‘The Death of Snow White’ Director Jason Brooks on Crafting a Dark Fairy Tale
The Death of Snow White is a hell of a lot of fun. Taking the story back to its dark origins from the Grimm fairy tale, we’re treated to a bloody tale of revenge, jealousy, and badass dwarves that will cut you to pieces if you cross them. But there’s also a charming love story at the center of all the violence and gore. And if you’re in the mood for a good belly-laugh, this movie’s got it, too.
The official synopsis reads:
Pursued by her stepmother for eternal beauty, Snow White flees into a terrifying forest and aligns with seven bloodthirsty dwarves—cold-blooded assassins with a knack for brutal killings. Her spirit is tested in this grim fairy tale.
I was happy to be able to talk to director Jason Brooks, who is also an actor and professional FX artist, about the making of The Death of Snow White, world-building, and his love of practical FX.
Dread Central: What’s your background with Snow White? Did you see the Disney movie as a kid, and did it scare you at all?
Jason Brooks: I did see it as a kid, but it didn’t scare me. Saw it when I was really young. But, yeah, it didn’t really stick with me in any way. I just liked animation and cartoons at the time, of course.
DC: So then what made you want to do this adaptation?
JB: Well, the executive producer, whom I’ve worked with several times, reached out to me and asked me if I would make it. He had been talking with his family—his daughter is the actress who played Snow White—and they’re big fans of the story and Disney. So they said, “You know, we like your style, what you’ve done. I’d love it if you did a version of Snow White.” Which I had never thought of before. So after thinking about it, I said, “Well, if I can make it my way, I think I’d like that.” So he said, “Of course.” That’s why he reached out. And then my partner Naomi and I, after about three or four days of locking ourselves in the office, came up with a story outline that I just fell in love with. So I was very excited to go back to him and tell him that we’d love to take it on.
DC: In the original fairy tale, the queen thinks she’s cannibalizing Snow White, and Snow White dies several gruesome deaths. It’s actually pretty violent. Did you intentionally want to bring audiences back to Grimm’s fairy tale?
JB: Absolutely. That was the first thing we did was go back to the Grimm fairy tale. Because we wanted to be more true to the source material and steer clear of anything Disney’s done, and not be clouded by what has been. I kinda wanted to go back to the short story and pick out a few pieces from the original story that I wanted to adapt, then found some gaps that I wanted to explore deeper.
DC: You get the feeling of a much larger world beyond the cast that’s on screen. What was the secret to making this world feel so vast and lived-in?
JB: Oh, yeah, thank you. I think it’s really just having the right team to come out, do our set design, build our sets, and getting a lot of local people and local talent to lend themselves and their costumes to the world. And then our camera team, led by Kody Newton, made it look fuller than we had a budget to make it!
DC: Yeah, you were really great at world-building.
JB: That was important to us. We really wanted to create a different world that we hadn’t seen yet. And I really like those old 80’s fantasy-adventure movies like Willow, The Sword and the Sorcerer, and The Neverending Story. So, where you have the dark fantasy, you have adventure, some comedy, some fun characters, and it’s just kind of a fun ride. And each one of those had specific world-building. That was important to us when we started writing, to establish what the world is, create rules around that world, and then write to that.
DC: What was the impulse behind making the dwarves kick so much ass? Because that was a new twist.
JB: I really wanted them to be seen as other performers, other people in the story. I definitely didn’t want them to come across as silly, or goofy, or a throwaway character. My partner, Naomi, their dad was a dwarf when he was alive. And so in writing this, too, we had a lot of connections to that world. He did a lot of work with Obama and Clinton for the Americans with Disabilities Act. He was very well known. And we reached out to a lot of people as well, asking them, “What would be respectful to you?” So the direction we were going seemed to resonate with a lot of people. Treating them as “normal” people and not having them be throwaway characters.
In the auditions, when we reached out, casting people, we specifically said, “We don’t want silly performances. We want people to build actual characters, and not caricatures or a stereotype.” And I thought, how amazing would it be to see some of these stunt people, to see them actually perform action scenes and get in there and show us what you’ve got. You know, having a dwarf rip his shirt off and be ripped with muscles and everything, I’ve never seen that in a movie, and I thought, “Why not have these actors do it as well?”
DC: And then, of course, there’s the giant dwarf, which is hilarious.
JB: Yeah, we wanted one that didn’t quite fit in!
DC: You touched on it a little bit already, but Sanae Loutsis was perfect and really embodied the part, besides looking like Snow White. Tell me what it was like to work with her.
JB: Absolutely. So I’d worked with Sanae on a few films in the past, and she’s always played an angsty teen. And when we took this project on, I had talked to Sanae and said, “This is a role unlike anything that you’ve done so far. I don’t want the angsty teen. I want the purity to come through. You have vulnerability, a little bit naive, but strong-willed.”
I also asked Sanae what she wanted to bring and what she thought of the character, and we were so spot-on to both of our visions of what we wanted it to be. Sanae was like, “I definitely don’t want it to be one of those things where Snow White suddenly learns how to sword fight, becomes a badass, starts kicking ass everywhere. I want her to always remain true.” And I was like, “That’s us, too.” Naomi and I wanted our Snow White to be strong, to be able to lead with love, lead with her mind, and be able to overcome these obstacles with her strengths, which are purity and love. Which I think we see until the end.
Even the last words to the witch, the last dagger in the queen’s heart, those words of kindness probably hurt more than being stabbed. So that was important to both of us, and then Sanae just took it upon herself, as she developed the character on her own, and as she showed up on set. When she performed her first couple of scenes, I was almost in tears on set. I was just really emotional about the way she pulled it off. From that point on during filming, she was Snow White in my eyes and no longer Sanae. She just did a really phenomenal job transforming that character and bringing it to life.
DC: Yeah, I thought so, too. It was almost perfect casting. The rest of the cast is great, too. What was the audition process like for the prince?
JB: We had probably 200 to 300 auditions we went through. And it was rough. We were struggling quite a bit trying to find the right person with the right look, the right vibe, the right feel. In my mind, I wanted someone who was kind of like Harrison Ford. Han Solo, or Indiana Jones. You know, the scoundrel who’s lovable. But I didn’t want the stereotypical Disney prince at all. And even given those directions, a lot of the auditions had people playing the animated cartoon, and overdoing the royalty thing.
When Tristan Nokes came in with his audition, Naomi and I looked at each other, and we just lost it. We were in love with him, we loved his performance, and then immediately wanted to reach out and give it to him because he just knocked it out of the park. When he showed up on set, he was just a big fantasy nerd, D&D nerd himself. That, to me, was another one of those perfect casting moments, where he was exactly what I had in mind.
DC: How long did the filming take?
JB: 19 days!
DC: Just 19?
JB: 19 days, yeah. We just didn’t have the budget to go longer. Originally, our first round was 30 to 40 days. But with budget constraints, we just can’t pay everybody for that many days. So we just had to whittle it down, combine some scenes, and make it really tight. And we had twenty days, but then we had to shut down for a few days due to a COVID-19 outbreak. So we lost a day off of that 20.
DC: Oh, wow. Was there anything that you had to cut that you wish you hadn’t?
JB: Oh yeah. There’s quite a bit. We cut about 45 minutes from the film to get it down to that magic almost 90-minute mark. But there’s a lot of other character building, there’s some jokes, there’s more gore. Some of the queen’s performance in the castle. Some people have said, “Maybe a director’s cut one day.” But yeah, there were some fun things that we had to pull from that.
DC: You really do have to kill your darlings sometimes, huh?
JB: You do. To make everyone happy and get it to the time that it should be. But I feel like it still tells the story without losing the heart. So I was satisfied.
DC: Of course, there’s a very touching love story at the heart of all this comedy and violence. How did you find the right balance of comedy and sincerity and all these emotions that are juggled throughout the film?
JB: That was a bit of a difficult one. Again, I like those 80’s adventure-style movies that have that mix. I kept it to two worlds that come together. Some people misinterpreted that as not knowing the tone. In my mind, I knew exactly what I was going for. I wanted the queen to have this darkness, and this dark, serious weight to all of her scenes. And then Snow White and her friends, they’re naive, and they’re having a different life. So sometimes your attitude and experience is dictated by the environment you live in.
Snow White with her friends, being playful, that’s all great. And so that’s what that world is. It’s full of humor, it’s full of fun, it’s full of color. The queen lives in darkness. And as those worlds start to come together and combine. You start to see the colorful world, and the humor starts to die down a little bit. Then it starts to blend towards the end there. So if there’s a humorous moment, it kind of happens during the prince and Snow White and their friends and everything. It happens at that point. And all the darkness would land in the more serious moments, or the darker part of the film. While having a little bit of quips or humor points throughout the battles just to break up the battles. Because we don’t have the budget to do an epic, huge battlefield thing, we have to break up the battle so that it plays.
DC: Did you have to build all the sets yourself and everything?
JB: We did. We built a whole castle. The whole village was all facades we built. We did get access to a real castle out in Idaho for two days, where we were able to film a couple of exteriors. And some of the interiors for the birth scene. That was shot inside an actual castle. But then, the whole opening with the witch, that’s about 50/50. But everything else was built, outside of the dwarf house, which was a cute little house we found here in the Northwest.
DC: Where are you guys based, by the way?
JB: I live in Bothell, Washington, which is about 40 minutes north of Seattle.
DC: So, most of the actors come from the Seattle area, then?
JB: We had to fly in a few people like the queen, the prince, the dwarves. But, for the most part, everyone else is Northwest talent.
DC: What made you fall in love with practical FX?
JB: Oh, man, I would say—my first horror movie that I watched was Halloween, when I was eight years old. On Halloween. Watched it with a babysitter. And it scared me. But then I kind of had this fascination with it. Like, “How did they do that? They didn’t really kill someone, did they?” And then I started getting ten, eleven, twelve, watching Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and all of that, I just became fascinated with how they kill people on screen. Why am I having this visceral reaction to something that’s not real?
So I started looking into Fangoria magazine, and getting them from the newsstand when I could, or going to friends’ houses and reading them. I started making my own costumes and props in my own house. Not being able to film, didn’t have any money for a camera or anything, but I was just fascinated with making things. So I made little projects here and there, which led to an artistic-type career. An independent filmmaker had me do graphic design for his films. They invited me out to the set, and then I started getting involved in set work. It just kind of snowballed. And then when I met Naomi on one of the films, we hit it off, became a couple, and decided to just go all-in on this Real Fiction Studios makeup and FX thing. And we haven’t looked back.
DC: Did you try to stretch your wings with this project and see how far you could go with your visual FX?
JB: We did. We were limited by time and budget, of course. And with it, Naomi and I ended up doing the costuming, some of the props, setwork, and special effects. I was acting in it. You know, we had so many things that we were a part of that after we wrote it, we were like, “What were we thinking? We wrote this. We did this to ourselves. But it was a lot of fun, and it’s what we love to do. But it was great to be able to write things into the story that we wanted to try, that would challenge us. And think, “Oh, this would be a really cool effect to pull off.” So we definitely stretched our wings a little bit there, within the constraints we had, and time and budget.
DC: This isn’t your first time as a director. How did filming your Friday the 13th fan film prepare you for this? Or did it?
JB: It did. Every project I do, I try to learn something from to take to the next project. So in some sense, I learned to dial back certain things in terms of number of people, or FX. Or don’t spread myself too thin, which ended up happening again, just by default because of budget and the need to have so many people involved in a story. And background extras. But I guess it gave me confidence on this one that I do know what I’m doing, and I can have more fun with this. Also, to rely on other people. We hire a bunch of talented individuals to come and help, and you hire them for a reason, so it really allowed me to rely on those people to do their job. And they did. I had an amazing team on Snow White who I absolutely could not have done it without. So the big takeaway was just letting me know I could.
The Death of Snow White is available now on VOD.
Categorized: Interviews
