Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on February 4, 2016, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Of all the frightening destinations visited in the horror anthology Southbound, the most gut-wrenching is the hospital where David Bruckner’s “The Accident” takes place. The writer/director delves into his grisly contribution in this exclusive interview.
“The Accident” occurs on a lonely desert road late one night, when a motorist named Lucas (Mather Zickel) hits a young woman with his car. In desperation, he takes her to find help and winds up at a small-town hospital that proves to be deserted…and that’s the start of a short screen story that will really get under your skin, incorporating some very strange 911 conversations (see review here). Bruckner, one of the directing trio behind 2008’s The Signal, previously helmed the standout “Amateur Night” entry in the original V/H/S (from the producing team, including Roxanne Benjamin, who are also behind Southbound) and was attached for a time to the new reboots of Friday the 13th and the Amityville franchise. Southbound, opening in theaters and arriving on VOD from The Orchard, places him in a directorial ensemble that also includes Benjamin (see interview here), the Radio Silence team and Patrick Horvath.
How did your work on V/H/S lead to Southbound?
I was very fortunate to be a part of V/H/S, and we all got to know each other really well. After that movie, a lot of filmmaking dialogue happened between all of us. So when those producers came together with the idea for another anthology, I was very happy that they called me up for it.
The stories in Southbound are interconnected in a way the segments in V/H/S are not. Can you talk about the process of weaving them all together?
Well, we all knew we had to do something different. If we were going to go back to the anthology form, we had to build upon what we had done before. The first V/H/S was, to some degree, lightning in a bottle, and everyone had gone off and very much done their own thing on that one, so there were positive revelations that came out of that and other things we thought we could improve upon. One of those was the rhythm and the flow of the entire piece, and we knew coming into this that we wanted to apply your classic three-act structure to the ride of an anthology, so if you were coming into a story late in the game, that story might tell you a bit more about the world you’re seeing, or the protagonist might be a little more informed about the problem they’re facing.
One of the classic pitfalls of an anthology film is that you end up having five first acts. It’s the same moment when you turn the page of a book to a brand new chapter, and you meet new characters, and there’s a brief hiccup in your attention span. For just a moment in the movie, you have to do the work as an audience member to get to know new characters and whatnot. For a horror film, and the kind of rollicking road movie we intended to make, we wanted the whole thing to flow from beginning to end and just zip by you, so we structured it accordingly.
Radio Silence had this concept of “zipper transitions,” where you use an existing element from one story to transition into the next piece. One example they gave was, there’s a dog in one of them, and you see the dog cross frame and we follow it and suddenly we’re in a new story. Then we started to play with, OK, what if those transitions were more consequential?
The film is very much oriented around the atmosphere of the Southwestern desert and highways, but yours is a much more interior piece. How did that decision come about?
The idea of doing something out in the desert came from us just scouting locations. We had locked down the idea that maybe we could center this all in a single locale. Radio Silence had shot out in a little town called Lone Pine, which is right between the Sierras and Death Valley, really beautiful country. We drove up there just as a brainstorming scout, and although we didn’t end up filming in Lone Pine, we ended up falling in love with the idea of shooting in the desert. From there, we tried to come up with desert-type stories, and I didn’t really think of mine as an interior piece so much as, I thought of driving alone on a highway at night, and the strange kinds of nightmares that would play out in my mind. Those scenarios scare me, when you’re alone and you need help and you can’t find it.
I knew I wanted to do something that involved one central protagonist who was mostly alone. I wanted to capture an isolated feeling out in the desert, and one way to do that was to have him be on the phone. Then it became a question of, OK, what’s gonna happen to this guy, what’s the phone call, where does it take him? I probably had 20 different ideas for what that could be, and as we all started to solidify our ideas, what I saw was a middle chapter between what Roxanne was doing and what Patrick was doing. I thought it would be very interesting to create something that starts in media res, because we’d be getting to that part in the movie where the momentum really needs to drive forward, and it would be great if something sparked at that moment that just plowed us into the next piece. Brainstorming that way, we came up with the idea of a car accident, and a fear I’ve always had that something would be my fault, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.
You and Zickel really sustain that well. How did you find him?
I was very lucky; we had a casting director, Lauren Grey, who brought a lot of great people into the room. I probably had 10 really good reads, and Mather just had that certain tone. There’s a certain vanity or formality he tried to maintain in this horrifying situation, trying to maintain his composure, that really struck us.
The key thing for us was, I had downloaded a bunch of actual 911 calls and I’d been studying them, and there are these strange social mannerisms that come across in these extreme situations that can be very difficult to comprehend, depending on the outcome of the call. If someone ends up being OK, you can kind of think of it as being funny, but there are a lot of “pleases” and “thank yous” and “yes, sirs,” and a lot of miscommunication. Roxanne and I were actually driving out to the desert late one night while I was casting and we were looking for locations, and I played a bunch of those real 911 calls for her, and then I put the audio of several of these actors’ reads on, and Mather’s was one of them. And you couldn’t tell that he was an actor; he just blended so seamlessly with the actual calls. I was very fortunate to find him, and he was just a wonderful sport about the whole thing, because it was not an easy shoot—both for him and for Fabianne [Therese, who plays the victim].
How did Therese deal with her painful part in the story?
We spent some time before the shoot to work on what her body mannerisms should be, and how she would represent the pain. One very important question was, how conscious is she? She’s not very, but then we start to wonder if she understands what’s happening to her, which is a very scary idea and a real fear of mine. She went off and did a lot of work on her own, and showed up on set knowing how to represent that stuff. It made my job easy; I was just looking at the monitor as her audience, telling her what worked best.
How did you and she work with the required makeup FX? They come off very well.
I found a great effects team, Josh and Sierra Russell, who had great ideas about how to pull them off. We were very excited about the challenge, because the surgery scene is set up in such a way that you get the sense that we’re really gonna go there. We brainstormed a lot, and then Josh and Sierra went off and constructed this amazing torso, and spent a lot of time with Fabi figuring out how it would work and a certain kind of magic that would happen on the stretcher. When they rolled out that torso on set, at one point Roxanne panicked because she thought Fabi was still lying on the gurney, and we were behind schedule and it takes a while to get somebody into prosthetics. Then she realized that Fabi was actually in the prosthetic already. That Josh and Sierra and Fabi fooled her to the naked eye is a testament to their work.
How did you cast the voices on the phone?
They were actors I’d worked with in the past: Zoe Cooper, Justin Welborn and Karla Droege, people I knew would be able to spend some time getting inside how those voices would work. There’s a certain nuance to 911 operators in particular; often, they’re just trying to get as much information as they can, and they’re not necessarily there for emotional support. So while you’re frantic, talking to them, they can come off a bit cold, at times condescending, in an effort to be clear. We wanted to find the perfect pitch to capture that disconnect, and Zoe played around a lot with that and found a great spot. Karla understood that her EMT would be a little more sympathetic to Lucas’ situation; she would be a safe place for him, and she really knew how to guide him. And then Justin, who I worked with on The Signal and is a longtime friend, is full of personalities and was just the perfect guy to voice the surgeon.
What do you have cooking for the future?
I’m working on a little sci-fi movie from a concept of mine that I’m very, very excited about, and developing another small piece. I also wrote a survival film last year, with my writing partner Nick Tecosky—a claustrophobic nightmare, which is something I’ve always wanted to explore in a realistic way.
Do you think you might ever reteam with your Signal co-directors Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry to make another film?
You know, it’s possible. I just went to see Jacob’s Synchronicity at a special screening, and so many of us were together again for that. We are certainly a very close-knit group, and it’s very possible that we will come together again to make another picture.
