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Spotlight on Frightfest 2019: Zach Lipovsky Discusses ‘Freaks’

In February Arrow Video Frightfest hosted its annual Glasgow event. Over the course of two days, several films screened with one of the highlights being Freaks. Directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam B Stein, the story followed young girl Chloe (Lexy Kolker) as she tried to understand the world around her after escaping the clutches of her paranoid father (Emile Hirsch). The film was firmly rooted in the science-fiction arena, but also had strong parallels with Room. It went down a storm with the Frightfest audiences, so much so that the film was brought back to London to screen as part of the 20th-anniversary celebrations.

During the August event, we caught up with one half of the directing duo, Zach Lipovsky to find out all about the project.

Freaks is one of only two films that is screening at this year’s Frightfest that has already screened at Frightfest Glasgow. So did the Frightfest team approach you and say they wanted to share it with the wider family?

Yeah, we’re very lucky to be invited back. We had an amazing screening in Glasgow. The audience really responded to it. It sounded like they [the Frightfest team] heard loud and clear that people really loved it. I had a great time in Glasgow and they said they very rarely bring films in both places, but in this case they really wanted to. That was really exciting. I think all four of them really believe in the film and the audiences have really connected with it.

How did the idea come about?

It was kind of a moment in our lives were we realised that we needed to change what we were doing, and make a movie that was very personal. Just make a movie for ourselves to show the world what we wanted to do. We’d each been doing stuff separately as works for hire, trying to make it as filmmakers. It just felt like we needed to strip everything down and make a small movie that really spoke to us. At the beginning, it was really inspired by Adam [B. Stein] my co-director, and his son, he was five at the time. Just the way his son was seeing the world. It was very confusing to him what was real and what wasn’t. He would think that car alarms were dangerous, but dragons are real and they’re safe. Were his dreams real? We thought it would be really interesting to tell a science-fiction story, but from the perspective of the kid, so that the audience doesn’t know what’s going on as much as the kid. Not until the kid learns anything do you learn it. We wanted to use that to create tension.

One side of the movie is this father-daughter story, but then there’s also this whole other story about these people who have been shunned by society for their differences. Was that always in the script, or were you influenced by how the world was becoming?

We actually wrote the movie in the summer of 2015, which was right as Trump was running for election. These xenophobic outbursts were taking everyone by surprise. We actually thought, and had a lot of debate about, whether it was going to be relevant in a few years because he wasn’t going to get elected…everyone just thought he was going to be a footnote. We were concerned about whether this movie would be outdated by release. It felt very of the moment when we were writing it, but we didn’t think it would be relevant a few years later. To the point where when the film came out at the Toronto Film Festival last year, it was just as kids were being separated from their families and put in concentration camps, which happens in our movie. Everyone was like, ‘how did you know?!’

When we wrote this it was science-fiction. We didn’t want it to be just about Trump and illegal immigration. Science-fiction is so great at just being a mirror to society. We wanted it to be a lot more universal than that. So we looked at throughout history at all the different times that people have been segregated, persecuted or whatever. In Canada, we have the residential schools, which were basically where the aboriginal kids were taken from all their families and put in Catholic schools. We’re both Jewish so we’re taught a lot about World War II; in the movie, there’s a family across the street, and that’s sort of based on kids being hidden in other families so that they were safe. We just looked at all of these elements and one of the things you see every time this happens is people being put into camps. So we made that a part of the movie and suddenly we were predicting the future. But it wasn’t, this is just a cycle that unfortunately, history repeats.

I think I’ve heard America described as the great pendulum. It’s a pendulum that gets further and further with every swing, not closer and closer. So, unfortunately, that just creates pushing people further and further to the edges, rather than finding common ground. We hope that the movie, as a work of art, because it’s not specific to any issue, hopefully, it allows anyone to watch the movie and have empathy. Movies are a great empathy machine so hopefully, it brings people together rather than separating them.

The majority of the film rests on the very young shoulders of Lexy. How did you go about casting her, and how did you know that she was going to be able to take this film on?

If we hadn’t have found the right girl, the movie would have failed miserably. We searched all over North America, 1200 kids. We kept whittling it down and pretty much when we found her we knew we had something special. Most people when they go into the movie, they’re going in because of Emile Hirsch or Bruce Stern and they come out of it talking about her. She just steals the show. A lot of that is because we did a lot of work to make sure we found a kid that could connect to their actual emotions.

Most kids are very fake because they learn the lines really, really, really well. It’s almost like homework. They don’t want to screw up and so they lose all meaning. We’ve worked a lot with kids and we’ve realised the best way to get good performances out of them is to connect to things that have actually happened to them. Kids are full of a lot of emotions. They are furious, they’re loving, they’re very passionate about getting something like ice-cream. A lot of the lines in the movie are straight from Adam’s son. ‘You’re not my daddy anymore’ and ‘I hate you, I wish you would die,’ kids say that stuff. You’re just like, ‘Wow, you’re really passionate about this.’ So we asked her a lot about when was the last argument you had with your father? Then we just improvised that and got her to the place where she was feeling real emotions that she felt from her real life. Then started doing stuff from the movie with that emotion.

She was by far the kid that could do that the most. Also, as soon as we said cut she would go back to being this bubbly little seven year old, that’s totally healthy, happy and excited by the work, rather than scared. A lot of kids could get to that point and then it was actually kind of disturbing for them.

Did Emile and Lexy have much time to work together to develop that father-daughter bond?

Yeah we had them hang out before the movie and go and do father-daughter stuff like go to the zoo, that type of thing. Then also when we were building the house, we had her decorate her room, just so it felt lived in.

When I watched it I thought she was very like Jacob Tremblay in Room...

It’s funny, we’re huge genre fans, but all the movies we watched preparing for the movie and writing the movie were not genre movies. They were Room, Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Florida Project, all these very real feeling drama movies with kids at the centre. That’s the type of tone we wanted to apply to science fiction and horror, which we don’t think has been done that much with kids. We really hope that she breaks out in the same way that Jacob did, or any of those kids, because I think her performance is up there with them.

You mentioned that a lot of people might be drawn to Freaks because of Emile Hirsch. How did he get involved in the project?

This was a very small movie. We wrote the characters knowing we weren’t going to have a lot of money, so the characters better be really interesting so that actors want to do it for that reason. We sent the script to a lot of people and some of them even got back and said, ‘this is an incredible script I’d be honoured to do it, except there’s no way you can pull this off on this budget.’ We got all these rejection letters. We only talked to Emile about five days before we started shooting. He said, ‘guys, I don’t understand why am I getting cast so late? This is one of the best scripts I’ve read in years, wouldn’t any actor want to do this?’ We were, ‘well we don’t have a lot of money, it’s just really for the love of it.’

He had just become a new father himself, and he’s never played a father before, so he really connected with what it was saying about fatherhood and parenthood. There’s not a lot of movies about the messiness of parenthood. Either parents are evil, or they’re saints. We wanted to show you love your kid, but sometimes you lose your temper because you’re tired and then you feel bad. Then you just want them to shut up, but then you love them. All the ups and downs of that, and he really related to that.

Freaks is one of those films that you can watch a second time and have a completely different experience.

I hate movies with mysteries where once you watch it once, the mystery is revealed. You go, ‘oh, well I could have never have figured that out’. Then later on when you’re going to the fridge you’re, ‘wait a minute, if it was that, then this doesn’t make sense, this doesn’t make sense’… all those red herrings. We tried to make sure there were zero red herrings. Basically, everything that happens in the movie that seems weird, that you don’t understand at the beginning, once you’ve seen the film, the second time it’s a totally different experience. You know what all those things are and they all make sense. There were a few people there last night who came up and said that it was their second time seeing it, and they loved it even move. Now they were in that world and they knew what was going on, which is pretty cool.

Have you got any ideas for your next project?

We’ve lots of things we’re hoping to do, but the main thing is we’re really hoping that people see this movie. There’s a lot more we want to do with the Freaks world – the Freaks cinematic universe. So we’re really hoping that people come out to see this film so that makes that possible. I feel that there are a lot more stories and types of things, as you say, the film has become very relevant. That’s been in some ways obviously really terrible, but it also makes the process of having made it very rewarding. In some ways when you’re an individual you feel very powerless to do anything about how fucked up everything is. So in some ways to feel like maybe at least you’re contributing to that conversation, or maybe even pushing people to being more considerate, that’s really rewarding so we’d really like to do a lot more of that type of stuff. It requires people telling everyone they know to go check it out so that becomes possible.

And the film is released in the US soon right?

Not yet. Originally it was going to come out on the 23rd August, but now it’s out on Friday 13th September. So all around North America, it comes out in theatres and also Australia and Germany, the Philippines and Japan. In the UK I think it’s getting a streaming home video release with Universal.

Kat Hughes is a UK born film critic and interviewer who has a passion for horror films. An editor for THN, Kat is also a Rotten Tomatoes Approved Critic. She has bylines with Ghouls Magazine, Arrow Video, Film Stories, Certified Forgotten and FILMHOUNDS and has had essays published in home entertainment releases by Vinegar Syndrome and Second Sight. When not writing about horror, Kat hosts micro podcast Movies with Mummy along with her five-year-old daughter.

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