Dances With Films 2017 Interview: Writer/Director Tyler Savage Talks INHERITANCE

Later today, writer/director Tyler Savage’s psychological thriller Inheritance will celebrate its world premiere at the 2017 Dances With Films Festival in Los Angeles. Daily Dead had the opportunity to speak with Savage earlier this week, and he discussed the inspirations behind his story, collaborating with his stellar ensemble, and more.

Look for more on Inheritance and some of the other great film selections at DWF 2017 in the coming week.

Let's start at the beginning, Tyler. Can you discuss what inspired your story for this, because it's a slow burn, but I love that stuff. I love any movie that pulls the layers back a little bit, and slowly reveals its hand. Obviously, family is the core theme to this movie, but I would love to hear about what inspired your approach. It's a really fascinating look into the things that bind us to these really horrific tragedies.

Tyler Savage: Well, I used to work in development at Warner Bros., and then after that I worked for Terrence Malick for like four years, and it was these hilariously contrasted experiences in the film world of trying to do something that's totally commercial, versus trying to do something that's almost decidedly not commercial in any way. With this, I was really trying to do something that was centered around a theme that was personal to me, while approaching the story through a genre framework. The idea at the core of the movie was how, for better or worse, we sometimes feel trapped or controlled by our own genetic history or our own family history. My father has a history of alcoholism on his side of the family, and my mother's side has a long history of some mental illness and depression, so those were themes that were pretty personal to me.

But I also spent the last few years as a screenwriter, so I've written a lot of more traditional horror movies and thrillers. So, for this, I was trying to find a way to bridge the gap between my more mainstream genre sensibilities, while focusing on themes that were more personal to me. And also, on the cultural level, it was three ideas of inheritance. The literal inheritance of a house, and then our genetic or hereditary inheritance, and then also cultural inheritance, that we all are descended from places and things and people that we would be made very uneasy about if we were faced with the facts or the harsh realities of past times. So that was the gestation of the whole thing, and then it was also collaborating with a lot of people that I had worked with in the past, and figuring out what our resources were and building a movie that seemed achievable.

What's interesting to me is considering where we are in our sociopolitical landscape, there's a lot to relate to in this movie, because so many of us have had to wake up to things that we didn't realize about our own families and people that we were close to, and their ideals. And now, some people have to make that conscientious decision to break free of those horrific ideals. Maybe I’m projecting a little bit, but it seemed like an interesting parallel.

Tyler Savage: That's awesome. That's really one of the things that we were going through in editorial incessantly. My editor Shane [Hazen] and I were really trying to see how much we could bring forward those ideas. So that's really nice to hear. Dash [Hawkins], one of my producing partners, he's from Louisiana, he’s part of an old Louisiana family, and his grandmother grew up on a plantation. That's obviously something that he's not proud of or doesn't advertise necessarily, but we all have these things in our past.

My family is actually fifth-generation Californian, and my mother's side of the family came out to California in the 1840s. So even though I don't know of necessarily any horrors that they perpetrated themselves, it's very unlikely that they could have survived those times and had the success and prosperity that they did without engaging in some potentially tough things that would be hard for me to reconcile if I knew the details of [them]. I started to research more of that time period and really found out about the Native American genocide in California, which is staggering.

The population of Native Americans inside of a 70-, 80-year period, just before the Gold Rush, went down by hundreds of thousands, largely because of plague, of different diseases. But also because the settlers would use Native Americans as target practice, and they would kidnap children and keep them as their concubines after they murdered their parents. These horrifically heinous things were kind of common practice for decades, before the federal government really took any ownership.

So, without trying to make it too fine of a point, that cultural inheritance of being a Western person, in America especially, at least for me, was always a central aim of the story.

Chase [Joliet] obviously is front and center in this movie, and he's really fantastic to watch and follow. And so much of what's going on with his character are in those moments when he's not even saying anything, which I thought he did a really fantastic job with. Can you talk about working with him and helping him find the core to his character, Ryan?

Tyler Savage: That was a really interesting process for both of us, because, back to that idea of how acceptable you want the movie to feel, there were times when I felt insecure about having Ryan be this more taciturn character. But something from the very beginning that made sense to Chase and I is that this is a guy who doesn't really know himself, and he was raised adopted and always felt sort of displaced. And in Isi (his character’s fiancée, played by Sara Montez), he found a home and he found some acceptance and he found love, but he's got a lot of anger under the surface. I think that's why he's such a soft-spoken character, and it bubbles up at times.

But yeah, that was the whole concept around it. Chase and I are longtime close friends. We worked together in Austin on a couple movies, me as an assistant and him as a PA [production assistant] on some projects, and he's got this still-waters-run-deep energy to him, this brooding, working-class intensity that I really wanted to play with. I liked the idea of taking a guy who's not dumb by any stretch of the imagination, but he's not an intellectual, and he's not an overly analytical person, and throwing him into this seemingly dream scenario, and seeing him flounder, because he gets in over his head.

So it was a combination of working with the man I knew Chase to be, and also trying to allow Ryan the character to lead our curiosity, to make it more experiential and have him be somebody who never had the answers. That's something in our personal lives that Chase and I also related to a lot.

One other thing in terms of casting that I have to applaud you on is that you used Dale Dickey, and I just love her. I fell in love with her during True Blood, and any time she pops up in anything, I just think she has such a spark to her. And yet Effy is sort of this minor character, but I almost could have watched a whole movie about her character, because she’s that engaging.

Tyler Savage: I definitely think the casting was intentional, because Dale's face is automatically a mislead, cause you see her, and you're like, "Oh, something's going on under the surface here." And I just love that.

But when I first met with Dale, she was just playing something in that show Vice Principals, where she was basically dressed like a man, with a mullet. She's like, "I'm always portraying crackheads or methheads, these terrible, murderous people." So I think it was fun for her to be able to play somebody who's kind of chipper and a little yappy that was against her type a little bit. But the whole thing came about because of Ashley Spillers, who plays Ryan's sister. She was on Vice Principals with Dale, and after reading the script, she was like, "I feel like Dale would have so much fun with the realtor character." So Dale was somebody that, when we put the movie together, would have seemed out of our reach, because it was not an expensive movie, and everybody was paid scale, so it was that personal connection that got me that lunch with Dale, and she thought she'd have fun with it and came on. It was great.

I know this is your feature film debut in terms of directing. So how great did it feel to find out when you got into Dances With Films, and get to enjoy your world premiere here in Los Angeles?

Tyler Savage: Oh, yeah. After all of the anxiety and anticipation that is post-production and the submission process, it was great. It was greatly relieving and exciting to get into Dances With Films, especially because I'm from LA. Back in the ’90s, when they re-released the original Star Wars films, I saw them all at the Chinese Theater. I saw the whole Godfather trilogy at the Chinese Theater. I've been going there my whole life. So it's a pretty surreal thing to think we're going to be playing in that 1200-seat house. And I know that I will never see this movie in a more grand, amazing way than that, so it's a pretty spectacular gift.