Check out our exclusive interview with the directors of the new sci-fi thriller, “Freaks”!
“Freaks”, the brand new Sci-Fi Thriller follows a disturbed father (Emile Hirsch) who locks his 7-year-old daughter (Lexi Kolker) in a house, warning her of a mysterious world full of dangers outside. Until one day, when the mysterious Mr.Snowcone (Bruce Dern) convinces the girl to escape her father’s control and to join him on a quest for freedom, revenge, and her mother (Amanda Crew).
We were able to sit down with the directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein and get their thoughts on making the movie.
The Knockturnal: So congrats on a wonderful film.
Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein: Thank you so much.
The Knockturnal: This isn’t your first collaboration. How did this come about? Y’all working together.
Zach Lipovsky: We met twelve years ago on a reality television show as contestants. It was called ‘On the Lot’ it was basically like American Idol but for filmmaking, with Steven Spielberg and Mark Burnett. We were making movies every week against each other. America would vote someone off every week, whoever made the worst film.
Adam B. Stein: It was like filmmaking summer camp. We just made movies ever week and we became great friends after. We kind of worked separately on stuff and started to collaborate more and more. This was the first big project we did together. We were kind of struggling filmmakers trying to get our dream movies made and none of them were happening. So we said alright what kind of movie can we write, that we could make, even if we had zero dollars and that’s where the initial conversations about Freaks started. But it obviously grew from there. At first we were thinking we would play the roles and my son would play the kid, that was the first draft.
Zach Lipovsky: Shoot it in his house. (laughs)
The Knockturnal: I love it.
Adam B. Stein: But then when we started showing it around we started to get actors interested. Bruce Dern was the first actor who signed on and we never expected a two time Oscar nominee to want to be in our movie.
Zach Lipovsky: I was supposed to play that role and then Bruce Dern’s playing it. He stole my role.
Adam B. Stein: It’s way better that we can have actual actors play the parts.
The Knockturnal: So tell me about the story of Freaks. Is it allegorical? How did you come up with the idea?
Zach Lipovsky: The film was really inspired by Adam’s son growing up, seeing his perspective on the world. As kids grow up they don’t really know how the world works. A car alarm is super scary but dragons are real and totally safe. We wanted the audience to have that perspective as they were watching the movie. In the movie you follow this little girl named Chloe who’s growing up in this house, she’s never left her house. Her dad says “if you ever go outside people will kill you”. As an audience, you don’t know if he’s telling the truth or not. You don’t know if there’s scary stuff outside or not.
Adam B. Stein: So we wanted to tell a sci-fi story from a little girl’s perspective to get the audience into that mindset. Then crazy stuff happens but it’s really hard to predict where the movie is going because it’s all from her perspective. Then thematically we definitely were inspired by political stuff going on and also stuff from our own family history to tell a story about what it’s like to be different in the world.
The Knockturnal: I think that effect really worked because I definitely I felt that claustrophobic feeling and that feeling like “wait what’s the ice cream truck here for? Can I trust him?”
Adam B. Stein: You can’t trust anybody. (laughing)
The Knockturnal: So obviously there are a lot of really cool powers in this movie. What was your favorite one to bring to life?
Zach Lipovsky: Well the film has an interesting take on the people with powers genre. We tried to approach it from a much more grounded, much more real, and much more character-driven perspective. People that have powers in our movie all their powers come from their character, what it is they want in the world. So if its someone who is a trickster, maybe they can disappear. If someone really wants to get outside and leave the world, they have the ability to bring the outside world to them. We tried to also make sure that even though this movie had a low budget we wanted it to feel really, really, big. So all of the visual effects, there’s over 200 visual effects in this movie, all had to feel like a camera had just captured them by accident. They all had to feel very real and very photographic. So we also tried to pick visual effects and abilities and powers that felt authentic and real and very photographic rather than big CG monsters and stuff because we couldn’t afford that.
The Knockturnal: Emile’s character is really the only one that has that graphic bubble.
Adam B. Stein: And for us that came from… he’s a dad and he wants to protect his daughter and put her in a bubble, keep her safe. So that was kind of how we approached the superpowers. What made sense for this character.
Zach Lipovsky: Luckily freezing time and turning invisible are very cheap visual effects.
Adam B. Stein: We also kind of wanted to go real with the sort of story of what would really happen in the world if people started to develop special abilities. They wouldn’t just go out and start saving strangers. We thought maybe superheroes wouldn’t even exist. It would be people trying to use these for their own gain and then what would be society’s response to that? Well, they would make that illegal. And that kind of creates this cycle.
The Knockturnal: So there’s a lot of narratives that are run between two locations. How did y’all approach that narratively?
Zach Lipovsky: We really wanted to make a movie that we could make no matter what. That meant it would have to be made for a low budget, that we would have to have creative control of it. So it would have very few locations. But in writing it we tried to be very, very, clever about making sure it didn’t feel like one of those movies where you’re just trapped inside of one house and a few rooms. Even though a lot of the movie is in a few rooms we do a lot of very visual clever things to expand the scope of the movie.
Adam B. Stein: Make it feel bigger.
Zach Lipovsky: In some inventive fun kind of ways that I don’t think audiences have seen before.
Adam B. Stein: A lot of that came in the editing process. We had to build this sequence that tried to be more and more exciting and put people on the edge of their seat. We’re cutting between location. A lot of that was found through editing and testing. We showed it every weekend while we were editing to our friends. “We were like is this working? No? Okay it’s not working yet, back to the editing room.”
The Knockturnal: I think it was really cool.
Zach and Adam: Thank you.
Also check out “Freaks” when it hits theaters on Friday, September 13th!
