September 27, 2010

If you’re an avid horror fan, you’re bound to have taken notice of one particular actor that’s been leaving an indelible impression in the films he’s appeared in over the course of the last several years. And that actor is AJ Bowen.

Most first caught him as Lewis Denton in the Sundance favorite THE SIGNAL; a movie made by a group of Atlanta based filmmakers (3 directors to be exact) and friends. Bowen then appeared in last year’s THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, most notably for his show-stealing scene mid-movie where he asks Greta Gerwig the films most quoted line of dialogue, “Are you not the babysitter?” Filmmaker Adam Green handpicked Bowen and wrote the role of Layton for him for his epic “slasher” sequel HATCHET II. And now, the actor takes the lead in POP SKULL director Adam Wingard’s upcoming HENRY-esque indie thriller A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE.

Penned by Simon Barrett (DEAD BIRDS) and starring Amy Seimetz and Joe Swanberg, Bowen plays serial killer Garrick Turell, an escaped convict that is in pursuit of his ex-girlfriend who fled after his incarceration in an attempt to start a new life and put the dark demons of their relationship in the past. The film has already made its festival debut, having been picked up by Anchor Bay for distribution and has been garnering lots of positive buzz, especially for Bowen’s complex leading performance as Garrick.

MH had the chance to talk to AJ Bowen for his first interview about A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE. Read on! -Robg.

Update: Congrats to Mr. Bowen on winning Best Actor in a Horror Film at FantasticFest this past weekend for A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE!

Robg.: First and foremost, how did A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE come to you? And were you familiar with the people involved? You’ve got someone like Joe Swanberg who comes from the kind of “mumblecore” world, Adam Wingard who had directed POP SKULL, Simon Barrett who had written DEAD BIRDS. So it’s a rather eclectic group doing this movie…

AJ Bowen: Eclectic is the perfect word for it. There’s a guy named Evan Katz whom I met through Ti (West). It’s such a small world. We were at the New Bev to watch BEWARE THE MOON, Paul Davis’ documentary on AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON and we met Evan there and went out for drinks afterwards. We talked a bit, became friendly with each other and flash forward 4 months and he sent me an email saying he had a buddy making this weird anthology about… well, “date rape”, and three of the four parts were completely done and they were trying to make the fourth one, so would I have any interest in looking at the first 3 parts? So I get this DVD in the mail and written in sharpie, it just says DATE RAPE – PARTS 1, 2 & 4. I had never seen POP SKULL, I didn’t know who Adam Wingard was, but I put it on and 45 seconds into it, I paused it, called Evan and said, “I don’t know who this is. I don’t know what this is about. But I’m down. Tell him I’m in.” Evan replied, “Well, cool man. He’s actually actively in pre-production on this other movie that they’re shooting in Missouri in about 3 weeks. Can I send you that script too?” Adam and I exchanged numbers and I got this script for A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE. When I read it, I was in a place where I was over playing the “heavy” bad guy. I’ve only done it twice but they’re the only movies that anyone’s seen that I had done.

You were a “good” guy in MAIDENHEAD, but that hasn’t come out yet…

Yeah, no one had seen that, nobody saw any of the other things I’d done where I’m not beating girls in the face. (Laughs) You do a couple of those and you get people saying “well we need someone that’s OK with hurting other people, especially women. Let’s call AJ!” And I get a little exhausted by that.

Had you done HATCHET II at this point?

Yeah, we had just filmed the first part of HATCHET II, I don’t think we’d done the second half in New Orleans yet. This was around the time that Adam (Green) was at Sundance with FROZEN. I read the script and the dude was gnarly; a really rough character and I didn’t see anything that I could do with it. He’s very mean, he gets off on it and I literally said “I can’t do this right now. I don’t want to do this.” It’s not a horror film either really. The guy was just so bad that I couldn’t see an angle to humanize him, so I initially didn’t want to do it. I was in this tricky situation where I knew I was going to get on the phone with Adam (Wingard) and talk to him about the “date rape” movie, but say no to the other movie. We got on the phone and ended up talking for like 45 minutes before any of that stuff came up. We talked about movies and things we were both into. He’s just a great guy and we had so many similar interests. Then right in the middle of it when I was ready to tell him I couldn’t do this; and he was in Missouri scouting, he said “Yeah, man. Did you read A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE?” And I was like, “Yeah, man. I read it. It’s intense.” And I was trying to figure out how to say no. He said, “Yeah I’m pretty excited about it, because I’ve got Amy Seimetz and Joe Swanberg to do it.” “What?!” I literally was on the phone to tell him no and when he told me that Amy and Joe were doing it, I completely in that second flipped. I was like, “Cool, man. I don’t know if there’s a part for me, but let me know. I’d love to work on it.” (Laughs) That probably sounds arrogant and I don’t mean it to be! I was concerned about playing another “bad guy” that was hateful.

Did you know in that conversation that he would let you play around with how you portrayed the character of Garrick Turrell?

Not yet. But the thing is; Joe and I have mutual friends and I love his work. Amy is a very close friend of mine, although I hadn’t talked to her in a while. But I know that both of us are feminists. And so when Amy told me she was doing this and specifically this role (of Garrick’s girlfriend Sarah), I was really surprised. They’re both really good actors, so right there I flipped and knew I’d do it. Three weeks later, I’m there on set and when I got there, I started talking to Adam about my concerns with this character. I didn’t want him to be hateful and I didn’t want him to be getting off on what he was doing. There’s plenty of movies like that and I don’t want to make one of those. And he said, “Nah, man. Me neither.” We started talking about bigger picture ideas and things we wanted to tweak. And credit to Simon, because we went in a pretty radical direction. The structure remained exactly the same; we went in a radically different direction in terms of character stuff and turned a scary mean “slasher” film into a love story, essentially. And I wanted to go into it with the angle that Amy’s character is an alcoholic. I went to Adam and said I really want to try to treat this as an addiction. I’d like to parallel the situation with Sarah’s alcoholism with what Garrick is doing. Because we’d done a lot of reading on serial killers and a common thread that I’d seen were guys that weren’t happy with what they were doing. In cinema, there’s always dudes that seem to be getting off on it. But what if there’s a guy that’s rational and very aware of his actions and the weight of his actions and how terrible they are? And he desperately wants not to be doing it, but can’t control himself? He has a compulsion. And Adam was into that. We talked a lot about that and that’s what we ended up trying to do with that character. Here’s a guy that loves a woman and desperately wants to be a regular person; doesn’t want to hurt anybody and believes wholeheartedly that he’s not going to hurt anybody. This is my “last drink”. “I’m never going to do this again.” Then he looks up and he’s just murdered someone. We took the angle of dealing with not the act, not celebrating the act of violence, but we dealt a lot with post, with the come-down. The thrill kill’s over. He’s back to being him and he’s coming down and doing this self loathing, this hatred of himself because he can’t stop this. That all came together when we got down to Missouri to shoot. It was a very small production and it was true guerrilla filmmaking. It was a very special experience for me to be working with those people. It completely changed the way that I work and I’ll never go back to the way I did things before. Working with Joe and Amy, the two best actors I’ve ever worked with; and I’d worked with a lot of great actors. Those two melted my brain. Completely deconstructed my concept of building performance and character. And also Adam too who was into the same thing.

The brilliant aspect of your performance in this and something I don’t think people are going to be expecting from you is that you could substitute the whole “killing” aspect of Garrick’s character with alcoholism or drug abuse and any addiction. You feel empathy for the fact that you don’t like doing this, you have no control over this compulsion, you just have to satisfy it. So in that regard, what was the main preparation you did when it came to how you were going to approach playing Garrick? How’d you go about making this totally different from Lewis (THE SIGNAL) and Victor (THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL)?

Well, it’s a simplistic viewpoint to say that Lewis and Victor and Garrick are similar people because the easy description is that they’re all dudes that are hurting people. When it came to Lewis in THE SIGNAL, Lewis believed that he was doing the right thing and he was doing it for a woman that he loved. And I was a little concerned about that when approaching A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE, thinking “great, it’s another dude after a woman and anything that gets in his path usually ends up getting permanently changed for the worse.” The moment that Lewis became self aware, he destroyed himself because he couldn’t handle it. With THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL and playing Victor, I tried to play it as a guy who was an 8 year old on Christmas Eve. He was curious and excited about the idea of bringing Satan into the world. With Garrick, a lot of the preparation came from a lot of research on compulsive behavior, substance abuse, chemical abuse. And then additionally, we’ve all been in relationships that are unhealthy because you so passionately love this person that it’s destroying you. Amy and I decided to take that angle, where there’s two people who love each other so much, can’t live without each other, but clearly can’t live together, sort of like a Sid and Nancy situation. So to that end, I did a lot of reading about the behavior of someone that’s got a dual identity. This person is one person and the thing I was trying to dial in on was as a society, when you hear about these things that are terrible, we’re so quick to judge. There are certain things we feel sorry for. If someone has cancer? They get all the support in the world. If someone’s fighting alcoholism? We’re still fairly supportive of that in regards to “oh, well, they’re trying to get help.” For a serial killer? For someone with violent tendencies? There’s no place for someone like that to go and not only that, they’re vilified. And so, I wanted to take an internal angle on that, instead of the traditional societal judgment that would be passed on this guy. I was trying really hard to figure out, “OK. What would it be like if you had this problem? And you didn’t want to have it? And you didn’t create it for yourself, but you can’t stop it either?” Additionally, I spent a lot of time alone. In the movie, most of the stuff we shot, I was alone. I spent most of my time alone. So it was a real bummer to have to go to set to have to watch Joe and Amy have a scene with each other and think, “Man, I’d love to act with someone today.” And in my scene, it’d be like “OK, this is a young actress from the University of Missouri.” “OK, it’s nice to meet you. I’ll be choking you out now.” (Laughs) It actually started to really wear me down. Because that’s not fun to do. It’s not fun to hurt people on film for me, at all. I don’t enjoy it. Not unless it’s justified…

Like in HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (Laughs)?

Of course, if it’s a mumblecore actress, I’ll happily shoot her in the face. (Laughs) But yeah, in terms of prep, specifically the music I was listening to, the things that I was watching, I was spending an awful lot of time, days at a time without talking to anybody, sort of stuck in my own brain, because I felt for Garrick. Literally there’s no one he could talk to about this. But whereas someone like Henry from HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER had Otis who knew he was a serial killer. But what if you don’t have anybody? I spent a lot of time alone. Oh, plus I had a mustache so that pretty much took care of character development. (Laughs)

The film just premiered for the first time at the Toronto International Film Festival, it’s playing again at Fantastic Fest in Austin – it seems like you guys got a tremendous amount of attention for it. Now that it’s been several months since you wrapped on it, what was it like to watch it for the first time with the cast, the crew and a whole audience?

In terms of the shoot, it was such a unique experience and it was such a bare bones production. Whenever we weren’t working, we were all together once we started shooting. And we’d all go out every night and hang out, and it was in the truest sense of the word a community, a family. And I passionately love all of them. The Toronto experience was the first time that all of us had gotten back together. Adam Wingard and I shot something right after. Him and Joe had been working on some stuff. I’d seen Amy, but all of us together in Toronto was the first time we’d been together again. We sat there and watched it and it was really special. It was really special to get to watch people that are friends of mine, in terms of crew and cast that worked really hard and went through a lot of pain and suffering to get this story told, and to get to see it in a packed house. Amy and I were sitting together, so to see Amy do something amazing, and sort of nudge her. The same with Joe, to be laughing together at some of the stuff we did. It was amazing. I’ve worked on a lot of movies, and you hear a lot in film people saying “I did this. I did that.” In the press we did and also for the Q & A afterwards, nobody said “I”, it was all “we”. “We experienced this together. We made this together.” It was really bittersweet. It’s great news that we were fortunate enough to pick up great distribution off of that screening, but I think that I can speak for everyone when I say “OK, what are we doing next? When do we get to make another movie together?” Because everyone involved in that really wants to work together again. It’s such a little movie, people had come from different worlds. We were all familiar with each other. I’m a horror guy and I’m OK with that. Amy and Joe are indie. Other people would describe Joe as mumblecore, although he doesn’t understand what that means. None of us totally understand exactly what that means. You mean an independent film for very little money where there’s characters speaking to each other? What do you mean? We were already being labeled as a mumblecore film before we premiered. And I blame Joe for that. (Laughs) But, these different worlds; Adam’s got such an avant-garde sensibility to how he approaches art, it all came together to tell a fairly cohesive, albeit non-linear narrative story that has plot. Like I said, it totally changed me. I’ve spoken highly of other movies I’ve done. THE SIGNAL was very special because it was done with my friends and that’s where we were nothing and then we were at Sundance. THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL was Ti’s movie and I came in to do a bit part, but I love that film so, so much. But A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE was a different experience. It felt like we did something special, and I don’t even mean the final outcome, but the process of getting together and trying to craft a story that mattered. Especially with something that’s crazy material like that. We really tried to make a film that means something.

A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE picked up distribution from Anchor Bay Entertainment. A theatrical and DVD release date is forthcoming.