A month or two ago I had the opportunity to chat with Oscar Madrid, the director and co-writer of the horror comedy, The Bloodfest Club. If you don’t remember, I posted the trailer for the short film here (check it out if you haven’t watch it yet). The final touches are being made on the short film and so at any point within the next couple of months we should be able to watch the completed product.
Below you will find the entire transcript of the film minus the boring administrative stuff in the beginning and end. Oscar provides honest and very detailed answers to the questions so if you want to learn how to make an awesome low budget film I highly recommend reading this interview. Be aware, there are a few spoilers in this interview even though a full length feature doesn’t actually exist yet. Enjoy!
Alex DiGiovanna: Hello
Oscar Madrid: Hey Alex
AD: Hey How’s it going?
OM: Pretty good how are you?
AD: Oh not too bad.
OM: I really appreciate your time and interest. It’s really nice of you to have any sort of interest in the project.
AD: I loved the Trailer, absolutely loved it.
OM: Ok cool, thank you.
AD: No problem. So to start off, how did this idea formulate in your head, you and Jim? Andy how did it take off?
OM: We originally were talking about doing a film that would work within a micro budget, doing that film locally and trying to think of the horror genre being more ideal for a low budget. Jim is a huge fan of horror films and, really, I had no exposure to them but I was a huge fan of comedies of the 80s and we talked about our mutual affection for John Hughes films and something about those films, they’re is some charm about those characters and people that you care about and thought that it would be interesting to mash those sort of real consequences into a horror film and not doing the traditional teens that are kind of stereotypes with no real sort of depth to them. We still want to do the stereotypes because there is something fun about those characters that we are familiar with but we started working through that process and then came up with this concept of the high school and what would happen if the breakfast club was attacked by alien zombies and it not being a direct spoof of the film but just being a jumping off point. So that’s where it kind of started and we just started through the outline.
AD: Huh. And did you say Alien zombies?
OM: Alien Zombies, yeah. So in the trailer you get a sense that there is like some sort of evil lurking and really for the feature length film there is kind of a pretty big back story about this high school that just so happens to be built on this Indian burial ground where, 500 years ago, there was this alien spaceship that crash landed in a native American village and a battle ensued and the native Americans buried these sort of strange creatures along with them in their burial ground. And local legend, you know, basically this local legend attracts this history professor to the town and comes to the high school where Sonny the janitor works and he is excavating the school grounds trying to find some evidence and artifacts related to these aliens and no one believes him and he is eventually asked to leave the school because he is kind of promoting this myth and teaching it as fact. Anyway, Sonny is up, he is kind of the eyes and ears of the school so he is very aware that something like this could occur. And if a cheerleader dumps their Slurpee in the back of the school, sonny always assumes that it’s a toxic waste fill or something. He has quite an imagination so he’s ready for this alien zombie resurrection when it actually occurs and the professor summons the ancient rites and the alien zombies storm the school on the night of the senior lock in. It’s the night of the senior lock in so there is only a few teachers there and chaperones and the parents don’t expect their kids back home until the next day so it’s the perfect storm and sonny has to step up and become the hero and, as we say, he has to set down his mop and pick up a weapon and protect the school.
AD: [laughs]. That is definitely an interesting little concept you got going on there. I must say, a lot of blending of a lot of different genres too. It’s very cool.
Let me get this straight, senior lock in, that’s just the night before graduation the seniors just kind of sleep in the school?
OM: Yeah, exactly. I had one my senior year and that’s exactly what it is. Everyone graduates that afternoon and then comes back to the school with a few teachers supervising and you stay the night in the school, there’s a dance and all kinds of activities going on and games and fun and one last hoorah before you leave high school. But yeah, the parents drop you off for it and pick you up in the morning.
AD: Is there any particular reason you chose the lock-in vs. prom night for instance?
OM: Yeah, so I think I’ve seen prom night done a few times and I think there is a movie Dance of the Dead that actually came out where it was prom night focused and I see that as more of an obvious choice and the lock-in made sense because even on prom night parents expect their kids home before, you know, 7 am on the next morning. And with the lock-in it was kind of like, ok, we’ll see you tomorrow sort of thing and it just kind of sets the stage for a little more tension and believability.
AD: Ok. And so, why the name The Bloodfest Club? Where did that come from?
OM: [Laughs] Yeah it is kind of goofy, we were talking about these characters and this group of students and you know the John Hughes influence obviously The Breakfast Club, but we thought it was kind of the perfect marriage between what we wanted to achieve as far as developing these really interesting characters that delivered some believable dialogue and what we wanted to promote as far as getting across the message that this is not a standard comedy, this is going to be gory and things are going to be real and there are going to be moments that you lose characters that you care about and its going to be bloody. And so we thought it was a goofy title but not to imply that it is a direct send-up of the breakfast club because there are other influences that you just pointed out, like The Karate Kid, Monster Squad and Evil Dead 2.
AD: Mhmm..And I’m sure you had a lot of other homages, I was watching the behind the scenes video I think last week and you did Missing in Action 2.
Both: [Laughs]
OM: There is some great, It was funny because Jim had turned me on to the whole Chuck Norris phenomenon before it actually became so popular and standard now. Everyone gets the chuck Norris’ references and jokes. Jim, to his credit or discredit, but he had a scrapbook from when he was a kid of Chuck Norris from like the early 80s
AD: Oh Wow.
Both: [Laughs]
OM: So since the early 80s he and his buddies would cut out these Chuck Norris, these movie posters for these chuck Norris films and they would build up this week before the screening and they would go see these movies and he was really into him and I really think this needs to be part of our character, he is really, this janitor Sonny Kane is really inspired by action films and he lives his life like he is in a movie but he is a good natured guy, good hearted guy who always wants to do right but he is a little off you know. The kids kind of make fun of him and give him a hard time but deep down he means well and he really has an opportunity to step up and be a hero for them and that’s where we really want to create this loveable guy, that you know when he gets in the heat of the moment he turns into Arnold Schwarzenegger, he turns into John Rambo, he has that ability to kind of summon that from deep down and turn into something that he’s not expected too.
AD: Hence the fantastic quote “nobody eats my kids in my school!”
Both: [laughs]
OM: Yeah, exactly! It was a challenge for us so we shot this trailer and short film which we want to get in front of you as soon as we have a couple finishing touches, we shot this short film over a two day period last August, and we wanted to give people kind of a preview of what we wanted to do for a feature length and try to show that this beginning, middle and end in the development of the character in a very short period of time and so in the beginning of the short film you’ll kind of see the kids giving him a hard time and then he has this sort of flashback and the kids walk away and we kind of explore Sonny and where he came from and its really, it’s this training he got from this other, wise janitor that worked in the school and mentored him and that’s why he is doing all the karate and tai chi, and all of that is that this guy has instilled all these values and said hey, I’m going to give you this training and someday you’re going to need to use it, someday you are going to come to the crossroads of your destiny and you’re going to have to make a choice, are you going to become the common garden slug or are you going to become a dragon that is going to soar [laughs] and so he kind of has this whole background and the kids make fun of him, he has these terrible crappy dragon tattoos on his arms and everyone thinks it’s kind of a joke but when they really need him he is able to pull it together and really apply this training and take charge because it is his destiny to kind of lead these kids to safety.
AD: So he is the Dragon Warrior?
Both: [laughs]
OM: He is exactly, exactly. And he has these inner thoughts, these sort of inner monologues, there is this great chuck Norris film called The Octogon and you hear these sort of inner thoughts of Chuck during that movie and we applied a very similar thing. Yyou get a little of it during the short film but you kind of hear Sonny saying in his head [Oscar whispers] “I must summon my strength” [laughs] you know he’s like “I must become the warrior” you know and then he’s got to step up. [laughs] We just wanted to have fun with it and just not take ourselves too seriously but get a really good talented crew around us and make us look good and I think we’ll eventually get that done but hopefully we’ll get enough interest that we can make the proper feature length film because the short is just that, it’s a preview, it’s just a launching point for the full length thing.
AD: So how far are you on your way to making the feature? Have you gotten any financing at all, even a little?
OM: We do, we have a couple of investors, but you know, we’ve got a long way to go and our goal is to just see if we can expand the outreach a little bit and maybe put the short and a trailer into a couple of festivals and get some more interest and get people to read the screenplay and really just generate that overall interest that we need to bring in the rest of the investors and even attach a name actor to the role of the teacher; that sort of creates this big mess with the aliens so we are going to reach out to some people and see if we can attend some conventions. Tonight is actually the first time we are screening the trailer for this event in St. Louis where they are going to debut Hobo with a Shotgun, the St. Louis premiere
AD: Oohh nice [laughs]
OM: Yeah it’s fun. I haven’t seen the film and I heard it was pretty entertaining and they are going to show our trailer before that film so I’m excited to have a 100 new people see it.
AD: Well you are going to have the perfect audience.
OM: Yeah exactly, you know this cult film audience that is, you’re right, that is exactly who we want to get this out to so it’s going to be fun to see the trailer on the big screen for the first time.
AD: We’ll good luck with that
OM: Thank you
AD: I know when I had reached out I saw that somebody from Toronto After Dark was trying to contact you guys, have you been able to do anything with that? Are you going to submit it to Toronto?
OM: Yeah, they had contacted us. We’ve been working hard on making a number of tweaks to the actual sound design, but everything I mean all the music is done and everything is ready to go and we kind of feel like we’ve been at this point for a few weeks now [giggles] but every once in a while we will look at the short and say oh ‘you know what we can make this just a little bit better’ or ‘we can change this just a bit,’ and I think we’ve got all those changes in now and we are just waiting for that final sound design to be laid in and then we are going to send that screener to Toronto After Dark and also to the Saint Louis International Film Festival which is going to be later this fall. It would be great to have it shown at either one of those festivals that would be amazing; of course we want to get it in your hands as well.
AD: [laughs] Yeah.
OM: We are pretty excited about it.
AD: So about the filmmaking itself, cause when I was watching the behind the scenes and specifically the Tai Chi scene, all of that was improvised apparently, or so it was said, how much of the film was improvised, or at least the short version of it, was there a decent amount or did you guys have Jim go off the script and then they kind of went and did their own thing too?
OM: That’s a good question. None of it was improvised, we spent like four years writing this screenplay, the feature length, and we wanted to try to find what was the best way we could condense some of that and give you a sense of who this janitor is and the situation and so we kind of extracted some scenes that we thought would be fun for the short so we’ve been really careful, and the dialogue and working through it and getting notes and feedback and really sort of fine tuning all of that and we stuck to the script. One of the things we did have in the script was that they would perform Tai Chi but, to be honest, I didn’t know anything about Tai Chi [laughs] so we started looking things up on YouTube and watching DVDs and Jim had come up with a little bit of a routine and worked through it with Peter Mayor who plays the Sensei in the short. Yeah I think they did a great job. It was funny. In the short film you kind of find a little more humor because they go through all those motions and then he starts going into like an air guitar and they kind of rock out together in from of the sunset and it looks really cool.
AD: [laughs]-I like that, I’m a big fan of the air guitar, I’m a professional myself [laughs].
OM: That’s cool. Yeah I think he did air drums and air keyboard as well.
AD: [laughs] Oh impressive. Going all out.
How big was the crew that you were working with?
OM: It was around 30 people and a lot of them had relocated so we had our cinematographer, who works out in LA, he came back in. Everyone originated from St. Louis and then started working in the industry so they are all over, they are scattered around the country. These are people we were close to or we knew somebody who knew somebody and said ‘oh this guy would be great, let’s add him to the crew’ he’s really good. So we kind of built the crew organically like that and it was really a great group, our biggest thing we said is that we wanted to work with people we really liked and had fun with, but that could do a really great job. It’s really hard to find those types of people but we were able to pull it together and those guys were awesome, I mean we know enough just to be dangerous and they really kept us honest and kept it true to the vision. We want, our biggest motto is, “please contribute ideas because it really isn’t about whether Jim or myself has the idea, it’s about who has the best idea” so if we had a line in the dialogue that sucks and you think it can be improved tell us, and it might be hard to take at first but in the end it’s going to be better.
AD: Gotcha. And what did you find to be the toughest part about making this short, was it getting the entire crew together or was it trying to pick the specific items from the script that you wanted to condense?
OM: Yeah, that was tough. In the end you get a little bit of a snapshot of things but it’s not the full story we want to tell. So that was pretty difficult, piecing together what made it work and what made sense and I think the trailer on its own gives you a pretty good idea, so it makes me confident that the short is just a little deeper dive into it. But yeah, I think that’s a good area that we did spend a lot of time on because once we got to the process of planning and we had all the right people that pulled things together that seemed like it would be impossible, like finding a school that would let us shoot this and finding the perfect location for the training ground and getting the right actors and all of that came together a lot more easily than I expected it too.
AD: Oh good. That’s very good. So where did you guys get the wig from? [laughs] Because I was showing my sister the trailer and she said that the wig was even more hideous then the one Joe Dirt wore, which, I think both are fantastic [laughs]. How did you find that wig? [laughs]
OM: Yeah, the hair and makeup people, Adrienne Sandusky and Patrice Singletary, they are really great and there is this shop, this salon that was local and I guess they had some manufacture vendor that they reached out to, we kind of gave them some visuals of like some 80s rockers, and I forgot who specifically we called out, but they matched it exactly to the photos that we had. We just imagined this guy who had this really outdated look but not so outdated that is would be unbelievable as far as the current date stuff, like I mean it still is ridiculous, we totally admit that, but [laughs] for the era, we just needed the two really pre-parable wigs, and knowing that we had a short period of time I didn’t really want to make Jim grow his hair out long [laughs] considering the short was only going to be a couple of days and then we’d go back to the table and work on the feature but, yeah, they just found it from local place. I don’t even think they had to order it, I think those things were in stock [laughs] which is scary.
AD: Did Jim ever walk around just wearing it randomly? [laughs] Off the shoot, kind of go shopping with it on?
Both: [laughs]
OM: [Laughs] Ahh noo. I would love to have done that. I think he even mentions in the behind the scenes that he’s a sweater, and he is not lying. The guy just drips, I mean it’s just like a river of sweat. It’s really almost unmanageable and the crew did a great job of getting him clean [laughs], but I mean, for him to keep those wigs on and stuff man, it’s brutal for him.
AD: [laughs]Oh man. So I guess, question. Well, no, before that. This might be the most important question I ask today.
OM: Ok
AD: Was Jim actually a janitor at one point in life?
Both: [laughs]
OM: Ahh, no. He was not. But the interesting is that was kind of an inside joke, I think we put that in his bio.
AD: [laughs] Yeah
OM: He was not, but we had an audition locally, at one point we were thinking about doing the trailer like a year or two ago and we kind of scrapped the idea because we had to find the perfect locations and we didn’t really have those. At that point a couple of years ago we did an audition for some of the kids, the roles of the high school kids, you see a couple of them in the trailer but there is another one as well but, we did an audition and one of the forms the actors filled out before they read, one of them, this guy said I want to audition for the part of the janitor which wasn’t on the table, Jim was going to play that role, but I guess he saw the logline and the description and he thought might as well ask, but on his little skills section he put, that he thought he could play the janitor because he actually had janitorial experience
[laughs]
So , we thought that was brilliant [laughs], I was like Jim, [laughs] we wanted to have fun with his bio and we’ve never forgotten about that guy who put that down because that was nicely played but also really hilarious at the same time
AD: [laughs] That’s awesome
[laughs]
AD: Question regarding the alien zombie, now that I know that it’s part Zombie [laughs].
OM: Yeah.
AD: Are you planning for it to be a rubber suit alien?
OM: Yeah, we definitely want to. There is something more real about that to me even though you know its fake, …less than the CGI stuff and first of all, that is pretty time consuming and at our budget, I don’t know how believable any CGI would work but I do know that I like the idea of a man in a suit, so that’s what we are planning to do. We’ve got a guy, Robot Monkey Lab, is the guy that is doing the practical effects for us. He’s already started building some of the stuff, he’s going to actually design the suits for the aliens, there is like seven of them I believe, and yeah it’s going to be really awesome and it’s probably going to be terrible for whoever has to be inside it. That’s going to be what really we want, is man in a suit.
AD: That makes me really happy [laughs]. Cause I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie Alien vs. Ninja, it’s a Japanese movie
OM: I haven’t, I need to check that out man
AD: Yeah, it’s hysterical.
OM: Yeah
AD: It was hysterical. Having the rubber alien just fighting a ninja, it was great, it was great
OM: That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s exactly what we need, and we want it to be pretty wild when Sonny is battling the final alien especially, it’s kind of a little bit of a showdown throughout the school and he tracks the alien down to the boiler room in the basement of the school, very Nightmare on Elm Street sort of thing and he has to face this creature and everything is on the line. It just seems better if we can have an actor there , you know? It is going to be exciting to shoot that.
AD: Now I recently just saw Attack the Block, have you heard of it?
OM: No.
AD: It’s like a genre mixing film like yours except, what it is is a bunch of inner city British teens scenes fighting aliens.
OM: Ohhh yeah, I think I have heard something about that.
AD: It’s awesome, I saw it last week, it was good and had me thinking, can we expect the janitor to enlist school children to fight against the creature with him, or is it more of the lines like the children are just going to hide and he’s the only protector?
OM: No, no, yeah absolutely, he definitely employs the kids to join the team and battle it out. They are pretty reluctant to do so. Everybody feels like they just need to get out of the school but Sonny is convinced they need to shut down the school, lock it down, and protect the town and that’s his real goal, is we are going to have to make a sacrifice for this town and not let these aliens out of the school. So yeah, he definitely gets the kids involved and they build traps and one of the kids, whose fate, actually, he perishes at the hands of one of these aliens, they actually use his body to invite the aliens into their trap so,
[laughs]
He’s one of the school jocks so he’s really muscular and they’ve got plenty of body to go around.
AD: Oh perfect.
[laughs]
AD: How much blood do you guys anticipate on using in this film? Gallons, if you want to give me gallons and figures. [laughs]
[laughs]
OM: Oh wow, yeah Alex, I don’t even know.
AD: Do you have any hope, like do you want to hit so much blood or do you want to say “eh we’ll go moderate here”
OM: Yeah, I think I’d like to use moderation in some scenes. And then there are at least two scenes in particular I’d like to really go over the top with it, so I think we want to rein it in a little bit and then really just go crazy with it. I don’t want it to be a bloodbath the entire time.
AD: Yeah
OM: I don’t want it to be totally distracting, but I think there are moments where it can be ridiculous, fun and crazy. So I really like the idea of a very serious gory situation, and actual actors, or characters that are really committed to the scene in this sort of ridiculous circumstance I think there is something about that that is really funny to me, and obviously it works for a lot of the great horror comedies. So yeah, we’ll pick our spots.
AD: Gotcha. I guess for my last question, just kind of for fun, do you have any really funny stories from the set?
[laughs]
OM: Yeah, some we can share, some we can’t. But
AD: understand
OM: I can tell you an interesting story, in all honesty it was very low key and it was very relaxed, and our assistant director, Aaron Crozier, who lives in Brooklyn, he’s doing a number of independent films, he just did a movie called Stake Land?
AD: Ohh yeah, I know exactly which one you’re talking about!
OM: Yeah, so he was assistant director on that and he was AD for our short but he is also our editor as well. But anyway, Aaron runs a really tight ship but at the same time, very fun and relaxed. I don’t know how he does it but he pulls it off, so there was really no drama to make for a great story but we did have an actor cast, whose name I have to keep confidential, but he was noteworthy, he had appeared in some horror films, and you’d probably recognize him or know the films, but he was cast to be the sensei and he didn’t show up. And…
AD: Wow
OM: [laughs] Yeah, so we had to scramble and I was on the phone at 3 am, before we shot, with this guys agent and we were trying to get him in town and he was not in any condition to come into town, to be discreet about it [laughs], and we scrambled and called a casting director, Joni Tackette, who casts for movies here in St. Louis like George Clooney’s Up in the Air and a few other films. She’s a great casting director and she bailed us out and found Peter Mayor, who played the sensei, and, in the end, did a job that was just extraordinary and so much better than the other actor would have done but at the time it was pretty desperate, we had no idea what we were going to do because our whole short and trailer revolved around that relationship. You know, it was going to be pretty tricky, and to get an actor to step in within literally like two hours was really tough. I was on the phone while we were shooting and when we had breaks as were starting to set up for the next shot. I was on my cell phone talking to an agent and working out the deal to bring him on.
It was more Hollywood than I would ever want to be. [laughs] We just have a good time being friends and hanging out and having just a very sort of relaxed non-Hollywoodish vibe going on and that was, I just didn’t want to deal with any of that drama. So that was different.
AD: Very Cool. Well thanks a lot, I really appreciate it.
OM: Oh yeah, no problem. I really appreciate your time, it really means a lot.
AD: Thanks man, I really appreciate it.
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