SLIFF 2017 Interview – Blake Eckard: Writer and Director of COYOTES KILL FOR FUN

Blake Eckard’s COYOTES KILL FOR FUN screens Saturday, November 4th at 7:00pm at The Tivoli Theater (6350 Delmar Blvd, St. Louis) as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. Ticket information can be found HERE.

Blake Eckard’s  BACKROAD BLUES screens Sunday, November 5th at 1:30pm at the .ZACK (3224 Locust St.). The BACKROAD BLUES screening is a free event.

In COYOTES KILL FOR FUN, the latest from Northwest Missouri indie filmmaker and SLIFF favorite Blake Eckard, a backwoods babysitter agrees to help an abused mother of two escape her lunatic boyfriend, but his psychotic brother is headed back to the area, and he has a fraught history with everyone involved. Filmed over three years in Missouri, Montana, and LA, “Coyotes” had a long gestation: Two-thirds was first shot back in March 2014, and a trio of cinematographers — Eckard, St. Louisan Cody Stokes, and American-indie legend Jon Jost — passed the baton behind the camera. Despite the prolonged production, “Coyotes” maintains a totally consistent — and utterly original — vision. The film features such Eckard regulars as Tyler Messner, Frank Mosley, Roxanne Rogers, and Arianne Martin. Gary Topp, co-founder of the distribution company Films We Like and a devoted supporter of Eckard’s work, writes of “Coyotes”: “I think it is his most accomplished to date; skilled, intriguing and provoking, with authentic performances and some phenomenal staging. It also has a palpable atmosphere of danger that hangs on; I recalled the original ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre.’ But ‘Coyotes’ stands alone. (Blake’s) films can’t be confused with anyone else’s, and I can’t believe he’s still an untapped talent.” SLIFF also screens Eckard’s second film, 2006’s BACKROAD BLUES which makes its belated Missouri debut. When broke, constantly spieling drifter Chip (Tyler Messner) has a chance encounter with Kent (Alec Jennings), a Bootheel resident who’s up north earning money to send home to his wife and daughter, he mercilessly exploits their uneasy friendship. After Chip’s intrusive behavior causes the pair to be given the boot from the farm where they’re working, the odd couple embarks on a road trip that ultimately leads to disaster. Shot over a mere seven days on 13 rolls of re-canned 16mm film stock — which allowed for just over two hours in raw running time, leaving virtually no opportunity for retakes — “Backroad Blues” was a true DIY production, with the writer/director rolling both camera and sound, and the two actors essentially serving as the entire crew. Calling BACKROAD BLUES “a minor masterpiece,” Dennis Grunes, author of “A Short Chronology of World Cinema,” writes that “‘Backroad Blues’ is hilariously absurd and tragic — like America itself.”

Blake Eckard took the time to answer questions about his film for We Are Movie Geeks 

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman October 24th 2017

Tom Stockman: Did you grow up a movie buff?

Blake Eckard: Oh yes I love the movies. I loved all the movies the budding filmmakers loved. I love Ray Harryhausen, just fascinated by films like THE 7^th VOYAGE OF SINBAD  and THE VALLEY OF GWANGI. STAR WARS certainly, and I remember seeing POLTERGEIST when I was very young, and MAD MAX. I like edgier, tougher movies when I was young, probably younger than I should’ve been watching those. I made my first film when I was seven years old. It was a seven-year-old version of ALIEN. Now I feel like time has gone by in a blink and I’m still in Stanberry making movies. It has nothing to do with wanting to go to a city. You go to LA when you get invited or you go there and you want to commit suicide.  Everyone out there is trying to break in.

TS: These characters in your film are so vivid. Do you based these characters on people that you know there in rural Missouri?

BE: No, they come from my imagination. They come from stories that are made up. I’m not doing documentaries even in a disguised manner. I’ve heard it suggested that I have based these on local stories and I don’t know where that comes from. I think people assume that they make what’s around me but that’s not accurate. BUBBA MOON FACE was the result of having a child, But I didn’t know any of those people. That would be a rough crowd to hang around with.

TS: I think part of it is your actors. They’re so natural and naturalistic. Where do you find these actors?

BE: Everybody in COYOTES KILL FOR FUN, I brought here. I cast all my film. COYOTES is my sixth feature film. I’ve probably made over 200 shorts if you count all the crap I made when I was young. Everyone from COYOTES was brought in. The one exception would be Tyler Messner, who now lives in LA, but he grew up here with me and I’ve known him my whole life. He moved to LA a long time ago to pursue acting. I’ve cast everybody from my third film on. The first two features I made were cast with locals from Stanberry Missouri. I got to the point where if I really wanted to bring these pictures up a notch, the acting needed to be brought up a notch as well. Synapse Films has decided to release a box set of all of my films. Synapse Films is like the Criterion of cult so I couldn’t be in better hands. Physical media seems to be going away, but Synapse wants to put all my films in a box set.

TS: Oh sure, Synapse is a great lebel. I ordered their Blu-ray of SUSPIRIA recently.

BE: Oh yeah, I drove to Kansas City to see that on the big screen just last month.

TS: Yeah they showed it in St. Louis last month too. It did look amazing.

BE: What a great restoration with that.

TS: I can see some horror influence in COYOTES. Who are some of the horror movie directors that have influenced you as a filmmaker?

BE: Probably the biggest are the two that just died this year, George Romero and Toby Hooper. What I recognized in those guys a long time ago was the fact that they had each made a movie, and in their cases the movie that made their careers as directors, totally outside the system and in the middle of nowhere. Rural Pennsylvania and we rural Texas.  Back before anything was shot in Texas, before Austin was a big film town. I recognize the outside nature of that. I was probably 11 years old when I saw both of those films. TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE felt like it could’ve been filmed right here, right in the back room of a gas station that was already familiar to me. Both of those films scared me and both of those films were made by natural born filmmakers. You could feel how they were kind of handmade.

TS: Where did you come up with the origins of this story that you were telling in COYOTES KILL FOR FUN?

BE: I think it’s the result of having kids. The two small children in the movie are mine. with BUBBA MOON FACE and GHOST OF THE EMPIRE PRAIRIE and now COYOTES, I honestly think I was creating a bigger picture than I was aware of at the time. Now I look at those as an unofficial trilogy of films, ones that are thematically linked. And someways they’re about my kids. I think BUBBA MOON FACE is the genesis, the beginning, The story of an innocent child being born into the wrong family. GHOST OF THE EMPIRE PRAIRIE is about the abused child who grows up to become the adult abuser. COYOTES is revelation. It’s fire and brimstone, the end of the line. You’re not going to get away from these crimes committed.  What goes around comes around. There’s no escape. I think that’s what this is. Everyone may take something different from it but it is the end of the line time with coyote. It’s a very dark and bleak film even though I’m not a cynical person.  To be honest, I think I’m ready to move on. The last three films have been pretty heavy. It’s not me saying that the world sucks, It’s just troubling material. Being a father changes your whole world.

TS: Do you ever break away from your script and let the cast improvise?

BE: Yes, I let them improvise, but I like to work with a script. I’ve never started the camera without having a clue as to what’s coming. I definitely approach filmmaking as a craft. You need to know where you’re going. I feel like I’ve done my job with casting and if an actor doesn’t like a line, I’m open to changing it.

TS: What were some of the biggest challenges of making this particular film?

BE: Trying to complete it has been very arduous. More than half of the film was shot about 3 1/2 years ago and it’s been a piecemeal pick it up ever since. I changed this movie a lot, mainly through editing but I’ve been shooting little pieces of it all the way through and I think I’ve deepend the meaning of it for me. There’s a deeper story, one underneath the cracks and beneath the surface. It’s my psychology and I know what that is if nobody else does. I think I’ve added, subtextually, a lot to this film and that’s been mainly the last three years of work. I went out to LA recently to get the voiceover and there’s a scene in the middle of the movie that was shot a year and a half later than everything else.  There were points I wanted to get across and I wanted to add layers of history to the movie. For example, you’ll see pictures of people on the wall and you wonder who these people in the pictures are, And then there are the black-and-white passages in the film.

TS: If you had more time and more money, what would you have done differently with COYOTES?

BE: If I had had more time and money I would’ve never made this movie. More time and money would not have equaled COYOTES in any way shape or form. I’m a film buff. I love movies and I can look at a movie like this and see that it’s a tough sell. It’s a dark, bleak film and it’s also weird and unusual. This film is as close to really getting personal and letting the cobwebs out and wanting to just really try to come up with something different then another low-budget independent movie that everyone has seen. I don’t think my films fit into any box well. At the same time I don’t want to make another film that looks like the five other films that I have made. I didn’t want this to just be another one of my “small-town movies”, I wanted to make something I hadn’t seen before. In hindsight, now that it’s done, it was the best thing to do and it was artistically liberating to a certain extent. The groundwork was all laid out, there was a script. I kept adding to it, and taking away from it as well. This movie was 12 minutes longer two years ago that it is now, so I was shooting more footage and adding to it, but I was refining it, making it shorter. I wanted it to be engaging.  It’s dark and weird as it is, I want to do it to unfold in a way that was structurally sound. You have to be careful when you get into the edit of a movie that you wrote so far in advance. You can’t just pick out the middle and put it at the beginning. It just doesn’t work.

TS: It’s very compelling. I also like the use of music in your film. You end with this symphonic piece. That was something that might not have worked, but in this case I think it was very effective.

BE: Thank you. You have no idea how I questioned my decision to do that. You’re right. It’s a true symphony piece that was recorded and that I was able to clear from the composer and the conductor who also score the rest of the film. But that music during the closing credits is from a live orchestrated peace with the San Francisco Philharmonic. It’s clearly not for the movie made on this kind of level budget-wise. This music could’ve been seen as the red thumb that gets jammed in your face like people are going to think “what the heck is that”? I put that in there and send a private link of the scene to the composer Irving Wolf who is in California. He said that that music meant something to him that has nothing to do with the context of this movie, but he also said that what I did with it worked.

TS: It ends your film on a chilling note.

BE: I think so too. It’s like fire and brimstone, Revelations, the Bible. That’s how I was able to justify it in my head. I didn’t want to go out with just a whisper of music. These folks are going to hell!

TS: What’s your next project?

BE: I have nothing pending in terms of shooting right away but I’m always writing things. I’m thinking about a potential short film.  There’s also something that I’ve been working on for quite a few years. It’s a film that I started shooting in Oregon years ago. The backdrop is Bigfoot hunters in the Oregon cascades.

TS: I would think that would be commercial.

BE: Yes, when I shot that there were none of these Finding Bigfoot shows on, So maybe the time is right for me to revisit that.

TS: Best of luck with COYOTES KILL FOR FUN and we’ll see you at the fest.

BE: Thanks!