Exclusive Interview with Robin Kasparik on Stephen King’s I Am the Doorway
Staci Layne Wilson
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While you may not know the name Robin Kasparik yet, this budding director has got a bright future ahead of him, and with his adaptation of a popular Stephen King story into a short film he’s getting massive kudos at film festivals across the world right now. The flick is called I Am the Doorway, and it’s from King’s Night Shift anthology novel. Kasparik did another short, Séance, a few years back and now he’s looking ahead to his first feature.
Kasparik filmed I Am the Doorway in two versions: one for the cinema and one for fulldome technology, which makes it possible to project in the domes of planetariums – it is the perfect backdrop for this eerie sci-fi horror film. Reminiscent of Ken Russell’s classic Altered States, I Am the Doorway offers many thought-provoking themes bolstered by trippy visuals and a killer score.
We got a chance to chat with Kasparik, as he prepares for his film’s next U.S. screening (at the Hollyshorts Festival in Hollywood, CA., August 17.)
Dread Central: I’ve always been intrigued by this great thing Stephen King does: offering one option per year to a new or up-and-coming filmmaker, for one dollar. How does it work? Do you get to choose the story, or what?
Robin Kasparik: When I presented my short horror Seance in Toronto at the Rue Morgue Festival of Fear years ago, I found out that Stephen King had started a program supporting filmmakers named Dollar Babies – for a symbolic fee of one dollar, you can make a film out of his story. I asked his office for permission, and shortly after a contract came. I signed it and sent it back along with a dollar bill. A few days later, I got their permission. But there was a catch. In the contract, I signed that I could not make one cent from the film and that the film could be shown only at film festivals. It was a crazy idea, but I wanted to make my dream come true. Except I didn’t realize back then that I would be fighting for it for several years.
Photo Credit: Ondrej Kramar
DC: What is it about this particular story that grabbed your attention?
RK: I was intrigued by the unusual title itself – I Am the Doorway. When I first opened the collection of stories “Night Shift” and saw one with the name I Am the Doorway, I read it before the others. It was love at first sight. King told the story about an astronaut infected with a strange extraterrestrial mutagen so poetically and yet brutally that I was captivated. You could feel the influence of Lovecraftian cosmic horror and Ray Bradbury on this story. In the subtext, you could also feel something touching on the depths of the human unconscious.
DC: When did you first discover Stephen King?
RK: When I was a child I saw the television film “IT”, which became a cult classic for me and my friends in elementary school. We knew it by heart. I didn’t read his books until I was seventeen. At that time, I was going to rehabilitation for back pain and the masseuse told me that she listened to audio books of Stephen King and had become obsessed with them. I went to the library and borrowed King’s book Misery – and I was hooked too. His style of storytelling was so absorbing that I always lived in his books for several days. I was mostly taken by Misery, Apt Pupil, The Dead Zone and the story I Am the Doorway.
DC: Your adaptation of I am the Doorway is very experimental, especially in the visuals. Was this your idea from the very start, or did the idea take shape later?
RK: Originally, I wrote a screenplay that was much more faithful to the original. Then I realized that the title was in the first person, “I Am the Doorway” and that the theme of the story actually urged to film everything from the main character’s point of view. Then I found out about the revolutionary technology fulldome, which makes it possible to show a film in the giant domes of planetariums. I imagined sci-fi horror on exactly such a place. I pictured the dome of a planetarium as the head of the main character which the audience enters and sees everything through his eyes. It really got my imagination flowing. I threw away the old screenplay and wrote a new one, where I used the story as inspiration. The original story by King is totally amazing, but I understood that it didn’t make sense to try to transfer it to the screen. I wanted to create something different that was my own.
DC: Who did your special effects?
RK: Paradoxically, shooting the film was not the hardest part. It would cost $60,000 to create the space nebula and psychedelic states of the main character in a postproduction studio. Back then, I was happy to have enough money for coffee. I didn’t give up and searched for ways to do it differently, without letting go of my vision. I came across the videos of London artist Morgan Beringer. He creates hypnotic videos with the help of the animation of thousands of photos of organic matter under a microscope. I was looking for something unusual and mysterious that would be connected to the psychology of the main character and Morgan’s experimental art was exactly it. Morgan created a unique universe at a fraction of the normal cost. The nebula is in fact another character, it gradually changes forms, colors and motion speed depending on the main character’s mental state. Thanks to the help of my friend, director Bill Malone, I also met visual effects artist Gene Warren III, who worked on films such as Hellboy, The Expendables or Resident Evil. Gene liked my project and composed the space nebula into the filmed shots. Visual effects artists from France and the Czech Republic also helped. Everyone could work on the film only in their free time so work on the visual effects took a year and a half. I’d never been so relieved in my whole life as when we managed to finish the visual effects.
Shooting POV.
Photo Credit: Nina Zardalishvili
DC: Tell us a bit about the filming and if you have any stories, particularly in regard to working in a silent medium with only one actor in a single room most of the time.
RK: Since the film was shot from the subjective perspective of the main character, we cast in the main role the mime Radim Vizvary, who is able to express emotions with his hands. His hands are the only part of the main character that the audience sees. French cameraman Nicolas Bordier mounted on Radim a construction with a camera so that the illusion of the perspective of the main character would be perfect. Radim looked around from all directions so our spacecraft had to have all walls and a roof, as opposed to classic film sets. The crew was outside the set and we controlled everything wirelessly from a distance, including camera focusing. We filmed long scenes with a lot of action in a row. We had to repeat some of them 30 times. It took 10 days to film the versions for cinemas and planetariums and it was the toughest, but also the most interesting, shoot I have ever experienced. /
DC: Where did the film premiere, and what’s the response been?
Brian Owens, Artistic director of Nashville Film Festival and director Robin Kasparik
RK: I am very happy that the film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Oscar® qualifying Nashville Film Festival 2017 and a Special Mention in The Shadows Shorts Competition at the Transilvania International Film Festival. I Am the Doorway was also shown at the A Night of Horror International Film Festival in Sydney, the International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix, at Sci-Fi London and other great sci-fi and horror festivals. LA Premiere will take place at August 17th at Hollyshorts Film Festival. I was also very pleased when the French sci-fi and horror magazine MAD MOVIES compared the abstract effects of the film to the psychedelic space in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The audience in Nashville nicknamed our film “Stephen King on LSD.” At the SCI-FI-LONDON festival, they asked me what drugs I was on. When I truthfully said that the strongest drug I’ve ever taken was a double shot of espresso, they didn’t want to believe me.
DC: What are your future plans for I am the Doorway… and yourself?
RK: I would like to travel with the cinema version to other film festivals in the fall. I will send it to Stephen King as well in the next few days. I would very much appreciate his opinion on the film. Especially since the film differs from the story in many ways. At the same time, I am working on the effects for the fulldome version of the film, which I would like to show in planetariums next year. I am also working on my feature-length debut, which will also be a horror film. I just love this genre.
Set design.
Photo Credit: Pavel Gabzdyl)
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