Exclusive Interview with All Cheerleaders Die Co-Directors Lucky McKee & Chris Sivertson

Today, Lucky McKee & Chris Sivertson’s wickedly fun All Cheerleaders Die arrives in limited theaters and Daily Dead recently chatted with the filmmaking duo about their latest collaboration, which finds them revisiting a project they first worked on over a decade ago now.

During our interview with Sivertson and McKee, the pair also discussed why it was time to “lighten” things up a bit in their career, finding their talented cast of up-and-coming actors, the challenges of blending genres and tones for their high school supernatural/zombie/revenge mash-up and what kinds of plans they have for an All Cheerleaders Die sequel.

Great to speak with you guys today- the movie is a lot of fun and I thought you guys showed a lot of ambition and heart. I know that All Cheerleaders Die is an updated take on a project you guys originally did quite a bit ago- what made now the perfect time to revisit it and give it a polish?

Lucky McKee: I think we were both feeling  that we had been making these dark, heavy dark character movies for so long that we needed to do something different and something that was also a little more loose and fun. It was really time for us to tap back into that energy and our first impulse was to revisit Cheerleaders.

In fact, at the time I was actually about to get started on a noir film but I just couldn’t get my blood up for it. That’s when Chris and I realized that maybe this was really the right time to go back. We weren’t sure at first what we wanted to do- a sequel? Start from scratch? So we decided to just kind of remake it ourselves, but put in a bunch of new stuff to enhance the story and the character more and change some of the things we weren’t happy with the first time.

Chris, what has this whole process been like for you, to revisit something you worked on at an entirely different stage of your career?

Chris Sivertson: It’s been so surreal, but surreal in a good way. Lucky and I have collaborated on a few projects over the years but, it was always while we were living in separate states. Making All Cheerleaders Die now with him was this wholly different experience which was cool, too. For me, honestly, this whole process has been a breath of fresh air and I think a lot of the energy we were feeling while we were working on the movie is definitely up there on the screen.

I really appreciated all of the dark humor of All Cheerleaders Die and how you guys didn’t create these paper-thin characters either.  Even though the actors’ performances are all playing up certain stereotypes to a degree, the way you handled everything from the characters to the tonal shifts really shows that you guys put a lot of thought into All Cheerleaders Die without ever taking yourselves too seriously.

Lucky McKee: Thank you, that was a huge part of the process for us when we were casting All Cheerleaders Die was that we could find new, fresh actors that could become these stereotypes but were also multi-dimensional too. We had so many actors come in and read for us and did nothing but give us surface auditions. They weren’t interested in doing the work or putting in any effort so I had no interest in someone like that. I needed real actors who were going to find the dimensions to these characters and make them unique, rather than them coming in and patronizing our ‘cheerleader’ project.

The thing is that with this movie, there are barely any adults in it because if you think about it, teenagers live pretty insulated lives. The less time they can spend with adults the better so most of this movie was going to hinge on the performances of these relatively-untested talents and I think they all brought something special to the project.

Speaking of your cast, I thought Caitlin Stasey was really great in this as Maddy. We see her really evolve as a character and nothing about her arc was typical at all which was kind of cool.

Chris Sivertson: The movie is all about Maddy and her experiences. We see how she is set in her views on the popular kids of the school at the start of the movie and how this fantastic situation she’s put in changes her views once she begins to see them as real people. And Caitlin was really able to tap into all that-this essentially good girl who is struggling with her beliefs and must overcome her own pre-judgments all while getting a little revenge in the process.  Maddy is a really complicated character and we asked a lot of Caitlin for the role but she nailed it. She’s a character that’s hard not to like and the same goes for Caitlin.

Lucky McKee: She’s definitely a leading lady in the making and those are hard to find, especially in the indie horror movie world.

You kind of touched on this a little bit but I wanted to talk a bit more about how you crafted these characters because you treated them like real human beings which, sadly, doesn’t happen a lot in horror movies, especially when it comes to younger characters. I also thought how you guys treated the male characters, especially in a pro-female film, was really well done too. They easily could have become toss-away roles but they aren’t at all.

Lucky McKee: Tom (Williamson) who plays Terry was a big part of that- he just came in and owned this Alpha Male role and it worked so well against all the female performances. At the core though, we wanted these male and female roles to represent very different extremes of gender politics in high schools today- guys who are posturing and pretending to be something they’re not and women who try and out-dominate their male counterparts. We never wanted them to be caricatures at all or it would never have worked at all with the material.

Chris Sivertson: The original movie was more zombie-focused but what was always at the center of all that was these were still teenagers with real teenager problems. Really, that’s where a lot of the fun comes out in the story- playing up the teenage drama angle.

The ending for All Cheerleaders Die suggests that maybe this isn’t the last we’ve seen of these characters- have you guys thought about where a sequel would go then? Is that something you have in the works?

Lucky McKee: It really all depends on what gets together next. I definitely think we’d both want to do a sequel, though.

Chris Sivertson: There’s definitely tons more story to this world and if you look at what we did in this one, there are a lot of clues hidden in there about things you’d potentially see in a sequel. So it is something we’ve definitely thought about. We consider this our first act and the ideas only get bigger from here. Hopefully it connects with enough people so that we get the opportunity to make the sequel that we have in mind.