work out how to describe it down the line; at the moment it’s just a very greasy film.
Jason: It’s a great title… The title’s very evocative.
(all laugh)
Ant: I don’t ever think there’s been a greasy film, this is the first one ever made… So that’s going to be going into post for a while, so hopefully it’ll be ready at the end of the year.
Sweet! So Jason, I noticed a lot of the effects were practical in the film – what percentage do you reckon were practical?
Jason: It’s hard to say… It’s something that I love actually, watching it again… it’s… y’know… they don’t date like visual effects because they’re already dated in a way. I think they’re beautiful. Um… I couldn’t really put a percentage on it but…
Andrew: …I mean, 90% are practical, but about 70% of those have had digital augmentation just to clean things up…
Jason: Which is not the right way to do it because a lot of these rigs were just one take wonders – “if this works, we’re gonna use it. If not, we won’t.”
Andrew: Things did work that way on set didn’t they? I mean you’re on set, and you’re trying things. If there’s a hose in shot Jason’s like “it’s okay, we’ll get rid of that; don’t worry about the hose, it’s fine.”
Ant: That was Jason’s line wasn’t it? “I’ll paint it out”.
Andrew: Yeah – and then we held him to it!
(Jason laughs)
Excellent! Now I noticed the band Emperor on the soundtrack – it was a great soundtrack by the way – how did you come into contact with them?
Jason: Yeah, so I contacted them via email. I got put onto their company Candlelight Records, who were the guys who originally signed Opeth until they went with another big company… but they’re just chilled out dudes; they actually just cc’d me in with all of the band members, and they were like “yeah bro, yes! It’s fine, it’s cool.” It was crazy because two of the band members went to jail in the ’90s for church burning, and one of the band members went to jail for murdering a dude… and the whole thing was just really awesome
Ant: [mockingly] “It was awesome…”
(all laugh)
Jason: I mean in their generosity, I don’t condone (laughs) church burning… Seriously, they were fantastic. I was (and am still) a huge Emperor fan… In The Nightside Eclipse is still my favourite black metal album of all time; I listen to it to this day. The whole experience just took me back to when I was 14 years old, listening to it on my Sony Walkman, so when I see it in the film it just evokes all of those memories; hopefully other people kind of get that as well. I’m really proud of the soundtrack actually…
…definitely, it’s great…
Jason: … it really works for the film. I have kids coming up to me after screens saying “oh dude, I’m a really big hip-hop fan but I love the soundtrack. I don’t even listen to metal but it suited the visuals and it suited the story and the characters”…
I noticed as well that the whole film was edited to this metal beat throughout…
Jason: Yeah…
so the soundtrack compliments the footage really well
Jason: Yeah, totally, and I don’t think it takes… if you don’t like metal it doesn’t irritate you but if you do love metal, hopefully you get something extra from it.
Ant: What band did you really want apart from Dragonforce?
Jason: Obituary… I was actually talking to John Tardy from Obituary. Again, I’m a huge fan of them and I had this song I wanted to use, but unfortunately he doesn’t own the rights. This was the case with virtually all the musicians – I was chatting to a lot of musicians and they were really into the film but they just don’t own the rights; it’s all down to the record companies and they don’t… some companies, especially the smaller ones, have a lot of good will, but most of the bigger ones are like “where’s the thousands of dollars”…
Yeah…
Andrew: Probably the one that I thought was the hardest to lose was the Enslaved track…
Jason: Enslaved… yeah, in the bit where they come out with the dildos we had Havenless by Enslaved…
Andrew: Big viking tune…
Jason: …it was so perfect. Yeah it was great. Beastwars works…
Andrew: You know what? I don’t notice – I love the Beastwars song…
Jason: It’s sludgey and…
Andrew: It’s kind of fun. It’s great to have New Zealand metal so represented in Deathgasm. One of our producers and a commercial director just shot a video for Bulletbelt who did the Deathgasm song…
Right!
Andrew: It’s their first music video ever…
Jason: The fun in black metal music videos – it’s insane!
Andrew: It was apparently quite a sell though, it was a “trust us” because they don’t fund metal – they fund hip-hop basically, or pop music, so they kind of went to the board with “okay, we’ve got this big commercial director, there’s a film coming out, this band sells out… this is a big, big band” and they begrudgingly handed over 20 cents to make this pretty cool music video. It’s going to come out after the film obviously, there’s some great footage. [To Jason] Have you seen it yet?
Jason: Nah, I haven’t seen it…
Andrew: It’s not graded… I’ll get them to send you a copy though, because it has just been finished, and we have to clear with MPI that we can use it.
Jason: I think it’s great. It was always my vision to have a heavy metal theme song, because I love movies with heavy metal theme songs… Alice Cooper did one, Man Behind the Mask, Dokken…
Andrew: (laughs) Dokken…
Jason: I just love when you have the theme song and the tie in music video, so that was always my vision.
Andrew: Like Nightmare on Elm Street… was it Dokken who did Nightmare on Elm Street?
Jason: Yeah, three, Dream Warriors…
Andrew: The Renny Harlin one…
Jason: (laughs) Yeah! Still love that movie.
Now Jason, I think your script might be the first to reference porno-grind as well…
(all laugh)
Jason: Hopefully not the last…
How did you approach writing it? It feels as though there’s so much there for metal heads who know what you’re going on about, but also the references you select – like Anal Cunt – just have the ability to be funny for everyone…
Jason: Yeah, there’s some really insane shit. If someone was psychotic and wanted to go frame by frame there’s heaps of coded messages…
Ant: Backmasking…
Jason: ..references to Megadeth songs and backmasking; I don’t know there’d literally be hundreds of metal references that you’d have to be really hardcore… you’d have to watch it a few times. I actually can’t even remember all of them. If I had a phone number on a wall or something it would be a metal reference… It’s really fun doing stuff like that – there’s also the more obvious ones too. In terms of writing it, it was literally just a case of putting stuff that me and my mates would laugh at on paper. I had one of my really good friends, Wade Cowin, just kind of gel on some ideas – he’s a metal head as well, he animated the intro to Deathgasm for us and we used to be in a band together and kind of get up to crazy antics… but it was just a matter of writing the sort of shit that we’d want to see on-screen. That’s all I’ve really ever done… I’ve never really tried to overthink it… hopefully I haven’t underthought it much. (laughs)
I’m also wondering, how did you go about constructing the scares and visual gags in the film?
Jason: A lot of them were scripted and a lot of them changed when we… we got a lot of gore through Andrew. Andrew…[to Ant and Andrew] you can name the company can’t you?
Ant and Andrew: Mainreactor
Jason: Yeah…
Andrew: We had a situation where we had another company that we’d hoped to do some stuff with, but at the end of the day they just bailed out. My wife had been supervising a huge show with this company Mainreactor, and were their main client. They were just supplying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of things to this big American TV show; my wife was supervising make-up on that. So we sat down with them and went “okay, we have this much money. He’s the script, here’s a list of everything” that was in the script at the time and they went “we’ll give you everything you want, but we won’t come on set for any of it” except the big creature at the end, “but, what we’ll do is, we’ll get into the locker, and you can take anything that you want” and they gave us some blood too. So we cut all the stuff back, filmed on the floor, and Jason, myself and another person just went “okay, we have to get all of this on-screen.”
(all laugh)
Jason: Yeah.
Andrew: …and that was the crazy thing. You know the mouth?5
Yeah!
Andrew: Well the crazy thing was that prop turned up so late…
Jason: Oh yeah…
Andrew: …and one of our props girls borrowed some props off an art director and he pitched that from another show. It was just sitting there, and it had a detachable jaw…
Jason: It actually does look a lot like Colin…6 It was uncanny! Vanessa Hurley obviously dressing him up as well…
Andrew: It’s the wig for sure.
Jason: Yeah…
Andrew: Most of the people wear wigs in the film; almost everyone was wearing a wig. But yeah, it was kind of like “okay Jason, this is what we have, can we make this work?”
Jason: Yeah, and then we shoehorned in things, which was great.
Ant: My favourite thing in the movie is actually the finger-touch.7
(all laugh)
Ant: It’s like instead of using his fist, he’s reaching for the closest thing.
Jason: (laughs) Yeah.
Andrew: It’s that total cliche of reaching for the keys… yeah, it’s great
Jason: It’s also a reference to that famous… what is it… God and Adam…8 (laughs) yes…
Andrew: I was thinking of E.T. but…
(all laugh)
Andrew: I don’t even remember what your question was but…
(all laugh)
Andrew: A lot of it was just going “we can either do an effect we can’t really afford or… half the stuff we can’t do, half the stuff here’s what we’ve got… how can we fit this in and how can we do mad shit with what these guys have given us?”
Cool! Just one more question… any chance of a Deathgasm 2 and if not, are you guys thinking of collaborating on something else again?
Ant: Sure, there is! It really depends on how well it goes I guess, because it’s only been doing festivals. So it’s the US company that have to probably make the call. I know they’re commission is probably keen…
Andrew: I just met with them in Cannes, and they were like “we’re in, depending on how well it goes.”
Jason: Yeah…
Andrew: If it goes well, reasonably well… they love the film so much…
Ant: Jason’s actually already written it…
Jason: I’ve got a treatment, and I’ve actually already written the first 10 pages so it’s… it’s actually so much fun going back, and revisiting the characters and just…
Ant: You know they’re all dead hey?
Jason: Not anymore!
(all laugh)
Jason: That’s the thing, I’m not sure how much I should talk about the new plot…
Andrew: Characters never die…
Jason: …but we use the device of the pages again to resurrect a few characters because I wanted to have the main, core group of five coming back again and reprising those roles, so yeah… um… yeah, I’m really keen to do it! It’s just so fun to write…
Ant: It’ll be all animated though right?
Jason: (laughs) Yeah… (laughs again)
Ant: But no, if enough people go and see it…
Jason: Yeah, it’s definitely up to numbers, and also up to the DVD… same as the music industry really; they kind of rely on people getting merch and coming to shows. Because of piracy… it’s so prevalent and just screws… it oesn’t effect the big bands and the big movies but for indie movies especially it is quite horrible. Hopefully we can get the support there and…
Andrew: We need to get some merch out there man!
Jason: Yeah! Everywhere I go people wanna buy…
It just feels like a perfectly merchandisable film
Jason: I should have just screenprinted a whole bunch of shirts and sold them in the car boot outside of the cinema (laughs)
Definitely!
Andrew: I think that new design, if they tweak it, could be an awesome shirt.9
Jason: I’d wear one of those.
Andrew: Right now we’re trying to get Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell together wearing a Deathgasm hat.
Sick!
Andrew: Bruce was cool to do it but Sam’s kind of like [Sam Raimi impersonation] “oh, I’m really busy”…
Ant: He doesn’t really talk like that, that was horrible…
(laughs)
Andrew: He does talk like that…
Jason: I love the Evil Dead 2 commentary from those guys, it’s so hilarious! I can just listen to them talk, just for so long.
Guys, thanks so much for the interview, and good luck with the film!
Deathgasm is currently screening at NZIFF, and will be screening later in August at MIFF. Ant Timpson’s other project Turbo Kid is also screening at NZIFF.