Interview: AJ Bowen Now Talks Ride Share Thriller NIGHT DRIVE and Plans to Direct
Drew Tinnin
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It’s hard to imagine what a lot of our favorite American horror independents over the last fifteen years would have looked like if genre staple AJ Bowen had decided to play the tuba professionally. Luckily, he chose the darker path and became an actor. In his largest and most likable role to date, Bowen plays a down-trodden rideshare driver in Night Drive. Combining a hang-out, late-night adventure movie, and a high concept sci-fi premise, the story centers around a mysterious passenger named Charlotte (Sophie Dalah) who manages to keep enticing Bowen’s character, Russell, with enough excitement and intrigue to not get kicked to the curb.
In our chat below, we start off talking about AJ’s tuba career that sadly never was, how he did all the driving in Night Drive, how co-director and writer Meghan Leon used her own rideshare stories in L.A. to help guide the story, and Bowen’s plan to write and direct very soon.
Check out the trailer and our interview below!
Synopsis:
Russell (AJ Bowen – You’re Next, The Signal) is a driver in Los Angeles who’s reeling from a series of bad decisions. While his life seems to be caught in a downward spiral, a business proposition from an alluring but enigmatic passenger named Charlotte (Dead Night) proves too good to turn down. A simple ride turns deadly, catapulting Russell into an even darker place, but Charlotte may be the key to a second chance he thought he’d never have… if he can make it through the night.
Dread Central: Have you been watching the Tokyo Olympics at all? You played tuba during the opening ceremony of the Atlanta Olympics, right?
AJ Bowen: I was in the opening and closing, yeah. So I got to record with Michael Kamen and play with John Williams but I haven’t gotten to watch it.
I listen to all eras of symphonic and classical music still. I miss the performance aspect of it at times. I think the last time I thought about picking up a tuba was like fifteen years ago.
DC: I’m sure it’s probably easier to get work as a professional actor than as a tuba player. It would be interesting if you ever got to help choose some pieces for a movie.
AB: That’s a funny thing. I’m a writer and I’ve always been a writer. So, I decided on the back end of the pandemic, I was like, ok well, the way that streaming has sort of changed things…the way that the price points work, you used to be able to sort of make a living off of the points on a movie or off of the sale or residuals… I just looked up and said, you know what? I’m going to go the Corman route. I’m going to own all my masters. I’m just going to do this myself. I’m the cheapest actor I know, I can write for me, I can write for what we have.
I know so many people that our composers. And I’m like, no I won’t be using you. I know just way too much public domain recordings of stuff. So in this script I wrote for a movie I’m getting ready to direct, there’s a ton of notes about music in it. All of the stuff is public domain. That is one leftover asset for sure. Okay, I want Dvořák’s “Water Goblin” here. I know this recording that is decent quality from 1927, we’ll put that in there. My brain still works that way.
DC: Working on smaller budget films, too, you’ve done pretty much every job there is on a movie set. What’s the story you have in mind now that’s going to make you jump from the actor/producer role into the director’s chair?
AB: For me, it’s sort of out of necessity. It wasn’t like I was super inspired to be like this script is super special and I’ve got to direct it. We moved up onto the side of a mountain and then Covid hit and we have endless amounts of hiking trails. It didn’t feel like a prison but it definitely felt like we were on a submarine up here. I would sit on the deck at night and at 8 p.m. like clockwork we would hear dozens of coyotes going off. We would hear them getting ahold of people’s down the hill, their pets.
DC: Those sounds are the worst.
AB: Yeah, it’s a pretty terrifying sound. I had to save our neighbors dog who got out and there were like five coyotes actively looking to make it dinner. Trying to beat those things with a kids plastic snow sled because I didn’t have another weapon!
DC: This is starting to sound like a movie.
AB: This is a big old mid-century house and it’s ever so slightly sketch. It just occurred to me, I can shoot up here. In college, my guys that we all got together and worked, we just trade off jobs depending on what it was. I always wanted to be an actor but I always wanted to do the other things. Me and my buddy Scott who’s actually in Night Drive, we went to high school and college together, so we would end up in front of camera more times than not but we were always hauling cable, gripping, G&E..that sort of stuff… I want to make something that’s fun. It’s sort of like a horror comedy with a bunch of different stuff.
DC: There is starting to be a new subgenre of ride share movies like Night Drive or more horror driven ones like Spree with Joe Keery. It’s just a great way to get two characters together that never would have met, like you as the driver and then Sophia [Dalah] as your passenger.
AB: We shot this one three years ago but just the turnaround time with stuff and then on top of it you spend a year and a half in a pandemic. At the time, I don’t think we would have ended up making a ride share movie if it had gotten to the point where it had become its own subgenre. But in our case, with this movie Meghan [Leon] wrote it because Megan doesn’t drive. So Meghan, the writer and co-director and producer, Megan’s been taking Lyft’s for years in L.A. and she has a ton of crazy stories. I think that Brad [Baruh] would’ve been like we can’t do a ride share movie because we don’t want to be compared to other ride share movies! I think that would’ve happened if it had been six months later.
I always think it’s interesting when you toss yourself into sort of a limited environment because you still have to try and make an interesting visual movie. In my case, I did the practical driving. There’s a few moments where we did poor man’s process where we set up rear projection on it but for the most part I’m driving practically in it. It’s just a weird thing that I have a ton of experience doing in these Indies. I did a ton of driving in A Horrible Way to Die with camera on the hood; I did the same thing in You’re Next. I did a thing with Tom Holland like twelve years ago and he was like, ‘Oh, we’re going to drive, can you act to the camera?’ He had me driving down Ventura Boulevard at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night which is terrifying!
DC: This movie does really take a left turn. It’s the gig economy meeting sci-fi. Your character is running out of options and then discovers a myriad of options. Just to roll back for a second, I remember talking to Tom Holland when he did Twisted Tales and I remember your story.
AB: Yeah, that’s what it was from.
DC: I think that’s one of the only times, off the top of my head, that you’ve really worked with some of the older guys. It’s interesting that you haven’t made too many films with people you didn’t already know.
AB: Yeah, I think what happened with my case is that we were traveling around to festivals with Signal and then I met other filmmakers who were also from their regions doing the same kind of things. We were learning how to do this with other like-minded people. It’s always still foreign to me 50 movies later where we take a movie to a distributor and they have opinions about the poster. There’s always these kind of interesting…they feel like arguments and really they’re collaboration. I just ended up that way. I ended up meeting Ti West, he was going to play a small role in his movie, and he was like do you want to come out instead and do this role? I was like, hell yeah, I’d love to come out and play a satanist in a movie. It just grows from there, it’s like being a touring musician. You go out with different groups. Working with people and building careers DIY, low fi, high concept where everyone knows how to do stuff.
It’s a very strange thing to remember eleven years ago making a movie that was lit entirely by Christmas lights with four people and that dude just directed Godzilla vs. Kong.
Night Drive pulls in to Theaters + Digital/VOD August 6th.
Categorized:Interviews
