Damon LeMay: Primary Resident of Zombie Town. Interview by Brian Kirst
After toiling behind the scenes of others’ productions, talented writer/director/producer Damon LeMay has recently given the world something of his very own – a terrifically inventive riff on the zombie film – Zombie Town (available from MTI Home Video). In Zombie Town an out of control slug invasion turns the small town of Otis into a zombie wasteland and ultimately heralds the beginning of what promises to be a terrific career for LeMay. LeMay recently took a few moments to take a bite out of a few questions – so please get ready to take a limb slung, artery punched journey below. Then be sure to check out www.zapatosfilms.com or www.edgewoodstudios.com for further information.
Brian: Do you have any directorial influences that the common horror film fan might be surprised by? Douglas Sirk? Billy Wilder? Gene Kelly? —
Damon: As a writer/director, the direct influences on Zombie Town are a number of films that will surprise no one. Evil Dead, Dead-Alive, Night of the Creeps. This film is very much my stab at the over-the-top, splatter-filled wing of the horror world – The type of film that really revels in the chaos and anarchy of it all. As a producer, however, my biggest influence was actually The Terminator. I became really interested in how James Cameron was able to create the illusion of a far bigger budget by investing heavily in a small number of effects scenes. By opening the film in the future with a big battle scene, he promised that the film had the ability to deliver the goods. As a result, the audience didn’t even notice that for the next 45 minutes, there was almost no effects work outside of gunfire. It was a pretty basic chase movie. The idea was to tide the audience over until his next big scene (removing the eye) and then the big finale with the revealed endoskeleton. I think these three scenes represented almost half the movie’s budget.
I definitely emulated this formula, by spending huge amounts of time and money on three or four key scenes. Probably half of our budget and schedule went into just the opening camp scene, the bingo parlor, the warehouse party, and the finale.
Brian: You’ve worked behind the scenes for quite a number of horror film productions. Which one had the most influence on you when you took the directing reins, yourself, for Zombie Town?
Damon: I had to IMDB myself to answer this one. Looking back, most of my horror credits have come after we completed principle photography on Zombie Town. The one which did precede my film was Edgewood Studios’ Ice Queen. Ice Queen was not a direct influence on Zombie Town artistically, but was a huge influence on it logistically. David Giancola (president of Edgewood) had been moving towards the idea of making smaller films with a very stripped down crew. The idea was to be a leaner, meaner machine. I took that job mainly to see if it worked, if you could make a film on that kind of schedule with that few crew members. Ice Queen showed me that you could do it, and being there allowed me to observe that machine and see where we could take the formula and improve it for Zombie Town. I essentially got to learn from mistakes which I didn’t have to pay for. That was invaluable.
Brian: You’ve worked on some films with a powerful sense of mood such as Legend of Lucy Keyes and Black Cadillac. While the films might not always be the best, did this stylization help inform your own work as a director?
Damon: I would not, in truth, say that these films have been a direct influence on my work with Zombie Town. I will say, however, that on each and every project I work on, no matter the genre, I try to watch the director and see what they’re doing. It’s great to see what people are trying and, most importantly, what’s working and what isn’t. Everyone has such a different approach to the challenges of directing, so it’s interesting to see things you wouldn’t have tried, to absorb effective techniques and ideas, and to avoid the many, many mistakes people make.
Brian: You seemed to be very involved in every area of the creation of Zombie Town -including the special effects. Has make-up (etc:) been something you’ve played around with on your own – or do you just leave that stuff to the professionals?
Damon: Before I say anything, I should mention that the quality of the effects in Zombie Town owes absolutely everything to the work Mike Turner and his team did for us on the film. He designed virtually everything and the whole team worked non-stop for the entire shoot. I owe all of them a lot. – Having said that, I have never done much in the way of make-up or effects on my own, but do feel I understand the craft and went into the project with some fairly strong opinions on what I wanted. In particular I was very interested in mixing effects so that we could try and throw the audience off to what we were doing. An example would be the chainsaw gag where we combined:
1. A real chainsaw and a fake leg
2. A real leg and a chainsaw that had had a chunk of the blade machined out to fit around the leg and
3. A stump wired to pump blood.
The idea is to cut between a shot the audience will assume is a fake leg and another shot where we pan from the leg up to the actor’s performance, implying a real leg. We talked a lot about cut points in designing these effects and what we needed to achieve with each effect. So while I was not too involved in the creation of the individual effects, I was very involved in planning out the sequences and how the various effects should work together.
Brian: You claim in the special features for Zombie Town that small town life (and the desire to stay or get out) informed the script for Zombie Town. Were there any other influences or events that also helped you form the script?
Damon: In truth, if there was any one thing that influenced the script it was thinking back to when I was young and would watch horror movies on late night TV. Particularly those nights when the parents went out and I, often with my little sister, would watch whatever terrible movie showed up on HBO. What I really wanted was to make a movie with enough charm, camp, and humor that people would look back on it with all the fondness with which I look back on those movies.
Brian: What did you find that your working style with the actors was like on Zombie Town? Did you allow them a lot of input or did you already have a clear idea of what you wanted in your head?
Damon: This was probably the area where I had the biggest learning curve. I understood the technical aspects of making movies. I understood scheduling. I understood budgeting. What I didn’t have was any experience working with actors, those strange creatures with whom I’d shared so many film sets. It took some time to figure out how best to communicate my wishes. It also took some time to realize how different their needs were. One actor can require a lot more (or less) time and communication than the one next to him or her. – In the end, I came to really enjoy the process of working with the actors and particularly the back and forth as we worked out scenes. Perhaps my favorite experience of the film as a director was a day when we had a dialogue scene on the schedule which was, as written, truly terrible. It was badly written and did not at all fit the direction we’d taken with the character of Jake. Thankfully we had a little time and Adam Hose and I completely tore the scene down and reworked it. Once we had the skeleton worked out, we brought in Brynn Lucas to help flesh out her dialogue and the three of us managed to take a scene destined for the cutting room floor and make it work.
Brian: What was it like working with the women in the bingo hall scene in Zombie Town? Was this brilliant scenario as fun to film as it was to watch?
Damon: In a word, fantastic! All of them, and particularly Peg Dombro, were so enthusiastic about the work and playing the roles. We really could not have asked for more out of the whole bingo scene cast. They did such great things with the dialogue and then Peg was such fun as the zombie Marge. It’s not every septuagenarian who’ll eat a fake arm and let you shoot them a dozen times.
Brian: What was the most difficult sequence to bring to fruition on the film? I would think it would have been the final water soaked finale. Was it something else though?
Damon: The climax was without a doubt the most difficult scene of the film. We had the exterior chase with the ice-cream truck, the warehouse interior, all the extras to wrangle, an actor to disembowel, a set to flood, and all of this with gunfire, stunt-work, and an explosion. All said and done I think we spent four or five of our twenty-one days of principle photography on this section of the film alone with at least three days of additional 2nd unit work. For me this was also a really gratifying scene to film. Not only am I so proud of how it all came together, but probably 80% of the zombies in this section of the film are friends and family. Where you see a mob of zombies, I see my aunts and uncles, my sister, my parents. I could never possibly say thank you to these people enough. Everyone drove at least an hour and a half to stand out in the cold and the rain for hours in exchange for no pay whatsoever. Without them we would have had no climax. Their generosity made the film.
Brian: Lastly, any future plans, words of wisdom (IE: Don’t sit on a toilet when there is a mutant slug invasion in progress) that you’d like to leave us with? And thanks – this has been an undead-like pleasure!
Damon: In terms of future plans, I have recently finished a new script in the horror genre. It feels like a big leap forward from Zombie Town and I’m very excited about. I think I’ve grown a lot as a writer and would love the chance to see if I’ve grown as much as a director. Hopefully I’ll be able to pull the new project together before too long.
As far as words of wisdom go, I would just encourage people to keep supporting independent horror. I know that for Zombie Town, and a lot of other smaller titles, the big challenge is getting noticed in such a crowded marketplace. So if you see a film and you like it, tell people. Word of mouth is the lifeblood of this part of the industry. When it comes to the independents, fans have a huge power over what gets made by what they champion and support, so help the good ones succeed and more will be able to follow. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me and, most of all, thanks to all the fans who’ve been renting, buying, and just generally supporting Zombie Town here and around the world.
