Cameron Cairnes & Colin Cairnes Talk LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL
Following a blistering run on the international film festival circuit, filmmakers Cameron Cairnes & Colin Cairnes latest feature, LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL, will open in Australian Cinemas April 11 and Jarret from Monster Fest was fortunate to catch up with the lads for a chat about the film.
LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL marks your third feature film as a writer/director duo, how does that dynamic work in the screenwriting and production process?
Cameron: I guess maybe Cole’s a little more hands-on with the actors. I have a little bit more of a post-production background with editing, so maybe I’m a little more across the edit and the coverage on the shoot, that sort of thing. The writing, well that’s fluid, a 50/50 on the writing. We kind of just divvy up scenes and go off to write once we’ve settled on an outline or the general shape of it and then bring it back together, we sort of edit each other. It’s very fluid, it’s a back and forth. And then with directing, it’s about preparation. It’s like going on-set, meeting crew, meeting your heads of departments and just briefing people as well as you can and having an open conversation. And then the plan is always to be on-set with the elements you need and then just being able to play and see what happens. Just being open-minded and collaborative. It seems to work out. It’s not like we sit down and nut out a system and would’ve never done that. It just kind of happens naturally.
The film has a true to period, late 1970s aesthetic, that is entirely convincing. How did you go about achieving this level of authenticity in both the writing and then the production of the film?
Cameron: It all sort of starts from the writing and trying to get that language from the time. So it’s immersing yourself in old clips of Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson and just getting a feel for the cadence in the way people spoke back then, and trying to avoid any sort of modern day jargon or phraseology and from there it’s building on top of that and every element has to be true to the time and it’s getting good collaborators on board who get that and who are prepared to just go that extra mile.
Colin: …and not accept the pastiche or parody version, which we always wanted to steer clear of. But like Cam’s saying, I think if the script, if there’s that level of detail and care that’s gone into the script, a good production designer or hair makeup costume is going to see that. They’re going to see that on the page. So they already know the sort of expectations that we have creatively, but then we’re just working with great people anyway who are just smart and creative and want to do their best work. So we’re very lucky.
Cameron: …and everyone just bought into the idea of let’s just make it an old 1970s TV show. So from the top down it was like just, yeah, we will shoot it like an old TV show with the three cameras running. Unfortunately we just couldn’t do it on tube cameras. We just needed that latitude and post-production. But the lighting grid, we were renting out old lights from the warehouse that hadn’t seen the light of day for 30 or 40 years. Yeah, hair, makeup, costume. I think our costume designer was writing just about every shop in Melbourne. It’s actually very hard to find seventies clothes now because generationally we were shopping in the eighties and nineties, it was flares and big collar shirts and they were costing you five bucks and now it’s a little more challenging for those departments to find that stuff.
Colin: If you’re doing something set in the grunge era, then you’re probably okay.
And the film’s visual effects look to be practical for the most part, was that for love of practical effects or in wanting to stay true to the period in which the film is set or even a combination of both possibly?
Colin: Both of those things. I mean we’ve got a love of practical effects and used them extensively in 100 BLOODY ACRES and SCARE CAMPAIGN. So we just love that it’s so tangible and visceral. The actors get to experience it, feel it, smell it, so that helps with just performance, but also like you’re suggesting it’s a bit of a homage to that period and the stuff that was done then and also just felt right to us that if we are setting a film in that period, then the effect should kind of feel of the time as well. And that comes back to that sort of authenticity that we were talking about. So it makes life harder in some ways, but it’s just much more fun to do. And I mean is some, well there’s some augmentation let’s say in a couple of sequences, some that don’t have any. There’s one particular scene where a character might reveal what’s lying, say within…you know the scene.
Absolutely, that scene had me questioning “how did they do that?“, like I had when I was growing up watching say SCANNERS and needing to rewind it over and over to try to determine how it was done.
Cameron: Definitely. Also you’re collaborating with guys like Russell Sharp who are close to our vintage, who grew up on the same stuff, it’s just so easy talking and referencing that stuff. There’s a shorthand, oh, you’re talking about VIDEODROME where James Wood puts his arm into…
I guess there’s no coincidence that the tone of LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL is akin to the era of cinema in which the film occurs, that mid-to-late 1970s, with its heightened paranoia and I was curious if there were any particular films of that ilk that had influenced your writing and directing of the film?
Colin: Paranoid thrillers played a big part. Not so much a thriller but NETWORK in particular, as to how far they take things for the good of ratings. Also THE PARALLAX VIEW, there’s that sequence where Warren Beatty’s watching that brainwashing montage video, that definitely influenced some of the stuff we were doing, particularly later in the film when it gets a bit bonkers.
David Dastmalchian gives a pitch perfect performance as the multi-layered protagonist Jack Delroy. Charismatic and sympathetic as the host of NIGHT OWLS and deeply conflicted as the individual behind the television persona. How did you go about casting David in the role?
Cameron: When we were in the early stages of financing, we are putting together lists of names, a ridiculous list of names but once we had our American producers Roy Lee and Stephen Schneider aboard, between them, they’ve got BARBARIAN, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY and the RING remakes, they understood that this film was ideas-driven. There was a really cool hook and it didn’t need this 5 million or 20 million actor attached, we just needed a really good actor with some familiarity that would help the character but not get in the way of the character.
Absolutely. Doesn’t bring any baggage of prior roles or their own celebrity.
Colin: Exactly. And Cam is a seasoned FANGORIA reader and had read all these articles about David, David talking about the original television horror hosts. We knew his work from all those huge movies where he played these quirky cameos. So we knew he was a good actor. We knew he had this background in theater from his days in Chicago, and he’s a monster kid who’s never grown up. So it just felt right and the first day of shooting was effectively day one of NIGHT OWLS. At the beginning, there’s that montage of episodes, highlights of the show, and the first thing we shot was his opening monologue, so it’s kind of a bit of tension involved, but it helped with the scene. It’s like Jack Delroy’s first night on TV and he’s got a lot to prove. And it was just awe-inspiring to watch him do that and hit it off with Gus, our sidekick in the band. It all just came together in that opening, that first morning basically, and we were walking on air from that point.
Cameron: And there’s something about his voice as well, it just feels 1970s, his distinct look too.
He embodies the character completely and you’re not sure how you feel about him throughout, your sympathetic to his personal loss and his questionable plight for ratings but you’re also questioning his intentions and integrity.
Colin: And that’s what I think those movies of the 70, the ones you’re talking about, your NETWORKS and all those thrillers and characters were, it wasn’t so clear cut back then if it’s a good guy or bad guy. There was always a lot of gray with those characters. They were flawed, really flawed characters. You get that a bit today, but it feels very scripted and confected. But back then stars were allowed to play slightly questionable characters and would win an Academy for it, and he sort of seems to fit that mold. He really evokes that era.
Definitely. I also want to touch on the casting of Ingrid Torelli as Lilly. I believe this may have been the first production I’ve seen in Ingrid in and her performance is so powerful and nuanced. Regardless of how great the film is, it all hinges on her performance being believable. How challenging was it finding the right actress for this pivotal role?
Cameron: Surprisingly we didn’t see many actresses. I think we had to look for somebody local, so we didn’t spread the net too wide, but we really just lucked out with Ingrid. She captivated us from her self-tape right through to her reading for us, and then we got her back for another read and it was so obvious she was going to be our Lilly, and she has these eyes that just stare right into your soul. We really exploited that. But it’s not only that, it’s just her instincts are fantastic for a young actress.
Colin: There’s a lot of depth to her, I think, which we didn’t get. That’s what stood her apart. There were a lot of fine young actresses, but she just had, there was a maturity to her as well that I think when you consider what she’s playing, something that might be quite ancient as well, really worked in her and our favor.
She was phenomenal, honestly a performance that rivals that of Linda Blair’s as Regan in THE EXORCIST. Another casting question I have for you, is that of Michael Ironside. His narration to the film’s prologue is sublime. What was it like working with such an iconic actor as Michael?
Cameron: He was just a dream. I mean, when we recorded him, he was in upstate New York or somewhere like that, and we were in a studio in South Yarra at three o’clock in the morning, and he was just sharing with us these wonderful stories, working on SCANNERS with Cronenberg and how he’d done an ADR session for SCANNERS in the nude. Just a lovely, lovely man.
Colin: He just seemed right. That voice and his history in the genre, and we just wanted a sense it was someone who’d lived through that period, which he obviously did, and that he might’ve been a friend of Jack’s back in the day. So there’s kind of a level of empathy with the voice, but it’s also a very professional voiceover straight down the line. So yeah, it’s a dream come true.
Cameron: I remember when we walked into that recording studio and hearing him say that line for the first time, the 1970s, like, oh my God, we don’t have to give him any notes at all. And he had lots of cool ideas about the read as well. It was impressive.
Atop of the praise from critics world-over, LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL has also received considerable kudos from some truly distinguished genre personalities including Stephen King and Mick Garris and I was curious as to whom the commendation has meant the most for you both personally?
Colin: The first one was Stephen King, which was a year ago. I think we had just finished at SXSW when Roy Lee, who knows Mr. King very well, said you might want to check social media. We probably didn’t sleep for two or three days after that, we were on such a high, it was amazing. And then the other one would be, literally three days ago. We were in LA. and thought we’d go up to the Universal City Walk and take a photo of us against a displayed poster of the film. We couldn’t. They were already gone and the next coming attraction was already up. As we were walking out of the car park and into the shopping center, this familiar looking man walks past us with his wife, and it’s like, hang on, that’s Joe Dante. And so we stop him and say, Joe, we’re the Cairnes Brothers, we’ve got this film and he says, it’s okay guys, I just saw it. I’ve just walked out. He had literally just finished watching LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL in the cinema.
Cameron: It was phenomenal. The stuff of Boyhood Dreams really.
Colin: If you had told us as 10 year-olds, when GREMLINS was our favourite film, that we’re not only going to meet the guy who directed it we’re going to meet him walking out of our own movie. Incredible.
