Adcock, Steve (2001 Maniacs)

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Steve Adcock on the set of 2001 ManiacsAbout a week or so ago, Tim Sullivan approached me to see if I wanted to set up a series of interviews to help promote the March 28th DVD release of his debut film, 2001 Maniacs (pre-order it here!). Considering the amount of talent involved, how could I say no to something like that?

The first gentleman I got on the phone was cinematographer Steve Adcock. He’s been here in the States for almost 20 years now and has a resume that’s about as varied as you can ask for; everything from The Devil’s Advocate to Karate Dog. 2001 Maniacs is probably the most troubled film he’s worked on in that time, but as you’ll see below, the final results have made the long, hard road well worth the trip.

We also chatted about Sullivan’s follow-up feature, Driftwood, which is about as 180 degrees from Maniacs in every way possible as you can as for, as well as the work he did on Night Skies and Cemetery Gates. Enjoy!


Johnny Butane: Where do you hail from originally?

Steve Adcock: I’m originally from the UK, moved here back in 1986.

JB: How did you hook up with Tim Sullivan?

SA: He called me many years ago, when Maniacs was in its first incarnation. A man named Nick Perry mentioned my name to Tim, I had done a film with him called Speedway Junky, so Tim called me and we chatted. We got together once, back when it was under Rhino, then it fell apart, then we got together again when it was through another company, but I had to bow out because the timing was unrealistic. So by the time the fourth incarnation came about, the one that was actually made, they had already had a DP slated but he bailed. So Roy Knyrim from SOTA Effects, whom I had worked with before on a music video, told Tim that he should bring me in and Tim said, “He was supposed to do this originally!” (laughs) So that was it, I was back in!

It’s amazing how big this business can be and yet so small at the same time.

JB: Now, the first time I saw it was fortunately on the big screen…

SA: Well, I should say, then, that the actual print was not a really good interpretation…

JB: Really?

SA: Yeah, they had screwed up the first two reels, unfortunately. One of the problems with Maniacs was that it had gone trough many hands, and sometimes they just weren’t the right hands. They had used a cheap company to scan the film into digital media for the first couple of reels, and that’s why there’s a lot of grain and blue, all kinds of weird stuff that wasn’t intended to be there… But after the first two reels it does get a lot better.

The DVD version is a lot cleaner, since it’s not being projected on a big screen…

Steve Adcock on the set of 2001 ManiacsJB: To be honest I probably didn’t even notice because I was just so happy to finally be able to see it!

SA: Yeah, it’s not too bad once you get past the introduction at the school, anyway.

One of the reasons it had happened that way was that I wasn’t involved in the end result color timing, I was working on something else and they didn’t want to make the time for me to be put in there. So… how can I put it? Other people not qualified did the color timing came in, and they thought it’d be a great idea to do some digital push ins and make the sky blue… and basically fucked it up.

JB: Not taking into account that you had shot it that way on purpose…

SA: Right. We shot it a specific way, with a nice clean negative so we’d have some latitude later to do what we needed with color correction… pumping tons of blue into something isn’t really good for anything unless you’ve already shot it with blue, because once you start adding blue it picks up a lot of artifacts. You’ve got to remember that it wasn’t struck from a 35 negative, it was scanned into a computer from an HD tape rather than from a negative, then the correction was done and it was put out to film; so it was done ass-backwards and that’s why there were so many mistakes.

Unfortunately the opportunity for me to be involved in the color timing wasn’t available, however, so…there you go. Once they found out they were having these problems, then they call me in to try and fix it all… so we did do some small fixes that made it a lot better, but it’s just a shame that they couldn’t have had me in from the beginning cause we would’ve had a really clean looking movie.

Don’t get me wrong, though, it’s a low budget movie and eventually the money runs out. In that situation, though, there’s a simple process that you follow to avoid having to spend money in the backend. Sometimes corners have to be cut that end up costing more, but that’s the business for you.

But after that entire drama – and believe me there was a lot of that with this film, I was pretty happy with the way it all came out, and the DVD does look pretty darn good.

JB: One thing I noticed while watching it for the first time is that the look gets darker, more rotting almost, as the story in the film becomes more and more twisted. Was that something you had intended from the outset or did it come about during shooting?

Steve Adcock on the set of 2001 ManiacsSA: It was intended from the get-go… We didn’t want to make it look like a horror movie, per se, because it’s really not a horror film; it’s more comedy than horror. The original script was a campy tribute to the Herschell movie, and that’s how it was shot. We wanted to make it nice and bright to begin with, and then slowly degrade things… not only with the lighting, but with the makeup, too. You notice they start to look more and more disheveled, start to get paler. As much control as we did have we tried to do that.

To begin with this was a 17-18 day movie, eventually it ended up being 22 cause we went into Thanksgiving, so when you’re running around at that kind of speed it’s kind of hard to keep the vision in place. Too often you worry about getting a light up and making the shot.

JB: Just getting it on film…

SA: Right, and a lot of people don’t get that, they go into a theater or sit down with a DVD and they don’t understand the process of getting a movie, which in this case looks like it cost a lot more than it actually did, done in the way you envision. Tim and I definitely had a plan going in there, and even though we couldn’t always stick to the plan due to schedules, budgets, and time, as much as we could we tried. And like I said, it was never ever supposed to be a dark, contrasty horror movie. The script just didn’t call for that.

I know some reviewers, especially those online, didn’t quite get that… they expected it to be, I don’t know, some really dark film, but it’s just not. Towards the end of the film there was some… let’s say disagreement on which direction the movie should go, which was decided on the last week of the movie and it’s like “C’mon, guys, there’s a script here… what are you trying to do?” It’s weird because you’re shooting a movie from a script that everyone approved, then all of a sudden there are some powers above who want to go in a different direction. That was a lot of the behind-the-scenes drama.

We did get to go back and add some scenes to beef it up a bit, which worked very well…

JB: What kind of stuff was added?

SA: Well, the barbeque sequence was never completed in Georgia, so we had to finish that one up in L.A. We also added the slaughterhouse scene, where you see the two guys working in the slaughterhouse?

JB: Yep, I remember that one…

SA: Yeah, that was put in just to beef it up a bit…

JB: Get some more red stuff in there.

SA: Exactly!

JB: How weird is it for you to be finally talking about a movie you worked on three years ago?

SA: It’s very strange, yeah. It took such a long time to get completed, and sometimes my memory is a bit hazy on the details…

Steve Adcock on the set of DriftwoodJB: We’ll jump to a more recent movie, then. I see you worked with Tim on Driftwood. How is that?

SA: It’s great, amazing. It’s funny how you talked about how long it took Maniacs to come together, but Driftwood is done. We finished it before Thanksgiving, we did the color timing, did a really good session for that, and everyone’s very happy; it’s all ready to go! That’s a movie that took less than 6 months from the start of shooting to its completion. Pretty amazing. All the details of that are still so fresh in my brain, the coloring details and all that, whereas I can be a bit hazy on the specifics of Maniacs (laughs).

JB: How is Driftwood’s look compared to 2001 Maniacs?

SA: It’s completely different, Driftwood is a much more stylized vision. I would actually call it a dramatic thriller, as it’s a very character-driven piece, very character oriented.

It was all shot in one location, a disused juvenile detention center, and we went there many days before production and literally went through the whole place, blocking out scenes and figuring out how we were going to cover it. Once again we were under some time constraints; it was a 15-day schedule, which had actually started out as 21, was cut to 17, then down to 15. So it was tight, we really had to be on it in regards to what we wanted and how we wanted to cover it; otherwise you would lose bits of the movie.

So we went through every location, blocked out every single scene, came up with all the angles and moves, lighting schematics, so when we went in there everybody was really well prepared. My electrical team especially was great; they had the next scene lit while the previous scene was being filmed, that’s how well planned it was. Each scene had its own look depending on where it was being shot, so that was a great help.

With Driftwood, we had specific photograph images in mind that we wanted to make sure we had to accentuate the story, whereas Maniacs was a broad palette from the get-go. All we knew on Maniacs was that we were starting nice and bright and that it would slowly deteriorate.

There also wasn’t nearly as much stylized lighting on Maniacs. When we got to Georgia, we wanted to make sure there was no electric lighting, per se, but that all the light there was was very natural. This place was supposed to be in the past, so there’s no electric lights, just candles and oil lamps. There’s one scene in the parlor where the girls are dancing, and the two guys are arm wrestling?

JB: Yeah, I remember that scene…

SA: If you notice that behind them are really hard shadows, as if cast by a fire or an oil lamp, and that’s what we tried to do for the entire film. More of an organic lighting.

Steve Adcock on the set of 2001 ManiacsJB: Is that sort of lighting harder to set up, would you say?

SA: I wouldn’t say it’s harder; each scene had its own parameters we had to work in… I would say it’s harder to create a source from natural lighting; whereas if you’re doing a regular film you can have all sorts of lamps and stuff to help you along. When it’s natural, it can’t be in the shot unless it is natural, you know? So if you don’t have some candles or an oil lamp, you have to come up with something off-camera that looks similar.

I’ve had three years to look back on Maniacs, and recently I saw the finished DVD and thought, “Well, that’s not bad at all!” When you see dailies you get a sort of sense of how it will look when it’s all done, but once the movie is finished you’re like, “Jesus, we did that in 20 days?” (laughs).

JB: What else have done since Maniacs, other than Driftwood, that you can talk about?

SA: I just finished up a movie called Night Skies not too long ago, which I think is going to be pretty cool.

JB: That was the movie that SOTA Effects did, correct?

SA: Right. Jerry Macaluso was one of the producers on the show, and Roy Knyrim, who owns SOTA Effects, was the director. It’s based on a true story; do you remember the story of the Phoenix Lights?

JB: Yeah… (read about it here)

SA: It’s based on a true account from that phenomenon, from a guy who was found in the desert in the middle of nowhere, ranting and raving, basically saying he was abducted by aliens. I’m not sure if he’s still there, but this gentlemen spent some time in a mental institution, I heard.

It’s based on his account of the abduction, where some young adults went on an RV trip and crash in the Arizona desert. After the crash they are observed and pursued by aliens. It’s actually come out pretty damn good… it’ was another of those really quick shoots, maybe 18 days tops, but it was a little easier because most of it was set either in or around the RV, so it was simpler to set up.

The alien effects look really really cool; SOTA had some animatronics, some guys in suits; they just did a really cool job. I think it’s going to be a very cool movie.

JB: That’s good to hear because I know when the film went into production, a lot of people were talking about it, but since then it’s been pretty quiet.

Night SkiesSA: Yeah, it has. They had a really good response at AFM, so I think they’ve been keeping a tight lid on it until it’s all finalized. I know they went back recently to get some pick-up shots, which the second until DP handled because I wasn’t available, and Jerry said about a week ago that they were getting ready to do the final color timing, so hopefully my schedule will allow for my involvement in that.

JB: Sounds very cool; can’t wait to check that out. What else have to done since Maniacs?

SA: I did another movie for Roy called Cemetery Gates… that was a lot of running around with a camera and blood gushing everywhere. I laughed my ass off the whole time! When the blood happens, it’s so extreme you can’t help it.

JB: Right, that’s the movie with Reggie Bannister fighting a Tasmanian Devil. How does the creature look?

SA: It’s pretty cool, yeah. A lot of it takes place during the day so there are a lot of quick cuts, so the monster isn’t shown in harsh lighting, using a long lens to make it as nondescript as possible. The budget was pretty low, but it looks pretty cool for what it is. A lot of running and gunning, you know? I’ll tell you, though, when this thing eats, it can get pretty messy! (laughs).


That wrapped up my chat with Mr. Adcock, whom I’d like to thank heartily for giving me a call to chat about this very cool movie. As you know, Maniacs is out on DVD March 28th. Be sure you click here to pre-order the disc. You can also see the trailer here and visit the official Maniacs site here. And hey, if you’re in Toronto, the Rue Morgue crew is showing the film on March 16th (details here), and if you’re in or near L.A., you should hit Dark Delicacies on the day of the disc’s release to meet pretty much everyone involved with the film!

That’s a lotta links! Stick around for more 2001 Maniacs interviews over the coming weeks!

2001 Maniacs on DVD!

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