February 1, 2008

This winter you’re going to be introduced to a whole staple of new talent when “THE SIGNAL” releases. Once again we sat down with one of the lead actors from this amazing new film. Actor AJ Bowen plays Louis, another victim of the strange transmission that is wreaking havoc in the city of Terminus. It’s no surprise with a film as strong as “THE SIGNAL” is that some huge genre fans were behind the making of it, and AJ is no exception. Here we got to geek out over USA Up All Night, “Sorority Babes In The Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama”, and talk serious about what an incredible collaborative effort “THE SIGNAL” was. – By Mike C. – 2/08

What are some of your earliest memories of the horror genre? What draws you to it?

I have two sisters that are a lot older than I am, one 9 years older than me and other 12. When I was four years old we lived in an apartment complex and my sisters babysat me a lot. Specifically I remember one time getting taken to this house party with the two of them while they were babysitting me and there was this movie that was on that all these high school kids, these teenage kids, were watching and I was forced to watch it. It scared the hell out of me, and it was “HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME”. It has such a profound impact on me that I haven’t gone back and watched it since, but it really screwed me up. Probably really close to that same time one of those sisters was babysitting me by herself and she took me, as punishment, to see “MOMMIE DEAREST”. I know that is probably not a horror movie but I remember it probably being the most frightening.

That scared you, eh?

It did! As a child of the 80’s I remember there were a couple of these channels, this was before Fox so we still had a couple of those city channels. All day long on Saturday they’d play these movies. As a kid I was fascinated by genre by movies like “JUST BEFORE DAWN”, and the early “FRIDAY THE 13TH”’s that would play on TV. I remember the first time I went to stay away from home and my friends mom was more liberal with what she let him watch and I got to watch “HALLOWEEN” over there, and then I had to walk all the back home! I was hooked a very young age.

Did you have a strict upbringing, were you not allowed to watch horror movies? Were they a forbidden fruit for you?

You know it’s funny, I wasn’t allowed to watch horror movies but I was allowed to watch any movie that was blood and guts as long as it was patriotic. I was allowed to watch “RAMBO”. I was in the theater to see “FIRST BLOOD”. I saw a double feature with “FIRST BLOOD” and “9 TO 5”, which I’m sure was very formative. I was allowed to watch “ALIEN”, and I was allowed to watch all the Gallagher comedy specials for some reason. But if it involved tan lines, boobs, and slashers I wouldn’t have been allowed to be a part of it.

Well, I’m a fan of Gallagher as well as horror so… Well, you talk about those old city channels because I think those helped expose people to older horror films, and now they’re mostly gone. Do you recall the early days of VHS?

Absolutely, VHS, beta max! We had a beta max player. Whenever we’d go to the video store, before there were Blockbusters, there was a place called The Movie Stop and I would look through all of these old videocassettes. I remember there were some movies you could look at the box and know you couldn’t get it, and you’re trying to sneak a look while your parents aren’t looking. There were certain movies that just from the box had an impact on me that I waited until I got older. I remember specifically they had a double feature tape with, and I can’t remember the second, but the first feature was “I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE”. There was a whole line of videos like that, like the old “FACES OF DEATH”, I was so fascinated by them. And I would catch a few clips of them here and there, like at other people’s houses. Those video stores were almost like those old TV stations back in the day, like you’d find such gems there and they’re so hard to find now! You’re in New York, right?

Yes.

I remember the first time that I went to Kim’s Video. It was a similar experience. Going up to the second or third floor and finding all those movies, like all the old Troma films. It was a fascinating experience.

Now…would you have been a fan of “ USA Up All Night”?

Hell yes I was! Big fan! Big fan of Linnea Quigley. Actually, “Up All Night” was the first time I saw “Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama”.

Is that a favorite of yours too?

I love that movie! That’s one of those movies that was very different after I saw it as a “grown-up”. There’s something really weird about these kids being stuck in a bowling alley, and I like the gore of it. I didn’t remember as a child how goofy the genie looked. I remember it being scarier but I still love it. There’s just a certain quality to all 80’s films, not just genre pictures, there’s such a higher entertainment value for me. I don’t know if I’m biased…

Well, it almost seems as if there was a little more of an effort made. Even in low-budget movies, even bad movies…

My buddy Ti and I were talking about “TEEN WOLF”, this completely ridiculous set-up, and plot, totally unrealistic, but there’s a shot in that movie, a really long tracking shot where Boothe and Michael J. Fox are walking down the street. It’s a really effective, a really amazing shot that would never happen today! There’s a lot of photography in those older films. Everybody still knew how to do their job, and whatever the outlandish plot contrivance was, they would still try to execute it the best they could.

I think they really catered to those of us that were younger in the 80s. I mean, every movie was like, “Let’s go with Louis Gosset Jr. and get my Dad who’s stuck in the middle east and fly F-16s!” or, “Hey, we’ll start a monster club and all the monsters that come to town will just happen to be the ones we like”. I miss that!

Is there a horror movie that you’ve gone back to that just didn’t hold up in sort of a humorous way, and is there one that does hold up and is an all-time favorite?

Oh man, you know what as a kid I really, really was freaked out by the first “HALLOWEEN”, and that always holds up, but you know speaking specifically I’m just going to throw this out there, and I catch a lot of shit from my friends for this: I love “NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET” and I love “FRIDAY THE 13TH”, but you know in this day of red and blue, if you have to pick one… I lean toward Jason. I always have. I think that goes back to being a kid and catching some of the movies on local TV. “FRIDAY THE 13TH PART III”…I remember being so freaked out by that movie, and specifically the biker dude that gets his hand chopped off. I went back and watched it two nights ago and it was so anticlimactic. That was almost disappointing. Then there are other movies like “BLACK CHRISTMAS”, that totally holds up for me. Several of the “HALLOWEEN” sequels don’t hold up. I was pretty scared by “SEASON OF THE WITCH”, I went back and watched that and I was scared about it but for a different reason. The music is still amazing. I gotta be honest, a lot of those movies, most movies for me that are genre movies, they usually still hold up. Because they captured something even if they don’t scare me in the same visceral way. Mostly nothing does. There’s still such a reckless abandonment and joy I find in them.

What about the original “BLACK CHRISTMAS”, you mentioned that as holding up. What is it about that one that makes it one of your all-time favorites?

I think what catches people who don’t know a lot about it is how innovative it was. There are so many elements to other subgenres in that one film. You have the guy in the house, the babysitter, the sorority slasher film, the nameless monster in the house, you’ve got that “who-dun-it” element. You don’t know who it is and there’s this paranoia about it. It was so innovative in that respect! A lot of people don’t know that it came out in ’74 would think that it was a ripoff of HALLOWEEN. Not to take anything away from “HALLOWEEN”.

“BLACK CHRISTMAS” was just amazing though because you were getting all these point of view shots as the killer. What made it so drastically different was that you never knew who it was, you saw Billy for 2 seconds in the doorway, or knocking shit around in the attic. He would lurk. What held up for me now is there was such a development of all the characters. Bob Clark did such an amazing job with sound design too.

There’s some shots where there’s two people having a conversation in a scene, but you can hear through the audio another character having a conversation on a phone that completely develops her story. It was just done with such care. My favorite thing to do is just set that up with A CHRISTMAS STORY and watch both. And they both start and end almost the same way, with a house at Christmas in the snow. In “A CHRISTMAS STORY”, there’s a lot of color, and a fuzzy warmth to it, and there’s Christmas music playing, it’s really heartwarming, juxtaposed with “BLACK CHRISTMAS” there’s no music, there’s some carolers far off, instead you hear the wind and it paints a completely different picture. I’m a sucker being in the cold, well, except for “ALIENS VS PREDATOR”. I think it’s so watchable. That’s the one horror movie that a lot of people I know still haven’t seen, and I get a lot of enjoyment taking it over places and showing it to people. That movie is like “HALLOWEEN” or “TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE”, if someone hasn’t seen it, and you throw it on, almost without fail people love it and are freaked out by it.

This film was… that phone conversation at the beginning!

It’s very unsettling.

Oh, it’s terrible, it’s still very effective. I’m amazing that they got away with that. If you think about it it’s not really dated by any plotline, it’s still so relevant, its still so frightening.

Is there anything in the genre that you like now? Anything stand out for you at all?

You know, actually I was talking to someone and I made the mistake of stating that we’re in a dire place for horror, and I don’t think that’s accurate because that kind of shits on people who are doing right by it. I meant more of the studio system, they’re always six-months behind what people want and they stay too long on things. There was a movie, I know you guys got to talk to some of the people involved in, I came into it late on, but this fall I finally got to see “BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF LESLIE VERNON”. I felt like I was watching a Christopher Guest film about horror. I really loved that. I got to hear Scott Glosserman speak about his film well before I saw it, we were at SXSW together, and he had an infectious love of the genre. And I thought that guy, Nathan, I was blown away by him! He really held that movie down. I thought it was a really interesting take. I’d watch anything that guy does.

So now I’m completely lost in the geekiness and we have so much to talk about. So, were did you start to get into acting, after all this horror movie watching you did as a kid?

It’s funny, it wasn’t something I actively thought I could do or would do. As a young teenager my buddy who showed me “HALLOWEEN” for the first time, we watched horror movies every weekend and would go out and try to make really terrible, terrible short films using stuffed animals as monsters. It was something I wanted to do, but never thought I could. I’d done a little bit right before I graduated high school, so I auditioned for Boston University, it was awful. I was really, really bad. I still have the rejection notice on my wall. So I ended up at University of Georgia because in the state of George they have a scholarship where if you’re in state they pay for your school.

It was by default I ended up at Georgia and it just so happened Scott Poythress was there, Justin Welborn [AJ’s “SIGNAL” co-stars], Jacob Gentry. All of these guys that ended up being people I work with now, we met there. So through a state of attrition we started learning about film, about acting. There were some of us that wanted to be editors. This just happened naturally: Ben Lovett the guy who composed the score for “THE SIGNAL”, he wanted to compose scores, like randomly.

We ran into someone who wanted to do every specific job. So we started doing short films together. I did end up at New York, and auditioned, and did very little, I did a couple of plays up there. I ended up continuing to show up and do small parts with my friends, then I decided, well, I’m 25 years old I’m going to go out to LA and see if I can do it. So I went out and started booking immediately. I’m making it sound like I had an agent or something, I still don’t have an agent. But I started finding auditions and taking them and getting cast a lot. I assumed it was because I had a beard. You know everyone else looks like a soap opera actor, so I get to play all the other interesting roles. Almost immediately after I got out here, I got an audition for… probably what’s the best movie that’s ever been made, “CREEPSHOW 3”.

Ah! I have to ask you about “CREEPSHOW 3”, because I rented it and if I don’t ask you about it, I can’t write it off on my taxes. (Laughs) So… Let’s talk! So… what was that like and did you have any idea what you were getting into?

No, I didn’t and that’s what was kind of awesome about it. I felt like I was auditioning for something really important and special. I was doing a play at a rep theater in LA, and this play was having all sorts of problems. Finally a friend of the director stepped into a role and he happened to be a casting director.

He asked me if I wanted to audition for it, and said, “Well, it’s a horror movie so you probably won’t like it”, and I said, no it’s my favorite genre, I want to make horror movies. I didn’t recognize any of the other people auditioning, and I did like three or four auditions and I kept reading, and then I got a call and I said I’d love to do it. Then we came to the first table read, and we weren’t allowed to know anything about it.

Really? This was all secret?

Yeah like I had the pages, but I wasn’t allowed to take them with me. I could look at it for a few seconds and then I got to go in and try to do something on the spot. So we went for the first table read and it was very professional, really nice. I mean, they had Starbucks coffee, man! That was the first time I found out that it was “CREEPSHOW 3”, and it blew my mind! I own the first two and I was just really surprised. It was right around that time I’d heard about “DAY OF THE DEAD 2: CONTAGION”, but I hadn’t seen it. So I read the script and we shot the movie at Universal’s backlot. Obviously, I’m not looking at rose-colored glasses, because it was a really awesome experience to shoot a movie right after you move out to LA on Universal’s backlot and have a trailer.

I get to shoot my part in the house that was the house from “BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE IN TEXAS”. As an actor you can’t really shape a film. I can’t be responsible for the writing, or the editing, or basically whether the movie’s successful. The only thing I can be responsible for is my specific performance in it. My goal was to do as much with what I had. I spent almost all my time talking to myself without anybody reading the lines to me. Any day as an actor that you can say you shot a movie at Universal and that you can walk into a Best Buy and pick up a DVD that you’re in, there’s a lot worse places you can be. A lot of actors who haven’t done it would kill to have that opportunity. I will say that it was a very auspicious beginning. I think it’s so funny because I love the genre so much and I’m fan of Romero and King and I was like, “Son of a bitch!” The other thing that was really tricky about it was that Jim and Anna are really nice. They cast me when nobody else would, but I gotta be honest, I didn’t watch the whole movie. I watched part of my part and behind the scenes and was amazed.

Well, I guess with the reputation of the previous two films…

You know, if they hadn’t called it “CREEPSHOW 3”, people would have looked at it and thought, “Hey, an anthology”, but then when they tried to do the animation in the beginning, the South Park style animation, I think there were a lot of choices made that guaranteed you were going to be eviscerated for this. You know calling it “CREEPSHOW 3”, not really having The Creep, then doing a behind-the-scenes where they sort of admit with pride that a production assistant wrote one of the stories. I can’t… I can’t vouch for that film. But when you’re just an actor the trick is to find talented people that you know you can work with.

And maybe talented people you knew you could work with, that’s kind of what happened with “THE SIGNAL”, isn’t it? You did work with all those people.

The way it worked out was I was living out in LA, and Chad McKnight, the guy who plays Jim Parsons lived in LA. Chad and Jacob Gentry met on Jacob’s first feature “THE LAST GOODBYE”, and I did a day on that, very brief. Jacob came out to LA for the DVD release of “LAST GOODBYE” and we were just talking about film and horror films. Jacob mentioned that it was going to be a horror film and I said I would love to do it, love to come back to Atlanta. So, 6-7 weeks go by and I get this conference call that I might be able to be in the movie. They talked about it and then called me back that I was now allowed to be in the movie and I got out of a play I was doing and flew back.

We did a reading of the script. That’s also when I met Anessa, but everybody else had worked together or wanted to work together. So I spent Christmas at home, did a week of rehearsal to work out the kinks in our performance and also develop our relationship with each other. And I highly recommend that, if you’re shooting an independent film and you don’t have a lot of money to do it.

At the time, there certainly was no ambition to make a movie that was going to come out in theaters. Of course, you don’t ever make something without hoping, but from their end they were trying to make sure they had a movie that would turn a profit so they could get money to shoot another movie. But the wheels just kept not coming off, and we kept saying to each other, “We might have fucked up, we might have actually made something that doesn’t totally suck here”, and the rest is history.

Ok, now here’s what blows me away about this movie, and it’s probably one of the things me and Rob were initially taken by. The acting is definitely superb. You and Anessa, everyone is fantastic. I want to ask specifically about your performance because you’re in all 3 acts. They’re all very different. In the first you have to be intimidating and terrifying, the second you have to scary and hilarious. How do you do that as actor? How do you keep the character together in your head?

Basically, you try the best that you can. If you get lucky like we did you have a really solid script, and try to keep your head down, stay out of the way and not fuck the script up. This was kind of every actors dream, to play these fleshed out characters. I think that was a great benefit. And I think a lot of the time Dan Bush, Dave Bruckner and Jacob [the directors] don’t get enough credit for helping the actors do the work that they did. Most movies if I’m going to be playing the typical villain, which we tried very hard to ensure that Louis wasn’t a typical villain.

He’s still very sympathetic in a way…

That was the hope, the goal. But, if I’m going to do that in most films, I’m going to be playing what is essentially “Leatherface”, “Jason”. There’s one dimension, one note to it. But when you’re doing a film that has 3 specific tones by default you’re getting an opportunity to show different angles to it. So in that regard it wasn’t that difficult. The thing that’s difficult is when there’s a poorly written script, and you have to try to figure out how to show all these angles without them being there. Also, when we shot “THE SIGNAL”, we shot it mostly in chronological order, which is another rarity for film.

Very helpful for the actors though. In terms of creating a character it was just a nice change of pace to play somebody who feels more than one thing. That’s kind of the goal. If you’re going to do it professionally, you hope to do what we got to do. Its fun, I got to play a monster, I got to play a scorned husband, a guy who’s losing his mind. I got to play comedy, a guy who’s trying to hide a body and act like its business as usually. I think we’re real lucky that it’s a genre picture where the actors, directors, and writers cared about the characters to try to make them actual human beings. I can’t really take credit for that. It was a privilege, a total fucking blast.

Let’s talk about the guys who directed, because they did such a fantastic job. You said they helped you out a lot. Give me an idea how they worked? Were they left very independent of each other, or were they always throwing stuff off each other?

I would say there was nothing, aside from the budget and lack of studio involvement – that was independent about this project. Not a one thing. Nobody was left to their druthers on this. It was a true, I hate to say this, but it was almost like this socialist experiment. The greater good always won out. We were very fortunate to have the developed relationships with each other because that made it possible. And the way that it worked with the directors was the same way. All three always on set, all the time. It just worked very naturally. It seemed like an unspoken thing that whoever’s transmission it was, they weren’t running the camera. But when you watched the movie it looks like one person was running the camera. It looks like one person edited the movie.
That means that they were far into each other’s head. They collaborated on the script, and it changed a couple of times, and they still ran with it. When we first started promoting the film, people would ask if it was tough working with three directors. And I guess if it were three directors who didn’t know what they were doing or didn’t get along or were assholes it probably would have been a nightmare, but it was the easiest thing in the world to do. It helped so much because there was such a democratic process to find out what the best idea was.

Everyone had a stake in what the best way to tell it was. I think having three directors gave the actors a lot more say too because it became more of a community effort, a community experience. Our line producer, our AD, all these guys had an equal hand in the telling of it. So it would basically be a huddle. We would huddle over it, talk about it for a few minutes about how to do it and shoot. Specifically there’s a moment in act two, there’s a continuous shot, a non-effects shot. I don’t want to talk about how we did it, we just…did the trick.

Which shot is this?

It’s the hallucination, when Louis is seeing Anna, it’s obviously Anna, but he’s seeing Mya there. The easy way to do that is to shoot a two-shot, cut away. Show Louis, show them. Cut it together. But we didn’t want to do it that, we didn’t want to cheat it that way. So we banged heads for 45 minutes, practicing it like we were going to be running a play. Once we got it down, we did it a few times and got it, and did it all in one take. We did that a couple of times in the movie.

Have you been surprised about the response the film got when it first started screening at Sundance last year?

Yes and no. It’s hard for me. It’s a little tough for me to be unbiased because they’re my best friends. I’m a fan of theirs, I like watching their stuff. But once I saw the cut that was sent off to Sundance and how it had come together I started thinking I actually thought we had a good shot of getting into Sundance. I would say aside from Scott I’ve probably watched more horror movies than anyone who worked on it. I’d seen so many and I thought this is good enough to get in. Other movies that haven’t been as good have gotten in. I wasn’t sure if people would respond to it. The best thing for me has been getting to travel and watch it with different audiences. It’s almost like a different movie each time. For example, I’m not aware of how violent it is, because I worked on it, you know? So I had no idea that it’s remotely scary, but when we played it at Sundance people were freaking out over it. I had no idea people would see Louis as a “bad guy” except for a couple of moments. I was able to fight for it and say, “Hey look, his wife is having an affair.” I don’t think that any of us had any idea that people would like it enough to tell their friends to see it. Or that it would strike a nerve with anyone.

I thought that it would eventually find its audience, and I wasn’t aware that it would have as many people interested in it. I thought it would be a cult movie on a shelf somewhere that you had to hunt for and find, and it still might very well be. But the response has been very humbling and that was a little bit of a shock. Going to all these film festivals, that’s a little bit of a shock, having people want to support it. People who have nothing to gain from supporting it other than being something they had a good time with.

So, are you ramped up for the theatrical release, and curious to see how horror fans are going to react to it?

I have no idea, I’m curious if people are going discover it, because there’s been some movies that have come out that I thought people were going to discover and not. It’s been a while since we’ve had a movie along the lines of “BLAIR WITCH” that captures the collective conscience. At this point in time, having the number of people who have already seen it is more than we were expecting when we made.

Any plans to work with the guys from “THE SIGNAL” again?

Always. They’re my family. We’re kind of like the low-brow “GOOD WILL HUNTING” of the horror genre. We know each other and we went off and did this thing. I’ll always work with these guys. Like, I talked to Anessa 3 times yesterday, I talked to Jacob.

It’s tougher now because I don’t think we’re going to be able to shoot a $50,000 movie again because the budgets go up and it makes it tougher to hire some of us who aren’t exactly a viable box-office draw. That makes it a little trickier, but we’ll go off and work on our own, but I’m guessing every couple years – get back together. I think the time is getting nigh to get together and bang heads together. We’re like a boy-band and we want to get back together and work on a new dance routine and go on tour, but we’re working on our solo projects right now.

Now what did you just do, what’s this film you just produced called, “MAIDENHEAD”?

Oh, it’s the first movie that my production company has had a hand in. This guy sent me a script, we’re very good friends now, and asked me to do it and I loved the script. At the time he had the money to do a third of the movie. He had the idea that we should shoot that as a short, see if we can make a kick ass short and hopefully get some more money to go back and shoot the feature. At the time there was no expectation for any more involvement from me other than to shoot the short, but I had a really good time working on it and it was really a kindred spirit experience where this guy liked the same kind of movies that I do and wants to make movies the same way I do.

So we decided to go and shoot it on a shoestring budget in Texas in August of last year.(2007) The story of “MAIDENHEAD” is this kind of a counter culture black & white “TWILIGHT ZONE” episode. It’s about a lonely guy taking care of his bed-ridden father, except his bed-ridden father just happens to be a vampire. It’s not like a contemporary story.

We went back and watched a lot of old movies, I went back and watched the first season of “TWILIGHT ZONE”, “ERASERHEAD”, “THE THIRD MAN”. It’s heavily influenced by Lynch and Cronenberg and Hitchcock a lot. It’s really about a creepy guy who finds his soul. It’s a slightly off, from another time, kind of story.

Was it influenced at all, maybe, by Romero’s “MARTIN”? It sounds a little…

You know what? Jim named the character after that.

Really?

Martin, yeah, in so far as I know. It’s always the Romero flicks that nobody seems to have seen. I was really surprised that I was the only one from “THE SIGNAL” that had seen “THE CRAZIES”. But we were totally influenced by “MARTIN”, all of those kind of quirky loner, is he weird, is he a good guy, like Norman Bates. It’s kind of like that. He comes off kind of creepy but is he really a “hooker with a heart of gold”, and nobody is writing that kind of story today. Nobody is trying to make that kind of movie today, this movie would never happen.

One of the first things we hear from people who are in the industry is that we need to make sure we have the option to do it in color because nobody will accept it in black and white. So, we were like. “Well, ok, we’ll shoot it HD and if people don’t like it we’ll throw a color edit on it”.

And you shot this in Austin, right?

Yeah, and we were lucky, we got Michael Parks to play our vampire friend. That was an experience, working with him. We were lucky enough to get the girl who played the love interest in the short film, we got her to come out and shoot it again. She’s amazing. It’s largely about these three people.

Is this a period piece?

You know, kind of. We talked about it being in a place called ‘neverwhere’, it’s stylistically, aesthetically not of this time, but it’s also–You know, I don’t like it when films try to be period but then you’ll see someone with a cell phone. We didn’t want to try to say specifically what time it is.

Try to create that kind of Cronenberg/Lynch feel to it then.

Yeah, like that.

In another interview you described “MAIDENHEAD” as sort of “PSYCHO” in reverse. What did you mean by that?

Well, without giving too much away, there are still some plot twists I don’t want to give away, essentially, you have similarities. Martin taking care of dad, versus Norman taking care of his mom. With Norman, he’s a really sweet guy, and then you come to find out things are not what they seem. Certain synapses are not firing appropriately, and it’s a downward spiral. With Martin in “MAIDENHEAD”, it’s more of a redemption. It’s not a reveal that this guy is crazy, it’s more of a journey with him trying to find his soul.

It’s a tricky thing to try to throw characters out, to bring up “THE SIGNAL” again, it’s tricky to make Mya and Ben instantly sympathetic, and it’s kind of a tough sell with Martin to make people view this guy as a sympathetic human being. And if we did our job, like with the couple of characters that I’ve had the opportunity to play, hopefully people will sympathize and he’ll be a human being instead of a monster.

Anything else on the horizon?

Well, I’m in the middle of writing a script that’s not a genre picture. I’m writing a western with Jacob. I’m also writing my own script, a Coen Brothers style film, set in Athens, Georgia in the 80’s. And hopefully if everything works out I’m going to get to work with my buddy Ti West on another genre picture. I mean he loves horror films, obviously, he makes them, so I hope that he likes them!

So it seems like you’ve had your hands in all aspects of filmmaking, have you given any thought to directing?

Certainly. I mean, if you’re just an actor, unless you come across a pie-in-the-sky scenario that “THE SIGNAL” is, you’re going not in control of the story or the quality. You’re a tool for the director and producer, a necessary tool, but a tool. But I’m more interested in storytelling, so I’d like to be in more control of the content. And I’ve always written, and I’ll continue to write. Eventually I’d like to be producing and directing my own things. All aspects of the filmmaking process interest me. I certainly will continue to produce more of the stories I want to see that aren’t getting represented, the stories that I love and as soon as feel like I know enough of what I’m doing on a film set and someone throws some money at me, I’d direct. I’ll just go off and do my own remake of “SLEEPAWAY CAMP II”.

So, we’ve ended up where we started, is that an old favorite too?

I love ’em, and I’m not going to be a purist and say I love the first “SLEEPAWAY CAMP”, fuck II and III. I actually really love “SLEEPAWAY CAMP II”. I like the first one, but I love “SLEEPAWAY CAMP II”. That movie and “JASON LIVES”, I think people need to shut up when they talk about “SCREAM” revitalizing the genre. I like “SCREAM” too, but if you want to get a couple of movies that are self-aware in a fun way “SLEEPAWAY CAMP II” is fucking hysterical, and it’s got great gore! I loved what they did with Angela. And “JASON LIVES”… that’s another one because they shot that in Georgia and I was a Cub Scout at the camp they shot it at.

That’s awesome, and I want to thank you, and all the guys from “THE SIGNAL” for talking to us!