Really Freakin' Out
Sarah Dobbs

On a rainy Saturday afternoon, six of the cast and crew of the indie British horror-comedy Freak Out – writer-director Christian James, co-writer and actor Dan Palmer, associate producer Simon Nurrish, soundman Glen Yard and actors Tony Rogers and James Heathcote – are crammed into a nook beneath the stairs of an arthouse cinema for a chat about the upcoming US release of their cult hit.

The movie follows the antics of best friends Merv and Onkey as they train an escaped mental patient in the art of becoming a bona fide serial killer. The problem is, he's a very quick learner, and before long the boys find themselves battling the unstoppable killing machine they've unwittingly unleashed. The emphasis is firmly on comedy, with plenty of sly digs at, and reverential nods to, the horror genre; it's riotously funny, despite its cheap-and-cheerful production, and the filmmakers' constant enthusiasm is contagious.

PENNY BLOOD: How would you sell Freak Out to a fresh audience?

JAMES: It's amazing, it's absolute gold! We've always sort of seen it as a modern day Evil Dead, kind of with some Clerks mixed in, a mix of Clerks and Evil Dead.

NURRISH: It's Evil Clerks!

PENNY BLOOD: It's a low budget, independent movie; how did you get started with it?

JAMES: We met at film school – that's where I met Dan. I'd worked on other people's films and hated every minute of it because it's all about me, I'm the most important thing in my life.

PALMER: After we met at college, which is the same college where we met Glen, and James a few years later…

YARD: But we're younger!

PALMER: And more handsome. Christian went to film school and I went to an acting school, though you wouldn't know it; Chris made a short film called Bank Holiday Monday, and I wrote a kids' monster film with two characters which were called Merv and Onkey. Eventually we combined the concept of Chris's short film with the characters of my script, and thus Freak Out was born. And the film was made.

PENNY BLOOD: After about four years.

PALMER: Yeah.

PENNY BLOOD: So how does it feel now that the film's getting international release?

JAMES: It's weird, it was a very slow process. If it was overnight it'd be more shocking, but we've had plenty of time to think about it…  and fight for it.

PALMER: Without sounding ungrateful, everything we've wanted has been like two years too late.

JAMES: And a hideous struggle.

PALMER: We've never had that caricature Harvey Weinstein guy shaking our hands with a big cigar and handing us a check; we never had that validation from someone from the industry.

JAMES: Rather than there being a lot of attention on us, people are slowly finding us, which is kind of the way it's meant to be. With our next film there's not gonna be so many eyes on us, but there are enough people looking in our direction…

PALMER: Ninety-five percent of people have been receptive to us and the film, and I think if we had overnight success… if we'd made the film in half a day and it came out and it became a success in like five seconds, we probably wouldn't have much validation and people would probably hate us. The fact that we've struggled and struggled, and we've still come out with a film that people like, I think people find it a bit more endearing.

YARD: Well, there's hate amongst us.

PENNY BLOOD: You've all been working together for like, years and years now, so do you all still get on?

HEATHCOTE: These guys never call me.

JAMES: He's not actually wrong.

PALMER: The thing is, James [Heathcote] is a self-contained unit; we'd just ring him when we needed filming, and James would turn up every time and he never let us down, but we always joked that if we didn't ring him for, like, a year in between filming, he wouldn't be phased by it. In theory, we could leave it for two years and then ring James and say we're filming again.

HEATHCOTE: That actually happened once.

JAMES: Shut up! The camera broke…

YARD: I like him. We almost went to see Reign of Fire with him.

NURRISH: It's very easy for us to say all of us remained friends but the reality is, there's a whole bunch of people we ditched, who're just not in this interview!

PENNY BLOOD: You mentioned the problem with the camera – there were a lot of other problems during filming, too: is the legendary "curse of Freak Out" still affecting you at all?

PALMER: Yeah, various locations where we filmed have closed after a week or a month after we finished filming, and we lost a few cast members. Well, one: Desmond Cullum Jones. Even after the film was finished, when it was bought up, Mo Claridge, the godfather of Anchor Bay UK, died on Christmas Day, and he's the guy that basically signed the contract that greenlit the Freak Out DVD.

YARD: So be careful on your way home.

PENNY BLOOD: Speaking of the DVD, there's a huge amount of extras on there…

JAMES: Well, as we were filming, we'd give someone the DV camera and say "just wave this around and get some footage, it might be interesting one day," and we generally forgot about it. When we came to put stuff together for the DVD, we realized we had about 9 or 10 hours of footage of us filming. Sometimes we'd just literally plunk the DV camera in the corner of a room somewhere and just let it film. We made a documentary from that and now it's a glowing hour-long how-to, or maybe how-not-to, make a film.

PALMER: That's the thing, people have said that even if you don't like splatstick, or silly comedy, or gory horror, or geeky humor; even if you don't like any of the elements Freak Out had, if you have a passing interest in films you're gonna get something out of the DVD. We really wanted to make it an unpretentious approach, and make people realize that if you really stick to it and you really have got ambition and you really have got drive, you can come up with something.

JAMES: We checked out a lot of DVDs around the time and found that a lot of first time filmmakers would make their commentary like "this is how you make a film" and we didn't want to make out that we're experts, because truth be told we're doing the second one now, and we have no idea what we're doing again! We didn't want to be patronizing and like "we're experts now, look at us, haven't we made it;" it's supposed to be very accessible for the wannabe filmmaker.

NURRISH: The thing is that you get in this mindset where you think you have to follow the mould that somebody else has already followed but the whole point is that there is no mould; it is what you make it. We've done Freak Out probably uniquely compared to anyone else in certain respects, and the next film will be unique again in its own right.

ROGERS: Also, don't forget Bumfeeling 101, which is a great introduction for anyone who's thinking of getting into bumfeeling, or trying to avoid feeling a bum.

PENNY BLOOD: You had a cameo from Less Than Jake in the movie, and you nearly had Freddie Prinze Jr. at one point…

JAMES: And Chris Klein!

PENNY BLOOD: So how gutted were you that you didn't get them involved in the end?

JAMES: The brilliant thing was, the joke would have been kind of on them, in that Jeremiah Gibble, who was kind of the twat of Freak Out, hangs out with Freddie Prinze Jr. and Chris Klein; they're like his gimp mates. At the time, and probably still now, there's not a very, shall we say, receptive following for Freddie Prinze Jr. online, so it would have worked quite well. They were cool about it; they knew the deal, and they both said yes, Chris Klein's agent said yes, and we spent a lot of time trying to get a yes from Freddie Prinze Jr.'s agent. The night before we were going to go to London to put them in a car and film them, his agent phoned up and said "Look, I've thought about it, and I can't do it, because of the type of actor he is, the SAG will come down on him, make an example of him."

PALMER: We needed four yeses, and we got three, so it fell through. But we got Less Than Jake, and the Less Than Jake fans have gone nuts about it.

HEATHCOTE: Some reviews have mentioned them as Linkin Park.

JAMES: Yeah, we just go with it.

PENNY BLOOD: So what are you working on next?

YARD: Well, I've just finished working on a film with a very successful director called The Witches Hammer, and I've formed a very beautiful relationship with the director, who I'll be working with on his next one, called Bane. Which has squid men in it. And cave men. And dolly birds.

JAMES: We have a new film, a new script; we can't go into the concept right now, because it's quite stealable…

PALMER: It involves a dinosaur island, that's all we can say.

JAMES: And it goes horribly wrong…

PALMER: It goes horribly right! Everyone has a really nice time, enjoys the dinosaurs and goes home with a knapsack and a candyfloss. No, it retains some of the humour of Freak Out, but it's got more of a linear plot.

JAMES: We wanted to make Freak Out very out there, it's not too restrained, intentionally so, but we can't cash checks anymore on being "oh look, we're low budget, feel sorry for us." Now we have to deliver. We've delivered an entertaining film with Freak Out, but now we're stepping into a bigger arena, and we can't make any more excuses for ourselves.

PALMER: We're not toeing the line; we are doing something we genuinely want to do. Freak Out fans won't feel alienated, but hopefully it'll find a larger demographic at the same time. It's going to deliver something similar to Freak Out… but with more gusto!

JAMES: And more money! Freak Out was on 16mm, which limited us visually as to what we could do, I could only get one or two takes of stuff, but now I can sit down and really go nuts visually and go all out.

PALMER: Everyone who was involved with Freak Out will be doing a roughly similar role in the next movie, but shaken up a bit. Like Christian said, you can only have one debut movie.

NURRISH: Unless we change our names!

JAMES: Yeah! Can we stop this interview now?

The guys' debut movie, Freak Out, comes to 2-disc DVD in the US on November 7th.