This weekend we finally get to see The ABCs of Death. AWESOME. First conceived as an idea in an innocent Pt Chev location, the anthology horror concept traversed the globe as filmmakers worldwide got to work on its 26 segments. Next, the finished product was unveiled, delighting and disturbing depending on what side of the fence viewers were on (in other words, whether they were sick or well-adjusted). We fired a few questions at producer Ant Timpson ahead of the long-awaited screening at Auckland’s Civic Theatre on Saturday April 20th.
FLICKS: How did this whole thing come about, Ant?
ANT: It was a really simple sleep-deprived eureka moment looking at alphabet books and coming up with the plan. There was an entire concept that happened right then and there involving stories relating to death told in an alphabetical nature. And I got to thinking “How you do that? How do you do literally 26 tales in the running time of the film? What filmmakers are we going to approach?” I kind of had a rough idea and shared it with my friend Tim League in Austin with whom I do lots of stuff. He’s got really good relationships with directors through his festival [Fantastic Fest] and I have through my associations over the years.
So we just basically asked some directors: “Would this be interesting to you? We’ve got a terrible budget to work with. But it would just be fun because you’ll have complete artistic freedom. We’re not going to limit you or restrict in any nature whatsoever.” We had an enormous response. So many people kind of came to do it because they’re in between films or they just love the idea of getting a small crew and knocking something out. You know, these guys are filmmakers who don’t like being in that black hole of waiting for things to happen.
We were going to fund it ourselves and then we just mentioned to some friends who work for studios and they were like, “Yeah. I’m in.” Like the guy at Magnolia, Tom Quinn, he just got it instantly and said, “Yeah. Perfect. Let’s do it.” And they funded it. And so that took the risk off us, and we just made a really strong case for the directors getting a back end deal if it works out, which it has and which is great. So the template was all in place and then arrived the reality of “holy shit, we’ve got a deal with 15 countries with different languages and contracts and paperwork”. A lot of the directors really just approached it as a fun experiment and they just didn’t realize that at the end of the day, this film had to be sold around the world and had to be at a certain deliverable level. And so we spent a lot of time scrambling to make this project work at the end of the day because it was approached as a fun exercise, but it became very sort of serious real movie in the end. The film is made up of short segments, which kind of is perfect since we’ve all got short attention spans now and many of us are making short things.
FLICKS: There’s a big difference between making stuff for YouTube and theatres.
Yeah. I mean, in a way, it’s kind of a YouTube movie. It’s like that generation now that’ve been raised to watch things three minutes or less – that’s the theory anyway. But this is way more like a wild movie experiment that I sort of grew up with and have seen in the ’70s-’80s when there were kind of oddball features that were a bit like this. We had a lot of room to manipulate the subject matter which people didn’t realize but we had a little bit of flexibility in terms of working on the pacing and structure.
So yeah, I think it’s really a bold experiment. I think it’s definitely flawed, but that was always going to be the case where you’re operating blind.
All anthology films have weak links, their internal ratio of what’s enjoyable.
There’s always one great story and then some other ones. I honestly think we worked the ratio better than that. But, you know, there are people who expect all anthologies to have a Crypt Keeper type guy introducing every story. Now to me, that was just so contrived. We try to modernize it and make it way more of an organic fluid feature film.
The weirdest thing is that a lot of people who reviewed it really wanted something like that to happen 26 times during the film. I was just like wow. I thought we had an elegant way of how to bridge over sequences, but some people really love those Crypt Keepers.
Who were some of the people that were most satisfying to actually get on board?
Well, there’s some that I didn’t know personally at first, like Marcel Sarmiento, who did Dogfight, one of the outstanding sequences in the film. He turned out to be a super nice guy. I really liked what he’s doing, he’s very smart and just a guy that I wouldn’t have met without putting this project together. And then a lot of them are people we hang out with at festivals like Nacho Vigalondo, Simon Rumley, Adam Wingard and really fun people that we know who would always deliver.
But in terms of the unknown, there was Timo Tjahjanto from Indonesia whose segment really lifts the film up into truly perverse heights, and he was a guy that I would never have thought of. We had some really good associate producers who introduced people like him, like the guy from Twitch film, Todd Brown. He basically was the guy who found Gareth Evans and brought The Raid to a wider audience after he saw the director’s first film Merantau.
So yeah, I think in a way, we wanted to be a snapshot of an international scene. Our guys were either just breaking or have made something truly exceptional.
It’s great that ABCs is playing at The Civic. Last year’s Cabin in the Woods screening was something else.
I think the energy level is huge because you had nearly 2000 people in that room, so it was kind of massive anyway. And with 2000 young hyped up people keen to see the hardest horror film of that year, I would love to say that that’s the level for ABC. But really, it’s way more of a niche film. It’s going to be a great night for me, anyway though, because it’s been a long journey to get it here and playing in the Civic and just seeing this crazy fucking movie playing in that cinema with some truly out there content, it’ll be one of the highlights of my life.
Having a big audience would be a massive bonus. I would love that to happen, but my only expectations are really just to get the film on the screen. And as the credits roll, the night turns into my birthday. So I’ll be kicking it both ways.
What has been like in other theatres as it’s played?
It’s been pretty amazing right across the board globally except for the Hawaiian Film Festival where I saw all of Tim’s wife’s relatives walking into the theatre who are quite old and not really the audience of this film at all. They were just there to support. And that was really super awkward and uncomfortable afterwards because I can tell that they just thought we were just disgusting perverts.
Apart from that, it’s been really supportive. It’s a film that plays to a crowd. With an audience in the theatre it’s way better than you sitting at home watching it by yourself, that’s not going to in any way perform the same as watching with other people with a few beers. It’s really been designed as something to talk about afterwards and compare notes, and you can’t compare notes with yourself. It just doesn’t work. So it’s really, truly a communal kind of collective experience.
You can watch a great film at home alone and it’s still going to deliver. But this film really needs to have that interaction following it, and also during. Because – and this is a shitty analogy – but for once and I can honestly say this without cringing – it truly is a roller-coaster of a movie.
