Your new movie Eddie
Glum - in a few words, what is it about?
Eddie
Glum
is a surreal horror film about someone making a
documentary about a disturbed man who is trying to survive in an abandoned
suburb after the world has ended due to an alien invasion. With Eddie
Glum being a post-apocalyptic movie - is that a genre at all dear
to you, and some of your genre favourites? I do like
post-apocalyptic movies but I guess I wouldn't necessarily say it's been a
MAJOR genre to me. I think a lot of horror films in general take
place in post-apocalyptic settings though they are considered to be a
different kind of genre (i.e. zombie movies). In terms of my
favorite post-apocalyptic movies I'd say Mad Max (Road
Warrior, Fury Road
particularly) and The Road. Movies that I would say were more
influential to me though but aren't really considered
"post-apocalypse" films (even though they are) would be the
original Night of the Living Dead films and the Japanese horror film
Kairo
(called Pulse in the West). (Other)
sources of inspiration when writing Eddie
Glum? Obviously I'm a big David Lynch fan, and I
put a pretty obvious call out to Lost Highway in Eddie
Glum, which is one
of my favorite movies. I'm also a big fan of the David Cronenberg
film Videodrome which I would consider an influence in a way.
Another person this film was very influenced by is a Japanese video game
designer named Hideo Kojima (most famous for the Metal Gear Solid series)
as well as the video game series Silent Hill. I have a few big
callouts to Hideo Kojima and Silent Hill in Eddie
Glum
if you know what
to look for. What made you choose, of all characters,
someone like Eddie to be at the center of your movie?
The
initial idea for the movie came from when I was making my last film.
We had finished a day of shooting and I was out to dinner with
actress Morgan MacCarthy (also in this film) and makeup artist Krystle
Feher. While we were at dinner I came up with the idea for a horror
movie about Forest Gump's evil twin brother. So that's basically Eddie
Glum
(his last name is "Glum" because it sounds like a
more sinister version of "Gump" to me). Now
jump ahead to the movie being out and the first thing everyone comes up to
me to ask is "are you trying to Slingblade with Eddie
Glum?"
lol. I was trying to rip off Tom Hanks, guys, not Billy Bob Thornton!
The craziest thing is (and I swear to God I'm telling the truth), I've
never actually seen the movie Slingblade before! (Though having
watched a few YouTube clips, people are absolutely correct that I sound
just like him in Eddie
Glum.)
Making
a movie with a post-apocalyptic theme - what are the main challenges from
a producer's point of view? The main challenge is just
getting shots where cars aren't driving by or people aren't walking
around. It's harder than it sounds, even though we were primarily
filming indoors most of the time. What made you pick the
mockumentary-approach to tell your story, and what were the advantages and
challenges doing so? I
think a lot of the idea initially came from the fact that even though the
main character is mostly supposed to be alone through the movie, I still
wanted him to talk a lot. Having it be set up as a documentary
made the most sense, and I also liked the idea that I could turn things a
bit half way through the movie and have you start asking "who exactly
is filming behind the camera?" You also play the lead in Eddie
Glum - so do talk about your character for a bit, what did you
draw upon to bring him to life, and have you written Eddie with yourself
in mind from the get-go? I did write Eddie
Glum with me in
mind for it from the get-go. Outside of the "evil Forest
Gump" reference I previously stated, a big thing with me in terms of
the performance for Eddie was concentrating on his rate of speech.
He will randomly take long pauses in the middle of sentences which I think
is a real stand-out thing about him and I wanted to emphasize. I
also wanted to make sure he was a bit emotionally flat (except when he
isn't, lol) with most of his lines and that his face was mostly
expressionless. My hope was that audiences will have a hard time
deciding if he's a good or bad person or if he's lying or telling the
truth because he's difficult to get a read on.
What can you tell us about the
rest of your cast, and why exactly these people? As with
most of my films, Eddie
Glum gets pretty weird and I knew it was important
to work with people who were ok working abstractly and didn't necessarily
need a full explanation on why they were doing something or what their
motivation was (as a lot of the time it's a complete mystery). Hope
Stamper and Morgan MacCarthy were both the main people I thought of for
the roles as I knew they liked things like this and would sort of just get
it. The other actors were a large collection of friends and
acquaintances who were also fans of weird horror who wanted to participate
and they all did a great job. A few
words about the shoot as such, and the on-set atmosphere? Things
were actually pretty smooth on Eddie
Glum. We ended up filming
everything pretty fast and in not many takes. I think a lot of that
had to do with the fact that everyone was cool doing something abstract
like this. Anything
you can tell us about audience and critical reception of Eddie
Glum yet? It's actually been pretty great! Outside of 2 negative reviews on Amazon (which of course is dragging our
ranking down, lol) I've gotten probably 8-10 personal messages from
people telling me how much they loved the movie, and the Chunkle Freaky's
Movies Facebook page has gotten a bunch of new fans because of the movie
too. Eddie
Glum was also given an A- rating on FilmThreat and it won
Best Horror Film at the Chain NYC Film Festival this last summer and was
an official selection at the Newark Film Festival in September. On
top of all of that I was invited to present the film to the film making
students at Lesley University in October which was fantastic.
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Any future projects you'd like to
share? Yes! I've nearly completed a new film called
Portal Man. Right now I'm finishing up the audio editing
on the movie and then all I have left to do is the music. This one
is a humorous sci-fi action movie and is easily the most ambitious movie
I've ever made. I'm pretty excited to see how people react to it
because it's the polar opposite from Eddie
Glum. Your/your movie's website, Facebook, whatever
else?
Follow Chunkle Freaky's
Movies on Facebook!
https://www.facebook.com/chunklefreaky
You
can also watch my previous films on Amazon Video: The Arc of Methul
and Solus.
Anything else you're dying to mention and I have
merely forgotten to ask? Thank you for taking the time to
interview me! Thanks for the interview!
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