Brendan Jesus
BJ: Did she [Camastra] actually drink all that stuff?
Nathan Crooker: Everything that you see her drink, the eggs, saltwater—all done in one take. That gets you ready like, I just saw this, what are they going to do next? Then you watch the scene where she’s pulling it all out, and you’re in it. You believe it’s real.
BJ: The ambiguity of the ending where she tells Haken she’ll continue, then goes out to her family and is says she’s done with it all…she proves herself to be a badass. I feel like this could totally be made into a feature and go so many different directions.
Nathan Crooker: Absolutely. It definitely has legs to be something bigger. There’s something there.
BJ: Consciousness, which is Sci-Fi, I think you did a nice twist on it. Nine times out of ten, or usually ten times out of ten, ideas like that are about some rich enigmatic billionaire man that wants to make an AI woman. I like how you switched it up. Knowing your history with Misery makes sense; this swap puts some things into light. What made you want to switch up from the norm and make it surround a woman?
Nathan Crooker: I originally wrote the script, and it was completely different and was a love story about a guy and a girl that takes place in New York. It was a little bit more in the S&M world, if you will, where she had the power. I think a lot of the films that I have, the women are strong, which has to do with my mom. She brought us up as a single mom for a while, and I have so much respect for her and women in general. Like, they can have a full-time job and bring up two kids. I can barely take care of a dog. But subverting expectation, like we’ve seen stuff so many times that I get bored with seeing it the same way. So if we’re going to do this story, what haven’t we seen? What can we do to make it different while also keeping you interested in it? Again, with a nice twist. I like throwing twists in. It was just this idea of we’ve seen this a million times with a man trying to make his version of the perfect woman, where it’s different for Courtney [Cavanagh]. She’s created this AI—not for sexual purposes like a guy would, it’s more for companionship, and I think she wants to be understood. Which makes it lonelier and sadder.
BJ: Not to play all my cards, but the first time I watched it, I cried.
Nathan Crooker: Oh really?
BJ: Yeah. It was like mid-afternoon during my first run-through from all your stuff. I was watching it and just started crying. Now, you don’t have to give this away, but I felt like he actually did have feelings for her. I don’t know if you want to say yes or no to that, or leave it up to the audience.
Nathan Crooker: I want to say yes; that’s the only way it works for me. Whether or not they come back again, it’s like residue; that’s what the movie is about. It’s also like the residue we all take with us from relationship to relationship, whether it’s friends or partners. There’s always something that’s left behind that still influences us. I think when he comes back again, he still feels that. In my mind, the more she does it, the more real he becomes.
BJ: She has a line along the lines of her not feeling the emotion behind his eyes, then when they hug right before his deactivation, there is one of the most intense moments I’ve ever seen an actor do, behind his eyes. That right there was where I started to cry.
Nathan Crooker: Oh yeah, Tom [Degnan] is amazing in that. A lot of it has to do with the music; it is so beautiful. It’s one of their things too where it has constant music throughout. I don’t normally do that. I don’t like wall-to-wall music, but I felt like it needed it. I wanted you to be in the trance-like space she was in because she’s on drugs. I think the music just sets it over the top. I’m glad it had that effect on you!
BJ: I do promise we will get to Isolation and #NOFILTER very shortly—
Nathan Crooker: I got time, brother!
BJ: So Midnight Delivery—
Nathan Crooker: Yes!
BJ: —which was part of Charlotte: The Return…
Nathan Crooker: Yeah, so this is what happens. The short world is a funny world, right? What do you do with the movie when it’s done if someone doesn’t call you up and say, hey I want to make this into a feature, or if you don’t have the money to make it into a feature. If these movies do really well on the circuit, you know Playback went viral, and Altered wanted to take it. Everyone wanted to play it. Same thing with Midnight Delivery. They have these companies that want to pick up movies and make these anthologies with them. Playback got put into Strange Events that Dread Central did. Charlotte is Dread or Epic, I can’t remember off the top of my head. They’ll call you up if they see the shorts getting a lot of views and ask if they can put it in an anthology, we’ll build a casing around it. With Charlotte, there was no casing. It was movie after movie. It’s probably a way for them to make some money—I get it. But it’s also a way to get people to see the movie more. It just became a part of that because they asked for it. It was never made to be, well the weird thing is on IMDb it looks like I directed Charlotte, and I didn’t.
BJ: Plus, IMDb doesn’t have the names of the shorts attached to their respective filmmakers. But Midnight Delivery is fun and interesting. As a whole I enjoyed it, though there were two things that really stuck out to me. The first is when she’s brushing her teeth and spits up a bunch of blood, then the knock on the door, and the blood isn’t brought up again. It’s like a tiny bit of world-building and lets you know so much about her character, but lets the audience do what they want with that information.
Nathan Crooker: I mean, that’s purposeful. That movie is very much into this idea of going back to the late ’80s type of horror films where they’re a bit more fun. When people would walk into the dark. It’s not the people who are like, I’m not going outside into the dark, I know there’s a killer out there. I was playing with this idea of dread, and sort of the jump scare factor while also making it fun, and not taking itself too seriously. Again, harkening back to some of the movies from the ’80s. So the blood is a setup, it’s done for a reason. You can take what you want from it, but there is a point to it.
BJ: The other thing I love is after the knock on the door, she checks through the peephole twice. A lesser filmmaker would have had her look through three times and then had a jump scare, and then an even lesser filmmaker would have had her look through once and have a jump scare. You have her look through twice and have no jump scare. That put me even more on edge. You’re subverting our expectations. It’s a minute detail that adds to the total atmosphere.
Nathan Crooker: Thank you for that.
BJ: On the subject of Playback, I have a fun story. I saw the thumbnail and thought it looked very familiar. So I watched it, and I realized I’ve had constant nightmares about that short film. In 2015/-16 at some point there was a viral post on Facebook of this short. I’m not just trying to butter your biscuits, but since I saw it, I have been trying to remember what the title was; it pops up in my nightmares at least once or twice a year.
Nathan Crooker: Oh good!
BJ: I watched that and realized, holy crap this is the thing I’ve been looking for! It’s just absolutely fantastic! Did you initially conceive it as a one-shot?
Nathan Crooker: It was an old script called VHS and was about 15 minutes. James Gannon, who produced Isolation with me, called me up and said there was a group of filmmakers that have a collective, and they are asking other filmmakers to come in and make movies where all the filmmakers have to make a three-minute horror movie. I was initially like, I’m not doing that. Then I was talking to a friend of mine and realized maybe I should do it. They were going to screen it at the Williamsburg Cinema. I found that script, and I think it might have been Nick Snow the DP who was like, let’s just take that and strip it down. And I figured I guess we could. So I went back and stripped the 15 pages down. Essentially, it had elements of Playback in there. Then I thought for three minutes, why don’t we just do it all in one shot? A lot of people called bullsh*t on that, but it’s not. I love Bloody Disgusting, but you guys always want to say something. They were like, it’s the short film that claims it’s one shot. What I love is there are people who really love that movie, and whoever’s reading this who loves it—I love you. The people who loved it would fight with people in the chats. This was the first thing I ever did that went viral, and I could see in real-time the people that hated it, loved it, and the people who were like, you’re f*cking wrong this movie’s great. Others were like, this movie’s a piece of sh*t. Watching this all unfold was really exciting. That’s when I realized my ideas are working and that I needed to continue down this path and trust myself. So basically, that movie was something else, and I turned it into something shorter. If nobody had said it needed to be three minutes, I don’t think it would have been one shot.
BJ: When he’s watching the TV and sees himself, that was prerecorded?
Nathan Crooker: What we did was shoot all the killings on GoPros downstairs, then I sprinted upstairs with my laptop. I downloaded a bunch of snow and edited in the snow with the scene we shot [of the killing] and then added more snow. Then I plugged my laptop into the TV with an HDMI and pressed play. As the camera was coming around I hit play and then hid. So we shot it all, edited it in real-time…what you see on the TV was shot moments before.
BJ: That’s honestly even more impressive.
Nathan Crooker: It was cool. We didn’t even shoot it that many times. It was like seven times.
BJ: The one last thing I want to talk about before we get into your current work is the music video you directed for “Rabbit Rabbit” by My Jerusalem.
Nathan Crooker: [Laughs] My Jerusalem, yeah!
BJ: That is the most delightfully weird thing I’ve seen in quite some time. The one question I have about it is the scene where the motorcycle and the car are about to intersect…was that one real shot? Because it looked very real.
Nathan Crooker: That was me on the motorcycle and Dana Brown who’s like my go-to girl in NYC. She’s PA’d for me, assisted me, just a rad girl who can do anything, but she was driving the car. It was the typical thing where you set the camera up, she drives as fast as she can then stops and leaves, we keep the camera rolling, then I do the same. Then we cut the screen.
BJ: That’s what I assumed, it just looks way too clean! I had to ask.
Nathan Crooker: I’ll give you another note, seeing how you liked it so much: that’s me in the bunny suit.
BJ: Oh really?!
Nathan Crooker: Mhmm. For reasons I can’t say. But I had to do it. Trying to direct in a sweaty bunny suit, like there’s loud music and everything, and Danielle who—you recognize her right? She’s the girl from Midnight Delivery.
BJ: OHH. I didn’t even put that together.
Nathan Crooker: She’s really pretty, but for Midnight I said we can’t have you that pretty.
BJ: It’s finally time, let’s talk Isolation. How did you become involved in this project? Where did your involvement start?
Nathan Crooker: Isolation was, well, I was supposed to do a film like everyone else, money got pulled, and we got stuck inside. But I really wanted to do something. The whole plan was that I was going to shoot and direct my first feature, and I was ready to go. I worked on this thing for two years, and I had a great team behind me. Everything was ready. Then poof. Then I was thinking, okay, do I write a feature that takes place in lockdown and then shoot it? But I don’t write fast. I thought if I do that, it is going to suck, and won’t be good. Then I decided to do a short. I started talking to my buddy Fil Eisler who does the music, who’s a fantastic composer who does a ton of Netflix shows; he just did a new film out at TIFF with Naomi Watts. I was on the phone with him, and we were just talking when I told him I might want to do this short. Fil was like, you’ve done so many shorts, you got nothing but time…why don’t you do something bigger? He said to think bigger. So I started thinking, think bigger…think bigger…okay, Fil. I woke up one day and thought, what if I was able to get a bunch of really good directors and craft a bunch of short stories—not saying short stories are easier to write, but they are easier to deal with. They write them, I can read them fast. The thing was, they had five to 15 minutes, no longer. I figured we could get some really great filmmakers, I can oversee some of the writing, and we can help tweak it if need be.
But I thought we can make something really tight. It was super possible, and I wanted it to be the best it could be. When the edits came in, I wanted someone else to see them that weren’t the filmmakers involved, I wanted to have that third eye on it, so that was James Gannon, who’s an incredible filmmaker himself. He doesn’t do horror movies, but you should check out his work—it’s amazing. So I asked him if he wanted to do Isolation, and he said yes. Then it was two months of making phone calls to CAA and ICM trying to find directors that had 4K cameras, were willing to write the scrips, were willing to shoot in their lockdown, and had casts, so to speak, in the lockdown that would work in the parameters I gave them, that could write. Also, I wanted people who could trust me. I was this random person who called them out of the blue. I’m also hitting people up on Instagram, Facebook—I mean, I was reaching out to pretty big names. I don’t know if people would have gotten back to me if it wasn’t a pandemic. What ended up happening was I got a great team of people together and said, look, here’s the story that I want to see. I didn’t want the pandemic or virus to be at the forefront, I wanted it to be the background of the story. I also said that we would not do zombies because that’s what everyone’s first thought would be. I wanted to do things that were survival horror.
What was cool in a lot of the stories was what the filmmakers were writing about, and keep in mind, this is at the top of the pandemic where no one was out and people didn’t know what was going on, they cared about themselves and their families…people were dying. People now are very flippant about it, but this is the time where everyone was scared. No one was going out. So these filmmakers—a lot of them—were writing about things that made them scared, like Bobby Roe’s movie about something happening to his kids, and Larry Fessenden’s was about his family. I felt like a lot of them were really personal stories. A couple of them aren’t, but that doesn’t say anything negative about the filmmakers. There were a few that didn’t make it because productions got shut down because they couldn’t shoot outside. Basically, I got everyone together, and that’s how it started. I essentially said I’m going to do this. I woke up one morning at like 5:30 in the morning and said, I’m going to do this movie, I’m going to find the dopest people, and we’re going to write the coolest sh*t and make this f*cking film. I asked James if he wanted to do it with me, and he said, absolutely. I’m telling you, brother, it was every single day at six in the morning making phone calls for two months and convincing people that this would not be a waste of their time, talking to so many filmmakers and agents. Once we got it locked in, it just kept going. There was so much to do. I was going to make one of the films, but I didn’t think it would be doing the film justice if I was making a short and producing such a big thing. I mean, we had productions in the UK, Germany; we had somebody making a movie in Georgia…the country! That got shut down, though, because his equipment was taken. We had one going on in Canada that didn’t make it into the cut. It was big and so much fun.
