Exclusive Interview With THE VELOCIPASTOR Director Brendan Steere
Josh Millican
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We’ve had our eyes on The VelociPastor since the project was first announced. I mean, how can we not be mesmerized by a film that features a priest turning into a dinosaur? Dread Central was lucky enough to score an exclusive interview with the film’s writer/director Brendan Steere. Give it a read below the trailer and synopsis for The VelociPastor.
Synopsis:
After a devastating family tragedy, a priest travels to China to find deeper spirituality but instead is endowed with an ancient ability that allows him to turn into a dinosaur. At first, he is horrified by his newfound superpower, but a local prostitute convinces him to use his newfound gift to fight evil – and ninjas.
Gregory James Cohan, Alyssa Kempinski, Daniel Steere, Yang Jiechang, Jesse Turits, Fernando Pacheco de Castro star with Aurelio Voltaire in the Wild Eye Releasing title. Look for The VelociPastor on VOD beginning August 13th with a DVD following on September 17th.
Dread Central: Before we get onto the film, let’s talk about you. Where did you grow up? What kind of film community did the city have?
Brendan Steere: I grew up partially in Montana and mostly in Pennsylvania. We didn’t have a huge film community – it was mostly me coercing a small group of friends to watch the weird stuff with me.
There is a single art-house theater in our area, and that’s the Pocono Community Theater in Stroudsburg, PA. They do midnight screenings and show things off the beaten path. I live in Pasadena now, but I still go to that theater every time I visit my parents.
DC: And what was your first taste of filmmaking? How did it come about?
BS: I made movies with friends in my backyard growing up. I just did it for fun – we never had scripts or anything – but more and more as I did that and got older, I realized that doing that was sort of the thing that brought me the most joy. The real switch flipped when I saw Reservoir Dogs for the first time, and really had more of a concept of what a director was and what they did. After Reservoir Dogs, there was simply no other option: I was going to be a director. From there I just dove headfirst into things like Sin City, El Mariachi, all the Edgar Wright films, all the European art films… I just wanted to consume everything.
DC: And what movies did you grow up watching?
BS: Jurassic Park, Twister, Space Jam, Star Wars, the works. I didn’t get into horror films until I was in my mid-teens, because they scared me too much. I finally got the guts to watch The Exorcist (something I still consider to be one of the best films ever made), and it just burst the dam open. I couldn’t get enough of horror from that point on.
DC: Any horror films that stayed with you and are even paid homage to in VelociPastor?
BS: Oh, god, a billion. Miami Connection and Black Dynamite were my bible(s) for this film. VP has a lot of the Japanese films I love in it actually – things like Hausu, Goke: Body Snatcher from Hell, a dash of sentai and kaiju films, etc. There’s also quite a bit of Bruce Lee martial arts films in there, with things like Enter the Dragon, Big Boss and Game of Death being big influences. In terms of horror specifically, we’re talking things like Suspiria, Track of the Moon Beast, The Killer Shrews, Equinox… mostly weirdo or creature feature horror. The idea of the film was that there could be a surprise around every cut, so part of the fun of writing was stealing from different sources and reappropriating shots and ideas in weird, novel ways.
DC: Tell us about some of your work before VelociPastor?
BS: I made a feature film in 2014 called Animosity, which is the polar opposite of VelociPastor. It’s actually a stealth remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, kind of the way that Wes Craven adapted Hills Have Eyes from Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. I’m very proud of Animosity and man is it ever a huge bummer. You can watch it on Amazon!
I’ve also done a whole ton of short work. I won a few festivals with a micro-short indie drama called Rules, I adapted the world’s worst fanfiction into a fake trailer called Legolas by Laura, and of course, there is the original, 2011 VelociPastor trailer short.
DC: So.. where did this idea come from?
BS: It was an autocorrect on my phone. Yes, really. I was in film school and needed to make a project for homework, and I didn’t have any ideas. This was right around the time that Grindhouse and Machete were coming out, so when my phone autocorrected “velociraptor” to “veloci pastor”, I thought it was just dumb enough to be fun. I made the short, and it was my first taste of any sort of viral success. It got featured in Huffington Post, on G4 Gaming Television (RIGHT???), and numerous other blogs.
DC: And did you toy with different mash-ups : maybe SharkPriest, WendigoParamedic, WaiterWolf, Bigfoot Bellboy?
BS: Firstly, I love all of these, and yes I WOULD make any of them into a movie. Secondly, no not really. Once it was ‘priest turns into dinosaur’ in my head, the only thing that I really focused on was seeing how far I could push that idea, which apparently ends in “ninjas”. Though I must admit: now having been pitched a million other dinosaur puns, I’m considering Ptoradactyl for the sequel.
DC: Did the screenplay start with the character or the story?
BS: The story, definitely. Doug (the main character) is a bit of a stock character at the beginning of the film. I’m a big fan of taking sort of cliche character archetypes and putting them where they don’t belong to see how they react. Doug is basically just ‘good guy priest’, so let’s see how ‘good guy priest’ will react if he suddenly becomes a dinosaur lycanthrope with a thirst for VENGEANCE.
DC: What’s the premise?
BS: ‘Good guy priest turns into dinosaur lycanthrope with a thirst for VENGEANCE’ is actually the most neat summation I can think of. Throw ninjas in there. And a Vietnam flashback.
DC: And did you have an actor in mind for the title role from the get-go?
BS: I did, but he was unavailable! I was totally crushed – I had written the role with him in mind from the get-go, and at the last minute he had to drop out for unavoidable personal reasons. We were briefly without a lead, until Gregory James Cohan sent in a self-taped audition. He had been working at a crowdfunding site called Seed & Spark which we submitted to, and I sort of begrudgingly agreed to look at the tape. It was incredible – he got the tone of the piece immediately and I cast him nearly on the spot. It was the best decision I made on the whole project I think: he IS The VelociPastor in that almost movie-star way.
DC: How did you dictate he play the role- as straight as possible, I imagine?
BS: We had a sliding scale. VP is an interesting film, because it’s kind of ‘medium awareness’ that it’s ‘a bad movie’, so all the actors had to toe this line between playing a character and playing an actor playing this character in a fictional bad movie. Greg/Doug has the most screentime, so it’s the trickiest game to play with him. Greg and I developed a shorthand, essentially dictating how much in any given scene he was playing Doug versus the fictional actor, and we just modulated it throughout filming.
For important/emotionally resonant scenes he needed to play it less jokey, because even if it’s a broad, silly comedy the audience needs SOME emotional anchor to attach to, no matter how tenuous it is. For instance: it was really important that the romance between him and our female lead Carol (Alyssa Kempinski) play out basically straight and real, whereas the relationship between Doug and the villains can just be funny.
DC: Tell us about any hurdles or issues you faced while shooting?
BS: Dead honest? It was the smoothest shoot I’ve ever been on. I was shocked how well it all ran. There were some standard ‘low-budget hurdles’ and what have you, but nothing as entertaining as you’d expect.
It was hard to find someone who would fit in the dinosaur suit though. It ended up being mostly my older brother who I forced into doing it, and I’m in the suit in a few shots, just because we’re both smaller guys and no one else would fit. Haha!
DC: Tell us about the look of your villain character – you obviously designed it?
BS: Yes! One of the things that I think doesn’t come across necessarily as much with VP is that there’s supposed to very intentionally be a lot of kind of ‘yellow peril’ casual racism in it, because it’s ostensibly supposed to be a period piece and people in the 70s just didn’t know any better (see things like Enter the Dragon). For instance: ninjas are a Japanese thing, so naturally it was very important to me that the ninjas only speak Korean, Cantonese, and Mandarin, because “dumb white people wouldn’t have known the difference”. Jiechang Yang (playing our villain Wei Chang) was totally game for all of it, I think he really loved playing around with being a cartoonish villain.
DC: Did you play with lots of different looks for The Velocipastor?
BS: Nope! That was very prescribed in my mind before we began filming actually. If you look at the 2011 trailer, the actor we had in that is dressed nearly identically.
DC: And is this flick intended to be a one-off or do you hope you might get to do a sequel?
BS: Oh, we want to do a sequel. The world of VelociPastor is so permissible and fun, and I want to explore more of how we can push it/what irreverent madness awaits.
DC: The film is hitting VOD and DVD- – – and there’s also the occasional special theatrical screening. How would you prefer audiences see it?
BS: Obviously in a theater is best, but mostly because I strongly believe it’s a film that should be seen with other people. You can watch it in isolation and have fun, sure, but this is a film to be enjoyed in a group. My truest hope is that once it hits streaming, people will have fun movie nights with all their friends and some drinks or weed or what have you. I’m not saying you have to be inebriated to have fun with it, but throw it on at your fraternity or sorority, bring your buddies from class over to your dorm, get your family together on a Sunday morning – that’s the way to see the film: in any way that you know you will enjoy it with others.
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