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| Symbol of a most dangerous game. |
Would you swat a fly for $1,000? If so, would you eat it if you were offered a bit more? Is there anything you wouldn’t do, if you were offered enough? Where would you draw the line?
13 Sins tells the story of a man who is drawn into accepting just such a challenge. It’s an adaptation of a Thai film, 13 Beloved. I asked director Daniel Stamm what led him to take it on.
“To be totally honest, it was pressure from my agent,” he said. “I was working with M Night Shyamalan on a script and I was very much in that world and not thinking about other work but my agent kept telling me I had to find a new project. There’s this belief in Hollywood that you only have a certain amount of time after one movie until people forget about you. I’d be sent a lot of projects I didn’t like but then my agent gave me the original version of this movie and I said I’d do it. He said whatever I wanted to keep I could keep and whatever I wanted to throw out I could throw out; he said ‘Do what you want with it.’
“I was very interested in it because in a normal movie you get to maybe one or two set pieces and the rest are like the glue that keeps it together. In this you could do 13 set pieces.”
It must have presented challenges, I suggest, because there was a danger of the story being too linear. Daniel agrees, and raises other concerns - the predictability of aspects of the narrative, for one, because “the movie’s called 13 sins so you know he’s going to get to 13 – he’s not going to fail at task four or task five. That’s why we brought in the subplot with the brother, so we could hold audience attention... We tried to keep it as fast as possible. We didn’t want a two hour movie that was just based on a gimmick.
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| Mark Webber in 13 Sins. |
“I felt it was very important that the audience could connect with the character. We discussed how many problems do you have to throw into the protagonist in the first act so he would do what he’s asked to do? In the first draft he didn’t have any problems and was motivated by pure greed. It was very dark, cynical and nihilistic.”
Quickly deciding that wouldn’t work, Daniel and the writers tried to get the balance right. “We ended up with a character who was basically a nice guy but under so much pressure that you understand why he did it because you and I or anyone would do it.”
When I interviewed Daniel about his last film, The Last Exorcism, he was very interested in the moral aspects of the narrative. I ask if that applied here too.
“Now that I think about it, this is almost the opposite journey from the one in that film,” he notes. “In The Last Exorcism we find a deeply corrupted character but the challenge was to still make him relatable. He’s a fixer, he’s a fraud, but he’s willing to get out and we’re betting the audience will accept him for that. He goes from corruption to a sincere journey that finishes with him making a stand against evil. At the same time, with the girl it’s the opposite journey because she has gone from pure country girl, sweet and innocent, to being corrupted by the Devil. What the source of her corruption is we don’t know, like here we don’t know who is behind the game or what the game is. I mean, we know the rules but we don’t know who’s behind it offering the money. The audience has one and a half hours to come up with theories about that. I don’t have an idea that’s going to blow their minds after that so I thought, why don’t I not reveal it at all and leave it in the imagination? The Thai film does reveal it and I think that’s a weak part of the movie.”
A lot of what makes the film work is its cast and the humanity they bring to the characters, I suggest.
“I was most excited about our whole cast,” he concurs. “It’s not a genre movie cast, especially not Mark Webber, who has worked with people like Woody Allen and Jim Jarmusch... he’s basically in every scene of the movie. He’s a fun actor to work with and he has amazing range. He can do the loveable pushover at the beginning but in a way that doesn’t get on our nerves. We need to be able to root for him and not just say ‘Come on, grow some balls!’ Then as the story goes on there’s stage where he transforms into a sort of bad ass action hero and it’s actually good for him. He doesn’t have any backlash or any negatives. But then there’s the stage where the addiction kicks in and it starts to have negative side effects but he can’t stop. It takes him to a darker place.
“He’s doing things that we enjoy seeing him do, he’s growing, he’s becoming someone else but it’s someone stronger. He’s becoming a real man, not in a macho way but in a good way. If he had been able to quit around challenge seven or eight he would actually have benefited from the game. But by that time he’s so addicted to his new persona and to the carte blanche that the game gives him to do all sorts of things, that he can’t stop.”
The addiction aspect of the story is so important that Daniel actually consulted addiction experts as the film was in development, aiming to develop a realistic scenario that enabled the audience to share the initial attraction to the game. Another challenge he took on was to introduce a character with a learning disability and make him not just a complication in life but a rounded person with a key role to play in the story. Devon Gray is a standout in the role
“I’m glad you noticed that,” Daniel says, “because I thought so but for a lot of critics seem to have overlooked it. Devon Gray did such an amazing job with the character but he’s not getting the attention I thought he would get. For some reason people don’t really talk about it so much.
“We thought carefully when we were developing the character. How impaired do we want to go? We don’t want him to be a parody, but he brought a different energy that was great for the movie. When everything else is sombre he brings this energy that’s fun and really adds something.
“ When Devon came in to the audition, he came in as the character. He didn’t look at me, he didn’t speak to me, he just did the scene and then left. The character was all his. Right from the start he had the stuttering, the mannerisms and the glasses. I had very little to do with it. Even on set when we were hanging out together and talking he stayed in that character and sat in a corner rocking back and forth. I thought, the less I pull him out of it the better he’s going to be. More than any other character, when I did talk to him I could tell he was mentally fact checking everything I was telling him with the back story he had made up for the character.”
Did he feel a lot of responsibility in developing a character like that?
“Despite things this character does I think we’re probably in safe territory because by that time [when his role in the plot becomes apparent] we know the game, we understand the seductive character of the game and we see how he could drawn into it. It’s heartbreaking and in his backstory he said he wanted to prove to himself and his brother that he wasn’t relying on help, that he wouldn’t always weak person, that he could make his own money.”
Finding actors who can connect with a role this intimately isn’t something that happens easily. Daniel says he always does his own casting.
“It’s important to me. I think you need to find out who you can work well with. All of us have a first impression, you shake hands and you think yes, I like this person,, but then you have to see how the actors react to adjustment. i like to ask them something completely random like now do it as a four year old or as a different character, because it won’t always be right on the first take and if they just do it the same way in every take then you might never get it.
“I never understand how producers just watch casting tapes but don’t get the direction in between, so they just see the performance but not how the actor responds to direction. So they have no idea if the actor is versatile or not. I’m doing a TV series [Intruders] just now where I didn’t get to cast the actors, so I didn’t get to make sure the chemistry between them was right. “I always cast the main protagonist first then work outwards from there. I like to get the actors in a room together so I can get a feeling if they’re going to be good together. It’s also important that everyone can get along because when you’re on set for weeks, locked away 24 hours a day around each other, if two people really don’t get on then that’s a big problem. I don’t think you can fake these relationships on film. Like Eliot and Shelby, they’re supposed to be in love and about to get married, so they have to create that attachment in rehearsals. We did a lot of improvisation on the backstory exploring how she related to Elliot’s dead mother, what happened the first time Shelby said to him that she was pregnant, what happened when they first had sex, etc., because it’s so important to have all that to build on.”
So now that Daniel’s television series is in full flow, what does the future hold. Will we see him return to the big screen?
“Oh, totally!” he assures me. “I don’t have new project because I can only do one thing at a time and I’m enjoying this. It has a great cast, all British actors because it’s a BBC show, but BBC America. They’re great English actors doing American accents. I always find it really fun, for some reason, English actors are a whole different deal than American actors. They take a different approach, a craft and a discipline, they’re very interested in the craft of acting. Then, when I’ve finished this, I’ll start reading scripts and try to find something else interesting.”
We’ll be back to interview him again when that happens.
13 Sins is out on DVD now.
