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.
As a producer, Roxanne Benjamin had an integral role in the V/H/S franchise, and now she has reteamed with that crew and also makes her directorial debut with Southbound. She tells FANGORIA about this unique anthology and her “Siren” segment in this exclusive interview.
Southbound, in theaters and on VOD from The Orchard, diverts from the V/H/S films and other anthologies by presenting five interconnected stories that weave into each other, following assorted characters facing varied terrors in the Southwestern desert. In “Siren,” which Benjamin wrote with Susan Burke, all-female rock band The White Tights experience a van breakdown in the middle of nowhere and seek help at a remote house, where the owners have a dark secret (see review here). As producer, Benjamin also oversaw the movie’s companion stories, directed by Radio Silence, David Bruckner (see interview here) and Patrick Horvath.
How did your experience on the V/H/S films lead to Southbound?
I think we kind of perfected the method as we went. When we started doing V/H/S, it was kind of thrown together and more down-and-dirty and DIY, and had a charm to it in that regard. On V/H/S 2, we had some of the kinks worked out and wanted to make it a bigger movie, and figured out that we should be bringing the filmmakers in earlier on the discussions. So when we did Southbound, everyone was involved in the conversation from the get-go. We came up with the ideas together, and wrote the whole thing in my living room over the course of a couple of months. It was much more like a TV writers’ room, where everybody was pitching their stories and figuring out where they would fit into the narrative. We did the same thing during production; everybody was on our main set working on each other’s stuff, figuring out the transition points, and then when we get into editing, it was the same thing; everybody gave notes on everyone else’s cuts. It was really one movie made by a group of filmmakers, rather than a bunch of smaller sections put together.
Did you know from the start that you were going to direct a segment of this one?
Oh yeah [laughs]! I wasn’t involved in V/H/S: Viral past the development stage, so when Brad [Miska, producer] reached out and asked if I wanted to do another anthology, I told him the only way I would be interested is if I could direct part of it. The financing came together very quickly, and then we got the rest of the V/H/S team on board.
How did you come up with your own particular storyline?
I brought Susan Burke on right away. I’ve worked with her on a couple of things; she’s great. She wrote [the Sundance award-winning drama] Smashed, and she’s also a stand-up comedian; I definitely wanted my story to have a kind of black humor to it. We were all discussing the idea of the open road and remorse and guilt, and I’m fascinated by the time period in girls’ lives when they’re out on their own. I wanted to make something about their relationships and the kinds of trouble they can get into that I don’t think we see as much in horror films. It’s always one girl on her own, the final girl, or it’s more like a variation on a male coming-of-age story. I want to see more of those stories told from a female perspective, like We Are the Best or Mustang or Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains.
Was any of “Siren” based on your own personal experiences, or those of people you know?
Well, I lived in Nashville for a long time and worked in a lot of music venues bartending, so I became friends with a lot of bands as they came through, so I got the inside look at that lifestyle. I definitely drew a lot from that, and particularly stories of people breaking down in the middle of nowhere, and just how much nothing there is out in the country [laughs]. I definitely pulled a lot from stories I’ve heard. I’ve never been in a band; I have like zero musical talent, you know?
How did you land the right ensemble for your cast?
A lot of us in the LA horror and indie-genre community work with many of the same actors, and almost everything, when you’re putting your team together, is recommendation-based. When you start casting certain roles, you watch your friends’ films and see performances you like and then reach out to them. A lot of the people in “Siren” are actually people Susan and I know from the comedy community. She’s worked with Dana Gould quite a bit, and I worked with Davey Johnson on Riley Stearns’ movie Faults, and I’ve known Anessa Ramsey for quite some time from the indie-film community. Then we brought on a casting director for some of the roles we weren’t able to cast out of our own network. Mather Zickel was one of the people we got that way, and I’m sure David told you about listening to his tapes out in the middle of the desert, those 911 calls.
Fabianne Therese was definitely somebody I wanted to work with, and then Chris Harding, our other producer, had met with Hannah Marks before on a previous project and brought her up, and I met with her and knew right away she would be perfect for one of the roles. We found Nathalie Love through Fabi; they were friends and she recommended Nathalie, and the two of them read together, and they were so natural with each other.
In terms of the shoot, how did Southbound compare to the V/H/S movies?
V/H/S was a totally different animal, because they shot all over the place over the course of a year, so it was a much more separated production. This was run like a standard feature, and the way it was scheduled was, again, more like TV, where we had one crew that was consistent throughout, one costume designer and one production designer, Jenny Moller. I was her assistant on the sixth season of House, M.D., so it was really cool to have her as the designer on something I was directing. We switched out the directors and the DPs and camera crew, and everybody else remained consistent, so it was just one 22-day shoot.
How was it filming out on those remote locations?
Oh my gosh [laughs], we definitely had our share of “We really are living this movie.” The house Radio Silence shot in, for the last story, we had cast and crew staying at. The girls stayed there while they were shooting my section, and after the first night they were like, “We can’t stay here, it’s really haunted,” so we moved them over to a motel. So then Susan and Matt Peters [co-star of Horvath’s “Jailbreak”], who are married, stayed the next night, and Susan saw something and then they moved to the motel [laughs].
There was a weird vibe being out in the middle of the desert; it’s so quiet, and you really have that sense of being in the middle of nowhere, with no cell reception. The van broke down once when my DP Tarin Anderson and I were heading to set; we got a flat tire, so we had to run two miles back to the house and then race out to Amboy, which was like 45 miles away, to get to set. We didn’t have the van, and we had to call AAA and try to figure out what we were going to shoot if we couldn’t get the van towed out to the location. We had a lot of strange things happen. When we first got to the house where we shot “Siren,” the people showing it to us were like, “Well, you have to say hello to the spirits and let them know you don’t mean any harm.”
How did you find the great creepy hospital for Bruckner’s “The Accident”?
I think David might have actually been the one who found that. We’d been searching forever, and that was one of the very last locations that we secured and the only section we actually shot in the city of Los Angeles. The rest of it was shot in Amboy, Twentynine Palms, Lancaster, Palmdale—places like that. It was a hospital that was closed on one side, completely abandoned, and then the other side was an operating clinic. There would be times when people would be walking past the set, heading to their doctor’s visits, and we’d be running through, covered in blood and screaming, so it was probably very interesting for them.
When it came to weaving the segments together, did you and the other filmmakers have to make any adjustments to adapt them to each other?
I don’t necessarily think so. There are definitely different ways I would have taken my story if it was a narrative feature and was going to continue for a longer amount of time. But we planned out all the transitions and where the stories would cross over and what it meant for those characters in the writing process.
Does the anthology format have a special appeal to you, or is that just how the opportunities have come up for you so far?
It totally does, because I first started in the business in TV; not just in the art department, but I had an Emmy Grant to follow around the director on Glenn Gordon Caron’s show Medium. I became obsessed with the idea of working in TV and showrunning, because you get to work with so many different directors, and that’s what the anthology format allows you to do. I figured out that just in the anthology films I’ve done, I’ve worked with 44 producers, 23 writers and 22 directors over the course of three movies, so that’s insane. It’s a very interesting collaborative process that’s completely different than what you go through on the set of your standard feature; I’ve done both, and I love both for different reasons. I love the TV aspect of doing anthologies, and that’s what draws me to them.
With horror on TV coming back in a big way, do you think you might explore that as well?
Oh yeah—I mean, I’ve got my hand raised over here, ready to go. If anybody wants me to direct one of their horror TV shows, I’d love to do that!
