Best described as Hanna meets John Wick with a dash of Home Alone, Cooties directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion reunite on the incredibly violent Becky, which opens in various drive-in theaters and on VOD platforms this Friday, June 5th.
“King of Queens” actor/comedian Kevin James plays a villain for the very first time and squares off against an unlikely foe in Annabelle: Creation‘s Lulu Wilson.
“Kevin James plays Dominick, a Neo-nazi cult leader,” said the duo in an exclusive interview with Bloody Disgusting. “Our priority for casting was to find an actor who is charismatic and charming like many of the cult leaders we’ve heard about – the type of person who can control and persuade others calmly and intellectually. Kevin James is the type of person who you immediately want to become friends with, he’s magnetic. We love the contradiction of the main antagonist, who is captivating until his demented narcissistic hateful ideologies become clear, at which point he becomes all the more terrifying.”
The film centers on rebellious 14-year-old Becky (played by Lulu Wilson) as she’s brought to a weekend getaway at a lake house by her father in an effort to try to reconnect after her mother’s death. The trip takes a turn for the worse when a group of convicts on the run, led by the merciless Dominick (James), suddenly invade the lake house.
Becky, not daddy’s little girl anymore, decides to take matters into her own hands. Going up against several “big mean prison dudes” meant that the filmmakers had to go all-out with the violence.
“We suplexed the bloody crap out of any lines,” the duo emphatically tell us. “In our opinion, we did walk a very fine line with the tone, which was a balancing act trying to keep it fun but intense, violent but emotional, grounded but shocking. We worked hard to build Becky’s character in a way that made her motivations for revenge feel ‘realistic’. By showing what Becky has lost, allowed us to show her go full-tilt with revenge. The bad guys took everything from her so any physical violence she enacts on them is at least in the film justified. Additionally, when a small girl is fighting with big mean prison dudes, she won’t be able to just punch them out. She’ll need to inflict massive trauma to take them out of the picture.”
Becky is extraordinarily violent and scored an R-rating from the MPAA, but there was a brief moment it was tagged with an NC-17.
“We did have to make a few little edits here and there, but in reality, it was just a few shots or trimming a shot to get us an R,” they explain. “For example, there is a point where someone is stabbing someone else. Originally, we probably had over ten stabbing actions. For some reason, the MPAA thought that was excessive. We just had to cut out a few of those stabs. We love the R-rated version, so that’s the final cut.”
And while the on-screen violence will make many horror fans cringe, Kevin James kept the mood light during filming – even when he couldn’t get one of the film’s grossest gags to work.
“Kevin is hilarious on set, so there was never a dull moment or a break between shots where the entire set wasn’t laughing,” says the duo. “One of our favorites was when we were filming an intense moment where Kevin’s character takes a medical procedure into his own hands. As you can imagine, doing any kind of surgery is painful and difficult, but imagine doing it on yourself with no anesthesia?!
“Obviously, Kevin was acting this out with some grisly prosthetics that were rigged to cut away easily with a fake knife. Either the knife was too dulled or the fake appendage was too strong because it wasn’t cutting away,” they reveal. “Imagine an entire set watching a shot play out ten times longer than it was planned, all the while Kevin is screaming in pain. It was a mix of horribly hilarious, because the stupid thing [prosthetic] wouldn’t break, and scary because we didn’t know if Kevin was really feeling pain or just getting frustrated that it wouldn’t work. As the camera kept rolling and his yelling reaching new levels of freaking the fuck out, the crew and I didn’t know whether to laugh or help. He kept sawing and chopping, grunting and yelling and on and on until he finally hacked through the tendon and played out the scene until we said, ‘cut’. At which point he cracked up, letting us all know it was as funny as we thought it was.”
While Kevin James is the big name on the marquee, Milott and Murnion sing the praises of Lulu Wilson, who they called their secret weapon.
“For someone as young as Lulu, she seemed to have a firm grasp on all the malignant psychological themes and character trauma presented in those shows,” they told us. “Hopefully, Becky can go a long way in showing the talent, star power, and skill Lulu has to offer and then everyone will know.”
As for what’s next, “We’d love to see Becky continue to kick more Neo-nazi ass.”
The home invasion thriller Becky will be hitting drive-in theaters, digital and on-demand June 5th.
source https://bloody-disgusting.com/interviews/3619041/directors-becky-inflicting-massive-trauma-big-mean-prison-dudes-interview/
No comments:
Post a Comment