Hot Picks

- Ready for My Close Up 2019

- Talk of the Dead 2016

- Script of the Dead 2024

- The Bell Affair 2023

- Easter Bloody Easter 2024

- Velma 2022

- Everwinter Night 2023

- Main Character Energy 2023

- Stupid Games 2024

- Bittertooth 2023

- 4 Minutes of Terror: Night Slasher 2024

- Apart 2024

- The Abandoned 2006

- Becky 2024

- The Evil Fairy Queen 2024

- The Black Guelph 2022

- Followers 2024

- Silence of the Prey 2024

- Battle for the Western Front 2024

- Beware the Boogeyman 2024

- Subject 101 2022

- Driftwood 2023

- The Legend of Lake Hollow 2024

- Black Mass 2023

- Skinwalkers: American Werewolves 2 2023

- The Manifestation 2024

- Spirit Riser 2024

- Garden of Souls 2019

- It's a Wonderful Slice 2024

- Caleb & Sarah 2024

- The Thousand Steps 2020

- The Desiring 2021

- When a Stranger Knocks 2024

- Quint-essentially Irish 2024

- Son of Gacy 2024

- Saltville 2024

- The True Story of the Christ's Return 2024

- Whenever I'm Alone with You 2023

- Jurassic Triangle 2024

- Midnight Peepshow 2022

- Offworld: Alien Planet 2024

- The Swiss Conspiracy 1976

- Sex-Positive 2024

- Here for Blood 2022

- All Over Again 2024

- The Color Yellow 2023

- Des Töchterleins Leid 2024

- I Am a Channel 2024

- The Hermits 2023

- Murdaritaville 2024

- Inheritance 2024

- The Devil's Partner 1960

- Pareidolia 2023

- First Impressions Can Kill 2017

- A Killer Conversation 2014

- Star Crash 1979

- Strangler of the Swamp 1946

An Interview with Adam Stovall, Director of A Ghost Waits

by Mike Haberfelner

May 2021

Films directed by Adam Stovall on (re)Search my Trash

 

Quick Links

Abbott & Costello

The Addams Family

Alice in Wonderland

Arsène Lupin

Batman

Bigfoot

Black Emanuelle

Bomba the Jungle Boy

Bowery Boys

Bulldog Drummond

Captain America

Charlie Chan

Cinderella

Deerslayer

Dick Tracy

Dr. Mabuse

Dr. Orloff

Doctor Who

Dracula

Edgar Wallace made in Germany

Elizabeth Bathory

Emmanuelle

Fantomas

Flash Gordon

Frankenstein

Frankie & Annette Beach Party movies

Freddy Krueger

Fu Manchu

Fuzzy

Gamera

Godzilla

Hercules

El Hombre Lobo

Incredible Hulk

Jack the Ripper

James Bond

Jekyll and Hyde

Jerry Cotton

Jungle Jim

Justine

Kekko Kamen

King Kong

Laurel and Hardy

Lemmy Caution

Lobo

Lone Wolf and Cub

Lupin III

Maciste

Marx Brothers

Miss Marple

Mr. Moto

Mister Wong

Mothra

The Munsters

Nick Carter

OSS 117

Phantom of the Opera

Philip Marlowe

Philo Vance

Quatermass

Robin Hood

The Saint

Santa Claus

El Santo

Schoolgirl Report

The Shadow

Sherlock Holmes

Spider-Man

Star Trek

Sukeban Deka

Superman

Tarzan

Three Mesquiteers

Three Musketeers

Three Stooges

Three Supermen

Winnetou

Wizard of Oz

Wolf Man

Wonder Woman

Yojimbo

Zatoichi

Zorro


Your new movie A Ghost Waits - in a few words, what is it about?

 

Jack is a handyman who works for a real estate company, fixing and cleaning up rental units and getting them ready to be rented again. He’s sent to a troubled property and tasked with finding out why every tenant breaks their lease. He soon discovers it’s haunted by a ghost named Muriel, and his initial fear quickly gives way to something much deeper.

 

To what extent can you actually identify with A Ghost Waits' Jack, and is he in any way based on yourself?

 

Jack is very much a combination of my co-writer MacLeod Andrews and me, yeah. I wanted to tell a story about my experience of depression and anxiety, because typically when they’re presented in film it’s in the more overtly dramatic forms of bipolar or manic depression. And MacLeod wanted to give a performance that was closer to who he is as a person. He’d just played a few very challenging characters which didn’t really use his natural charm or humor, and wanted to give a more transparent performance. I think we both have struggled with a severe need for human connection at times when it wasn’t forthcoming, so we were both primed to explore the feeling of being left behind or just adrift in society.

 

(Other) sources of inspiration when writing A Ghost Waits?

 

The main two inspirations were the video game P.T., which is a first-person haunted house puzzle game designed by Guillermo Del Toro and Hideo Kojima, and a web comic called Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. My friends Jenn and Brian Price invited me over to play P.T. one night, and I had them cracking up laughing at my reactions. It’s this very creepy, atmospheric game, and there are all these wonderful horror beats in it, and I would just absolutely refuse to engage with them. Once Jenn got her phone out to record me playing the game, I started thinking about how I hadn’t seen a haunted house movie with a character like me at its center. Somewhere around then, I saw a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic where a man asks a woman what she thinks is the most American film and she says, “That’s easy, Ghostbusters. The existence of an afterlife is proven beyond a doubt, but the whole movie is about growing a small business and navigating government bureaucracy.” I thought, “That’s hilarious! But also yeah, she’s right, a ghost does mean there’s an afterlife. I would have so many questions!” So those two things formed the spine of what would become A Ghost Waits.

 

What can you tell us about your co-writers Matt Taylor and MacLeod Andrews, and what was your collaboration like?

 

Matt Taylor is a film writer whose pseudonym I will not reveal. We’ve been friends for a few years, and I was visiting him just before Christmas 2015 and told him I was working on this new script but wasn’t happy with the ending. We ended up talking all night about it, and he inspired the character of Rosie and her dynamic with Muriel. I then went off and wrote the script by the seat of my pants because we had the budget before we had the script. Once it was time to film, MacLeod flew in a little early and we sat at my Dad’s kitchen table and went over the script so that MacLeod could ask questions about anything he wasn’t sure of. We didn’t have time to continue doing that during production, but once I had cut together the assembly edit and start working that down into something closer to what we have now, we could see clearly what did and did not work. We didn’t have any money left, so MacLeod was the only person who could come back for pickups, but once we were back in the same place, we started interrogating the film and figuring out which beats needed to be eliminated completely and which could be replaced with or shaped into a better idea. For both sets of pickups, it was just him and me in that house, coming up with ideas in the moment and chasing them until we were satisfied that they were as fun or as cathartic as they could be.

 

Do talk about your film's approach to both horror and comedy!

 

Honestly I think that’s just how my brain and heart work. I find absolute horror and absolute comedy in everyday life. For instance, one time I was sitting with a person with whom I was in love, and I was thinking, “This is a miracle! How does something like this even happen?!?” Then I looked around and saw that most of the tables around us were peopled with couples experiencing the same miracle, which got me thinking that love is the most boring miracle. I think there’s something horrific in how we define ourselves with things that might not even exist.

 

What can you tell us about your overall directorial approach to your story at hand?

 

This was my first film — I had attempted to make a short film some years before, but that fell apart in spectacular fashion — so I had this feeling that things might be okay as long as I never reached beyond my grasp. I’d been writing scripts for about 20 years, so I was confident in my ability as a writer. I felt like if I just kept things simple and never lost sight of the point of the scenes and the characters, then we’d probably be okay. Also, in terms of directing actors, my philosophy tends to be that their job is to know the characters better than I do. I might have created the characters, but if we get lucky and the film gains any traction at all, they will be far more associated with those characters than I will be. So when I sat down to talk with Sydney or Natalie or whoever about their character, I didn’t really want to talk about the script. I asked them what kind of music they thought their character listened to, or how the character might respond to a car accident, just things that might show how deep they understood the character. I knew that I wanted to make something transcendent, and you can’t do that if you’re executing the world you have in your head. Anything I could do to open that up and let the actors and the crew bring their own energy and experience and ideas to the world, I felt like that would only add to the film.

 

You also appear in front of the camera in A Ghost Waits - so what can you tell us about your character, and have you written him with yourself in mind from the get-go?

 

To be completely honest, I play Neal in the film because I knew I could afford myself and that I’d be available on the day. Though, one fun bit of trivia is that MacLeod directed me in ADR, and he did a really great job. If it had just been me in my bedroom, I would not have pushed myself as hard as he did.

 

Do talk about the rest of your cast, and why exactly these people?

 

MacLeod and I have been friends for years, and have been trying to make a movie pretty much that entire time. We lived together for a while, and one week we were working on his acting reel so we watched everything he’d done up to that point. He’s such a talented actor that he was often cast as someone who has either lost their mind or is in the process of losing their mind, which again he is very good at performing. But I wanted to see him fall in love and save the world, so once this became a viable project that we were going to make, I seized the opportunity to show the world what my friend can do. 

 

All four main roles were written with specific actors in mind, though only two of them were actually played by those specific actors, the other being Amanda Miller who plays Ms Henry. I’d seen Amanda in a bunch of short films and she was always the best part in them, so I knew I wanted to work with her. 

 

Sydney Vollmer, who plays Rosie, came in when we were auditioning local actors in Cincinnati. I had found someone that I thought might be a good Rosie, but once Sydney and I met on a video call and started talking about the character, I knew Sydney had to play Rosie. First of all, Sydney obviously has a much better grasp on what it is to be a teenage girl than I ever will, but also she just had this great empathy for the character, who is very snotty on the page. Sydney is a very gentle, sensitive person, and bringing those colors to Rosie made her a much richer character.

 

I’d been following Natalie Walker, who plays Muriel, on Twitter for a while, but did not know her otherwise. Like I said, I’d written Muriel for someone else, a friend who got cast on a TV show and was thus unavailable. I was back at the white board considering who could play Muriel, and I happened to be on Twitter and Natalie had posted something hilarious and brilliant, as she is wont to do. I was laughing, and remembered that she’s also an actor. So I went to her website hoping there might be some clips of her work, which sadly there were not…but her email was there! So I emailed her and said that I was making a feature in Cincinnati and thought she’d be really interesting in the lead, and asked if I could email her the script. She said yes and she liked it, so I asked her to record and send over an audition. She did, and the moment it starts it was so clear that she was Muriel. I remember thinking that because she’s so fiercely intelligent and funny, that there might be a sort of parallel to Robin Williams where by having to sublimate all that energy into a very still performance, there’s almost a vibration to their stillness, like a whole world within trying to get out. I know it was hard for her to be the straight-person and have to keep everything inside, but I think she pulled it off magnificently.

 

A few words about the shoot as such, and the on-set atmosphere?

 

Principal photography was 12 days in August 2016, during a heat wave, in a house with no air-conditioning. So that was fun. I mean, it actually was a lot of fun. We had a really tiny crew — 4 of us, many days — and we were in it together. I definitely had the least production experience of everyone on set, so felt like it was incumbent on me to create a space that positive and open and energetic. Which, I was living my dream of making a movie, so I was VERY positive and energetic. Mike Potter has remarked several times that every now and then throughout production I would just say “Can you believe this? We’re making a movie!” I’m basically a puppy, it turns out.

 

Anything you can tell us about audience and critical reception of A Ghost Waits?

 

When you make something so small and personal, you really don’t know if anyone will ever care. I’m very proud of what we made, and I remember telling MacLeod that we couldn’t control what people would think of the movie, or even if people would ever think of the movie, so our goal had to be making something that we were happy with and proud of. We’d prepared ourselves for the likelihood that we would be distributing it ourselves and fighting for every pair of eyeballs we could get. And then FrightFest happened. 400 strangers paid money to watch our movie, and it resonated with them. After the screening and Q&A, I had so many people coming up to me thanking me for the movie, saying it made them feel seen and heard. Which… at my lowest, movies have always made me feel less alone, and it was my goal to do that for someone else. To be a part of that legacy is overwhelming and validating and just the very best feeling. And the reviews have been good too! I won’t pretend that I always knew in the moment what I was doing, but I was always following the same North Star. I’ve always loved reading film criticism, especially when I was growing up in Northern Kentucky and didn’t have access to arthouse or repertory theaters. Film critics are champions and advocates, and I relied on them to tell me what I should be seeking out. (This was before the internet, too, so I was scouring books and magazines.) I sometimes struggle with the idea that I made a real movie, and having critics embrace it has helped me feel like a part of the film ecosystem.

 

Adam directing Sydney Vollmer

Any future projects you'd like to share?

 

Nothing is definite yet, but I’m working on a script that has some interest so that’s pretty cool. It’s a time travel road movie with some disaster movie sprinkled in. I’m really hoping we get to make it soon.

 

What got you into filmmaking in the first place, and did you receive any formal training on the subject?

 

I was a sensitive boy growing up in the South and the Midwest, so movies were always my safe space to go where people weren’t telling me to be less weird or talk less about the stuff that fascinated me. We lived near a theater for a while, so in the summers during middle school I’d walk over and just watch movies all day. I cannot count how many times I watched Batman or Kindergarten Cop. But whenever I’d read interviews with filmmakers, they’d always say “If you can be happy doing anything else, do that.” So I spent a long time trying to do anything else, which meant I never went to film school or any of the steps you’re supposed to do before making a movie. 

 

My film education came in three phases, I think. The first was when I started writing for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, and had the opportunity to talk with working filmmakers and ask the questions that I didn’t feel were being asked elsewhere. Like, I don’t care what it’s like to work with George Clooney, I want to know what the seed of the idea was and how you knew you were finished with it. 

The next step, once I’d left film journalism and started working in production, was my time as the 2nd AD on the romantic-comedy Split, written and directed by my friend Jamie Buckner. Doing that job gave me a front row seat to how an independent film was made. It allowed me to see where money had to go versus where it went out of habit. I saw how various people approached the various jobs, and gained a better understanding of what those jobs were. 

The third phase, which started around the time I knew I was going to get to make a movie, was actually watching YouTube videos. There’s some great stuff on there about film theory and how it actually serves the experience of making/watching a film. Channels like Folding Ideas and Every Frame A Painting put concepts into words that I understood, and deepened my appreciation of an art form that I thought I knew pretty well. 

Oh, and I guess making the movie would be the fourth phase!

 

What can you tell us about your filmwork prior to A Ghost Waits?

 

Nothing really to tell. Like I said, I tried to make a short film but never did. I had a few music videos fall apart. I’ve had a few friends remark on how deeply strange it is that the thing that worked out was a feature, which is certainly not the norm.

 

How would you describe yourself as a director?

 

I think I’m an enthusiast. Like, I don’t really start writing something until I don’t think it works, because then I have a puzzle to solve and that’s what gets me excited and engaged. Then, once it’s written, I get excited about finding people who share my enthusiasm for the characters and the world. Then we make it, and I’m excited to show the world how amazing my collaborators are. Then people see it, and I’m excited to talk with people about it, whether they like the film or not. I just like getting excited about people and ideas and the actual work of creativity.

 

Filmmakers who inspire you?

 

Oh boy, how much time do you have? Robert Altman is definitely at the top of the list, with Joel and Ethan Coen right behind him. Joe Dante has wired so much of my brain. I think Amy Seimetz is one of the most exciting filmmakers out there right now - She Dies Tomorrow was like Bergman doing a film in the style of 2001. Oh, Bergman is a huuuuuuuge inspiration. I remember the first time I saw Scenes From A Marriage, I told my friend that my sense of story was out the window because apparently the most fascinating thing in the world is two people talking. I also adore what Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are doing - Spring is a favorite film. And Charlie Kaufman, and Spike Jonze. Jonathan Demme. Barry Jenkins. Bong Joon-Ho. Park Chan-Wook. Dorothy Arzner. Jeremy Saulnier. Steven Soderbergh. Karyn Kusama. Jennifer Kent. Guillermo del Toro. Alfonso Cuaron. She hasn’t made a movie yet, but Phoebe Waller-Bridge is ridiculously inspiring. Lorene Scafaria! Steve McQueen! Don Hertzfeldt! Mike Flanagan [Mike Flanagan interview - click here]! I adore every movie Chris McQuarrie has written and directed (I can still quote swaths of The Way of the Gun). Seriously, I can just go on and on. I told you, I’m an enthusiast. Oh, and Mike Nichols is probably next to Altman as the most influential directors for me.

 

Your favourite movies?

 

Do The Right Thing (HOW DID I FORGET SPIKE ON THAT LIST), Gremlins 2, M*A*S*H, Fargo, Arrival, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Requiem for a Dream, The Silence of the Lambs, Punch-Drunk Love, The Apartment, Paris, Texas - I’m gonna stop there or this will just turn into another massive list…

 

... and of course, films you really deplore?

 

Feeling lucky?
Want to
search
any of my partnershops yourself
for more, better results?
(commissions earned)

The links below
will take you
just there!!!

Find Adam Stovall
at the amazons ...

USA  amazon.com

Great Britain (a.k.a. the United Kingdom)  amazon.co.uk

Germany (East AND West)  amazon.de

Looking for imports?
Find Adam Stovall here ...

Thailand  eThaiCD.com
Your shop for all things Thai

I’m sure there are movies I hate, but I’ve done a very good job of putting them out of my mind.

 

Your/your movie's website, social media, whatever else?

 

Twitter: @adamstovall @aghostwaits

Website: aghostwaits.com

Instagram: @notadams

 

Anything else you're dying to mention and I have merely forgotten to ask?

 

Nothing leaps to mind. Thank you for such wonderful questions!

 

Thanks for the interview!

 

© by Mike Haberfelner


Legal note: (re)Search my Trash cannot
and shall not be held responsible for
content of sites from a third party.




Thanks for watching !!!



 

 

In times of uncertainty of a possible zombie outbreak, a woman has to decide between two men - only one of them's one of the undead.

 

There's No Such Thing as Zombies
starring
Luana Ribeira, Rudy Barrow and Rami Hilmi
special appearances by
Debra Lamb and Lynn Lowry

 

directed by
Eddie Bammeke

written by
Michael Haberfelner

produced by
Michael Haberfelner, Luana Ribeira and Eddie Bammeke

 

now streaming at

Amazon

Amazon UK

Vimeo

 

 

 

Robots and rats,
demons and potholes,
cuddly toys and
shopping mall Santas,
love and death and everything in between,
Tales to Chill
Your Bones to

is all of that.

 

Tales to Chill
Your Bones to
-
a collection of short stories and mini-plays
ranging from the horrific to the darkly humourous,
from the post-apocalyptic
to the weirdly romantic,
tales that will give you a chill and maybe a chuckle, all thought up by
the twisted mind of
screenwriter and film reviewer
Michael Haberfelner.

 

Tales to Chill
Your Bones to

the new anthology by
Michael Haberfelner

 

Out now from
Amazon!!!