The Cold Descent – Exclusive Set Visit Report: Tony Todd, Michael Eklund, More!
Michael Steves – writer-director
DC: What’s the basic synopsis of The Cold Descent?
Michael Steves – It is a Western about a group of two people on a train headed to Atlanta. It focuses on a former slave in 1870s Georgia, who is on a mission of revenge to kill the daughter of his old master, who scalped and murdered his daughter. So it’s an historical Western horror film.
DC: Sounds unique.
MS: One thing really unique, especially for a movie of a lower budget Western horror film, is it’s very historically based. Almost everything mentioned in the film, besides the core elements, are based on real people. So the two main characters are both based off real people. Tony’s character is based off Nat Turner, who was a slave in the 1840s who had a slave rebellion, and he was kind of a symbol of resistance at any cost; he was a guy who killed about 60 white people in a rebellion, and sometimes not necessarily someone who specifically wronged him. So our main character is this guy Jericho. Jericho is after his former slave master’s daughter because he led a rebellion on his plantation and as retaliation after the rebellion failed, his old master scalped and murdered his daughter. So this is years after the Civil War, years after the fact, his master’s daughter is now a grown woman, and he is on this train to Atlanta to murder and scalp her. So that kind of kicks off the ‘A’ story, this girl has a hired mercenary who’s a former Confederate soldier, he’s supposed to protect her, who is kind of a Clint Eastwood type of guy who doesn’t give a shit about anyone, very stone-faced killer sort of guy. And then over the course of the movie they ultimately find that there’s something scarier on the train than any of the three of them. These people have to team up to fight this other threat on this train to Atlanta. So our three leads are Tony, Michael Eklund, and then Jennifer Laporte; basically they’ve all brought whole new elements to the story, to their characters. They’ve all managed to make very memorable Old West characters that draw off tropes but then completely subvert, which you will see when you see the movie. Lance Henriksen is great.
One thing that’s also cool with our cast, we kind of want to draw off Alien, like in the first Alien there is no one person who was the one big movie star, so basically you have a group of recognizable actors mixed in with some unknowns, and hopefully that adds an element, like you really don’t know who is going to survive or not. So that’s kind of fun, like you don’t really know who actually has a good side to them and who’s going to make it to the end. Lance plays the devil; he is an awesome devil. He kind of plays it like a cold-hearted boss who would love to fire you just to see your reaction.
DC: Who are some of your favorite cinematic devils?
MS: I like the one in Damn Yankees, that old musical from the 40’s. He is basically just some kind of a common huckster. Tim Curry was an awesome devil, and what was cool about Tim Curry was he was a sexy devil. So you have two sides, you have the more deadpan devils and the more campy ones. Peter Stormare in Constantine. Those are two of my favorites; not necessarily my favorite movies, but… you know. Yes, Robert De Niro, he’s a great devil. Al Pacino made a great devil in The Devil’s Advocate; he made a campier devil, but that was a really fun one.
DC: Who came up with the idea?
MS: The initial idea came from Yousef, our producer, who also acts in the film. The train is going to hell is what’s ultimately happening; these people think they’re going on a train to Atlanta, and then they find out they are on a train to hell and now have to team up to avoid being damned forever. Initially what came to me was, we wanted a story about a haunted train, and they gave me the twist. Then a few kind of general character ideas. And then from there it was supposed to be a Western, so I kind of changed the setting and made it like 1870s Georgia, mostly because the reconstruction is really a fascinating time in American history; like for example, the place that they’re going to in Atlanta, at this time it wouldn’t be uncommon to see a black person shot in the street, that was a normal everyday thing and not illegal… well, technically illegal, but like not really illegal. So you’re in a time period that is brutal, very barbaric and also not really covered by many films like 1870’s Georgia, like that kind of setting. It is the Wild West because it is a place where laws don’t apply to everyone. In a sense everyone is a villain, so there you have all these characters who have villainous sides to them that over the course of the movie find their humanity, find what little might be left of their humanity. Every character kind has some dark secrets and bad things they’ve done and bad things they’re going to do on this train. It’s kind of like “Hell on Wheels” meets The Shining, or Unforgiven meets The Shining is how I’d describe it.
DC: You mentioned the historical accuracy.
MS: I did a lot of research; it was very important to me that everything in the film was related to a real life incident. So for example, one of the characters takes part in a massacre that actually happened during the Civil War in Centralia, in Missouri, where a train full of Yankee soldiers were beheaded and had their heads rolled down into a town as a terrorist attack. One thing that I wanted to include is a lot of Westerners and a lot of things about this time period have this element of class, like when people talk there’s kind of this idea that even though they were rough-and-tumble, that brutality is usually taken out of it, more sanitized in some way. So in this one we really wanted to look at things that people had done, or historical moments that has been talked about, really bring to the forefront the brutality and kind of the cheapness of life in a place like this.
DC: Is it hard to do an authentic-feeling Western on digital media?
MS: Stylistically, the movie has a very old-fashioned style; it’s like very heavy camera, lots of simple movements and old fashioned lighting style. But then we’re talking about issues and exploring issues through the horror element that you wouldn’t see in an old fashioned Western; but it has a little bit of that John Ford old fashion style Western look. My DP is Gabi Chennisi and she’s phenomenal. Our first movie is Clinger and it premiered at Slamdance. It stars Vincent Martella. That movie was like a campy 80’s horror comedy… kind of in the vein of Evil Dead and Re-Animator; this one is a completely different style but still a bit of a throwback style, like not a modern visual aesthetic. Gabi and I work on commercials all the time.
DC: I understand the Jericho character evolved. Can you explain how?
MS: Originally the character from the beginning, Tony’s character, was written much younger and one of the producers threw out Tony Todd’s name and I thought, “Oh my god, that would be perfect!” It brought a whole new element to the character. In terms of casting and performance, Tony’s character Jericho Whitfield, who is this former slave on a mission of revenge, his character has basically gone around the South killing slave-owners and their families. And he has all these souvenirs from all the things that he’s done, so it’s kind of like Nat Turner meets Malcolm X, but also he’s got a little bit of a heart of gold, he is a sympathetic and lovable character too, he is a complex man. But Tony really made it his own, like there’s a lot of stuff that Tony has brought to the character that wasn’t in the scripts, for example, his entire costume was all stuff that came from back stories that Tony made up, and it ended up in the film. What’s really incredible about working with actors in the caliber of Tony and Michael Eklund and Jennifer Laporte, our female lead, is they really do transform the characters from what’s on the page. They take people that are on the page and then they bring a whole new life to them. Tony has absolutely done that with his character Jericho. I hope that together we create some sort of iconic Western horror character that you haven’t seen before, so it’s incredible. The coolest part has been the elements that the cast have added to the scripts and added to their characters that were never there before.
DC: Do you use some practical effects?
MS: Demons are all practical. Yeah, it’s pretty much all practical with a little bit of CGI enhancements, that’s how we do it, but then that’s keeping with the old-fashioned aesthetic. We wanted this to have the look of a movie that if it were in black and white you could’ve have seen it in the 40s or you could have seen it a long time ago. So the effects are deceptively simple, but then there are elements in the story that you would never see in an older film. There is nothing that you see and don’t know where it came from. One of our references was The Lord of the Rings, which kind of takes a fantasy world but everything feels very tactile and you know where everything came from. If you look around in the art department, you’ll notice, if you read the newspaper, their newspaper actually has like articles that they wrote, like we actually went to the detail in the sets of props and costumes, they are very specific things. The same is true for the visual effects; they are specific and detailed in terms of how we present the demons and the hell element of the story.
DC: What were your references for hell?
ME: The hell is from a bunch of different places. So our version of hell was a combination of Dante’s Inferno, it has a few elements; this hell is cold, hence the title, so it’s cold in this version of hell and it’s based on mostly a test, that tests not only you but also tests the characters against each other. So it’s kind of like a series of trials, it has the kind of Biblical element. The demons in the film have a Greek mythological look to them kind of based off Greek theatre. So it’s like Greek mythology, Egyptian mythology, a little bit of Biblical stuff, a little bit of Hellraiser and The Lord of the Rings thrown in there, and even a little bit of Event Horizon in there, and then also Old West elements. The whole thing still has the period piece element continue even when they’re in hell.
Look for more on The Cold Descent in the coming weeks.
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