An interview with CHRIS K. DANIELS, director of “Scumbags”

For me, genre is everything and it’s nothing. It’s everything because it’s the bones that makeup what my story actually is. Though it’s also nothing, because I never let that constrain me. A horror is a horror, but isn’t it fun when a horror is also a complex character drama? Maybe a mystery too? The more depth and stray from a pure genre, the more range for a story. So that’s definitely the philosophy I had in mind on Scumbags. Though replace all that horror with crime, heist, action and an overall sense of stylized comedy. I knew this film would benefit from exaggerated style, speed and especially genre. I tried to give every independent portion of the story the most thorough ‘moments’ to embrace whatever genre it’s being in that moment, and then have a sense of cohesive transition between everything to keep the style and pacing alive throughout. I think genre cinema works best filled with elements of author cinema. Samuel Caswell gave me the luxury of these amazing, constantly exciting characters filled with their own specificities, which let me bring the sense of relationships, dynamics and psychologies to life. His immensely compelling writing made my job so much easier, allowing me to focus heavily on exaggerating the genre and stylizing the sequences most cohesively and intriguingly, through my pacing, my cinematography and my editing. Intensifying the feeling of the genre and the feeling of every given moment within this world of genre became my priority and my obsession through the duration of this production.

I’m so glad it kept you glued to the screen! That was my main goal in all this. Scumbags was such an intriguing script, that I knew I needed to do everything in my power to make every portion of the film the most compelling thing it could possibly be. So that’s where the never-ending notes in my journal came in. Just constantly-evolving ideas on style, pacing, tone and specific sequences. The amount of times I reworked my idea for the overarching style was incredible. I knew I wanted everything to push genre and sequences’ overall tone with speed and look. For speed, I eventually decided I wanted everything to happen in segments of building into delivery. So things would happen and progress really fast, frantically and intensely for short periods, leading directly into given periods of steadiness and nuance, where I could allow for character moments and plot development. So I created that rhythm for the overall pace of development within the film. This, mixed with my idea of cinematically continuous transitions with dialogue that I had these incredible actors perform very quickly, further developed the tightness of the film. I realized quickly that the dialogue and basis of the characters works best without a lot of hang-time. Just quickly delivering lines, with each given character quickly, intentionally moving onto their next moment in their almost selfish-style. Though with all that being said, I think this film truly came to life for me in the edit. I had all these intense ideas about filmmaking-style, and genre-exaggeration in pre-production and on set, but when I began editing, somehow even more ideas were coming at me. It was like I was directing the film all over again, but this time it was just me and a computer. Though this is when I started utilizing sound. I began creating a visual editing style that worked based on the transition of sound. And before I knew it, I was recreating the whole rhythm of the film again, letting dialogue pair with individual drum tracks that I was creating to build to transitions and to sink certain ending lines, then to express the intensity of one thing before quickly and exaggeratedly jumping to another. I was making all sorts of wild sound-based-pacing-movements, creating a faster, more controlled pacing of everything. Before I knew it, I was re-working dialogue, cutting portions out, re-ordering certain aspects, hyper-stylizing everything and creating a steady, OCD-based tightness that I was quickly falling in love with and becoming obsessed with all at the same time. My editing timeline for this project was immense, and of course, deeply satisfying. Though overall, the rhythm and tightness you spoke of was something that developed for me over months. From pre-production notes, to shot-list, to on-set, and especially, to the editing room.
I would say my sources are both literary and cinematographic, but mostly, it was through experimentation of everything and obsession with further-developing endlessly.

My job with the actors definitely varied thoroughly across this production, though I would say it was mostly a mix of two things: expressing the distinctiveness and specificities between the two characters and punching the dialogue into them, to bring it to life. We had quite a large amount of rehearsals before going into production, which is always a blessing. I met at Chad Comiter’s (Vincent) house weekly with Samuel Caswell (Marco) to rehearse everything over and over and over again. There, I mostly gave notes on pacing and on specificities of delivery to make each of these characters as compelling as they could be. We reworked lines, we blocked movement, we blocked reactions and we constantly changed and adjusted everything until we had scenes we were all proud of. On set, my job with the actors become even more interesting, because it was all that regular director stuff, focusing on performance and on nuance, as well as focusing on implementing a stylized camera into the midst. Being Director and Director of Photography is exciting in that way. My job became working with the actors as a human obsessed with pacing and style, and as a camera, obsessed with cohesiveness and overtly-specific body movements, blocking the performances of them in context to myself, as the perspective of a genre-based camera. My amazing actors were all just as in love with this film as I was during production, which really helped in bringing their characters to life. They understood the exaggerated style of the whole piece, but with them, I made sure to focus on the specifics of each character rather than the abstract ideas of realism vs fiction in this story. It was important for me to distinguish what it was that would bring the best performance out of them, and I realized it was all character-based, not world-based. That idea definitely helped in getting the uniqueness of each character down with the actors. My actors were also immensely talented and super easy to work with, which makes any director’s job even more of a pleasure.