Tribeca 2017 Interview: Clay Staub, Shawn Ashmore and Amanda Schull Discuss DEVIL’S GATE

Last week, co-writer/director Clay Staub celebrated the world premiere of Devil’s Gate, his mysterious sci-fi thriller which pits a pair of FBI agents (played by Shawn Ashmore and Amanda Schull) against a small-town farmer, after his family is abducted and nothing is as it seems. Daily Dead caught up with Staub, Ashmore, and Schull to hear more on the project, and they discussed their approach to the material, how being isolated in Winnipeg during production was an asset for them while working on Devil’s Gate, and more.

I'd love to start off with you, Clay, and hear about where the idea for this story came from. As somebody who's driven through North Dakota and South Dakota and Montana, those wide-open states where everything feels so vast and wide open, I could see how that might make the perfect location for a horror movie. What was it about North Dakota in particular, for you, that made it the perfect landscape to tell this story?

Clay Staub: One of the things I ultimately needed was a landscape that was as flat as possible, and the reason I wanted that is because I wanted everything—manmade structures, everything—to break the horizon. I wanted it to have a lot of weight to the sky, because it plays a big part in this film, and I wanted it just to have this awesome, epic scale. Because again, this is an independent film, but it still has to produce big quality results, and I knew that in this film, it is all about the landscape and how you structure and even how you shoot it, and it was very important that the landscape become a character in the movie.

Once you see the movie, I think you'll understand why it is what it is. It's very threatening. I know it sounds weird, but it's very threatening because there's nowhere to go. It's almost like looking at the ocean. If you were on a farm in the middle of nowhere in North Dakota, and you were trapped there, where would you go? And once you realize the full effect of the big picture, then you realize the threat of the environment itself. I'm talking non-specifically here, because I can't give away too much, but it’s almost as important as the characters in the movie.

Now, Shawn and Amanda, both of you are no strangers to the genre world, and I'm curious, was there something in particular when you read this script that really hooked you from the beginning?

Shawn Ashmore: Yeah, first and foremost, I thought I knew where Devil's Gate was going when I started reading it, and I pride myself on being able to predict where a script is going. I thought I knew where Devil's Gate was going, until I didn't. And as a fan of genre filmmaking, that was exciting for me. To be a part of a story that I didn't necessarily see coming is exciting, and that's what I want to experience as an audience member.

And also, Colt Salter, the character I play, I just liked him, and I hadn't quite played a character like him before. He has a real strong moral compass, and there were some really important moments in this film where Colt stands up and has to make some really interesting choices. He is also forced to go outside of his comfort zone in a very major way, and look at the situation he thought he understood from a totally different perspective, and I thought that was kind of interesting to explore as a character and as an actor. I just thought that would be a fun ride.

Not to mention the book that Clay provided, because he's an incredible artist. He visually created and represented the world in his paintings and in his artwork along with the script, so I understood visually the world that we were going to be in, and that was a huge selling point for me. I thought if we could even put half of that on the screen, half of what he was representing in his artwork, the film was going to look incredible. And to be honest, it looks exactly like the way that he envisioned it and represented it, and that is amazing to have a film translate so purely from the script and from the visual standpoint at the beginning to the end result. That's well-thought-out and well-planned, and a director that knows exactly what he wants, and that's very important and was very cool.

Amanda Schull: I agree with what all of Shawn said, but also, for me, Agent Francis was a person very different from anyone I had played before, which was very exciting. And she's put in circumstances that she thinks are one thing and change dramatically several times throughout the entire script, which is really interesting and challenging as an actor to try to do justice for and rise to.

I also really liked that while she may come across as a very strong, confident, capable, intelligent woman—which she is—she has a lot of insecurities that she is masking, and reasons for those insecurities and flaws like any other human. To try to intricately play those experiences up with these fantastical situations was a real pleasure, and not to mention the fact that the three chuckleheads that I got to work with every day were a lot of fun, too.

Clay, did you guys shoot this in North Dakota?

Clay Staub: We were up in Winnipeg, actually. Or “Winterpeg,” as we called it. And it was really cold. One thing that happened, when I was doing the paintings and laying out the groundwork, it was so strong in terms of design and what the execution would be, but we never found the farm. We had to build it. So we were building in winter, and you could imagine how cold that could get. It was just brutal.

Amanda Schull: Yeah, we're an LA-based group here [laughs].

When you’ve got a cast and crew that’s mostly LA-based, do you feel like going up to Winnipeg and isolating yourselves away from your normal community helped you in terms of making this movie and adding to the atmosphere that you were building throughout production?

Clay Staub: Yeah, absolutely. I can tell you, the entire environment we worked in was an absolute influence on the characters. Even if it just rubbed off a little bit, every one of our actors felt what I felt once we had built the set and the farm was there, because we were in the middle of nowhere. It absolutely helped with the entire structure of the film, and because of the farm and that environment, there's so much texture in this film. When you see it, I think you'll get my point. Shawn and Amanda could chime in on how they felt being out there, but it subconsciously gets to you. There's no doubt.

Shawn Ashmore: As much as I hate being away from home and away from loved ones, I feel that being on location is beneficial for actors. You bond quickly. It's not like, "Okay, the workday's done, now we all go home to our families and we're distracted from the work." All of us—Milo, Bridget, Amanda—we hung out all the time. We would go to dinners, we would be talking about the characters, or we would be talking about the upcoming scenes for the next week.

So I think that on an independent film, where you don't have a ton of time to shoot, every moment feels almost like rehearsal. It always helps. I felt that being away in Winnipeg was great for the film.

Amanda Schull: What I'll add to that is also working out at that farm that they created for us, we had no cell service and we had no WiFi, so we spent all of our downtime talking, which is kind of a novel concept nowadays on set. I don't know how the casting gods smiled on us for this as well as they did, and I shouldn't speak on behalf of everyone because they're not all here, but I will say that from my perspective, I really liked my co-workers a lot. It was really a wonderful gift we were given to be isolated for that chunk of time.

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In case you missed it, check out our previous coverage of the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival.