For his sophomore feature, Canadian actor-turned-filmmaker Jay Baruchel adapts ‘Random Acts of Violence’ – the graphic novel from Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray – for the screen. With the horror film arriving on Shudder this weekend, Baruchel took some time to chat about his upcoming feature – which we wrote, directed, and stars in alongside the likes of Jesse Williams and Jordana Brewster.
When comic-writer Todd (Williams) heads out on a press tour from Toronto to New York alongside his wife Kathy (Brewster), publisher Ezra (Baruchel), and assistant Aurora (Niamh Wilson) to promote his latest work, he finds himself haunted by the violence in his bestselling series Slasherman. As deaths quickly start popping up around him, all mangled in vicious ways envisioned by Todd for his comics, the writer begins to wrestle with the repercussions of his storytelling.
Random Acts of Violence has been almost a decade in the making, ever since Baruchel and his co-writer Jesse Chabot acquired the rights to the graphic novel in 2011. The film marks Baruchel’s first step into the horror genre – an entertaining slasher film that also doubles as an enthralling deconstruction of violence in films and asks questions about creative responsibility. Baruchel spoke about the process and making the transition from comedy to horror and actor to director.
Read the interview in full below:
I know that this film has been in the works for quite some time. I was just wondering how it was that you came across the graphic novel? And what it was about that comic book that sort of resonated with you so deeply and made you want to turn it into a film essentially?
Yeah. So it starts out in a super, super boring way, which is, Jesse, my writing partner and I, we were kind of trying to establish ourselves as writers. And so we met the people that had the rights to Random Acts because they own the rights to another comic book that we were really interested in. And I guess, to sort of suss us out, they asked if we could come up with a pitch for this thing. So we really just tried to do that as best we could. We tried to, you know, deliver on the pitch that we made. And then at a certain point in just trying our hardest, we started really giving a shit about it. And there was a clear shift from it being a sort of assignment to becoming, you know, a baby – something that we would like, suffer eight years of development to get going. So yeah, it starts very kind of humble and then at a certain point, we just sort of took creative ownership of it. And, you know, I don’t know how the producers felt about that. But at a certain point, yeah, we were just like, this is our baby and we want to fight to make it as good as we can. And I think the thing that sort of struck us was the potential to kind of, well.. just a really strong conceit for a scary flick, but contained within that conceit was the opportunity to say things or question some things that we thought were worth questioning and as the thing kind of snowballed over eight-plus years of development, conversations that we were having amongst ourselves about the thing we were writing and about other things that we were watching and reading, we realized needed to kind of be put in the thing. So yeah, it’s… by virtue of not getting it made, we were afforded eight years of trying to tinker with the script to make it as strong as it could be.
The film deals with turning trauma into art and whether or not that’s a harmful way to heal. Why was that important for you to address in this particular film?
We were kind of very, very interested in trying to, if there is such a thing, find the source of inspiration. But, you know, we realized obviously, that inspiration is something of an ouroboros of a snake eating its own tail. So it’s like you can go through something harsh, and then find a way to process it. And that might be therapeutic to a degree for you. But that doesn’t change the fact that you’ve now put something harsh out there, which will then inspire something else – for better or worse. And so we were kind of interested in, sort of, where the ring kind of closes in terms of nature and nurture type shit. But this sort of idea of inspiration as kind of two mirrors – back and back to each other; life and art – and they kind of reflect one another into infinity. Jessie, who I wrote the movie with, we went to high school together and went to fine art school and, one of the things you just… I don’t want to say you take for granted, but one of the things that are kind of bread and butter to, at least, some degree is trying to analyze or pick apart why somebody wants to say something and how they said it. So these conversations… we were really struck by them and they kind of got stuck in our head.
The film is obviously quite an uncomfortable watch, intentionally – due to the themes you’re exploring. Did you ever have any hesitation, while you were writing it and making it, that it might push viewers away? And how did you balance those heavier themes with creating an overall satisfying film?
To be honest, and it’s gonna sound super hokey, but my biggest concern was that it wouldn’t be hard enough. And so I remember when we handed in what was basically the draft that we’d end up shooting and being like, I wonder, did we leave some harsh on the table? T hen in making it I wondered if it wasn’t as hard as it should be. And I don’t necessarily feel that way anymore. In terms of the balance, I think it’s like… so if we succeeded in nailing that balance, I think it was down to just knowing what role every scene serves and knowing what the load-bearing responsibilities of certain beats are. And just knowing that not every scene is the same thing, and each scene should also have a very specific role. If you built the thing correctly, it should kind of fall into place to a degree. But I also know that no one goes to see a horror movie to not be scared. And so that was the other primary motivation, it was trying to figure out how we can accomplish the task we set ourselves which was to make a horror film. And a horror film that doesn’t scare you, I would argue is to at least some degree unsuccessful. We just built the story as strong as we could and tried to scare the fuck out of people.
You were given the rights to adapt Random Acts in 2011. Over that time, from script to screen, were there any political events or news stories or podcasts, with real crime in mind, that fed into how you and Jesse shaped the film in terms of how you approached the film’s themes of creator accountability and the depiction of violence against women?
The Zoom Out answer is yes to all of it just because eight years passed between the time that we wrote our first pass of the treatment to actually getting to go to production, and, hopefully, we’re both different kind of men than we were when we started. I would like to think it’s been a forward trajectory in my adult life. It was, for lack of a better term, growing up and trying to reconcile some of my fascinations with morality and, something that was of profound importance up here in Canada was something called the missing and murdered Indigenous women inquiry. It took years and hundreds of millions of dollars and basically it didn’t… Nothing is better as a result, but at the very least, it forced an uncomfortable truth on the uncomfortable Canadian living rooms and dinner tables which is that, if you were an indigenous woman, you were six times as likely to die of violent death than the average Canadian. And that’s like a staggering, unforgivable statistic that none of us should be okay with so that definitely had an impact on us. But I also know that the seeds of these kinds of questions, this bit of self-reflection, was already had already been planted in both of us. For me, I go to Ann Rules’ Green River killer book that I read when I was 26 or 27 and it was the first true crime book I’d read where she took all kind of historical, contextual and emotional real estate away from the killer and gave it all to the victims. Each chapter serves as a bio of each of the victims. And that’s a very trying read, and it’s meant to be, but it was this sort of epiphany moment for me. And then it was this thing I heard Stephen King say or I read something he wrote in Fangoria which was that in slasher films when you kind of resent the heroes, the victims, and you’re actually – to a point – rooting for them to get it in an unpleasant way – as unpleasant a way as possible. You know, what does that say? And what is that experience? From that, it occurred to me that I could name Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers, but I couldn’t name any of the kids that they killed. It all started to line up at the same time. So yeah, just by virtue of growing up and hopefully not being an idiot, a lot of it rubbed off on us.
Do you feel that your experience as an actor impacts the way that you direct and, if so, is it a positive impact?
Yes. Well, thank you for saying I’m experienced. I appreciate that. Um, yes. Hopefully, yes. You’d have to… That’s a question for the people I’ve directed, sadly, you know, because it’ll be a version of me tooting my horn regardless, but, ideally, yes. I’ve been on set since 1995 as an actor, and the vast majority of them, in my opinion, didn’t necessarily function correctly. And there’s a sort of industry standard of organized chaos, as they call it. But the organized bit is a bit of hyperbole. It’s just fucking chaos. And you have a lot of directors who don’t really know what the thing is that they’re looking for. And they hope that having you know 70 plus casting crew in front of them working as hard as they possibly can, they hope to see the thing they’re looking for. But when they don’t, and all they know is what they’re not looking for, you get north of 8, 9, 10, 11 takes and you really don’t know what the fuck is happening. And so I wanted everybody to feel that they were doing something, feel that something was happening. I wanted everybody across the whole company to have the same info. Always, always always. So whenever we did rewrites, we’d send them out to absolutely everybody on the crew with an intro letter explaining why we made the changes we made because we just wanted everyone to take ownership of it. Also for me, I want it to all feel like a version slightly north or south of playing cops and robbers in the backyard. Because it’s all make believe, regardless of how fucking heavy it is. It’s still make believe and I think if everyone shows up with a kind of sense of fun to a degree and imagination then you operate from a way happier and freer place. So I wanted everyone to look forward to being there. And also the other thing is, I told all my actors, yeah we wrote these people but they’re yours now. So you have to defend them, you have to push back against me. So if the script has now built something like a decision you don’t think your character would make? Tell me and we can find a decision that they would. I want you to tell me where I’m wrong. Because that way, you own the character and you give a shit and nobody can understand or care for them as deeply as the person playing them. So hopefully all of this came across.
There are a lot of great practical effects on show in this. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about the process of staging some of the kills in such an effective, visual manner and working with that smaller budget to do so.
Thanks. I’m glad you think so because I’m really, really proud of the prosthetics in this movie. I say proud like I did them but like, I’m proud in that I think they look fucking wicked and I think we pulled it off. It starts from the fact that I got to work with, as far as I’m concerned, one of the great prosthetic makeup artists in the world – a fella called Paul Jones – who I’ve known since I was 18 when he built a, sort of, throat slit rig for me for a crummy movie that I got killed in. I shouldn’t say crummy. For a movie that I got killed in. So we start with understanding, first off, a general idea and concept for the violence and we know that our goal is, wherever possible, to be as close to anatomically correct. The rule we had was we want to go kind of small and clumsy and we want it to be uncomfortable and we want it to be in the sort of stubbing your toes and shit. Like, like in that neighborhood. We just wanted it to be kind of dirty and harsh and as close to authentic as we could get. So we start choreographing to a degree… roughly mapping out… I shouldn’t say choreographing, just mapping out the general story beats of each kill. In doing that, we kind of, you know, might have a bit of inspiration like the scene where the kids get it in the car. The kid in the passenger seat, who gets it probably the worst, there’s a bit where he puts his hands up and he gets stabbed him through both palms of his hands. Well, that was my cinematographer Kareem Hussain. As we were shotlisting that sequence and trying to figure out what we wanted it to feel like, he was like “well what about something like this?” I was like that’s fucking god awful and that feels like something that could actually happen, you know? And then, to be honest, I kept sort of piss testing it with my stepdad because he was a combat veteran and an emergency room nurse so he has seen a lot of shit and we’d write a sequence and show it to him and be like, is this a thing that would happen or what would it look like and so he was always there, my stepdad Cliff, to tell us “okay, it should be a bit less or here it should be a bit more” like he gave me a bit about what happens to me when I meet my untimely end. We originally thought it would be way kind of smaller and a bit more subtle and then Cliff very quickly was like, that caliber rifle at that distance would be a fucking disaster in the back of that car. So it was just figuring out the story beats, figuring out what our hero prosthetic gag is if there is one – so in the car, hands and girl in the thigh kind of thing – and then figuring out how we can best serve those because, again, all moviemaking is sleight of hand. It’s all just a magician on the stage. But it starts from figuring out what the point of the scene was.
In terms of the aesthetic, were there any kind of flashes in particular that you were nodding to or recognizing? I kept thinking about Black Christmas, obviously, because of the Christmas lights and everything.
That’s absolutely right and Black Christmas looms very high in the pantheon of Canadian film history. A lot of people don’t realize that effectively the slasher genre was born in this country. So, Kareem, my cinematographer, came in with a strong instinct of this movie called ‘White of the Eye’ – I think it’s from like, the early 80s. And there’s really, really dynamic steadycam work in that flick, and he had a strong instinct for that. As well as that, he came in with Deep Red. What was weird is that he assumed that our whole script was something of an homage to Deep Red. And then I realized that I had never actually seen it. And then I watched it during prep and was like, oh, damn. So Karim has a lot of influences, you know, like the leather glove shit from all the Argento movies. There’s definitely big strands of that in our films DNA. What I came in with was the red shoes ballet movie from the 40s. There’s one particular sequence when you stop watching the play, and you’re kind of in it and everything on stage comes to life and the pacing of it, the movement, the energy the camera had, and the hue of the light really got stuck in me and I was like “I don’t quite know why but this is the thing for Random Acts”. And so then coming in with those two things and some ideas about color, we got into a conversation and put it all in our shared symbiotic food processor and this movie came out of that.
One of my favourite things about the film is that it has a really striking, distinct visual style, especially for the opening with the comic book strip. Was this something, the bright red lights and the Colbert show, that you always had a mind from minute one of writing the screenplay or did it sort of come later in the process?
It was weird. It’s one of these things where, as I’m writing it with Jesse, I can’t help but see the shit in my mind’s eye. And when I think about different things, my mind’s eye has different looks for them. I also suffer from, what do they call it, synesthesia. Like I always see color when I hear music. And so the colors that I kept seeing in my head thinking about this thing, or listening to music, and brainstorming on it, I kept getting a really, really strong strong strong sense of pink and red and it kept coming across in a massive way. I think part of it is like, part of it is, you know, growing up asking “what is a Christmas tree? What does the wall behind a Christmas tree look like when all the multicolored lights are firing at once?” They conspire to create this warm pink kind of vibe to it and what was super funny was.. I mean, funny to me not like hahaha. It’s not a fucking knee slapper. Day one of pre production, I was outside having a smoke and Karim walks up and we give each other a hug and go like holy shit 20 years in the making because we’ve known each other since I was 16. I was like, we finally get to make a movie. And anyway, we hug and he steps back he goes “okay so, fire and water, cyan and amber”. And I said, “okay, fuck, let’s get it” like we were still outside. We hadn’t gotten in the bloody building yet. And so I was like “okay, let’s get into it. It’s like amber isn’t the same side of the color wheel as my pink and redshift. And green is counterpoint to that, and blah, blah, blah” and we just kind of start so we approached it very earnestly from the very first day. And what it ends up doing is it ends up feeling like we’ve chosen colors from the comic book spectrum. And that ends up working. But it wasn’t like that. It was a way lamer, hokey or artsier process where like the fucking colors picked us. So we knew the look before we knew the metric for it. And then when we audition the look in camera testing, we were like,” oh fuck so not only does this look wicked but it’s also doing something to us. It’s doing the right thing. It is the right combination of melancholy and disturbing. I’m getting happy as well as fucking scary out of it. Oh, this seems to be the right thing”. And so yeah, it was a deeply, deeply nerdy kind of process. The whole thing.
Thank you, Jay, for taking the time today. Anything you want to leave folks with?
Just be nice out there, I guess.
Random Acts of Violence is released on Shudder on 20th August. Read our review here.
