‘Frankie Freako’ Director Steve Kostanski On His Love For Weird Little Dudes [Fantastic Fest 2024]
Director Steve Kostanski knows how the craft an incredible world populated with goopy but lovable creatures. Just look at his 2020 film Psycho Goreman, a ridiculous horror comedy with a ton of heart. But the practical effects pro shows no sign of stopping with his new film Frankie Freako, a puppet-filled chaos machine reminiscent of Ghoulies.
In the film,
Workaholic yuppie Conor has a dilemma: no one in his life respects him! Not his boss, not his coworkers, not even his wife Kristina, who thinks he’s an uptight “square”! Conor sees no way out of this existential rut until one night channel-surfing he catches a bizarre ad for a party hotline hosted by a strange dancing goblin: FRANKIE FREAKO. Conor is entranced by Frankie’s promises of wild and freaky adventures, just a phone call away – could this be the recipe to spice up his flavorless life?
Home alone for the weekend, Conor works up the courage to dial the number for the Frankie Freako hotline. As soon as the call connects, it unleashes CHAOS into his white-collar world, releasing Frankie and his troublemaker friends from their dimensional prison. It’s a race against time as Conor must defeat the rambunctious ruffians and clean up their trail of destruction before Kristina returns from her trip, all while going on an unexpected journey of self-discovery.
We sat down with Kostanski at Fantastic Fest to talk about little shithead cinema, the fleeting lives of puppets, and his love of stuff!
Dread Central: Why do you love weird little dudes so much? I know Psycho Gorman’s a big dude, but we’re going to call him little dudes in our hearts.
Steve Kostanksi: I mean, from my childhood, I’ve always loved just action figures and any kind of media. I just loved stuff as a kid. I love toys. I love video games. I love movies. I just loved all of it, and the iconography of those things just burned in my brain, and as a kid, when you’re super impressionable, it’s like something like the Xenomorph just sticks with you in a way that could never happen in adulthood. I grew up on Godzilla, so the iconography of Godzilla movies is a big influence on me, any kind of Japanese tokusatsu. It’s informed my design methodology, which is making things that if you shrunk it down to toy size and put it on the shelf at a store, would kids see that and be like, “I got to go buy that toy!”
DC: But I love that because I think you said this in your director’s statement, we are in an era of very serious horror, which I’m into. But I also really love that we are getting films from people like you that are just wacky. I love the wacky and I love the weird and the not-so-serious just as much!
SK: Yeah, it’s like I always tell people, I take the craft seriously. The work is serious, and I have to give credit to Adam Brooks, Matt Kennedy, Conor Sweeney, my Astron-6 buddies who are all in the movie and who are comedy experts. They get that for comedy to work, it has to be a serious performance. You have to sell the lines. You have to sell the scene for it to actually be funny, even if you’re doing the dumbest shit imaginable. That to me is the thing that I find with a lot of horror comedies. It gets very winky and I feel like you have to treat your silly puppet monster movie with the same level of focus and intention as a serious horror movie.
DC: No, I love that you said that though. It’s got to be so hard to take it seriously and get in that head space. But every character takes the monsters seriously. It helps put yourself in the world more, even though there’s a bunch of little men running around.
SK: Well, and I’m also, I am just fully committed to these universes. Yes, it’s all funny and silly and goofy, but I don’t know. I think of Psycho Goreman [referenced as PG going forward] and that alien council scene. I could live in that for two hours.
The intention, even with Frankie, when we go to Freak World, it’s like, I want you to be like, “More of that, please!” I love giving people little tastes of odd corners of my brain, but not staying in it so long that you get sick of it. I want people to talk about it after and be like, what is the infrastructure of Freak World? Do they all drive around in mine carts? I want people asking those questions as they walk out of the theater because those are the questions I ask. As a kid, I’d watch The Super Mario Bros. Movie and there’s just scaffolding everywhere and sparks, and it’s like, “Where are the sparks coming from? Why are there sparks??”
DC: Where’s the lore book for all of your movies??
SK: I feel like some YouTuber at some point is going to build out and do a seven-hour video that’s just all the lore of Frankie Freako. I know people have done The Void Explained, and I’m like, please explain it because there’s a lot of gaps I don’t have filled on that.
That is really part of the fun for me. I like that it becomes this communal thing that everyone participates in, and once the movie’s out, it has a life of its own. People add and tweak and theorize and mess around with. I love PG obviously. People really latched onto him and his developing sexuality.
DC: We love hunky boys!
SK: That makes me really happy. The fun of the genre is the conversation after the movie, and that’s what I loved as a teenager, watching all the Evil Deads with my friends and just bullshitting about how did you build that weird car in Army of Darkness with the propeller on the front, really getting into the nitty-gritty of how the universe works for all these movies. That’s the fun part.
DC: Oh my God, that’s the best part. When you’re just hanging out afterward and just thinking about the theories. I also wanted to hear how you designed Frankie Freako and all the little dudes. How did you start with their look?
SK: I mean, I was inspired by obviously Ghoulies and Munchie and all of those little shithead movies.
DC: I also realized that we haven’t had a good little shithead movie in a while!
SK: No, nobody does them many more. I think also the intent, at least the approach now would be to do them all in CG and not make little puppets, which is not the same thing. But as far as designing Frankie goes, he definitely evolved over a few months into what the look ended up being. I sculpted him three different times. I did kind of a promo Frankie, that was just for the pitch to get the movie financed.
And then did another version that made it all the way to the molding-casting stage which I ended up not being happy with. So I started from scratch again. But then once I locked in the sculpt, we started figuring out the wardrobe. The one thing that I was really adamant about this was I wanted them to have outfits. I didn’t want to do Ghoulies where they’re all naked, which it’s its own look and it’s cool, but I just like the idea of them looking like little people.
Then it came to color coordinating, and I started very simple with the main three where I was like, it’s going to be RBG, red, green, blue, as far as their skin tones, and then we built them out from there, figuring out their hairstyles and all of it. It was all stuff that I thought would be quick and easy, but it was a lot of ton of work, like settling on his little soul patch thing, which is loosely inspired by John Travolta’s look in that movie Swordfish.
DC: Wait that’s hilarious.
SK: I love how 2000s he looks in that movie. Even those movie feels like an early 90s movie. I’m always inspired by early 2000 stuff. I feel like those were formative years for me.
DC: They don’t get enough credit. I feel like everyone talks shit about early 2000s genre movies, but they shaped me so much as a kid!
SK: Well, yeah, I’m sure for you like everyone, The Queen of the Damned and The Queen of the Damned soundtrack is pretty significant, right?
DC: Absolutely, yeah.
SK: So I like to squeeze that into my stuff as well. That’s why everything’s kind of in a non-time. I never say 1994 or whatever. It’s a little bit of whatever I want it to do.
DC: Okay. I was going to ask, because it feels period, but not really.
SK: I’ve done that on all my movies. I just keep cell phones out of the picture completely. I also find having had to do cell phones for directing TV and stuff, it’s such an annoying thing to have deal with now because I don’t want to watch people texting. Then I always get the pitch of like, “Well, what if you had a host of cards or whatever where it pops up on the screen” and I’m like, “Cool, that is a thing that will instantly date the project and make it not interesting to me at all.” So I just wipe cell phones off the map and commit to feeling like a little 80s, a little 90s, and if I’m feeling spicy, a little 00s.
DC: So what was it like directing little puppets? How does that work?
SK: I mean, I was puppeteering a lot of the time. It was a small crew, so we’re all doing everything. Every crew member was puppeteering. Our physical effects guy who would do pyro and smoke was in there puppeteering, prosthetics people were puppeteering. This is one of those all hands on deck type movies. We had a tiny crew tight timeline, so it was just like, whatever gets us through the day, everybody just jump in and do it.
DC: Ok so everyone was a puppeteer. Did any of y’all have puppeteering experience?
SK: None of us did. So it was a learning curve for everybody. There’s learning involved to get to what ended up on screen for sure. But yeah, I mean, we tailored the schedule. We did three weeks with our cast. So Conor acting against the backs of puppets heads, basically shooting out our humans, getting all our closeups and mediums of them, and then the last week of shooting was turning around on the puppets. So that three weeks gave us a bit of time to mess around and sort of ease into learning the puppets, but yeah.
DC: That’s smart.
SK: Yeah, it seemed like the smart way to do it. I think worked out okay. I’d probably do something similar if I do this again, we do another Frankie. I might break it up though.
DC: Was this your first time working with puppets?
SK: To this extent, yes. I mean, PG had puppets, The Void had puppets. I mean, all my movies have them somewhere, but this is my first time being like, “This is a puppet movie”. It was a bit of a just kind of “jump in and hope it works out”.
In my head, it seemed simple. I was like, “Well, yeah, it’s like the puppets are, they’re smaller than people. They don’t have to eat, sleep, drink, we’re done.” We can literally just chuck them on the ground and go home. But yeah, there’s a lot of maintenance and effort that goes into maintaining and operating.
DC: Did they break?
SK: They broke a lot. I talked to a lot of puppeteers while I was developing the project in prep, and they were all telling me that every time you use a puppet, you’re killing it a little bit. They have a finite lifespan, whether it’s silicone or foam latex, all these materials break down the more you use them. So thinking of it in those terms was terrifying because it’s like, yeah, we’d be operating like a Frankie all day and then by the end of the day he would always split at the corners of his mouth. So we’d have to tack those back in.
DC: Did you only have one of each?
SK: We had just three of each, which ended up more being like two. It was like swappable body parts we made. Kind of little Lego men with different heads and arms. We had loose legs, loose arms, that could be rod puppeted. And then we had rigid arms and legs that could be posed. Those are the puppets that I brought. The posable ones that can stand up, and then the heads, we had simple heads, and then we had animatronic ones that only worked like 10% of the time. So we shot around ’em for the most part.
DC: Would you work with puppets like this again now that you’ve done it?
SK: Yeah, now that I’ve gone through it and I’ve suffered through it and I’ve made all the mistakes that I’ve made, yeah, I could do it again. I know there’s certainly things I would do differently and ways to do it better. I feel like maybe if you had asked me this right after I finished shooting, I would’ve been like, “Hell no”. I would’ve been like Trey Parker or Matt Stone after Team America, where they were just like never, never again. [Laughs]
But no, now that I’ve had some time to sit on it, I can also say, this is the only one of my movies that I actually enjoy rewatching. Usually, I just don’t watch my stuff. I’ve watched it a thousand times a million times in post-production, but this one, I was happy to sit and watch it last night. I just like watching it with the crowd. It feels good. It makes me happy. So yeah, the idea of doing it again, but doing it better is definitely appealing to me.
DC: That’s such a good feeling too, to see people react and you’re like, “Oh, you get it. All of that was worth it.”
SK: Well, it was weird walking around with them and seeing the reactions. It was so cool. Really noticeable hype around those puppets. I could hear people in the room being like, “Oh, that’s Frankie Freako!”
DC: We love a little guy! We just love a weird little dude that we can glom onto. I feel like you’re the pioneer of weird little dude movies, at least in the modern era.
SK: I hope I can keep doing it now that I’ve figured it out. It’ll be slightly less stressful the next go around. Yeah, it’s fun. And I do kind of love that now. I just have a bunch of little dudes around.
Frankie Freako comes to theaters on October 4 from Shout! Studios.
Categorized:Interviews
