“One arc I had in my head was turning them into dogs.” - E.L. Katz, writer/director, Cheap Thrills
We discovered Cheap Thrills at the South by Southwest Film Festival in 2013. Nearly a year later, it’s almost time for SXSW again and Cheap Thrills is ready to be unleashed on the world. The debut film of E.L. Katz, a screenwriter for shorts and indie features, stars Pat Healy and Ethan Embry as Craig and Vince, two buddies desperate for money. So desperate that when Colin (David Koechner) and his wife Violet (Sara Paxton) offer them money for completing dares, they accept.
So begins a night of violence and humiliation for the two cash-strapped men. Cheap Thrills explores how far they will go for money. The film’s contest became a bit legendary around the streets of Austin, and certainly caught our attention. So we sought out this E.L. Katz to find out what made him tick.
Discussing Cheap Thrills with Katz touched on some spoilers, so I’ve replaced the pronouns to keep it vague about who does what, but you probably won’t even want to know what dirty deeds are coming. Except the finger chop. I mean, they’re not going to do a dare movie without someone losing a finger.
So fair warning, spoilers follow otherwise there’d be no interview, but if you take our word for it, and the city of Austin’s, you can see Cheap Thrills on VOD starting February 21. Then E.L. Katz will answer the questions you’ll surely be asking yourself too. Or read very carefully now and become intrigued to see how far he takes it in Cheap Thrills. We dare you.
SuicideGirls: Did you think of any games that were too much for Cheap Thrills?
E. L. Katz:There was one draft that, it wasn’t a game but one of the really strange, weird drafts, ultimately a funnier draft even though it was a horrible, was Craig wants to leave the game and Vince stays there by himself and he keeps playing on his own. You don’t know what’s going on and then he ultimately finds out that Vince has been paid to go to his house and kill his wife who’s pregnant. So it got really dark and it was too dark, way too dark. It was one of those things where like now the audience is going to completely check out. So we were like this is probably not the way to push it.
SG: So that is the line?
EK: I think that’s the one thing. That was the only thing. Other stuff, there wasn’t anything else that was too extreme. That was the one for me.
SG: In the conceiving and writing of Cheap Thrills, did you play with the order of any games? Like this is too much to come so early so let’s move it later?
EK: It’s all about expectation too. The audience has their own wall. If things start to progress too straightforward, they’re going to know, “Okay, when’s the hatchet going to come out? When is he going to lose a body part?” It was all about you kick the ball a little further, you do something a little fucked up and then you pull back. “Oh, just make me a mixed drink.” So it’s not about progressing it just in physical harm, it’s about people making decisions that make them mad at each other, compromising their own morality. So it wasn’t necessarily Saw-like traps, not that I don’t like the Saw movies, but it would have seemed really difficult if we were like, “All right, finger, arm, head.” You kind of run out of places to go. So a big part of it was playing on where people thought it was going to go.
SG: I even meant with the moral challenges, like how early can one be asked to sleep with someone else?
EK: Yes, you’ve got to think about that quite a bit. Where is his head at there? Is he desperate? I think once you take a shit in someone else’s house, they might be able to push you a little further, which is crazy. When these challenges were suggested by some of the audiences at our screening, people got tattoos on their ass and all sorts of stuff. I thought nobody would do that. It’s funny, I think people are quicker to do crazy things than you might think.
SG: So you had an audience where you suggested things, and they actually did things as extreme as permanent tattoos?
EK: Do we have the picture?
SG: I believe you.
EK: We talked about it beforehand, some ideas. Then we introduced it during the beginning of the movie and yeah, everybody did everything. Some people did stuff without even knowing what the challenge was going to be. They just went on stage like, “I’ll do whatever.”
SG: With the tattoo challenge, you must be familiar with Suicide Girls.
EK: Yes.
SG: What is a tattoo you would dare one of them to get?
EK: Oh God, one of the Suicide Girls? It’d be hard to stump them. What’s in really bad taste? I think maybe a tramp stamp of their father’s face would possibly be the worst thing that they could do. I don’t suggest any of them do it.
SG: We’ll publish this and see if anyone takes the bet.
EK: No one will.
SG: So taking the shit was one of the central issues. When you got to that point, that was a key to the script?
EK: Well, it’s a pretty dehumanizing act. I think one arc I had in my head was turning them into dogs, so there’s a lot of dog stuff in there. They’re taking a shit on somebody else’s property, they’re pissing on each other. Ultimately they fight over a dead dog, then a human. It’s like they become beasts, so they’re fucking on the floor in front of other people so it’s kind of finding ways to just turn them into animals, dehumanize them. That’s also where they’re heads are at too, so anything that would contribute to them being in more of a desperate primal place, it was kind of keeping my eye more on that than necessarily what the act is. It’s what the act does to them.
SG: How many earlier drafts were there before the shooting script?
EK: Many. We worked on it for three years. I did a lot. On and off, but sometimes it was more of a pet project and sometimes it was more like we’re trying to rewrite this, we’re trying to get it going.
SG: By the time Would You Rather came out, were you like, “Aw, man?”
EK: We found out about that a month before shooting. I was definitely, I e-mailed that to the producers. I was like, “Ugh, I don’t know guys.” It just seemed like that one had more momentum. I think they’d already shot it. It was definitely troublesome but at the end of the day, I was like, “Well, this is going to be its own thing. It’ll have its own voice. Let’s just go for it and see what happens.”
SG: We have seen shows and movies where people get their finger chopped off, in situations where they’re agreeing to it. What was your take on how to portray that scenario?
EK: It was trying to do it like “Who’s on First?” I think. So it was a mixture of this intense buildup but also goofy, old fashioned comedy. The longer I pushed that in that context, the more I thought it would be amusing, at least to me. It was the suspense of when it was actually going to happen.
SG: How long have you been working on moving into directing?
EK: I haven’t been working on it. It just happened. I’ve been writing and that was pretty much what I was focused on. I am a writer. I write scripts. I knew I wanted to direct but I hadn’t. It’s not like I worked on a short film, it’s not like I worked on a music video. I don’t have a director’s trajectory. It was something where I found a script, I want to do it. So my path to that was really quick, which is kind of funny because I didn’t think I was going to necessarily do it again. It was like I’m doing this now. I’m going to do it because I might never have a chance to do it again. One day when I’m teaching film I want to be like, “I did one movie.” Now I’ll probably do another one, but it wasn’t something that was a foregone conclusion like this is the career path I’m going to take. I wanted to write and eventually teach screenwriting.
SG: Have you taught classes?
EK: Yeah, like part time stuff here and there. I’ve done some mentoring. I taught at a school for the blind actually, the Braille Institute, I taught some creative writing there. One day I’d love to go back to UCLA because that’s where I took my extension course. I always wanted to be a teacher.
SG: Do you know what your next film will be?
EK: I’m going to do a crime movie. I’m going to write it with Pat and we’re going to do it with Keith Calder, the producer of You’re Next. It’ll be a heist film, hopefully we’ll do next year.
SG: Will Pat be in it also?
EK: Oh yeah. I’d love to put the rest of the gang in there if I can. We’ll see.
SG: How important was it to give Pat a leading role and cast David as a sort of character we don’t often get to see him as?
EK: All of them, because they’re really fun. I think David has the potential to play all sorts of fun, scary, darker characters. Just nobody offers them to him but hopefully that’ll change now. Pat was somebody that I wanted to work with for a long time. Great World of Sound, I thought he was really good and the fact that he was able to improv an entire film essentially with nonactors, I was like he’s going to be quick on his feet. He’d be real, be human. That was my whole goal with this, just to create some sort of reality so even though it gets really crazy and shocking and weird, it’s grounded in some way in something that’s recognizable.
SG: Was Sara a tough sell?
EK: It helped that we were using Pat and Pat kind of sold her on it. I think at first she was like, “This is a character that says nothing” and that’s not the most appetizing thing for anybody. But I think once she figured out that she was in control of everything, and that she was the puppetmaster then she was like, “Okay, this seems kind of interesting.” Then it was more of giving her a job to be a very active listener and observer. You have to watch these people and subtly influence them without them really knowing it. She loved that.
Cheap Thrills is on VOD starting February 21 and in theaters this March.