Robert Olsen, Dan Berk, and Maika Monroe Interview
Picture this: you and your lover are on the run from the law. You both successfully robbed a convenience store and are now driving away to finally obtain the good life. Unfortunately, your car runs out of gas and leaves you stranded in the middle of nowhere. Luckily for you two, there’s a decrepit house across the street. You break in and explore — as you should — to see if anyone is home, but instead you find a little girl chained up in the basement and by the time you’re ready to run out in a panic, the owners arrive. Then, you discover that they’re significantly worse than the both of you. That’s the case of Mickey and Jules in the SXSW hit feature film Villains, starring Bill Skarsgård and Maika Monroe, which hits theaters this weekend. I got a chance to chat with writer/director duo Dan Berk and Robert Olsen and actress Maika Monroe about the film.
*Warning: The following interview contains major spoilers so read at your own risk!*
What influenced you and this idea for your movie?
Dan Berk: The real answer to that is much more practical and boring than what we sometimes get. You know, our first film was a location movie called Body and it all took place in this one mansion. And we learned a lot of the real practical benefits of shooting single-location at that point as far as how much to extend your effective shooting time. So, your 15- or 20-day schedule might look or feel more like an 18- or 23-day schedule by comparison with the actual amount of time you have at the castle.
Robert Olsen: Otherwise, you're spending two hours a day loading in and two hours at the end of the day loading out moves and driving across town.
Dan Berk: We wrote this right after we premiered Body at Slamdance in 2015. Or… I think we wrote it before that. The winter of 2014. So, at that point we were like, “Yeah, let's just make the big version of Body. It'll be $100,000. It'll be so luxurious and catchy.” Luckily, we put the script in front of a producer friend of ours and they were like, "Don't do that. It'll take a few years to get the movie made. But like, put real actors in it, get a budget, and make it a real movie." And we were like, "Aw fuck, I didn't realize we could do that."
Robert Olsen: So, we had the house — we knew we wanted this to be in one house. The second thing that we knew was that we wanted to follow a sort of “lovers on the run” type of couple — you know, this Bonnie and Clyde/True Romance-type thing. Then, we knew that we wanted them to break into said house and come upon something. And I think, you know, what we eventually landed on was… well, who are these antagonists going to be? Who are the owners? And we wound up sort of settling on this idea of them running into these almost bizarro world versions of themselves, or an older version of themselves. Looking at a lot of those different Bonnie and Clyde-type movies, you have some of them, like True Romance, where you're kind of rooting for those characters the entire time despite whatever things they're doing, or killing people, or doing whatever it may be. Then, you have something like Natural Born Killers where you're with them, but after a while [it’s like], “You guys are killing people. I'm not morally with this anymore.” And then you have something like Badlands that's kind of in the middle where they're killing people, but you still love them. We always kind of pictured George and Gloria as just being Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in Badlands if they didn't stop at the end and they got to like, keep going. So, we built it from there. It's a very character-based film. We're not sitting here trying to say that two people breaking into a house and finding something that they're not supposed to see is like, this movie idea that no one's ever fucking heard of. But what makes this film unique is more just like, the tone and these characters. That's what we spent the most time working on and building. It's a tough thing to describe a tone like this. Everybody wants it to be just a total comedy; or is it a thriller or a horror movie? Well, you know, it's somewhere in between. That's the trickiest part of getting a movie like this made. Some people who read the script will go like, “Whoa, the script is really bonkers. Like, I love this. It really stuck out to me… but I don't know.” ‘Cause our first two movies are nothing like this. Our first film is like, a total straight thriller. Our second film was like, a sequel to a movie that [had] a very dark tone. And here we are trying to say, “Oh, just trust us. This is going to be a little bit more of a Raising Arizona vibe than it is, you know, a Don't Breathe vibe.” So, that's just a tough sell for a lot of people. It took us a while to find the right actors who were willing to trust us there because there's a lot of risk on their part.
There's so many set pieces that's just inside the singular house where there's always a different dynamic going on, with the characters being separated. What were your personal favorite set pieces while shooting?
Robert Olsen: We'll tell you our least favorite: anything in that foyer area… that front door area where the whole like — spoilers and whatnot — but when she's holding the [redacted] and threatening to smash it. The space in there was just… [laughs] if you show any DP or gaffer this space, they'll go, "Oh, no. You shot here?" It's just tall and thin and there's nowhere to put lights. So, we had this like, insane shot list and we knew how we were going to make it work in our heads. But it was such a crazy day of shooting and getting those angles and everything, and we just kept going, "You just gotta trust us. This is how it's going to work out." Our DP Matt would be like, "Alright, I'm just gonna trust ya on this one." And it was such a tough, tough day and we had to do it so piecemeal that we got out of it just going, “Man, that sucks.” But when we saw the footage we were like, "Oh my god. No, we did it. We got it." And now it's like, one of our favorite scenes in the movie.
Dan Berk :Plus, the added score to it was like, “Thank god this works.” I think one of the fun ones — or maybe funny — was like, the hair tunnel. From the earliest time we were like, "This is gonna be so cool. We're going to do this like, eight-foot tunnel. We're going to build this wig thing and it's going to be so surreal and wild." We shot out of the stage day and if you saw the thing, we're like… we're idiots.
Robert Olsen:Totally.
Maika Monroe: Oh yeah.
Dan Berk: Just to get those shots that I think we probably could have gotten totally not with any of this, but there was this three foot wig thing. Maika is like up on a table, upside down.
Robert Olsen: [The] camera is just over her while she's laying on this table with her hair down. The camera’s here and we're just like milking tears. We're like, “CRY, CRY!”
Maika Monroe : “CRY, LIKE A BRIDE!”
Robert Olsen: I'm sure the blood must've been rushing to her head, probably gonna pass out and she was just like, "I love you so much, Mickey, I'm gonna miss you."
Dan Berk: You would've thought you were watching a Saturn V rocket launch.
Robert Olsen: You look at the shot and it's just like… there's a little bit of hair on the film.
Dan Berk: But it's still very emotionally impactful; it was just really silly. But that was the same day as the laundry chute. That shot did come out how we wanted it to look. That was really fun. The camera was way up in the sky and it was kind of like, you know… I think — again, spoiler alert — all of the inside of George's head when we see Sweetiepie, that was this six-foot tube that had blood and guts on the inside of it that we just kind of like, put on the end lens and we were just shocked that it worked.
Maika Monroe: Oh yeah, it worked out. It was so good.
Robert Olsen: That was pretty interesting. [It’s] another one of those where you look at the shot and go, “Oh, cool shot,” but then [you] look at the still from set and you question, “Did you guys really need to do that?”
Dan Berk: Yeah, you're right. Yeah, while we're reacting to those cool shots and going, “That wasn't worth it.”
Robert Olsen: It was a giant tube. Yeah, it was so fun. I mean, I think that's just all of the — I don't want to be too sugary and be like, “It's all fun!” — but it was just a really joyous set. We’ve worked on a lot of movies on a lot of different capacities. And, you know, sometimes you're on a shoot and it's not fun. If you've ever been on a bad movie set, that's one of the worst experiences you can have. Thank God it was a good experience on this one because you had nowhere to hide.
Maika Monroe: Oh no.
On a final note, I want to touch upon this and I'd love your input Maika. The cocaine sequences felt so like, Popeye with the spinach.
Maika Monroe: Which one?
The final one… the BIG one. How was it getting into that comical movement for that entire sequence?
Maika Monroe: We rehearsed that one. I have videos that I don't think they were aware at the time that I was filming, but the two of them in our rehearsal space both on the ground like, testing out ways. I'm just watching them on the ground.
Robert Olsen: We were like, “Can you stretch your arm like this?”
Maika Monroe: I was dying. I have to admit it was incredible just watching, you know, your two directors on the ground trying to rehearse. And I'm like, “Wow, this is amazing.” And [they’re like], “Move your butt up here.” And the two of them… both trying to show me.
Robert Olsen: And Dan was over there like, “No, look! I got it! I got it!”
Was Bill just like, trying not to laugh the entire time?
Robert Olsen: He had the easier job there. He just had to lie there. Yeah, that was another sequence, though. Everybody was like, “What are you guys doing with this scene?”
Maika Monroe: I mean, there are a lot of shots.
Dan Berk: Usually, you shoot coverage where there's a wide shot. Then, you go in for your close ups and everyone based on that wide shot understands what you're doing. No one knew what the fuck was going on during that moment.
Mickey and Jules are lovers on the run, headed southbound for a fresh start in the Sunshine State. When their car dies after a gas station robbery, they break into a nearby house looking for a new set of wheels. What they find instead is a dark secret, and a sweet-as-pie pair of homeowners who will do anything to keep it from getting out.