Interview conducted by Britt Hayes

Texas Frightmare Weekend was held in Dallas this past weekend, and I got a chance to sit down with the cast from the Anchor Bay Films remake of I Spit On Your Grave, directed by Steven Monroe. When the film was first announced, I, like many others, was initially weary of the project. How could anyone remake a film so dark, so morally ambiguous, and so damn brutal? Especially today with studio pressures and the limitations of the MPAA? Would anyone want to see it? It’s a difficult film to remake, at best.

However, I sat down with the four leads of the film (Sarah Butler, Daniel Franzese, Chad Lindberg, and Rodney Eastman) and after discussing the project with them, I feel pretty optimistic.

Brutal as Hell: Sarah, what drew you to this project? Did you read the script first and then audition?

Sarah: Yeah, I just came in like any other audition. You know, I was maybe a little turned off from it at first. My manager is super protective of me so I had him read the script and then he came back to me and he goes, “This script kicks ass! You have to do this. You’re going to kick so much ass.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” Thinking about it more and talking about it to friends I realized what a great opportunity it was  as an actor. It’s not every day we get to play two characters in one project. Having that great of an arc was just a real honor for me as an artist and I had a lot of fun with it. It grew on me.

BAH: And what about the rest of you guys, what sort of drew you to this dark material? It must take a lot of guts to volunteer for a film where your objective is to rape a woman over and over.

Rodney: I’ve always been drawn to sort of, you know, not necessarily dark material, but definitely…I guess you could say “fringe material”. Not only in the work that I’m attracted to, but sort of art across the board. I’m not a big fan of vanilla. I did this movie about rape and revenge, and I just had a film called Spork at Tribeca that’s about a fourteen year old hermaphrodite in the deep south. I’m always interested in a quirky story versus the sort of typical…

Sarah: Controversial. You like controversial.

Rodney: I do like controversial.

Daniel: I was going to turn it down. It just felt really out of my comfort zone, but then the more I thought about it, I figured it was something that would make me grow. I mean, I really wanted to be a part of it because I love exploitation film and I knew what this movie was, and I knew how cool and fun it would be to be a part of it, but I’ve experienced issues with other projects that I’ve done where people think that you’re the character that you played, and I just didn’t know how much I really wanted to attach a rapist to that. But then as I thought about it, I just thought that the challenge itself would be something that would help me grow as an artist and something that I would be able to accomplish. So you know, it ended up taking me longer.

Chad: Yeah, I feel the same about Rodney, I mean, I respond to dark material where I feel like it finds me a lot of the time, and it feels very natural for me. I’m not the sort of guy [who does the] slip on a banana peel sort of humor…I just, you know, I really love dark material and this was certainly dark and exciting.

Daniel: And dark material is usually the stuff with the most meat, the most conflict, the most places that you can go as an actor. It’s extremely rewarding.

BAH: Right. You don’t have to just show up and just be there in front of the cameras. You actually have to give an effort.

Rodney: Yeah, but it’s interesting. ‘Cause I’ve never even…it’s the second time you just talked about it, and someone else in the Q & A earlier [asked] “Are you worried about how you’ll be perceived playing a character like this?” and this is the first time I’ve ever even thought about that, you know. I mean, this might be our final movie that all of us ever do an interview for, you know?

Sarah: Please! Come on!

Rodney: But I don’t think that. I just think that that’s interesting, ’cause I never…I don’t want to sound pretentious or anything.

Daniel: We probably won’t work for Disney anytime soon. But we don’t really care. I don’t need to be in Cheaper by the Dozen 3.

Rodney: Not to be pretentious, but just as an artist I’m not thinking about the result, I’m just thinking about the work.

Sarah: I’m worried about my mom seeing it. That’s about it.

BAH: I’d have to agree with you there. I don’t think I’d let your mom see it, either. I think maybe the second half, but maybe not the first.

Daniel: It was interesting because I died in another horror movie, well, several now, but the first time that I died, I think it was Rosario Dawson’s mom that told me to make sure that my mom came to set that day because then she could see that it wasn’t real and therefore she’d be able to handle it. So she did, and it worked. But even with this one, I was like, you’re just not gonna see it.

BAH: Never!

Daniel: You’re never ever ever gonna see it.

BAH: “This is never happening for you!”

Sarah: Yeah!

BAH: How did you separate yourselves from playing these very difficult roles? At the end of the day, was it easy to just sort of brush it off, or was there a decompression and separation process where you had to be alone? Was there a period after Steven (the director) yelled “Cut!” where you were still in character so much that you couldn’t let it go?

Daniel: It was a decompression. For sure, like after work.

Sarah: Yeah, I would say that pretty much all of us at the end of the day had to just break away from the character because all day long, even between the scenes…you know, to keep it consistent, we had to kind of be in our own zones. We didn’t really hang or talk on our breaks during the day that much, but then you know, that takes so much energy, so you just, at the end of the day, as Steven was saying earlier, hit the hot tub and we’d all be out there just like, “Ahhhhh, man,” and then refuel for the next day, jump right back into it.

Daniel: There were some rough nights and some rough mornings.

Rodney: Yeah, I think that…’cause I’ve done both…being taxed mentally, and this material is definitely taxing emotionally and mentally, it’s far more exhausting than digging a ditch for eight hours, seriously. The drain on the body, you know, the brain uses 60% of our energy throughout the day. Anyway. It’s true.

Sarah: (laughs)

Rodney: And so, you know, I would be wiped out. But as far as being “the guy”, it’s pretty easy for me to just kind of go in and out of…I try not to take on too much of any one character. It’s a mask.

BAH: And you’ve all seen the original?

Sarah, Daniel, Chad, Rodney: Yes.

BAH: Did you watch it prior, or was it something that you found when you read the script?

Rodney: Once I had read the script, I watched it during the filming, but in like, the first week. Just to get a

reference. But I didn’t really want to, really. I know it’s a real fine line between creating something new and honoring the old, and I totally have respect for the original filmmakers and the original film, but I don’t wanna get attached to that. I just wanted to make it a brand new movie, you know? It’s a brand new movie for me, so I didn’t feel that heavy obligation to, you know, walk like somebody.

Daniel: If I’m fortunate enough not to have seen any of the material of something that I’m about to work on, I like to read the script with an open eye first, and see what I take out of that, and then watch it. And that was sort of the process I did. I read the script and I had the audition the next day, so I wasn’t able to really watch it right away, but then I had, I guess, a week before my call back, so in that week I did watch the film. I had heard about it before from following John Waters and Quentin Tarantino, and a lot of other people who I’m fans of who give their fans things that inspire them

back, so being their fan doesn’t stop there, you can continue on with the things that inspire them. Which is something I like to do also – I love that about it, so I had known the importance and reverence of the original, but hadn’t necessarily seen it, but when I did it was definitely shocking.

BAH: Yeah, it’s pretty hard to watch, I think.

Sarah: Yeah.

BAH: It’s not a happy movie, by any means, even with the revenge. The rape is so awful, and the revenge is justified but it’s not something pleasant to watch at all. You leave the film, I think, feeling pretty dirty.

Daniel: Without giving anything away, I can say that the attackers in this one have a much more sophisticated perversion.

BAH: In the first one they seem more like yokels or backwoods hillbillies with no real motivation other than rape or getting laid.

Daniel: They’re still yokels, but I think that…

BAH: Sophisticated yokels!

Sarah: (laughs) It’s more in the motivation.

Daniel: Yeah, they’re…

Sarah: And it may be that they have some stupid motivation, but there’s at least some way that you can understand, like, “Oh yeah, there are people like that!” and maybe these guys, you know, don’t have any girls coming up to them in that small town and you know, that’s just a deep down frustration and anger that they have that may come out. That

may have been something to influence them. You never know. In the original it kind of felt like they’re just bored or something.

Daniel: Yeah, I can say something without giving too much away, ’cause it’s in the trailer, but my character videotapes the crime, so there’s a voyeuristic element to the character I play, and each of us have our own…that’s what I meant by sophisticated perversion…we have another level of perversion.

Rodney: I think again, with all due respect to the original, I think with four guys, with a certain energy, the difference in our project is that each character is very well defined from the gate, and just in the writing, and then, you know, what we were able to individually bring to each character. It’s just got a real script. It’s got a real strong foundation for us to build on.

BAH: And that’s what I wanted to ask Chad about. The character of Matthew is obviously still included, but it’s not as – Daniel, you were doing this great, dead-on impersonation

earlier – it’s not as cheesy as the first. What did you do with that character, without giving too much away?

Chad: Well yeah, you know, his version was a little more animated and I don’t even know if he was necessarily mentally handicapped. He just seemed kind of cartoony. I just went at it as more of a childlike nature and uh, I have a stutter in the movie, so I watched a lot of YouTube videos, and I just did it from a very innocent place. Not over the top, you know, just very honest.

Sarah: It’s fantastic. Really fantastic.

BAH: I was wondering about that one because that’s one character you don’t really forget, but how could you possibly incorporate that, especially today? And some of the things he says are just…out there.

Chad: Yeah, exactly.

BAH: What did each one of you take away from the story? What’s your individual take on it?

Daniel: I think an interesting thing, and I don’t necessarily mind horror remakes, but some of the times in the

extremely popular ones the killer is just killing, whereas in this one it is a revenge flick. It is one of the true first revenge flicks for females, if not the first, I don’t even know. I think that when you watch the killing, even the person who is squeamish and not able to deal with it, can root, can truly root, but then because of the humanity of our characters, and as Rodney was saying the depth that we try to bring to it, along with the script, I think there’s also an element of – is this even right? So it’s like, you get to the point where the audience is asking themselves questions and being afflicted throughout, and I think that’s what makes it a really good thriller. Even you’re not sure of what’s going on or what’s right and what’s wrong anymore.

Sarah: Exactly. I think my goal was to make people straddle a fine line between “Yeah girl! Get ‘em!” you know, “They deserve that,” and like, “Woah, who is the bad guy in this story?” I didn’t want them to be able to settle on either side of that, so…

Daniel: That’s the perfect thing. Unsettling.

Sarah: Yeah.

Daniel: That’s the feeling people should get if we did our job right, when they walk away from this film.

Sarah: I just find it a really unique story like that, and that’s what I think.

Rodney: Again, I feel like I’m coming off as the totally detached guy.

BAH: That’s fine.

Rodney: I just, I don’t know. It’s really interesting, you make a movie and the clips everyone saw today is the first time we’ve seen those clips, and it’s…I sort of practice detachment out of necessity because you do your best on set, you turn in your best performance, but once the editors and the raters and the producers and everybody else gets their hand on it, you have absolutely no control of what’s going to end up on the screen. So, it’s almost like a question that I could only truthfully answer after I’d seen the movie like everybody else, ’cause I guarantee I’m gonna be surprised.

Daniel: Oh, yeah.

Rodney: I haven’t watched the movie, I have no idea what’s coming. And that’s super exciting, and Anchor Bay has been very restrictive, even with us, with what they’re letting people see, so I kind of like it…being in the dark. And I, like everybody else, am anticipating this. I cannot wait.

Daniel: It’s a peculiar position to be an actor because you have to rely on so many other peoples’ aesthetics. There’s so many movies that the editor has messed me up or the special effects haven’t turned out how they were promised, and you have no control, so you can really just go and do your job and hope that you guys don’t beat us up too much.

(everybody laughs)

BAH: No, no. Well, I think I’m actually one of the kinder critics, even on our site, and especially when it comes to remakes. I’m more optimistic than most.  You have so many remakes these days, and I think it’s fine if you want to give it a new twist, a fresh take on the material, or maybe tell it from a different point of view. That’s always interesting. But if you’re just stealing the name of a genre classic and remaking it for the sake of a dollar, that’s when it gets out of control. And with this we’ve gotten a lot of responses because people do hold this film near and dear. It’s an odd film to say you hold close to you heart, but people do cherish it. We’ve gotten plenty of negative comments saying that the filmmakers would fuck it up, or it wouldn’t be as graphic, but from what I saw today, I’m optimistic. And the teaser was really fantastic. I think it’s going to be really good.

Sarah: Yay!

Daniel: Welcome to our side!

Chad: We feel the same way as you do, I mean, we want it to be bad ass too, and you know, being actors in Hollywood, we’re very concerned with things going “Hollywood” and campy as well. I think people were really concerned that they were going to do that with this, and we have a depth to this one, and a performance that I don’t think the original quite had. This is just grounded.

Sarah: Well, and I can say something. I don’t know, but we’re trying to get our rating right now, and they’re kind of waiting. I think Anchor Bay wants it to be R because they want it to get out more, but it’s become really difficult for them because there’s so much in there that they’re going to flip it over to NC-17.

Daniel: We want R, but we’re expecting NC-17.

Sarah: Yeah, and so I just want people to know that even if it does somehow get watered down, that is not what any of these artistic minds in this room or our director, it’s not what we want, you know what I mean?

BAH: It’s not you, it’s them.

Daniel: At some point we’re all going to be making it seen.

Sarah: Yeah, and we want you to see the unrated version and all of the things that we did.

BAH: The MPAA is very fickle. Some years they don’t like sex but violence is okay, and some years violence is okay but they’re against sex. They’re usually okay with vagina, but no penis, and no homosexual sex.

Daniel: I know how furious Larry Clark got when I did Bully because Shannon Elizabeth in American Pie can walk around completely naked and it can get an R rating easily, but then he wants to show nudity in something that’s a drama and then immediately he had to go unrated because they were going to give him an NC-17.

Rodney: I think also, as just sort of a testament to our belief in the movie, is that the four of us are sitting here in Dallas, Texas, great town.

(everyone laughs)

Rodney: It is! Great town. We’re not seeing any of it, and Anchor Bay is not paying us to be here. We’re here because we believe in this movie and we’re here to support it. 100%

BAH: We have a pretty good relationship with Anchor Bay, and regardless of when this movie comes out, which I believe is sometime this fall, we’ll get a screener prior to release and get the word out to help promote the film, especially if it is given the NC-17 rating. We try to cover less commercial films on the site as much as possible and give more attention to filmmakers and projects that have more care behind them, and obviously you guys are passionate about this project.

Rodney: I don’t think it will be that long before it’s in theaters.

Daniel: Yeah, it should be fall.

Rodney: I think it’s on a fast track.

Daniel: I think they’re waiting on a rating and then if the rating doesn’t come in then they’ll probably have to do a re-edit, which might push the date, but if the rating is smooth then I feel like it will come out sooner than later.

Sarah: Yeah, they want to get it out.

Rodney: Definitely.

Daniel: One thing to remember is that this isn’t a 60 million dollar Hollywood-saturated remake. All of us took pay cuts, all of us worked at scale, we did this to make this become something because we believed in the project. Once we all signed on, we signed on in a big way.

Chad: Bare asses and all!

(everyone laughs)

Rodney: You guys only got scale?

BAH: Oh no, no, no! No bickering in here!

Sarah: No messing with us Rodney, this is not the time or place.

BAH: Well it was really great to talk to you guys, and we’ll leave it at the bare asses!

Sarah: Oh no!