Thanks to the folks at the Philadelphia Film Fest last week I got to interview Simon Barrett, one of my favorite writers currently working in genre cinema. Simon was in town presenting his newest film The Guest which premiered in Philly as part of the Graveyard Shift and as a judge for the festival. Simon is probably best known to horror fans for his collaborations with Adam Wingard such as You’re Next, A Horrible Way to Die and the first two entries in the V/H/S series. His newest film the 80s action throwback The Guest is set to open in Philly theatrically very soon.
It was great chatting with Simon about not only his influences and writing process, but also the possibilities for a You’re Next sequel and the mythology he had setup for the V/H/S series and how he had envisioned ending the series. If you’re into the V/H/S series you definitely want to check out what he had in mind.
What is your writing process like and what inspired The Guest?
My writing process tends to be different with every project; it depends on the individual thing I am trying to create. I tend to write sporadically, but I try to focus on one project at a time and just stay in that world.
With The Guest, after You’re Next, it was the first time in my and Adam’s career we were able to conceive a project just based on what we wanted to make as opposed to what we could get financed. All of our previous movies were what we thought we could pull off; for the amount of money we thought we could possibly get from people. Ultimately it was about getting to the films that inspired us to make films in the first place.
We both grew up in the 80s and The Guest was actually an old idea, I had started writing it back in 2007, it just wasn’t working, the tone wasn’t quite right. But when Adam was talking about wanting to do something that showed our influences and in particular referencing Halloween and The Terminator, suddenly I thought that idea really meshed well with this old script I started. It was a weird Frankenstein of inspiration, but it ended coalescing into a coherent film.
What’s your role in the directing process and to turn that round, what is Adam’s role in the scriptwriting process?
If Adam is directing I don’t have any role in the directing. One of the ways I think Adam and I tend to work well as a partnership is we know when to give each other space. Prior to The Guest I produced and wrote all of our films and this was the first one where I was able to step back and let our producers Keith and Jess Calder take over. But generally I am only on set for Adam if a scene is not working and can work with the actors on the dialog, sometimes I can provided them with some character back-story stuff and only if Adam specifically wants me to.
Normally I just stay completely out of that because you don’t want the actors feeling there could be two conflicting voices. A huge part of directing is getting the best out of your cast and crew and for that, they need to trust you implicitly, meaning its Adams show when we’re on set.
Similarly he doesn’t know what I am writing until I am finished and I feel like I have a script to show him. He never knows what the story or characters are going to be until I give him a rough draft, but generally it matches the genre we were talking about doing. He’ll send me music a lot when I am writing, to be like I want to do something with this kind of tone and that kind of guides me, but he never gives me any specifics.
So that is how we work we just give each other a lot of creative space. That way he is able to see the script fresh like a viewer would, similarly I stay out of the editing room till Adam has a rough pass, so that way I can kind of see the film fresh we always try to make sure that one of us has objectivity.
Would you eventually want to direct, I know you’ve acted in some of your films would you want to pursue either more?
First of all I am not interested in acting, as any sort of career. I enjoy acting and I think being in front of the camera and trying to act does inform both screenwriting and directing, but the best way to know how to direct actors is to get in front of a camera and act.
I would like to direct more, I did direct a segment of V/H/S/2 and I have done some shorts here and there, but I think if I never direct again, I would stagnate as a screenwriter. I’ve had a few projects offered to me to direct, but the fact is Adam and I have a lot on our slate now working as a team and that comes first. I probably will direct a couple of features in the next few years, but it will be when Adam and I have a window. I want to direct and go back to being a screenwriter and when I get bored go back to directing again.
V/H/S Viral is screening as part of the film festival and I was bummed when I heard you and Adam were leaving that world behind. I was a huge fan of not only the series but the mythology of the films and the wraparounds as well, care to share where you were planning to go with the series?
Marcel Sarmiento took over the wraparound and I really don’t want to undermine his work. But Marcel’s thing if I understand it is taking a more internet, social media context, where I was more about exploring these families of collectors. Like we show in V/H/S/2 the character that Kelsy Abbott plays is related to the character that Frank Stack plays in the first film. If you look at the second film it’s actually a prequel to the V/H/S wraparound and you realize the guys who were hired to steal the tape, were actually hired to create a tape, you see they were hired by the kind of ghoul character in V/H/S/2.
I did want to explore that a bit further and solidify what was going on there.
The whole idea obviously, is there are these collectors and they are using an analog technology, because the electromagnetic energy of analogue recordings effects your body in a certain way so it’s like they invoking a magical like spell by consuming these analogue footage of supernatural things, in a certain, specific way.
It’s was a frustrating thing because initially my idea for the second film was that Barbara Crampton was going to be L.C. Holt’s mother and the daughter of Frank Stack in the first film. It was going to be this insane family that is part of this collectors thing, but we couldn’t use Barbara because the financing producer of V/H/S and V/H/S/2 wouldn’t let us do any union stuff, we had to go all non-SAG; which is why we are in those movies so fucking much.
So I had this idea that Barbara Crampton was going to turn out to be the head of the team of collectors and she would explain what the black magic ritual involved a little more, but that was going to be more what was the wrap around segment for V/H/S/2, which had a lot of difficulties and turned out to be only 70% of what I wanted to be. I never really fleshed out what I wanted to do for V/H/S/3 to be frank, because we figured out pretty quickly we weren’t going to be involved in it, just timing-wise and everything.
So it’s not like I wrote a script for V/H/S/3 and I had just gotten into the writers guild, so that would be a challenge.
Yeah when I interviewed Ti West for the Innkeepers he mentioned there was a scene not in the film or the DVD that tied his segment into the wraparounds that would also answered some questions?
Ti had a bunch of cool ideas about how the serial killer from his segment. There is a deleted scene that actually we never put on the DVD or anything, I posted some stills of it online linking the killer in Ti’s segment played by Kate Lyn Sheil to this cult of collectors. You see her robbing a thrift store to get a tape. See, it was going to be this weird black magic cabal of tape collectors trying to make themselves immortal by trying to crack this specific magic code, they could achieve by watching these tapes in a specific way and every single time they fuck up and that was going to be the overall theme of the films.
Wow.
You can kind of get that if you really pay a lot of attention to the first two films. Basically when I talked to Brad Miska and Roxanne Benjamin who at the time were the major creative producers along with Adam and myself, I talked specifically about the goal of the third one was going to be to be answer those questions that we setup in the first two films. I wanted Barbra Crampton because she is this horror icon to be the one who is pulling the strings and behind all these collectors, to the point she let her own son do this botched ritual and it just never came together.
It’s kind of a shame but on the other hand, you just have to let go. I want to finish by saying Ultimately I talked to Marcel and he told me what he was doing and I was like dude, go for it, that’s awesome, take it over figure it out and good luck. You don’t always get to finish the stories you start sometimes and that’s okay.
I was a huge fan of You’re Next and I had read some interviews discussing a possible sequel any news on that?
We are definitely not going to make a sequel to You’re Next, because we didn’t make Conjuring dollars. You’re Next wasn’t a total flop theatrically, it did okay it was a modest success, it did well on video, but there is no one clamoring for a sequel. If you need a sequel to tell the story, you’re not telling the whole story.
So there is definitely, 100% not going to be a You’re Next sequel and I think that’s a good thing.
Finally, The Guest is definitely inspired by 80s action films. What were the films you were watching on repeat while you were writing and inspired by?
To answer that question specifically, I try to specifically not watch films while I am writing that are event close to what I am writing, because we are always trying to be original. I want to try to do something original even if it is combing a bunch of homage sources, I want the end result to be original and different than anything anyone else is doing rather than a prestige piece. So I try to stay away from that stuff.
The film that probably influenced me the most was the original Stepfather. That was a big one although it’s not an action movie, and the late 80s, early 90s films by John Woo, Johnnie To and Ringo Lam a lot of those Hong Kong directors. Everybody thinks were are referencing Lady from Shanghai with that mirror maze, but it more Enter the Dragon and Longest night, that is probably why I kept writing mirror mazes in my script till I got one made. My last three scripts had mirror mazes and the mirror maze in the script came from the set of Transcendence, which happened to be shooting in New Mexico at the same time.
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