If you’re a fan of modern genre films then it’s more than likely that you’ll be familiar with the face of actor Jeremy Gardener. In the last few years he has made appearances in films such as Bliss, Fingers, and Sadistic Intentions to name just a few. What you might not be aware of however, is his background in writing and directing. His first film The Battery, released in 2012, was met with a positive response and now comes After Midnight.
The film sees Gardner’s frequent collaborator Christian Stella officially step into the co-director chair and tells what the team are coining a ‘rom-mon’ (romantic monster) story. In After Midnight, Gardener plays Hank, a man determined to kill the monster he believes is stalking his home each evening just after midnight. As well as trying to fight off this perceived monster, Hank must also deal with the fact that his girlfriend Abby (Brea Grant) has disappeared. The story plays out across a decade, with Hank looking back to happier times with Abby, and it’s all too easy to see where the pair are going with this new hybrid term.
After Midnight is being released via Arrow Video on 8th June, and in typical Arrow fashion the disc is jam-packed full of extras, including a copy of The Battery on the Blu-ray release. Ahead of this release we sat down with both Jeremy and Christian to delve a little deeper into the project. In our chat they shared how they find working together as a team, their taste in traditional rom com’s, and how a certain Lisa Loeb song came to be used.
You’ve said in past interviews that the story was inspired by a past relationship, but when did the horror elements come into it?
JEREMY GARDENER: Well I mean, it always kinda starts for me concurrently. I write…I’m a very weird writer, by weird I mean bad, I don’t have any structure when I sit down to write. I don’t plot anything out so I had started with this image of a couch in front of a door. I was starting to think about why that image was stuck in my head, and imagining what was on the other side of it. Then I was also in the middle of a very long relationship where I realised I was giving up certain things, certain aspects of my personality and my goals in order to just maintain the status quo. So I wanted to write about when one half of a relationship sacrifices for the other half. Then I also had this couch in front of the door. I always knew it was going to be something coming out of the woods and attacking. I didn’t really know how to merge them together and start writing. Christian was originally supposed to co-write with me, but he gave up after three pages, so I just kept going.
CHRISTIAN STELLA: Yeah, we went back and forth for three pages. I wrote a freezer into it. That freezer stayed until the end. That freezer was on set…and then we cut it out.
JG: In the love scene in the flashback, that’s the freezer that Christian wrote into the script. That’s his one writing contribution.
CS: The characters would have never made love if it wasn’t for me writing that freezer into it.
You have worked together on several projects now. How is the working dynamic?
CS: It’s really good because I’m the technical guy; I do the cinematography. Even on The Battery, I did the sound mix and all of the post production colour and so on. It frees up Jeremy to work with the actors, and to work on his own performance as well, not having to be in charge of all the crew and all of that stuff that’s happening that can pull you out of your performance.
JG: I’ve been making stuff with Christian for twenty years. When we started making movies it was just a natural fit because I have all these ideas and Christian goes, ‘well you can’t do that. That’s not going to work. Here’s how you would have to do that. You’d have to have this much money and this set of people’, and I go, ‘why man, come on just let me do it!’
CS: You have to have a steadicam.
JG: So we’ve developed a shorthand over the years where we plan out the shots and how we want it to look. We both have similar sensibilities as far as wide shots, long takes and letting things play out in front of the camera. Once we plan all that stuff out and shot list, once we get on set we are able to focus on our individual strengths. It’s nice.
There seems to be a lot of co-directors these days, why do you think that is?
JG: Well you know Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead just stole the idea from us really before we could do it. They’re our producers on this obviously, and they’re an incredible co-directing team in their own right, so we’re just aping them. I think what you’re seeing is maybe a lot of friends who have grown up together. I mean I don’t know the relationship between all of these, but a lot of this starts as friends. People who have similar sensibilities and they just come up together. There’s also not so much of a stigma against it anymore. There used to be this grand auteur, one director thing and now people are more aware of how filming is such a collaborative effort that it’s not – although you do have to split a lot of money, which sucks. Or you have to split no money, which is even worse. But I think you’re just getting to see people who have spent years and years and years telling stories together actually just being able to carry that into actually making movies, which is great. The more voices the better.
CS: I think the main reason to me is probably because when you’re a kid, or starting out, it’s impossible to make a movie with no friends and no help, and so you kind of start with a team somehow. We were making movies when I was like thirteen years old.
JG: Now those teams are getting a chance to make their movies for real now.
I’m sure a lot of people ask what your horror influences are, but I was wondering more about where the romance influences came for the film?
JG: For the writing, I’ve just always been a sap. A huge super sappy, sappy sap. I’ve watched as many romantic comedies as horror movies probably. It’s probably close. We watched a lot of Punk Drunk Love, Almost Famous. Some of those really influential, late nineties auteur dramas. All the Real Girls is a big one for both of us, the David Gordon Green movie. Just a very fly-on-the-wall slice of life, romance. I really, really love that one. All that stuff just creeps in. I never really have an explicit influence. It’s just all the crap I grew up on with HBO and video stores. They all just seep in there. Christian probably has more specific romantic…
CS:…I do, but I don’t know if they… they don’t necessarily seem like our style. Like I love the movie Closer, but that’s…
JG: That’s gross Christian.
You and Brea Grant play Hank and Abby over the span of a decade, flitting between on the verge of break-up and the honeymoon phase. Did you have much time to work on that relationship?
JG: We didn’t have a ton of time because it is a very low budget movie. But the way we structured it was we got to do all the stuff that was tough, the end. The lived in, we’re not really in a great place right now stuff, when she got to set. Which was easier because we didn’t know each other as well. Then over those couple of days as our report grew, we were able to, we had to back-load all of the early romantic stuff to the last couple of days of the shoot because I had to shave my beard for the flashbacks. By that time we’d gotten to know each other a lot better. It was much easier to do all that lovey dovey, more intimate friendly stuff because we had been able to hang out for a week. That would’ve been tough if we hadn’t been able to do that. It’s amazing how quickly you really get to know people on set. It just forces friendships very quickly. Although when I shaved my beard and I look like a peanut, a walking thumb man, it was really, really tough to be confident.
It is quite an impressive beard. I’ve seen you in a few things with facial hair, it must have been strange to have to shave it off, almost like losing a limb?
JG: It was devastating. I told everyone they could make fun of me for about thirty seconds and then we had to get back to work.
CS: I thought the whole movie was cancelled.
JG: I got a call from Larry Fessenden after we [finished]. We sent the movie around in an early cut to some people for notes and I got a note from Larry Fessenden, the first thing he said was ,’hey man, I just saw the flick, now I understand why you have a beard.’ I was just like, ‘come on Larry!’ I mean he looks like a thumb too!
The climax of the film features an unforgettable karaoke rendition of Lisa Loeb’s ‘Stay’. Why did you pick that song?
JG: First off I’ll say that when I wrote the script I wanted to make sure that in the script it was a song that everyone knew, so that I could really explain that that moment could land. So it was originally written for Bryan Adams’ ‘Everything I Do’ from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. That would have cost more than the whole movie, so then we started looking. We had a music supervisor going through and giving us a list of things that were possible.
CS: I wish I remembered more of the songs, I think one of the films we could afford was ‘I Touch Myself’.
JG: That was in the running for a while there because it would have been really funny.
CS: It would have been embarrassing. But I wanted something late nineties because that’s when I was more listening to music. I didn’t grow up with Bryan Adams so I was definitely on the Lisa Loeb bandwagon.
JG: I think that what happened was I always expected it was going to be a big eighties power ballad. That that was going to be the finale. But then when the Lisa Loeb thing popped up and Christian mentioned it was in his wheelhouse, I remember going around the set and asking people if they had heard the song. As soon as you play those opening notes, everybody knew it.
It’s also cropped up in a few rom-coms such as Reality Bites, which helps re-affirm that romance film subtext.
JG: Totally. It’s so weird. We were at Tribeca with this and Reality Bites was having its twentieth anniversary, and she was there and she played the song. But somehow we couldn’t… didn’t line-up and be like, ‘hey, we also have your song’.
So she’s not seen the film yet then?
JG: I don’t believe so. But we did find out last week that she’s started following Brea [Grant] on Twitter. It was a big flash of activity because I think Joe Lynch tweeted about the movie and tagged Lisa Loeb and then she started following Justin Benson and Brea, but not either of us. It seems she might be getting closer to realising that this is happening, that this is out there hopefully.
The film may be called After Midnight, but actually there’s a lot of it that takes place during the day. Again, it seems to be a trend that’s coming through with the likes of Midsommar and The Endless also focusing on the daylight hours. What made you decide to tell the story more in the day than the night?
CS: I mean I love to shoot first-off outdoors, and during the day. I like pretty stuff I guess – you can quote that – but I don’t know if that was a conscious decision though.
JG: Well one of my favourite movies of all time is one of the most daylight movies of all time – Tremors. Tremors is almost 99% in the day. There’s only one night sequence in that whole movie. Obviously it’s not a super scary movie, but there’s another example of a movie that’s got a very absurd monster, but you really just care about the characters. It all takes place in the day.
But also the After Midnight title was not the original title. The original title was Something Else. After Midnight was changed for marketing purposes after we sold the movie so that didn’t actually line up with the original script, so that doesn’t actually correlate. But I’ve always thought if you can scare people in the day, or put scenes in the day… I think another thing that Christian and I talked about early on, which is there’s almost a Paranormal Activity clock to this movie where you know every time you see him on that couch at night that something is going to happen. It’s kind of a relief when it’s in the daytime again. The daytime allows us to explore the characters more, and then when it’s night, it goes back to this thing he has to deal with.
Arrow Video are releasing the film on After Midnight and features your previous film The Battery as an extra. Are you excited to be sharing not one, but two films?
CS: Arrow is amazing because the UK never got The Battery on Blu-ray. It also never got the special features. One of the special features is a ninety minute Making Of documentary, which is basically our second film. It’s a whole ninety minute movie about making The Battery. It’s awesome that Arrow has given life to that outside of the United States. It’s the only time that has ever been released anywhere outside of the United States.
JG: It’s called The Tools of Ignorance and it’s… basically my film school was DVD extras, so I wanted to make a Making Of that really went through the whole process from when we first started making movies back in school, all the way to getting The Battery finished. We did an entire ninety minute feature-length documentary. So it’s actually going to be three movies for the price of one on that Arrow disc, and it is glorious, and I can’t wait for it.
What’s next?
JG: I’m not sure. I’m writing, I’m trying to write right now. Christian is also writing a movie right now and I guess we’re going to see what happens with this whole pandemic and whether or not we can…I’m curious as to what people are going to want and what’s going to change about how things get made, or don’t get made or funded, after all this. But I’m always writing so we’ll see.
After Midnight is released on Blu-ray on 8th June 2020.
