Jake Kennedy: Entering Devil’s Dungeon with Horror’s Latest Gruesome Find. By Brian Kirst
Talented English director Jake Kennedy has been bloody busy as of late. His Armageddon style, character driven gore fest Days of Darkness has recently made a blast on DVD and he has just completed filming on his latest chunk spewing opus Devil’s Dungeon.
You can check out the trailer for Devil’s Dungeon at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWWZ9Nymf1w after reading Kennedy’s exciting, detailed questions below. The generous Kennedy has also supplied exclusive stills from this star filled project for Horror Society – proving, once again, that the horror community is not only the most creatively fun but the most generous as well.
Brian: If you could create the ultimate musical soundtrack to fully accompany your grandest cinematic goals – who would it include? Lots of Iggy and the Stooges, Mary Martin humming that goat herd melody, Samantha Fox ‘wanting to have some fun’?
Jake: Maybe Sly Fox, but definitely not Samantha Fox! My goal with every film I do/am doing right now (horror), is to create a score that is so intertwined with sound design, that the score is sound design and the sound design is score. I managed to pull this off with my multi award winning short: We All Fall Down (www.weallfalldownthemovie.com). I found one guy who was both a sound designer and a musician. The results were just fantastic. My latest challenge is the movie I have just wrapped. It’s called ‘The Devil’s Dungeon’. It’s supposed to be a creepy ‘reality’ style horror film, shot in an old hospital. Because we are supposed to be watching raw footage that was shot there (Blair Witch Style), I can’t use a score. So my challenge is to create a creepy score out of sound design without letting on that I actually have a score in this film.
Brian: Do you have any directing influences that horror hounds might be unfamiliar with – The comedies of Billy Wilder, the stylistic fervors of Douglas Sirk? Tell all!
Jake: I can’t directly throw names out there and say they are my definitive influences. I was born and raised in England; spent 5 years in Australia and have now lived in the US for 5 years. So I have many different influences in my life that affect my attitudes and sensibilities towards writing, creating characters and my style of directing. I did a bunch of comedy shorts before venturing into horror and I definitely tap into my dry/off the wall British sense of humor influenced by such comedy shows as Monty Python, Benny Hill, ‘Allo Allo, Are you being served, The Office (UK), Faulty Towers, Little Britain, Viz comic.
Brian: Tell us a little about your acting days. Does that experience help you when dealing with performers on your own sets?
Jake: When I changed careers from the world of Advertising to Film, I knew I wanted to be a writer/Director. So in order to help master my craft, I took up acting for 2 years and went to classes twice a week, just so I knew what the actor’s journey was like and what went on in the mind of an actor. The idea being, that I could then relate to actors better and get better performances from them. So the first thing that happened was that I learnt a lot about ‘being an actor’. I even booked a few commercials and some film and TV work as a result! Now when I am directing, I really draw upon that experience when working with my actors. I also learnt one key thing. On a set, if your actor just isn’t delivering, you can’t teach them to act and you can’t make them act better. Yes you can guide them, do some exercises with them, or just relate what you want in a different way, but you can’t make them a better actor. So the key is to hire the best actors, let them know what you want and let them do their job. Casting is therefore key. And it’s been said a million times, casting is 80% of directing. It’s been said a million times because it’s very true.
Brian: Was the hit and run incident in “We All Fall Down” based on reality – something you read about or personally experienced? (I mean, even though they are worth extra points it’s not nice to run over old ladies!)
Jake: No not really. It’s just a device I thought up to get me into the story quickly. I guess it’s been done a bunch of times before and will continue to be done, as that’s one hell of a way to change/destroy someone’s life, both driver and victim’s. It makes for great character reversals in a matter of seconds.
Brian: Days of Darkness is fascinating for its grand character studies – the easily dissuaded romantic hero, the wild-eyed preacher’s son, the masculine self-sufficient gay man and the mothering porn star. Was this what drew you to the project or was it something else?
Jake: What drew me to the project was a producer who wanted to pay me to write an end of the word zombie script with the key briefing point, and I quote: ‘I just want everyone at the end of the movie drunk and killing zombies’!’ That set the tone of the movie for me so when I started sketching out a treatment, the decision was to go for bigger characters that fitted the tone of the movie more so than subtly nuanced characters more fitting to a Jane Austen adaptation.
Brian: I love lots of blood in my films. As long as there are geysers of red stuff (which is plentiful in D O D), I’m a happy camper. As an audience member, do you have a favorite gross out effect?
Jake: Not much grosses me out anymore. However, I was hiding behind my hand in the eyeball scene in Hostel and the leg amputation in The Ruins. That was gross. Films that create FX that are gratuitous just for the sake of it and have no other substance to them gross me out. The eyeball and leg scene was in context in an enjoyable movie, so enjoyable on a visceral holy-fuck level.
Brian: What was the most difficult thing about filming D O D – long hours, damp and cold, an uncomfortable set?
Jake: – Definitely the speed at which we were shooting. We had 90 pages to shoot in 12 days. We were shooting on film and that takes a lot of work, especially when FX are involved.
Brian: What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned from your film making experiences thus far?
Jake: Don’t work for other people if you can help it. On DOD, I was hired by 2 producers to write and direct. So it was my vision and all that, but at the end of the day, it was the producers own money funding the film. So when I had creative differences with them, guess who won? After 7 years of waiting for opportunity to strike for me (and it did once with DOD) I am now driven to be a master of my own destiny. I have an agent, various producers working for me as I’m attached to their projects and after 5 years, nothing has really happened for me except some good networking (and the opportunity given to me with DOD). So I am all about getting out there and making it happen for yourself. I learnt how to write screenplays so I could be the master of what I wanted to direct. Plus you have a much greater chance of getting to direct if you write the thing yourself.
Brian: If you were given an unlimited budget and resources – what would be your dream film project?
Jake: I guess it would be to find and direct a very cool script that is truly scary. I love to affect people that way. Not many films do it to me, but yet that’s what I want to do to people. It would probably be a cross between Ils (Them), The Orphanage, The Hills Have Eyes (re-make, I, not II!) and the Ring. I really want to work with the producer Roy Lee as he does a lot of these kinds of films.
Brian: Any words of advice (IE: Don’t fall asleep with your girlfriend under a rabid meteor shower) or future projects that you’d like to tell us about?
Jake: Advice: Create your own luck, be prepared, network, never give up and always use film maker clichés in interviews!
Future projects:
Back to The Devil’s Dungeon. It’s my latest writing / directing effort and is a cross between Wolf Creek and the House of Whipcord, shot in the style of Cloverfield and Children of Men. It’s about a demure young single mother who works for a battered women’s shelter, who is fed up with being in debt, so she reluctantly decides to become a stripper for a month in order to earn some fast cash. When she’s approached by a stripper friend to take her place to dance at a well-paid private party, she jumps at the chance of making the extra money. But little does she know, the private party is actually a malicious trap by a psychopathic killer with a vendetta against strippers, where her worst nightmares are about to begin. We are about to go into the final mix and I will shortly be looking for a suitable distributor who will appreciate this grizzly little picture with lots of boobs, blood and scares. The production process was tricky as we didn’t have a lot of money. Basically I had to try and make $1.5m dollars look like $3m. Having worked for a few horror production companies in the past, I slowly soaked up the best way to make the dollars go further than, let’s say, within the studio system. One of the things I didn’t skimp on was my actors. My goal was to try and cram as many ‘name actors’ into even the smallest roles of the film. This even extends right down to James Duval who play some random guy at a party who sleazes his way onto our heroine and eventually gets knocked out by the very sexy Eve Mauro. We also had Michael Rooker as a grizzled assassin. Then from the horror stables: Marieh Delfino (Jeepers Creepers II) as my lead. Then Tony Todd, Tracy Coogan (Zombie Honeymoon), Garrett Jones (lead in Automaton Transfusion), Jason Connery, Eve Mauro (Wicked Lake), Allison Lange (Single White Female II). Then we had Lochlyn Munro and Graham McTavish the bald mercenary from the latest Rambo film as my main bad guy. It was a joy to work with such an amazing cast. Hopefully a Lionsgate or Dimension Extreme will lap this up and release it theatrically just in time for X-mas! Guys grab those girls, some popcorn and sit back for a sexy, disturbing ride!!
