Co-directors Tim Rutherford and Cody Kennedy have spent a decade creating their feature debut, The Last Video Store. The idea for the film began as a short film, but gradually expanded to a full-length feature, one that caught the eye of Arrow Films who release the film on Blu-ray in the UK and US on Monday 9th December. Set in the confines of a video store, and starring real-life video store owner, Kevin Martin, The Last Video Store is a must-watch for those who grew up trawling the shelves of their local video rental store.
When her estranged father passes, twenty-something Nyla(Yaayaa Adams) is tasked with the thing she hates the most – cleaning up his mess. Left behind are a collection of VHS tapes, and with them, the burden of returning them to “Blaster Video”, a time capsule to an era in which cover art and a catchy movie title were king. Blaster Video is run by Kevin, a human encyclopaedia of VHS history, and a friend of her father. Amongst the returns is an unknown tape, a movie not even Kevin has heard of. Was this the last movie Nyla’s father watched before he died? The mystery is too much to resist. But when Kevin and Nyla press play, they unwittingly activate a long-dormant curse, and a series of classic cinematic villains are plucked from B-movie heaven and hell to be unleashed into the store itself!
In the lead up to The Last Video Store’s release on 9th December, THN spoke with co-director Tim Rutherford about working as a directing duo, the importance of physical media, and which movie character he would most like to spend time with.
The Last Video Store began life as a short – what was it about this idea that prompted you to expand to feature?
When we first started – Cody and I met in high school – we discovered that the two of us together wanted to make feature films. In Edmonton, there’s a pretty decent little indie film scene. So we started making shorts together, and then through Ded Fest, a local Film Festival, we met Kevin [Martin] and discovered his video store underneath a daycare. At this point we were much younger than we are now. But that first initial feeling of walking into a video store in like 2012, was completely overwhelming. Both of us had grown up in video stores, and had a love of similar movies, and then meeting Kevin was such a surreal experience.
When we started making shorts for Ded Fest, we started featuring Kevin in the shorts and that immediately led to a place with unlimited possibilities and the source of a lot of our inspiration. How could we kind of encapsulate an experience like that [visiting a video store], that so few people moving forward would have the opportunity to experience. Then, how can we enshrine such a strange character, like Kevin. So we started making these shorts. As they started gaining momentum, we realized this isn’t just our idea of the video store, it has so much to do with Kevin himself and the interaction and the experience within the hallowed halls of the video store, if you will.
It just naturally progressed like – if this is what we want to do, then let’s just take it to that next level. It is ten years of waiting and mulling. As with so many other filmmakers, it’s quite a long path, but it’s not necessarily a straight one. Cody and I spent a lot of years in between other projects and following different career paths. Cody began working in the commercial side of video games at BioWare, and now Electronic Arts. I joined the independent film scene as a production designer, and then eventually working in a studio. Through those years we were both able to collectively grab so much experience, and skill that would lend itself to the final product of the feature film.
In the film, video store owner Kevin is one of the central characters. In real life, Kevin does indeed own a video store. How important was it to you that it was Kevin that played the character over an actor playing a version of him?
I think right out of the gate…it was probably the second or third short that we shot with Kevin. I really noticed that Kevin in real life, and Kevin on screen…he just was able to encapsulate this hyperbole version of himself. Just listening to him rant about movies as a writer myself was like, how could we go in any other direction? If we really wanted to get this video store experience right and not get lost in the sauce of nostalgia, then we have this guide that takes us through there. He was just so good. He’s that likable, he’s that intoxicating in real life. Despite Kevin’s many years of resistance of “I’m not an actor”, and always down-playing himself on screen, the audience, just again, and again, and again, really took Kevin out of that head space.
Cody and I worked with him quite closely. Josh as well, having been a trained actor, having him and Josh work together is just absolute magic for those two. I think for us it was infinitely important if we wanted to get this experience right, to put the right person on screen. I think it was just always Kevin.
You essentially rebuilt a version of Kevin’s video store to be the setting. What was Kevin’s reaction to the finished product?
He embraced it because, as you may know, filming independently, we forced him to build some of it, and work on it. All those VHS spines that you see, they were all hand-printed and painted. Buying VHS cases was way too expensive, so we ended up buying these cardboard versions. He had to paint and glue all of those himself. I think he gained a real great appreciation for just how much depth his store has. I feel he was very happy with it in the end. It was a strange and surreal experience to stand in this version, 2,000 kilometers from the original.
I think he was a little bit like, “we could have done more, we could have built more”, and it was just like, “well, you didn’t have that attitude in the five days of prep that we had where we were working 14-hour days to get this thing built”, (chuckles), but looking back and comparing it to his shop, which is just absolutely beautiful, but a complete licensing nightmare, we definitely have to go the road that we did with a little less is more.
There seems to be a trend of directing duos, especially within independent cinema – you co-directed the project with Cody. What’s the dynamic of the relationship between the two of you, and how helpful is it having someone to share the responsibilities?
It doesn’t necessarily make it easier in certain aspects, and in other aspects it really lightens the independent load, especially in indie film. Josh and I were the lead carpenters, and building and helping our arts department make props and fill the space. So I was doing production design, writing, and directing at the same time. It was a lot easier to pass some of those responsibilities like VFX, supervising, and a direct line with the DP that Cody has, being more of the VFX and camera focused director. I am able to typically focus more on special effects and choreography, dialogue and acting with the actors. So I feel like, in some ways, it definitely lightens the load and makes it a lot easier.
Certainly, like you said, in recent times, it makes it a bit more appealing to be able to split this one, massive role, into two. Two different people that can focus really more finite on a lot of the details that often do get missed in independent. But there’s the obvious hurdle of working together. Cody and I have been friends for 25 years, so we’re more akin to brothers…who don’t always agree, and don’t always get along, but we understand the end vision together so keenly that it makes it easy to push past the difficulties that working with two separate minds can cause. We’ve always discovered that in between our two different ideas, and are two different approaches, often is the best rhythm. The best balance.
I find that a lot of these co-directors, and that co-directorship growing in the independent scene, has really stemmed from that understanding that one vision isn’t always the best vision. So when two come together and you find where they overlap and where they countersink each other, you get some of the best material. Some of the best things that we come up with are the things that we argue about.
One thing that I really enjoy is that all the characters have a fully formed story arch, including action hero Viper and slasher killer Caster. Why was it important to you that these characters were fleshed out?
I think that bringing Josh Roach on, the co-writer, helped us reformat the script into a nice tight screenplay. It really helped us highlight the most important character moments. For me starting out, I really wrote the first half-dozen drafts really really focused on Nyla, because I knew that I would be more innately drawn to Kevin, and I felt like the camera would want to focus on Kevin a lot. So I felt like by putting our entire focus on Nyla, we would be able to see her story come to life. It was really important to have not just a side character that is kind of along for the ride which, is a very popular thing, especially in B-movies in the 80s and 90s, to just have a female character just along for the ride; the main character gets all the jokes and all the lines.
As we were expanding on that, and seeing Kevin and Nyla’s relationship develop…seeing that connection that Kevin had with these characters come into light and Kevin to be forced to examine them a little bit. Like is Viper a good guy? He’s not a good person. He’s like a poorly written, two dimensional, effectively bad guy stemming from the Steven Seagals and the Jean-Claude Van Dammes. When you watch the movies and you’re just like, “is this guy, the good guy? He’s really hurting people, and he doesn’t seem to mind at all”. Viper doesn’t really have any telltale qualities of heroism. Then to see that countered by Caster who is a very typical bad guy. In contemporary film you’d see that from a sympathetic angle.
For us it was really important to bring those characters from the past into the future so that we would have four characters interacting from different time periods. Really having that all come together was just really, really integral to not becoming overly satirical, or too much of a parody that we missed the intention of the film, which was to look at nostalgia as not a good thing, and not necessarily a bad thing, but something that is important to everybody in life.
During the film, several character archetypes from classic cult cinema are brought forth into the real world. These cover a variety of genres from horror, action and sci-fi. How did you land on the ideas that you did? I imagine there’s a version where you could have solely focussed on horror, sci-fi, or action.
Honestly, if the movie could have been three hours long, we would have been through more of it. Again, it comes back to that experience in the video store. It’s never just one type of film. In particular, Kevin’s shop is not really divided by genres, so much as it is by wider ideas. There’s a whole director section, and there’s Westerns, and then there’s Western creature features. We thought we could just do the broader strokes of just doing all these different horror movies, which are a staple to video stores, absolutely, but what else was there? What else was getting rented?
A movie like Prey Stalker was an example of something that we just really wanted – a movie that was like those mock buster’s, the rip-offs, and sci-fi probably has the biggest array and selection of those movies. You’d get the cover that looks almost identical to Predator, and somebody’s mom is just like, “oh they wanted Prey Stalker, was it?” So we wanted sci-fi for that reason; horror…it’s very little fictional writing to say that one of Kevin’s favorite movies of all time is Friday the 13th: Part 4. We wanted to embody again that video store spirit of, “well, you’ve seen the main genre. We all know Jason, but we want to meet the Canadian little brother” so to speak.
Going from there, it just seemed obvious that the next step would be action. Basically in order, they are the most popular genres rented in the video store. Kevin was just like, “oh, it’s easily sci-fi, horror, and action. Those are the three things that I rent out the most.”
If, in The Last Video Store style, you could bring forth characters from any film to hang out with, who would you pick?
I would probably pick Alan Grant from Jurassic Park. I think he’d be really cynical and interesting to speak to, and also, I love dinosaurs, so that would be pretty fun, and growing up being a kid named Tim in 1993 meant it was pretty influential to me. Also, I would probably want to meet the xenomorph from Alien, although I don’t think it would end much better for me than it did for Brett. I guess on that note from Repo, Man, Harry Dean Stanton’s character, that was like me turning into a teenager, realizing that I’m not the only person that thinks this cynically about the world around them.
With streaming services now becoming a lot like cable used to be, do you think that physical media might be about to have another boom again?
I really hope so because streaming services have brought a lot of great movies that were getting forgotten and kind of abandoned to the out-of-print kind of era I guess. So hopefully we see a resurgence of analog films, because there are things like special features that you just don’t get on streaming services. You can be subscribed to Criterion and have access to all these beautiful films, but not necessarily all of the incredible special features, which to Cody and I were so integral to our growth as filmmakers and understanding more about the industry, and how it functions without having direct access to the industry itself.
I think that as we go forward, and all these streaming services struggle and some of them start dropping their libraries, we’re going to see a lot of incredible movies that are staples of pop culture and regional culture just get lost because they’re out of print. Nobody has access to the analog, and the streaming service that owns it is in this financial crisis for the next 12 years where nobody’s going to have access to the rights for these movies even. So I think it’s really important to grow and expand your libraries so that when that happens, these movies don’t get lost and forgotten, which I think is a tragedy.
Every time there’s a format change, we lose a little bit more every time. It seems on one hand, bringing accessibility to a lot of people around the world is a very great benefit to everybody, but then the other side of it is, just what do we do in the interim. How do we access some of the great features and stories that don’t get retold, movies like Prey Stalker and these Canadian mock busters and from around the world, these kind regional interpretations of more expensive stories. I think those get lost almost immediately. We have that joke about Canuxploitation exploitation and all around the world when we’re doing Q&As people are, “what are you talking about?” And it’s just like, “well let me teach you about format changes and regional storytelling.”
The Last Video Store is being released in the UK by Arrow – Arrow always takes great care with their releases. How have they been to work with and what can people expect to see on the disc, other than the film?
They’ve been an absolute dream. If somebody would have asked us three or four years ago, “who do you want to distribute your movie?” Arrow’s right at the top of the list. So to have them reach out after the completion of the film and be like, “we love this, we want to release this,” was such an incredible dream come true and to know that there’s going to be this beautiful box set, with this incredible art. I think they totally nailed that and then when you fold out the booklet, there are essays, video essays and written essays, and articles. We did a special features component that involves a lot of our old shorts and a lot of our concepts and former drafts. There’s just so much comprehensive material inside of the book that it feels like the only way to experience this film moving forward.
The Last Video Store is released on Blu-ray via Arrow Films on Monday 9th December 2024.
