JT: Jim Towns
Believe it or not it wasn’t a Stephen King novel, or a classic horror movie, or something De Palma had done that inspired writer/director Jim Towns to make House of Bad. Nope, it was a.. truck.
CH: How did you pitch “House of Bad”?
JT: I really didn’t, is the funny thing. When I was still finishing the script, I contacted Scott Frazelle because there was a truck which factored greatly into the script, and Scott had the most badass diesel-driven old Ford pickup I’d seen in a while. It seemed like the perfect vehicle for the Teig character to drive- it just suited her. So I called him to see if we could use it, and we hadn’t talked in a while so we caught up a bit. He read the script and within a very short amount of time he was helping me with rewrites and he and his wife Dorota were producing the film. I’m still not exactly sure how that all happened. A month and a half later we were on set shooting. Sometimes you bang your head against the wall forever, and sometimes things just kind of work out. There’s just no predicting it.
CH:How long did it take to write the story, and where did the idea come from?
JT: The script developed over quite a long time, like at least two years from first inception to the shooting draft… but there was a lot of down time in between. Basically I wrote the first twenty pages in 2009 as a straight-up heist thriller, and ran into a wall. So I put the script in a file I have on my computer called ‘back burner’. It lingered in this digital purgatory until 2011, when I came back to take another crack at it. That’s when the supernatural element came to me, and that blew the doors off. From there it was only a week or two to a first draft. Then Scott and I teamed up and we worked together to push the dynamic of the sisters’ relationships.
CH:Was it a case of ‘door knocking’ when it came to finance, or was it relatively easy to get the film funded?
JT: Most of the funding of the film came through our producers Scott Frazelle and Dorota Skyrzypek. Then there were a few other investors including (producers) Paul Anderson, Sam Ray, Clint Jung, Keith Thomson and myself. We did a small Indiegogo campaign as well. The financing was a bit of an ongoing challenge, and it went all the way though post production to the final delivery. There’s a lot of costs that new filmmakers don’t take into account, like at least half your budget goes to everything that happens after you’ve wrapped the shoot and that’s horrifying, frankly. All the post and delivery costs really sneak up on you and test your resolve to see through what you’ve begun.
CH:Had you known any of the actors you cast before the film? (They’re all terrific)
JT: All the actors came to us in different ways. Heather Tyler was in a one-woman stage play in 2011 that Scott and Dorota saw, and were super impressed. She came in for an audition one afternoon, and Dorota read against her. I shot test video in their kitchen, and watched this cute girl in a tank top turn into this blistering psychopath in an instant, and that was it. She was Teig. Sadie had responded to an online casting call for a previous film I’d been developing… in the comments section of her submission she’d written ‘fearless actress’… When I was casting House of Bad I went back to those old submissions and there she was staring at me, looking every bit as fearless as her comment- and she was right, she’s absolutely without fear. Total rock star. Cheryl Sands had auditioned for me for a previous film I was going to make called Manhaters!, which is still in a bit of limbo. There were one or two guys in the room when she did her audition, and afterwards when she was done and left there was this kind of stunned silence among all the guys. Cheryl is absolutely HYPNOTIC to watch, that’s the best adjective I can come up with.
Almost everyone else we brought in were old friends- Jim Falkenstein is a hilarious guy who can practically make you wet yourself, he can be so scary- our DP Chad Courtney was terrified of him the entire shoot because he had to film all the stuff of Jim screaming right into the camera for the flashbacks. When it came time to do ADR we recorded Jim in the sound booth saying the most horrible things imaginable that he was gonna do to Chad, and emailed it to him as a wrap gift.
Lisamarie Costabile and I have been pals for a while and I think we did something really interesting in having the ghost of the mother be pregnant. I think it was unique choice, and people seem to find her bloody belly really frightening. LM was amazing, she was doing pickup shots like four days before she gave birth and was like ‘no big deal’. Clint Jung is a Hollywood veteran who’s been in everything from Jobs and 24 to about a zillion other things and I’ve always wanted to put him in something ever since I heard him say the phrase ‘If you’re lying, I’ll wear your skin as a kimono’ in an audition. He’s a great guy, as well, and is always a bunch of laughs, so I think he has a good time when he gets to play a total psychopath.
CH:When did the film pick up a distributor?
JT: We had a final cut at the very end of 2012, with final score, sound VFX and all. We started submitting to film and especially horror critics at the beginning of 2013, and started getting all these great reviews. Around then we hired Circus Road Films as our sales agent, and they went right to work and got us to all the right people. We showed at the Big Bear Horror-Fi fest in the spring and won the audience choice award, and really soon after that we had two interested distributors. We opted to go with Osiris because they were dedicated to the film, and had a specialized plan to sell it on its merits. The other company was more of an assembly-line type of thing and they also wanted to arbitrarily change the title, which wasn’t going to happen.
CH:There’s some really heavy stuff in the movie, how did your actors handle it? Did they ever come close to needing a ‘break’ from filming?
JT: We had no time for breaks, haha. But no, everyone came in super-prepared and ready to go for it, and all our actors are total professionals. I think Heather had the hardest job because of the incredibly dark place the Teig character goes to, and that’s really far removed from who she is, so she really had to commit for it to sell on camera. I think sometimes it took her a bit to shake it off, as it were, but we were all always a team tackling this thing together. The HoB family is one that I hope to keep working with on my future films- we really managed to assemble a talented and fun group of people and that’s rare.
CH:Have you a favorite moment in the film, one you’re especially proud of?
JT: There’s moments that I think are keystone scenes that really stand out, like Teig’s attempted suicide and the sisters’ final confrontation. Some of those were pretty easy to get and some were more challenging. Funnily, some of my favorite scenes in the film are ones where we had to get really creative or even do something incredibly dumb to pull the shot off, and when I see one of those shots I smile and remember how we would all gang up on a problem and knock it down, so those tend to be my favorites.
CH:Do you envision a sequel?
JT: It’s not something I’m planning on actively chasing down, no. I think we told a good tale and it was fun, but it’s been a long time working on this one film, and I have a lot of other projects I’m interested in moving on to now… that said, I’ve done some outlines for where a sequel could go, and if House of Bad does really well and someone wants to finance it, well of course I’m interested and I think we could take it somewhere that no one would anticipate. We’ll just have to see.
“House of Bad” is on DVD December 3