Grimmfest is just a few short days away, meaning that it isn’t long until attendees can enjoy four days of some of the best new genre films around. Whilst several on the list fit firmly into the traditional mould for a horror film, there are many on the line-up that shift perceptions and blend with other genres to mix things up. One of those movies is Happy Times. Directed by Michael Mayer, and co-written by Mayer and Guy Ayal, Happy Times is set during a Jewish family gathering. The night begins well, but quickly veers off course, cue lots of bloody violence and comedic mayhem. A wonderfully entertaining blend of telenova, humour, and eye-watering violence, Happy Times is excellently entertaining and is sure to be a smash when it screens at Grimmfest.
In the run-up to the screening at Grimmfest, I spoke with Mayer to find out more about Happy Times.
Happy Times is screening at Grimmfest in October, how are you feeling about introducing the United Kingdom to it?
The film played at another festival earlier in the year, I think it was the Israel Film Festival. The film being so culturally specific.. there’s a lot of universal themes so I think a lot of people can get it, but it’s definitely culturally specific. So I know it played really well for a Jewish and Israeli audience. My star, Liraz Chamami, lives in London so she was there and she said the responses were great. I’m interested to see how it’ll play with the sort of, like a genre audience, because I feel it’s pretty gory, but I don’t necessarily know if it’s a straight horror film per-say. It definitely has horror elements in it, but there’s more to it. I wish I could be there and gauge how it plays because it’s always interesting to me with these genre hybrids, how do they play? Who is connecting to them? Who is thinking they were duped?
For those that haven’t read up on the film, what’s Happy Times about in a nutshell?
The shortest answer is it’s about a dinner party gone wrong. A group of friends and family in Los Angeles, most of them Israeli expats that show up for a…I know it’s been touted as a Shabbat dinner – a Friday night dinner – but is actually the end of the Shabbat. They get together for a Shabbat dinner and with a little bit of alcohol, a little bit of cultural differences, inflated egos, faux friendships, things deteriorate quite quickly. It goes to all kinds of fun places.
The idea of the end of Shabbat, I don’t know if that comes across for every audience, but when the Saturday ends according to Jewish tradition, there is a ceremony, which people don’t do that often. They don’t get together and celebrate this, but it’s basically switching from the day of rest, to the rest of the week. The blessing for it, the exact words are basically, “we’re moving from the Holy to the mundane.” We felt that was appropriate for the situation where the Saturday is over, the Holy day is over, and now we can transfer back to being complete animals. We felt that bridge in Jewish tradition of the back to the grind kind of thing we were, “this is where we should place this.”
Where did the idea for Happy Times originate, I’m hoping there’s no real-life comparison…
But there is actually! I don’t go out much, I’m kind of a homebody. I’m married to a non-Jew so we don’t celebrate too many of the holidays. I’ve been living in Los Angeles for a long time and a few years ago I was invited to a Rosh Hashanah dinner here in LA. Los Angeles brings together a very diverse community. If you go somewhere in the Bay area in San Francisco, most of the people that move there that work there are in high-tech, it’s a lot more homogenous in terms of who moves to the Bay area. But LA, New York, and I’m sure London, big cities bring together people from all kinds of walks of life. I was sitting at that dinner table and I was surprised. Everybody was obviously talking politics because it was post Trump [being elected President] and I was amazed at the fact that everybody had an opinion. It was so diverse and we tend to get a little heated and abated. I don’t know if you know Israelis, but we’re warmer so it was pretty quickly that it escalated to a pretty loud discussion. It just felt like you could throw a lit match and things would go really, really bad.
After that I was thinking a lot about that dinner, especially since it had been years since I had been in one of those situations. It felt really explosive to me. When I spoke to my friend Guy Ayal, we talked about it and he’s had similar experiences. That the general feeling when you’re among people in a social event is that everybody is just a little bit too much on edge. That the discourse is quite explosive. It won’t take much for people to lose their heads.
The whole thing felt a bit like a soap opera.
I love that you said that because when I was talking to the actors, one of the things that I was saying was, “I want you to play it borderline telenova”. Nobody should be aware that they’re in a comedy, but everything should be a little heightened, a little hyper real.
Family gatherings always seem to be a great cause of conflict when on screen, what do you think it is about these settings that works so well?
I’m very close with my siblings, I love them to death, yet they can totally throw me off. My sister can tell me something that anybody else will tell me and it just hits differently. We’re invested, we’re tied, we’re connected in a way that’s so deep and has so much baggage and so much history, that it’s simply unavoidable. Even if you have the loveliest family and everybody gets along wonderfully, it’s always there. I guess it’s human nature. The other thing on the flip side of this, I’ve never been to one of these events where there’s not at least one person you definitely have no idea why they are there. Great that we’re getting together, why did you have to bring so and so. Especially in those larger gatherings when it’s a special event, there’s always a mishmash of personalities. It’s always just an opportunity for drama.
Happy Times is an ensemble piece, logistically how do you juggle them all so that everyone has their moment?
So that was something that both Guy and I discussed. Guy was very adamant that everybody should have a moment to shine. Even though I think there are two, three, many even four characters that are there throughout, obviously there are also bigger names in terms of who they are as actor, but we knew that if it wasn’t going to be at least good scene, or memorable moment for each one of those characters we’re just selling ourselves short. The other thing is it was just simply so much fun to write. I think even in the side characters, they’re universal characters, you recognise these stereotypes, we literally know these people so we definitely have these anecdotes and moments where we were like okay, this character has to get that moment.
In terms of the actors, I’ve worked with two of them before. My previous movie which is totally different – Out in the Dark – I worked with both Michael Aloni and Alon Pdut, and they are both in this. Even when I was forming the idea, I called both of those actors and said, “hey, If I shoot something in LA would you consider this?” They both loved the idea so I sort of knew in terms of casting that those two guys were in. Almost everybody except for maybe one actor were people that we sort of knew or our casting director was like, “I’m going to give you one name”. When we were looking for our lead,
Liraz Chamami, who I think has a tremendous role here in this movie… I’ve never known her, but when my casting director looked at the script she said, “okay, I’m going to send you one name because I think this is perfect”. Everything in terms of casting and finding the actors was a lot smoother and easier. The bigger challenge was finding a schedule with everybody. That was a big challenge, but luckily as a director that’s a lot less on my plate. I had amazing producers that took over and made all of it work.
Some early reviews have compared Happy Times to the work of early Tarantino, what are your thoughts on that?
At first I didn’t see it. But then I was like who am I kidding, Tarantino is for anybody of our generation, he’s so influential. Even if we’re not aware of it. Definitely we, both Guy and I, are huge fans, we grew up on his movies. As I was looking at this, I was like, “wow there is so much in there that is taken, even from just the chapter breaks that are so him”. There’s so many nods to him, so then I got it. In terms of the complement itself, I couldn’t have asked to be compared to anybody better. It’s amazing. I’ll take it.
Something I love is that Happy Times is such a multilingual film. There’s Hebrew, English, and even Spanish. It offers a great view of how diverse society really is, was that intentional?
Absolutely. That was one of the things right off the bat, we didn’t know how much English, how much Hebrew, but this is how we all talk. Even now when I go back to Israel, my nieces and nephews are so heavily influenced by content and material in English. All of them are interacting online and there’s a lot of English involved with that, so even the language back home in Israel throws in so many English words. I’m not making comparisons, but if you’ve seen the movie Parasite, even there the upper class family keeps using English words. We’re so multicultural that it’s unavoidable.
One of the things that we also wanted to show is, Los Angeles has a large Latino population. A large latino community and I know a lot of the Israeli community here and the hispanic community interact a lot. A lot of people who move here from Israel work in construction, and construction is populated with a lot of Latino. I’m married to a Latino, born and raised in Chicago, I see so many similarities in terms of family values, the place of religion even in a secular family. I think there’s a lot of similarities and I’m always surprised at how much animosity and how many Israelis look down on Latinos. We try to do that with the maid.
One of the things that was important to us whenever there’s Spanish, there’s no subtitles. If you watch the movie in Israel there’s Hebrew subtitles when they speak English, but when there’s any Spanish thrown in, there are no subtitles. It’s also because unfortunately a lot of us don’t make the effort of learning another language. There’s a specific scene that deals with it, but if the characters can’t understand what she’s saying, neither should the audience.
Have you been using your pandemic time wisely, working on the next project?
Not as much as I wish it did, but there are a few projects. We’re negotiating a deal for an adaptation right now. Then I have a TV series in development, which also has an international twist, so it happens in the US, but also in Europe, that’s being developed with Fremantlemedia right now. Then there’s my own baby that I’m writing, there’s three active projects happening right now. Guy and I both talked about, not necessarily a sequel, but we were talking about trying to write something within that mixture of genres.
Why should people add Happy Times to their Grimmfest viewing, what are they going to get from your film that they might not get from others?
I’m dying to see the other films that are playing at Grimmfest. I’m saying they should take a chance on Grimmfest period as opposed to staying home and watching Netflix. There’s wonderful stuff everywhere, but what I’m saying is, even if they don’t watch Happy Times, get out of the house and watch these movies. A lot of them don’t have the chance to play anywhere else. You might not be able to catch these movies elsewhere. We were lucky enough to be distributed in certain territories, but I’ve seen some of the line-up when it came out and there are a number of movies that I would run to see at Grimmfest. I’d be very happy if people go to see Happy Times, but I’m saying get out of the house, go to the theatre, watch it on a big screen, watch it with other people. The two greatest genres to sit in a group together are horror and comedy. Comedies are always funny when you see them in a crowd, horror movies are always scarier when you’re watching them in a crowd, so this is just the perfect combo.
Happy Times screens at Grimmfest 2021 on 9th October 2021. Tickets for the festival can be purchased here.
