Director Greg Olliver Talks Devoured, Surprise Endings, and Falling Down the Stairs
Scott Hallam
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Before he took the helm as the director of Devoured, Greg Olliver had only done documentary films. With this horror project Olliver delivers a meticulously paced movie that delivers a great, unexpected ending. Olliver recently sat down with Dread Central to talk about the film.
Devoured (review here) stars Marta Milans as Lourdes, a woman on her own in the city, working as the overnight cleaning woman at a restaurant, trying to earn enough money to send home for her son to have a life-saving operation.
As this is a horror film, you would expect things go bad for Lourdes, and you’d be right. Olliver gave us the scoop on filming Devoured, finding his elusive star, and one particularly insane stuntwoman.
To start, Olliver gave a brief rundown of Devoured for those who have not yet seen it. “Devoured is a slow-burn psychological thriller/horror about a sad woman who works in a restaurant at night, and really horrible stuff happens to her,” Olliver said. “Then, at the end, it gets even worse. It’s not a happy film by any means. It’s a sad, weird, twisted, depressing film that will leave your mind a little melted at the end.”
Devoured has a fantastic ending that viewers probably won’t see coming. Olliver discussed the challenges of trying to surprise the audience without cheating them. “The challenge is trying to make sure where you take the people at the end is not disappointing because it’s so far in left field,” Olliver said. “I harken back to an M. Night Shyamalan movie, The Village, where there were monsters in the woods. And at the end you find out it was just somebody in a costume. The Village made me so fucking mad, man. I was like, you cannot do that to people. You can’t piss off your audience. That movie made me super mad because if I’m going to a monster movie, I want to see the fucking monster! It can’t be a person in a suit.”
Indeed, Olliver and Devoured writer Marc Landau worked to deliver a film that shocks and entertains audiences, while still playing within the rules of what’s fair. “In Devoured we’re trying to ride the line between what could be real, what could be in someone’s head, what could be supernatural,” Olliver said. “At the end, you can’t throw the audience such a curveball and call it a twist. It had to be part of the story. I think we’re really lucky that Marc Landau, the writer, had that great ending in his head from the very beginning. It just works. I love films like this where it keeps you wondering and then, at the end, it just clicks and works.”
And with the surprise ending, Devoured almost begs to be rewatched. Olliver confirmed that there are indeed clues and some unique filming techniques that will really appeal to viewers who watch the movie multiple times. “It’s funny; it was a lot of fun planning the secrets,” Olliver said. “There are scenes that we shot where we used one angle, and then, for the flashback, we used the same exact scene, but shot from another angle. The exact same thing is happening, but it tells a very different story. It’s acted the exact same way. It’s just shot from a different angle so you see a different part of it, and it tells the real story of what’s going on there.”
As Devoured reaches its climax, there is one amazing stunt that just has to be recognized. Stuntwoman Stefanie Flores performs a fall down a flight of stairs that will curl your toes. Olliver discussed the fantastic scene. “I was ready to be fast editing a dummy falling down stairs with loud sound effects when this stunt guy and stunt girl said, ‘Don’t worry. She’s gonna fall down the stairs,'” Olliver said. “I’m like, are you kidding me? If you look at these stairs at Raul’s Restaurant… every time I go there for dinner, I’m waiting for someone to die on the stairs. It’s like this huge, tall, narrow spiral staircase that people should be dying on on a nightly basis, and this actress just said, ‘I’ll do it. No problem.’ We did at least three takes of her falling a full flight of spiral stairs. Who in their right mind would think that would be okay?! But she just did it, and it comes off so good. All I did was film that. It was all Stephanie Flores.”
Finally, we talked with Olliver about his star, Marta Milans, an actress who carries the entire film on her back. Without such a fantastic performer, Devoured could have potentially fallen flat on its face, but Milans was a great fit for the role and excelled. Olliver discussed the search for the perfect actress. “It was actually really hard to find her,” Olliver said. “When you have the right budget and the right ‘known’ director, it’s probably not that hard to find fantastic talent. But when you’re unknown like me, having only done documentaries and you have a limited budget and you’re sort of doing cold call casting… Marc, the screenwriter, and I did a couple of open casting calls, and by the end of the day we were like, holy shit, we’re going to have to shelve this project because the film does rely on the lead actress absolutely 100 percent. But at what point do you cut the cord? We were getting deeper and deeper in post-production. At what point do we just say fuck it because we can’t find the right person?”
Olliver continued on the hunt for his Lourdes. “Then, luckily, Marc saw the ‘Law and Order: Special Victims Unit’ that Marta was on and said, ‘Hey, I saw this girl last night and she was really cool and it seemed like she was really natural.’ Our casting folks called her in for us, and it was an instant breath of fresh air that was a complete relief. It was like, ‘Wow, there’s talent!’ She was just so natural, so great, and ready to just dive into this mess of a role. We were so blessed to find her. And I guarantee you, if she wasn’t in the film, we wouldn’t be doing this interview right now. You’d be like, ‘That was a fucking stupid movie.’ Marta made it fantastic!’
Devoured stars Marta Milans, Kara Jackson, Bruno Gunn and Tyler Hollinger.
Synopsis
An immigrant mother (Marta Milans; Killer Women, Mala Hierba) works as a cleaning woman at an old New York City restaurant in order to make enough money to pay for her sick son’s operation. With no friends or family, she lives a lonely, desperate existence, saving every penny and sending it home for her son. As his condition worsens, malevolent forces living within the walls of the restaurant begin to torment her. She struggles to escape and return to her son before the evil within the dark walls drives her completely mad.
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