Special Report: Quinn Armstrong on the Fresh Hell Trilogy

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Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of the Projection Booth. I'm my host Mike White. On this episode, I'm talking with Quinn Armstrong. He's the director of the twenty twenty film Survival Skills, and he is back with a trip tick of movies, Wolves against the World, Dead Teenagers, and The Exorcism of Saint Patrick. Those are all currently available via streaming.

Definitely check those out and I hope you enjoyed the interview. Quinn Armstrong. I wanted to talk to you a few years ago because I saw your film Survival Skills as part of a festival. I don't remember which what it was, it's four years ago, but I loved it. I thought it was fantastic.

Oh, thank you very much. Yeah, it's very close to my heart that movie. You were really pushing the envelope with that one, and I appreciated that so much. And now you're back with a trip pick. Holy Cayle, I'll talk about ambitious.

When did this come about for you? When did you decide I'm going to do not just one more film, but I'm wonder three more. So, like all great stories. This one starts with a conversation about the tax incentives available in the state of Ohio. Essentially, Good Deed and I at the production company had been talking about doing something together for a while, and we circled a bunch of different things, and then I had this idea, what if we packaged some things together for the tax incentive to better take advantage of that system.

And they said, great, what And I said, I will get back to you. It had been I write constantly. I have hundreds of terrible scripts floating around on my computer, and so I was picking my way through things. I found the Exorcism of Saint Patrick and Wolves against the World, these two movies that really mirrored each other and were very similar in a lot of ways. And at first it was going to be just those two, and then that felt too neat to me.

So I took Dead Teenagers as a much older project and threw it into be like a wild card, different flavor in there. That's how we arrived at the current construction. And then how was the actual filming of this? Did you do it all back to back? Back to back?

We did Dead Teenagers, then Exorcism, then Wolves. I think a total of forty two shooting days. I think about fifteen each on Dead Teenagers and about twelve on Exorcism. Just a absolute whirlwind of a production cycle. But the crew is Ohio based, and we were all staying in a university dorm, in this little cinderblock room and university dorm.

The university aided that we were there. They absolutely despised it, and we were in deep rural Ashland, Ohio, and I thought people are going to start losing their shit about six weeks in, but everybody was amazing. It was really stunning to me the bench of talent that there was, both in terms of cast and crew. Maybely in Columbus in Cleveland. Were you that familiar with Ohio?

Had you shot there before? I had been in Ohio once to shoot my friend Colin West's first feature called Double Walker, where I did some producing and I was an actor in it. I was there for about a week and a half in the bleak midwinter, and I remember feeling like my skin was going to fall off my face in the cold, and that's about it I remember of Columbus, Ohio at that point in time. So I imagine with three movies being shot, is anything being done currently or is it just one the next Are you keeping the same crew, keeping the same actors? How does that work for you?

So it was one after the other, partially because the weather was so good to us, because the first movie we shot in August, everything was green, it was summery and nice. Then as soon as we needed it too, the leaves started changing and falling for Exorcism, and then as soon as we needed it too, the trees went bare and it started snowing for Wolves. So yeah, it was back to back, same crew the whole way through. Some repeating actors in smaller parts, but for the most part, actors were coming and going from project to project. Anthology movies, any anthology movie, you have to decide how much you're emphasizing the wrap around and the connections between everything, and how much you're emphasizing the individual pieces.

And this project is very heavy on the individual pieces. There are a lot of what is common between them is more about putting them next to each other and seeing what resonates than trying to create any kind of big narrative through line. There's echoes and rhymes and things like that. It didn't feel like the fresh hell centimentic universe necessarily didn't have to watch one to understand the next one. Yeah, they're all very self contained.

And when did you actually shoot these? So we shot these in twenty twenty two from late August to mid November, and then we were in post for and then we were in prepping distribution stuff like that forever, just because that's how he. Goes and kind of the same question. Did you do posts for one than the next or were they any advantages to working out all three of them at the same time. We worked on all three of them at the same time, just out of necessity.

Our amazing editor, Kure Burton, as one of my oldest friends. I've worked with her forever. Essentially, the way it worked is I functioned as her assistant, so I took the projects, I helped set them up, and occasionally I would do some rough assembly stuff, but she is the one who took them through beginning to end. The entire end. The last thirty minutes of Dead Teenagers is her construction.

There's some stuff from the script in there, and it follows the broad outlines, but she really was the one who got down to the nitty gritty and was like Okay, how are we following this very abstract, strange sequence. And while she was doing that, I was over here doing sound for one of them. I did music for a lot of them. We were all just bouncing around. I didn't realize you did the music as well.

That's amazing. I did the music for Dead Teenagers and Wolves, and our wonderful composer Yosa did exorcism. What are the plans for these now that they're done? So we are doing a kind of like mini road show in Ohio. I'm heading out there next week.

I hope it's next week, to do q and as and things like that. I'll be there for a couple of weeks and then seeing how that goes. We're then expanding and expanding. I believe they're out on streaming at some point in the near future. Don't worry.

I'll make sure to put in any release dates or anything so that we're covered. I really people ask me, I have no. Idea, and I'm curious as far as were you based normally that you made this trip to Ohio or several trips to Ohio. I bounce back and forth between Seattle and LA a lot to serve for work. I connected with Good Deed because they're the ones who bought Survival Skills way back when and released it, and so we had been talking about trying to make something that was a little more marchibal martially like something because so you've seen Survival Skills.

I'm so proud of it. It's hard to market that movie sheet. And this idea of leaning into sort of cozy horror, like Stephen King's style premises and then taking that and then pushing it into directions that are uncomfortable was the original pitch for this project. We had talked about doing it in New Mexico, we had talked about doing it some other places, but Good Deed is really and I admire them for this. They're really invested in developing Ohio talent.

As a Michigander, still appreciate that they are trying to do that in Ohio. Everybody shot LA. We know what LA looks like, especially horror, local, regional energy, and shooting stuff in places that have very specific, unusual textures to them so important and so great. I might not be always to see a horror movie that's set somewhere. I've never seen a horror movie set before.

It feels like this must have gone fairly smoothly since you were able to do three movies all in a row, Because it feels like if something bad had happened in the first one, it throw off everything else. Yes, I lived in constant fear of that, just every day, which nut be like, let's hope today's not the day everything balls apart. And again this is down to the crew. Kaylin r DP Sydney Lawson, wonderful people. We went over scheduled one day by about an hour.

Yeah, it was a tight ship and I still look bad cushion. There's no reshoots, there's no there's no pushing this day off. If this day is off, that this day is d d D da da da da da, and things would happen. We had one of the deaths in Dead Teenagers originally supposed to take place in a lake. It was two cold, it had gotten too cold and we couldn't put an actor in for hours at night.

That morning I sat down with the two actors concerned and hey, we can't do this sequence, how about this? How about this? And we wrote that death scene. I wrote that on the day that we shot it it was a mad. Rush, but that you were able to solve that problem, and I know so much of filmmaking is solving problems.

That's really commendable. Yeah, I think it is a matter of faith in the Cassen crew. Being a director, in my opinion, it's essentially middle management. My job as a director is to make sure everybody's making the same movie. That's really it.

And yeah, I'm creating shot lists and doing camera angles and stuff like that, but it's really all just in service of making sure that what the camera is doing is complimenting what the actors are doing. So it's just management really. I know this project hasn't even gotten really off the ground yet as far as the rolling out of it, but I'm curious, do you have your next stuff already in mind? Are you going to do another trip Tick? Oh?

God, I doubt another trip Tick. We'll see. If this one does really well, then I'm sure we'll have a conversation about it. But I exist constantly in a state of I always have two or three projects that some producer in la is telling me, Oh, yeah, we're gonna get five million dollars, We're going to get these big actors and that sort of thing, and I come close over and over again, and fall spart over and over again. A percentage of my attention is there, and then the other percentage of my attention is like, what's the weirdest thing I could do for little money?

There's actually we might do. We're seeing We're seeing about this. We might do a sequel to Survival Skills. It would be a very strange kind of sequel, but that that might happen in the next few years. If it does, I will be buying a ticket a Quinn.

Thank you so much for your time today. This was great talking with you, and I look forward to your next project and I'd like these so much. Thank you so much for doing that. Thank you so much for having me on and for talking about projects. I'm always happing to chat.

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