‘The Lonely Man with the Ghost Machine’ Director Graham Skipper On Acting, Directing, and Monster Puppets
It’s just one of those things. I was scrolling Facebook when I saw that a new movie called The Lonely Man with the Ghost Machine had just been released on demand. Intrigued by the title, I checked it out and soon discovered a real hidden gem.
The film concerns our titular lonely man, Wozzek, who is quite possibly the last person on the planet. He’s holed up in a little cabin in the woods and keeps himself company by dialoguing with a series of cassette tapes on which he’s pre-recorded one side of a conversation. And then there’s the matter of his wife. She’s dead, but Wozzek has constructed a machine by which he is able to make her image appear. Oh, and he’s also being stalked by a creature called the Deletarian, who used to eat humans before they went extinct. But now, because of its own loneliness, it wants to be friends with Wozzek.
Graham Skipper is the film’s director as well as the lead actor, playing Wozzek. He’s on-screen almost every second of the film, and his performance is really something. He conveys perfectly the sadness, vulnerability, humor, and anger of a character who is desperately alone.
If you’ve been watching indie horror this past decade or so, you’ve likely seen Skipper in something. He’s appeared in genre favorites VFW, Bliss, and Suitable Flesh, as well as dozens of others. You might have also seen his previous film, Sequence Break, in which a deranged arcade game tries to suck its players into a nightmare dimension.
I was fortunate to be able to ask Skipper a few questions about personal filmmaking, directing himself, and cool cinematic puppets, among other things.
Dread Central: What made you want to take the leap from acting to directing?
Graham Skipper: I have always wanted to direct, and I had made a couple of shorts and a couple of smaller things. Then back in 2016, when I jumped into my first feature, Sequence Break, I wanted to totally create my own world. When you’re an actor, you’re so focused on one small aspect of the production—which is something that I love about it. But, then, as a director, I wondered how it would be to envision a whole thing.
And then with The Lonely Man with the Ghost Machine, this opportunity just kind of fell into my lap where I was basically going to be given carte blanche to do anything I wanted, however weird I wanted to make it, and do everything completely my way. And I had this really weird specific idea that I didn’t know if anyone would let me make this if somebody else were deciding what to do. So I’m just gonna do it.
And it was great. It all came fully from the heart. And I think I used it as a great opportunity to dive into parts of me that needed to get out.
DC: So would you say [The Lonely Man with the Ghost Machine] was a very personal film for you?
GS: Very personal, yeah. There was stuff going on in my life around that time. There were multiple things that were really tumultuous in various familial relationships and such that really informed the scriptwriting process, the shooting process, and then the post-process. You know, they always say, “Write what you know” and make art that’s personal to you. And I just said, you know what, I’m going to be unafraid to dive head-first into this, and I’m going to bear everything that I want to, and just not worry about what other people are going to think.
I don’t know, it was just a thing where I wanted to get rid of my own critical eye and just give in to everything. And what I’ve seen is that people really responded to that because I think they can see just how personal this is for me. It’s just something that I think a lot of people have found a connection with. Whether it’s something going on in their lives, or just tapping into emotions that we all have that maybe we don’t voice that much.
DC: Would you say that because of the personal nature of the film, that’s why you had to play the lead part yourself? Or were you always sort of planning that?
GS: With Sequence Break, I purposely didn’t want to act in that because I didn’t know what it was going to try to direct myself. But, for this one, absolutely the personal nature of it made me go, “Well, I know what this character is, and I know what is happening here.” So that makes sense on one level. But, also, we had a very small budget, we were going to have a very small span of time to do this, and I just felt like I’m just going to cut out the middle-man and dive head first into this and do it myself.
And I really enjoyed the process of directing myself. It was weirdly very comforting for me to give such trust to my D.P. Ken [Whiting]. Basically, we would map out the shots, we’d talk about what I wanted it to look like, and we’d set it all up. Then we’d do a take so I could see what the move was, see what it was like. And then we’d just roll. Since we were shooting on such a fast schedule, I mean we shot this whole thing in six days, I know I could feel in the performance when I was getting what I wanted. So then I’d turn to Ken and say, “Did you get what we wanted?” And eventually he would say, “Yeah. We got it.” Then we’d move on.
So I weirdly felt very at home because I’m used to being an actor, and I can generally feel when something works, when something hits, emotionally, the way I want it to hit. And it just really flowed. That process with working with Ken, I’ve worked with him before a bunch, we’re good friends, we share a lot of the same ideals of filmmaking and stuff like that. And so it was just a really good partnership in order to get The Lonely Man with the Ghost Machine done.
DC: Was it hard being the only actor at times, without having anyone to bounce off of?
GS: That is a good question! I really tried to think of all those moments as a monologue, or when the Deleterian comes in, that actor wasn’t even on set. That was a puppet, so their voice recording was done remotely. And so there were people on set who were reading the stuff so I could respond to it. And a lot of the stuff we had pre-recorded with the Deletarian actor so that we had his timing and cadence. It took some experimentation to figure out how all that was going to work.
But after a while, I just had to imagine that I was having a conversation with this guy, even though it’s just a voice. Or even with my A.D. just off camera reading this stuff, I was able to get myself into the mindset, that I’m doing a scene with someone else, and I need to just react the way that I would. And it worked great.
And, again, even with some of the folks on set who were reading some of the lines, and certainly with Paul [Guyet], who voices the Deletarian, it was done with a lot of soul and a lot of that intention of we’re piecing this very important relationship in the film together in a unique and interesting way. We were all very cognizant of wanting to make sure that we pumped as much emotion and depth into all that as possible, which helped me get into it more.
DC: Of course, you did have a human partner, and Christina Bennett Lind was absolutely perfect. How did you find her, and what was it like working with her?
GS: I love Christina. Christina and I have known each other since college. We went to acting school together. And I’ve always wanted to work with her in a professional capacity. I mean, in college we did, and granted I graduated college in 2005, but we’ve remained friends. She also produces her own stuff. Christina is really into indie filmmaking and guerilla filmmaking. She knows that life and I knew that she enjoyed it. And I always had dreamed of getting to act with her again because my favorite acting scene that I did all through college was with Christina. I knew we had the chemistry that we needed and I knew that she could crush this role.
So I emailed her and she emailed me right back and she said, “You know, this is so funny. I was literally thinking that I wanted to get back on a set and do some real, down-to-earth guerilla filmmaking. I need that back in my life.” So I think it was sort of kismet in terms of timing. And of course, she was amazing. She was only there for three days, but we just knocked everything out.
With her, I knew we weren’t going to need a lot of rehearsals. Some actors you just know. It’s like, “We’re gonna talk about it, then we’re gonna get in. She’s going to know her stuff. And we’re going to be able to get all of this done quickly, and it’s all going to hit emotionally.” She did that in spades and I couldn’t have been happier getting to work with her again. She was amazing. Especially on such a small, contained low-budget film like The Lonely Man with the Ghost Machine. She was so game for everything and such a rockstar. That’s someone who you really need in your corner when you’re working on indie films like this.
DC: How did the design of the Deletarian come about? Did you design it yourself or did you have any help?
GS: So a friend of mine, Christina Bryant, who actually is married to the voice actor that plays the Deletarian, she is a professional puppet designer. And so I reached out to her. She and I had collaborated on some stuff before, and there had been a few near-misses of projects where I wanted puppets and they didn’t happen. So I really wanted to work with her, and I reached out to her about this.
One thing that I really wanted with the design of the puppet, which was something that I shared with her, was I said, “I know that we don’t have the money or resources to do something hyper-realistic.” And I didn’t want to do CGI, not just because I prefer practical stuff, but with CGI you’ve got to have a lot of money to do some really good CGI if you want to sell it. And I knew we just didn’t have that. Additionally, for me, this has always been a very tactile film. I wanted people to feel the sweat in this movie.
So, the point is, I wanted it to be a puppet. And I said, “Let’s not worry about realism.” Some of the references I gave her were the Skeksis from Dark Crystal. We talked about muppets and I said, “Nobody cares that Kermit doesn’t really look like a frog, but we’re still emotionally invested in Kermit because of the performance and because of the circumstance that Kermit’s in.”
And so I said, “Let’s come up with a design.” One of the early ideas that I had was that I didn’t want it to feel like it was made of flesh. I wanted it to feel like it had a bony exoskeleton. I just thought it would be an interesting idea to have something that would traditionally be a mammal, like a wolf, but instead of having fur, it has the bones on the outside. That’s always been weird and jarring to me. Then she came up with this fantastic idea for how to do the eyes. Since the Deletarian is coming from the skies, purportedly this sort of extra-dimensional situation, to have this purple light literally breaking out of his skull. And she came up with the idea of the scattered star look for the eyes, which I thought was so dynamic and so fun and so interesting.
So we went through a few different designs. She did some sketches and then built a couple of smaller mock-ups, and then eventually it came down to the final design, which I was very, very happy with. It was so exciting to finally have that day on set to work with the puppet and feel how the puppet is an extension of your arm. I actually play the puppet most of the time. Unless I’m actually on screen with the puppet, it’s me who’s animating the puppet. And then a couple of other guys when I’m on screen would do it.
That was a very interesting experience, but it worked really well, and I think she captured the feel of the design that I was going for.
DC: Was it exciting to work with a puppet finally? You sound like you really wanted to do that for a while!
GS: Yeah! It was awesome. I was so stoked. I love the tactile nature of that stuff and I can understand if people watch the movie and they’re like, “Well, that doesn’t look like a real thing,” or, “That looks like a puppet.” But that’s what I wanted. It goes back to what I said about Kermit. I think that performances sell what those are and it’s totally okay in a movie to see the strings so long as that emotional core is there.
DC: It was pretty ingenious, the idea of a man talking to himself via cassette tapes instead of, say, doing an internal dialogue or something like that.
GS: Thanks! Yeah, so the inspiration for that actually came from a Samuel Beckett play which is called Krapp’s Last Tape. It’s a one-act play and the idea is that the main character, whose name is Krapp, it’s not specifically said, but we imagine he’s the last man on earth. What he does is he’s logged all these memories of his, so that he doesn’t forget, onto old tapes. And I believe in the original, it’s reel-to-reel recordings. But he listens back to that so he remembers what happened decades ago. And occasionally he’ll sort of talk back to it.
I thought, “That’s a really fun way to, if you’re that lonely, and you really are by yourself, and you really are kind of cracking up, then you’d find a bunch of cassette tapes.” I just wanted to take it that step further and say, “What is that like when someone pre-records half of a conversation?” How much can that really change the other side of the conversation? And wondering, because some of those conversations get very specific, I like playing with the thought, “Hmmm..is he imagining the other half of these conversations? Had he had this conversation a million times? Or maybe there is another version of this conversation. I wonder what that would be.”
And just leaving that question up in the air was something very interesting to me. I think it plays very well. People seem to respond to that, and I’m very glad that they do.
DC: So thematically he’s in dialogue with himself in that way, and The Lonely Man with the Ghost Machine also explores being in dialogue with our ghosts and our monsters in a metaphorical sense. What made you want to explore these really complex themes?
GS: Yeah, part of the impetus for the whole thing at first was just six months prior to writing this, my stepmother suddenly passed away. It was interesting and heartbreaking to watch my father’s grieving process and how he was trying to reconcile what happened with his new situation. And he was having a lot of difficulty with that. So it made me think, “How do we process grief, and what would happen if we could bring them back? What would we say to them? What is it that we miss about them? Is it the everyday stuff?”
And conversely, like with the Deletarian, how do we converse with the other part of us that’s creeping in? I always look at it like the ghost machine is hope, and the Deletarian is this creeping death on its way. And when we experience grief or when we experience someone in our life passing away, it obviously brings up questions of our own mortality.
I knew that with my dad, that was something that he really started to think about. So it was really that kind of dichotomy between the hope to erase what is done, and the fear and curiosity surrounding your own imminent demise. Just the fact that you’re suddenly alone when you had something that was so solid, so true, and so constant in your life that now is suddenly gone. Then just asking that question and throwing my character in the middle of all that, and trying to understand how do I cope, and what do I do. That’s at the heart of the emotional beats of The Lonely Man with the Ghost Machine.
The Lonely Man with the Ghost Machine is available now on VOD.
Categorized:Interviews
