‘It Ends’ Director Alexander Ullom About The Beating Heart of His Existential Horror Film
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Alexander Ullom’s road trip horror flick, It Ends, ponders what if said hell was just an endless road. After its debut at SXSW, the Gen-Z horror hangout film about four post-undergrad friends trapped in a Jeep Cherokee on their way home on an endless road of purgatory has been making the rounds. Since March, it’s racked up accolades at fests from Florida Film Fest, where Ullom was raised, to Overlook Film Festival, to most recently Fantasia Festival, where it won the “Best First Feature Award.”
Ahead of the film’s New York premiere at the revived Film at Lincoln Center horror program series, Scary Movies XIII, Dread Central chatted with Alexander Ullom. During our chat, we talked about how his experience as a teenager affected the movie’s soul, the unusual timeline for making it, and how Gen-Z viewers hope to inherit the movie.
Dread Central: I would love to know how the root of the idea for It Ends began. Where did this existential story originate?
Alexander Ullom: To fully, completely break any sort of general wall and dump the information out. It’s obvious in the movie, but I was someone who struggled with adolescent depression. Adolescent and adult depression. I guess just depression. [Laughs] And the characters and the place that they get on once they graduate there, or they’re entering the real world. There’s this belief that when you enter the world, there’s going to be this hero’s journey where you have these identifiable obstacles that you’ll overcome and pull meaning from. But it’s really just a scrap in the mud, and there is no set path.
I was 18, and I was really going through it. A lot of my structures were dissolving around me. Then I got invited to my buddy’s house, and he was like, “We’re playing Monopoly.” He mentions that a silverback gorilla could kill a grizzly bear. And I’m like, no, you’re wrong. That’s not correct, first off. We started screaming at each other; it was genuinely the most animated I’ve been. I remember being like, “OK, you know what? I’m going to stick around for other people and for just shooting this shit with my homies.” It’s like a stupid basic lesson, but I needed to go through that as a kid. That was half of the genesis of the idea.
Then the other half was just, I was smoking weed on my buddy’s porch and was like, “What if a road never ended?” That one’s way less poetic. But those two things together are just like this set, confined structure that you endlessly move forward on, and that I was coming to terms with.
From my research, sketch is a big part of your background, and through watching some of your work. How did you integrate that experience from that comedic filmmaking background into your character writing upon this horror landscape?
I learned that all the best dialogue comes from people being in the moment. And so when I would write, I would perform the dialogue or improv it, like sketch comedy, and then also have the actors do that in rehearsals, and everything would get written down eventually. But that’s probably the character approach. And then there’s a lot of absurdity in those stupid sketches. If anyone is reading this, go watch. Did you see Heist Job? I have to shout out Heist Job. The film, wait, wait, wait. Let me see if that’s public. *It wasn’t public. Alex proceeds to make the short public in real-time.*
There are only two reactions to something absolutely horrifying, that human suffering that makes absolutely no sense and is absurd, is absolute abject terror, as an animalistic terror, or just funny. I don’t know. So that’s probably that influence on that. Yeah, the comedic background. I mean, look at Zach Cregger. He’s a genius when it comes to comedy, and now Weapons is about to come out.
DC: Tell me everything about how you guys shot the film in Florida. Just reading that you guys read it was filmed at Gainesville and Tallahassee?
AU: We shot in Florida because of the Florida State Alumni package. That, and also, I love Florida. I grew up there. It’s just that the woods in Florida are so ungodly hostile and dangerous and very hot, so that sucked. The main reason we shot in Florida is that’s where our resources were and where we got a free equipment package. Then it was also just where we could pull favors. I would’ve loved to have shot this in some sort of Seattle, Northwestern Big Tree, but we didn’t have the resources for that. And the Florida woods were fine. The Florida woods are just a lot more hostile. I almost clicked on a rattlesnake one time.
DC: A lot of the film is well strengthened by your shot composition, different angles to really make this endless road feel so fresh within every scene. Tell me about finding that specific rhythm for the storytelling.
AU: I think there are three times as many cuts in the first half of the movie as there are in the second. There’s another technique when you have no money. Doing close-ups really helps. It looks the same as a close-up in Dune. It’s just space. So obviously, you have to work well with the actors there to get that. What was really tough too, a huge thing on it was that I had all these shot design sequences. When you have no resources, you’re only getting three or four setups a day doing that type of stuff. But luckily, that was the stuff that we never reshot that kind of survived all the rounds. We reshot the movie, or pickups, like 70% of the movie. I made it when I was 22, but the stuff that was boarded from the beginning always survived.
There’s definitely some, and it’s a weird thing to say, Tarantino influence or James Wan, maybe Tarantino or Safdie’s influence in the first half. I think Good Time was a movie that showed me how to do a high-budget thriller for no money, which again is working very intensely with an actor and then shoving the camera in their face. This invokes just a straight-up animalistic response to watching these children fight for their lives.
The design of the first half is obviously a lot more formulaic. It’s a lot more like a typical studio horror movie. And then in the second half, it becomes a character hangout movie. So it’s Linklater style. That’s like the entire gimmick of the movie, which is that it becomes an existential hangout piece. But at that point, it’s about the characters. So there are no big, crazy cameras. There’s some fat, there are some intense editing decisions that happened, but mostly it’s a hangout movie. There’s definitely a stark contrast, and that is the thing that I’m very curious to see how the hustle and bustle of New York responds to.
DC: When it comes to getting your cast together, tell me how everyone assembled because everybody’s just so talented.
AU: So talented. All of them are so freaking talented. I wrote the role of Tyler with Mitchell Cole in mind. I met him in college. The guys do HVAC repair work in real life. If the industry found him, he would be the next Robert Redford. He’s so sick. Then Noah [Toth], who plays Fisher, auditioned for my thesis. It didn’t work out, but I kept him in mind and then brought him back.
Mostly, if I had to say, how did I cast this movie? As I posted on Instagram, I was like, “Hey, I am casting a feature film.” And “people are like, What the fuck? I went to high school with you.” People sent me Akira [Jackson] and Phinehas [Yoon], who play Day and James, just DMing me and being like, “Hey, you should check out this person, because I post on Instagram.”
Then we read a bunch of backstage actors, and it really just came down to chemistry, and then how well they could perform the dialogue in an organic hangout sense. It’s weird because the two needed to be able to enter fight or flight, but also chill and hang out with each other. So it was like a nice balance of that. But they’re all also so talented, and because we re-shot when we got older, they had two years to sit with the characters, too.
DC: That was a perfect segue to my next question. Were there any difficulties in shooting when it came to doing the reshoots? How much of the movie did you have to reshoot coming back to it a few years later down the line?
AU: It was never the genre sequences. It was never the comedy. That shit worked from the beginning. Not to blow smoke up my own ass.
But yeah, the genre stuff and the comedy always worked. It was mostly pacing stuff and then emotional arc stuff that I had just never done because I had never paced for longer than 20 minutes. It was never performance issues. Also, because we had no resources when we started, we’d bump up against 12 hours. And what happens when you do that, when you bump up against 12 hours and you have no resources? One of two things happens: either the crew takes the brunt, and they hate their lives and hate the movie, or you just make creative sacrifices.
We prioritize the crew every time, and maybe that’s why the universe rewarded us to get us to go back and fix stuff. So it was fixing character arcs and fixing stuff that we just couldn’t do because we didn’t have the resources. And so we got very lucky to go back and reshoot stuff. The biggest issue, I guess, is facial hair.
When Snoot Entertainment came on, they were very hands-off, really. They were just like, “What do you want to fix?” And I was like, “This, this, this, this, and this.” I would go back and reshoot stuff right now. If I could, I would go back and change stuff. My producers, Carrie Carusone and Evan Barber, who were the ones that were on it the whole time—those are the OGs, my loves, my best friends. They would kill me if I said that.
I was older, and I had come of age, so my sensibilities were better, and I had screened the movie thousands of times for strangers in my living room. We would go out to bars in LA and meet friend groups and just be like, “Hey, do you want to end your night? By watching my feature?” I’d screened it so many times. So I just knew exactly what the movie needed and where it didn’t work.
DC: So that was your own way of doing test screenings. That’s very smart.
AU: Definitely. And super important. I grew up doing the morning show at my high school. Shout out to Newsome High School. But when I did the morning show in high school, I would either screen a video or I would sit in an audience of literally 3000 kids. Then they would either be like, “Okay, yeah, this is working.” Or they would bully me relentlessly. So I learned film school in an Ender’s Game program, where it was trial and error. It was life-or-death filmmaking. Learning in high school specifically, after you throw a comedy sketch on, and it’s like, “If this doesn’t work, I’m going to get food thrown at me.”
DC: Gen Z will eventually have this movie in their arms. What is it that you want them to take away from the film?
AU: I can’t give an answer to that specifically because I think there is an aspect of the movie that allows you to project your own stuff onto it. I can say from James’ perspective, all of them have different approaches to their suffering and to this world that they’ve inherited. So there are different ways of going about it, and I think every character’s decision was just as valid. I think you can definitely pull stuff away from each way.
The characters react to the meaninglessness, but I think that for me to outright say it or say what they should, I think that when they watch it, they will see themselves enough in the characters. They will be able to pull away their meaning. But it is one of optimism that I will say that each one is a statement of optimism in the face of nihilism. Yes. I will say that, at least.
Categorized: Interviews
