Chris Hill: CH
Gary Michael Schultz: GS
CH: I was doing some research and saw this started out as a short.
GS: Oh wow, you did do some research. I will try to give you the short summary of how Devil in My Ride came about. I directed a lot of shorts and worked on features in different capacities. Some of those shorts were pretty good. There was one particular short that I made wanting to work with a couple of my good friends. Two guys I really dig Frank and Joey. My co-writer, Mike Dozier, his car broke down and he was driving this really shitty minivan for a couple of months. Michael’s my boy, I talked him into destroying his minivan for the sake of art. So basically we went old school and we got this big trucking garage that was empty for the weekend. I shot a bunch of background plates. Like we would have done the days before green screen and we brought in the minivan and shot this ridiculous short film called Devil in My Ride. It was so vulgar; I thought it would be hilarious to do. I am a big fan of horror conventions and the shorts they had there, a lot I loved. I wanted to do something that was a mix of horror and comedy. So we showed it and it went over very well. It played a lot of fests and from there we shot the feature.
CH: There was a 3 year gap between the short and the feature, but first where can I check out the short?
GS: You’d probably have to come to my place for a personal screening (laughs). As the feature comes out, we will probably add the short as a DVD extra. It’s not the greatest short I ever made and the three year gap isn’t 100% accurate. You have to film it then you have to go to post, then you have to petition to sell the movie, which means you have to take it to festivals. So it ends up being a year from when it’s done filming to when it comes out. Then we did the feature, shot it, added visual effects and then it gets into festival. It’s a pretty long exhausting filmmaking process.
CH: How close is the short to the feature?
GS: We changed a lot. In the short, Hank and Travis are already best friends who grew up together and it’s more about the separation of their friendship. That works for 10 or twelve minutes. But what appealed to the comedy in a feature was taking two guys on a road trip that become friends like a great odd couple type of adventure. You go on the adventure and see how they become friends, if they became friends. It made Travis more emotionally invested in Doreen. I love genre films but I love character based drama films. I love films where you give a shit.
CH: How was it to balance the comedy with the character aspect?
GS: The short answer is it’s not easy. A lot of movies that try to mix genres, fail. The ones that are really successful like Shawn of the Dead, Evil Dead 2, Ghostbusters are some of my favorite films ever.
What I tried to do was take the comedy seriously. Travis might be a wild card and the situations he is in might be ridiculous but if Travis believes what he is saying and Travis believes the situations that he is in and we take it seriously, for me that’s when it works the best. I looked to the masters Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Chris Rock, Louis CK. People like that – they studied comedy and why things are funny like how you can be ridiculous but responsible with your comedy. There is a way to be vulgar and responsible and true to your character. If you spend the time learning as much as you can about your characters then you know how they will react. And that will dictate how your plot’s going to go. If you know how Travis and Hank are going to react then you know where conflict will be and conflict makes films and storytelling interesting.
I always envisioned Devil in My Ride like Dante’s Inferno – two guys going through hell.
CH: When you wrote the film, when they are riffing about Travis’ wife. Was that improv or was that in the script?
GS: That was the very first line I wrote in Devil in My Ride. I would like to say it was something more sophisticated than that but that was the very first. Frank Zeiger is a fucking brilliant improver and a comedian. It’s probably my favorite one liner in the film. We wanted to show why he was gone for a few years. The guys were pretty close to the script. Instead of rehearsing, I got Joey and Frank to hang out together. Frank would do improv in character as Travis and Hank. If you lived in Detroit, you probably saw him doing both characters and Joey is so method of an actor, he will do anything. It’s an indie film, we were running and gunning shit. With Erin, we looked at over a 100 brides.
CH: Was she in the short as well?
GS: No, she wasn’t. The devil bride in the short is on the east coast running a theater company. So we needed to cast a new devil bride and Erin was it. From there, we needed to cast a Johnny Priest and Llou was it – he completed the table. When I was working on another film I came across Big Llou Johnson in a post house with my sound guy so I called Big Llou and he answered in that deep baritone voice he answers “This is he” and I said “This is Gary Schultz and I am making a film. If you’re into Blues he just released a new album and you should listen to it.
CH: How did you get Sid Haig?
GS: Mike and myself wrote the role and when making an indie film you need to get someone that the audience will love and I am a huge fan of Jack Hill films. Black Mama, even though Black Mama White Mama isn’t a Jack Hill Film but it has Pam Grier, who is my favorite actress, and Jack Hill discovered her and Sid Haig is in all the Jack Hill films. People know Sid from Tarantino and Rob Zombie – he’s blown up. And I thought he was so great that it would be awesome to have Sid do comedy.
We filmed with him in Chicago on Halloween two years ago – how fucking cool is that?
CH: The hotel with the windmill on top – is that real?
GS: The pioneer? Yeah that’s a real working hotel.
CH: Where is it at? I have been to Vegas a million times and never saw it.
GS: That’s in Illinois, You got fooled by movie magic my friend, I appreciate it.
