CODY CALAHAN: “I just wanted to do something simple and knew the next movie I did would be heavily character driven”
FANTASIA CLAPPER: Hello Cody
CODY CALAHAN: Hello, how are you doing?
Thank you for joining Clapper Ltd here and congratulations on your new movie ‘The Oak Room’
Thanks, man.
The film is really very enjoyable. This type of film should be made more often, an intense adult thriller with great dialogue.
I agree.
What has the response been like so far?
It has been really amazing. I do not want to say surprisingly amazing because I had a lot of faith in the film, but it is different, especially in these times when everybody is used to superhero, more flasher movies whereas this was just stripped down to the essence of storytelling. I am just glad it is resonating with audiences.
The Oak Room feels very different to your other films. What was your approach to making the film? Did you have a very clear idea on the type of film you wanted to make?
Oh yeah, yeah, for me as a director it is incredibly different to anything I have done previously. That stuff was more in the horror genre.
Although this was pretty horrific at times?
Yeah [Cody laughs] but a lot of the gore is more subjective in this than the other movies that I have done. I did a movie called ‘Let Her Out’, and for about four years afterwards, I was just producing stuff and looking around for projects. During that time, I was also developing on this stage play with Peter Genoway. Originally, I just wanted to make a movie that was really stripped down, and I knew I didn't want to have to be chasing action scenes and chasing a budget which I'm used to doing. I just wanted to do something simple and knew the next movie I did would be heavily character-driven. I wanted to work with certain actors because this is the first Union film that I've done. One of my oldest friends Ari Millen, who plays Michael in the movie, we grew up together and have worked on a few projects together in the past but only when I’ve been a producer. Ari is an actor, so this felt like a long time coming, to make something like this together, and I’m super proud of it.
You must have been proud of Ari’s performance. Everyone was excellent, but he was quite terrifying.
Yeah, yeah and it’s funny because the film was adapted from a stage play and he actually played Michael in the theatre production too. It was Ari who brought the script to me. This was his first project as a producer [as well as playing Micheal], and he had the idea of what the movie could be and how it could be adapted for the screen. We then started talking with writer Peter Genoway early on about what the movie would look like. Ari was in the playback in 2013, so he had a while to really think about his character.
You mentioned you wanted some real character actors for the film. How did you go about casting for the roles?
I hadn’t actually seen the play, but Ari told me about the characters so we started thinking about who would be perfect from the Canadians we had worked with already or those we wanted to work with. I had wanted to work with Nicolas Campbell for a long time, so we had an idea of the people we wanted to go to, but the one that we kept sticking on was the character Steve (played by RJ Mitte). We spent a long time thinking about who would be perfect for that role. Regarding the cast as a whole, everyone was the first person we wanted, and everybody loved it. It was funny too because we would say “you just got to read the script, ignore who’s involved, just read the script” which they did and went on to realise that this was something different, something very special.
Something special indeed. The actors must have been over the moon with a script that they could sink their teeth into and really showcase their talents. You wrote as well as directed most of your previous films is that right?
Yes, the movie I did before this, Let Her Out, I wrote the story with a friend of mine, and he wrote the script. Normally, I would write the treatment or even the script itself. This was the first time I worked with a writer on what wasn't originally my idea which was (pause) pretty refreshing.
Did you feel any pressure due to the source material being a stage play?
No, I mean every time you make a film you learn all these new things about yourself creatively, but usually, for me, I write everything because I’d have an idea I want to make and then I would end up writing the script due to budget restraints, or I just want more time with it and want to be able to tweak it. I would do it out of necessity. Working with Peter Genoway [writer of The Oak Room] on this movie made me realise that it’s nice to have someone else create this world that I then step into. You can really change the whole thing if you want to, but it’s great to have someone whom you can bounce ideas off, someone who has also been living in the same world. I kinda noticed that when you write and direct something, from the get-go you’ve already decided what this thing is.
It’s your baby isn't it?
Exactly! It's your baby, so it’s very collaborative, and I always try to stick true to the notion that the best idea wins but here [with The Oak Room] it's nice to be removed a bit from the creative so that I can see what I’m working on from a bird’s eye view which is very hard to do when you’ve written it yourself because you’ve already contextualised and visualised every scene. So when somebody says “that scene doesn't work” you reply with “no, no, no I have this vision for it”. However, when you're working on someone else's project, you're able to see it from a bird's eye view which enables you to maybe make more critical judgements of it before you dive right into it. I quite enjoyed it. I’m still writing stuff that I might direct but actually since this movie, some of the stuff I’m working on will be used just as a writer and I won't direct. I’m going to separate the two moving forward. I think so. I still might write the treatments for something I want to do, but in future, I shall be working with more writers when directing.
You’re the director so of course, you have an influence on the way The Oak Room feels and looks but was it more of a collaboration or did you read the script and say I know exactly what I want to do with this?
It’s interesting because obviously the first thing I read was the stage play, so it's less about the visuals more about characters. Just trying to visually see what it would look like and feel like as a movie was an interesting process but from the get-go, I always knew that it was going to be a kind of easy adaptation because this bar and these characters are sort of like the people I grew up with The town in which I grew up was a half an hour bike ride to my nearest neighbour. The town was small, and it took three school buses to get to High School, the High School was across from two farms. It had the local Legion, the place everybody had their first beer. So I really knew who these characters were and I knew what the setting would look and feel like so It wasn’t a movie that I felt so dead set on how it looked because I knew this world and I just knew when I got the right actors it would organically become what it is. Normally, a lot of the stuff I do is quite visual, and I start with images that I want to portray. On The Oak Room, Jeff Montray was the director of photography who did his thing whilst I would work closely with the actors. Of course, I worked closely with Jeff on how we would shoot it but we kind of danced together rather than really mapping out what we were going to do before we got there. We would rehearse scenes, have an idea on how we would shoot it, but then an actor would move somewhere different so we’d throw that out and instead try something else. A lot of the time, we would just fly through. It's a great way to work, can be stressful, but it’s a nice way to work if it works.
What was the stressful element?
Normally, I would map out exactly how I wanted a scene to be shot, where to move the camera and when. With The Oak Room, we would just light the whole set so the talent can do whatever they wanted. Jeff would have an idea on where to put the cameras, but we would do 10-15 minute takes and just run the whole scene and hope that it came outright. Approaching it that way can be stressful because you can realise in the edit that it just didn't work and you start believing you should have shot it in little pieces, but there’s something about filming long takes. You can see Jeff the DoP, and all the actors just lose themselves in it, and you start watching it like you are watching a movie. Ten minutes into a take and you are there. Nobody is yelling “cut” every thirty seconds, nobody's laughing, and you're not moving the camera too much. You're very much in it. The more I talked to the actors, the more I realised we were diving so deep into their backstories and they are all so talented that I felt I should just let them do their jobs.
It must have felt like a stage production at times?
For sure, I mean I’ve never worked that way before but I directed another movie, literally a week after The Oak Room, and I took all the ideologies and the way we shot it and I brought it to the set of a more traditional horror film. I brought the idea of long takes and everything. It's been a really great way to work.
With regards to the budget, did you have more freedom than you've had in the past? Or did it actually hinder you having a larger budget?
With a bigger budget, you learn all new problems. Having money means you now need to do everything properly, and I can't just run around doing as I want. I feel like you can always wish you had more money on set, but I think we had the right amount of money as there were no days where we felt we weren’t getting the right kind of performance because of a budget. I was less worried about not having enough money to get my vision across, which is also a lot of pressure because now you have the right amount, everyone says “well it better be great” [laughter]
Do you intend to make more films in this genre? or would you like to go back to more chaotic horror like in your previous movies?
Yeah, I think so, I love all types of films. Often reviews will say “directed by the horror film director..” but I have never thought of myself as that. It was just a niche that we liked and thought we could experiment in. My learning curve just happened to be in horror. I think now that myself, my business partner and everyone have matured as filmmakers, I would like to do more films like The Oak Room, but that doesn't mean that I won't maybe do something that's very much in the horror genre. It would have to be the right script, though. Right after The Oak Room, the next movie I did was a horror-comedy, so I think I just want to do as many things as I can and learn new things. I want to keep throwing myself into uncomfortable situations because that’s creatively how I learn. Stress makes me learn as I find myself taking more risks. As soon as I feel comfortable and feel like I'm not doing anything outside of my comfort zone, I feel like the audience isn't going to be engaged. When I feel like “oh fuck, I don’t know what I’m doing” that's where the magic sometimes comes from. You can always fail in that situation, but I think I would rather be scared to try something and fail than to do what’s comfortable. Maybe I wouldn’t do more horror films like those I’ve already made just because I feel like I’ve done them, but that doesn't mean that if an amazing script came along, I wouldn't do it but I’m definitely driven now buy the content and the script.
How long did it actually take to make The Oak Room?
We shot the whole thing in around 18 days, maybe a couple less. Yeah. We shot everything in the Oak Room scene in 3 days and everything in the Spruce Tavern scene (the bar with Paul and Steve) in about 5 or 6 days, something like that. Then the exterior stuff took just a couple of days. It was fast.
What was it like having only two locations (both bars) to film in?
A lot of the films I’ve done are short shoots because it's on a lower budget and with a lower budget you have less days. The more money you have, the longer you can film. We got pretty good at shooting between 3 to 4 weeks but of course, outside of that, the DoP and I would grab a camera, go out and spend time getting extra footage to insert into the edit. The one thing I loved about doing something like this is I knew what the set would look like everyday as Jeff and I signed off on how it would look. Jeff Maher is an incredible DoP so I was comfortable letting him do his thing and it was just nice to show up everyday and not have to go through a checklist of things to do. Which meant I could concentrate on the actors and where to move the camera but it was sort of refreshing to live in one space and forget about all the other little things, the checklist you do as a director in order to make the frame look great. Instead, we could just rely on the story and the acting. That was super refreshing [Cody laughs] but on the other side sometimes you walk on a location and even though it's maybe not the perfect location for what you envisioned, it’s new so it gives options and a fresh way to look at a scene. Whereas, showing up to a bar 5 days in a row with the same two people sitting at the bar becomes challenging on how to make it progress within the space. We would always try to make it feel different because we really wanted the movie to grow. We would start wider [angle lens] and then get tighter and we would flip the world later in the story. I don't know if you noticed but we shot one way and then when they go into a different story we would come back to the bar from the other side. We used experimental things like that in order to make the bar feel different even though it's the same place and it’s lit the same.
There’s a lot of small details in the narrative which raises a lot of questions..
I don't know if I can give anything away [Cody laughs]
Is the story 100% conclusive or is there a lot of ambiguity that enables viewers to fill in the blanks for themselves with their own imagination?
It’s tough because even the answer can give it away..
Oh really?!
I haven't heard anybody yet that is completely wrong so it's one of those movies where there’s enough hints, hopefully if we did our job right, that should spark a lot of conversation or maybe even an argument about the film’s secrets. I'm always curious to know what people think. That’s the fun of making movies! Hearing people’s interpretation.
Do you know conclusively what has happened in every aspect? Does it all link up like a puzzle?
Yes It does and I knew.. [Cody pauses] It’s hard to find the right words without giving it away. I knew exactly how it was going to play out and I knew what to tell the actors but sometimes the actors would have their own interpretation of that ending. There are a few theories that I have heard which I can foil and ruin but there’s a few that do make a lot of sense [Cody laughs] That's the part of the movie that's exciting, It’s the choice of what to show and when to show it. I wanted to make sure that I made a film where people watch it once and say “It’s that” but someone else sitting beside them would say “no, no, no because of this it has to that” and it forces you to watch it again. You know you’ve probably made a good film if someone is willing to watch it again shortly after just because they need to find out the truth. It's been amazing hearing that so far.
How difficult was it for you to actually make the film knowing all these intricate details are involved?
I was so certain that the wardrobe had to look a certain way that I actually went out and did wardrobe for all the characters and picked up the props myself. I did at one point have to sit down and map them all out. I had to decide how much of the props I would show and listen to test readers and then change things to make it more ambiguous.
You had test groups reading the script then?
Oh yeah, for sure. When I was younger I would write something and believe it was perfect. Then I would make it and go “oh fuck, its not perfect” So now I try and get as many people as possible to read a script and make sure that we’ve done our due diligence before shooting.
What do you have coming up in future Cody?
Literally a week after The Oak Room, I went off to make a horror comedy called ‘Vicious Fun’ with David Koechner from AnchorMan. One of the stars in it. It’s a really wacky horror comedy set in the 80s. It’s probably going to hit festivals early next year/end of this year.
All the best with both The Oak Room and Vicious Fun. Thank you for doing this interview with Clapper Ltd.
Awesome man. Thanks so much. I know it's a weird time right now in the world but thanks for taking the time to do this zoom call and thanks for watching the film.