“I had a dinner with Tyler… he asked me if I liked getting hit in the face!”
Hitting the home entertainment market this week is Tyler Shields‘ idiosyncratic debut feature Final Girl. A tense horror thriller with splashes of action and downright weirdness, it showcases Abigail Breslin as Veronica, an innocent-looking girl with a penchant for kicking ass.
Her opponents are a group of teen killers, amongst which is Twilight star Cameron Bright as Shane. Bright has his fair share of experience working with offbeat directors – he appeared in Jonathan Under The Skin Glazer‘s controversial Birth next to Nicole Kidman. So how did this gig measure up? Get the fascinating lowdown below…
How did you come to be involved in such an unusual horror movie?
It was luck of the draw I guess. One of Tyler’s best friends was supposed to play Shane, and they ended up having a Visa issue I think, coming over… so they had a last minute scramble for someone, and my name came to the top of the list. I had a dinner with Tyler, and he did the whole 21 questions, Tyler-style… he asked a few different questions I’d never been asked before by a director. He asked me if I liked getting hit in the face… that kind of stuff! I was like: “Do I get to do my own stunts?” and he’s like: “Yeah of course you do!” (Laughs) He’s just a straight up person, I could tell right away he wasn’t worried about the movie at all, he was worried about me and that’s what I was happy about.We bonded and then that was it, and I feel we made an amazing movie because of it.
There was a lot of improvisation involved, how did that help you develop your role?
I’d say for any character it’s always cool because you get to do your own thing. I’d say probably up to 80% of what you see in the movie now is to do with us throwing in something. We’d start off with it, and Tyler would be like: “It’s missing something.” And we’d just run with it, see how it feels. You know, we’d bounce stuff off each other in the moment. We’d cut and he’d be like: “Okay I like that and I like that…” Then we’d just do it again and run with those, see what else came up. Next thing you know we’d made a movie! (Laughs)
That last act… it’s very trippy in nature!
Yeah! I think for me it wasn’t too bad, because my trip is a scene out of real life anyway. It was more for Logan (Huffman) and Reece (Thompson)…that was the fun part because they were doing the crazy stuff. It was fun, we’re not necessarily supposed to know we’re tripping out. Suddenly it just hits us and we’re like: “Woah!”
Tell me about how you developed your onscreen relationship with Francesca Eastwood. It’s a subplot but also an important emotional story in the mix…
It’s weird, because the one good thing about this movie is it’s going to be up to the person watching it as to how they perceive the story and the subplots. With our characters, it’s like: “Alright, what drove all four of these kids to be like they are?” It never gets explained, it’s all your own opinion as to what happened.
Tyler let us do our jobs, we let him do his, and it worked. Especially with Logan, Logan’s amazing. I don’t think they wrote a script for Logan by the way! But it worked. We bonded a lot over the fourteen days of filming this movie. I’ll never forget it, that’s for sure.
Were you a fan of horror movies before going in?
Oh yeah definitely, I’ve always been a fan of them. I always think that, not necessarily horror, but that psycho-thrillers and stuff like that, I find them to be more real. People don’t realize the world around them sometimes, that there are are messed-up people in the world. That happens every day. For me, being what I would like to say is a pretty regular dude, playing those characters is way more fun. Being able to go to those emotional extremes as an actor, that’s amazing. As a 22 year old dude, I just want to go f*ck sh*t up in movies, pardon my language! (Laughs) So horror movies and thrillers are perfect for me.
Final Girl is out now on DVD.
