An honest Cage gets caught up in an offbeat thriller.

“Adios, Red Rock.”

As we celebrate Texas Week here at FSR I knew I wanted to make sure this week’s Tao of Cage had a little Texas twang. Unfortunately I do very little planning in advance and hardly ever think things through. Last week I wrote about Joe, which would have been the perfect choice for Texas Week. Joe isn’t just Nicolas Cage’s most Texas movie but I do believe it’s his only movie that actually takes place in Texas. Go figure.

There may not be another Cage movie that take place in Texas but in 1992 Cage did play a drifter from Texas. This week we’re talking Red Rock West!

In this offbeat thriller Cage stars as Michael Williams, a former Marine from Odessa now looking for work in Wyoming. A friend gives him a tip about a job opportunity on an oil rig and Michael decides to check out, but the foreman of the site passes on him due to the fact that he’s a liability thanks to a bum knee he has from his time in the marines. With only $5 to his name, Michael continues his trek across Wyoming, hoping to find work elsewhere.

Unfortunately Michael can’t catch a break. As soon as he leaves the oil rig he realizes he’s just about on empty. He finds a nearby gas station and uses the last bit of money he has to put a little extra gas in his tank. Just when all hope seems lost the gas attendant suggests Michael head for Red Rock, a little town about 40 miles away.

When Michael arrives at Red Rock he stops at the local watering hole, also named Red Rock. It’s midday and there’s no one at the bar other than the owner, Wayne (JT Walsh). When Wayne sees Michael he mistakes him for someone else, asking Michael if he’s here for the job. Michael, very desperate for work, decides to pretend to be this other person and accept the job without knowing what it is. Uh oh.

Wayne invites Michael back to his office and explains the details. The pay is a huge stack of cash, half of which Michael gets now and the second half coming once the job is done. The job is to kill Wayne’s wife, Suzanne (Lara Flynn Boyle). Realizing there’s no turning back, Michael accepts the cash and continues to go along with everything Wayne is saying.

Michael never intends to actually kill Suzanne. His plan is to just take the money and get out of town but he does feel obligated to try and do the right thing. Michael decides to pay Suzanne a visit and let her know that her husband paid to have her killed. In doing so Suzanne offers Michael double the money to kill Wayne. Michael accepts the money.

Now with more money than he knows what to do with Michael can quickly leave Red Rock never to return. Before doing so he does write a letter to the sheriff of Red Rock explaining that this couple have both paid a to have each other killed. From this point on it should be smooth sailing, but Michael still can’t catch a break.

As he exits the town it’s a dark, rainy night. With visibility out on the highway poor Michael ends up hitting a man with his car. The accident occurs in the middle of nowhere. There are not witnesses and likely no one else around for miles. Michael could easily flee and no one would ever know. But Michael is a good guy and can’t leave this man here to die. He scoops the victim up and drives him back to the hospital in Red Rock and that’s when things get really crazy.

I’ll never forget the time I first saw Red Rock West. I was about seventeen, and I was working at a Kmart in Phoenix. I was working in the electronics department, and this was perfect for me because this was back when big box stores still had rather large movie sections. Kmart has all the major releases that would come from the big studio vendors, but then they also had these racks that were filled by smaller vendors. These racks were filled with $3 DVDs of all kinds of different films. There were older films, newer films, small indie entries and forgotten about bigger budget flicks.

DVDs were a hot commodity at this time, and most titles were still $20 or more so these $3 titles would go quick. The vendor actually had to come back every week to refill this rack, and you never knew what titles would be there the following week. One film may always be part of the rotation with 5–6 copies always available, and another film might just appear once with about 2 copies.

Going through this rack was very, very exciting and something I did every week. It resulted in me buying a lot of bad movies, this is true, but every so often I would come across a gem and that would make it worth it. The week I came across Red Rock West was like hitting the lottery.

At this point I was already a huge Nicolas Cage fan but I had never even heard of Red Rock West. I cannot explain the joy one experiences when they come across a movie by their favorite actor that they never knew existed. It was one of the most glorious moments of my life, and for as long as I live I’ll never forget how I came across this film.

It helps that Red Rock West is a very good movie, of course. In fact I would go as far as to say it’s great and maybe the most under appreciated Cage movie there is. When I “found” it I didn’t know anyone else that had ever seen it. To this day I don’t hear a lot of people talk about it, although everyone that does seems to love it.

Directed by John Dahl, the film is a wonderful, twisty neo-noir. It’s never quite clear where the movie is going. Once you thing you’ve figured out the direction and you know the step it takes an unexpected turn. It’s so wonderfully crafted that even though I’ve seen it countless times it still somehow manages to fool me with each viewing. I think that’s a huge credit to Dahl and the performances. I already know the story but I get so sucked in every time I watch it that I think, “ah, this time it’ll play out how I expect!”

Cage is in top form. He plays Michael with a much more nuanced performance than the Cage we’ve all come to know and love over the years. There are still some quality Cage freak outs to be had, but they’re like mini explosions that pop up every few scenes and leave as quickly as they enter. The performance as a whole is very reserved.

This is a classic case of wrong place, wrong time. Michael is a genuinely good guy and we know that from the jump. He’s upfront about his knee injury to the foreman, even though he could have lied and gotten the job, and he refrains from stealing money from the gas station even though he could have easily done so and at the time he had no money. He accepts what he thinks is going to be a job as a bartender and things just spin wildly out of control. All along the way Michael keeps trying to do what he thinks is the right thing and every single time it digs him into a deeper hole.

Red Rock West has a lot of elements you’d find in a Coen Brothers’ movie. In fact it’s very similar to Blood Simple, which came out a few years earlier. The two movies actually make for the perfect pairing if you’re looking to have a double feature this weekend. The basic plot is that basic Coen plot — good person comes across what should be easy money, things go terribly wrong.

Cage isn’t the only great performance in the film. Walsh and Boyle are both phenomenal but my favorite moments in the film are when Cage shares screen time with Dennis Hopper. Hopper plays Lyle, the hitman that Michael was mistaken for. Like Michael, Lyle is also an ex-Marine from Texas. Under some unusual circumstances, but then in Red Rock nothing is unusual, Michael and Lyle meet up completely unaware that their lives are already intertwined. These moments between Cage and Hopper are incredible. These are two heavyweights that have never played by the rules of Hollywood just chewing it up together. Their shared moments alone are worth the price of admission.

Part of why Red Rock West has sort of slipped under the radar for years is that the film never really received a theatrical release. It was purchased by Columbia Tri-Star and it was deemed to be more of a DTV or straight-to-cable release. In an article from The New York Times in the early 90's Peter Graves, a marketing consultant for Polygram, the company that produced the film, said a theatrical release wasn’t a viable option telling the paper, “The film doesn’t fall neatly into any marketable category. A western film noir isn’t something people can immediately spark to.”

This is such bad logic in my opinion. I understand the marketing appeal of selling a movie based on its genre but why not market a movie based on the fact that it’s a good movie? It seems like sometimes that would be the best approach.

The film eventually received a limited theatrical release but that was after it had played on HBO and made its way to home video. These days the film is readily available. That DVD I bought years ago for $3 can be purchased on Amazon, although these days it’s closer to $10. The film hasn’t been released on Blu-ray in the US yet which is a shame but there is an English-friendly German version out there. If you do the streaming thing there is a really good HD version available for rent or purchase from Amazon. With good HD transfers out there hopefully it’s just a matter of time before it hits Blu-ray stateside.

As film lovers we’re always hoping to discover that “new” gem. It doesn’t matter what other people thought of it before or if they even thought of it at all. When you come across a movie that you were previously unaware of and you instantly fall in love with it that’s a special feeling that you want to share with the world. Red Rock West is my gem and I want to share it with you.

Catch up with earlier explorations of The Tao of Nicolas Cage!

The Tao of Nicolas Cage: ‘Red Rock West’ was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re not saying they all should be, but they could.

This week, Disney releases another live-action remake of one of their animated classics. And they have many more planned for the future. But they aren’t the only ones attempting to adapt animated works into flesh and blood. The Ghost in the Shell joins Beauty and the Beast in theaters later this month, and other anime remakes, such as Akira, are in development.

It is surprising that more studios aren’t trying to copy Disney with the idea, though. Is it because so few non-Disney features involve human characters or because those that do aren’t that interesting? Below I’ve selected some that could work just fine. Some of them maybe should be done. If you have any other ideas, be our guest and share them in a response.

Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (1989)

As I’m not a fan of redundant literal adaptations, I’m more interested in picking failures that could be remade, such as this very unfortunate film based on Winsor McKay’s comic strip. Basically there should just be a better adaptation of McKay’s material, but with all the talent who touched this version (Hayao Miyazaki, Brad Bird, Ray Bradbury, among them), there are probably some good bits worth salvaging, including the look and pace of the story. Just make Nemo more interesting and lose the flying squirrel sidekick.

An American Tail (1986)

Most of Don Bluth’s movies involve anthropomorphic animals and very few human characters if any. So, remaking them as “live-action” would really just be remaking them as performance-capture CG-animated features. That’s basically the case with the Secret of NIMH redo in the works. But here’s a crazy idea for An American Tail: turn it into a human immigration story. It’d be a little less adorable but would be taken more seriously for its relevance to current events (see our list of essential immigrant and refugee movies).

Princess Mononoke (1997)

There’s already a live-action remake of Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service (and two of Studio Ghibli classic Grave of Fireflies), so it’s only a matter of time before others follow. CG Totoros are surely on the horizon, but a live-action Mononoke is the movie we need more right now with its environmentalist themes. It could be done perfectly with effects a la The Jungle Book, and thanks to Kong: Skull Island, people are talking about the 20-year-old animated feature right now.

Quest for Camelot (1998)

Another young woman hero can be found at the center of this loose adaptation of Vera Chapman’s series of books based on Arthurian tales, which received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song. Perhaps it’d be best to see how well Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword does, especially since Quest for Camelot was a flop, but an improved take on the story, retaining some of the humor, could be a funny fantasy like Princess Bride or Willow for a new generation. Or they could just go back to the Chapman books and start a more faithful franchise.

How to Train Your Dragon (2010)

Not anytime soon, but just as we’ll probably eventually see very recent Disney features like Frozen and Moana remade, a 2010 adaptation of a children’s book could very well find its way into live-action form someday. In fact, it might be the most logical of DreamWorks Animation’s films. With Game of Thrones finishing up soon, we’ll need more dragons of the non cartoon variety. The live-action stage spectacular version from a few years back looked pretty darn cool, so a movie shouldn’t be too tough to pull off.

When the Wind Blows (1986)

If they can remake Grave of Fireflies twice in live action, then they could certainly give this lesser-known British feature from the late Jimmy T. Murakami (The Snowman) a try. Based on the Raymond Briggs graphic novel, it follows an old couple as they poorly attempt to prepare for armageddon and then die from radiation poisoning following a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. Uplifting, I know! But also fun to pretend cast the two great British actors who’d perform the small, two-character story.

La Linea 1 (1971)

How about a live-action feature based on an animated short? Or a live-action short based on an animated short? You know Disney is going to mine from their own once they run out of features. Osvaldo Cavandoli’s initial one-off film, which spawned a long-running series, may not seem like it’d inspire much in the way of a live-action version given that it consists of just a humanoid line drawing interacting with his maker, but the tools now exist to have an actor play the main character interacting with a digital world around him and the visual effects artist manipulating him and his surroundings. Think the Oscar-winning work that went into the barely real live-action Jungle Book meets Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind mashed with Duck Amock and Harold and the Purple Crayon. Meta movie supreme!

7 Non-Disney Animated Films That Could Be Remade as Live-Action Movies was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A video of faith-shaking proportions.

Nothing like the most epic battle of all-time (and even beyond that) to start the day.

Since the dawn of man, depending on what you believe, there has been a war waging between God above and Satan down below for the ultimate of spoils and the most divine of creations: the very soul of humanity. It’s a battle waged in dark alleys and brightly-lit sanctuaries, in high rises and slums, in barrooms and boardrooms and bedrooms and ballrooms, a battle that has outlasted every other war combined and multiplied infinitely, and one that, if ever truly won by either side, would alter the entire fabric of life, the universe, and everything. Again, depending on what you believe.

Either way, though, you better believe it’s a skirmish that makes for great moviemaking. Over the last century both God and the Devil have been portrayed onscreen innumerable times by innumerable types like George Burns (God), Al Pacino (Satan), Morgan Freeman (God), Tim Curry (Satan), Alanis Morrisette (God), Jack Nicholson (Satan), Groucho Marx (God), and Elizabeth Hurley (Satan). And in the following montage from Filmscalpel, they all get their due.

What you’re looking at here is an eight-minute video that has compiled two dozen examples of the Heavenly Father and the Fallen Angel as depicted by cinema across the decades, Satan on the left looking right and God on the right looking left, each pair squaring off for a stare-down There are terrifying and hilarious examples of both deities on display here, but the real star I think is us and our neverending fascination with our celestial puppet masters that causes us to reinvent and redefine them generation after generation.

This video is presented by one of my favorite sites, Filmscalpel, and is the sixth and final installment of the “Pretty Messed Up” video series conceived by Dutch director Peet Gederblom, whose work outside this series we’ve featured before. After you’re done with this video, be sure to hit that Filmscalpel link for the rest of the series, not to mention all the other great work the site produces.

The Ultimate War Montage: God v Satan was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The way to a sci-fi’s heart is through its stomach.

At the beginning of Mad Max: Fury Road, Max Rockatansky crushes a double-headed gecko beneath his heel, wipes it off his boot, and eats it. It is a perfect moment — the panicked scuttling of the gecko over the sand as it fatally scurries towards Max’s foot; the crunches; the way the squirming lizard dangles helplessly from Max’s mouth as he turns to the camera. It’s a brief lull before we’re whisked away into 120 minutes of high-octane car theatrics — and it tells us everything we need to know about Max, ever the opportunist, and his hostile, crusty world. As NPR’s Jason Sheehan notes, a similar scene takes place in Road Warrior, in which Max chows down on some dog food; “a history of lack and desperation completely told with nothing more than a hungry stare, a fork, and a single can of Dinki-Di.”

In science fiction, food can ground what is otherwise unfamiliar, if not outright ungraspable. And I relish these moments; when strange speculative worlds are crystallized by something as ordinary and common as eating, cooking, or sharing a meal. And while unsurprisingly the foodways in science fiction are themselves far from ordinary, the undeniable relatability of the need for food prevails. How food is represented in sci-fi affords audiences the opportunity to better understand these brave (and often terrifying) new worlds and the characters who inhabit them. In this way, depicting food and food-acts in sci-fi is indispensable to the genre’s project of — to bum a quote from Rod Serling — making the improbable possible.

Below are some of my favorite comestible trends in science fiction; ways in which food appears in sci-fi, and what these appearances can tell us about just how doomed we are (spoiler: very). Full disclosure: writing this article made me super hungry, which is less a problem of ramen than of cockroach bricks looking a heck of a lot like licorice.

Bon-futuristic-appétit:

1. Space Heroes Eat Noodles

As Seen In: Blade Runner; Battlestar Galactica; The Fifth Element; Cowboy Bebop; Almost Human; Prometheus.

It’s been noted that the sci-fi noodle trend likely has its origins in Blade Runner. And truly, noodles are coherently enmeshed into 2019 L.A.’s landscape; their iconography boasting a cultural hegemony and an almost casual metropolitanism. Ex-professional robot bounty hunter Rick Deckard’s introduction is moderated through a portable noodle bar — he is “rumpled, used, and unshaven,” and the noodle bar compliments: bustling, no-nonsense and shrouded in dulled neon. Deckard, heroically, just wants to be left in peace with his noodles — not hassled by the LAPD to resume blade-running. And while Deckard eventually resigns, for all his endearing gruffness, he takes his noodles with him. Barring any anxiety around globalization — if there is a sinister downside to a future of noodle-ubiquity it’s the worthwhile price of an increased sodium intake.

Ominous Rating: 1 delicious street noodle bowl /10

2. Post-Scarcity

As Seen In: Star Trek; The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Gene Roddenberry’s utopic vision extends to food; a future where if you can dream it, you can eat it (so long as long as the desired molecular structure is on file). The ability to synthesize a wide variety of materials instantaneously, has made it so that minimal human labor is required to accomplish the necessary task of acquiring and preparing foodstuffs. Picard sums it up nicely in First Contact: “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.” There is, admittedly, a sinister element to the automation of such an intimate and artful human activity. I’m reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, and the “queasy horrors” that supposedly come with trying to find love for people who have no use. Queasy indeed. And whether or not you find this threat compelling, there’s always the wrinkle posed by Douglas Adams: that for all its well-intentioned politics, post-scarcity food automation might produce something that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

Ominous Rating: 3 cups of synthetic tea. Earl Grey. hot. /10

3. High in Protein

As Seen In: Snowpiercer; Star Trek; Galaxy Quest; Enemy Mine; Titan A.E..

The prevalence of bugs as food in sci-fi rests on the question of the physicality of what folks are able and willing to eat. This, consequentially, is complicated by the fact that the “horridness” of eating bugs is culturally specific, and tends to stray from any desperate act of self-sufficiency into a vague ostensibly comedic xenophobia. Snowpiercer (a.k.a. “Apocalypse Runaway Train”) skirts this quagmire; offering the ingestion of bugs as a class critique rather than a cultural one (though, of course, such things invariably overlap). The revelation that the tar-coloured gel blocks consumed by the inhabitants of the back cars are made of ground up cockroaches is not awful because eating bugs is gross (reminder: “babies taste best” is a thing). Rather, the horror rises out of resonance: like the bugs, the back-dwellers are “interlocked in a hellish vision of crawling, squirming movement” — a violent, theoretically humane cycle, mechanistically imposed to preserve the balance of the train’s ecosystem. All to say: the “bugs” part of let them eat bugs, is less disconcerting than alimentary social darwinism, or the coding of insects as something the masses will have to eat when we fuck the planet up enough.

Ominous Rating: 5 cockroach jello bricks /10

4. Oppressive Mush™

As Seen In: Brazil; The Matrix; Alien.

In her essay “Futuristic Foodways,” Laurel Forster suggests that “food and science fiction provide a valuable means of understanding the link between the individual and [the] controlling powers around [them].” In this way, both food and sci-fi are deeply concerned with the effects of technology, the body, and where the two intertwine insidiously: how human lives are contorted to align with technological needs, rather than the other way around. While the unholy trinity of food, body, and oppressive entity is brought together most dramatically in Alien, my heart belongs to Brazil. In Terry Gilliam’s retro-futurist indictment of bureaucracy, the act of eating is a thoroughly disconnected experience; one more subservient to pretence and the superficial implications of eating than eating itself. Lunch is ordered off a menu of pictures and numbers, and Sam, ever at odds with the baffling systems of his world, struggles to communicate with the waiter, who, unsatisfied with a qualitative description, demands a number. When the food arrives it is in the form of regrettable, bland lumps as inert and passionless as the patrons of the restaurant. Here taste, skill, and texture are supplanted by grotesque technological overkill that leaves Sam frustrated and dissatisfied in what will prove to be symptomatic of a larger institutional incompatibility.

Ominous Rating: 8 dehumanizing blobs of product /10

5. The Most Dangerous Game (People!)

As Seen In: Soylent Green; The Road; Pandorum; Delicatessen; Cloud Atlas.

The cannibalism in Soylent Green is terrifying in part because it is institutionalized; because a corrupt corporate perspective has brought about, and made room for, an equally corrupt corporeal one. It’s an anxious vision of the future that has become no less pressing since 1973: an overpopulated, polluted world struggling to cope with a previous generation’s untempered industry. Soylent’s gut-churning, infamous confirmation, that the hunger of the general public is at once the problem and the solution, is deeply upsetting; as putrid and sickly as the color of Soylent itself. And it’s a specifically modern fear: that the moral decline brought about by corporate evils can be made manifest — like some horrible demon that understands marketing and mass-production. In this way, Soylent (film and foodstuff) presents a supremely damaged oroborus where urban and moral deterioration go hand in hand, and overconsumption leads to self-consumption.

Ominous Rating: 10 horrifying Cormac McCarthy cannibal cellars /10

However, though this article would seem to prove otherwise, there is an unfortunate tendency in sci-fi to put human hunger in stasis; to make little to no reference to how characters cook, eat and interact with food. No matter, it seems. We’ll subsist off lasers and stardust. I find this to be a stale, incomplete vision of the future. To omit food is to omit visceral and deeply intimate world-building; to side with hollow sterility over a lush and infinitely interpretable alimentary language. The act of eating, with all its complexities and subtext, is an inextricable part of being human. I have to believe that however disconcerting our future, we don’t actively divest from such a fundamental part of ourselves — that, when given the choice, we choose street noodles over a food pill.

The Future of Food: 5 Ominous Trends in Science Fiction Cuisine was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How he and director Jordan Peele crafted the look of the allegorical horror hit.

Cinematographer Toby Oliver’s involvement with Jordan Peele’s Get Out was a match made in Blumhouse Productions. Oliver, who had previously worked with Blumhouse Productions on The Darkness, was sent a copy of the script which Peele had spent several years developing, and was immediately impressed. “It was a well worked-through script,” Oliver told me over the phone last week, as we discussed the production of Get Out and the role of a Director of Photography in general. “He put a lot of time into it, he knew what he wanted to say, so that was really appealing.”

Oliver’s name was put forward as a possibility by Blumhouse Productions, and a meeting was arranged.

“We hit it off in our first conversation, and I had a few ideas about how to visually approach the film and those seemed to agree with what he was wanting to do as well, so that was really a great start,” Oliver recalled. After that meeting, he was brought on board with Get Out.

As to what those ideas were, there were two major ones. The first was that the movie, on the whole, should have a pretty naturalistic feel. That, for Oliver, meant that, “most of the movie should feel really grounded in a reality that suggests a real world rather than a heightened, horror movie kind of visual experience… to make sure that it feels very grounded for the main character, Chris.” The second idea was that the Armitage Estate, where Rose’s parents live, should have a warm, inviting look to it — at least in the beginning. “Rather than getting to the house and having it be frightening when you first arrive, that’s something that’s only revealed later on, and so we actually wanted to visually portray the estate as somewhere very welcoming and warm and fuzzy,” Oliver explained. “And Jordan really loved that idea as well so we started working together to refine that.”

While the color grading was enhanced in post, Oliver also used various in-camera methods to set the foundation of the look he and Peele sought. “In camera I used what are called LUTs, and they’re basically a color set-up in the camera that you load up to the camera so you can make the camera take on a warmer tone or a cooler tone or a darker tone or a more contrasting feel by loading up these sets of parameters,” Oliver said. He used multiple LUTs for Get Out, including one for the daytime scenes set at the Armitage Estate, which had a warmer tint to it which he further helped along through adjusting the camera settings.

“What I think is important, for the DP, in conjunction with the decisions they make with the director, is that if they have a look in mind for parts of the movie, or an overall look on the movie, you want to create that in camera and have that applied to the dailies so what the editor’s working with has already got that color burnt into it, rather than having them work with a blank canvas that could go in any sort of direction,” Oliver explained. “And then of course it can be refined later, but at least you’ve got something to start with that’s close to what the original idea was.”

Oliver’s camera of choice was the ARRI Alexa Mini. Due to it’s more filmic look for a digital camera, among other reasons, Oliver has chosen to work with a number of different Alexa models since the camera was first released, but the compact size and lightweight nature of the Mini was particularly appealing to him. Coming from a background of documentaries and films shot on 16 mm, Oliver appreciates the advantages of a more portable camera. “[The Alexa Mini] gives you the same image quality, and that’s really important. You don’t want to cut corners. And it’s much easier for hand-held. Because it’s lighter you can leave attachments on it, you don’t have to strip it down. One of the main things I try to do for a director, and I certainly tried to do this for Jordan Peele, is to get them a lot of coverage — a lot of shots in the day, so they’ve got more shots in the editing room to make the movie as good as it can be. And that means maybe shooting a few extra setups per day than what you’d normally do, but I think that’s really important, because having those options really makes a difference. So I do whatever I can to not have the director and the actors waiting around for too long for the lighting. And then when we do start shooting, they’re not waiting around too long for the camera to swap positions and so on.”

“One of the main things I try to do for a director, and I certainly tried to do this for Jordan Peele, is to get them a lot of coverage... having those options really makes a difference.”

As Get Out had a tight 23-day shooting schedule, efficiency was a top priority — and therefore, so was preparation. “Jordan was really keen on being as prepared as possible. He knew full well that he was a first time director, and Jordan’s a very, very smart guy so he knew that because of that, the preparation for how he wanted to shoot the movie was perhaps even more important,” Oliver said. “He didn’t want to be there on set, trying to wing it, under the pressures of trying to get everything done every day.”

In addition to storyboards, Peele and Oliver, assisted by four of the film’s producers and the first assistant director, Gerard DiNardi, shot a photo storyboard of all the scenes taking place at the Armitage Estate, which basically involved them walking through every scene that took place in the house and acting them out for Oliver’s stills camera. “It gave Jordan a really good sense of space, and where the camera should be in relationship to the actors within that space.”

From a DP’s perspective, Get Out offered both some conceptual and technical challenges. Conceptually, one of the bigger challenges was The Sunken Place, where Chris’ hypnotized conscious gets sent. One big inspiration was a netherworld sequence from Jonathan Glazer’s surreal sci-fi Under the Skin, which served as a sort of starting point. They wanted a vaguely underwater feel, without Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) actually appearing to be underwater. As such, they utilized elements of the technique known as dry for wet. “We shot it in slow motion, and had [Daniel] hanging off a wire, and used the camera moving around him to create the sense that he was falling through this vast space, with the help of a little bit of digital effects, like the floating particles and so on,” Oliver explained. “It was a lot of fun coming up with that, actually.”

Technically, one of the hardest shots to pull off in the film (from a DP’s perspective) was the scene where Chris wakes up at night and goes outside to have a cigarette. Though cut into a few different shots in the finished movie, it was filmed as a single Steadicam shot. “Of course you need to light the whole sequence and not show any of the lights — and that’s a common enough challenge for the cinematographer to have to deal with — but it’s always a tricky one when you’ve got to go from an upstairs to a downstairs, and then shoot in both directions,” Oliver said. “The whole walk down was pretty much used, which is great. I think shooting a longer take like that, even if it subsequently does get cut into a couple of pieces, can work really well in horror movies because it tends to build up the tension since you’re not cutting away or cutting out of the sequence and you’re with the character for that whole journey.”

Oliver noted, though, that even though Peele’s script was fantastic and he was happy with the footage he shot, it’s extremely difficult to judge a film before it’s gone through the editing process. “When I saw an early cut of the movie, I realized it was going to be good,” he said. “Its really struck a cord.” As Get Out continues to perform extremely well both critically and at the box office, where it’s surpassed $100 million against a $4.5 million budget, it would seem that audiences definitely agree.

A Conversation with DP Toby Oliver on Crafting The Look of ‘Get Out’ was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Don’t think one of the scariest movies ever can get any scarier? You’re wrong.

Question: what’s scarier than riding your big wheel through an empty hotel, turning the corner, and finding yourself face to face with twin little girls dressed in matching baby-blue dresses, and oh yeah, they’re dead?

Answer: riding your big wheel through an empty hotel, turning the corner, and finding yourself face to face with a full-grown, malformed-cheeked woman who looks way to happy to see you and can’t stop singing, “In Heaven, everything is fine.”

This hypothetical scenario comes from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, of course, and in the question portion, I’m sticking with the original, little Danny Torrance bumping into the Grady Twins. In the second, however, you might have picked up that the figure described is the infamous Lady in the Radiator from David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Now how, you might be wondering, did I get Lynch’s chocolate in Kubrick’s peanut butter?

I didn’t, that accomplishment belongs to master editor Richard Vezina, who has created the short video Blue Shining which posits with unsettling accuracy what the horror classic would have looked like if Lynch had been at the helm. I’ve scoured the internet, and I can’t find any suggestion that Lynch was ever up for the gig — in 1980 while Kubrick was shooting, Lynch was embroiled in The Elephant Man — but a couple minutes from now you’re going to really wish he’d gotten the job.

When Lynch has done horror, it’s been off-center like Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive, horror you can tell is horror until it’s over, and even then it isn’t the first designation that comes to mind. This video, though, gives you a sense of how the director might have tackled a head-on scarefest like The Shining, and I’m willing to bet Stephen King would have preferred the suppositions made here over the reality of Kubrick’s production, which he infamously loathes.

This happens a lot, by the way, people wondering what certain films would look like if directed by David Lynch. Just a few weeks ago we ran one featuring La La Land, and in the past we featured this take on Return of the Jedi, which Lynch was actually asked to shoot but passed on to make Dune. While those were (admirable) stretches, this one feels so viable you might actually believe it’s real. Or at least terrifyingly surreal.

For bonus fun, try to catch all the Lynchian Easter Eggs sewn into the video, there are tons of them.

In the Overlook, Everything is Fine: ‘The Shining’ as Directed by David Lynch was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We chat with the director of ‘Dearest Sister’ and ‘Chanthaly’.

Welcome to the fifth episode of the Shallow Pocket Project, a series where Film School Rejects and the folks at In The Mouth of Dorkness team up to chat with independent filmmakers about working outside the system on a budget. Check out our last chat with Karyn Kusama (Director of Girlfight and The Invitation). Special thanks on this episode to Brad Gullickson and Darren Smith.

Today, we chat with Mattie Do about the rise of Lao Horror. She is the director of Dearest Sister (available on Shudder) and Chanthaly. And, god willing, her next film will be a time travel slasher flick set in rural Laos. If that setting doesn’t get you interested in what she’s doing, somebody call the time. Because film is clearly dead to you.

Do has a vibrancy to her that is flat out invigorating. You can tell she’s digging life in every way. If you want an idea of what that looks like, check out this four minute short film she did for the introduction of Dearest Sister at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. Realizing she was going to miss the festival due to other commitments and world travel, she threw this together to wow the crowd. I love any filmmaker that lets their creativity show in an introduction video.

She and her team are making dope Lao movies and they’re growing a community all at the same time. Where they are right now feels to me like the early days of Hollywood. In twenty years, Lao film makers — especially Lao horror film makers — will consider Mattie Do the rock upon which they built their community. Sounds pretty heavy right? The truth is Do mostly wanted to talk blood, lottery ghosts, time travel, dogs, and burned flesh effects. Our conversation gets into the pirate cinemas of Laos, how everybody just wants to get laid, how a director knows her own fucking mind, and how mistakes are sometimes all we can see.

Do isn’t just making movies in Laos. She’s making Lao movies. That’s a huge difference. Her films feature Lao actors, Lao culture, Lao language, and even Lao beer. Yeah, they engaged local companies for sponsorship. They ended up with a large portion of their Namkhong Beer support as cases of beer. I want to say, talk about a well lit set? Nailed it.

She made her first film, Chanthaly, for $5,000 (and a pallet of beer). She’ll tell you herself she wished she had a sweeter camera for making the movie. It’s hard to explain to your parents that your cool art house film is as great as Transformers (her dad’s favorite flick) when it just doesn’t have that same $300,000,000 feel. But, look, you can’t sit around waiting until everything is just right. Chanthaly has mad heart and I think it looks good anyway. It’s an art house ghost story. A young woman, housebound with a chronic illness and with an at-best overbearing father, changes her medication and begins to feel a presence around the house. She believes it to be her long dead mother trying to make contact with her from the beyond. Despite everyone telling Chanthaly that her mother died giving birth to her, she believes the ghost is revealing long lost childhood memories to her. It’s wonderfully tense work. Could you interpret it as an allegory for Laos? As part of her Indiegogo campaign for Dearest Sister she offered to put up the final cut of Chanthaly on her YouTube channel. Give it a look and you tell me.

As a former ballerina, genre story is in Do’s blood. A ballet is almost always a fantastical story. In our conversation, she shares that Chanthaly is inspired by Giselle and Dearest Sister is inspired by La Bayadère. These roots weave seamlessly with Lao culture and social commentary. Dearest Sister is the story of Nok (Amphaiphun Phommapuny) who comes to the big city for the first time and is surprised by a lust for the shinier things in life. There’s some very sharp commentary within about the objectification of women and the corrupting influence of money. Nok is hired to help Ana (Vilouna Phatamy) around a very posh house. Ana is going blind at an early age and occasionally has fits. Nok discovers that Ana’s fits are actually ghosts revealing tomorrow’s lottery numbers. Once she discovers this secret, she gets a taste of the sweet life and things go about as well as you’d expect from that point.

Here’s the thing. Mattie Do is basically a rock star. Both of her films have been to Fantastic Fest. Dearest Sister has gotten rave reviews and traveled the world. And she’s doing all this from Laos — a country that didn’t even have full-fledged cinemas until recently — with a group of people who are basically serving as jacks-of-all-trades to get the job done. It’s wildly amazing work they’re doing. But enough about that from me. Click the link below (or here for iTunes) and check out the interview. Let her tell you.

ITMOD CHATcast: Mattie Do

The Rise of Lao Horror with Director Mattie Do was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.