THN talk female killers with the cast and crew of Some Kind of Hate [Exclusive]

It’s hard to believe that it has already been almost two weeks since Leicester Square was overrun with horror fans from every corner of the world. The sixteenth annual Film 4 FrightFest took place over the August bank holiday weekend and in case you thought our extensive coverage (here if you missed it) couldn’t get any better, this writer is here to tell you you’re wrong.

One of the films of Saturday was Some Kind of Hate. Directed by Adam Egypt Mortimer, the film offers an interesting and exciting spin on the slasher movie. Rather than the typical menacing thirty-something white male stalking a load of pretty popular people, Some Kind of Hate offers a female teen outcast hunting bullies. Starring Ronen Rubinstein, Sierra McCormick, Grace Phipps, Noah Segan and a whole heap of young up-and-comers, Some Kind of Hate needs to be seen by everyone.

Whilst over at the festival we bundled director Adam Egypt Mortimer, producer Amanda Mortimer and lead actor Ronen Rubinstein to a secret, off-FrightFest location to find out all about bringing a female Freddy Krueger into existence.

How did the idea for Some Kind of Hate come about?

ADAM EGYPT MORTIMER: I was working with Brian DeLeeuw, who was my co-writer on a film we were working on, a different project, which was a big ghost story kind of movie and we worked on that for a while and I realised it was going to be too expensive for me to be able to make that my first feature.

The way we work together is he’s quite literary, interested in exploring the emotional, realistic side of horror and ideas. I said to him what if we make a slasher movie that approached the subject as if it were an indie drama or an emotional story, what would a literary slasher be like? He came back to me with the idea to do something set in the world of high school bullying, about a girl who died because of bullying and comes back to get revenge on behalf of somebody else who is the victim of bullying. So that’s where the initial idea started.

We tried to develop the story in a way that the slasher character would be iconic in the way of Freddie Krueger, but she, along with all of the other characters, would have fully developed emotional lives.

How early on did you decide to make Moira female?

AEM: It was the initial concept. After I said ‘emotional drama’ he [Brian] said ‘female slasher’. I think part of that reason was because we haven’t really seen that so much before. We were trying to make every choice that would warrant bothering to make another slasher film.

And how was it working together, is it easier or harder to co-write something?

AEM: It’s so much easier (laughs). When I write by myself it’s such an anxious mess. When I write with Brian we work very quickly and come to agreements very quickly. We bounce ideas off of each other and are able to take turns pushing through it. It’s much easier and I think that’s why I’ve now done three screenplays with him.

AMANDA MORTIMER: I think it helps that you guys are both full time writers. You have the time to sit together.

AEM: When we decide to write a script together we sit down every day until the script is done. All day, every day until it is done rather than saying lets meet a month from now in Starbucks and talk about it for a couple of hours. We’re like, if we’re gonna do it then lets sit down and power through it. Sometimes we’ll have to finish it and leave it and do something else and come back to it, revise it later. But when we’re working it’s quite focussed.

What were your inspirations / influences whilst filming?

AEM: I was very, getting into the film and coming to the idea of it, I was very inspired by the French new wave of horror. So films like Martyrs, Inside, Calvaire, all of these films clearly felt like they were French directors who grew up watching American horror movies and then applied their Frenchness to it, brought an extra thing. I love those movies, those movies blew my mind when I saw them.

I was interested in horror when I was a child and I was interested in special effects make-up. My mom made me a Freddy Krueger sweater when I was a kid but I hadn’t been focussed solely on horror as a filmmaker, and then I saw Martyrs and it really blew my mind. I was like ‘Oh you can do something so serious and important in this genre right now’. I think it was those influences that reached back to America in films like Adam Wingard’s A Horrible Way to Die and Ti West’s House of the Devil, all of those films showed that America in a very very low budget and indie way were picking up on those same ideas. That whole collection of events is what made me focus [on horror] specifically. In this new wave of horror doing a slasher in that mode was something that hadn’t been done. No one seemed to be doing it yet and it seemed very fertile.

The film deals with issues of bullying and self-harm. The teenage years can be very tumultuous. How much of Some Kind of Hate is fiction and how much is auto-biographic?

AEM: I don’t know. Autobiographically I was bullied younger than the kids in the movie. I was actually bullied by a kid called Willie who sort of tormented me for several months in school. When I complained about it to my father he told me that I should punch him. I remember him saying that and I remember my mom getting mad at him and then the next day the kid was fucking with me and I punched him in the jaw.

I got in, (laughs) unlike the character in the movie, I got in not that much trouble, I got yelled at and sent to the principal, but everyone kind of knew this kid was a psycho. Then he started calling my house every weekend asking if I would go over and play football and be his friend. My parents actually never let me and intercepted those calls. But that was younger than high school and it was prior to this crazy era of cyber bullying and suicides and things like that. I think Ronen being much younger and much closer to high school when we cast him was closer to that world and had more proximity to all that.

RONEN RUBINSTEIN: Yeah, I mean high school is like two or three years ago so I was definitely in the prime of the whole cyber bullying and people taking the step of taking their own lives. Throughout freshman and sophomore year I was pretty close with this one person. She was a metal head and she was an outcast, she would sit alone and draw in class.

She got bullied through the whole cyber bully thing, it wasn’t even in person, they took the coward’s way out, and she ended up taking her life one day sophomore year of high school. So then as soon as I heard about this film I was like this needs to be done. It’s much more than a cool film, cool script, cool director, cool character, the topic is probably one of the biggest things that drew me.

Something really does need to be done about cyber bullying.

RR: Yeah, but it’s so hard to stop. You can always hide behind your computer. The worst part is the parents of the victims and the people doing it, they don’t know. You’ll never suspect who’s doing it. It’s not just your stereotypical cheerleader or jock, it’s anybody now and it’s not just your stereotypical metal head or nerd [that’s the victim], it can be anybody nowadays because it’s so easy to hide behind your computer.

AEM: Yeah I think it’s really hard to convince people, especially teenagers, the consequences of their actions.

RR: Yeah, they think it’s just like whatever, they have no idea.

AEM: If there’s any theme in our movie that relates to that it’s that cruelty has really apocalyptic consequences.

How did you get the cast together?

AEM: We worked really hard to put our cast together. Having this idea that the movie needed to have an emotional resonance and have realistic characters I searched individually for each character very intensely. I looked at a lot of people. Before even really casting it I workshopped the scenes with other actors to try and understand what the roles needed to be. I think also because we had ups and downs when the movie was financed, and when we were able to shoot it there was a long period of time between finishing the final version of the script to when we shot it that there was a lot of time to look for cast and think about how it all comes together. That said, then suddenly you’re about to shoot and then there’s a scramble, and over the course of two weeks everything falls into place.

There was a lot of thought, even in the audition process it’s actually a really interesting and valuable time as you learn what scenes are working. After watching some scenes so many times during auditions I wound up revising them so that they would make for a better movie.

What was it about Ronen that made you think he was the one for Lincoln?

AEM: Well he had such an intense personal connection to it. One of the most important things for the cast beyond their ability was their willingness to go on this ride with me. We were making a movie that we wanted to take quite seriously. I think I was always concerned when I was saying I was making a low budget slasher movie that people were thinking we’re going to show up and not commit to it. You know let’s make it campy and difficult for me to find the depth to it and Ronen from our first conversations instantly committed to it.

The thing that both appeared a challenge and became what the movie is really about is that physically he’s quite different to how in the original script the character was written to look. We wrote Lincoln as this scrawny kid who obviously isn’t able to fight back and Ronen is a very physical person, very strong. So he was able to bring to it the idea of Lincoln being somebody whose holding back a rage rather than somebody who’s helpless. That brought a really interesting depth to the character. I think you can see that in the way that he stands from the every beginning of the film, he’s in all of these escalating series of events and he’s holding back. Then he unleashes this incredible rage and this incredible physical violence and then he has to spend the rest of the movie worried about that again. Sort of holding back his strength and that was such an interesting and unique quality. I talk too much about it being an emotional set of characters and an emotional movie, but Ronen was able to translate that into something more physical.

You have two high-profile Disney stars on your cast, was that a concern casting them or was that a conscious decision to try and reach a wider schism of the teen audience?

AEM: Well part of it is simply if you’ve gone through Disney I know that they’ve been vetted to be high quality performers. If you watched Sierra McCormick’s TV show A.N.T Farm there is nothing that suggests that she’s going to make a great enraged slasher because that show is just unwatchable unless you’re twelve years old right? (laughs). But to deliver those lines and do the comedy, be in Disney and do all that stuff you already have to be special. So you’re doing anything you can to find someone who can do that. It was one thing seeing her in that show and another thing meeting her. She turned out to be quite brilliant. I knew that she’d be able to the part and she’d be quite special in the part, the fact that she has a million tween fans is of great value and you hope that maybe this will be all of those kids’ first horror movie. Maybe they’ll be as traumatised by this film as I was when I first saw my first couple of traumatising movies. I don’t know if that’s sick or depraved (laughs). I think that experience of being scared as a kid is great. That time you first see something really scary and really interesting. One of the first movies that really disturbed me was Watership Down, the animated film about bunny rabbits.

AM: It’s a dark, dark movie.

AEM: You have these increbile experiences where your mind is blown and I think it would be cool if Sierra fans had that.

AM: I think it’s also that Sierra was really interested in the material. Because she’s come up in this Disney environement she doesn’t have too many opportunities to do dark, dark things. She really likes darker things, she’s a really interesting, well read, wide variety of type of kid. You know her favourite movie was Requiem for a Dream when we met her, she was sixteen at the time, we were like ‘you are insane’ (Laughs). Because all of her material has been this fluffy Disney stuff I think she really grasped onto the opportunity to get to play in that [darker] world.

AEM: So Ronen, you do a load of scenes with Grace and Sierra, how was it working with them?

RR: My God they were all for it. The coolest thing was whilst shooting this film is that Adam was very good at letting us do pretty much all of the physical stuff. Like almost no stuntmen. I can personally say that the only stunt I was not allowed to do, even though I wanted to, was light my whole body on fire.

AEM: But he did light his hand on fire.

RR: (Laughs) But I lit up to my elbow and I kept pushing the producer ‘why not just let me put on the suit’. But they were like ‘absolutely not’.

AM: I had a stunt guy there for the scene with Willie in the bathroom and he was not allowed to be used because Ronen was ‘No, no I’m going to do it’.

RR: No because that’s half the fun of making a movie, is actually living through it. Sierra this fifteen year old little girl you want to say, she did all the physical stuff herself also. There was not one moment where she said ‘let’s bring the stunt double in’. The headbashing scene, I don’t know how many takes she did…

AEM: She definitely lost some brain cells.

RR: It was amazing.

AM: The really scary one which you weren’t there for was when Michael Polish smashes the bottle over her head. She took it, I mean, it’s fake glass, but it’s still real. It’s this man and this little girl. I remember sitting there thinking her mom is going to kill me. But she really wanted to do it. She was like ‘that scene is going to be so cool!’. She was so excited and it was important to get her face in as well.

AEM: Yeah that’s the thing. The reason why they all had to be so physical was because we needed a movie where you could see their faces and their emotional reactions to the horrible things that were happening.

RR: Then I really want to praise Grace for, she didn’t have a lot of physical stuff that she had to go through but she had a lot of psychological stuff that was super sensitive. That’s almost sometimes harder than the physical stuff. Like I would say the cutting sex scene, whatever you want to call it, that’s super intense. It’s a little over the edge, but she did it as a pro. She knew why we had to get that scene, there was nothing immature about it. She put herself in all those sensitive positions as well and she did it like a champ. If I had not of known them I would have never have guessed they were from this (to Amanda) fluffy Disney corporation where they tell you what to do and when to do it, the genre’s very simple. But they went all out with this film.

AM: Grace left our set to film Teen Beach 2. She was from our set to Puerto Rico.

So Ronen given how gung-ho you were about the stunts, can we expect to see you channelling Tom Cruise and hanging off of planes in your future?

AM: He would definitely do it.

RR: Dude I would love to. Especially cause they’re hitting that point where they have the technology to do that. He was literally [on a plane] you know the story. But yeah, Hell yeah [I’d do it].

Ronen, your character in Orange is the New Black caused quite a stir, were you expecting that kind of reaction?

RR: (Laughs) Absolutely not! You know I was very familiar with the show, I realized that there wasn’t a lot of friendly male characters. So I thought you know maybe people will like him, that’s all I could hope for. I liked the character, he was this charming Southern dude. It was insane, the reaction was great, I did not expect it.

AEM: I think you’re the only handsome man on it that isn’t a rapist in that entire series.

RR: Yeah they’re all like rapists or bad dudes and it was nice to play that one nice guy. It’s a great show.

AEM: I hope they bring your character back in.

RR: I hope so.

AEM: And your hair looked so good in it too! Your long seventies hair (laughs).

RR: That was the prime of my long hair.

AM: Ronen’s hairdresser scolded him a lot for what we did to his hair.

RR: Yeah, jet black box cut hair.

Some Kind of Hate is a horror movie, so I have to ask, what is everyone’s favourite scary movie?

AEM: For me I have to do a couple, it’s Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and Martyrs.

RR: So I’m not very familiar with the older ones (all laugh)….all right if I have to pick one The Conjuring. Scared the shit out of me. And actually Michael Myers because he always walked and was so damn slow but he would still get them. And the music of Halloween I think that’s half of why I shit my pants, because it was so creepy.

AEM: Halloween was a big influence on us in the way that we shot the film and thought about it cinematically. The way that Halloween is filmed is so much better than almost anything else in the genre.

RR: They set the bar high.

AM: I would have to say Jaws. That traumatised me.

AEM: I wouldn’t see Jaws until very late in life because when I was younger I was aware of what Jaws was and I loved being in the ocean and I was like ‘I don’t want to see it because I don’t want to ruin the ocean.’ So I waited until it would not destroy my life.

RR: And Donnie Darko! That film was weird, like uncomfortably scary.

Some Kind of Hate releases 18^th September in the States, are there any plans for a UK release?

AEM: Yes!

RR: Yeah baby!

AEM: We just set up a deal with Frighfest and their label with Icon is going to release the film.

RR: Frightfest presents…

AEM:  We announced it at the screening. They [Frightfest] have been so supportive about the film. They asked us, I think it was right after we were announced to play Stanley Festival, they contacted us and said they did Frightfest and could we show them our movie. We sent them a link, the movie’s 82 minutes long, 84 minutes later Paul wrote back an email that was so ecstatic and filled with such awesome praise about the movie and how much they wanted to show it. So that when they came to us and said they wanted to release it as part of their label we just thought it was the coolest thing, the movie coming out through people that really understand why it’s interesting and what we’re trying to do. To us it was just a slam dunk, we’re really excited about the UK release.

AM: They’ve just been really supportive. Not just the acceptance but arranging for us to come and having three screenings for us was a big deal. We’ve never done that before and filling three screenings was amazing. The whole process has been really amazing with them.

Adam you’re now working on Holidays…

Holidays is a movie that was created by a guy called John Hegeman who now has a company called Distant Corners and he is somebody I’ve worked with over the years. He hired me to do what was essentially my first music video, he’s hired me to do short films for films that tie-in. He’s always worked with marketing and studios and he hired me to do these projects over the years.

Holidays is the first feature film he’s producing through his new company and he hired me to produce it with him. He saw an early cut of Some Kind of Hate and knew that I’d know how to deal with directors and how to do a low budget film. So he hired me to produce it and the idea of the movie is different directors each doing a different horror movie about a different holiday. So we have the guys who directed Starry Eyes doing Valentine’s Day, Gary Shore’s doing St Patricks Day, Kevin Smith is doing Halloween, Scott Stewart is doing Christmas and Amanda produced that segment. Then I got to direct one myself, I’m doing New Year’s starring Lorenza Izzo, she was wonderful.

So everybody has shot those, the movie is almost finished. We’re probably going to have the film finished next month and then we’ll see what happens for release and all of that stuff. It’s a really exciting, really interesting project.

AM: It’s a fun movie.

AEM: We really let director’s do whatever they wanted as long as it was this holiday just tell your story. I think it’s… I don’t know when you say the word elevated it sounds like marketing jibberish but everyone went in with very interesting storytelling.

AM: I think everyone thought that they would be the most esoteric one, they’re all very classy and thoughtful pieces, but it was quite interesting to see how everyone went in that direction. There’s a lot of women in it, so many movies about women in it.

We really enjoyed Starry Eyes so have been excited for this  film for a while.

AM: They actually wrote Adam’s segment.

AEM: Yeah I thought it would be interesting to do something I didn’t write and I really wanted to work with those guys so I said pitch me something for New Years and they came up with this idea….Who did I not say? Sarah Smith who did Midnight Swim, she’s doing Mother’s Day and Anthony Scott Burns whose a brilliant new filmmaker did Father’s Day.

Adam you made a mini sequel to Darkest Hour…

AEM: That was through John, he was running the department at New Regency and he hired me to make that piece.

Any temptation to expand it into a fully-fledged feature?

AEM: With Darkest Hour? I don’t think that movie did too well for the studio so they probably, my guess is they wouldn’t be interested.

AM: I think the problem is they own the film.

AEM: Yeah I don’t know if that franchise is gonna move forwards. I mean the concept of what I did, the movie itself was about a couple of people in Moscow and the concept I did in the short was people all around the world communicating in this subterfuge way. That feeling of like intercutting people fighting this menace that’s something I’d like to explore just not in the Darkest Hour universe.

Ronen, you’ve just completed work on a couple of movies what can you tell us about that?

RR: So a film called Condemed which I was shooting when I found out about Some Kind of Hate that comes out in theatres in November. Then we wrapped a film in May called Smartass and I co-star with Joey King who is a good friend of Sierra McCormick.

AM: They look like twins.

RR: She’s another child genius whose like blowing up in the business. That’s just a straight up coming of age drama set in 1989, East LA, in the bad times of LA.

And how old were you in 1989?

AM: Zero.

(All Laugh)

RR: Negative seven, I wasn’t thought of yet.

And Amanda what’s next for you?

AM: I co-produced a film called Bone Tomahawk.

AEM: The Kurt Russell cannibal Western.

AM: Yeah it’s premiering at Fantastic Fest in October. Then we wrapped a movie in April called Beyond the Gates which is like an ultra low budget feature that Barbara Crampton also produced and then got tricked into starring in. Then there’s a couple of thing circling around. We’re putting together a movie that we’re going to shoot in Singapore because I’m from Singapore. So Brian and Adam wrote another film for Noah Segan that we’re planning on filming there.

Some Kind of Hate is released in the US on 18th September and on digital platforms in the UK on 19th October.