by Anthony O'Connor
In a Violent Nature, the directorial feature debut from writer/director Chris Nash, has been dividing audiences (and bodies) around the world. The Canadian production tells a familiar slasher story but from the killer’s POV.
FilmInk’s own horror tragic, Anthony O’Connor, had a chat with the director about the inspired concept.
The idea of a slasher but from the point of view of Jason (or whomever) is such a fresh take for horror fans. How do you sell it to people who maybe aren’t as obsessed with the genre?
“I feel like the best way to pitch it, what our actual pitch was, was to somebody if they were a little more of a snobby cinephile rather than a horror fan, it would just be if Gus Van Zant directed a Friday the 13th sequel.”
When did you come up with the idea and where did it spring from?
“Well, it actually just sprung from Gus Van Sant’s movies. They just hit me at the right time. I was in film school in the early 2000s. My first year in film school was the year that he brought Gerry to Toronto. And when I was working on a set, I was volunteering on this feature and it was super, super low budget, didn’t even get finished, but the camera assistant was talking about Gerry and I was just like, “Well, what’s that?” And he was explaining it to me being like, no, it just follows these two guys through the desert and that’s it. Nothing really happens. And I was just, it’s not the most intriguing pitch, but man was I mystified with what could this movie possibly be?
“And I loved his aesthetic, and I really liked the fact that all his characters set the pace for the entire film, and they were the metronome. And just being a genre kid and being at that point in time in my life too, wanting to experiment in film school, I thought this would be really interesting to see how we take those rules and bring them into a genre film.”
Thinking about the writing process. Did you have any kind of hard and fast rules that you had to follow?
“The rules were just sticking with Johnny [the killer] as much as possible. So, knowing that we’re sticking with Johnny, but knowing that there needs to be some level of exposition happening. And the conceit very clearly is, there’s a whole other movie going on just outside of the frame, but we need to know what that movie is. Other than that, it’s just going through slasher movies, writing out all the archetypes and being like, ‘okay, which ones are we going to use?’ These are such easy shortcuts for audiences to understand, especially genre audiences. ‘Oh, who’s this character supposed to be?’ And that helped out so much.”
It’s interesting though, because the archetypes were there, but the character writing was quite nuanced, even in the minimalist bits we get. Was that part of the goal?
“I’m going to have to give that to the actors more than to me, because I feel like I was, other than some humoristic flourishes that were in there, but so much of it was actors bringing in other character qualities that I hadn’t written. So yeah, I’m definitely going to have to hand that off to them more than take credit for it myself. But yeah, happy it’s there!”
So, your background’s visual effects, right?
“Well, I mean, as far as credits go, yeah, prosthetic effects is what I have the most credits in.”
You really do deliver on the gore in this. Like you’ve got these stretches that are almost contemplative and quiet, and then you’ve literally got someone being folded in a pretzel. It’s quite the juxtaposition. Was that a deliberate way of shocking people out of the Zen state?
“It was definitely functioned to that. But being a prosthetics artist too, me and Steven Kostanski, who was the prosthetics lead on this, who’s also an amazing filmmaker, we just wanted to use this as a good opportunity to play around and see stuff that we hadn’t seen before. And the actual conceit of the film is such a risk, I felt like it was a risk the entire time; ‘is this even going to work? Is anybody going to watch this?’ And so, we were always feeling like at the very, very least, we just got to have good kills. The kills have to be memorable, whether it’s how they’re shot or how involved they are. So yeah, that was really important to us to make sure that they were impactful.”
What’s the reaction been from audiences? Have you been in many screenings of it and seen it with a crowd?
“I’ve been to a few screenings. The reaction’s always been fairly positive, but it’s really hard to measure. I haven’t been to any screenings where I’ve been sneaking in and seeing it casually – that would be torture for me. Any of the screenings I have seen have been announced as the filmmakers going to be there. So, I feel it’s kind of a stacked deck knowing that audiences playing to the fact that filmmakers are there as well as enjoying the film. But the reception overall has been way more positive than we would’ve assumed.”
Looking at Rotten Tomatoes (a very imperfect metric to judge by) the critic and audience reactions are split, the critics are much more effusive than audiences. Audiences seem to be split right down the middle. Why do you think that is?
“Oh, I just think it’s just not a film for everybody. I mean, it’s doing what it wants to do, and that’s all. We can’t make it be anything else. My producer Pete [Kuplowsky], has been keeping an eye on the Twitter chatter way more than I have, and noticed that there’s been people that just hate the film and then people defending the film. That’s a lot of fun in itself. We knew that it’s not going to be for everybody. We knew that audiences are going to be split. We thought it was going to be way less favourable towards us than it is.”
What are you most proud of about it as you look back on it?
“I think just, this is such a flaky answer, but just getting it done in general, it was such a terrible, difficult production. The fact that we got it done, the fact that it managed to play Sundance, I think the moment that certainly stood out for me in a way that other moments didn’t was just having Stephen King tweet about it, because regardless of any kind of acclaim or anything that the film gets, that’s the only thing I can really take to my parents where they know, where they’re like, ‘oh, we know him.’ That’s really fun.”
What was the toughest thing about the shoot? What was the specific challenges that made it such a pain
“Being just a low budget production. There’s always a ton of challenges. It’s a very open secret that we ended up reshooting the film. We did principal photography for four weeks. We shot about 80% of it, and then there were so many concessions that we had to make when we were shooting that at every turn, there was a huge, huge concession that was veering us further and further away from the formalist choices that we were supposed to be making for the film. And by the end of our four weeks of principal photography, as I was driving back to my house from the location with my car full of equipment, it just kind of hit me that whatever we got wasn’t necessarily the film that we went out to shoot. And in every respect, when it came down to where we were forced to put the camera because of other things, even the design of Johnny’s costume was never quite right. And even the forests we were shooting in, they were just different. They were not as imposing as I envisioned when I was writing it. So yeah, we re-shot and beyond that, there was also just crazy, crazy weather. We had to replace our main actor halfway through and we could never quite catch up. So yeah, having to reshoot essentially the entire film with half the budget and half the crew, it wasn’t great. But it seems to have worked out, for what it’s worth.”
In a Violent Nature is in cinemas 1 August 2024
