Darren Bousman – Mother’s Day
Darren Bousman – Mother’s Day
Exclusive 1:1 Interview With the Film Director
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Darren Bousman: Today is an intense day because I’m killing off the majority of the people in one day.
Staci Layne Wilson: Get it all over with at once, right?
Bousman: It’s bitter sweet though because this is all cast members that I’ve been out working with for a month now that all basically start getting killed off. We started killing people off yesterday or two days ago, and it’s probably the most emotional I’ve been around the movie or with the movie because this is not like the Saw films where…I mean, I love the Saw films, and I always will, but the Saw films are very gimmicky in their approach to killing people and the death, and they’re always in some great gimmicky way. This isn’t. The deaths are very, very pedestrian.
Wilson: Really?
Bousman: I think so much stuff of what makes the thing so disturbing is that instead of ripping someone’s rib cage out and blowing their face up and whatever, people are just getting shot, people are just whatever. It’s a very horrific kind of thing for me because I think it’s so simple. Again, I want to say the word “pedestrian” which makes it infinitely more disturbing for me.
Wilson: How do you handle these types of death scenes because you say they’re not over the top or Grand Guignol like in Repo. So are you showing the aftermath of the suffering of the person who’s dying or is it more about the suspense and lead up to the death?
Bousman: [It is]…to a point so much that if the gimmick doesn’t work in which I’m killing somebody, I just say, “Move on. I don’t care. Let’s just keep going.” Where in Saw, I would freak out and be like, “No, no, no. We have to get it this way. We’ve got to get the death like this.” I really don’t care because this movie is such a different movie for me. I want to call it more adult in some respects. It is so simple in its execution. The whole kind of idea that I’m going with, we talked about this at Comic Con a little bit, my whole approach on this is Normal Rockwell. Take this very Normal Rockwell like setting; this very Norman Rockwell like world and put it through these crazy people, these crazy, crazy people. That’s the way we’ve done this. So unlike Saw where you’re in a dark dungeon with a green backset room, you’re not. You’re in someone’s living room. You’re in the backyard of someone’s house and all this other stuff. By doing that, it makes it infinitely, in my mind, more relatable. You can easily relate to someone who’s sitting on the couch crying, and you can’t [relate to] someone in a sewer who’s tied up to a machine that’s twisting their limbs off. I think that, to me, instead of harder emotionally, it’s a much harder film for me because it’s so realistic. I’ll give you an example. I shot a scene last week, and I twittered about this, that made me physically ill. It made me sick to my stomach, and there was no death in it. There was no cussing in it. There was no violence in it, and there was no blood in it, but I was so fucked up from it, so fucked up that I could not sleep that night. It was funny. We went to set the next day and Briana Evigan comes up to me and she wasn’t even in the scene, and she says, “This is the first movie that I’ve been involved with or first thing that I’ve done where it’s affecting me.” She’s like, “I’m so kind of affected every night when I go home that I can’t sleep.” It really did. It was a simple scene between Rebecca De Mornay, Mother, and Warren Kole who plays Addley, and they were talking. It was two people talking, but their performances and what they were saying was so disturbing to me that I had a hard time. It’s the first movie that I’ve had that I’ve actually noticed it affecting me as a person.
Wilson: Really? I’ve known you for a while now, and you always seem so very emotionally invested not only when you are making movie, but also in editing and just the product that comes from it. So to hear you say that is like wow, you must be like booking your therapy appointments.
Bousman: Here’s the deal. I won’t do anything unless I love it. I’ll do nothing. I have to love something. That’s why you’ve never seen me wasting my mind with Saw coming out, but his movie might not work. This movie might be a terrible movie. It might fail, but the fact is I took it because I loved it, and I loved the character within it. Sometimes you strike gold, and the films that you do work. Sometimes they don’t work. This is the first time that I’ve done a movie as well that the movie I started off making is not the movie I ended up making.
It’s a weird thing. So the script was written by Scott Milam, and it was very, not tongue-in-cheek. That’s a complete wrong thing. It’s a very fun read. It’s very disturbing. It was one of my favorite scripts based on this movie a long time ago. It’s called Wichita. Now, Wichita never got made, so we just took some ideas from it and said, “How can we take what we love about Wichitaand incorporate it into Mother’s Day?” So we had these ideas and we cast the movie and whatever, and it was the fourth day of shooting that we started with the brothers. All of sudden I started realizing that we were making a much more serious film, much more drama than the thing was, I think, intended to be. Next thing I knew, I found myself emotionally invested in everybody, in the killers, in Mother, in the victim and the ancillary characters where that was never supposed to be the case. That was never supposed to be the case. It was never supposed to be you fell for Ike and Addley. You were never supposed to. It’s supposed to be that here are some crazy ass fucking killers that are doing crazy ass things. I mean, what if the audience loves them, but not love them in the fact that you care equally about Ike and Addley as you do the victims downstairs who are being tortured? I think by the end of this movie it’s going to be interesting to see who people are actually siding for because I think people are going to be equally siding for the killers as they are the victims.
Wilson: Now one thing we talked about (you mentioned ComicCon), was the fact that you didn’t even have any idea who you wanted for Mother yet, so I’m kind of curious to know what Rebecca De Morney has brought to the role herself that you didn’t even envision.
Bousman: Mother is the hardest role to cast because there are so many different ways we could have gone with Mother. We could have gone the elderly mother way like let’s say someone in the vein of Ellen Burstyn or something like that. You know, the classic elderly kind of woman. We could have gone with the very scary Karen Black type version of Mother as Rob Zombie portrayed. We could have gone with the sweet, innocent, no frills like the Sissy Spacek kind of way, like that kind of thing. We didn’t know. I don’t think anyone knew at that time. That’s what I’m saying. The movie that we started off with is not the movie that it’s become. No one really knew what Mother should have been. It’s such a critical role. There were a lot of sleepless nights trying to figure out who Mother is. One of the producers came to us and said, “What about Rebecca De Mornay?” I’ll be honest. I never thought of Rebecca De Mornay. That was never in my thoughts. I wasn’t like sitting around saying, “Oh, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle.” It took me a day to process the idea, and then all of a sudden I was like, “Wait a minute! That’s actually fucking brilliant.” Here’s a woman who has played one of the most intense female villainesses in the last twenty years. You watch The Hand that Rocks the Cradle. She is horrific in it. She is scary. She makes you uncomfortable. So I got on the phone with her, and I talked to her for about five minutes, and after five minutes on the phone with her, it was clear to me there was no other choice for Mother. It had to be Rebecca. She grasped it. She understood it. She understood not only the character, but the psychology behind the character. She understood not only why Mother killed, but why she treats kids the way she does, why all this other stuff. It was great because she approached it from a psychological standpoint, not from a here is the script. She’s called me on a lot of bullshit. I think she’s one of the reasons that the script has elevated itself to the point that it has because she’ll call shenanigans on things. Early on in the process, she was like, “I don’t think Mother would do this. I don’t think Mother would say this,” and she has really made the film infinitely better. The other thing which I think is great about this movie is our cast is such a higher level caliber, I think, than a lot of horror films. I mean, from the presence of Rebecca De Mornay to the presence of Alexa Vega and AJ Cook to the presence of Shawn Ashmore and, you know, it’s a movie that has elevated itself upon the casting. I tell you the two, the three people that I think are going to blow people away to the point of it’s going to be a huge deal when this thing comes out when people see them. It’s the brothers, Ike, Addley and a new brother, Johnny played by Matt O’Leary, Patrick Flueger and Warren Kole. These three guys, I would go so far as to call them brilliant. They have figured a way to make us love everything they do. If they are kicking someone’s face in, shooting someone in the face or threatening rape, you love them. You absolutely just love them. It’s something pretty bad ass.
Wilson: I remember some people’s comments in that Last House on the Left remake in regard to the brutal rape scene with Garret Dillahunt… they were saying, “He’s really good looking and it’s so weird to see him raping somebody, yet thinking he is cute.” It made audiences not sure how to feel. So are your brothers in a good looking sort of manner?
Bousman: The brothers are all attractive. Every one of them is very attractive, but not in the Last House way. This is one of the big things that I was concerned about coming into this. We had this movie written prior to Last House coming out. Now I’m a fan of the original Last House on the Left. I’ve made that no secret, but I was scared when The Last House, the original Last House, came out wondering while our storylines are nothing of similarity, there’s a lot of similarity that could be associated with it. Last House on the Left had three bothers and one girl, and three family members and a girl. We have three brothers and a girl.
It was the brutality put on a family. This is the brutality put on a family. So how is it that I can make this movie completely inherently different? That was a big thing, and I think luckily we had time to completely kind of overhaul our script and I think learn from Last House as well. Here’s the deal. The difference between The Last House on the Left and Strangers and Funny Games, these are all movies where there’s kind of an alienation from the killers themselves. In Strangers you spend forty minutes and you don’t even see them, but then all of a sudden you see a bunch of people in masks. You don’t know why they’re there, and then all of a sudden they kill everyone and they leave. This movie, frame one is a family. No masks on. You get to know them intimately right off the bat, frame one. I think by the time you’re introduced to the victims, you’ve met everyone; you’ve seen everyone, and you side with everyone. Then I think you throw them into an environment that conflicts with each other, it’s going to pull you in different directions because you’re not one hundred percent sure, I think, who you’re supposed to be rooting for. With Funny Games it’s obvious right off the bat that those two guys were there for no good. In Strangers you knew right off the bat these guys were not here for good. The Last House on the Left, when you met those people, you knew they were bad. Frame one they’re breaking out of this prison thing. You knew they were bad. I think in this movie you don’t know what’s going to happen. You’re kind of compassionate yet completely not. They’re kind of crazy yet completely not. I think this is going to be exciting. We’ve taken the clichés that everyone is going to expect [like] dark cabin in the middle of the woods isolated from the public. All of these things that people are going to expect [we’ve] done the opposite. This movie is set in suburbia. It’s set with neighbors right outside.
It’s set with people that you can completely relate to. The other thing is the art between the actual characters as well. It’s a big kind of twist and I really can’t get into it, but the arc within the killers is pretty fucking awesome as well. It’s not just people there being brutal to be brutal.
Wilson: When I think of Rebecca De Mornay as a mom, I think of a milf. I mean, she’s so beautiful. Is that kind of how she is in the movie, too?
Bousman: No.
Wilson: She’s not at all?
Bousman: I can’t wait for people to see what she looks like in this. She’s obviously very attractive, but she’s not playing the milf thing at all. She is a milf, one hundred percent, but she’s found a great way to play Mother in a very…I’m trying to think of the best way to describe her. She looks like an attractive school principle. You can see there’s a sweet woman there with a stern personality that will slap you if you get out of line. We’ve gone to an extreme, I guess, to make her not the hot Rebecca De Mornay that everyone knows. That being said, there’s really no way to make Rebecca De Mornay not look good. She’s a very, very attractive woman. I would say that the biggest thing I’m excited about people seeing in this is that I think as a horror film, and I would consider this…if I had to call, I would not call this a horror film. I would call it more like a psychological thriller with horror undertones. This is not that quick-cutty, violent, flash-framey, wit-paney shit that I’ve done before. I think it’s much more of an adult film which the acting is what carries the movie, not the gimmicks. I think that it’s been one of the hardest things I’ve had to do in that respect because to go against my wants to oh, let’s do the 360 round and let’s flash frame into this and let’s do this, to actually let the tension build to the acting due to the performances. It’s been really hard, actually. You’d think that would be the easy part for me to sit back and monitor and let them do whatever they want, but in some respects it’s a lot harder because it’s forcing me to not rely on tricks. If they were forced to rely on the camera movement and the ability of the actors to portray this kind of reality which leads sometimes to doing 50, 25 takes just to make sure it’s perfect because I’m not relying on gimmicks.
Wilson: But you are working with some of your previous crew, such as Joseph White [the DP].
Bousman: Joe White’s fucking brilliant. This guy’s the most amazing cinematographer in the world. I mean, again, here’s the deal. A lot of people didn’t like Repo. No matter what you say about Repo, there’s no denying that the style that Joe White brought to it is nothing short of breath-taking.
Wilson: Absolutely.
Bousman: You know, what we’ve done here is the film looks absolutely incredible. Joe has done an amazing job with the look of the film, and again, kind of making this very moody, beautiful piece that again kind of mirrors this small town middle America Americana. He’s great. Then I’ve got a lot of people back. I’m actually watching dailies right now, and in the dailies every actor that I’ve worked with in the daily that I’m looking at right now is Briana Evigan, Lyriq Bent and Tony Nappo all sitting around this thing talking. [They’re] all people I’ve worked with in the past. Tony Nappo was the guy who got shot in Saw II in the eye. Lyriq Bent was from Saw II, III and IV, and Briana from Fear Itself.
Wilson: And J LaRose who was in…
Bousman: Oh, J LaRose. Alexa Vega. Quite a few of the old crew returning as well as my crew itself. Tony Ianni who I bumped up to production designer who was the art director on Repo, he’s doing the production design. Leslie Kavanagh (this is funny) he was the wardrobe on-set person on all the Saw movies and Repo. I moved him up to costume designer on this. I have other people here as well. Oh, François and Damon, [they’re doing] the makeup, visual, prosthetic effects. They did all the Saw films. They did Repo. They’re back doing all the kind of gore effects. What’s great about this is with Saw and Repo the prosthetics, like you said, were very huge and grand and all this other stuff.
In this, they’re not as huge or grand, but they’re as intricate and/or disgusting, and I think, again, the trick with this one is being a very realistic fashion. I think François and Damon have their work cut out for them because the violence is a much different type of violence than I’ve done before. I think it’s very, very, very realistic, and they’ve been on set everyday. So I have a lot of my same people back.
Wilson: Any cameos from your Chance dog, as in the Saw films?
Bousman: Oh my God, it’s funny you say that. Chance has been with me everyday on set. I actually tried to do a scene with her. I’m not joking with you. The scene was supposed to be with Kandyse McClure for Battlestar Galactica. She escapes from the house at one point, and she’s running down the street. There are houses everywhere. This is a set in the middle of America, and she runs up to a house, and in the house there was a big, big, big picturesque window. She’s banging on the door to get the people to let her in, and I tired to put it where Chance was looking at her out the window and I was shooting over Chance onto Kandyse outside banging on the door, but in the very end, Chance looked too pretty and fluffy. She actually stood out. It’s kind of ridiculous.
Wilson: That’s great though – outtakes for DVD.
Bousman: Yep, she’s on set every single day.
interview ends - Darren called onto set
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