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Your upcoming movie Evil Apps - in a few words, what is it about?
We're basically dropped into the world of Kayla West, who's a college girl on
the verge losing her best friend Taylor in an ongoing rivalry over a guy.
Taylor then starts to dabble in black magic and gets access to a range of
weird smartphone apps, capable of everything from changing people's minds to
exploding their heads. Kayla's got to decide how far she's willing to go before
Taylor rips her whole damn world apart.
To what extent does Evil Apps reflect your personal
attitude towards smartphones, and are you a smartphone owner/app-user? I
have a real love/hate relationship with my smartphone. I have to keep
reminding myself that I own it, not the other way around. I sometimes put
it into a box to stop myself checking it every few minutes. The
black magic addressed in your film - have you put any research into that
aspect of Evil Apps or did you just make it up as you went along? I
used to read a lot of stuff about the occult a couple of decades ago. I
was a guy at university and curious about a lot of things, and the occult
was something that fascinated me for quite a while. Did a lot of
background reading and made my mind up about how I felt about the various
phonemena that people tend to experience. Must admit, I haven't done much
background reading on the subject for a long time though; just never seem
to find time anymore! Other
sources of inspiration when writing Evil Apps?
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Pat Higgins |
Well, the relationship people have with their phones (not just my own
one) is pretty fascinating, so a lot of it does come from that. I think
there's a lot of people out there with a fairly serious addiction
problem; people unable to exist in the room that they are in because a
vital part of their consciousness is 'elsewhere'. The ongoing grind of
technology is only going to make this worse, of course. The mere concept
of Google Glass scares the piss out of me. So I guess I took all those
concerns and funnelled them into something that would be great fun to
watch and had a kick-ass exploding head scene.
How
do you intend to approach your story from a director's point of view? I've
got a very strong visual plan for the movie, in terms of everything from
the wardrobe colour schemes through to the edit and the post-production
process. I don't think it's possible to do a movie that's so steeped in
technology without ending up with a degree of 'words on a screen', which is
something that we're very much embracing rather than running away from.
It's a lot more caffeinated and jittery than anything else I've done
before; a real relentless barrage of information, gore, cool female
characters, one liners and interesting stuff. Black
magic has the wonderful quality to it that it can make everything happen
... which might include quite a few gory special effects - so what can you
tell us about that aspect of Evil Apps? Well,
there's that pesky exploding head which I can't seem to shut up about,
largely because we've never done one as a practical before. There was an
exploding head in KillerKiller, but that was CGI augmented with our usual
bucket of grue. It all gets a bit biomechanical towards the end too;
you've only got to look at one of the available perks on our Kickstarter-campaign to get an idea how!
Anything
you can tell us about your cast yet, and why exactly these people? Our
two most vital cast members, Kayla and Taylor, we haven't signed up yet.
We've been filling in the smaller characters with people we've worked with
in the past and actors we admire, but those two central roles are still up
in the air. They're in pretty much every scene so the whole damn movie
hinges on their performances. The idea of making that final decision is
frankly terrifying, and we'll probably keep putting it off. If you have
any ideas, feel free to let us know. As
far as I know, your film is currently still in its fundraising stages. So
what can you tell us about your fundraising efforts? Well,
the Kickstarter-campaign began last week. We've never tried the
crowd-funding route before, despite it being a really obvious route for us
to go down. This just seemed the ideal project to get people really
involved with; it's high concept, great fun and we're delighted with the
script and all the pre-production work so far. You can go straight to the
Kickstarter at http://tinyurl.com/evilapps
or head over to http://www.jinx.co.uk
to read more stuff about it. Once
the funds are raised, how do you plan to proceed ... and any idea when the
film will be released onto the general public yet (and yes, I realize it's
still waaay too early to ask)?
We'll deliver all the perks
to our backers (from digital downloads at a fiver through to executive
producer perks at rather more!) by October 2014. It might be a bit
earlier, but that would be the absolute last point. After we've delivered
the downloads, DVDs and so on to all the wonderful people who made it
happen, that's when we'll have to work out how those lowly folks who never
got involved will get to watch it. A year and a bit is a long time in this
business; DVD might not still be viable for a commercial release at that
juncture. In fact, it's pretty touch-and-go already!
Any future projects
beyond Evil Apps?
There's another thing going on that I'm not allowed to talk about. We
have a habit of doing 'secret projects' from time to time, and it's one
of those. I'll probably come clean about it later in the year. One of
our previous secret projects ended up becoming Bordello Death Tales, the
horror anthology I shot with Jim Eaves [Jim Eaves interview - click
here] and Al Ronald that came out last
year, so our secret project have a history of turning out pretty damn
well.
We've also already had Werewolves, Cheerleaders & Chainsaws this
year, which was a filmed version of my live show about low budget horror
filmmaking and is available as a freebie from our website. Plus we've
got a Director's Cut rerelease of The Devil's Music coming out shortly
via those fine folks at Cine du Monde, so there's loads of good stuff on
the way.
Your/your movie's website,
Facebook, Kickstarter, whatever else? Check out http://www.jinx.co.uk
and http://facebook.com/jinxmedia
and http://tinyurl.com/evilapps
- but be sure to do it QUICKLY! Once the Evil Apps boat has sailed, it's
gone for good. Anything else you
are dying to mention and I have merely forgotten to ask?
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Actually, I'll just say a few words about crowd funding if I may. The
reason we're making movies is because we love them. We're making them
for people who also love them. This stuff is meant to be fun; it's
monsters and technology and gore and kick-ass scream queens, and all the
stuff that made me love horror movies in the first place. I can't be
arsed watching movies where people get tortured in grimy locations any
more. We want to make flicks that are fun, goddammit! We're also getting
pretty good at this; our company has been going for ten years, in which
time we've produced or co-produced six features which have all had a
commercial release. If crowdfunding works out as a way of putting these
kinds of movies together, everyone wins. The backers win because they
not only get to be genuinely involved in the process of making the
flick, they also get to see it first and cheapest. If they want to get
more involved than that, they can end up with their name on the credits.
For a little company like ours, this model would mean that we don't risk
bankrupting ourselves every single time we shoot a feature *and* we're
suddenly not answerable to any other authority. We don't have to include
or miss things out just because that's what the major retailers or the
supermarkets or whatever want. This is a shot at real creative freedom
and a direct relationship between the guys making movies and the guys
watching them.
So, if you care about supporting independent horror then please visit
the Kickstarter campaign and get involved - http://tinyurl.com/evilapps
-, we promise to make the
coolest movie we can.
Thanks
for the interview!
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