Before turning his hand to producing and directing, Tom Shell was the Prince of Pulp, starring in such cult classics as Surf Nazis Must Die, Death Row Diner and Beverly Hills Vamp.  I met Tom at his South Pasadena home, and once his two dogs finally decide not to have me for lunch, the four of us settled in on Tom's front porch for a long chat about the movie, vampires, working with actors, production tips, and Tony Todd’s strange hunger.

JMB: So, Tom, why another vampire movie?

TS: Oh, god, everybody loves vampire movies. I think the one thing that drew me to this one was that it was sort of a mix between one of my favorite films growing up as a kid, An American Werewolf in London, you know the whole transformation thing of an innocent college chap was always pretty interesting and entertaining to me, and I thought this had some pretty entertaining bits in it as well.  So, it kind of reminded me of that, and then it had the whole new twist on vampires, the Blade and Buffy twist, where there’s Sentries as vampire hunters out there so it kind of blended a little of the new lore, the new shit that’s been going down in the vampire genre as far as these Sentries or vampire hunters, and it blended the older theme of American Werewolf in London and the turning stuff.  And I just thought it was original, it was fun, and a couple of the guys, AJ (Draven) and Remesh (Thanadi), the producer and the writer of it, approached me.  We shared a manager, AJ and I, and he was the one who hooked us up.  He’s a big vampire fan and he said it’s a great little vampire script, you've got to read it.  I thought the dialogue was good.  I thought Ramesh did a real good job of all the old lore and it was fun.  I felt like between the college kids with their contemporary lingo and the vampires with their Old World jargon, it gave it an interesting, diverse kind of feel.  It went back and forth a lot.

JMB: I really liked the look of your film.  How did you decide on your shooting style?

TS: Well, because we were doing HI-Def and I was worried about doing a lot of daytime exteriors, which I think the technology’s not quite there, even though some guys really know how to light it and it’s getting better, but you need to have a lot of money and a lot of time.  So I really wanted to do it night and keep it dark and do a lot of sunset shots, and keep it moody.  And then we effected a bunch of it in post too.  I laid heavy on some of the blue filters and there’s something called a Magic Bullet Suite and we did different filters we would lay on from Magic Bullet to create different looks, so it’s kind of how we achieved it.  These days I’m really a fan of just shooting, when it comes to Hi-Def, shooting straight and effecting it in post.  You just bring it in clean, crisp and as well balanced as possible because you have so much latitude once you get into post.  You can really make a mistake if you try to get too tricky on the set.  Editing in the camera could be a huge mistake and it’s the same thing, I think, with lighting in the camera or putting filters on in the camera.  With the way postproduction is these days, you can fix it in post, which is not my favorite expression, but it works in this instance I think.

JMB: So what was your post process like in terms of the kinds of things you had to do?

TS: (laughs) I was busy running around trying to get free music from everybody in town!  We wanted a nice rock thing too and we got a lot of different songs.  We got everyone from Jucifer, who’s, I think, a Satanic vampire cult in and of themselves.  Jucifer did some songs on it and we had Children of Bodum, who did the opening song, who is this great hot band out of Denmark and we got theirs for next to nothing and, oh wait, are they Danish?  No, I think, actually, Children of Bodum is Icelandic.  (jmb note: they’re Finnish)  They sold out the House of Blues when they came here.  They have a bit of a following, so we got lucky to land their song.  And then Index Case's The L, which is another great rock band, so we got a lot a lot of rock music. 
We had Red Gypsy Animation do the effects for it.  I had the force field that the Sentries would be able to throw off and a few other gags that we did.  Some of the wire removal.  We knew we kicked a guy across a courtyard and we had another guy fly in with this spinning back kick through the air.  And that was all done on wires and I had them use wire removal for the visual effects.  And then the edit was pretty straightforward.  It was a lot of fun.  I even got to help on it once in a while.  I had the editor go away and I’d go and try to mess with a scene like I thought he should do it, and he’d come back in and call me an idiot and rip it apart. (laughing).

JMB: And who was your editor?

TS: Andrew Bentler, this was his first feature really.  He’d messed around with a lot of shorts and he was the assistant editor on the film I produced, The Far Side of Jericho, and we became friends through that.  He helped me out enormously and I thought that he had a lot of talent, so this was the first feature he edited.  He went on to edit Brotherhood of Blood after that and Pandemic and one other feature .  So, within a two-year period he’s compiled four features all of a sudden.  So, he’s moving up.  I should be getting a commission from him.

JMB:  Now, this wasn’t your first feature as a Director.

TS: No, my third.  My first one was called Strike Back, which was kind of an occult-martial arts- action-adventure film.

JMB: Covering all genres!

TS: Well, yeah, it was and it was kind of campy.  I came from the Roger Corman, Fred Olen Ray, and Jim Wynorski school of filmmaking, (jmb note: the triumvirate of schlock).  Not that I liked that necessarily, but I grew up out here as an actor and I did 15 features as an actor.  I was in Beverly Hills Vamp, Teenage Exorcist, Death Row Diner, Bikini Drive-In, Dinosaur Island; the list just keeps going.

JMB: Surf Nazis? (jmb note: see the Troma trailer for Surf Nazis Must Die here.)

TS: Surf Nazis Must Die, of course.  And so, those were the guys that gave me my first start.  I’d been writing some scripts and, like every filmmaker or screenwriter, when they start off, all my scripts were like 40 million dollar opuses, and so I finally wrote something that was on the low budget end.  And Fred Olen Ray and Roger Corman both kind of gave me a break and let me use some of their people and helped me to get some of the financing for it and that’s how I got Strike Back off the ground.  And then I went on to write and direct something else called Wind River.  We shot in Utah with a much bigger budget and that was a great experience.

JMB:  Was that your family film?

TS: Yeah.  It was on HBO family for six months.  It was also Lion's Gate Home Video's Best Selling Video for the month of April in 2002.  So we got a little plaque for that.  We got a plaque from the Film Advisory Board for their Award of Excellence.  So, I’ve got a few plaques from that one.  And that was nice.  So that worked out really well and that got me a couple of other film offers after as a director.  Both of which fell through, unfortunately, at the financing stage, because of crazy financers and crazy executive producers and stuff like that.  The Thirst was a little lower budget then what I’d just come off of but I was just itching.  It'd been like four years since I’d directed a film.  I’d been Producing and Line Producing and other things and I was just dying to do something.  I was tired of all the big stuff I was attaching myself to, 2 and 3 million dollar budget films, so this time around I said I’ll just do under a million with The Thirst and have some fun.  And I did.  It was actually a lot of fun.  We had a really good time on the set.

JMB:  So what was you final budget, when all was said and done?

TS:  Um... it was south of a half a million dollars.  How far south?  I won’t tell you if it drove past the border or not.

JMB:  What kind of advice might you give someone who’s doing or just completed a horror short and is now looking at making a feature?  Something from the Hollywood trenches.

TS:  (laughs) Everybody thinks they can make a film but the thing is, it’s so multi-faceted and the talents need to lie in a lot of different areas, so the smartest thing you could do is try to surround yourself with the most talented people possible and be a really smart collaborator.  Figure what your strengths are and maybe run with those.  Hopefully your strengths are seeing talent and working with actors.  And if they’re not, find some help from a casting director, so the actors can take care of themselves and you don’t have to direct them too much if that’s not your strength.  Hopefully, the script is good, and if not try to find somebody to help rewrite that thing if you can’t write it.  Script and actors are the first things that get going.  And obviously with production, getting a good cinematographer and help with some kind of a UPM that’s going to keep it on budget and keep it on track so you can try to achieve your vision is just huge.  So, those are the first things. 

JMB:  I know that people when they’re approaching a movie for the first time they think, oh, we’ve got a script, it’s good enough, let’s just go.  Could you talk about the development process?

TS:  Well, you know, the funny thing is, we did a couple of passes on the script, but it was pretty good from Ramesh Thadani, who was the writer.  I met with him and I liked it and felt like I wanted to scale it down a little bit.  We thought we were doing it for about a million dollars; 1.2 is what we thought we had the line on at the time.  So, I scaled a couple of things down, took down some characters and things and I thought this was doable at 1.2 (million).  I did a couple of drafts off of that.  I thought we had it pretty good.   And then, of course, the budget got bit in half.

JMB: The REAL budget.

TS:  Yeah, yeah.  And so we really had to go through and change it again quite a bit, and hopefully hang on to the important things.  That’s where you really look at the structure of it and I think we did so with index cards up and looking where’s the heart of this, where’s the bones.  What can’t we lose and what can we get rid of.  So we shaved down on characters and locations and some stunts and some crazy stuff and were able to keep it at that budget.  And then, of course, it changed again once the money came into play and I started location scouting because locations are the next thing.  So, you’re kind of rewriting the whole way that you go along, so if you don’t know how to write really, really well... I mean, you gotta be honest with yourself, if you can write or not.  Then you got to drag a screenwriter along with you that can hopefully, be continually helping you out with all the curve balls that you get thrown at you.  Because we had to shoot this all in a mental hospital, an old mental hospital that we had to make look like a dormitory and a college.  I think it looked like a college at the end of the day for the most part, but we had to really be creative.  It was the Norwalk Mental Health facility.  They shot The Ring there.  You couldn’t film on one part of the thing because they, the prisoners, (laughs), the patients, were allowed to roam at this one part.  You had some real nutty folk there.  It was part of the California Film First (jmb note: now defunct) program, which allows filmmakers to utilize certain California locations for almost fee free filming.  Even though don’t be fooled by that.  You still have fire marshals you have to pay for and maintenance men and your monitors that oversee the whole thing, so, you know, you’re not off totally free.

JMB:   So your free location ends up coming back and biting you in the butt with payroll.

TS:  Mmm-hmm.  The water trucks and fire marshals and police showing up and coming by and monitors, yeah, always, always something.  So that’s one of the tricks of the trade, get the bottom line on what the location is really going to cost.

JMB:  Just going back to the script for a minute.  Did you make many changes on set or did you stick pretty much to it as written?

TS:  I tried not to.  I felt like once we had a really good game plan going in -- and it was a really tight schedule and a lot of pages -- so there were a few scenes where I was kind of willing to improvise but you know, if good ideas are thrown at me, I’m all over it.  As long as it’s within the crux of the scene.  Some of the vampires dialogue was so, like I said before, Old World, that it wasn’t a good thing to go straying off of that.  I think Jason Connery felt like he could improvise away with his English accent and get away with it and sometimes he did.  But for the most part everybody stuck to the dialogue and I think that was probably the smart thing to do in this.
Tony Todd, who played Julian, the main vampire, came in with some strong ideas.  He wanted to have fruit.  He was always eating red fruit which kind of goes against the grain of vampires.  We had to get out the old vampire research books real quick and hmmm ...can they eat fruit?  But he was the Clan leader and he had some special powers and it seemed to work, but I’d never seen that done before.  Tony had done a vampire role Off Broadway a few years back and he’d never played a vampire on the screen so he was really excited to try to make this work and he had a lot of ideas coming in.  He didn’t mess with the dialogue too much but he definitely messed with a lot of his business.  Which is good.  I mean that business really helped a lot.  And it’s great when actors come in and give themselves business to do.  Which is always something really important for a director to think about.  A lot of actors you just don’t want to stand and deliver dialogue.  You gotta think about putting something in their hand or giving them something to do.  Whether they’re cleaning the house while they say the line or packing away a dead body, they should be doing something instead of just standing there and talking.  I think a lot of first time filmmakers forget about that aspect of things.

JMB:  Did you storyboard at all or how did you approach prep?

TS:  You know, I storyboard the scenes that look complicated to me.  The scenes that look like big days, so I have ideas.  I didn’t bother storyboarding ahead of time, not until I saw the locations.  I’ll take pictures of the locations actually, and then create little stick figures and put them in front of the actual locale and stuff like that.  So it’s really low grade storyboarding.  I’m not a great draw-er.  I want to try this new storyboarding program that’s out,  Frame Forge. 
I do love storyboarding but it’s so time consuming and they change so much when you get to the shoot, and it’s funny, as a producer, if I work with a first time director, I’ll make them storyboard it out even though I know that it’s going to change.  I think it’s good to really be able to think about what you’re going to do before you go out and do it and haven’t thought it out.  I don’t feel like I need to storyboard as much necessarily because I’ve been through the process so much that I really do know what I’m going to do.  I’ve thought about it a lot so when I get to the set I’m not all of a sudden surprised at anything.  I’ll just storyboard the important ones, the important scenes.  Once I know that the locations are in place.

JMB:  What was your shooting schedule - how many days?

TS:  We had to shoot in two weeks time.  It was a 12-day schedule.  Eleven at that mental hospital and one day at Topanga State Park.  So, yeah, basically it was real tight.  I had to know exactly what I wanted.  Couldn’t do a lot of takes.  It was about 8 pages a day was what we were knocking down, (laughs), literally.  It was fast and furious!  One of the choices that I made was, and I liked the choice anyway, but it was also out of necessity, was to never really show too much of the gore.  It’s not a blood and gore fest.  Everything is off camera or intimated and I think that choice worked well for this anyway because it was tongue in cheek.  This wasn’t that kind of a film.  If it had been we would have needed another week because it’s just, you know, when you have to slow down and bloody everybody up and get prosthetics and do wounds and stuff like that, it’s just too much.

JMB:  Given that shooting schedule, you got some amazing footage.  The fights are great.  The stunt where the guy flies backwards into the pile of garbage, that was a great shot.

TS: (chuckles) Thanks.  That was fun.

JMB:  The whole look of it feels like much more than 12 days and south of $500,000.

TS:  That’s what we were trying for, yeah, on the price that we had.

JMB:  Great job.  Got anything else you want to say?  Any last words of wisdom?

TS:  I think that because of what we were just talking about, at 8 pages a day, you need to walk and talk a bunch.  You have maybe more dialogue then you want and, quite frankly, it wasn’t a suspense movie, necessarily.  It was a horror film but it wasn’t suspense horror where I could just burn the camera for 2 minutes while somebody walks along the corridor waiting for somebody to jump out at them.  Which is a great way to make your film come on in at 90 minutes.  But we didn’t.  I wasn’t doing that, so I really had to rely on dialogue and actors a bunch to pull this one off.  So the casting process was really important. And we had a great casting director, Ricki Maslar, who’s done a ton of indie stuff, so we got real lucky with the cast.
Allison Lange came in and she was just like "the one" from the minute that she read.   She was perfect, such a pro. Some other people came on, like Reni Bell, who played the Goth Girl and she was great and a lot of fun.  Mark Ryan, plays the main Sentry, who I wanted from the beginning when he read it.  He ís such a consummate actor.  Jason Connery came on at the last minute and did Claudius and he was just great as the son that just wasn’t good enough and wanted everything and was selfish and fiery and he did a good job.  And, of course, Tony Todd.  I really liked Tony Todd in the Candy Man stuff, so he was good.  (jmb note: Candyman, a 1992 cult classic from a Clive Barker short story).  And that’s the layout of the actors that were impactful, that really kept the acting process alive.  And that’s so important.

JMB:  Thanks, Tom, that was great.

TS: Yeah, it was fun.  Did I talk too much?

I get up to go and the dogs start barking again as I beat a hasty retreat to the street.

-- jmb

THE THIRST

Directed by                               Written by 
TOM SHELL                              RAMESH THADANI

CAST 
Julien             TONY TODD
Will                 A.J. DRAVEN
Claudius       JASON CONNERY
Jayne             ALLISON LANGE
Amelia           AMERICA OLIVO
Rico               OWISO ODERA
Ashley           RINI BELL
Darren           CAMERON ZEIDLER
Jason             NICK HOLMES
Laurie            STEPHANIE LEMELIN
Reeve            MARK RYAN
Titus               BILL DOYLE
Aldren            JARRAD HEWETT
Jed                 C. THOMAS HOWELL
 

AddTime:  2007-06-15 10:40:20
Count:  7893
Keywords:  thirst, vampires, american werewolf, Tony Todd, wire work, Magic Bullet, frame forge 3D, hunger,
Average Rating:  0