Daniel Isn’t Real was one of the star attractions at last year’s 20th Anniversary Frightfest. The film, directed and co-written by Adam Egypt Mortimer, stars Mile Robbins as Luke, a very troubled young man. Struggling to cope with his everyday life, he finds himself reconnecting with his imaginary friend Daniel (Patrick Schwarzenegger), but Daniel isn’t entirely what he seems and Luke soon finds himself in way over his head. Post Frightfest screening it generated a lot of buzz from the audience and found itself firmly at the top of most people’s ‘films of the festival’ lists. The accolades are all to believed, we gave it the glowing five star treatment, as Adam Egypt Mortimer has made something truly, truly special.
The story (told from Daniel’s point of view) first started out as a book, In This Way I Was Saved, written by Mortimer’s co-writer, Brian DeLeeuw. The pair met at a party, and after hitting it off, Mortimer sought out the book and loved it so much he wanted to adapt it. The process became a rather long affair with Mortimer at one point deciding to temporarily bench the idea so he could work on what would become his debut film, Some Kind of Hate. Mortimer used this film almost as a proof of concept / proof of himself as a filmmaker to get Daniel Isn’t Real off of the ground once and for all.
We first met Adam at London’s Frightfest back in 2015 when he was attending with his debut feature film Some Kind of Hate, and we have kept an eye on his career ever since. This, combined with how much we adored Daniel Isn’t Real, of course meant that we had to sit down and talk to him about the project. Despite being in the maelstrom of Daniel Isn’t Real‘s release, Adam is actually already hard at work on his latest film, Archenemy, which stars Joe Manganiello (of True Blood and Magic Mike fame). The film went into production at the start of January and had just wrapped filming when we caught up with him to find out a little more about Daniel Isn’t Real.
You’ve had a very busy start to the new year…
It’s been a little crazy. We just wrapped production on my new movie last week, so I’m basically just a human-shaped husk of a consciousness. It was super exhausting. The one that I just did was actually probably the most gruelling. It was wild to be starting to shoot a new movie right as Daniel was coming out, and to be working back-to-back like that.
Hopefully the toughest part is over, you just need to put it all together now.
I’m catching up on my sleep, and then yeah, we’re looking at what we got and trying to figure it out. It’s a new one for me, it’s not a horror movie. It’s a slightly different mode for me and it’s interesting for me to understand, ‘oh this is a different genre, what does that mean? Does it mean anything?’ It’s helping me understand what did I do as a filmmaker. What am I in relation to what the genre is? That’s an interesting thing to explore.
From what I’ve been reading it’s a more action-based film, and you’ve got Joe Manganiello who has done plenty of action. I’m guessing he was quite a nice resource to have to hand?
Yeah, he was wonderful to work with and he was really committed. It’s still something that I created; it’s about a very disturbed character who is really haunted and traumatised, and Joe was pretty remarkable [at playing that]. For a guy who’s known for being so handsome and so charming to come in and be this really gnarly person, it was an interesting challenge for him, and he’s an exceptional actor.
I’ve been finding and understanding – this being my third movie – working with actors who really want to find an opportunity to do something deep, and appreciate through what I’m trying to do with them, is the greatest part about what I’m doing as a filmmaker.
What I like about him is that on the surface he has this classically handsome jock appearance, but then is a massive Dungeons and Dragons nerd underneath.
He’s a legendary D&D player. I went to his house and he actually has a room that he built in his house that is just for Dungeons and Dragons, and has giant sized monster sculptures and his Dungeon Master throne. It’s wild.
With this movie and with casting him, and comparing to having Patrick [Schwarzenegger] in my last movie, it’s like I’m sort of making up a world in all my films of all these extremely attractive men in these really dire dodgy circumstances. I think that’s an interesting body of work to be dealing with. Even going back to Some Kind of Hate with Ronen Rubinstein whom has now become a little bit of a heartthrob himself. To take these men and explore what their masculinity is, explore what’s attractive, what’s repulsive about them, and all of these guys whom have been willing to walk down that path for me. I think that’s just been really interesting. I wrote that comic book Ballistic; that’s a similar character and none of this was really…I think I’ve found my way into this period of time where this is something I’m really exploring with these actors. I’m really enjoying that.
I’m currently reading the novel upon which Daniel Isn’t Real is based. The narrative is told through Daniel’s perspective; the film follows Luke. When did you realise that, although Daniel is the more compelling literary character, that Luke is the more cinematic protagonist?
I think that was really early on, that was a really early decision that Brian [DeLeeuw] and I made when we were working on the story. It felt like to be an audience member in a movie we would really need to be experiencing the uncertainty and the fear and excitement with Luke. To be in a movie too closely aligned with Daniel would give things away. It’d be a super interesting idea, I guess it’d be like American Psycho where you’re aligned with the person. But Daniel Isn’t Real is a story about Luke in the sense that it’s about his consciousness. You really need to come in with the consciousness of the person who’s like us, who we can recognise, who’s a human being, and then start to wonder what is this other impeding consciousness. It seems much more true to the experience. Whether you see the movie as being about a schizophrenic or demonic possession, or something more universal like we all have a voice in our head that tells us to act well or badly, I think you have to be in Luke’s consciousness for all of that to work. So that was really early on, and while working on the script, there were early versions where things were completely opposite of how they turned out. In terms of what Daniel really is and how the twists and the turns work, but from the very beginning we started writing it from Luke’s point of view.
As an animal lover, can I just thank you for not going down the Midnight route…
(Laughs) So in the book, rather than trying to kill the mother, they succeed in killing a dog. We had that in the script for a while. I think at one point we had both the dog and the mother, everybody was getting poisoned and it was crazy. We wrote this really horrific scene where the dog dies, and then at a certain point I was like, ‘Dude, we will lose everybody. Nobody will care about this movie. Nobody will root for Luke to get out of this if fifteen minutes into the movie he murders this adorable dog. We just can’t do it.’ It’s so funny to think, because it was the same thing as in the movie, they poisoned the mother with prescription medication and that’s how they killed the dog earlier. To think that, ‘well you can kill the mom, you can try to kill her, no one’s going to be mad, it’s just a scary movie. But kill a dog, man, you lose everybody’. The dog in the book is named Midnight…we knew for a fact when we started the movie that it wasn’t going to have the same name as the book – In This Way I Was Saved – so our working title for the first year or so of working on it was Snuggles with Midnight. There’s a tiny piece of ridiculous trivia.
Imaginary friends in movies are pretty much always painted as the villain, yet in real life I personally think they’re quite a healthy thing to have. Did you have any imaginary friends growing up?
Absolutely. I had a very specific imaginary friend that I have a memory of from when I was very young, and I thank him in the credits of the movie. His name is Mr Nobody and he was this faceless egg-shaped Humpty Dumpty kind of character. I very specifically remember introducing my dad to him at lunch one day, when I was like four years old. I said, ‘Hey dad, this is Mr. Nobody.’ Beyond that one imaginary friend as an only child, everything I had was anthropomorphised. All of my stuffed animals had this really rich, psychological life and social structure. I would talk to them and they would talk to each other. To some degree, that’s where your creative life begins. All of the characters in my movies and everything I write, those are all imaginary friends too right? I agree with you that in real life imaginary friends are super helpful probably. They represent something about how our consciousness is interested in communicating and creating and can find something beyond what’s just right in front of it physically. I’m definitely not making an anti-imaginary friend statement here.
I did notice Mr. Nobody in the thanks section and wondered who that was…
I was glad that I got to honour him. People have noticed that in the credits and bring that up and it’s fun. It’s fun to reach back into your memories like that and go, ‘that really happened, that was a real thing.’ He was definitely a weirder / creepier looking character than Daniel, but he was only a positive influence. He just hung out with me and we had lunch together. It was a very chilled situation.
We’ve spoken before about the incredible cast in Daniel Isn’t Real. The first time I watched it, Patrick [Schwarzenegger] really stood out to me, the second time around though it was Miles’ [Robbins] performance as Luke that captured me. I’m not sure how it passed me by the first time, but he has so much to do personifying both of these characters. How much work did you do to get that right?
Miles was so crucial to the movie. I felt that in trying to cast somebody to play Luke, I was really concerned about doing a movie where the main character was only going to be mopey. Luke starts in such a negative position, he’s quite isolated, he has anxiety attacks, and he doesn’t have a lot of relationships. I felt like the movie’s just going to be boring, we’re not going to care unless I can find somebody who can bring a certain kind of energy to that character. Miles, prior to this movie, everything he’s done, he’s been known for being very funny. He was in a comedy called Blockers, he was the comic relief in Halloween. I thought that that was the perfect kind of person. Miles is so energetic and so funny. On set he’s always goofing around. To have that inner life and that desire to be liked, and that desire to be entertaining, was something that was so crucial for him to be able to bring to the character, so that it would be watchable. I think the first moment you see him on screen you start to fall in love with him because he has this emotional availability and charisma.
The other interesting about him is that Miles really wanted to play Daniel. He really had strong feelings about Daniel and what kind of interesting charisma that character would have. To deprive him of that, but then let him get it at the end, in this climatic moment…He was so excited to do that. Finally, after being this traumatised kid the whole movie, he finally gets to be the other guy. He really got a chance to inhabit that performance. He’d had a chance to watch Patrick and how Patrick was Daniel for moths before he got to take that part on, so there was a lot of time spent developing how that could work.
When Donnie Darko came out I was seventeen and I just loved everything about it. I had similar feelings when watching Daniel Isn’t Real. I can see this having a very similar effect on the young of today. It’s got this good-looking cast with Miles, Patrick and Sasha [Lane], as well as this super dark and intriguing plot.
I would love to know… I’ve travelled with the movie a lot, and I’ve gotten to see a lot of people respond to it. Usually, mostly, slightly older crowds, not really teenagers. I’d be really curious to know if this is one of the first genre films they’re seeing when they just randomly catch it on a streaming service. Is it going to appeal to them in that Donnie Darko way where you discover a movie at a certain time and you go, ‘I can’t believe how this is describing my reality, how are they doing this? But it’s also so insane’. That’s definitely the goal with something like this.
Arrow Video are releasing the film in the UK. They are always really thorough with their discs in terms of extras; they fully champion physical media. What extras are people going to find on that shiny Arrow disc?
Amazing extras! I did a commentary all the way through the movie where I tried as much as possible to have a focus on how I designed the movie and why I made certain sort of film-making choices. For me, I didn’t go to film school, so a lot of what I’ve learned about film-making has come from listening to commentaries and watching bonus features and reading books written by directors. It’s become something that as I’ve found that people respond really positively to, my style. I want to share very much with people where that comes from and how I execute it, so I go pretty deep into that on the commentary track.
There’s also a video essay by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, film professor, and she goes very, very deep into how the film is about art and creativity and how we use artwork. She has a really high-level academic video essay on the disc, which I’m ecstatic about. Then there’s, narratively speaking, there’s deleted scenes, many of which were deleted for good reason, but there is an alternate ending. There’s an additional scene from right at the end of the movie that I think really changes a lot the perception of what’s happening. It was an ending that I went back and forth between in the edit – should it be in? Should it be out? – and I think it’s a really important piece for people whom are interested in this movie to see because it just expands on the metaphysics and what the ending means in a different way than you get from the regular movie. There’s some really crucial features on the Blu-ray.
We didn’t really have the resources to do it, but sometimes I think that maybe one day I’ll do…if this movie ever demands for it in like ten years… if I can do a director’s cut and maybe change a little bit about some of the pieces here and there.
You’ve worked with Spectrevision [Elijah Wood’s production company] on your last two films. It’s been in the news recently that Elijah Wood is interested in trying to get a hold of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. This caused a lot of people to take to Twitter to request you helm it…have you been working on your pitch?
I haven’t really developed it thoroughly. I have an idea of a few things that I’ve wanted to do. It’s something I’ve wanted to do since I did Some Kind of Hate. Making that movie inspired a lot of thoughts in me about Nightmare on Elm Street and what it could be. I think that property is so elusive that until we really are able to sit down with the owners and figure out, ‘yes we really want to do this’, I wouldn’t develop the pitch much more intensely. But I have a starting point that I think is really fascinating, and I hope I get to do it.
There is a legion of Twitter folks behind it…
And that’s so lovely. There’s nothing nicer than people on Twitter saying that they want you to do something cool. All the Hell that Twitter gives, it’s worth it when people pop-up and say, ‘we’d really like to see this guy make this movie’. My mom knitted me a Freddy Krueger sweater when I was like ten or eleven years old, so it’s definitely been such a big part of my consciousness forever.
DANIEL ISN’T REAL is released in cinemas on 7th February 2020, and on Blu-ray and Digital HD from 10th February 2020.
