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| Candy Land Photo: Courtesy of FrightFest |
A big hit on the festival circuit last year, with its UK première at Frightfest, Candy Land explores the lives and friendships of a group of truck stop sex workers who take in a lonely evangelical girl and have to contend with a serious of mysterious killings. It’s now getting a release across the US, so I arranged to chat with director John Swab and his wife Sam Quartin, who plays one of the central characters, Sadie. She began the conversation by telling me about their history together.
“We met on John's first short film,” Sam tells me. “I sent a tape in for a short called Judas’ Chariot in fall 2013, and then after that we did Let Me Make You A Martyr together. And then we got married.”
Run With The Hunted and Body Brokers followed, she says, and they’re still interested in doing more work together.
“I always thought lot lizards would be a good subject for a horror film,” says John, reflecting on Candy Land. “You know, over Christmas, two years ago, I sat down. I had some time, and it just kind of came out.”
“It was very quick,” says Sam. “He went down in the basement and was out in, like, two weeks, with it done.”
He nods. “I'm from a very religious part of the country so I know a lot of very fundamentalist and very religious people I grew up around. I also know people that have worked in sex work. I kind of know both worlds a little too well, so I just combined my knowledge there and use it to write a story.”
I venture that what makes it so powerful as a film is the real sense of camaraderie between the sex workers, and the sense that we know them because they're so close to each other. How did he develop that?
“A lot of it was written,” he says. “We don't really rehearse a lot. I think it kind of stunts the performance and the raw feeling that we were trying to go for. A lot of the actors knew each other already, so that kind of helped out where there was a natural bond between everybody, so it kind of just naturally fell in place.”
“Me, Eden [Brolin] and Owen [Campbell] had all worked together,” adds Sam. “It was cool that Olivia [Luccardi], like her character, was coming into a new experience, and had never met those people before. That was true in real life because we already had some bonding experiences and then she came in as an outsider in real life too.”
“Anytime I talked about the movie, I said the goal was for it to be an X-rated John Hughes movie,” says John. “It almost feels like a coming of age movie in a way, you know, where you fall in love with these characters. And as they reveal themselves, and then right as you feel like you get to know them, they start dying. For the movie to work, you have to have a connection to the people as they are taken away.”
I ask if he feels that there’s a parallel between the sex worker community and the religious community in the film, as characters from both drift through this landscape which is nobody else’s home.
“Everybody's kind of whoring themselves to something, be it a god or money,” he says.
“I think it is more when you are alone or feeling alone, if you're given an opportunity to belong to something and be a part of something, when you have nothing, it doesn't necessarily matter what that thing is,” says Sam. “Just from people I've talked to, if you have nothing, you're ‘Okay, I'll try to be a part of this cult for a little bit.’ You know, it's when you're vulnerable, and a lot of people that go into sex work are kind of similar in that sense. It is a bit of a wild way of life for people that don't have anything and are open to trying it.”
“I just think making sure each one of them felt like their own person was important,” says John. “And then spending the right amount of time with everybody, even though the movie is very short. But there's just little moments in the movie that make them feel like their own real people. There's a moment when Sam and Eden, Riley and Sadie are sitting on a little parking cement block, and they're talking about shaving their legs. And it's like those little moments where that wasn't scripted, it was something I overheard them talking about on my headphones, and was like, ‘Oh, we should just put that in the movie.’ Those little bits of dialogue feel real because they are real. They make you connect to these people and make them feel real to you.
“Really, to me, the movie’s a comedy. It's dark and it's deranged, but you have fun while you're watching all this stuff happen. So I wasn't really trying to make any social commentary with the film at all. However, I think the reality of sex work and of religious fundamentalism are very real, and you have to draw from that in order to tell the story, but there was no statement I was necessarily trying to make with it.”
There’s natural comedy in the culture clash between new girl Remy and the established group of friends, I note.
“Oh, certainly. I mean, the scene in the diner when they're all talking and she's obviously never had a conversation with somebody who's openly gay. Everybody laughed at her when she mentioned that she's never had a hot dog or a coke or any of these things. So yeah, playing off of her innocence and naivety was certainly a source of comedy and also just a way for these people to connect.”
I suggest that the costume choices enhance that comedy, and John reveals that most of the clothes in the film are his.
“He's a hoarder,” says Sam. “I'm a collector. We have rooms of racks of clothing. I love the colours and the textures, and I feel like that's a huge part of what makes it feel so real besides the locations.”
“That’s a big thing for the characters,” John outs in. “You feel like you're connected to them because when you look at them – you know, Sadie's got on this great Thunderbird jacket, this leather vintage jacket, and a Thunderbird is a sign of strength, and she's kind of the head of this group. So these kind of visual cues that you get people through wardrobe, help you identify who they are in a short amount of time. We made Levi look like a little bit of a Marlboro Man, you know? I had a lot of fun with that. And I think a lot about it, because I think it's very important for the story and the character and the actors.”
He mentioned the location - how did they find that?
“Jeremy [M Rosen] and I, the producer, were kind of forced into Montana to shoot this movie,” says John. “We drove around and scouted and scoured the whole state and came upon that truck stop. When I saw it, I was like, ‘This is the whole movie right here.’ And, you know, it was a very small budget. So we left the truck stop open, it was running the whole time. Nothing was shut down. People were buying gas and eating and all that. There were real truckers in the movie. A lot of the people in the movie are real people that were just in that place at that time, and we asked them, ‘Do you want to be in the movie?’ But yeah, without that location, I don't know if the movie works. I don't know if it even would have happened. It was kind of a perfect storm.”
We also, briefly, visit the place where the cult is based.
“Yeah. There's two carpets in that house that are very distinct, and kind of place you in a time and a place. The house looks haunted on the outside, and then when you go inside it, it lives up to the exterior. It's quite scary in there. I feel like the minimalist style of their living kind of reflects their fundamental beliefs.”
In many ways the film feels quite timeless. Little clues tell us that it’s set in the Nineties, but that house is amongst the elements which conjure up quite a strong Seventies vibe.
“I think the Seventies and the early Nineties are two periods of time in film history that mirror each other a lot,” he says. “One is the new Hollywood area where there were a ton of indie films being made that were experimental, and kind of pushing boundaries. And then the Nineties was kind of the rebirth of indie cinema after the Eighties when, you know, Steven Soderbergh and Larry Clark and Quentin Tarantino and all those guys started making movies. Indie film became mainstream again. So those two periods of time, for me are the most interesting times. When I watch movies, I tend to stick to those two periods, so I think most of the things I do are inspired by that time period.”
We talk about his influences for this film.
“There's a weird movie called Dusty And Sweets McGee, that nobody's ever seen, made by Floyd Mutrux,” he reveals. “It's kind of a nonlinear documentary film, with great music, and it just kind of pops around. And it's all these little vignettes. But it's kind of a road movie in a weird way. So that, and then I watched some giallo films from Italy, the Mario Bava films. And then I also watched Bully, by Larry Clark. You know, the realism in that and how it's filmed and the way that people act, it just feels like you're in the room with them. That’s something I always aspire to, strive for.”
The giallo influenced the distinctive choice of weapon used by the killer in the film, he says, whilst the locations influenced some of his other stylistic choices.
“I think it's only three or four locations total, and at a certain point, you can only shoot a hotel room so many different ways. It actually is really fun because at the truck stop and at the motel, you spend so much time there that you don't want to repeat yourself in how you approach things visually, so you’ve got to get creative and reinvent every set-up. But because you're not moving around and there's no company moves, you're not really strapped for time.”
“My favourite part was the opening shot, having sex with a trucker in this truck,” says Sam. “I don't know why that was the most fun of the shoot. It felt very liberating. The guy was awesome. He was found at the truck stop. Also getting to spend the time with Eden and the other people I've worked with was really fun. And Montana – I mean, the mountains are incredible. I love like the shot when Levi is with the dildo and Officer Rex - it's just a bizarre scene to be happening amidst this beautiful landscape. I've never seen that before.”
Candy Land is in select US cinemas from 6 January.
