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Your new movie Eat the
Rich - in a few words, what's it about?
About to be evicted, an unemployed woman decides to sacrifice her
landlord, the town mayor, to the old gods at the solar eclipse and consume
his riches.
Eat the Rich is a dark drama, cannibalism thriller short film
that premiered at the 2024 Morbido Fest.
What were your sources of inspiration when writing
Eat the Rich, and is any of
it based on personal experiences - apart from the cannibalistic ritual I
hope? Most of my work explores the horrors of late stage capitalism, and for
this short film, I wanted to take a common phrase and let it simmer. I
also knew that the total solar eclipse was crossing my part of the country
the following year, so I designed the film to take advantage of that
phenomenon, which we captured live in a field southwest of Fort Worth.
To be honest, I live with severe disability and chronic illness,
significantly due to a landlord who painted over a several year old leak
before I moved into the apartment. By the time I realized our ceiling was
full of dangerous mold, I had symptoms of Ankylosing Spondylitis,
Hashimoto’s Hypothyroidism, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and many other issues
under the autoimmune/immune dysfunction umbrella. My life has changed
forever, so it’s a bit personal. Be good to your tenants, or you might end
up on the menu! Do talk about
Eat the Rich's approach to
horror!
Eat the Rich is a folk horror, which isn’t my usual subgenre of horror. I
do love revenge, though, so I wove in a juicy revenge plot, and I focused
on what was easily accessible to me given our tight budget. We shot in our
own home in the small town of Bowie, Texas, and let the mystery of magic
speak for a lot of the horror. I had to include a gory bit of violence,
though, as brewing up some fake blood is basically mandated for all of my
films. To lean into the arcane nature of human sacrifice and the supernatural
power of solar eclipse, we dug up the dead language of Akkadian for our
spell and threw in a dash of cuneiform. Special thanks to my husband Levi
Bailey for being my spellcasting magick assistant and dead language
resurrection consultant.
The build up to the ritual is comprised of warm, earthy tones with
negative space. Cate does without far too often, so we see her in daylight
with empty framing. Her compounding misery and desperation builds on
images of country roads and disrepair.
After Cate performs the Assyrian ritual to the old gods, we see her back
in her farmhouse kitchen but with a sumptuous, meaty spread of riches with
the finest china, brocade tablecloth, and candlelight. You are what you
eat.
At least to me,
Eat the Rich has also
highly satirical elements to it - would you at all agree, and if so, were
they part of the concept from the beginning or did they just gradually
sneak in?
Most definitely! I have a very dark sense of humor (thanks, trauma!), and
all of my films have a bit of comedic relief. I thought even the title of
Eat the Rich lends itself to a wink and a nod at the audience, so I had
some fun with it. It’s been very gratifying to watch this with a crowd and
hear them respond to the jokes. What can you tell us about your overall
directorial effort to your story at hand?
As I said before, I am chronically ill and disabled, so I spent six months
in pre-production on this short film while working full-time. Before
autoimmune disease, I worked in commercial film production
managing everything from travel to budgets to location scouting, and I
used those skills to thoroughly prepare for this film.
To try to avoid triggering an autoimmune flare or injuring myself, I
worked on a tight schedule with the assistance of my 1st assistant
director, long-time friend and fellow filmmaker Shane Borza, and put
together shot lists and storyboards. I leaned into folk horror, of course,
but also some cannibalism films.
My watchlist included Ravenous (cannibalism),
Barabbas (also filmed the
solar eclipse live), The Innocents (for montage magic) and
The Feast (a
Welsh horror revolving around a dinner party). I’d also like to give a big
thanks to my composer Lenny Gonzalez for our deeply eerie score, our
dedicated editor Quirine Dongelmans and our first time production designer
Stacy Swinney who was game to paint cuneiform on the ritual blanket, craft
several spell props, and more. I couldn’t have gotten this over the finish
line without our dedicated team that deserved more money than I could
afford to give them. (Hopefully someday soon!) I also had some experience capturing natural disasters/phenomena in real
time as I directed an improvised short film in blacked out Manhattan in
the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy called Darktown.
As for my autoimmune disease, unfortunately, all of that preparation did
not keep me off of steroids after we wrapped as I did overdo it and had a
weeklong migraine bake my brain. At least I made it through the shoot and
had a few days to rest (and get a month’s worth of steroids) before
returning to my day job. Do talk
about Eat the Rich's cast,
and why exactly these people?
Joyce Yoo, our protagonist Cate Turner, is a long-time friend and the wife
of Shane Borza, and they were my first call when I was putting together
this film. I needed some experienced DIY filmmakers who were down to help
with almost anything given our budget and time frame. Kelly Kidd was a
recommendation of the director of photography, and he brought some real
menace to our cowboy mayor/aggressive landlord.
A few words about the shoot as such, and the on-set atmosphere?
I try to keep the vibe on my sets fun while being well-organized. I will
say I had an excellent craft services (snack) table prepared. All of my
well-laid plans went a bit out the window due to a few different factors,
though. Shane and Joyce flew in, and by the time they arrived, they both had
Covid-19 symptoms and tested positive. The good news was that I had asked
everyone to mask inside and planned all meals outside with ventilation
since I’m immunocompromised. I had to call all of our crew the day before shooting began and ask if
they still felt comfortable coming with a known illness on set. Two people
declined, so we had to retool the schedule and crew duties to compensate.
Since we couldn’t move the eclipse date, the show had to go on. No one got
sick, so it worked. We also had some nosy neighbors call the police while we were doing
driving shots and some other wrenches thrown in the machine. I’m glad we
got through it and very proud of what we put together with some
significant challenges.
The $64-question of course, where can
Eat the Rich be seen?
Starting May 1, aka International Worker’s Day, you can find Eat the Rich
streaming on Bloodstream TV here:
https://bloodstreamtv.com/show-details/eat-the-rich-2024
- they even offer a 7 day free trial, so sign up and dine for free!
Anything you can tell us about audience and critical reception
of Eat the Rich?
I believe our film has satiated a certain hunger caused by late stage
capitalism, and the film has been embraced – especially in Latin America.
We have played several festivals from Mexico to Brazil, and they have
quite the appetite for the uber wealthy. Muy delicioso.
Any future projects you'd like to share?
Hysteria, written & directed by Jenna Payne: Tired of
being dismissed, a chronically ill and undiagnosed patient takes matters
into her own hands, murders most of her doctors, and blows up an insurance
company. Dark comedy/medical revenge, winner of Wench Film Festival
Pitch It Till You Make It, finalist for Sundance Development
Track. Due to my immunocompromised status, I developed a fun shooting style for
this film that will also keep me safe on set. The plan is to sequester
skeleton cast and crew, shoot either on green screen or virtually, and
composite the actors into miniature hospital sets designed and built by
Fon Davis and his studio Fonco. After all, having a list of symptoms so
long that doctors’ eyes glaze over is a bit like being dragged through a
dollhouse. What got you into filmmaking in the first place, and did you
receive any formal training on the subject?
I found film accidentally after many years of being a big fan with a long
list of video rentals. I was working at a law firm, which I found quite
boring and frustrating, and I found an ad to help out on set as a
production assistant for a low budget film. I was hooked immediately and
directed my first short film, Feline Frenzy,
within a few months. I signed up for a writing workshop with Ela Thier of the Independent Film
School, and then I took the rest of her workshops. I found some amazing
collaborators and felt really confident about making the leap from fan to
filmmaker, but I never went to film school or did much outside of weekend
and evening classes here and there. I mostly learned by doing and by
teaching myself.
What
can you tell us about your filmwork prior to
Eat the Rich?
I have directed a variety of short films, worked in commercial production,
and begun developing horror films with diverse, emerging writers and
directors under my own production label Disaster Capital. One of my
favorite early films is the Zompires in the Park! teaser for a webseries I
wrote and turned into a comic book.
How would you describe yourself as a director?
I’m very focused on economic injustice as a storyteller, and I gravitate
toward tales of horror, crime and comedy that explore those themes. With
the world in its current state, storytellers have the ability to widen the
audience’s perspective, grow their empathy, and put a new lens on the
horrors we read about every day in the news.
For style, I’m fairly flexible. I always like to design the film to serve
the story and the theme and not the other way around. I’ve done a film
noir project, a madcap Mario Bava-esque sci fi comedy [Mario
Bava bio - click here], a handheld
desaturated natural disaster film, a comedic commercial for a non-profit,
and now a folk horror cannibalism tale. I like trying different things and
experimenting. As for my method of working, I did work in commercial production for a
long time, and even before I was undeniably ill, the hours and some of the
expectations seemed unreasonable and unhealthy. At my production company,
I encourage our filmmakers to think about shorter hours, more preparation
and better leadership skills to make our sets safer and happier. Film can
be the most fun job you’ve ever had, but the system is also prone to abuse
and abusive leadership. We can do better, and I’m doing what I can within
my sphere of influence. Filmmakers who inspire you?
This list would be so long I’m not sure I can even start, but I’ll drop
some names in no particular order here. I’ve found inspiration in the
films of Dorothy Arzner, Billy Wilder, Edward Dmytryck, Alfred Hitchcock,
Roger Corman [Roger Corman
bio - click here], Mario Bava, Robert Altman, Stanley Kubrick (Paths of Glory
is my personal favorite), Kathryn Bigelow, Rob Reiner, James Cameron, Carl
Franklin, Karyn Kusama, Steven Soderbergh, J.A. Bayona, Coralie Fargeat
and so many more. Your favourite movies?
I just don’t even know where to begin with this, but I’ll say that the
movie that got me very young and opened up the possibilities of what you
could do with film was Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka from 1991. My
understanding is Steven doesn’t like this film (or perhaps the reception
was so harsh that he no longer likes it and has recut it), but I think
this film is amazing as it was and needs an official home release. I had
two copies on VHS, but my VCR ate both of them. Don’t make me get a
laserdisc player, Steve! ... and of course, films you really deplore?
It’s so hard to make a movie that I try not to publicly criticize anyone’s
work, but I think the main crime in cinema is to be boring.
Your/your movie's website, social media,
whatever else? You can find me at the following:
https://jennapayne.com/
https://www.instagram.com/dir_jenna_payne/
https://x.com/jenna_payne
https://www.youtube.com/user/dirjennapayne
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3937569/
Thanks for the interview! |
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