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| Conor Sweeney in Frankie Freako! Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival |
It’s 8:30 at night, and that, by Conor’s standards, is late even for a Friday. His wife is away. He’s supposed to be looking after the house. That shouldn’t really be a stretch for this fundamentally very boring man. But Conor has seen an advert for a party line on late night TV and he just can’t get it out of his head. It’s not the sort of thing he would normally do, but perhaps it’s inevitable: he picks up the phone and dials. his life will never be the same again.
That’s the plot of Frankie Freako!, the latest offering from Psycho Goreman director Steven Kostanski, which screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival. I spoke with Steven the morning after to find out more about it.
He’s never called one of those hotlines himself, he says, “But I've been fascinated by the numbers since I was a kid. I mean, they used to be on TV when I was growing up. It's crazy the variety of stuff that they would advertise that you could call about. Obviously there were sex Hotline ones, but then there were also psychics. My favorite one is there's a psychic who can tell you what historical figure your pet used to be, like ‘Oh, your dog Skippy is actually the embodiment of Napoleon.’ That kind of weird shit I'm really fascinated by. And that sort of led to what the plot of this movie is, which is, what would happen in a weird nightmare version?”
It’s clearly a very collaborative filmmaking process, I note. Did that apply to the script as well?
“It was something that I've been kicking around for a while,” he says. “I wanted to make a little monster movie. I've been arguing with the other guys that there's room in the genre world for something like this. They were convinced that nobody wants to watch little monsters being shitheads, but based on the reaction last night, I think people are pretty cool with this.
“But, yeah, it was definitely collaborative. With my writing and directing style, it's not super hung up on anything specific. I like the vibe of getting to the set and everybody just being like, ‘So what are we doing today?’ And we just start to figure it out as we go. There's a lot of moments in the movie that we made up on the spot because I really feel like a lot of inspiration comes from being in the space - like having Conor and Adam in their outfits and giving Adam his dumb ponytail. It's like, ‘Great, what can I do with this now? It's tough to have that just on the page. I like to have it in front of me. Standing on set with those guys, riffing, is the ideal filmmaking scenario.”
It looks like there are parts of it, though, that would need quite a bit of planning. How does one manage continuity with so much destruction going on?
He shrugs. “I'm not super strict about continuity. I find on any project I do, or even working as a prosthetics artist, there's basically two stages to keep track of: the clean stage and the dirty stage. Because once everything gets messed up, nobody's really keeping track of how everything looks. I know some people get hung up on things like blood continuity and stuff, in editing, but really, does anyone really look at that?
“We had a very tight shooting schedule, so we really had to commit to just like, yeah, this is the house clean, this is the house dirty – aside from really big signifiers like having a mine cart crash through the wall. It also helped to shoot things chronologically, which we did for the most part. So we did all the clean house stuff first, dirtied it up, and then just kind of progressed through the movie from there, and built up to things like the mine cart crash.” into the wall.
That cart, he acknowledges, was inspired by the famous sequence from Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom. We go on to talk about the creation of Frankie and his friends.
“In the script, they kind of came up with their personalities,” he says. “I knew I wanted Frankie to be a rock party guy. I wanted Boink to be the tech guy and then Dottie to be the cowboy. I always try to think of these characters in action figure terms, you know, like Ninja Turtles and GI Joe. Everybody's very distinct and has, like, a thing. They have a gimmick that justifies you buying that toy. And so you look at somebody like Dottie and it's like, yeah, she's a cowboy and she's got little guns. And I can already see the action figure for that. There's a switch on the back that flips her gun arms up or something. Boink would have a little extendo arm to grab onto things.
“Thinking in toy manufacturer terms helps with a lot of the character designs; and keeping the color palette as broad as possible. I deliberately made the main three characters red, green and blue, like RGB, the original AV cable look. I knew the FKs would be purple and silver. Just having a very bold color scheme helps a lot. And they all developed as we were making them too.
“I did do preliminary designs for some of the characters to guide them. As you're sculpting, you come up with things. As you're casting, you come up with things. As you're making the wardrobe, you get ideas. It was a very collaborative process with the whole effects team in the shop to figure out the looks of these guys. There was a lot of ordering children's clothes off of Amazon for the little FK's, little pinstripe suits and stuff. It was a real process of discovery before figuring out how all this would shoot.”
I tell him that one of the things I loved about Psycho Goreman was how well its various aliens fitted into the history of genre films and TV in a certain period. What were his influences in this case?
“With the freako stuff, especially, I think visually, big reference points were anything that was off-brand Blade Runner from the late Eighties and early Nineties. That was a very influential period of time for me in my movie watching. There’s a little bit of Tim Burton's Batman in some of the designs actually. Like in Munch Tower, I specifically had the design of the buildings in Batman in mind because they're very segmented. It feels like you can see the different time periods of different floors in the skyscrapers in that movie. So I tried to have a bit of that, and making things very industrial, which is a little bit like the Double Dragon movie has that kind of dystopian future world. Also, the Super Mario Bros. movie has a similar type of off-brand Blade Runner universe that I wanted to ape. I remember distinctly taking screen grabs from that movie and having them as a reference point when I was building the miniatures for Freakworld.”
We talk about the creation of the film’s very square central character and he says that he didn’t have to look very far for inspiration in that case.
“Really, you look at the movie and it's autobiographical. It’s like real life for the first 10 or 15 minutes and then it gets derailed by creatures and wackiness. And I think that's basically my personality. It's like I try to speed through the real life stuff quick so I can get to the monsters and to mayhem. So, yeah, the writing the dork character was not a stretch to do.”
When it comes to casting, he enjoys working with his regulars.
“For this movie especially, it was such a tight timeline and a quick, small project to put together that I had to think in budget terms and I figured I could wrangle Adam, Matt and Conor pretty easily to be in it. I love working with them – any excuse to get those guys playing off of each other is amazing to me. My happy place. is when those guys are riffing together. It's the best. They're so good at it.
“Adam especially, I'm always looking for new ways to make him look as dumb as possible, so it was great putting him in that suit, giving him a ponytail and big rings for some reason, painting in his goatee a little bit. Also I had really been wanting to make a movie with Connor. I felt like I had not given him that starring opportunity yet, and he definitely has the charisma for it. The idea of building the entire movie around him getting his ass kicked by puppets and him reacting to that was very funny. So, yeah, it was a no brainer sliding those guys into this movie because I feel like they were the exact right fit for it, and they get what I'm doing perfectly. There's no winking at the camera. They play it straight to a hilarious degree.”
Next up for him is a new adventure in the sword and sorcery series created by Roger Corman.
“I'm deep in Deathstalker right now. That's the next big thing. So we've got another block of shooting we’ve got to do, hopefully this fall, but we have a rough cut together. We're working on that. My priority right now is getting that done and out into the world, hopefully next year at some point.”
Will he bring it to next year’s Fantasia?
“I'd love to. I'd love to come back to Fantasia. I'll take any excuse to come back here. It's a great festival, great people, a lot of fun.”
