Vincent Gaine
Do you consider Sweet Taste of Souls a horror film?
Felicity Mudgett
It was written as a horror, and always when you get down to it, you start with a script but what you’re able to film, the push and pull of the logistics and the actors, the taste of the director, they all paint different layers on top of what the original script is. I think our director, what she did was a little bit more psychological thriller. Horror has a lot of sub-genres, but it’s nice to think that it has appeal on a bunch of different frequencies if you think about it that way. I think the more that you can give an audience, the better. For the people that are looking for a slasher, for example, it’s not the film for them, but people that are looking for something a little bit more quirky, more towards Twilight Zone or Hitchcock, something that’s going to benefit them, or people who are feminist, they are going to find that more interesting. Everything I wrote the to be was multi-layered so that you could watch it and, if you were so inspired, watch it again and be able to pick up more. As a writer it’s interesting, because I love irony and set-ups and pay-offs, watch it a second or third time and pick up on that stuff.
As a writer, what I owe an audience is kind of a sacred covenant. This is where my business background: you’re going to take twenty bucks from someone or, more importantly, their time, and time is life, it’s a deal where you say, within the confines of this genre and within the promise of the poster, you’re going to deliver that to the audience. Everything extra is bonus value. If I give them twenty dollars of entertainment, that’s my job but I want to give them $150 worth of entertainment. This is an unassuming, unpretentious type of film, we can only do so much with the budget that we were working around, and fortunately the horror genre has a very forgiving, very committed type of fanbase which I love! I want to give them more – at the end of the day are they in a different place than they were at the beginning? I hope that they would be, I wanted to deliver an ending that was perfectly understandable within the context of the premise. Throw people around and hit those marks that are prerequisites of the horror genre. I think horror calls for very deep, bone-chilling type of terror, and there’s a lot of different types of terror. The scariest movie I ever saw was The Blair Witch Project, and it had me grabbing the thigh of my poor little fourteen year-old niece! I had to get a drink after that movie, but what’s scary to one person is not going to be so scary to another, it depends on taste, so I try to hit those things. In a romance, you have to have that first kiss, otherwise people feel like they’ve been gypped, because it’s a requisite of the genre. After you hit those, then you can do a lot of things, which is what I was trying to do. Why even write to horror, because certainly the world has enough gore and terror, you don’t need to add to that, but since fright is a very deep emotion, if you can use that to make a point or to bring somebody to a different place from where they started, that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to introduce a theme, I emphasised it more towards the end, if you can have the audience think about how does this relate to me, and without finger-wagging ‘This is really going to relate to you!’ First and foremost, entertain the audience, and if you can give them a little bit more extra value than what they paid for and secondly, at the end, are they in a different place, is what I was hoping to do, and it all turns on this age-old question of what is evil?
VG
This was your first credited script. However, everything you were just saying indicates familiarity with genre and with script structure. How did this project come to you, and how did you approach it, incorporating all of that knowledge you had?
FM
I think that deep down I was always a writer, because I have always been writing. But when I was younger, I didn’t want to make it a career, I didn’t want to do it for money. People in their twenties, they think they are pretty smart, it’s not until you get to your thirties, forties, fifties, that you understand how stupid you were in your twenties. Finally, I figured I’ve got something to say.
On the very practical side of writing, I came in, I don’t have a big body of work that’s been published but this is what I’d like to do so how do I do it? It became kind of a head-scratcher, well how I do that, I’m pretty close to LA. I read all the books, go to the seminars, talk to the people, I did every speck of learning that I could possibly do and to do it well. Particularly story structure, because that is the backbone of the story, it goes back all the way to the Greeks, the three-act structure, the hero’s journey and all that, how can I incorporate all these disparate things and put them into some project that I want to do now. Horror wasn’t my first choice although I do like horror. My first script was actually a fantasy romance, but then the very practical side, the business background, said this is never going to go anywhere, it’s going to be in a drawer, because the movie business is a business, so if it doesn’t have a place to go, if it’s going to die in a drawer somewhere, what’s the point?
So then, in addition to the fact that horror is a very intriguing genre, it became a very practical genre for me. With horror, people don’t expect high production values, they don’t want it overproduced, they want something very visceral that they can relate to, you don’t have to have named actors, you don’t have to have buildings blowing up. Limited sets, monster in the house, they are all part and parcel of that genre. So I said, how hard can it be? It’s actually very hard. It’s like when you watch somebody with a golf swing, looks so easy. It’s hard. My background is a little bit different from most people in that I understand there’s a business side to it. This story was kind of pre-wired for the sequel, and hopefully we’ll get more money for the sequel which we’ve had overtures for and in fact, even doing this, word got out, Hollywood people called saying can we buy this project from you? My producing partner at Flying Dolphin said no, let’s just do it. You get to a certain point in life and ask how did you spend your day? Life for the audience is very important, this is the project I’d like to do, let’s do it the best we can and see what happens. We did everything the way that we could possibly do it the best we could, gave it the best chance. Of course, things come up and you think how do I overcome this obstacle? But you get older, so your bag of tricks is deeper, so it’s all good.
VG
You mentioned earlier that you thought Sweet Taste of Souls was something that would play to fans of The Twilight Zone. Watching it, it did very much remind me of The Twilight Zone and The X-Files. I wonder, do these comparisons resonate with your own? Referring to your bag of tricks, what were further influences that you drew upon while writing?
FM
I don’t want to say a feminist bent, it’s so de rigeur to say I’m a feminist but I’m a feminist, because I would like to see the female story more in popular entertainment than what I do see. For me, as a feminist, it’s interesting to note, why don’t characters like Batman or James Bond have a character arc, why are they no different in the end than they are in the beginning? This is all part of the onus on the writer, to put somebody in a different place than they were at the beginning. Let’s make a world, let’s be different than they were at the beginning. The corollary is that’s how women had been written out of the definition of hero throughout the ages so that’s what I tried to turn on its head when I wrote this screenplay. As soon as I had the hook, the concept, I had the whole thing, it was just a question of writing it out, beginning, middle and end, this was good. When I started writing the character of Ellinore, now she’s the villain, but is she the villain? This was something I kind of turned on its head because you never really want to justify why somebody is doing something evil or bad, but when you get to the point where you understand why that person is doing something evil or bad, then here’s a flashlight pointing at us. This is what I wanted to give the audience, because when I was considering evil as a character, at first it’s living in our head, then it’s living in our office, then it’s in a bunch of different places, and this is what we as people, as humans, have to consider, evil is always trying to, keep evil as a separate thing, Joker, whatever, these are influences that are outside of the character where the audience is, where the protagonist is, but what if evil isn’t out there, it’s in here and it’s trying to get in here, this is what we have to guard against. That’s what I wanted to get into in my movie, turn the definition of the villain on its head a little bit and maybe people consider, this is what revenge, the main character says, you want my soul, you’re not getting my soul, you offer revenge, I’m not afraid of you and that’s a big thing to be able to say. My character Nate, he is the hero, and I want him to say I am you, that’s what we always have to guard against.
VG
Talking about the writing process, there’s always an assumption that the events we see in the film, the main narrative, will be the most interesting events in the characters’ lives. There were some interesting backstories here, particularly between Kyle and Nate, as well as Lily. Was there a particular challenge or balancing act between the earlier events and those of the current drama, or indeed balancing between the different characters, that of Ellinore and that of the kids? What can you tell us about the balancing act of those different dramas?
FM
The actors were asking me about this, I try to defer everything to the director’s interpretation of what the script was, but they were asking. If you’ve ever done stories, there’s a start, and then somewhere, towards the end of the first act, sometime in there, they make allusions to the backstory. It’s tricky to weave in a backstory if you want, first of all, the psychological aspect of the characters and you want to give the actors a basis so they aren’t just saying lines, these are the lines of a person who’s lived an entire life before this story begins. The B-line story, for those two actors, I wanted to give them a reason to be in conflict the entire movie when they have a separate thing that they have to resolve by the end. Kyle is very upset with his brother for not standing up and he’s too much in his head so, it’s very Hamlet, you’re in your head so much that you don’t act, so I tried to examine different ways that brothers have conflict on a subterranean level, they are not thinking about the thing that they are fighting about, they’re really fighting about conflicts that are unresolved between them, that’s kind of a B-story through the movie. There’s some symbolism there, I don’t know if you noticed, the handshake is very metaphorical, layered in there in a very subtle way, and different audiences want different levels so I don’t want to be too heavy-handed with that, I just want it to be entertaining, but if you look at the movie a second time and look for the symbols and what’s going on behind these characters, hopefully you’ll find a lot more going on.
VG
In terms of getting the cast together, was it a long audition process? Were there particular actors in mind early on? At what stage in the overall production did the casting take place?
FM
This is an interesting question because it’s something I learned in process. I anticipated that as a writer, but I didn’t know how to deal with it. When you’re writing a character, in screenwriting you don’t have the latitude anyway because you can’t really say what’s in people’s thoughts, how constrictive do I form a character? The more constrictively the character is defined, the fewer actors will be able to fit in that part authentically. I wanted to write a part where the borders of the character are defined because the character has to tag certain plot points, realistically, but I wanted to write characters that were kind of open enough so that when we found the actor it would be just a moment of surprise. Every actor has a well of their personal experiences, so when they are trying to do a character, if the character’s loose enough so that they feel free to dig deep and bring that person to the character that’s in the thing, the character has to be written loosely enough to do that, so they feel free to examine what they have to give. So that was kind of a dichotomy I was working with. I was sure I would intuit to where the writing is still right. I’m writing about younger characters and people are different now to when I was twenty, I wanted to leave that for the younger characters to interpret. It wasn’t like I was afraid I couldn’t do it, but I didn’t want to do it because I thought it would be easier and more effective to do it the way that I did it.
I was involved in the whole preproduction side as well and when there was picking, choosing, they would ask what did I think about, and I really tried to be standoffish because I have to turn it over because I don’t want to hamstring anybody else’s decisions. These professionals are throwing their mojo and I’m not pre-determining what it is. If you ask me my opinion, I’ll tell you but I’m going to stand back. It’s interesting, some of the characters, like for example the actor who played the character of Wendy, I saw her reel and I was like ‘Oh my god!’ and the guy who played Nate too, I was really tickled and amazed when John Salandria and Mark Valeriano developed this rapport with each other, as brothers. They are different but the chemistry was just beautiful. And the lady that played Lily, she brought this kind of simmering thing, all I wanted for the person, as I said it’s pre-wired for the sequel so she’s right there. The most interesting character that I had no conception for what they would look like, and I specifically didn’t want to, was the lady that ended up playing Ellinore Hunt, Honey Lauren, because the director took the look of that character in a much different direction than I had thought it through, and I’m really glad I stood back because she just brought another dimension. And when the actor is allowed to bring their dimension into a character like this it goes sterling and there’s are things that came out of Honey Lauren that were just like, OK, cool!
I was on the set the whole time and I kept leaving because [mimes chewing nails]. Normally they don’t allow the writer on the set because they go nuts, I would have absolutely gone nuts, but I had my bit in the whole time. And I was very heavily involved in the editing process through the producer particularly, but I was on her shoulder. This was the footage that we have, and depending how you cut stuff, you can be very cunning, we could have turned our script into a comedy easily, and we could have turned it into a drama easily, it depends what you want to cut this to. Then I was glad to have been back on board because I saw what we had, and I saw what we had written, and what’s taking the best of both worlds?
You might be interested to learn the happy coincidences of the edit process. When we were filming, the scene that was really seminal because it’s the climax of the third act, we were not happy with the footage that we got because there was a lot of greenscreen work there, there was some technical issue, it was not good, but by then we had worked with our computer graphics guy, or modelling guy, who said ‘You know what, I bet we could use this film and part computer enhance it. What would that give us?’ We can’t bring everyone back, it’s too expensive, how do we make this good? So then with this, what we call Shadow World, when Nate gets out of this world into the other world, what can we do with that? Oh, we could do this, we could apply this, we could put extra lines of dialogue in, it was better. I thought it was better than the original script. The original script also called for a pretty complex scene where the kids are fighting the cat as they exit the photograph. Again we were limited, it’s not Hollywood, and during preproduction I rewrote that to accommodate what we could actually do, but a lot of that was not doable, it was in my head, it wasn’t functionally doable, it will be doable for the next movie, I think we’ve got more money, which will be good!
VG
One of things I find most interesting about the production process is learning about the happy accidents. You’ve mentioned that certain things turned out not the way you expected – when you finally saw the finished product, did it surprise you?
FM
I was very happy with the finished product. When we first started editing, I thought we don’t even have a movie, but then, oh yes we do! We didn’t quite get this; we can edit it in, we can cut this. We’ve got to get from point A to point B – in the story it’s a straight line. We don’t have that, they didn’t film it. OK, well actually, if we edit this, this and this, we’ve obtained this, but we didn’t do it in a straightforward way, which is actually a more interesting way sometimes to tell a story. Not by cause and effect but by other things happening and then the audience understands this movement, they understand it in a 3D way because you went 3D to get there, so it’s better, actually. It’s not always better, but it can be, so we were fortunate about that.
The whole process of the back side of producing the movie, which I’m now pretty familiar with has given me a great new tool to write to because again, this is back at the beginning, again it’s a business. The more tools you have as an artist, and I like to say artist, the more chance that something I make will actually go somewhere. To put a painting in the closet is no victory, even a brilliant painting in a closet, I am aghast that that’s what happens to some great works, the writers, the creators don’t understand that there are constraints that you have to work around. They are constraints but they are not really constraints, they just give you borders, you scratch your head and come up with solutions.
VG
Now that the film is finished and on its way, what are the stages of its release and distribution?
FM
It will be released as part of an All Souls Day marketing blitz that TriCoast is putting together for us. It’s going to be on a lot of different platforms, Amazon, AT&T Direct TV, and Hulu, which is very fortunate for us. We were picked up, which is a happy thing, but I think a lot of independent film people, they’re at all these festivals and thinking please pick me up, it just kind of happened, we just networked in the right way, we’re not even in LA, so it was kind of a miracle. They are working on an international marketing strategy, we’re in communication with them about that, because the producer, she was pretty high up in Oracle, so it’s a collaboration, well, they are doing all the work, but we’ve had two cents here and there, I think they’ve been helpful, with ideas for that. It’s been two years in the process of preproduction, production, postproduction, over a year in postproduction, and that’s what it takes. You’re so naïve about how movies are made until you’re actually in the nitty gritty of camera angles and intellectual property and W9 forms, a whole business sense. The independent film producer, they’re artistic but they don’t have necessarily the business sense to bring the whole thing to fruition which again, our extensive business background was very helpful to us. So that’s what’s going on with that and we’re talking to TriCoast, and we’re talking to other people too, about further work along what will hopefully be a series of movies based on the premise that evil can infect somebody and then it pops out in another direction, another iteration of the whole conflict: do the right thing, don’t trade in your soul or bad things happen.
VG
However sweet they may taste.
FM
The title, Sweet Taste of Souls, refers to evil is always hungry to convert people, and it’s more attracted to good people. So if you’ve got a good heart you need to be more aware of how it’s trying to get you. It seduces, it’s got every bag of tricks. The sinister voice changes through the movie, because evil can do anything, it’ll get you, it knows all the stuff, it’ll seduce you, you have to be careful.
VG
The bakery and the cherry pie, plus the broader setting of Angel Falls, I was reminded of Twin Peaks. Was that a conscious homage on your part or the director’s part?
FM
That was kind of after the fact, oh, Twin Peaks! Somebody else mentioned that, with the locus of the evil being in a small town. No, because the subsequent stories that were derivatives, they all came from different places because evil comes from different places. But I chose the pie shop for a number of different reasons. It’s a place that should be, ooh, apple pie or cherry pie is better because it’s a very sexual thing, it should be a place where you should be able to just go in, it’s these little life things, should be the most innocent place possible but it’s not. When the kids are coming into the pie shop, they have to step right over the dog puke, so when your little spidey-sense goes off, don’t go in the basement, the omens come in, I was playing with that too. You always get warned not to go in, how can I turn that on its head as well? It was all fun: learn the conventions and think OK, I’m not going to compare myself to Picasso or anything, but the thing is you learn the convention, then you can break it if you have a good reason to. A lot of people don’t learn the convention and they trample all over everything. Wheels are round for a reason, because they work. If you’re going to make a polygon wheel you’d better have a really good reason why that’s going to work, because you’re not doing wheels anymore, you’re doing hoverboards. That’s OK, but once you understand transportation you can do something new.
VG
As you say, you have a whole bag of tricks and background that you have drawn on for this. What kind of advice would you give to aspiring screenwriters?
FM
I had very good advice from a man at one of the seminars in LA. He said to me don’t go to film school. Go to film school, but don’t go to film school. Be involved in a film set, so you know, because again I will warn you, do not write a script that ends up in a drawer. Learn about business, learn about the marginal sale, learn about the genres, respect the genre and learn about story. Hollywood makes movies that sell because there are templates and plot points, and if you can write the structure that’s sound, then it will support any type of story. Think it through, do not just start writing, sketch out the map of the whole story first, because when you build a house, don’t just create a house, figure out what the buyer wants, if you can have someone commission you as an architect, because everyone’s committed to the buyer. And then, do the whole thing up, and the very last thing, dialogue, because dialogue is like throw pillows. If you’re writing and you have pithy little dialogue things here and there, don’t lose them, write them down, but you don’t want to write your whole script and think oh my god, I forgot to put a powder room in the first floor. That’s a beginner mistake. I can put that in now, but now I’m going to have to do my permitting again, put in more plumbing lines, more electrical lines. Story is like that because it’s operating on six different levels at the same time. Conceptualise the story broadly, write the story framework, make sure you honour your genre, and then write it. Then rewrite it, then rewrite it.
To quote Aaron Sorkin, I was at a seminar with him too, he said, as a writer you sit in front of your computer, and you write, and then you rewrite, and you bash your head against the screen until blood comes out. That’s the writing process. Think about that, that’s a lot, so it seems like a little thing, it’s not, it’s a lot. And they say, of all the different careers, writers reach their peak the latest in life, they give the example, if you’re a gymnast you peak at thirteen, but writers, once you finally have something to say, you take all these disparate things, at all different levels, and then you make sense of them. Younger people write with a lot of clarity because they don’t have all of this, but older people can write on a lot of different levels because they just have the life experience. That’s my advice, learn about your craft, I don’t like the word craft because that’s beer, beer talk, everyone uses the word craft, but it really is a craft, writing is a craft, understanding the business is a craft, take advice, read the books. Writing a good story is very psychological too, read the Diagnosticians’ Dehisce manual of mental disorders, read that, that’ll throw some tabasco on your fire, read psychology, read things, understand your god, lace that in there too, good and evil.
VG
You mentioned that Sweet Taste of Souls will hopefully get a sequel. Is that going to be your next project, or do you have something else on the go at the moment?
FM
We have in development a couple of different projects. We’ve been approached to a TV series on the paranormal, that’s going to be a big time-suck, although I’m very interested in that. We did some interesting paranormal things happen on set…
VG
Cool! Can you give us an example of a paranormal occurrence on set?
FM
Oh yeah! We filmed the last scene in a tattoo parlour, and it’s an actual tattoo parlour in Ramona, California, that used to be a stagecoach stop. We talked to the owner, who was very good to us, who told us, this is a small little place, four room, one storey building, and he told us all the different people that had died in this place, several of whom committed suicide. In the last scene of our thing, somebody committed suicide in that room, two or three of them! He said the place is so haunted that he’s walked outside the place and had the door lock behind him, like watched the key turn. I’m like, OK, now we’re between scenes and there’s a lot of glass, like an aquarium in there, so I thought if there’s a spirit here, would you please manifest in our footage? I’m thinking if there’s something on camera, social media would have a heyday with that! But it wasn’t. Actually, the moment that I said that, the lightbulb above my head blew up, and something just went whoosh! I am not kidding, it went right through me, out the door, whatever it was, it’s giving me goose pimples just recollecting that.
And that’s not the least of it. Another weird thing was, there’s a picture in the dining room, we probably took it off for copyright purposes, but there was a photograph of a lady in the dining room, it was actually the grandmother of the lady running the shop, and that lady’s name in the picture on the wall was Ellinore! It’s weird. Again and again and again, we had many of those things, but that’s the one I was personally familiar with.
The next story’s going to be tattoo-oriented, which is very fertile. I saw once a little video of an extreme close-up of a pair of tattooing needles going into the skin of somebody, and that’s a metaphor for my recurring theme of evil getting into you, but it’s also penetrating and it’s sexual. The tattoo community is a very big, committed community, I don’t think that they’ve been honoured with a movie about them yet. It’s going to take a lot of research to get that right, because I’m outside of that. Again, if you look around, again just turn it on its ear, understand it, and what can we do that will be different and maybe tell it in a better way.
In your story, you have to get, again, from point A to point B, because a certain thing or dialogue has to pass between people, so everybody normally thinks, well, how at about the dining room table, that’s a beginner. Think about five other locations, OK, let’s have them do that at while bowling, or jumping out of a plane. You start thinking about how can that affect the same plot point, but in a more entertaining way. That’s how I’ve been looking at the whole writing process and storytelling process: this is what I want to say, what’s the most entertaining way that I can tell it? Always honouring the audience, the audience’s opinion, whether they’ve enjoyed themselves or not, I just want to make this interesting and fun for them, for their twenty bucks, you take their time, take away somebody’s life for two hours, 98 minutes, then don’t cheat them for goodness sake! Moviemaking and filmmaking are fundamentally two different things. Hollywood moviemakers, one end at the extreme, the decision is made to go ahead, greenlight a project, those decisions are made by accountants, and that’s why oftentimes you walk out of the movie and, OK I was entertained, but I kind of feel like I just had cheap Chinese food. It’s all gone already, I’m still hungry, was that it? They’ve made their quadrants or whatever they’re trying to do, when you have two hours of entertainment decided by an accountant, I mean there’s all the other people, but versus the far other extreme where you have filmmakers who are artistic and when they make their art they make it for them. In either scenario, the audience are short-shifted, because it should always be about the audience, and I think that’s where both ends of that spectrum miss the mark a little bit. That’s another thing I would say: put your magic on something that people are going to really enjoy, and see what happens.
VG
I like that. I think putting your magic on something that you want to enjoy is a really nice sentiment to end things on. But I do have one other question that I always like to ask: you mentioned earlier that The Blair Witch Project was your scariest film experience. Would you say that’s also your favourite horror movie?
FM
Oh no. My favourite horror movie is Tremors, which is a comedic horror. That’s my favourite one. Some great lines in that one. And also, we’re gonna need a bigger boat! John Williams, I’d kill him, my legs cannot go in the ocean, and I live by the ocean! Just my ankles go in and der dum der dum. I was scarred for life by that movie. Rosemary’s Baby, there are all sorts of different horror films. I’m not particularly fond of slashers, gore for gore’s sake, and I don’t want to go way off into the deep end there, not my cup of tea. But there are people who that and do that well, not me, no.
VG
Thank you so much for talking with me, Felicity. This has been really interesting as always. Best of luck with the film!