Interview with Directors Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel of Deadgirl

Interview by Marc Patterson

 

Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel have crafted an exquisite and horrifying coming of age film that has taken the festival circuit by storm, and has got film lovers talking.  Deadgirl is richly layered and as complex as it is simple.  Mostly it refuses to be pigeonholed, reading as much as an allegorical morality tale as it does a dark and twisted zombie nightmare.  We recently reviewed the film (Review Here), but also got an opportunity to sit down and talk with Marcel and Gadi about the challenges of making a film that has been widely called unmakeable.

 

Brutal As Hell: First guys, thanks for taking the time out for this. Deadgirl is one of the most original screenplays I’ve seen in quite some time.  Where did the idea originate from and how were you turned on to the project? 

 

Gadi: Trent Haaga wrote the first draft for the script years ago and it was really personal for him and was really tough for him to give it away. Probably one of the reasons why everyone said nobody is going to make it, and he also had this feeling that if anyone ever did he would have to change so much and he just didn’t want to risk it.  And that’s really all I knew about this script is that it was casually mentioned as something no one would ever to do, so it took some time for us to convince him to let us give it a shot and that’s how it kinda started there.  We worked on it for about a year together, and with Trent, to develop what was his first draft. 

 

Brutal As Hell:  And I understand that Trent didn’t just want to give the script out to anyone, for some of the reasons that were mentioned there.

 

Gadi: Yeah, we ran into the same thing.  First we were “Fine, we can make the film by ourselves.” We had companies saying “We love it, but here are all the things we’re not going to be able to do and here are all the things were going to have to change.” I think that Trent anticipated some of that and I think that’s why he held onto it. He was basically “I love this script and it means a lot to me, and I’d rather it just stay on paper.” So we had to convince him that what excited us to make it was the same thing that excited him to write it.

 

Brutal As Hell:  It’s easy to look at this film simply as a coming of age story in and in many ways that’s precisely what it is.  But watching it there is a lot more going on.  It’s a morality tale, it takes on some gender issues, and yet at the same time you have some very real aspects of horror in the film with the dead girl herself.  Throughout the crafting of the script what were some of the challenges to take all these elements and bring them together to make them work?

 

Marcel: That was definitely a challenge.  You want it to work on all those levels.  The nature of the premise was very horrific, so it was just a matter of balancing that against the coming of age story and hope that you combined characters early, at least that with Rickie you follow his journey and understand what he was up against and battling with internally, and if that worked then the horror stuff would be easier to play off of because scares are a little easier than internal character dilemma’s.

 

Brutal As Hell: One thing that I really liked about the film was that you brought in the element of the dog to the film and I thought that made the film a bit allegorical.  It’s part protector, part voice at one point for the dead girl.  Where did the idea of the dog come from?

 

Gadi: That was one of the things that on one hand it was a very practical decision.  We have a lot of openings, and we have a lot of walking around, so let’s throw in something.  So on some levels it was just practical in that we want to keep everyone awake.  But it’s also one of those things that when you come into it you can start exploring. What does it really mean and what can the dog do to the story and to the movie?  It came from a lot of different places.  It was new element we suddenly had all this room to play with. 

 

Brutal As Hell: It was interesting because I thought it was an element that really added something to the film.  Now, I have to talk about your dead girl Jenny Spain.  Can you tell us about her?  This was her first and only film to date and you really put her through the ringer.

 

Marcel: We got really lucky when we met Jenny.  This was an impossible part to cast and such an integral part of the movie.  So when we heard of her existence out there in the world and sent her the script and she really loved it.  She had great instincts about her and she has a great look so she was perfect for the part.  More than that, on a day to day production level she just made the making of the of the movie possible just by her being who she is in real life, and her enthusiasm for the role, and everything that it would entail and everything that we wouldn’t be able to provide for her. Normally when you have someone who is naked you have closed sets and you do all this special sort of things to make people comfortable.  We couldn’t really do any of that.  Everyone had to get comfortable with each other real fast and keep working.  So she was a real find and has become a good friend to both Gadi and I.

 

Brutal As Hell: I thought she delivered the single most powerful performance in the film and it was pretty amazing to learn that she’s been in nothing aside from this.  It was pretty awesome.  For all the talking about her role, you’ve got her lying around naked for near the whole shoot.  And for all the dominant sexual themes in the film that are really just pushing the edge, the film never at one point slipped into the exploitive.  But yet you’re dealing with subject matter, especially in horror that is highly exploitive.  How did you maintain that balance to ensure you weren’t exploitive?

 

Gadi: Personally I think a lot of people would disagree with you but I’m glad you see it that way. 

 

Marcel: That was real important to us.  We put a lot of care into how we orchestrated those sequences and we didn’t want anyone to get repelled from what they were seeing and disconnect from the movie but at the same time you want it to be powerful.  It always kills us when we read about people saying that the film is really exploitive and misogynistic and just out there to shock you because we spent so much time making sure that it wasn’t that. So that was really was the bulk of our conversation was in how to handle this kind of material in a way that… I mean, Gadi and I we always felt that if we read the log line about the movie in a newspaper we always wonder if we would go see it.  What we love is when people say “I wasn’t expecting that.  My friend dragged me to this and boy I thought it would be something else.” We know it worked when we hear that.

 

Brutal As Hell:  But I guess the reason why I didn’t think as exploitive was that it deals so heavily with the issue of gender, but you know there wasn’t a lot of graphic sex.  I’ve seen so much of this so-called “torture porn”, if you will, that when you see this it was obvious that this was something else that was trying to come across on the screen.  And without making a joke of it your film literally takes that concept of a woman as an object and lays it on the table.  There she is, she’s naked, a pure object.  She doesn’t even speak.  Now I watched the film with my wife who said at the beginning of the film “Oh god, Is this going to be another one of the rape films?” with a real spit of disgust in her tone. And she kinda lost attention, but then halfway through she’s actually watching the film and is into it. So what’s the reaction been so far from other women who have seen this film?

 

Gadi: Not what you’d expect.  Actually you had the experience that we’ve had.  It’s been exactly that.  One thing that’s happened since we created the movie, since the most recent screening, has been a real reversal of what everybody expected.  There will still be guys that come up to us and say I thought this movie was okay but women are going to fucking hate it.  And truth of the matter is almost at every screening, at the end of the movie women respond to it stronger.  They just get it.  They feel what we attempted to do and they don’t bring a lot of their own baggage.  They just see the movie and maybe it’s just that harder for men.  We set up a screening in Seattle and at the end this mother came up to us with her fifteen year old daughter and was telling us how much they loved it and how much it meant to them and how it really affected them.  And we wouldn’t have predicted it because we sorta fell into the same thing when people were telling us that they hate it you start to think “Shit, maybe we’re wrong.”  It’s been fascinating, and I think what you experienced has been what everyone has been hopefully getting to witness and it would be great if people got the word.  I guarantee it’s really easy for people to write it off and say “It’s just one of those movies and we’re going to hate it and if you like it what’s wrong with you” and that kills us.

 

Brutal As Hell:  I think the unfortunate thing here is that your film is going to be coming out later this year and it’s going to be slid into the horror section because that’s the easiest place to put it, but obviously it’s a lot more.  It’s played to some general festivals.  Have you seen a difference in the response to the film from the average festival goer to the genre enthusiasts, who have come out to see a gory film?

 

Marcel: Well, we have a small theatrical release coming up on July 24th and that’s to about 10 US cities, which is really cool. But I remember telling Gadi that one of the more satisfying premiere draws was the Midnight Madness.  But we also had a regular Friday night screening in Toronto, and they were not difficult on the crowd and they really liked it and loved it.  And you know the genre audience is going to come out and check it out which is cool, but it’s pretty cool when regular movie goers come out and see something that’s not quite what they expect.  That’s stuff has always been fun, because sometimes we complain about always getting the midnight slot because it might turn away and people might again assume what the movie is. But we get it.  You want to appeal to the non-midnight crowd.  But it’s also like that crowd, some of them just hate it.  It’s not extreme enough.  Some of them are disappointed that it doesn’t try to push every boundary and shock you in scene after scene.  We didn’t exactly win over the horror community either. We’re really split down the middle in every category. 

 

Brutal As Hell: One thing that stood out to me that I really enjoyed, which I’ll approach carefully as I’m not big on giving out spoilers, but at the end of the film rather than fall into a typical Hollywood like formula where everything is wrapped up nice and neat a nice safe road is taken towards a predictable ending, you took the chance here to really wrap up the film in a way that for lack of a better term was very literary.  You let the characters be who they were.  The film finished in a way that was true to who the characters were in the film.  Because that wasn’t the neat and safe way to go was there any resistance along the way?

 

Marcel: The good news is that you’re talking to the producers, which is one of the reasons we were able to make the movie is because we didn’t have to answer to anybody.  So, yeah it might be the last shot we get to do something like that.

 

Gadi: I was going to say that hopefully they agree with you and we’ll talk to people who really liked the movie and they’ll say they didn’t like the ending and we’ll say why and the reaction will be because “Rickie would have never done that”.  It’s just that people don’t want to see that.  And you’re right there are some unconventional choices that the movie makes. But it felt true, and that choice of the movie’s ending got us banned in Germany.

 

Marcel: It’s true.  The German censors basically give you their response about what you can cut and trim to make the movie acceptable and part of their determination was that we could do nothing, that even the end of the movie was morally objectionable, and even if the movie was trying to say something positive in the end we failed to sort of steer it in a way.  It was pretty amazing. 

 

Gadi: After everything that happened in the movie that choice was what got us banned in Germany.

 

Brutal As Hell: When I was watching the film there was a few films that kept popping into my mind. The Outsiders, Stand By Me, and then Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door.  Were there particular films that you turned to for inspiration in the process? 

 

Gadi: Oh yeah, we always say The Outsiders, Stand By Me, and Rivers Edge.  It’s a huge disappointment to people sometimes when we’re asked what horror movies influenced us and we always answer it with Stand By Me and people will laugh and they want it to be something else, but that’s what we saw when we saw the story and again great observation.  We appreciate it.

 

Brutal As Hell: Yeah, maybe it’s me, but I thought Stand by Me had some pretty horrific elements to it.  Are there any current projects that you’re working on that you can tell us about real quick?

 

Marcel: Yeah, Gadi and I recently got hired by the company Gold Circle whose last film was The Haunting in Connecticut to do this reimagining of this Danish film that they have the rights for, Murk.  It’s not really a horror movie, but it’s sort of a dark twisted thriller.  So we’re writing that and hope to direct that in the fall and that’s what we’re focused on at the moment.

 

Brutal As Hell: Well it appears we’re about out of time, so I want to congratulate you on what I felt was a superb film, and thank you again for your time.