Released in cinemas today, The Beta Test is an expertly crafted blend of drama, political satire and erotic thriller. The film is written and directed by best friends Jim Cummings and PJ McCabe, and tells of the decline of a Hollywood agent’s sanity after he is invited to a no-strings sexual encounter with a complete stranger. The Beta Test builds upon Cummings’ proven record of directing both Thunder Road and The Wolf of Snow Hollow, with the addition of McCabe an extra layer of creativity, the result of which is a thoroughly entertaining movie.
To coincide with the release, Cummings and McCabe will be attending a special screening of the film at London’s Prince Charles Cinema on Saturday 16th October. Ahead of the screening we sat down with the duo to discuss their creative dynamic, how they prepared for their roles, and PJ’s enigmatic worm script.
Jim I actually caught Halloween Kills last night, you make an appearance in it, what was it like going toe to toe with The Shape?
JIM CUMMINGS: It was amazing. My birthday is Halloween, I’ve been watching these films since I was a toddler, I shouldn’t have, but I have been. David Gordon Green called me because he saw Thunder Road on an airplane again. We had been penpals for years since the short film, he’s another Southern filmmaker, and he said, “hey brother, what do you think about playing this cop character?” I play a character named McCabe, which is ridiculous.
We met David because we were writing a TV show and we wanted him to direct it. So we’ve known him for five years or whatever, then I get the script and the character’s McCabe which… It was two nights that I was down in Wilmington shooting the movie. When you’re doing the scene, I think they used the take of when they actually surprised me with him coming into the room. I didn’t know that he was going to make this big entrance. So I’m doing my bit and I get interrupted, I think I say “Haddonfield. A town where nothing ever happe.. oh my…” and he immediately cuts me off and it’s very funny, but that was genuine. When Michael is coming at you in the thing, with the thing, it’s like, “oh, this is an actual threat, it’s no longer a movie”. The guy is also a stunt performer, so he’s this jacked, amazing, strong dude.
PJ MCCABE: I can’t wait to see it.
You’ve been friends since college and have worked together a lot over the years, but this is your first time co-directing, how was the collaboration?
PJM: It was great, it was fun.
JC: It felt very natural in a weird way, suspiciously. We never argued. The way that we write is all out loud. So we’re already kind of directing the film in the writing process. So really we had directed the movie in my garage, just talking about what the movie was going to be in our offices. Then when we showed up on set it was just executing what we had already built.
PJM: Just the two of us running around on set, talking to everyone. We had such an idea of what we want to do before we get on set. We’ve just talked the whole thing out a million times. Once you get there you try different things, but you already have a pretty clear idea of what you want to do. We’ll have some ideas on the side and little pow wows, but then we’ll just go off.
JC: It’s just sprinting on set. Just, “we gotta get the shots! We gotta move! We have no time!”
PJM: There’s too much chaos to argue about anything. You’ve gotta just get the shot.
JC: It’s this weird thing because we’ve never had a real budget, or a really long schedule – we shot this movie in seventeen / eighteen days – shot Thunder Road in fourteen, because it’s so quick doing these things we have to forensically build what the movie is going to be before we shoot it. We don’t shoot inserts. we don’t shoot coverage. It’s just, “no, this is the shot that’s going to open the scene and we’ve got to make sure that that works”. There’s no fluff at all, because we’ve not been able to afford fluff. We do a podcast version of the film as well. So we’ll do the whole thing out loud and play all of the characters then we’re just kind of executing the podcast. Making a video version of the podcast that we’ve already done. It was easy.
PJM: I think we just agree on most things comically. Our sensibilities are very similar. It was very rare that we would have a disagreement.
JC: And the directing was like, “how far can we push it?” How subtle should this be, but then the punchline is really graphic.
PJM: We’re kind of bad influences on each other. Maybe in a way it’s just us pushing each other to make it crazier, which is fun.
JC: I think so.
Jim, you also edited the film, did you find you were half editing whilst directing, already piecing scenes and moments together?
JC: So I was watching Jamaica Inn the other day, the Alfred Hitchcock movie, Charles Laughton plays the bad guy. There’s a scene where he’s coming in and he has a gun behind his back and he sits down in the frame, and it’s a cut on action. For the rest of the scene we’re at his level and it’s not up like it was. I thought, “Alfred knew how it was going to be edited beforehand”, of course that’s how you do it. I feel like that’s so absent in cinema now, that craftsmanship of knowing how something is going to be before you do it. Bong Joon Ho does that very well. But it saves so much money. I know in speaking with Ken Wales, the cinematographer, how these things can be put together. There’s a scene in The Beta Test where I’m leaving the hotel and then I’m walking into a boardroom in that sequence. The edit of how it works is literally me turning my head, and with that cut on action the brain of the audience is, “oh that’s seamless”, and it’s just because I have twenty-four hour access to the lead actor, so I can do that stuff. All of that stuff is planned beforehand so it makes the job of the editor very easy.
You wrote the film together and are both actors, at what point did you know you would be playing Jordan and PJ, and how did this influence the writing?
JC: Oh very early, from the beginning. We were doing the bits and then because we were doing the bits in the scenes it was like this could be a movie. Then we kept doing it out loud then there was no question.
PJM: I feel like a lot of our weird crazy stories come from just Jim and I doing bits and acting out stuff.
JC: Sliding into the actual conversations of the scene. We’re talking and then he’ll do a bit that leads the scene in a different direction, and then that ends up becoming the script. Very early on we knew it was going to be us.
PJM: Just writing it by doing it and just acting it out by accident.
JC: I tried to get [Jake] Gyllenhaal to replace PJ, but he wouldn’t do it. He said, “no he’s perfect for the part”.
PJM: Yeah I made sure that didn’t happen. I called a guy.
How did you prepare for playing the characters, what decisions did you make? Jordan, I noticed, has a lot of teeth on show.
PJM: Yeah, Jim’s a teeth actor.
JC: It’s funny, somebody on Letterboxed was, “are those fake teeth? Does Jim Cummings wear fake teeth?” No, they are my real teeth. We did a bunch of research about what it was like to be an agent during the WGA unpackaging fight. So we had all these people telling us what it was like on the inside, the stress that these people were going through. So I tried to embody that as much as possible. I’ve played stressful characters in the past, my two previous films, but I wanted this guy to be just a nightmare to be around. I feel like the other two that I’ve played are very nice guys, so it’s very inhuman for me, it’s a very difficult thing for me. I think this is my biggest performance, the other characters that I’ve played have been closer to me, this guy is more of a weird suit facade. The prep was just a lot of us goofing off in our buddy Ben’s living room that had a big space. We’d just rehearse freeform, doing that for weeks before we shot.
PJM: Right. I guess it was a lot of rehearsal and finding it up on its feet to find these specific characters. Just a weird scope of agents.
JC: We also play best friends in the movie, and we’re actually best friends in real life, so for our scenes, certainly for PJ, there are so many times where I’m going through Hell in real life and then he’s like, “I got to really round, I got to help out somehow”, so it wasn’t too far from our actual relationship.
PJM: Yeah our main scenes are very similar to using figuring out things in our real life.
And as PJ, you got to get some fathering practice in…
PJM: Sure, absolutely. That’s our friend Kevin’s baby.
JC: Baby May. That’s her feature film debut. She was the MVP on set. It’s so funny, whenever a child is on set everybody is like, “oh my God! I wanna go hang out with the baby!” and it’s like, “no, we’re still making the movie”. She became the mascot for the day, she was cute.
With you sharing responsibilities for various tasks, how much did you divide up who did what?
JC: I mean really there were times where PJ would go off any research data scribing or the actual numbers of when Facebook actually started incorporating ads manager and started selling their users information to advertisers, or connecting their users information to advertisers. All of that heavy research stuff we kind of tag teamed, but there were times where PJ would show up with this article and we’d go through it. It was kind of freeform.
PKM: I don’t think it’s necessarily giving each other specific homework to do. I think we write a lot of our projects now, it’s just stuff that we’re interested in. It usually ends up being science or tech based in some form, or history based because it’s just things that are interesting to us. Then we find weird and funny ways to put comedic spins on it. That just kind of happens.
JC: I was joking last night with PJ that our relationship is half Woodward and Bernstein, and the other half Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The South Park guys and then investigative journalists. It felt like that in the writers room. We wanted to make sure that we nailed the agency stuff because to huilate these guys it wouldn’t be the same if it was conjecture. We knew that we had to do the research, which sucks because it’s so much work, and we’re not journalists. It was a lot of just longform interviews in coffee shops with people who are in the world. That stuff I mainly did, then because of my Twitter I had people tweeting at me, so I took the brunt of that stuff. Then writing it was us just constantly doing it out loud. That became the screenplay.
PJM: It’s finding serious topics and then making fun of them.
JC: It is South Park.
I know some of the stories you heard made it into the film, but was there anything you felt you had to leave out?
JC: We put a lot of it in. There’s a quote from Robert Altman after he made The Player, I think it screened in Cannes. The first question somebody asked was, “is Hollywood really that bad?” and he said, “oh, it’s so much worse.” I don’t think much has changed in that regard. The amount of screwing over of the clients to make money is so graphic and so real that it would be difficult to explain. We heard stories of two clients with similar movies, but the agency was able to package then be the studio behind one of them and then bury the other one and make the first one because they’re able to make more money off this one, without ever telling this person why their movie wasn’t made. They would just make excuses and be like, “the script isn’t wasn’t good enough” or whatever, and it’s actually ownership. It’s so criminal and awful. That’s why we made the film outside of Hollywood, I think everybody should. But it’s a very strange industry, film. There was stuff like that that felt too complicated to put in and it wasn’t the story we were trying to tell.
PJM: Honestly it could have been a lot worse, what we could have put in.
JC: You feel bad for him at the party when Raymond says, “you’re a dying social network”, the audience is like that poor guy.
PJM: I don’t think there was anything specific that we said, “we can’t put that in”.
JC: There’s stuff that we put in that you wouldn’t really notice. There are allegations or testimony of rampant cocaine use at this big agency and so when I race in to grab the vape out of PJ’s desk, there’s a mirror with cocaine on it. There were small things like that that we put in as Easter eggs,we put in as much as we could.
I know you’re already working on the next project which I believe has a Victorian theme, how’s that progressing?
PJM: It’s been good. We’ve been writing it for the past year now, slowly putting it to paper. It’s very complex, but I think it’s going to be great.
JC: It’s the longest gestation period we’ve had with a film. Because it’s a period piece, we want to get it right, not just in language, but also the culture, so we’re talking with different historians to make sure that we’re doing it right, and then also making the jokes we want to make. But it’s such a great tradition of Victorian horror, Dracula, H P Lovecraft, all of our favourite horror storytellers. We also want it to be funny, it’s very difficult to pull off. We haven’t written the script yet. We’ve had this long Google document of what the movie’s going to be, but I’m terrified to sit down and actually write it because then it’s, “what if we get it wrong?” I still feel like we’re in this weird research phase of making sure we get it right before we ever put pen to paper.
PJM: But we’re forcing ourselves to do it.
JC: I’m always the one that’s, “let’s take time”, and PJ is, “we need to do it now!”
What’s this worm script that you keep teasing on your Twitter PJ?
PJM: (Laughs) Oh my gosh, the worm script! The worm script is cooking, it’s developing… No. The worm script is this deep development of this project that I’ve been kicking around for a long time. I doubt it will ever reach the light of day.
JC: They’ll never let it happen.
PJM: It’s like this bad old joke of something I’ve been writing forever. But it’s kind of become more of a joke at this point.
JC: It started out because we were trying to get in touch with Steven Yeun. I tweeted at him and said, “Steven, I’m wondering if you want to read this script, you can act in it. It’s three hundred pages, but it reads like a dream and it’s about worms.” He got back to me and said, “tell me about this movie.” PJ started his Twitter account that day and was like, “it’s just going to be worm twitter”.
PJM: #wormscript
JC: “Just about this worm script I’m doing”, and people have joined in with #wormtwitter, it’s really funny.
PJM: To the point where we’re going to have to make this movie at some point.
JC: This three hundred page…and it keeps growing in length, cause now it’s a four hundred page script.
PJM: We’re going to focus on some of our other projects first. The worm script is in deep development. Please spread the word, I’m glad it’s getting out there.
The Beta Test is available in cinemas now.
