‘The Birthday’ Director Eugenio Mira and Star Corey Feldman On Resurrecting Their Cult Classic
Over 20 years ago, Eugenio Mira and his writing partner Mikel Alvariño made a cosmic horror nightmare starring the incomparable Corey Feldman. Titled The Birthday, the film had a successful festival run but then essentially disappeared. Until now. Since being leaked online and rediscovered by genre champions like Jordan Peele, The Birthday is getting a full restoration in honor of its 20th anniversary. Finally, audiences in the U.S. can see the cult classic that has evaded so many for so long.
In the film:
Not everything is as it seems at the old Royal Fulton Hotel. Norman Forrester is finally going to meet his girlfriend’s family at her father’s lavish birthday party. But what was supposed to be an important step forward in their relationship doesn’t exactly go as planned; he’s not on the guest list, his girlfriend is ignoring him, and her father doesn’t like him at all. Rejected and heartbroken, Norman wanders away from the party, only to find something far more sinister than his girlfriend’s family lurking deep within the churning bowels of the ailing hotel: an ancient evil that threatens to bring about the end of the world.
We spoke with Mira and Feldman at Fantastic Fest about The Birthday getting a new life, the dark comedy of Stanley Kubrick, and Feldman’s ability to create a beautiful dance on camera.
DC: It’s wild that The Birthday initially played at the first Fantastic Fest in 2005 and now you’re playing it again. How does that feel?
Eugenio Mira: Well, it’s strange because I’m not that old and I’m not that young. Of course I was very young when I made the film and now you start to look back and it’s kind of scary that some stuff is left behind. I’m all for the future, so I can’t wait to talk about future projects. At the same time, I’m so grateful that it’s finding an audience because it never was released in the U.S.
DC: The story is crazy. It didn’t really get released and it leaked online…
EM: I don’t want to get too much into details because I’m so grateful at this moment, but 15, 16 years ago, it all had to do with the way the movie was produced. It was a very low-budget thing, but we used all our energy and the film itself we were very proud of, but we didn’t have infrastructure for pre-sales and we didn’t know any of that world. We were all rookies.
Then when we had, over the years, some interest for distribution, the materials weren’t ready. And I didn’t own it. Then two years ago I got the blessing of the production company allowing me to do the restoration. And that’s when I started to work with it, and Jordan Peele found it and had an interest in it. It was perfect timing to get to the 20th anniversary of The Birthday. It’s a very strange story.
DC: What are some of the films that you would say inspired you to make The Birthday?
EM: A good, very good question. A myriad of them. I co-wrote the movie with Mikel Alvariño, who I met at film school in Madrid when I was 18 years old. And we were these two guys always throwing stuff at the wall.
When I got the interest of a producer who approached me because he saw my short phone, I said, “Hey Mikel, this is it. I mean, this producer wants to know if I have a feature, let’s play with ideas.” So we had a lot of references.
For Mikel came the whole Lovecraft thing. I was the one who was obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, that kind of real-time movie where the real movie is happening offscreen and we’re following the wrong character. I was enamored with that, which is why [Corey Feldman’s] character arc is about accepting that his girlfriend is not in love with him anymore. So The Birthday a movie about denial, mourning, and being reborn, but there’s also the monster that The Cult is suspecting to be born and the host also happens to be his now ex-girlfriend. I thought that there was a lot of irony in all that, and we were playing with that.
To me, an inspiration as a director is Martin Scorsese’s After Hours.
DC: Yes!
EM: I love that film. Believe it or not, I like the awkward black humor of Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita. To me, it’s like the first Coen Brothers movie.
So yeah, Kubrick was definitely a big inspiration. From Kubrick, we go obviously to The Shining, a movie that transcends my interest and fascination with the horror genre. It’s a film that by itself, even if I wasn’t into horror movies, that film movie would be one of my most important films ever as an audience member and as director in the making. I love that film. My parents made the mistake of letting me see the film when I was only eight or nine years old.
DC: Oh, noooooo…
EM: They said, oh, only the first part when they arrive at the hotel. But, of course, they forgot. My sister, who is two years younger, and I got to see Danny seeing the twins, and that was when we started crying and yelling. It was like a kind of software installed in our brains. It changed our lives forever.
DC: So how did you get Corey Feldman to join the project initially for your rookie film?
EM: 20 years later, and I’m still pinching myself. It was simple, we sent him a short film that I made in the year 2000. That was my only short film with a love letter. And he just liked the script. He wanted to meet me. I’ll always remember we spent 42 minutes talking. I was in Barcelona on my phone and he was super into the film and all that, and suddenly somebody told me, “Hey, he signed the contract”. It was one of the happiest days in my life, being in my 20s saying, “Oh my God, I’m going to make this movie with my childhood idol.”
DC: Corey, what initially drew you to The Birthday? Why did you want to be a part of the story?
Corey Feldman: So I read the script initially and it’s a brilliant script. But there were hard things to get through and to understand because there was a bit of a language barrier. It wasn’t all perfectly transcribed at the time from Spanish and English. It was originally written in Spanish [by NAME], and then he translated it the best that he could into English, but his English was broken at the time.
So when I saw it, it was like, “Okay, I love the script. I can feel the pulse of it, I can feel the intensity of it. I get the characters, they speak to me, but there’s just something missing.” There’s something missing, which is two things. One was the actual flow because you want it to flow. And when there’s broken English and it’s hard to understand certain things, that flow is broken and it also makes it harder to define the characters. So there was that, and then there was also the other thing, which was the fact that it was a period piece. Eugenio wanted it set in the 80s. So I felt that it was very important to bring in some of the catchphrases of the period.
EM: For the record, we had the best advisor in the biz.
CF: Yeah, I mean, I don’t take credit or anything. I just like to help where I can. And that’s always been the case with most of, I mean, I am a producer on the film, but that’s it.
But the point being, right, we had to go back and redo all of it. So one of the first things I did when I got there was Eugenio, Mikel, and I sat down and we went from page one and we reshaped the script so that it had the flow.
DC: That’s got to be so cool for you as an actor to be able to help shape scripts and produce.
CF: I’ve done it on probably 10 or 15 films, but I don’t take credit. I take credit as an associate producer or co-producer or whatever. Because look, we all do things behind the scenes that people aren’t aware of, and I think it’s kind of expected when you become an actor who’s been doing it for 40, 50 years, people start to go, “OK, I think you know the game a little better than I do.” It’s not an ego thing. You want to help people.
EM: This is important. He came with fresh eyes with all his experience in a movie where his character is in every single shot. He finessed and enhanced the script.
CF: Well, thank you my friend. Seriously. Here, I’ll give the compliment right back. The entire thing is genius, and it’s because of his vision. At the end of the day when I got there, yes, the script had some holes that needed to be ironed out. But he already had everything diagrammed out. He already had everything blueprinted out. He already had schematics of every scene, every shot, every moment, everything.
DC: That makes improvising easy and changing things, though, right?
CF: We didn’t do a lot of improvising.
EM: I had no experience when it came to talking to actors. The fact that Corey had worked with my heroes, I was so excited to see that he could understand all that dance and deliver a performance seemingly effortlessly while hitting the marks with the camera and all the choreo.
CF: That was one of the most complicated things about the film. So understand that the film is shot in real time, which means that you never walk away from my character ever, and it’s 111 minutes long, right? So it’s almost like a big play. I mean, really, that’s the way this thing was drawn and choreographed, like a big play. So it was really a dance, like he said, where it’s like little pirouette, we moved to the next partner. Everything is timed out that way.
So with that, you do need the experience. You do need to really have the wherewithal and the presence mind of where the camera is and at what time, and at what location, at what degree, what angle. Then you have to be able to also kind of narrate to the other actors what they need to do because they’re not as experienced. So you’re kind of carrying them along with you as you kind of ride on this tornado.
DC: That’s so cool.
EM: I said to the other actor, don’t worry. I got this next take. We’ll do this. And Corey was finessing helping with that. He’s not only an actor, a performer, and a singer, but he knows about dance, dancing, and the timing. I got the big privilege of working with somebody who since he was very, very, very, very, very little, working with this demanding productions that were incredible. He had all those jobs because he was good at it. And you see it as an audience member.
It’s incredible. It’s like how can somebody that young can be so natural and exude that confidence? We couldn’t believe that we had Corey playing the protagonist of The Birthday. This is the guy who made all these things, and he’s here going from one place to another and doing it apparently effortlessly.
The Birthday comes back to select theaters this month and hits VOD on October 29, 2024.
Categorized:Interviews
