Brian Taylor: So one of the things I find interesting about Oddities is it doesn’t seem particularly interested in following the rules of one genre. It moves between crime, dark comedy, and horror, sometimes when you least expect it. So when you were developing the story, did you intentionally set out to play with the audience’s expectations, or did the story naturally take you in that direction?
Tyler Savage: I do think from the beginning, it was a short film in 2023, and the short film was the thing I wanted to do. I wanted to combine my love of crime thriller with my love of horror. So it was sort of intended to be a mashup. And then when you go from 15 minutes to 90 minutes, it was like, okay, well, maybe this is sort of like this genre-skipping thing. Because also, for me as a filmmaker, people want you to go into one lane, and horror is having a big moment right now. But I really do love mystery. I love thrillers. I love suspense. I love crime fiction. So I was like, you know, it’s so hard to get a film together. And also, I think audiences are very sophisticated now. So when you’re playing with tropes and archetypes and genre elements, especially for a genre crowd, people that know these movies and love these movies, they get what you’re doing.
So, I think that was kind of the main conceit. Every 10 to 15 to 20 minutes, the thing keeps evolving in a different direction. And I think the only part of it I was a little nervous about was the tone, because there’s a lot of dark humor in it. But then there’s some more grounded, dramatic elements, and then it gets pretty bat-shit crazy. And so it was like, are all of these things going to play nice? It’s sort of a love letter to a lot of the genre elements I love the most. I tried not to stay in one lane.
Brian: So, obviously this started as a short film, and you’ve expanded it into a feature. So I imagine one of the biggest challenges was figuring out what to keep and what to reinvent. Was there something about the original short that you knew absolutely had to survive? And what was the biggest discovery you made when you started expanding the world?
Tyler: That’s a great question. I feel like with the short film, I made a little bit of a pivot. This is my third feature, but when I did the short, I was like, you know, I’m going to not take myself too seriously and do something that’s just sort of a celebration of stuff I love. And the thing that seemed to work about the short, as far as the way it was received at festivals and online and stuff, is that people liked the humor in it. And I was like, you know, my first film is a little bit self-serious. My second film definitely has some really black humor in it. But I was like, maybe I want to just lean into the buddy movie stuff and some of the comedy here. So I think that was some of the tone.
That was the main thing that I wanted to carry over. And then, as far as the elements, it was the setting of an antique shop. And Adrienne Barbeau [Betty], I was like, let’s carry that along. But then, you know, I think sometimes when you expand from short to feature, you can feel that they’re just trying to stretch a relatively threadbare storyline longer. And I was like, I do not want to do that. I was like, I got to go back to the drawing board. I can keep some of the tonal things that I loved that seemed to be working from the short and some of the general conceit around the antique shop. But everything else is up for refreshed thinking or whatever. So that was the main thing.
Brian: So your two central characters aren’t exactly making the best decisions in life, and yet we’re supposed to follow them into these increasingly bizarre situations. As a filmmaker, how do you get an audience to invest in characters who are often responsible for creating their own problems? And how much fun is it to write characters who keep making wrong choices?
Tyler: It’s definitely very fun to write characters who are making wrong choices. This is kind of like writing an animated thing or something, you know, like cartoons, where people make increasingly poor decisions, and you’re kind of watching a train wreck. I also have a really deep love of noir films. And so noir is kind of a contract with the audience. It’s all around the idea that you’re going to see something that doesn’t go well. And I think that’s so interesting. You could start a movie and go on this journey knowing that this is going to end poorly for these people, but how are we going to get there? And so I think, as far as getting people to go on a journey with people who are making such obviously poor decisions and self-destructive decisions, it’s chemistry.
Some of it’s obviously on the page, and you’ve got to make them charming despite their flaws. But I think a lot of it worked with Vicky Boone and Liz Kelly, who were casting directors. And I was like, we really just need great chemistry between these leads, because if they’re not charming and we don’t believe them as best friends, then the whole thing would collapse in on itself because, if they were grating. And also, I’m a millennial, so trying to write young Gen Z girls, I was like, if this comes off… I read some scripts where people try to write younger characters, and they’re kind of grating and obnoxious. And I was like, we can’t do that. They can be making self-destructive decisions, but we have to like them, despite all of that. I give a lot of credit to the cast for helping me.
Brian: If you didn’t like those two girls, you have no investment in whether they make it out, what happens, or whether they’re going to redeem themselves for the decisions they’re making. So I think you’re right. And they do show, they do come off as being friends and having the right chemistry. So your mission and what you wanted to do came off as being true. So, you got Adrienne Barbeau, someone who’s practically horror royalty, playing a character who initially seems like a sweet, harmless woman. What did she bring to the role that surprised you? And did having someone with her history in the genre allow you to play with the audience’s expectations in ways you couldn’t have otherwise?
Tyler: Definitely. I mean, I think that’s a great question, because when you cast an actor who’s bringing an entire body of work to the audience, you have to make it so not everybody is immediately going to recognize her or know all the touch points. Obviously, genre fans do, and we’ve been playing a lot of fantastic film festivals, so those people obviously do. And it’s fun. There are little inside jokes where Lilamar’s character, Rose, lies and says her name is Stevie, which is an homage to The Fog. And there are these little Easter Eggs in there. But it also has to work for somebody who’s not a big genre student and just came to this movie through a recommendation or whatever. I think it was trying to find a way where there were a couple of those little winks for the genre audience, being like, we know who we have in this role, and let’s have some fun with it. But also just make it work for anybody, regardless of whether they’re aware of her body of work or not.
And then, as far as what she brought to it, she got asked this question a couple of times by the press about how she handled going from sort of sweet to menacing, and what she thinks about when she plays villains. And she really doesn’t frame it that way at all. She frames it like this is a dramatic role. “I understand my character’s backstory, I understand her motivations.” She approached it the same way she would approach a piece of serious drama. And I think that’s what grounds the movie. One of the rules I had was if we’re going to do this sort of genre-leaping thing, the only way to make it feel grounded is if everybody buys into the world of the story. You know what I mean? It’s kind of easy in horror to be like, and then some crazy shit happens, and everybody… You know what I mean? But that doesn’t feel good. It feels a little bit like a cheap trick or something. But if the people are really grounded in the reality of the story, despite how crazy it gets, it allows you to stick with it. Otherwise, I think you can kind of tune out and be like, okay, and then this happened, and then that happened.
And so Adrienne really approached it as, you know, I’m not a villain. I’m a woman who has sort of a righteous mission here, and the story is just not being told from my perspective. When she actually watched it with an audience for the first time, something late in the film happened to her character. She’s sort of being bested by one of the younger characters. The audience was sort of rooting for Rose, for Lilamar’s character. And she’s like, “But wait a minute. Why aren’t they rooting for me?” Because in her mind, she’s like, “I’m doing good work here. I’m a good guy.” And I think that was cool to see. I think some of the best villain performances are the ones where the performers aren’t just judging the character, but they’re actually trying to get into the shoes of what their logic is. And so, you know, she came from a theater background, and I used to want to be a playwright. I think of things with very traditional dramaturgy in terms of the way I prep to talk to actors. So we didn’t treat it like, “Hey, this is a crazy genre movie.” We treated it like, “Hey, this is Betty, and this is her worldview.” And she stayed grounded in it, despite the fact that it’s pretty nuts.
Brian: Well, no hot take, maybe not a hot take. She is in the best John Carpenter film, which is The Fog.
Tyler: Yes, oh I’m with you.
Brian: So something I find fascinating about your career is that you worked on some Terrence Malick films before directing your own movie. So Malick’s filmmaking style is obviously very different from something like Oddities, but is there a lesson you’ve learned from being around his productions that still influences how you approach storytelling today?
Tyler: I really appreciate that. I never get asked that.
Brian: Really?
Tyler: I never do, and I do think it’s odd.
Brian: Yeah, Knight of Cups and Song to Song, which was filmed here.
Tyler: That’s actually how I met Vicky Boone, the casting director, and everything. And To the Wonder and Voyage of Time. I was with that camp for a long time and met so many wonderful people. I would say that my first film, Inheritance, had more touchstones of arthouse stuff, especially in terms of the photography and the tone of it. And then I think as I’ve gotten older, I’ve kind of leaned into the fact that I really do love genre cinema. I like being able to paint with a broad set of primary colors and to do things sort of unapologetically. Not that I don’t have an appreciation for nuance and more subtle storytelling, but there is something fun when you can kind of play with the whole palette. And I think genre allows you to do that. So I think as I’ve just gotten older and more confident in what I like, that’s how I’ve angled.
And as far as what I carry with me from the years of working with Malick, I think there were some lessons in terms of a way of working with people and a way of collaborating. Those films were done almost with the kind of freedom of a student film or an experimental film, but done at a pretty high budget, with A-list talent and everything. There was just sort of this freewheeling, exploratory approach to filmmaking that made me see, really firsthand, how you can pivot on the day, how you can embrace what was going on. Terry was so good about embracing what was going on in the environment on a day, what was going on with the weather that day, what was going on with a particular actor that day, and being like, well, let’s let this sway us. And sort of humorous examples are usually around a bird landing on a tree in the middle of a shot, and then the bird becomes the subject of the shot as much as or more than the actor standing in front of the branch does. But sort of letting the actual moment-to-moment reality of your shoot day sort of be what it is.
It’s different when you’re playing with genre, because you have a lot of setups and payoffs and story elements you have to nail. But if an actor has an instinct on a day or a location is telling you something, it’s okay to pivot. And actually, that’s where you get some of the most exciting stuff, I think. As a producer, I’ve seen filmmakers stay rigid to their plan, and they end up trying to do a square peg in a round hole thing. They’re like, “No, but this is how I pre-vised this, and this is how this is supposed to look.” And I’m like, but the location doesn’t look like your pre-vis board, or we had to pivot locations at the last minute. So now you’re blocking something you thought about for three months, and it doesn’t fit this.
Brian: Or the actors brought something to it.
Tyler: Exactly. The actors are like, “I don’t want to sit in this. I want to pace around a thing.” And then you have to adjust. I even rewrote a lot of the climax of the film. Once we locked the locations, I rewrote probably 10 to 15 percent of the draft around realizing, okay, well, this is the reality of the space that we’re setting this in, so we’ve got to make those adjustments. So I think having that sort of light-footed, improvisational, spontaneous approach to production is something that I’ve carried forward. And also, I will say, for Malick, he sticks to his guns so much and knows what he wants and is unapologetic about it, even when other people disagree. And you don’t want to be stubborn as a filmmaker, but there needs to be a clear hierarchy, and you need to be okay with people disagreeing with you. So I think, just energy-wise, having been around that for a number of years, I’m not really bothered. I obviously want all my collaborators to be on the same page, but sometimes that’s not going to happen, and you just have to accept that.
Brian: As a director, it’s your vision. You’re trying to get a story out, whether you wrote the screenplay or not. You’re trying to get a vision out, and the collaboration is making that vision happen.
Tyler: The buck has to stop somewhere else or it just gets chaotic.
Brian: So watching a movie like Oddities, you feel an appreciation for the strange, unpredictable side of genre filmmaking, which we’ve talked a lot about. So were there particular filmmakers or movies that influenced the tone of the story? Was there something you wanted to do differently from the horror films you grew up loving?
Tyler: That’s great. I think that goes back to the tone question. For me, the test was, or the question was, how many different tones and ideas can we contain in one story? And I feel like some of my favorite films that I grew up with don’t feel limited. Even some of the John Carpenter stuff, there can be some really humorous human elements to them, despite having some really ghastly elements as well. And so I think for me, it was just a test of how far I could push the tone, and whether you could have comedic, dramatic, horror, and mystery elements all kind of playing in a stew together, and have that be additive and having them be in harmony, rather than feeling that they were in conflict. So, you know, I think there were too many films that were touchstones for this. It wasn’t any one director or one film. It was really a celebration of so many of the genre films that made me want to be a filmmaker.
Brian: That’s why you make movies. Thank you!
Member of the North Texas Film Critics Association, and lover of all things Cinema
Brian Taylor
Member of the North Texas Film Critics Association, and lover of all things Cinema
