The Final Girls was recently released to theaters and VOD, and is available today on Blu-ray and DVD. For those that are interested in what went on behind-the-scenes, I recently caught up with director Todd Strauss-Schulson to talk about the movie's evolution before he got behind the camera, improv comedy on set, building the camp for the movie, and much more:
Can you talk a little bit about how this script came about, what it took to bring it to the screen and what changes you made?
Todd Strauss-Schulson: I was editing my first movie and thinking about what I would do second. These guys I went to college with, Mark Fortin and Josh Miller, are these really cool writers. They're big horror fans—Mark especially is really deep, deep into horror stuff—and had written a script.
Eight years prior to this, we went to college together in L.A. We would hang out, get drinks or dinner. We would always sort of pitch ideas back and forth, things to work on or movie ideas or whatever. Eight years ago, he just soft pitched me, "What if kids got sucked into Friday the 13th and had to survive the movie?"
I didn't hear anything else about it for a long time. I'm editing another movie and they send me the first draft of the script. I read it and I was like, "This is something so fucking cool and cinematic. I could flex my muscles and there's such a huge heart in this movie." Even when I read it the first time, I never felt like it was a horror movie to me.
When I read it the first time, I was like, "This is Back to the Future." Back to the Future is not a sci-fi movie, right? But there's a time machine, there's all this time travel stuff, there's a crazy scientist. It has all the things that would be in a sci-fi movie, but it's not really sci-fi. Is it a comedy? Is it an adventure? It's just kind of a cool story that feels pretty joyful and is real entertainment. I just started to think of this movie in those terms.
Was there anything that specifically drew you into the director's chair for The Final Girls?
Todd Strauss-Schulson: Then I got involved with the script and was like, "I want to do this. I know how to do this. I feel like this is the thing for me." Five months before I read the script, my father had passed away. I went off and made my movie a month after that happened. It was a pretty intense moment in my life.
The idea of making this follow-up movie that was going to now deal with the death of a parent was attractive to me. The personal part of it was that I dream about my father all the time. My father was my best friend and he was really supportive of all my filmmaking. It was really a shame that he just missed me getting my first movie by two months. I'd dream about him, so in a way he was still alive. It's a nice thing. This idea of your parent coming back in your dreams and wishing you could spend one more day with a parent was really a huge part of my life.
That's what the movie's about. It's about a girl who gets stuck in a dreamworld with one more chance to see her dead mom. All of the horror stuff just felt fun, clever. The smart idea was can you tell a story about grief and sadness and loss in the middle of a genre that trivializes those things, where's there's bloodlust? Where those are the big laughs, those are the moments. The grosser, the better. That just seemed like a really smart cinematic conceit to me.
The Final Girls does a great job of balancing comedy and horror with those more dramatic character moments.
Todd Strauss-Schulson: Over the course of three years as we were looking for the money, we worked on the script, all of us together. There was a shaping involved, there was trying to get a lot of comedy in there. The idea's really funny. One of the reasons why movies like Back to the Future, Pleasantville, and Purple Rose work is because there's levity. They're funny. My hope was that you could be laughing throughout the first hour of the movie. If it could be a cool, clever, unique comedy, then by the end of the movie, you'll be able to cry. It'll tenderize you enough that you'll be able to have some feeling instead of it being this mercenary, violent scare.
I worked a lot on that, and then I worked a lot on set pieces and action and a lot of the clever meta stuff. Just as a cinephile, I'm a kid that didn't do homework and just watched movies. I would just wander around West Coast Video trying to watch every movie in a row. That's how I lived my life for eight years in high school. I'll just start in this section, try to watch all of them without any discretion.
The idea of the movie's the antagonist. If you get sucked into a movie, you can see the credits and that would be cool. You could cue flashbacks and you would know you're in slow motion and the movie could loop on you. That was all really clever, visual, playful stuff. I also put a lot of that in the movie.
Focusing on the comedy side of things, it seems that there was a lot of improv and a lot of fun had on the set. Can you talk about how much of what we see on the screen was improv and how those actors helped improve the comedy of the movie?
Todd Strauss-Schulson: There's a lot of work on the jokes. Once the structure was down, there was a lot of dialogue pinch-up. I went off and sat with a lot of my friends who are comedy writers. That's mostly my world. I'd go in and I'd have the construction of the jokes. It's like, "Someone say this." Thomas and Adam are going to have a conversation. That's like Heat. It's like seeing Robert De Niro and Al Pacino go for it. We know their points of view. What are the funniest things to talk about? I'd have a lot of friends pitch on those jokes and they'd all write up their funny jokes and I'd put them in the script.
Because Thomas and Adam are friends, and Alia and Angela, and Malin is so funny, I would sometimes send them pages and have them write in their own voices. When we got to set we had a lot of funny jokes. A lot of that stuff was pre-done and then we would have everyone pour their brains into it. On set every now and again it gets kind of loose. Thomas is just a fucking hero with improv. Thomas and Adam particularly get a lot of fun stuff. There'd be a section where I'd be like, "All right, guys. We know what this is supposed to be. Just go say whatever you want to do." A lot of it was written and a lot of it was written even by the cast in their voices.
One thing I found interesting from our previous talk was how you built the camp from the ground up. Can you tell our readers more about the process?
Todd Strauss-Schulson: Yeah, we had an amazing production team. We didn't have a ton of money to make this movie or a ton of time. Katie Byron is this little girl genius, wonderful creature. She showed up, we wanted this movie to be really beautiful, which is weird because you're making this movie that takes place in the '80s. Those movies aren't particularly beautiful and the coverage isn't so stylish.
At first I thought if you were going to go orthodox with what it was like if you got stuck in Friday the 13th Part 4, there might not be a very pretty movie to look at. It'd be kind of washed-out and muted. I was like, "What if it was just like Wizard of Oz? What if you get stuck in this hyper-colored movie world and everything is insanely beautiful?" Let's go that direction. That'll be a lot more fun. We'll go with staying beautiful and then we'll make it feel like a dream of a camp from the '80s.
We built that huge cabin and we designed it first on a computer to house the motion control rig that the booby trap sequence is shot with. We constructed that sequence and then built the cabin around it to house the gear we had to use for it. These girls had eight days to build that cabin from the ground up. It still is standing there at that camp in Baton Rouge. It's dressed full of [stuff from] dumpster diving and estate sales from people down there.
It does have a lot of the color schemes of Friday, those mint greens and all that stuff. We wanted it to feel like it was a carbon copy of those movies. A dream of a dream of an '80s movie—a little bit ethereal. There's a lot of sky replacement, tons of greens. There's flowers everywhere that are just so poppy and colorful and sort of hyper-beautiful. That's what we were trying to do, to make it feel like maybe our lead is in a dreamworld, that there's something weirdly ethereal about this. Doing beautiful action and beautiful violence would be a bit more enjoyable than just mercenary, dark, gritty, hostile, torture porn. I was like, "Who cares about that anymore? Can it be beautiful?"
Spoiler Warning: The movie definitely sets up a sequel. Is this something you've seriously planned out and is Sony interested?
Todd Strauss-Schulson: I know Josh and Mark have ideas for sequels. The cast and the crew love each other. We still have text chains. I love them so much that I felt like I was the head camper and they were my little camper. I think we'd all love to do it again and there are ideas floating around. It is constructed to have them be stuck in the sequel to Camp Bloodbath. That could be hilariously fun to come up with that. I think really this movie just has to financially prove that there is an appetite for a sequel.