‘Cursed In Baja’ Exclusive Trailer: Jeff Daniel Phillips Gets Weird In His New Feature Film
If you’ve watched a Rob Zombie movie, chances are you’ve seen Jeff Daniel Phillips. Whether he’s hamming it up as Herman Munster or soaked in blood in Halloween II, Phillips is a genre chameleon. But, he’s more than just an actor. And his latest directing effort Cursed In Baja (which he also wrote and stars in) is set to have its world premiere at London’ FrightFest, before it comes to VOD and Blu-ray thanks to Anchor Bay Entertainment. We have the film’s exclusive trailer, as well as an exclusive conversation with Phillips about his most personal film to date.
In Cursed In Baja,
Pirelli, an ex-lawman, travels to Mexico searching for the heir to a Los Angeles fortune, while confronting his own complicated past. But what he finds in Baja challenges him to the core.
Watch the trailer:
While Phillips is best known as an actor, he’s been directing music videos and shorts since he went to film school at USC. But what really inspired him to start work on his latest feature was attending a horror convention in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There, he led a panel with young filmmakers to talk about his own experiences as a filmmaker.
“I just started rambling and saying, ‘Well, this is how I did it. This is how I would do it. These are the things that I did, and I made mistakes,’” said Phillips. “I rambled for an hour, and I came out kind of exhausted. And then I came back to Los Angeles, and I was like, ‘I’m telling them how to do it. Why aren’t I doing this myself? And why don’t I make my list of all the people that I could pull in and do something like this as a feature?’ And then that’s what I did.”
Enter producer Kent Isaacs, who told Phillips to just do it and supported his vision every step of the way. He said don’t worry about the financing, let’s just start and see where it goes. So, Phillips reached out to friends and former colleagues to help build the film’s crew. The film’s DP, Keith Coleman, came on after Phillips ran into him on the street after not seeing each other for almost 20 years. One of the main actors, who performs burlesque under the stage name Audrey DeLuxe, worked with Phillips ten years ago when he was opening for Rob Zombie and they sang Sherri Moon Zombie happy birthday. Phillips put his decades of connections to use to bring this story together.
From there, even without studio support, Phillips was well on his way to direct his next feature.
“I just started crafting this story around what I knew I could pull off. It was like a Robert Rodriguez thing where you just, you make your list of what you have and try to make it work,” Phillips said. “That’s how it started. And then it just kept snowballing.”
For Phillips, this was all about reverse engineering a film. He found people and a location, so now it was time to really flesh out the story. And here is where he was inspired by Rob Zombie and the renowned filmmaker’s process.
“I didn’t have the whole concept in the beginning, but it just formed, evolved. And that’s a Rob Zombie thing too. I have to give him a lot of credit,” said Phillips. “When he’s on the set, if he sees something that’s not going right, he’s not precious about anything. Like he’s just like, ‘Okay, this isn’t working.’ Whether it’s a performance, whether the writing, whatever it is, [he says] let’s just pivot and go this direction. And it works so often for him. So basically, I kind of follow his line of thinking.”
With a script in the works, Phillips, Isaacs, and Coleman traveled together to Mexico where they started filming on a farm in Baja. While Phillips wasn’t quite sure what they were going to capture, he was excited to start filming and see what they could capture. This is scrappy, DIY horror filmmaking at its finest: go shoot and see what happens.
That led him and his team to some very interesting places, including through some barbed wire to retrieve a drone.
“We did these incredible drone shots over these canyons. And then, because there’s no GPS in certain parts, [the drone] went down. So my DP had to climb the side of the mountain to get his drone and he comes back and he falls on this barbed wire,” Phillips explained. “It was stuck in his back. This guy’s incredible. And then we were just pulling the barbed wire [out of his back] and he’s just like, ‘Don’t worry about it.’”
But it wasn’t just about the footage they captured in Mexico. A lot of this film consists of sequences and moments that didn’t make it off the cutting room floor from Phillips’ previous directing work, with some footage upwards of 20 years old. The result is a purposefully disjointed fever dream that weaves a complex tapestry of a man losing his mind. It’s almost experimental, an exercise in both Phillips’ actual memory and his character’s memory.
“I use so much footage from past things that I’ve done. Some of the footage is like 20 years old. [It’s footage] that might’ve gotten cut from something else, but for some reason, I wove it into this,” said Phillips. “I had so much stuff to go from. Then I had different looks over the years and long hair and beards and whatnot. So it kind of fit.”
In fact, Phillips uses footage he took of a young Finnegan Seeker Bell (who also stars in Cursed In Baja as an adult), which is reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. While this wasn’t necessarily Phillips’ intent, it was certainly serendipitous, especially because Bell is now a musician with a following in Mexico.
“I knew him as a baby, so [seeing] the kid evolve, I just wove that into the script,” said Phillips. “Him and the rapper, Jose Conejo Martin, knew each other, those two record together. So I wove that [relationship] into [Cursed In Baja, too].”
At the end of the day, Cursed In Baja is an experimental passion project that also serves as an ode to B movies. And for Phillips, that was the goal.
”We ended up pulling off something and now we’re going to show it in London and we’re going there to celebrate. It’s not about winning awards or anything,” said Phillips. “I just want to get it out there and make it. And most of it for me is making it, you know?”
Phillips produced Cursed In Baja with Kent Issacs. Thomas Zamback and Brian Katz serve as executive producers. VAAAL composed the score. Catch the film when it premieres at FrightFest this August.
Categorized:Interviews
