Culture

Rialto Cinema - Moray Place
Saturday August 10 8:30pm
The Regent Theatre - Octagon
Sunday August 11 - 8:45pm

Director Evan L. Katz’s latest film, Cheap Thrills, is a devilish morality tale in which a wealthy couple (David Koechner and Sara Paxton) test how far a poor couple (Ethan Embry and Pat Healy) will go for some extra cash. The film has been selected for the “Incredibly Strange” section of the New Zealand International Film Festival, and Radio One’s Aaron Hawkins spoke to Katz about the film, Drafthouse, and television’s current renaissance.

Aaron: Cheap Thrills feels like Indecent Proposal meets Jackass as written by Roald Dahl, by way of bunfights.com. It’s a macabre concept, but a very simple one, which is a challenge for a director to maintain over the course of a feature film.

Evan: Yes, but I think it’s a good way to go when you don’t have any money. The whole point of it was: how do you make four people talking crap to each other in a house enjoyable? It’s not like a home invasion film – we don’t benefit from having people chasing other people around with hatchets and stuff – so there has to be some ideas to play with there.

Well you kind of do have people chasing each other with hatchets and things.

Well, actually no. They willingly offer up their body parts [laughs].

[Laughs] Right, which inevitably leads us to questions around exploitation… It is essentially exploitative – how far will a poor person go for a rich man’s entertainment, and subsequently his money?

Yeah, and I think in life people will go pretty far.

At what point would Evan Katz have backed out in the film?

Um, before cheating on my wife!

That’s certainly a watershed moment.

I think that sometimes if you have to pay the rent, there [are] a lot of allowances that can probably be made. But I think at some point, your wife won’t give a shit if the rent’s paid.

It’s a conversation that everyone’s had at some point, often late in the evening and early in the morning – “what would you do for 50 bucks; would you drink out of this ashtray for 100 bucks?” I wondered about the arc of the story – are you interested in taking that concept to its logical conclusion or is the premise a way of working back from the more pulp-ish excesses of the film as it escalates towards the end?

I think it’s balancing the two. I think I definitely have my own interest in lowbrow and highbrow simultaneously, so I wouldn’t pretend that this is purely a think piece and I don’t think it’s purely escapist. It kind of manages to be both. It’s kind of a smart bar conversation that goes to hell after too many drinks. There [are] some good ideas there, but there’s also a lot of madness and testosterone and really brutal stuff that happens. …

You go out with some of your friends to the bar and you never know what’s going to happen after too many drinks. You might end up punching the dude in the parking lot, or whatever, but you’re still friends the next day. This is where you keep it going and keep the drinks going, and just see what happens.

It’s a fine balancing act, but it certainly feels like it’s being pitched at a more lowbrow audience, or at least an audience that is more interested in lowbrow films. It played at midnight at South by Southwest; it’s been selected for this festival by Ant Timpson of Incredibly Strange films. That is a particular audience. So how do you transcend that to get the more serious material out there? Because it is a lot more thoughtful than splatter films and Drafthouse films often are.

Well, The Act of Killing they just put out recently, which was really incredible and so much more vicious than almost anything I’d seen recently. So we have good company. I think the Drafthouse label has been able to mix things that are purely party-escapist with something a bit more high-minded. So I don’t really worry about it – we’ve gotten the movie out to people that just want to see a late-night horror film and have a good time. But we’ve also shown it to some critics who are pretty serious and kind of intimidating and don’t typically seem to like that kind of stuff, and they’ve really responded. So … it can reach people who just want to have a good time, and people who want to think about stuff.

It raises interesting questions for me around censorship because I feel that the message and the subtext of the film is almost more offensive than the visual elements of the film, but [the latter are] more likely to get you grief at the censor’s office. That sheer exploitative nature of humanity is far more repellent to me than someone getting their face punched in. And I don’t know what that says about me or society, but …

I think it is more offensive, and I think it’s more sad, too. I mean, special effects – we’ve seen a lot of them, and it’s really not going to stick with us for too long. But the ideas of how people treat each other – that’s what keeps us up at night.

What is it about Ethan Embry that impressed you so much it made you want to cast him in this film?

I really liked him in Brotherhood – in that one he was kind of playing a character out of Breaking Bad, which is one of my favourite shows. There’s a lot more to him, and when we met with him and sat with him, at first he actually seems quite intimidating – he rode in on a motorcycle, he was kind of legit, he had all these tattoos. But then we actually started talking and he likes a lot of smarter genre stuff, and crime films, and just had his head wrapped around the script and the character … I think it’s fun to have the Can’t Hardly Wait dude suddenly be, like, the heavy.

August 11, series 5b of Breaking Bad begins, the end of an era. There’s a lot of talk around it being some of the greatest, if not the greatest television writing of all time.

That one and The Wire. The Wire’s a little harder to get into, I think Breaking Bad starts off so amazing and quick, but I think The Wire’s also a pretty good investment.

It’s interesting that you mention [The Wire], because I think there are similarities. I mean, that too … is fundamentally about one man constantly making choices between bad and worse.

[Laughs] Yes, and I think that’s a fun kind of storytelling that seems to be dominant. Heroes on television now are people who are doing kind of dodgy stuff to pay the rent … and I think people like watching that.

It’s a golden age of television.

It really is. It’s better than film, I’ll say that.

Why is that, do you think? What are the preconditions that exist to have elevated a medium that has been so mocked so often by cinema to have almost usurped it?

I think that it’s traditionally been a writer’s medium, and I think that a lot of the people that get tired of being sort of dicked around in feature film development, really solid writers, are like “no, I’m not going to work in feature films any more, I’m going to TV.” So there’s a brain trust, there [are] a lot of really smart people – the development executives that they hire are a lot smarter.

I also think that long-form storytelling just makes for a better story. It’s like the difference between a book and a 22-page pamphlet. There’s only so many things we can do in a feature film sometimes, and sometimes it comes across as shorthand. Whereas in a TV series, you can spend an entire season working on a single character arc.

And investing in production values, which is something that television hasn’t necessarily done well until the last five, ten years.

Yeah, I mean look at Game of Thrones – that’s crazy. I mean that’s better looking than almost any fantasy film that we’ve seen in a long time. I haven’t seen a swords or sandals film that’s felt in any way like Game of Thrones. It’s just that they deliver on the promise of the escapist. They actually give you a whole world to jump into. It’s just harder with feature films.

The film adaptation of the TV series has existed almost as long as that medium has. Can you see a point where people are essentially making films as pitches to get into the television business?

I think that’s dead on. I’d love to break into TV, and I completely see Cheap Thrills as something I’d love to show TV execs. ... You break into TV and you can create all kinds of worlds. You’re not investing six months of your life into just telling one story.

Who do you think will win – Hank or Walt?

Nobody will win. They’re all going to lose. It’s going to go down in flames, man, that show is not going to have a happy ending.