John Pata is a brilliant director, writer, and producer of Independent Horror Films and a close personal friend of mine. He has let me sleep on his couch, eat his food, shit in his toilet and now he has granted me an interview that I have waited for longer than anyone could ever have imagined. (cue drumroll....) The wait was well worth it, as John Pata has gone into great detail in every question that he has answered. Hope all my readers enjoy this epic interview!
Who are your influences, director-wise, in the genre of horror or non-horror?
Well, there is only one way not to sound cliche here, and that is not to name drop all the typical influential horror directors. So I won't. But yeah, all the typical directors, for sure. Probably two directors that top my list are
Lloyd Kaufman and
Robert Rodriquez. Both are such DIY, independent directors who have really established their own way of filmmaking.
Lloyd's attitude, perseverance and integrity are extremely encouraging. Having watched all his films and making-ofs, reading all his books and seeing him many times at conventions, he continues to inspire me. Meeting him in 2006 is what finally pushed me to write
Better Off Undead. At the end of the credits there is a personal thank you to
Lloyd.
As for
Rodriquez, fuck, is there a better example of a director who does what he wants and how he wants to? He doesn't film in
LA or
NYC, pretty much
Austin or
Mexico. There is so much about that man that I completely respect and admire. On many of his films he is pretty much a one man show. He writes, directs, edits, operates the camera, scores the film and films in his home town. He does all his post-production in his garage for fuck sake. The way I made
BOU is like how he makes his films. Except for he is far more talented. And rich. And makes better films. With bigger budgets. And is extremely innovative. Fuck, okay, so I am nothing like him. Dammit.
When did you first start getting into horror movies, watching them and/or directing them?Watching them, seriously as long as I can remember. I have a brother that is seven years older, so he was in middle school and would have friends sleep over and I remember watching horror movies with them. When I was probably 8 or 9, I was in a
Blockbuster with my dad and he came up to me and said, "
John, you like horror movies, have you seen this one?" He held up a VHS, I responded no, which he then went to the counter and talked to employee into selling him that movie, which was
Night of the Living Dead. He said if I liked horror I had to see that one. Aside from
NOTLD I pretty much saw the more mainstream horror when I was younger. Then my life changed when I was 10. My best friend Sam and I rented
The Evil Dead based on a recommendation from the video store clerk. Holy. Fuck. I was blown away. It was that point that I wanted to watch all horror, no-budget or big-budget. It didn't matter. If it was horror, I wanted to see it. No film to this day has had an impact on me like
The Evil Dead.
As for "directing", I started making backyard movies with
Sam and our friend
Eric when I was in middle school.
Night of the Living Seizure People was our first one, then the next day we made
Dance Party Slaughter. They were spur-of-the-moment, complete
improv movies. A couple followed,
Jaws 1999, which was half live action/stop motion with a toy shark. Our culmination of backyard cinema was
Night of the Living Seizure People II: Shake, Rattle and Die.
Better Off Undead was my official first time directing a horror film.
How long did it take you to write a fleshed-out script or screenplay for Better Off Undead?2 and a half months is probably a reasonable answer. I started writing it in my
Northern Renaissance Art History class. I had that class Tuesday and Thursday, and every day I would write the script in my notebook instead of taking notes. I would say 60% of the script was written then. I would write out scenes that came to mind, or bits of dialog. I didn't exactly have the context of it all, just the subject matter. Once I filled up the notebook, I would spend my Friday and Saturday nights in the 24 hour computer lab on campus typing it out. This is where everything was pieced together. I was taking the individual scenes or chunks of dialog and try to figure out how to have them fit.
Where did you come up with the ideas for Better Off Undead?Well, a lot of the dialog was either conversations I had before, or have been thinking about. For example,
Jordan Brown and I did set up a bet about ejaculating four times in an hour. I was a senior in high school and he was a junior. For the record, I was saying he could NOT get off four times. We had everything worked out, what the rules/guidelines were, and so on. He was adamant he could do it, yet he never put his money where his mouth was.
When I was younger I used to get so upset at the end of
A New Hope because
Chewy never got a medal. I'm pretty sure I expected it to happen one of those times, sadly I was disappointed every time.
I did find my dad's porn when I was 14. I didn't jack off to it, but I did think about how weird it was to hold the vary magazines that my dad jerked off to.
For most of the dialog, I thought about who was going to play the characters. I pretty much knew who was going to play who, and I knew no one had an experience, so I wanted the dialog to be as natural for them as possible. I was fearful of clunky, uncomfortable and awkward dialog. In turn, I wrote like we talk.
There was no doubt in my mind that whiskey was going to be included. The cast and crew of
BOU are my close friends, and we spent a lot of time watching horror films and drinking whiskey. We watched all kinds of horror, but we particularly liked zombies films. It was only appropriate to write a zombie script and include whiskey.
Anytime I was coming up with ideas about gore/action, I thought about what we had available and what we could afford. The budget came straight out of my pocket, so I knew it wasn't going to be much. I came up with a mental list of what I knew we couldn't pull off: fire/explosions, gun shots, etc. and in turn came up with a list of what I thought we could pull off. I figured I could make some shitty squibs at the time, so guns were out of the question. I figured hitting someone with an axe and baseball were much easier than shooting someone. We used a real axe and bat as much as possible, but when someone got it, the fake weapons were used. I made the fake weapons out of Styrofoam.
Were there any scenes shot that seemed like they would look better than they did once you reviewed them on film?There's a couple, mainly when the characters make their way through the comic book shop. The audio is kind of rough there, mainly because we didn't figure out we had a mic cord long enough to make a boom mic. But the scene I was hoping would be better than it is takes place after the main characters have their first run in with a zombie. They are walking down the street and talking about what happened and what to do. I had this idea it would look really impressive to do as one long tracking shot, no cuts and no different angles. Well, I fucked that one up. First off, the shot is over exposed which bugs the fuck out of me. Second, we didn't have a steadycam so the camera bounces a little more than I'd like. Also, we had some issues with the audio, and while the deliveries were good, there is some dialog that gets missed because it's a little quiet. We should have broke it up considering there is a lot of dialog there. I toyed with cutting that scene all together, but decided against it because cutting that scene would mean cutting out parts later that reference it. Oh well, fuck it. We learned from it, and that's all that matters.
Something similar is jokes I thought would get more laughs than they did. But comedy is difficult, because it all depends on the viewer and their sense of humor. I like paying attention during screenings to see what gets the most laughs.
BOU showed at the
CryptiCon 2008 Film Fest in
Minneapolis, and in that screening there were laughs I haven't heard before. That was an incredible feeling.
Here's a quick story about jokes falling flat (
Quick? Who am I kidding? Look at how fucking wordy this whole thing is). From the get go, I was nervous about the humor. I was nervous the humor might not come across, and I feel the film relies on the humor to set it apart. Once I had the film finished, I held a "private screening" for the everyone who worked on the film, the bands and close friends and family. I bought a bunch of food and beer for everyone, which was about 40 people total. And this was going to be the first time any of them saw any of the film. I decided to have a little fun, and cut together a "different" version of the film, which is on the DVD,
Better Off Gay. For those that haven't seen it, I re-cut a scene and dubbed most of the dialog. So now the scene plays as two characters making an agreement to trade hand jobs for blow jobs. No one knew I was going to do this. So I gave a quick spiel and started the film, which was
Better Off Gay. Everyone laughed and once it was over we really watched
BOU. There was hardly any laughs. It was fucking quiet.
Dale,
Drew and
Brown (the main cast) laughed at each other, but that seemed like that was it. Halfway through I felt like we completely failed. I just sat by the beer and started slamming them down. I was so down. I felt so fucking shitty and was in a position where I didn't know what to do. The next day we recorded the commentaries and I felt a little better. I was talking with
Dale about it, and he said he really thinks showing
Better Off Gay killed it. Even though everyone laughed, he thought everyone was so excited that the little tease but a dampen on the excitement. Regardless, let's just say I was very relieved when we had the public premiere with two sold out screenings, over 500 people total, and the laughter took over the theater.
What type of camera did you use to film Better Off Undead?Whoa boy, time to get technical. We used a
Panasonic AG-DVC30P, which is a
3CCD using digital format with a external
RODE NTG-2 mic. This is the camera our DP,
Colin, had so it's the camera we used. Not only did we use the camera for filming, but was used to record all the sound effects and music.
You said the film cost around $700 to make. Where did most of the money go into? Looking back, I sometimes ask myself that question. After seeing the film I occasionally think 700 bucks sounds like more than it looks. The majority of the budget, which came straight out of my pocket, probably went to video tapes and corn syrup. I provided food when we'd film, but it was always really shitty; pretty much sandwiches made of bread, meat and cheese and potato chips. I fair amount of money went to props. We went with pretty basic make-up, so not much money there. To be completely honest, the money didn't go to the special effects, that was pretty much the cheapest part. I handled the special effects, and tried to figure everything out the cheapest way possible. I used some latex, which I got a small bottle from a hobby store for 6 bucks. All the intestines were made from pantyhose stuffed with cotton, so that was extremely cheap. Anything you see a zombie actually chewing on something, or biting into something, it's a loaf of Italian bread covered in fake blood. The loaves of bread were only 99 cents each. The body casts were made from packaging tape, which my mom got for free from work. So to answer that question, I have no fucking clue. I might have to pull out all the receipts and take another look.
What part of the whole filmmaking process was your favorite?It's so fucking difficult to pick a favorite, here's why I: each step of the process is fucking exciting. I know it's probably cliche and generic to say, but fuck it. It's true. When all is said and done, I really like post-production, that's really when everything comes to life. Especially on
BOU. Keep in mind, this was our first time doing anything like this, so we had no fucking clue what we were actually doing. I thought about it a lot, and prepared as much as possible, but during filming I wasn't sure if anything would be usable. Then came post-production, and I realized that we actually did kind of know what were doing. So that was really exciting for me. Plus, I seriously fucking love editing. Before
BOU, my only editing was done VCR-to-VCR. In high school I made a film for a class, and got to use the AV room where they had editing equipment for VHS tapes. Then
BOU was finished filming and it was my turn to learn editing on a computer.
Colin (the DP) had a computer with
Adobe Premiere so that's what we used.
Colin cut together a few small scenes, just to show me how to do it. All in all, he showed me the program for about 3 hours, and then I took over. I went editing crazy. The first day I edited I worked for 27 hours. I probably spent close to 200 hours editing, and that was just for the visuals. We recorded every sound effect you hear, and that was fucking awesome. Especially creating all their gore sound effects. A lot of work went into the sounds. For example, there is a head crush in the film which the sound of that is comprised of 11 different sounds.
Your least favorite?Getting everything together.
As a filmmaker, do you prefer to run the whole show and not deviate from your plan, or do you take advice or suggestions from your peers in a teamwork kind of way?I definitely took ideas from others. Sometimes the ideas were great, and worked out. Other times I didn't care of them, so they were scraped. It think it important to listen to other people's thoughts, because one person can't think of everything. There were times someone suggested something to complement what was written in the script and I was dumbfounded I didn't think of that. Sometimes the suggestions were so obvious, but there was so much going on I didn't think of it. At the same time, I think you do have to be strict and stern sometimes. One suggestion can quickly turn into everyone suggesting tons of ideas, and it gets out of control quickly.
One thing that was important to me was for the dialogue to seem as natural as possible. For all my scripts, I tell the actors that the words on the page are essentially a foundation. Those are my words, the way I speak. Not everyone speaks the same way as I do. I always tell them if they can say the same thing but in different words, and it is more natural for them, do it.
Drew's roommate (the one he got to suck face with during the dream sequence) is pretty attractive. Do you see yourself using her in any more productions as some nice eye-candy? (hint hint: nude scene!)Well, she now lives in
Louisiana, so we would have to have a pretty good budget to fly her up here. But I would like to see what else she could do. Some people don't pick up on this, but she is in the dream sequence and the roommate that got bit. In the dream sequence you don't really see her face much, so I can see why people would not catch that. She was pretty nervous about her dialog, so I kept trying to calm her down. When the day of filming came, we rehearsed once and she fucking nailed it. After the first rehearsal, I was like, "
Fuck it, let's start rolling." I thought she did great and would like to see what else she could do.
And I am going to say something here that you, and others, might not like. I know it's not very "horror" to do, but I don't have any intentions of having nude scenes. Well, at least nude scenes of females. Bring on the dick! There needs to be more dick shown in films. Don't get me wrong here, I love tits as much as the next guy, but dick needs some love too. However, there has been a fair share of appearances by dicks in films lately, especially in comedies. But not enough. There's never enough dick.
Do any of the actors have any prior acting experience?No, not really.
Jordan (
Evan)
Brown had done a little acting in some shorts our friend made. But those were made pretty much on the spot. No one that worked on the film, cast or crew, had ANY formal experience/education.
John, did you come up with the dream sequence? ( I really liked that part and was sorta surprised that he was just dreaming)Why do you even ask that question? Do you doubt my ability to write such an awesome scene? I am offended. Fuck yeah I wrote that shit.
Okay, truth is that
Drew (
Marcus) came up with it. Well, actually he HAD that dream. I was writing
BOU and he told me about this dream he had and asked if there was anyway I could write it in. I found the spot and wrote it into the script. I am so happy he shared that dream with me.
Will you be working on any new films in the near future??Oh man, do I have some projects. Where do I start. Well, last summer I began working on
Among The Dead, my full length zombie script.
ATD is not a sequel, but takes place at the same time as
BOU. While
BOU takes place on the first day of the outbreak,
ATD spans across the first seven days of the outbreak. The script is completely different. I look at
BOU as a
Troma-esque fun film.
ATD is a serious script, there is some humor throughout, but nothing goofy like
BOU. In fact, I don't exactly think calling it a zombie script is appropriate. It is a character driven horror film. The zombies are really just a second thought, they set the scenario for what takes place. Anyway, we ran into all kinds of trouble filming and as of right now,
ATD is placed on the back burner. Looking at the situation, I have realized that
ATD might be a little too ambitious for right now. I flat out love this script. It is definitely my favorite script I have written so far. I want to see this film made, but only when the time is right. For the whole scoop on how we got shit on and fucked over, check out the blog at
myspace.com/amongthedeadmovieAside from
ATD, I co-write a slasher script with my best friend
Sam Warnke called
Phineas, which is about
Phineas Gauge as the killer. For those that don't know who
Phineas Gauge is, he was a railroad worker who survived an accident in 1848 where a railroad spike went through his head and severed the two halves of his brain. Even though he survived, he was not able to control his emotions. We watched a shitty dramatization video of this in high school, and pretty much talked about making a slasher script based on
Phineas since.
Phineas follows a church group of 20-somethings at some cabins on
Lake Michigan recently purchased by their church. They are there to tidy up the places and have a run in with some partyers who are camping out on the beach. But something, actually someone, is lurking in the woods...and it's
Phineas Gauge. Sure, he died in 1860 and it makes no sense for him to be killings people in 2009, but who the fuck cares?
Sam and I talked about this concept for many years, and it more or less came down to what kind of people do we want to kill off. A bunch of
Christians came to mind. All I will say is that
Phineas is a very ridiculous script filled with tons of blood.
That does it for my full length scripts for now. I have many shorts written, and have begun taking a couple of them past the script stage to the very early pre-production stage. Almost all of them are horror, or at least horror based. I just recently opened a screen printing shop (enter shameless plug here:
theoffbeatpress.com) so my time to film has been severely limited. It will happen soon. Since
Grindhouse came out, I have had an idea for a fake trailer for film called
Sascrotch. I'm not going to say anything more about that, just that I would really like to get around to that soon.
Have you ever considered exploring any other genres besides horror?For sure. I can say this, horror is the genre I plan on working the most in, but I will definitely dabble outside horror. I have a ton of shorts written, one is a comedy titled 44oz., which is about if forced to, would you rather drink 44oz. of semen or diarrhea. I love comedy. I think comedy is such a great genre, but I feel not many people do it right. I think comedy is hard to pull off. Nowadays so many comedies start out hilarious, but then loose the humor in the third act to get serious and bring together the story. Which can be fine, but the first half and second half feel like completely different scripts. I am a big fan of drama films with the right amount of comedy mixed in. Two examples that come to mind are
Stand By Me and
The Shawshank Redemption. I would love to make a film on that level someday.
If you are working on some new films, do you plan on using any of the same cast or people that worked on Better Off Undead??For sure. You will see familiar faces in a lot of projects I do. I can almost promise the main people who worked on
BOU will work on most my projects. Whether or not that is in front or behind the camera, time will tell. After all, I know those suckers will work for free.
Where is the one place in the world that you would want to film in the most??I don't think I have a specific location I'd want to film in. To be honest, I never really thought about it before. Sure, it would be awesome to film on the land where
The Evil Dead was filmed, or in
Martha's Vineyard where Jaws was shot, just to name a couple.
I know this isn't exactly specific, but I want to film in non-traditional places. In other words;
Fuck Hollywood. Fuck NYC.
Sure those cities offer a lot, blah blah blah, but we've seen it how many times before? I'd like to film in the cities that get overlooked. My dream would be to film a bigger budgeted film in
Oshkosh and the
Fox Valley. Now when I say "bigger budgeted", I don't mean "big budget". We filmed
BOU for $700 for fuck sake, I am not talking
Transformers 3 here.
There was some very cool punk rock in your film. What are some bands that you really want to have in any of your upcoming films?Before I answer that, I want to acknowledge the music that we used. All the music you hear, aside from
The Suicide Machines, is from local bands.
The Suicide Machines are my favorite band, and I know the singer a bit so one day I wrote to him asking about using a song or two. Instantly, he said yes.
Dale, who plays
Chris, is the lead singer for
The Lemurs and he told me they wanted to write a song for the film. One day, he tells me about a title the bass player,
Crowley, came up with...
Better Off Undead. At this point I didn't have a title for the film, even though we were halfway through filming (the working title was
Untitled Zombie Story Full of Stupid Dick Jokes written by
John Pata). I thought about it for a bit and
BOU was so much better than anything I had in mind, I called
Crowley and asked for his permission to use the title and said then they get the theme song. And let's face it, that song fucking rocks.
Back to your question, I don't know if I can really answer that because I feel each project warrants its own music. I could easily say I want to use this band or that band, but only if the music fits. From here on out, I only plan on using a song if it fits. I am much more interested in using music composed for the film than trying to fit in a band's song. I think it is safe to say there will always be some sort of punk rock elements to all my films, because punk rock music is what I know, it's what I have spent more than half my life listening to. But I have to face it, I definitely plan on using
The Lemurs again. Hell, in my mind, they get dibs at writing songs for all of my bigger projects. Even if it's only used in the ending credits, I will use them somehow. I do like the idea of using as much local bands as possible. As for specific bands, fuck, there's too many. There are some non-punk rock bands I wouldn't mind using;
Angry Johnny and The Killbillies, and lately I have been thinking of
The Who's "
I Can't Explain", I think that song could really add to a scene. I adapted a short story from a
Pig Destroyer album that uses
The Pixies song "
Debaser", which is pretty fucking awesome considering I am a huge
Pixies fan.
Any last words?Did anyone read this entire thing??? Holy fuck, I need to learn to shut up. Jesus. Christ.
First and foremost, thank you
Shu, for not only giving me some time here, but for supporting independent cinema.
We are a bunch of schmucks who wanted to have fun and make an attempt at making a film. We did this solely for fun and because we love horror. If any of this sounds interesting, and you wanna find out more and/or check out
Better Off Undead, go to
myspace.com/better_off_undead or email me at
betteroffundead@hotmail.com. We have DVDs and T-shirts for sale, both are 10 bucks each. The DVD comes with over 3 hours of special features, including a 30 minute making-of, 4 commentary tracks, a built in drinking game including a cast and crew commentary of us playing the drinking game. All the money from the DVDs and T-shirts go into our next projects, not our pockets. If your friend(s) have a DVD, make a copy for you and all your friends. We just want people to see what some jackasses in
Wisconsin did for fun one summer.
Keep creating and supporting independent horror, and not just horror but everything independent.
Again, thanks
Shu for letting me have verbal diarrhea for way too long. You fucking rock buddy. Take care and so long.
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