‘Suitable Flesh’ Director Joe Lynch on Tackling Lovecraft in 2023 [Fantastic Fest 2023]
Mary Beth McAndrews
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For a director so good at creating brutal violence on screen, director Joe Lynch is a ray of sunshine. Behind the buckets of gore is a person who loves to make movies and wants nothing more than to support those who also pour blood, sweat, and tears into their craft. His passion for the genre shines through each of his films, and his latest, Suitable Flesh, is no different as he tackles Lovecraft through one sexy, steamy lens.
Read the full synopsis:
Psychiatrist Elizabeth Derby becomes obsessed with helping a young patient suffering from an extreme personality disorder. But it leads her into dark occult danger as she tries to escape a horrific fate.
Dread Central spoke with Lynch at Fantastic Fest about being a filmmaker, death by backup camera, and the joy of making Lovecraft roll in his grave.
Dread Central: I’m so excited to chat with you in person and meet you in person
Joe Lynch: When you’re in an environment that is so conducive to genre film and filmmaker camaraderie, you want to be friendly with everybody because it’s a positive place!
DC: I just made a movie and it’s such a miracle to make a movie.
JL: Wait, you just made a movie?
DC: Yeah, I just wrapped my first feature film.
JL: Congratulations. Oh my God. How do you feel? Let me interview you. Have you gotten into your assembly yet?
DC: Oh God, I don’t even want to talk about it.
JL: You have to realize, that everybody walks in with a bottle of Jack and a razor blade.
DC: That’s literally what it was. My producer called me, he’s like, be upset. I was like, “I’m not”, but I’m crying in my bed.
JL: Jack and Gracie, the enigmatic editor who hates to do press, edited Suitable Flesh. I was in there with Jack. There’s nothing worse than assembling a movie because it’s just a big fat fucking mess, and you’re looking at every single flaw, but it’s all in there and you’re staring at it and it’s going, “Fix me, mommy, fix me!”
DC: It’s the worst.
JL: Believe me, everybody has that feeling. Did you ever see The Fisher King?
DC: No, but I need to.
JL: It’s Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams. There’s a moment in the movie where very early on when Jeff Bridges’ character’s life is over. Something happens and the camera just slowly moves into his face and to his eyes and all you hear is, “Fuck”. I think about that shot every time I watch an assembly and it’s common. But trust me, the fun is coming. I swear to God, fun is coming when you start to shape it. It’s like when you listen to an album and you hear that one track and you go, oh, I fucking love this song. Then it starts to build, “Well, I do like track five now. Track seven’s pretty good.” Next thing you know it’s your favorite album.
DC: As a journalist and a filmmaker I now to really truly understand the miracle of making a movie. Regardless of the quality, it’s still a miracle that a movie is made. What was that moment for you when you were in the editing room for Suitable Flesh? Was there a specific scene or moment when you were like, “This is it. It’s coming together”?
JL: Yes, and it’s interesting because it was two scenes. One, it was a scene that was incredibly problematic at first. It was our day one scene and you don’t know because everyone’s still feeling each other out and no one’s quite gelling yet. Everyone’s kind of sussing each other out, on both sides of the camera. And the first scene was the scene with Johnathon [Schaech] and Heather [Graham] at the dinner table. I thought, “Let’s start things off a little slow, a little chill, and then we’ll go upstairs and we’ll have a lot of sex on camera.” We wanted to just ease into the day a little bit. I thought two people sitting at a table, what could go wrong? And it was a disaster.
The sound was turned all the way low. You couldn’t hear anything. I’m sitting there going, “Am I going to have to dub everything?” As much as Heather and Jonathan were friends already and they had worked the scene out, it was just everybody was figuring the work. I felt like I undercovered it.
The checks and balances of making a film is when you set up a schedule, you have to figure out, “Well, if I spend a little bit of time on this scene of two people sitting at a table talking about a fish dish, if I can get through that fast, that means I get upstairs and I can get all that extra coverage of sexy time.” That is really what people are going to want to watch. People don’t want to watch two people talking about a fucking fish dish.
They want to see all the hot action upstairs, and the more coverage I can get, the better the scene’s going to be. Or at least that’s kind of how I positioned it. And we took half an hour too long, which now means I’m not going to get shots seven, nine, and 12 when I flip the world, when I go upstairs. It becomes this game of math. It becomes this challenge. So finally when we were in post and that scene, I was terrified to get into it.
The editor when we assembled it, they were on set. So I was able to see it when I came home the first day. [I could] go [to] the second or third day and go, “Oh, thank God something is working” just because it’s two people sitting there and the dynamic was already there. That was one.
The other one was what I like to lovingly call the smashing and the stabbing, which is the scene outside towards the end of Suitable Flesh. And that was another, we had one night to shoot all of that stuff outside one night only. Once that sun came up, that’s it.
DC: Were you filming Suitable Flesh in the summer or in the winter?
JL: In the summer.
DC: So you had way less nighttime, too.
JL: I was sitting there going, “I am screwed” because I spent a lot of time on the smashing and not enough time on the stabbing.
DC: Oh, but the smashing. Let’s just say you use a backup camera in a very fucking cool way that I wish more movies did.
JL: You know what though? I just love that I’ve been holding that in my back pocket for literally 17 years. Since I got a Prius, I knew I had to kill someone like that.
DC: I’m surprised more people haven’t done that before.
JL: Everybody says that. Everyone’s like, “You, son of a bitch!” I was like, “Hey, you had your opportunity, Scott. I’m sorry you had your moment. You could have told use it in Sinister.” But the point is, is that for that one really just in the edit, all I had to do was make sure that the original shot around the inner moment was good, and that took about three takes. And that’s not easy because the actors, they’re doing most of the action themselves. I’m off the side screaming, “Stop, go, reverse, stop, go.” It was brutal, but we had to get that right.
When we got to the other bit of that, which is a character is horribly stabbed over and over again, I realized I had 30 minutes left and the sun was coming up. So I had two angles. That’s it. So when I left, that was one of those moments where I go, “I don’t know what we’re going to be able to do unless we shoot something else back in LA” and that wasn’t going to happen. So again, my editor saved that scene.
We were in the edit and we were literally fighting and saying, “This is fucking bullshit”, “We can’t do this”. It was a big back-and-forth. Then I was told, “Get out of the room for an hour,” and I left, walked around the block and I came back and what is on screen is what they did with that. Seeing those two moments come together, I was like, alright, I think we have something
DC: So in Suitable Flesh, sweet queen Barbara Crampton, she’s just sucking on a vape in this movie. It cracked me up.
JL: It cracked us up.
DC: I love it. Why that choice?
JL: Well, I needed it purely from a storytelling standpoint. I needed to have there be, without giving too much away, that dichotomy. I needed to have that contrast, and I just thought, “Oh my God, I think it’s going to be so fucking funny.” As Barbara does, she takes her parts very seriously. She does a lot of research. She does a lot of prep for it. I found this out when we first worked together on Creepshow, and she would send me videos of her working the scenes out. If I could tell my 12-year-old self that I would be getting videos on a phone from Barbara Crampton, my brain explode.
But seeing her process was so fascinating because she really does the work. She does the homework. When I wrote it in that she was going to do the vape thing, she was like, “Oh my God, this is so fun. I’ve never vaped before. This is crazy. What should I use? Should I go watermelon? Should I go strawberry? There’s so many flavors. Holy crap.” I was getting videos of Barbara vaping and going, “Does this look right? Why is there so much smoke? Where are these clouds coming from?”
DC: That’s my favorite thing of all time.
JL: She really got into it because we’ve all seen it before, when you watch someone smoke a cigarette or vape in movies, you can tell the people that have never done it before, and we wanted to incorporate that into the film. The fact that she’s ripping those clouds when someone’s walking by and blowing into her pocket. We wanted to incorporate that in Suitable Flesh. I thought that was a really funny thing to see, but also I knew I needed it to be able to have that contrast.
DC: And so [Barbara] brought you the script. I know in the film’s intro you said she brought you the script originally written by Stuart Gordon. This was going to be his last movie. So did you make big changes to the script? How did that work in terms of the story’s evolution?
JL: Oh, the Suitable Flesh script definitely evolved a lot. Yeah. This is with all the respect in the world for what Dennis Paoli did, but when I originally got the script and I pitched them the gender swap, Dennis came back with the next draft that did a lot of the heavy lifting. From there, I will, and I’m not saying this is an egotistical thing at all, I always do a director’s pass. I’m a writer myself, and whether it’s a script that I had done or one that has come to me, the director again is another author of the script. And again, I run everything by the writers, the producers, and everything, whenever I’m going to change things up.
The crash-cam thing that was not in the script. That was something that I infused in there, but also a lot of the dialogue, and that was something that I was able to do when we got the script back and we started casting. I never do my director’s pass really until we cast. Once I know who we’re working with and what their strengths are, then I can kind of dive in.
So when we get to maybe a week or two before we actually shoot, that’s when I’m delivering my director’s cut. I’m trying not to put anything new. It’s little things. It’s little details that I know that I can pass on to the props department or in the dialogue. Those little things are part of the evolution of what a script needs to be to get you to set and then propel you into the post.
DC: This is a Lovecraft story and it’s obviously gender-swapped and brought into the present day, but why do you think we still are so interested in these Lovecraft stories and Lovecraft specifically? I mean, despite all of his problems that we know about him as a writer, his stories are still so universal in a way. And so I was just curious about your thoughts about tackling Lovecraft, especially in 2023.
JL: I think the thing about Lovecraft is that to be completely honest, he’s an IP. He has the kind of weight that when you go Stephen King or Clive Barker or Tom Clancy, there were these authors that had weight to them. People would say, “Oh, I love Lovecraft, I’ll watch that movie.” So we knew that we had value to his name. But that said, you go back to his well of stories, both the short stories and the longer form stuff, he was telling these stories that feel incredibly modern. I’ve heard this a couple of times, where someone says Lovecraft is unadaptable or is very difficult to adapt. I disagree.
A lot of his stories translate to modern times. What’s interesting is that you don’t see a lot of films that are shot as period pieces for Lovecraft, right? Most of them are modernized versions. It’s a little cheaper than having to deal with horse-drawn buggies and lots of corsets and stuff. But Lovecraft just translates, and I think he has stories that you can take from one era and plop into another. That said, “The Thing On The Doorstep” was written from the male gaze. So to take what he had from back in the day and project it into now, that was what was exciting.
That’s what made it so exciting for us to make Suitable Flesh. We know that he’s spinning in his grave. He’s probably on Letterboxd right now going, zero stars fail, and you know what? Fuck ’em. In the end, I was able to, for all intents and purposes, exploit the good name, but also I think be as respectful to his storytelling techniques. I love the fact that he likes to have characters tell stories. There is a technique to his prose that is incredibly cinematic and incredibly exciting. So to be able to respectfully take that, but also piss him off a little bit is really, really gratifying.
Suitable Flesh comes to select theaters and VOD on October 27, 2023.
Categorized:Interviews
