‘Little Bites’ Director Spider One and Star Krsy Fox On Making Their Most Personal Film To Date
Filmmaking duo Spider One and Krsy Fox have tackled a wide array of topics in such a small filmography. From the different angles on artists and trauma to a hellish bachelorette party, they’ve examined the weird and wild facets of humanity. But their new film Little Bites goes even darker as they weave a tale about parenthood, domestic violence, and survival.
In the film:
Mindy is a young widow and mother who desperately tries to protect her daughter Alice from the grips of a fiendish, flesh-eating monster named Agyar. Mindy has been secretly sacrificing her own life by allowing the creature to slowly feast on her body as she keeps Alice hidden away at her grandmother’s home.
We spoke with Spider One and Fox at Fantastic Fest about making such a personal movie, method acting, and hideous jean skirts.
Dread Central: Congratulations on Little Bites! How does it feel to have had it play in front of an audience and have everyone see it?
Spider One: It feels great You make these movies, I’m sure any filmmaker will tell you, and you live with it for so long and you’ve seen it a thousand times and you’ve toiled over every frame. But then suddenly you see it in a theater with other people and it feels kind of like a fresh experience again.
DC: Well, you said Littles Bites is your most personal movie, so it especially must feel kind of raw, watching it with people. It is very different from what you’ve made before.
SO: Krsy, didn’t I say to you when we were watching it, I was like, “Wow, this plays a lot darker than I thought.” [Laughs]
Krsy Fox: We’re bumming everyone out. Yeah, I mean, it’s a heavy movie.
DC: It really is, but it works though. After seeing Bury the Bride, it’s so interesting to see you growing as a filmmaker. I love the way you frame Little Bites and how close we are on everyone’s face, especially yours, Krsy. I wanted to hear more about that decision to be very close and claustrophobic with the cinematography.
SO: Yeah, I mean, I had mentioned in the Q&A, it was a really conscious decision to try to emulate the time period in terms of the technical approach. We didn’t do anything beyond a dolly push and a few crash zooms because I love those, they’re my favorite thing in the world.
But yeah, obviously this is meant to challenge the viewer, certainly at least in the first act to feel her isolation and particularly in the two sequences when she’s alone in the kitchen and eating. We’re like, “OK, what’s happening?” Then the phone rings and then we’re completely close up on this phone call. We never see the person on the other side. And so yeah, I think for me it was definitely an intentional thing to try to hopefully convey to the audience how isolated she is. And then also the oddness of knowing that there’s always this thing downstairs as she’s trying to do normal things like heat up a bowl of noodles.
DC: That house is incredible. Did you find a house or was it an amalgamation of houses? How did that work?
SO: That’s an incredible place. It was a crazy house in Simi Valley and apparently, it started out as just some normal 1200-square-foot home and the owner is constantly building.
DC: It’s the Winchester mystery house all over again.
SO: Just to show when we scouted the house, the room that was Alice’s room, was one way. And then we came back and he had raised the ceiling like a second story.
KF: He raised the ceiling, but there was a giant hole in the ceiling. He said, “Well, so what happened is I fell through the roof and through the ceiling. So then I decided instead of just fixing it, I’m just going to raise it.” So yeah, he was constantly building. He’s outside adding onto another part of the house while we’re shooting. It was crazy.
SO: But it’s an incredible house because when you step in, you have no sense of time. Seriously.
KF: And it’s so dusty, so it looks great on camera. So many spiders. It felt like it was an old Gothic mansion. And Mindy, she wouldn’t be cleaning her house, you know what I mean? So it sort of felt very real. It didn’t matter where you pointed the camera, it was beautiful.
SO: Yeah, and we tried to utilize as much as we could of that house. But there were still other rooms we never even used in the movie.
DC: That’s nuts. Krsy, what was it like getting into Mindy’s headspace, especially since you’re on camera almost the whole time?
KF: I mean, it was weird. Right before we started it felt intimidating. I was like, “Holy shit, I’m in every scene, but one.” I didn’t think about it until we broke down the schedule. But it was weird. I thought a lot about the character before we started shooting and I thought about making sure there was a lot of space in the way she spoke and a lot of thoughtfulness and struggle. We talked about when I have conversations with the monster in my head, I’m just saying to myself, “I fucking hate you. I fucking hate you.” You know what I mean? It’s just having a lot of that deep-seated anger that you’re always holding back.
It’s kind of the opposite of my personality. I’m a bubbly person. I’m a really honest, open person, and Mindy is super reserved because she’s in all this trauma all the time. So honestly, it happened very naturally as soon as we started because the first day was the scene with the mother and the daughter coming home.
DC: Oh wow. What a way to start.
KF: Yeah, it was like we dove right into that. But then we started, I think the next day was the monster, and we did all the monster stuff at the top of the movie. It’s weird when you’re getting that many prosthetics put on you, every day you’re having someone biting on you, touching you, you start to feel very violated. You know what I mean? Even though everyone’s wonderful, the makeup people, you just didn’t want anyone to touch you after that. There was the day that I stood in front of the mirror and took off my robe and I had almost an internal panic attack. I was just like, “I need some space.”
DC: No, it’s a lot. Especially I think that, again, you talked about this is a domestic violence metaphor, and so it’s right there and it’s a lot to take in.
KF: It is. Whether you’ve been through it personally or whether you’ve had people close to you, it’s a really important subject matter to me. And obviously being a mother on top of it, I just was like, “I need to do this justice. I need to really feel what this woman would be feeling.” And it was hard on me mentally. It took me a while to be normal again. And I was just like, “What’s wrong? I’m in such a funk. I finished a movie, I’m proud of the movie, but I wasn’t happy.” It took me a while. I was like, “Oh, well, I’ve been living in this woman’s head space and it’s not good for your brain.”
DC: No. Especially when you have a daughter and you would do anything for her. Spider, as a parent yourself, how is that for you mentally? I mean, I know you’re not in front of the camera, but you’re putting your parenting soul out there, essentially.
SO: Yeah. I mean obviously everything in the movie is a bit of a metaphor for these real-life subjects, but everything is from a real place and everything is from things that have happened in my life, our life. That’s why Little Bites is so special. And I don’t know, hopefully, people can find, even if you’re not a parent, their own way in. That’s why we reference this idea of family and we all have our ideal versions of what that should be. But then things infiltrate your life sometimes that you can’t control and you don’t always know what’s happening with somebody. The scene in the grocery store with the other mom just wanting to talk about gymnastics class as this person’s crumbling inside. You don’t always know what’s happening in someone’s life.
For me, I think I am a bit of an optimist in life in general. So I also wanted to show at the end that, not to give away anything, but there is a path to survival and triumph. And amongst that darkness, I want the audience to leave feeling happy-ish.
DC: Yeah, there is hope at the end of the tunnel.
SO: Yeah, because I think survival in any film for me, we talk about it all the time. There’s certainly horror where everyone dies, and there’s a place for that. But I tend never, I don’t know, I always want to show…
KF: I’m always pushing, you got to kill at least one more person. Come on. That’s our difference. [Laughs]
SO: So I think there’s something quite nice about showing someone at least getting through.
DC: Why did you want to do period? Why did you want to do the 1970s?
SO: I was born in 1967, so I have an incredible fondness for being a little kid in the 1970s. It’s funny that Cher is a producer on this, I remember as a little kid every week, whatever night it was on, watching Sonny and Cher and my mom wondering what she was going to wear tonight.
So I just love that time period. I love the clothes, I love the aesthetic of all that. And I like to be able to eliminate technology from a movie. I think that’s helpful because even with this movie, we involve CPS and, well, CPS was only around, I think it was only formed in 1975 or something. It was such a new thing. And so it gave us liberty to not necessarily have [super strict rules].
I don’t know. Whenever I watch a film set in another time, it really is a sense of time travel, which I think is really fun. If I could do anything, I’d love to be able to time travel because I would love to go back to 1940s Hollywood. And so it is really fun to do that and try to create that time authentically.
KF: It feels scarier, too, in a way. You’re much more isolated in that time than you are now. And people didn’t talk about [domestic violence] the way we do now. Everyone I know is, like, “Oh yeah, I’m in therapy.” It’s not a shameful thing anymore. But back then, you just didn’t talk about it. You just kept yourself. So yeah, it felt very the right decision for this movie.
SO: Yeah. It’s funny. I don’t even remember why, but it just felt like it should be.
KF: I think it was really ultimately the first thing for you was no cell phones.
SO: And the clothes. It’s so funny, she hated the clothes.
KF: The one thing I hated most was that long jean skirt. I just hated it. I had a teacher when I was growing up who used to wear those every day and she was like a miserable woman and I was just like, “Oh my God, I’m dressing like her.”
DC: Before we wrap up though, I wanted to hear about our amazing creature and who plays the creature.
SO: He’s actually a real monster.
KF: We found him under a bridge. [Laughs]
SO: His name’s Jon Sklaroff, and he’s an incredible actor who took on this role and was completely method the whole time. So he would get his makeup on in the morning and obviously have it on the entire day.
KF: He’d wear his teeth all day.
SO: The entire cast and crew didn’t realize that that accent wasn’t his real. He’s from New Jersey.
DC: What??
SO: We had worked on that. We tried a bunch of different things and we ended up landing on, I guess what I call sort of like a theater British. We wanted this idea that he was so condescending to Mindy. It wasn’t quite British, but it had this air of arrogance to it, and he was great, and he stayed in character the whole time. No one even knew what his real voice was which I think drove some people crazy, but I fully appreciated it.
KF: The thing with him, out of everyone, because we do a lot of prep for movies, so I rehearsed with all the other actors a lot, but I did one read with him, a quick one, and then we never rehearsed. On set, he’d be like, “Do you want to run lines?”And I would consciously avoid him. I was getting this visceral reaction from it. So I didn’t want to mess with that.
So then I would put him in place and I’d go in the dark room and he’d have the makeup on it. I was so freaked out at him, so creepy. So I like to put myself in that state. And I think it worked well for him too. And he also could barely see me with all this makeup, so I was a little foggy blur for him. I think that was cool, our disconnection because I felt much closer to all the other characters, except for him, which I liked.
SO: And we made an effort to try to create hopefully a unique space for Monster. I haven’t seen, somebody that’s so articulate and so manipulative in his psychological torture equals the physical torture. I think it’s a unique space to play in. The things he says to her hurt more than the bites. That’s that horrible song he sings to her about her husband. It’s just like, “Oh God, it’s just so mean.”
KF: I remember that doing that scene. That was the moment we only did one take of my coverage. It was one of those moments when he was saying the most awful things and I could not stop crying. I remember that moment. That’s one of the scenes that really stuck with me after, and that’s one of the reasons I think I felt so dark and I don’t know, it was just awful.
As an actor, you’re a human. And even though you’re pretending and we’re making this thing, it still hurts to hear horrible things.
SO: It’s funny how it really does infiltrate your emotions. Even though, you’re pretending it infiltrates your emotions.
Little Bites is streaming now on Shudder and AMC+.
Categorized:Interviews
