Interview: Directors Jeremy Gardner and Christian Stella Talk Tribeca Hit SOMETHING ELSE
Michelle Swope
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It might not be mainstream, but horror fans, especially indie horror fans, know and love 2012’s The Battery. The film was written and directed by Jeremy Gardner, and his good friend Christian Stella did the cinematography, editing, and sound. It’s a zombie movie, but not a typical one, and the fact that it deals more with complicated relationships, using dark humor, is part of the reason for its popularity.
Gardner has been working on the script for a new movie for the past six years and now that film has finally come to fruition, with the pair sharing the director’s chair. Something Else premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last week and it’s a stunning combination of a love story and a monster movie. But much like The Battery, the film focuses on relationships as well as horror and the comedy of everyday life. Gardner and Stella assembled an indie horror dream team, recruiting producers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, responsible for Spring (2015) and The Endless (2017), as well as Dave Lawson Jr., known for Trash Fire (2016) and 68 Kill (2017).
Something Else is terrifying but also takes the viewer on an incredible roller coaster ride of emotions right up until the last scene of the movie. If you don’t already know their work, get familiar with it, because this pair of filmmakers is unstoppable, and I can’t wait to see what they do next. You can read my review of Something Else here.
Dread Central had the pleasure of chatting with Jeremy Gardner and Christian Stella about Something Else, the struggle of making independent movies, finding humor in difficult situations, and a lot more. Read on to find out what we talked about!
Dread Central: Hi, Jeremy and Christian! Thank you for taking the time to talk with me today. Congratulations on Tribeca! I love this film so much.
Jeremy Gardner: Thank you! That’s why I sound like I have no voice, because you can’t go anywhere with Dave Lawson Jr., our producer, and expect to survive a weekend, especially in New York.
Christian Stella: He brings out the animal in everyone. (laughter)
Dread Central: How did it feel to have Something Else premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival? That’s huge!
Christian Stella: Relieving for me.
Jeremy Gardner: It was definitely a long time coming. You get the rush of filming, but it’s only a couple of weeks and then it’s over and all those people disappear. Then it’s just me and Christian in a room for months and months and months. Then you start to think that nothing is actually working and all the jokes are falling flat and you have no perspective. To finally be able to see it with an audience, and they were laughing at all the right spots and being scared at the right spots, it was super rewarding.
Christian Stella: The movie was still in post-production up until about two weeks before the premiere. We overnighted it on the absolute deadline for it to play at the premiere. It was nuts.
Jeremy Gardner: Yeah, we went to L.A. to finish the sound mix a week before the deadline and came back and then Christian finished the color and sent it the next day.
Dread Central: Something Else is a wonderful love story, but it’s also a really crazy monster movie at the same time. Jeremy, what was your inspiration for writing the story?
Jeremy Gardner: If I could write like a normal person, I would have written a lot more stuff by now. My process is weird. It always starts with some image I can’t get out of my head. For The Battery, it was just two guys walking down a road and then I built from there. And it ended up being about friendship and about being stuck with people you don’t necessarily love, but they’re all you have. This one started with a couch in front of a door. For some reason, I couldn’t get that image out of my head. Then we did this weird experiment where I said, “Christian, I’m just going to send you three pages that you don’t know what they’re going to be and then you write three pages and I won’t know what they are, and we’ll just go back and forth.” So, I wrote these three pages and then he wrote three more and then I sent three more back to him.
Christian Stella: And I quit.
Jeremy Gardner: And he just quit.
Christian Stella: I quit because the characters started talking all rednecky in a different dialect and I was like, “Oh, I can’t write rednecks.”
Jeremy Gardner: So, then when he gave up on it, I just couldn’t let it go, so I started thinking about, why is this couch in front of a door? And then, of course, I can’t write something that’s not meaningful in some way to me. I was in a very long-term relationship at the time and I started thinking about what anyone gives up to be in a long-term relationship, one side or the other. They always say relationships are compromise, but sometimes maybe one person compromises more than the other and then the realization of that way late into your life that you might have given up a little too much. So, that coalesced with this whole idea of, “Well, shit, why is the couch in front of the door?” I’ve always wanted to make a monster movie. I have this dream that I’m going to be able to make my version of all of the alien, vampire, werewolf, zombie, monster movies. I want to be able to do all of the big ones. So, I was like, “Well, fuck let’s make a monster movie this time.” Even though monsters are expensive, so I probably should have stopped. (laughs)
Dread Central: I’ve been looking forward to this movie since I first heard about it and when I finally saw it, I was just blown away by it. It’s really beautiful and terrifying at the same.
Jeremy Gardner: Well, thank you. That’s what makes Christian and I work so well together. I’m a total, sappy romantic. Obviously, I wrote it, but Christian is even more romantic. He would just do only the romance part and cut out the monsters if he could.
Christian Stella: I was like, “Oh God, okay I guess we’ll do a monster movie, in a romance movie.”
Jeremy Gardner: If it can be all the real girls with monsters in it, or I don’t know. That’s what he wants. Someone said it was The Notebook with a monster. (laughter)
Christian Stella: I think The Notebook has a big mansion-y house like our house.
Jeremy Gardner: I think it’s because I just look so much like Ryan Gosling that they just can’t get that similarity out of their heads.
Christian Stella: Exactly.
Dread Central: I’m a huge fan of the previous films you’ve done together, The Battery and Tex Montana Will Survive!, and I like the way you incorporate comedy into serious, and sometimes horrifying, situations. In Something Else, Wade, played by Henry Zebrowski, has some hilarious dialogue. Why do you think it’s important to have humor in the stories you tell?
Christian Stella: I don’t think it’s possible for us to not have some humor. I think that’s just our personalities.
Jeremy Gardner: Right. I’ve always talked about some version of this before, but I can never pin down how to explain it. It’s like if you wake up and someone says, “Hey, your uncle died.” And then you see someone slip on the ice outside and it’s really funny, but also, they hurt themselves. I feel like every day is an up and down of something’s disappointing, or sad, or you just realize that you didn’t get that loan that you wanted, but then your friend makes you laugh. I’m more interested in movies that don’t try to be one tone, but that reflects more of what it’s like to just be alive. Sometimes shit is really funny and sometimes shit is really sad, and those two things can actually coexist in the same moment, let alone in the same day. So, I just can’t help but add those things when I’m writing. I’m trying to explore the full concept of living.
Christian: Yeah, I think it’s that we’re not consciously adding comedy into the movie. I think we have to actually purposefully take it out because that’s just us putting our natural personalities into it.
Jeremy Gardner: To me, it would be a process to make it only scary, or only sappy, or only funny. It’s just like, “Okay, that was a really scary scene. What comes next? I don’t know, maybe a little levity.” And it just starts to happen. It’s just kind of an organic flow. I don’t really think about it that much.
Dread Central: Yeah, it’s not forced at all. I especially love the conversation where Wade goes off on this hysterical tangent about why he thinks the cat is the monster.
Jeremy Gardner: Yeah, Wade is a brilliant character. I originally thought if I ever got this made that they wouldn’t let me play Hank, so I started writing Wade for me (laughs). I started giving him all of the best lines. And then when they were like, “Yeah, you can play Hank. You’re fine I guess.” Then I was like, “Great!” I was a huge, huge fan of Henry Zebrowski’s Last Podcast on the Left, to the point that my girlfriend starting getting jealous of how often I would talk about something he said, but I had no connection to him.
Then, one day I was watching Shudder’s TV Show, The Core, and Mickey Keating is the host, and one of his guests was Henry Zebrowski, and I had worked with Mickey in the past. So, suddenly I had this (laughs) distant connection where maybe if I reached out to Mickey, I could get ahold of Henry. And weirdly enough, that episode was about zombies and Sam Zimmerman recommended The Battery on that episode, and I believe in nothing, but I was like, “This means something!” So, I reached out to Mickey and he texted Henry and then Mickey said that Henry said it was cool to send him the script. Then, Aaron Moorhead used the fact that he went to school with Henry to say, “Hey, I’m also involved, in case you don’t know these idiots.” So, it was really just a nice connection of all these things coalescing. I guess, weirdly, so many of the genre people right now are coming out of Florida. Maybe it’s because it’s such a horror to live here. We grow up and want to tell stories about how terrifying our lives are.
Dread Central: I saw the monster in Something Else as representing the loneliness, pain, and emptiness that a person feels when they lose someone they love, and I could relate to that. Was the monster meant to be both metaphorical and real?
Jeremy Gardner: I don’t think that it’s not. Certainly, it’s very obvious that there’s this thing that won’t leave him alone, that’s nagging him, that’s attacking him, especially at night when he’s alone and he’s alone with his thoughts. That is all obviously in there, but what I actually really love about the monster is that it’s actually, a monster. It’s just a monster. It just so happens to come at a really, really bad time. So, there’s no interpretation that’s wrong in that sense, because clearly this guy is going through a very low point, and this thing which you’re not sure is even real or not, it lends itself to thinking about it as a metaphor for loneliness, or for this faults, or for the things that he has not done in his life that he’s putting or off or that he’s ignoring. But then it just ends up being an actual swamp creature, which is also fun.
Christian Stella: We purposefully made sure that it was up in the air and that people would be guessing the whole movie, but the simplest explanation is our explanation.
Jeremy Gardner: It’s bad timing. (laughter)
Dread Central: I thought the monster was visually compelling and I love that you used practical effects. Can you tell me about what went into the creature effects?
Jeremy Gardner: It was a guy in a suit, in a 100-degree weather in Florida, and we had to take his head off every three minutes, so he didn’t die. In between takes we were slow dancing (laughs) and he was running around cracking jokes, but we had to keep him hydrated and cooled as best we could because he really came into hell and had to put on hell. But that’s what makes it feel there. I mean I can jump on it, I can roll around with it, I can hit it. It’s not just in the computer. I think the only thing we did is Aaron Moorhead is a genius, and he just went in and manipulated its eyes to let it blink and move the mouth.
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