Writer/Director Chris Nash’s first feature film, In a violent nature, is set to release an arthouse version of the slasher into theaters this Friday, but the journey to get there has been long and arduous. So much so that Nash reshot a large percentage of the film just to get it, and the gory practical effects are perfect.
This included a recasting of the film’s undead slasher villain, Johnny (Ry Barrett), WHO is involuntarily summoned when a medallion is removed from a collapsed fire tower in the woods which entombs his rotting corpse. This is terrible news for campers on vacation in its territory.
Bloody Disgusting spoke with filmmaker Chris Nash and star Ry Barrett ahead of the film’s theatrical release about the nature of Johnny and the difficult obstacles he faced in making this unique independent horror film. The inspiration behind In a violent naturereveals Nash, doesn’t actually come from iconic slashers, and that informed its overall approach to the arthouse horror film.
Nash tells us: “I was very inspired by the work of Gus Van Sant in the 2000s. Gerry, ElephantAnd Last days. I love these films and I really wanted to see what I could do to incorporate that into a genre film. The slasher seemed like the best way to achieve this; especially the “slasher in the woods” kind of thing. We can really just hang out in this environment. But the main thing to set the tone was ReallyI think, just stepping back and letting the scenes exist as they were and without even aiming for a tone.
“It was A weird thing talk about it with Pierce Derks, my cinematographer,” Nash continues. “We didn’t have the biggest budget to do something crazy and wild with lighting and all that, and I was like, “Well, let’s go super naturalistic.” He said, “Yeah, no look is also a look.” » So this is very much a “no tone is a tone” type of film. We tried to treat it almost as if we were making a nature documentary where we’re just following something, or following a postman at work, just going from house to house. It’s not the most exciting job in the world, but it’s honest work. It is how we approached it, be as objective as possible.”
What is a nature documentary without a subject? In a Violent nature finds him at the home of the undead Johnny, quietly roaming the woods for large portions of the running time. What was Nash looking for when he was looking for the right actor to play the killer, you may ask?
“I’m still trying to answer this question myself“, replies Nash. “I certainly I feel like we found it., And We I got lucky with Ry. Ry actually stepped in to replace the actor we had originally cast as Johnny. This was one of the problems we faced during our first attempt at filming, as the actor we had to play Johnny had to withdraw due to medical reasons. So we brought in replacements. At the time, we thought, “This isn’t going to be too much of a problem because he’s in costume all the time.” » But when we follow this mute character, as an audience, you understand everything. When you don’t have these visual cues, you just see all of physical reality and the little, tiny differences between postures, between where people actually support their weight when walking, and just the size of the door itself.
Nash continues: “It was pretty shocking and pretty shocking when we had that meeting together, like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s that actor. It is that actor.’ We could see that it was completely different. So when we asked Ry to step in, we did a lot of rehearsals with him. We talked about how to walk. He In fact did some research himself. He was watching animal videos, just nature videos of animals walking towards just try to get an idea of how a predator would wander through the woods stalking its prey.”
Barrett added: “They had an initial shoot that I wasn’t involved in, and that was about a year before they approached me and decided to do the shoot again. At that time, I don’t think there were plans to reshoot everything, but there were key scenes and key moments when they certainly I 100% had to go back and redo. The whole movie revolves around his movements and everything; I think you’d be able to tell if suddenly it was someone different. So the decision, in addition to a bunch of other factors were necessary to redo the whole thing. I was really happy being on board, and the fact that they were going to do this, and sort of building this character and being there for all of it.”
As for Barrett’s process for deciphering his character, he looked to Nash’s script.
“I think Johnny is supposed to be a little mysterious, psychologically and what’s going through his mind,” Barrett says. “It was more, I think, about treating him like an animal, like a wild animal in a way., and that’s what the analogy (in the film) sort of sums up: what Johnny is and how he works. I saw it that way because of that. The monologue that Lauren Taylor What gives is that he’s like a wild animal, a bear that just has something wrong with it, and that’s how he works. What he does doesn’t necessarily make sense, but to him it makes sense.
“The suit Really lends itself to the character,“ Barrett elaborates. “I had my rules that I stuck to, but once you put on the Johnny costume, somehow right locks everything in place. Putting on the costume wasn’t a very complicated task. There was an underlay, like Under Armor, with skin, latex skin, and everything looked rotten under the pants and below shirt. Then there was either a hood that I wore on some days with an open mask that allowed you to see the back of Johnny’s head, and then other days there was the mask, the full face mask, and then some days we had the mask that had a cutout so I could see and move better. The only THE The real day that took the longest was the day you really see Johnny’s face. That makeup day was longer because it was a full application and probably took close to three hours.”
It’s not just the actor who changed during the reshoots, but also Johnny’s design. Nash guides us Some of these key changes that ultimately improved his original vision.
Nash explains: “Looking at the cut assembly, we realized that there were little things that we could improve this just changed the tone quite radically. For example, how far we followed Johnny with the camera, just giving him that perfect space in the frame. Because we were a lot closer the first time, and the second time we were like, “We need to pull back a lot more.”‘ Another thing we looked at is that we redesigned the weather mask. This was a much more accurate representation of what the firefighting mask was like in real life, but we realized it looked a little too much like a diving bell; It looked a little too ridiculous. So we redesigned it, made it much more fitted to his head, and gave him that glasses look for a more piercing eye.
“There are so many things we retained from the first time, even the way we did gore gags, little flourishes we could add,” he adds. “So I do not recommend, and I also strongly recommend, remaking films in their entirety before releasing them.”
Check In a violent nature in theaters this weekend, and stay tuned for a follow-up interview here on Bloody Disgusting about the film’s practical effects and bloody kills.
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