Joe Begos recently spoke with us about his new film Bliss in theaters and on VOD September 27. Here’s what he had to say about his drug-fueled, dark art filled descent into Hell.
Andrew Hawkins: What's the first thing people should know about Bliss?
Joe Begos: I just think that they should go in as blind as possible. It's a psychedelic, rock 'n roll, drug-fueled vampire nightmare into Hell, I guess. A descent into Hell. (laughs) I feel just get a cursory explanation and go forth. Go forth into the descent.
AH: It's a film that definitely goes down into a story of mayhem, the journey to Hell, and the extreme stuff that Dezzy does along the way. Talk to me about you as a filmmaker. This is a very singular vision. I think of it as a dark art horror film.
You've made quite a few movies so far: Almost Human, The Mind's Eye and you've got VFW coming out. Do you like sticking to specific genres, or are you having fun going between cerebral horror, sci-fi, and even experimental stuff?
JB: Well I don't know, I don't want to be in one box. I think you should take it from where you are in life. My first two movies are very heavily influenced by other things. When I made them, I was in my mid-twenties; The Mind's Eye and Almost Human. My experience in life consisted of just smoking a lot of pot and watching movies with my friends, so that's kind of what I made: movies that were encapsulations of what I'd grew up watching cause that's what I needed to get out of my system.
With Bliss, I'd actually been through a bunch of shit in my life and I was having trouble coming up with a movie, at least I could get made. I had just been through a lot of shit and I was like, "You know what, fuck this. Here’s where I’m at. I'm going to start over and make something super personal." I went and made Bliss, which I feel is a nice evolution of filmmaking abilities while still keeping the spirit and flavor of my original movies. So it's been a nice climb to that. For VFW, I'd been hired for it based on my first two movies. Now I'm going back and doing a bigger budget version, or a bigger budget just straight forward white-knuckle exploitation movie.
AH: You have a huge cast, too.
JB: Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous. I've got that great cast in my neon-soaked sleaze atmosphere that I'm becoming such a fan of presenting in my movies. So I think that you've got to take it from where you are mentally, and you've got to be flexible and grow as a filmmaker.
Y’know I love Mind's Eye, but I feel like looking back, it was more of a lateral move or like a side-step from Almost Human where I was trying to do something in the realm od Almost Human again when I should've just fucking went left field. That's what I did with Bliss. Even though VFW is still that straight action, it's so much different than those other two. I learned that that's probably the way to go, going with what's in my gut and what's in my head and how I feel right then and think about nothing else.
AH: That leads me into wanting to talk about Dezzy. The story you wrote here is just a piece about this artist who dives full-force into substance abuse, anxieties, fears, stresses, and ends up producing life-changing artwork. Where were you at when you were thinking about putting this plot together?
JB: I was really broke; I couldn't get a movie made, my anxiety was crippling. (laughs) I had a really bad breakup and I didn't think I'd ever be able to make something again. It almost felt like I was starting over, so I wanted to make something that really fucking-- whether people loved it or hated it, it was going to make a fucking mark.
I basically wrote my life at that time (laughs) but I thought it was much more interesting to have a female protagonist who was a painter as opposed to a dude writing a screenplay in his apartment. I've always wanted to make a movie about painters, the visual aspect of it. And I'm a big fan of that early Clive Barker stuff especially, how he predominantly writes about artists a lot. So that's where I was coming from with that, and it was literally my mindset when I was making the movie. I fired my agents while I was writing it, so there's a lot of anger about representation of agents and artists, and just how fucking much people feed on the creative aspect of things, and how rich some people get off the hard work of others. There was a lot of shit going on in my head when I wrote that (laughs) It was very cathartic to get it out. It felt nice.
AH: Tell me about the interaction with Dezzy and her agent. Am I right that there's a little bit of a nod to Tales From The Darkside: The Movie in there?
JB: You are one hundred percent correct.
AH: Yeah, that's one that I grew up with. That final segment is classic. "I can’t live on ten-percent of nothing." I love that setup and the way that Bliss proceeds from there.
JB: Yeah, I took that little bit of dialogue from Darkside that I love so much, but I assure you I've had many a conversation close to that, with many fucking suits. I'm curious if Stephen King himself went through some of that shit. But yeah, It's real.
Dora Madison as Dezzy
AH: Let's talk about Dora Madison. She goes all-in on this performance. How was it working with her on this?
JB: It was fucking awesome. She’s one of the best collaborators I've ever had. She was willing to go one hundred percent. I think we were both in a kind of similar situation, where I was just so desperate to make this piece of work and she had just come off some tv shows that were a little more wholesome and all that good stuff, and that's not really how she is. (laughs) She's a fucking wild child, so she wanted to drop that persona and do something the complete opposite.
She was willing to just go out there and fucking put it all on the screen and really change things up. We were both in that place, and she just came in and auditioned. The character is essentially me, and I'd never met her before. She was doing the agency scene and she was improving stuff that only I would say or that I've heard myself say. I knew between that and her extremely striking physical presence with the big hair that would just fill up the fuckin camera frame so nice; I knew that she was the one who had to be in the fucking movie. We started hanging out before the shooting, and she realized that she was going to essentially be playing me as we got to know each other. It hit her.
She ended up raiding my closet, and all of the t-shirts and flannels she's wearing in the movie are legitimately from my dresser. Those are actually my clothes.
AH: Like the Death Waltz shirt?
JB: Yeah, that's my fucking Death Waltz shirt that she still hasn't given back to me! (laughs) I got the rest of them back, but I haven't gotten my Death Waltz back. (laughs)
It also became so vulnerable putting all of this stuff on screen that she felt that she could also be vulnerable and put this stuff on screen. We were kind of in it together and I’m there operating the camera, so it was a very intimate working relationship, and we were able to get very good results working from that. She's just a phenomenal actress who will go where she needs to go if it means the movie is gonna be better and it's good for her performance. She's fucking awesome.
AH: Some of the intensity of the sequences are really extreme, and she pulls it off awesomely. It makes me think about the practical effects that you're using in this movie. Looking back at some of your earlier stuff: head explosions, throats being ripped out, major practical work-- what's your thinking on practical vs. visual? Are you hardcore nuts-and-bolts, guts-and-blood guy?
JB: Yeah, the only digital effects that I've had in any of my movies-- including VFW-- was wire removal and things like that. There's never been any other enhancement of CG or gore, I like to do it all in-camera. I just don't know why people don't; I can assure you it's a lot more expensive to do it digitally and it never fucking looks good.
I'm very smart about it, so on my last three movies, I've had second unit set aside a day where we'd do it after the shoot schedule. Like, okay, these are the biggest effects: this head explosion, this body explosion. I'm going to figure out a way to do set extensions, and then we'll shoot that stuff with a crew of five. I can operate, I can shoot, and then we can spend all day doing that where we're not paying twenty other people to be on set. We're not paying actors to sit around, so I built that stuff into the schedule to simultaneously shoot that in ways or have blocks to do it after the fact.
In Bliss, the body explosions and meltings and the head regrowth, that was done after that principal photography. That stuff took twenty or thirty hours to do. On top of that, you look at the '80s or 90s and there's practical effects being pushed to these glorious levels where, if we had had the R&D and the money and people kept doing that for another twenty years, where would practical effects be now?
So I want to build to that, but I also feel like when you go to great fx artists-- I used Josh and Sierra Russell for Bliss-- you go, "I want to do something like this, try something I haven't done in a while, but we have a small budget," that excites these people when you try to do stuff like that. I know we're always trying to do effects in new ways, or show them in ways that haven't been done in a while.
It was lit so darkly, but I was very adamant about doing the one take where Dezzy blows her brains out and then her head regrows in stop-motion and she comes to life. That was all laborous stop-motion that we did with dummies and composites and stuff like that. That took twenty-five hours, and it's still not to the length it should be. The stuff is time-consuming but it can be done. It always blows my mind when people opt not to do that stuff. I don't care how fucking quick your shoot is, it's not that hard to set up some blood tubes if you're prepared for it.
AH: Sure, a little bit of air pressure and you wind up with a blood spray that people are going to remember because it's got some real weight to it, not just visually cropped onto the film after the fact. That makes me think-- you shot this in 16mm, right?
JB: Yeah.
AH: What are your thoughts on celluloid vs. digital? Are you all about getting it in the can and actually doing it hands-on?
JB: Yeah, I love shooting on film and I've always wanted to shoot on film, I just never have. With Bliss, I had a lower budget than my last movie and it was like, "Alright, what can I do to take some steps to elevate my craft and elevate how this movie's going to look?" I always wanted to shoot on 16 and everyone's like don't do it, it's a waste of time, you can't even tell the difference. I can always tell the difference, I feel an attraction to it, more so than anything on digital.
AH: A lot of people say 35 is the minimum that you want to go, but with 16 you made it look awesome. It's so vibrant.
JB: I also feel like 35 can sometimes look almost too clean at this point. I love the grain of film. At least with 35, I'd be able to get exposure. But I shot on 16 and you know, it was not hard. It cost us about $2500 extra, and it makes the movie look so much bigger. I bought a 16mm camera system for the movie, just because I needed a 16mm camera to attach to the actress and you can't rent them anymore. So I bought it with my salary because I wanted it. Now I have a 16 camera system.
Unfortunately, we couldn't shoot VFW on 16 because the cost would have literally made us lose a day, and that fucking schedule was so goddamn tight that I couldn't lose a day, so I just opted not to deal with it. Going forward, I'm going to push very hard to make stuff on 16, especially if I do something really small that I'm producing. I feel like there's just an aesthetic to it that sets it apart from anything else being made.
Courtney and Ronnie, two other members of the LA neon sleaze nightlife.
AH: Let's talk about the visual aesthetic of this and also some influences. I got threads of The Hunger and a bit of Liquid Sky, and you were talking about when Dezzy blows her brains out. That was making me think about Combat Shock; and when everyone was crawling back to her while she was finishing the painting, I got vibes of original Lustig's Maniac. Talk to me about being a hardcore horror fan and bringing all of that together, and your thoughts on the look of the film.
JB: There's this whole aesthetic of nighttime LA kind of sleazy underground that's never been brought to film. Those are the kind of bars I hang out at, where I go see shows. That's what I wanted to show on film; there's nothing being fucking shot like that.
AH: Neon lighting, post-punk shows and clubs.
JB: Yeah, I mean Good Time looks amazing. Good Time is the closest thing I can think of that looks like that and is shot on film and has that grime to it. That was shot in New York, and I wanted to be able to do something that is like what the Safdies do for New York, or what Ferrara is able to do for New York, but I want to do that for LA. Any day time scenes, I love the way McTiernan shoots, it's fucking magic. Same thing here: if we're shooting daytime, since we're shooting all nights, we're going to have two hours at the beginning of every day to shoot our daytime stuff and we'll just piece it so that the entire daytime stuff is all going to be at golden hour.
LA just looks so fucking dope. It looks like Die Hard when you shoot like that, so that's how I wanted it to look. A lot of this camera stuff is written into the script. A lot of the more complicated shots are written into the script like the threesome 360 scene in slow-motion, some of the freakout stuff, and some of the loose stuff. The camera would become almost a character in some scenes, and we'd find the way it was going to advance from there almost documentary style.
AH: It looks great. The establishing shots are excellent, especially the shots going out of Dezzy's apartment when she's painting.
I want to talk to you about dark art and Chet Zar. Talk about working with him and the painting and how it relates to Dezzy's character.
JB: With the painting, the first thing was that I hate when you watch movies like this: it's all building to something whether it's an album or a painting, and when you get to it, it's fucking janky as hell and stupid. It's like, "That's what I just watched this fucking movie for?" So I really wanted it to be worth something at the end, and I wanted her to be an artist of a certain caliber.
I met Chet at an installation at a festival I was at for The Mind's Eye. We had a cursory meeting there. I was writing this and I hadn't contacted him while I was writing it, but I knew I wanted it to be his style and I wanted it to go to him. If he didn't want to do it, that was the aesthetic I wanted to go for, and I didn't know what I was going to do if he didn't want to do it. I finished the script and I sent it to him, and he didn't really say anything into even reading it, and I kind of nudged him. He really dug it.
We met up and I had a very basic, basic idea of what I wanted the painting to be, so I gave him that and he ran with it and made it what it is. That's how that came about, and that was a cool collaboration because I'm a shitty painter, so having such a basic idea and seeing somebody bring it to life but it also works within the aesthetic of your movie, it was perfect. We did it in a way where he painted it smaller and photographed it numerous times while he was painting it, so that we were able to select what our stages were, blow it up, put it on canvas, he painted over it so it had texture. 16mm made the texture look great. It had a realistic progression of a real artist making this giant fucking painting. Without that, the movie would've ended on fumes, I think.
AH: Well, it ends great. The final shot is just an awesome horror image. I think people are going to be thinking about this one as a standout current horror film when everyone gets to see it. Like I said, It's been such a great time talking to you. It’s been a blast.
Anything you'd like to say for final words?
JB: No, nothing off the top of my head.
Well, thank you so much. It's been a great time.
JB: Cool, man. Thank you.
In select theaters and on digital Septer 27