The following interview originally ran on Starpulse.com in 2011.
Jim Mickle has been working in the film industry for almost 10 years now, laboring primarily as a crew member on pictures like Transamerica, Shortbus, and Pride and Glory. In 2006 though, he made his feature length directorial debut with the independent horror film Mulberry Street, about a deadly infection which turns Manhattan dwellers into rat creatures.
This year, his latest work Stake Land, a post-apocalyptic vampire movie which he directed and co-wrote with lead actor Nick Dimici, premiered at the Independent Film Festival Boston. Before his film opened, I had a chance to sit down with Jim to talk about the story’s origins, about what makes his vampires unique, and about his brief appearance in the movie.
Evan Crean: You wrote this film with Nick Dimici, who you worked with on your last film Mulberry Street. How did you guys come up with the idea for Stake Land?
Jim Mickle: Out of desperation. We wanted to make a movie where we were just going back and doing things on our own. We were trying to make another movie and we were having trouble with it. We were having a lot of difficulty getting this other movie made, and it was a bigger budget, and we just said ‘Look let’s just do what we did with Mulberry Street. We can tell a simple story, we can start… I have a place in Pennsylvania, where I grew up. We can go back there and shoot it. Given the elements that we have, how do we make a story out of that? And it grew from there really. That was how the seed of it started.
Originally it was going to be a web series, we said ‘Let’s do something we can shoot on weekends, and we don’t have to be held to it, and we don’t have to quit our jobs.’ We can go back and shoot Friday, Saturday, edit during the week, and post it next weekend. It was kind of about how do we get this accomplished and how do we avoid this whole big budget thing where we can’t get movies made.
EC: How did it go from the web series then to the film?
JM: At some point Larry Fessenden became involved, the producer, one of the producers, one of many producers. I think he said, ‘I don’t know how to make a web series, it’s a cool idea, but I don’t know how to make a web series, but in the meantime I have a company that can finance a movie right now. If we can make this into a movie then we might have financing.’ So it all sort of happened by accident really that they came along, and it was perfect timing.
EC: You mentioned before that you were from Pennsylvania. Was that primarily where the film was shot?
JM: Half of it was shot there and then we took what I want to say was a three month break. Then we came back in November and shot in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, just to try to get a winter look. The seasons changed and we went home. Nick grew his goatee out, Connor grew his hair out it was awesome. Then we came back and it was a completely different season, it was like rocky terrain. We wanted to get that road movie feel, so it was half and half.
EC: When you’re making a post-apocalyptic story what’s your secret as a filmmaker to making every place look abandoned?
JM: The right locations and a really good art department. We had a great art department on this. My sister is a production designer. She’s done huge, huge movies and she was working while we were working on this, so she couldn’t do it, but she kind of gave us her whole art department. Then also Larry’s wife is an art director, so she came and brought a bunch of people. So we had this team of really amazing art department guys who really know how to make stuff look good, but then also just really good locations. Like that barn is my barn that I grew up in, in Pennsylvania, like the corn field, the woods, that was all our own property. Then we went to a neighboring town that happened to have a lot of gas stations and…
EC: So you guys shot in a lot of abandoned places?
JM: Yeah, a lot of that, unfortunately, because you don’t really have to look that hard.
EC: The vampires in the film are very non-traditional.
JM: They’re kind of zombie-esque.
EC: They’re fast, and they’re very gross. Was that intentional that you were trying to make them more zombie-like?
JM: I think that just came because we really like zombie movies, and it just started to go that way, but we really wanted to make them different, and we really wanted to make them scary and gross, that was really the idea with them. Twilight hadn’t come out yet, but True Blood was out, and I was just getting a little tired of sympathizing with them all the time. So it was really like, how do we make these things…I think our idea was like for all these people who like these movies, we want them to come in and shit their pants. So we killed the baby, just everything we could to do be like ‘This is not an R.L. Stein vampire movie.’ (Laughing)
EC: It seemed like overall you were trying to take a different angle, even in the way they had to kill the vampires. Like you can still stake them, but you can also try to take out their lower brain.
JM: We wanted it to be really difficult, and not something that was this glamorous thing. Make it that it was actually shitty work to go in and kill these things. What a pain in the ass to have to go in and get the hammer. That was the idea. Make it as grungy as possible like a dirty job.
EC: I thought I read in the credits that you played banjo on the film?
JM: (Laughing) Yeah, I’m behind Danielle, playing the banjo.
EC: How long have you been playing?
JM: Not all that long. I used to play a little, but I play guitar, and I played a long time ago, for like a year, and then I kind of lost it. It came up that she was really embarrassed and didn’t want to sing, but we practiced a little bit, but I brought the banjo at some point and she was really nervous, so I said ‘Look I’m not very good at banjo, but I’ll sit behind you and play to sort of ease you into it.’ There was the producer Adam on the guitar there, so it was like a whole family affair. (Laughing)
EC: Primarily we’ve seen you do horror. Do you think you’ll stay in the horror genre or move on to other ones?
JM: The next one is like a thriller that’s sort of a Southern noir I guess. It’s adapted from a book and it’s more like a contemporary western in the late 80s. That’s what we’re doing next hopefully. I’d love to keep doing horror but it’s more about the stories I think than anything and so far nothing that terrific has popped up that’s been a great story that I can fall in love with.