Set Visit Coverage: Brian Lubocki and Michael Hayes Talk Fire City: The Interpreter of Signs
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We were lucky enough to get to play with demons on the set of Fire City: The Interpreter of Signs earlier this month while the complex “horror noir,” which is the brainchild of writer-producers Brian Lubocki and Michael Hayes, was shooting.
It’s directed by F/X master Tom Woodruff, Jr., and stars Tobias Jelinek as Vine the Demon, who must square off with an even eviler Demoness, Cornelia (played by Danielle “Dani” Chuchran).
We had a chance to talk with the actors plus the director and his two right-hand practical effects guys (his son, David Woodruff, and Academy Award winner Dave Elsey), but in this installment you’ll hear from the originators of Fire City: The Interpreter of Signs, Lubocki and Hayes.
Dread Central: So… what’s the Fire City story in this film? It’s based on your body of shorts and other works set in this world, correct?
Brian Lubocki: I’ll let Michael take the story question, but I’ll preface it by saying Fire City is a world where demons live among us, only we can’t see them for who they truly are.
Michael Hayes: Um, this particular story is about a hallway where demons and humans live together. Demons need misery to survive; it’s the only thing that they need. They eat like normal people but only do that because they like it. They don’t need it but they need human misery so we have a character who is essentially procuring misery for them. He is a demon who is a drug dealer to humans and also a misery dealer to the demons. He lives at the end of the hall, and every night creative misery comes to the end of the hall.
BL: So it’s a bit of an eco system…
MH: What happens is this eco system is thrown out of whack; the humans suddenly reform themselves. Nobody comes to his door anymore. All the humans on the floor who previously were despicable – wife beaters, child molesters – are now model boyfriends, parents, girlfriends. So, the demons begin to starve, and they are trying to figure out what has caused this to happen as they are starting to die.
BL: It’s as if all their transgressions have been wiped clean.
DC: Now, how did this happen?
BL: Well that’s what the movie is about…
(Laughter)
BL: And also important to distinguish is that it is very specifically not a Judeo-Christian story. This is not angels versus demons, heaven versus hell. This is closer to maybe Lord of the Rings and Constantine. Demons live here just like we do; they don’t know anything more than we do. How they got here? They’ve got their own philosophies and religions just like we do, but no one really knows.
DC: Why do you call them demons?
MH: They actually call themselves that; again, we are not Judeo-Christian but… drawing from all sorts of different mythologies.
DC: But are they damned souls? They’re not really dead, right? Are they mortal or not?
MH: That gets into part of the underlying mythology of our world, which is actually part of the reveals that we present in later films. So this is the first film of four films actually.
BL: For the time being I will only say that they… they experience the mythologies and the stories and, you know, what’s on TV just like we do. So they most closely compare themselves or see themselves similar to what the Hollywood version of demons are. They essentially… even though some look more like… we’ve got one that looks more like a Borg, call a Borgling Demon. And some that look like an animal world. There’s also some that have other chemical properties. Some have metal in their structure. So there really are differences [between] them…
BL: Yeah, but it really comes from a really pure material, sort of evolution, as if evolution took a fork on the road. I would say that he most closely relates to some of the demons that he’s seen on TV and books more than anything else.
DC: So what made you decide to make a movie? It’s such a huge undertaking. This is something where you’re really taking a leap but it’s a great risk. What was the one catalyst that made you both say, “Okay, this is a movie that we are going to make.” Or I guess four movies!
MH: I’m not sure there was one catalyst as much as it was… we’ve been friends for a number of years and writers [but] have never written together. We finally sort of sat down and said, ‘You know, we want to make something that we’ve written. We want to see our writing executed.’ And so we thought, ‘Let’s just do a web series.’ ‘All right, so what do you like, and what do I like?’
And we came up with a mix of sort of horror, noir, thriller, those kinds of things. And the moment that we came up with that core idea of what if demons live among us and human see them as other humans, not because they’re cloaking themselves but because that’s just the nature of the world… demons that can’t be seen as anything else other than human. Sort of the same way humans can see a certain spectrum of light. We can’t see infrared light, we can’t see ultraviolet, we only see a certain spectrum. It’s the same; it’s more of a scientific property.
So when we came up with that and started to build it out, we realized that it was a much larger story world that could become a feature film. It was really a franchisable idea, kind of an endless story generator as we started to build out the rules of the world. And when we realized that, we thought… rather than just try a webseries, it would really best be served by what everyone else would do with it if they had all the money in the world, which is make a feature film franchise.
DC: Well, I’m going to give you my personal opinion here and just give you a little back story to my question. It is that special effects guys, I find, do not make the best directors. I think Tom Savini movies are not great. I didn’t like Stan Winston’s movie about the werewolves; it was laughably bad. I can understand why you would obviously want Tom Woodruff to do this because he knows so much about practical effects and he brings so much to that point of view… but what is it about him as a director that makes you guys think that he’s the best person to tell your story?
BL: One of the things that Tom has beyond just making features is actually performing in features. So he has an extra special piece where he knows from day one how grueling it is. And not only is he performing but performing in a suit… We did a short film with him and saw him in action, and now this is just him times ten. He really knows the beats and really is concerned with the actors and honestly more so than where the camera is as much as are we getting those emotional moments, and every actor has come up to us and said that he really works; it’s really special.
DC: That’s a good point.
MH: And I was also just in conversation with him and talking about what he would do. We have had other directors direct Fire City in pieces but with Tom we thought that because he brings ADI [Amalgamated Dynamics, Inc., Woodruff’s special effects company], that it would be just a good fit, if in fact we felt that he was capable of executing the world. The more we talked to him, the more he seemed very aligned with the way we looked at the world. It seemed like a natural fit. So what we wanted to do was sort of see what it was like so we made a short film. Just to kind of see where things were, and it went really, really well. We were probably the weakest links on that.
(Laughter)
MH: We hadn’t shot for a couple of years, so you know, there was all sorts of things that we had to kind of get back up-to-speed on, remember from our last shoot, but it was just a fantastic process and Tom did such a great job… and just full speed ahead; let’s get it done.
DC: My next question is about your cast and how you chose who would play these characters because there was so much to them as far as the look. Yes, you may look great in makeup, but can you do the dialogue of the scenes, can you show the emotions? What was the process in casting Tobias and Dani?
BL: We had a lot of casting. We saw no less than I think 80 leading actors who came through. And it was just all about the performance, the benefit of doing it this way, and with this low budget we really weren’t bound by any sort of distributor [like], ‘You’ve got to have this name or this sort of person in it.’ We did go through [that] over the last couple of years as we were trying to put something together and just all those obstacles to things that would ultimately cut into our creativity. So really we just went for broke as much as we could… and just found the best talent.
MH: And also part of it was that we wanted to make sure that we would be a movie that we could sell. As much as everybody wants ‘names,’ we have monsters, and so we talked to a lot of sales agents. We talked to a lot of people in the distribution world, and while of course they all want big names…
DC: Yeah, who’s going to be on the front of the DVD box, the Blu-ray….
MH: I went and showed them the poster with just monsters on it and just said, ‘Can you sell this, or do you need a name on there?’ And they said, ‘I’d like a name on there, but if there’s no name on there, I can sell that.’ So that really sort of underscored for us that the strategy at this level was to really go for performance… It’s just very difficult when you’re not able to audition actors. You have references to people’s work or what they do, but you really don’t know what someone is going to do with the character that you’ve written until you actually see them do it. And that’s the danger of going after names cause, you know, we’re nobodies so they’re not going to read for us. And so it’s kind of hit or miss; maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t. Maybe they’ll be great in the role, but put them with another actor who’s great in their role and the chemistry doesn’t work. It was really a great thing for us to be able to not read names alone, just work on performance, and we got great, great actors.
DC: What was it about Tobias specifically that made you think he is your Vine? Now you know he is for sure, having worked with him. But what kind of an early promise did he show, and what’s he done that made the character even more so?
BL: Well, for me it was the final audition; we narrowed it down to three, and really there were two who were really strong, and he just… he left it all in that audition. Every emotion. I mean, he brought it. He did not hold anything back. Just that kind of performance. We knew if he can do that in an audition, well, what can he do when he really had time to work it out?!?
DC: And how’s he helped the character evolve into something that’s maybe a little bit different, that’s his own now?
MH: He’s definitely become Vine, you know… [when] we’re in a scene, he will say, ‘You know, I wonder if he would say this instead of this.’ I’m like,’ Yes absolutely; you tell me – you’re Vine at this point so…’
BL: Yeah, and you know someone in makeup who is the hero, it’s hard to care about that person. Hellboy comes to mind, but I can’t think of very many movies where… you’re compassionate to them. And if you don’t care for him, that’s the whole film – you’re lost. So he really brings an element to it. Everybody on the crew has said, ‘I can’t wait to see him come back. Is he coming back in the sequel? I love him so much.’ That’s not easy to do. Two hours of makeup a day and contacts and prosthetic teeth, but even the teeth… that’s funny… all the actors had issues with these giant teeth pushing up into your gums and at times you get a lisp. He’s created a really kind of articulation to get around those teeth that has become the staple of how he speaks and his mannerism.
DC: Now nobody else can play the role… Smart actor!
BL: That’s right, that’s right.
MH: Absolutely…
BL: And we start thinking in the demon world, just like us, if you whatever you’re born with, you find a way to live in the world with it. You know if you have a handicap or whatever… So someone dealing with giant pointy teeth would have to learn to not cut his own lips when he talked…
MH: For me Tobias was the choic because he understood not just the character but understood the world and he understood the journey that this character was going on. And he understood it in the scene that he read, better then really anybody else. And what was really most interesting to us is who he was off book and who he wasn’t. But it didn’t matter at all… because he knew the scene and he knew the character and he knew where the character was in that scene better than anyone else. And it wasn’t as much about the specifics words as it was about that for me. And when I saw that, I thought that he could definitely inhabit this character and just kind run with it, and he has.
DC: Yeah, you’re putting him through a lot.
BL: Absolutely… He loves it; he’s game.
MH: This is day 16 of 15 out of 18 makeup days…
DC: Wow.
BL: Long days, 12 hour days, 6 days a week. He’s a machine; he’s the biggest [champ].
DC: I want to talk a little bit about your embracing of the social media aspect of this. I like the fact that you’re letting fans have access to this and you’re encouraging crew to tweet and you even have a sign that says #FireCity. Was that a conscious decision, or are you like, ‘Well, social media is out there; I guess we just can’t fight it.’ Talk a little bit about the rationale behind your accessibility.
BL: Before I answer that, in case we don’t get back to it, I also want to say we put all the actors through all sorts of hell, makeup, etc., and we had similar stories with Danielle Chuchran, with Keely Alona, with Kristin Minter, the whole cast – even when those that weren’t demons are acting demonic. All the humans actually have two roles because they have to be… the most despicable and also the most moral at the same time.
DC: Yeah, they’ve really got to go from one side of the coin to the other, huh?
BL: Without a doubt.
MH: But to answer that question, social media is just essential for any film really, and for us it’s about awareness. We don’t come from a book series. We don’t have a big studio behind us. We’re an independent feature film genre franchise. What do we do with that? We decided that we’re just going to show everything. I mean, we’re not showing video yet, but we want people to find us. We don’t want to be mysterious or secret; we’ll do that later, once we have an audience, but for now it’s really about finding that audience and getting that audience to find us.
BL: And there’s also something really special about letting people in early. [We’re] fans ourselves of certain series. As a fan you’re always writing part of the story yourself, and sometimes you think, ‘I wish it would have gone this way instead of that way,’ and even our sound guy today was talking about that and talking about our world. And at one point we said, ‘What would this character wear in this scene, this is an important scene, what do you think as a fan?’ And it’s just great to have that. You can see what works and what doesn’t work and you see what people react to and maybe you do focus a little more specifically on it. We did a Kickstarter campaign, and one of the things we did, which was fantastic, is have a contest. The best demon gets to be in our film.
Fire City: The Interpreter of Signs centers around a fragile balance that exists between humankind and the demons who secretly live among them and the crisis for all when this balance is broken.
Harry Shum, Jr., plays an abusive alcoholic boyfriend who suddenly transforms into a caring and loving person, along with the rest of the humans in his seedy tenement building. Dependent on human misery for survival, the demons in the building begin to starve.
Writer-producers Brian Lubocki and Michael Hayes successfully funded a Kickstarter campaign for the film in August 2013. For more info visit the official Fire City website, “like” Fire City on Facebook, and follow Fire City on Twitter (@interpreterfilm).
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