Filmmaker Ryan Nicholson Talks Collar, Gutterballs 2 and Plotdigger Films
Ryan Nicholson is a filmmaker known for going to extremes. Fans of his past movies like Gutterballs and Hanger can attest to that. Nicholson recently sat down with Dread Central to talk about his newest release, Collar, and the upcoming Gutterballs 2.
So just what his Nicholson been up to since the release of Collar (review) in 2014? “I’m all over the place because I’m doing a ton of different jobs all at once. But I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Nicholson said. “I’m used to either doing F/X or making my own stuff. If I’m not doing that, I’m either writing or thinking about the next project, which is usually right around the corner. We usually do one or two films a year since we started Plotdigger Films. We like to get one film done a year, at least.”
Plotdigger Films is Nicholson’s production company and a forerunner in underground horror. Although usually known to have tongue firmly planted in cheek with his movies, Nicholson took a much different approach with his newest release.
“Collar. That was a great experience,” Nicholson said. “It’s nice to see the DVD out and people checking it out and hearing their thoughts on the subject. It’s a dark, dark film which is my own views on mental health and the down-trodden society that we see. We drive by these people, but we don’t engage with them. Collar is me taking the viewer into a day-in-the-life of this character, Massive, and the characters that he encounters throughout the day and what happens to them. Massive obviously has some serious issues; eating human flesh is one of them, ritual Satanic abuse is another one. So it’s definitely something that is new to us to go that dark with the least amount of humor. It’s hard for me to write stuff without putting cheesy, campy humor in it. In this one I tried to stay away from that as much as possible. There’s still a little bit in there, but mostly it’s free of that campy humor.”
Just what inspired him to go so far to the dark side? “After I had viewed films like A Serbian Film and Human Centipede 2, stuff like that which was very dark, I got it in my blood that I wanted to take myself to that dark place and make something different from our standard Plotdigger Films fare that people are pretty accustomed to,” Nicholson said. “I wanted to do something a little bit different, and I think, for the most part, we achieved it.”
The subject matter itself was actually delivered to Nicholson while he slept, and his star appeared just at the right time. “Collar spawned from a dream I had,” Nicholson said. “It was about a big, psychotic homeless man who has a dog collar around a police officer and drags him through alleys, and in every alley the cop loses another part of his body, so by time he gets to the other side of the city, the cop is basically just a torso being dragged along. And this was actually a nightmare where I woke up and I was sweating. It was a really insane dream. So I immediately wrote the treatment and then kind of shelved it for a while. Then I worked with Nick [Principe] on Seed 2, in which he plays one of the killers. I had a great rapport with him. I had known about him from his Laid to Rest work and wanted to work with him so I immediately thought, ‘What project can we do right away?’ I thought of him as the psychotic bum. At that point I wrote the script and sent it to him, and he was like, ‘Holy shit! This is dark.’ And he loved it.”
Nicholson continued on working with Principe and all the positives he brought to the set. “I remember when Nick came to Vancouver to shoot it,” Nicholson said. “We’d be shooting, and he’d be like, ‘Really? Really? Another rape scene?! Come on!’ He’d be like, ‘There’s too much rape in this movie. Come on, Ryan.’ He knows when to draw the line so he kind of collared me in a way, in the sense that he reined me in as a director because there were things I wanted to do in that movie that would have been just… beyond. And he talked me through it. He’s a filmmaker himself. He’s a great guy, great actor, great director. He wanted to see the movie have some success, being in it. He didn’t want people to be completely turned off and just write it off as some sick, schlocky thing that Nicholson did again. So he helped me through that, and that was awesome.”
Principe left a tremendous stamp on Collar and, according to Nicholson, the cast and crew as well. “It all goes back to working with someone who really knows what he’s doing,” Nicholson said. “He really brought the Massive character into the forefront. And a lot of the other actors were really happy to be able to work with him. He’s been on big budget horror stuff and he’s been on little budget horror stuff and you just see the experience of a guy like Nick; it helped us out tremendously.”
In addition to Principe, Nicholson enlisted some of his own usual suspects to create the nightmarish Collar. “I used some of my regular actors and you catch some of their mannerisms from other movies within Collar, so that may or may not have worked to my benefit,” Nicholson said. “But I like working with certain people. We’re like a big family when it comes to making movies. I try to use the same people as much as I can. With something like the subject matter of Collar, you need these actors to go to places where they normally wouldn’t go, but they trust you as a director. With myself, the actresses who played the hooker and the female cop [Becca MacDonald and Aidan Dee], I’ve worked with them before. They know how I direct and they know what I want and they’re willing to go there when not a lot of people would be. I’m grateful to have these actors do scenes that could be pretty objectionable to some actors.”
He also tapped some familiar faces to make the amazing effects in the movie come to life. “Michelle Grady designed the F/X for Collar,” Nicholson said. “Michelle was with me for many movies. She’s also worked on larger budget shows. It’s great for me to be able to be involved and have the people I want to work with. She did an amazing job. And my wife, Megan Nicholson, also does F/X, and she did an amazing job. So I’m lucky because these girls have worked on bigger things, and they still like to come out and get dirty with me.”
Nicholson, of course, is well-known for his incredible special effects work, recently contributing to the Soska Sisters’ upcoming film, Vendetta, as well as notable favorites like “Smallville”, The Chronicles of Riddick and “Supernatural.” As special effects work is his love, we inquired if he easily turns those duties over to others.
“No, I don’t, and that’s the problem! Nicholson said. “Michelle Grady is my ex-girlfriend, so I have her and my wife, two girls on the set that both know me very well and both probably would think I like to micromanage things. I expect so much from the F/X because if I was doing it, this is how I would want to do it. For the most part, it works out great. There have been times where I’ve said, ‘No, we need to do that again’ because I didn’t like the way it looked, and that will cause some tension. But in the end we get the shot and it’s good. But it’s a tough thing to let other people do the effects, because that’s how I got into the business.”
Plotdigger Films is well known for insane violence and gore. He reflected on the desire to try to push the boundaries further every time out and the pitfalls of that. “There’s that urge to try to go further,” Nicholson said. “Then you have to think to yourself that it gets to a point where it gets too silly and goes from shock to schlock, and that’s what happens to some of my movies like Gutterballs or Hanger, where it’s so absurd that it goes into a different stratosphere of genre. Not necessarily horror, but schlocky, X-rated horror. People have termed it ‘gorno.’ And I don’t necessarily want to make those kinds of movies, but I also know what people who buy my stuff want to see. So there’s a balance. I try to keep a balance of what I want as an artist and what the fans want to see. I’ve done movies in the past where I’ve toned down elements, and people say, ‘Dude, this movie is not what we expected from a Plotdigger film’, and not in a good way, either.”
Nicholson continued, “There’s this balance where I want to be creative and I don’t want to do the same thing every time. But at the same time, I want to deliver something to the fans because, really, that’s how we do what we do. Nowadays, we’re fan-funded, even some of the production money that comes from other countries, they’re fans. They’re fans of the original Gutterballs and whatnot, so they put money into the sequel. But they’re fans so we have to deliver, especially when they’re investing in us.”
Which brings us to Plotdigger Films’ upcoming movie, Gutterballs 2: Balls Deep. Check out the brand new teaser trailer below. And if you want to be part of the act, the Gutterballs 2: Balls Deep Indiegogo campaign is just inches from achieving its goal and offers some really cool perks for those who contribute to the cause. It’s definitely worth checking out.
Nicholson gave us the skinny on Gutterballs 2: Balls Deep. “Gutterballs 2 follows the surviving character from the first Gutterballs,” Nicholson said. “She is riddled with nightmares of BBK, the Bowling Bag Killer, so she takes up some counseling with a sort of new age, face-your-fears counselor. The guy is a real arrogant prick and he’s determined to cure her by her facing her fears, so he basically takes some of his other patients and her back to the bowling alley and all hell breaks loose.”
All hell breaks loose, indeed. Nicholson stuck with some of the aspects of the original movie that fans really enjoyed. “It touches on other horror movies like the first one did,” Nicholson said. “We touch on The Patients and old movies like Bad Dreams and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Things are touched on because I think that was a lot of fun with the first one. People would say, ‘That’s such a cool homage to Halloween’ or whichever film they enjoyed the reference to. There’s definitely some new characters introduced. BBK, the Bowling Bag Killer, comes back into the fold. It’s kind of a whodunit. There are a lot of red herrings thrown into the mix to keep it interesting. It’s like going disco glow bowling, midnight bowling, with lots of cool lights and lots of fun stuff. I think fans of the first one are really going to get a kick out of this one. And there’s talk of doing a Gutterballs 3, which is a completely different concept.”
The crowd-funding campaign is a huge help for Plotdigger Films. Nicholson explained how the greatly appreciated money is used. “My shooting budgets are fairly easy to obtain with producers. They know my style, they know I’ll come in on budget with the shoot,” Nicholson said. “Post-production and the lights and things, insurance, and all of this other crap that we need to get for distribution… that’s always the part where I’m very weak at coming up with money. So the crowd-funding helps with all that because we’re able to essentially offer the fans some sales in advance. They want to see their money going into the production.”
There’s no rest for Ryan Nicholson after Gutterballs 2: Balls Deep. When you keep yourself as busy as this filmmaker does, there’s always something else right around the corner. “I’m working on a script for a supernatural, paranoid schizophrenic ghost story. This is kind of a stretch for me,” Nicholson said. “It’s more character-driven and actually based on a factual story which happened in my hometown. I’m hoping to shoot it next summer. I’ve also been trying to develop a crime, episodic, heavy, gritty dramatic thing. A step away from horror, but at the same time it’s horror based again on events that happened in the city I live in. More of an episodic thing, not necessarily a web series, but something we could perhaps shop to the streaming cable providers or something. So we’re trying to branch out and work on a couple different things as well as Plotdigger Films doing what it does best, continuing on with the carnage!”
For more visit the official Plotdigger Films website, “like” Plotdigger Films on Facebook and follow Plotdigger Films on Twitter (@plotdigger).
Gutterballs 2: Balls Deep Synopsis
The Bowling Bag Killer returns to wreak havoc in Gutterballs 2: Balls Deep, the long awaited sequel to Ryan Nicholson’s cult classic Gutterballs. Double the gore, double the sex, and double the fucks, GB2 goes balls deep and will deliver the red stuff by the five-gallon bucket a few times over.
With the anniversary of the “Bowling Alley Massacre” looming, a group of stupid teens venture into a retro bowling alley after hours to summon the spirit of BBK. When the killer’s mask is found hidden among the lanes and then unboxed, the teens unleash a grotesque series of murders that eclipse the first killings in their sheer brutality and originality. Written and directed by the creator of BBK, Ryan Nicholson, and producer by Plotdigger Films, Gutterballs 2: Balls Deep strikes in late spring 2015! Teaser trailer edited and scored by Roland Freitag.
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