Tracy Crockett - Introduce yourself.


Brian Avenet-Bradley - Hey, I’m Brian Avenet-Bradley; I’m a writer/director who’s done three horror features.


Tracy - Where do you reside?


Brian - I’ve been living in Los Angeles for about two and half years.


Tracy- How long have you been into the filmmaking world?


Brian - I’ve been drawn to filmmaking since I was a kid. I started making Super-8 and VHS shorts when I was ten.


Tracy - Is there any 1 person that’s responsible for your reasoning to become a film maker?


Brian - Not one person really. It was really the power of movies. I always loved stories, and then my parents took me to see my first film I was seven. And that film was the original Star Wars. I think seeing any film on the big screen at seven will blow you away, but that was a hell of an introduction- aliens, gun battles, space dog fights, and explosions. So I started re-enacting the film with friends. Then we started making up our own stories. Then we tried to turn them into plays for our family and friends. The problem was our plays involved us running through woods, kind of hard for the audience to keep up. Long story short, by the time I was ten I was shooting original stories on Super-8 and VHS. The first one was a monster mash up with Dr. Jekyll, Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolf man. After that, I became hopelessly addicted.


Tracy - What’s your favorite all time horror movie?


BrianThat’s a hard one. The horror genre is so wonderfully diverse covering everything from Alien to Friday the 13th part IV. But I can name a few which have had a big impact on me. Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, John Carpenter’s The Thing, Romero’s Day of the Dead, Kubrick’s The Shining, Cronenburg’s Videodrome, Ridley Scott’s Alien, Hitchcock’s Psycho, Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II … This list is just going to go on and on…


Tracy - Why?


Brian - Looking at the list, I think what draws me in most to these horror films are the atmosphere and isolation- a sense of building tension and dread, a certain bleakness and hopelessness. The exception to that on the list is Evil Dead II. Evil Dead II has its own splatter-stick zany style that ropes me in and appeals to my dark comic side.


Tracy - In today’s society who do you believe is the best filmmaker and why?


Brian - That’s another killer question. There are a lot of great filmmakers- new ones and older ones still doing amazing work. Actually, I find that often times it’s not the filmmaker as much as the individual film. It’s really hard to have all the pieces of a film come together as a masterpiece. If a filmmaker can make just a handful of amazing films over the course of his/her career- that alone is an amazing accomplishment. So I think it’s more important to cherish individual great films. They really take on a life of their own beyond the filmmaker. But if I had to pick a best filmmaker, I would say this week I’d pick Herzog. I just saw Rescue Dawn, and he continues to make powerful films. And he just did Grizzly Man, a great documentary. The fact that Herzog is a writer and director who has been making superb fiction and non-fiction films for so long, and continues to do so, is really impressive.



Ok now to the goodies……



Tracy – Ok so let’s go back a little bit a few years. Tell us where the idea for Cold Blood came from, if you would please??


Brian - Cold Blood is the belated U.S. release of my first film, known as Freez’er overseas. Freez’er initially started as an image I couldn’t get out of my mind- a big white freezer with a woman’s dead arm hanging out of it. When I was growing up, the family home had two huge freezers in the basement. They always kind of spooked me out as they seemed like large, buzzing coffins. They were the perfect length and size to put a body in, several bodies. So with that freezer image burned in my head, I wrote the first scene. What I really wanted to explore in the script is what happens if you kill someone you love in a fit of rage. How do you accept and handle the consequences? So the lead character in the film kills his wife and can’t accept what he’s done and the rest of the movie builds from that. I liked having an “unsympathetic” character that you actually have sympathy for. Someone who’s made one wrong mistake- an unforgivable, deadly one- but is really a decent person. Also, a lot of the film was inspired by the principal location, the 250 acre farm. I spent a lot of my childhood on that farm, and one very lonely winter in that abandoned farmhouse, and it was a very beautiful place that became very creepy at night. Laurence Avenet-Bradley played the corpse in the film, and we were actually married on that farm about three years before we started the movie. Some of the main character’s wedding photos are actually the real wedding photos of my wife.


Tracy - how hard was it to keep the creepy atmosphere throughout the film?


Brian - A lot of the creepy atmosphere comes from the location and the cinematography. Almost all the set design existed somewhere on that farm, it was just a matter of rearranging it. The script was written with the location in mind, so I made sure to maximize all the creepy locations and angles that naturally existed there. Laurence and I wanted to have very source motivated lighting and a high contrast look. So there is very little fill in the movie. For instance, if a scene is supposedly lit by a bare hanging bulb in the barn, we rigged one primary light source right above the practical bulb and didn’t add any additional fill light. This way things really dropped off into shadow and darkness. That’s creepy to me. Because if you can’t see into the darkness, anything can be there, just about to come into view. Laurence carried this high contrast style throughout the film. It was a very gutsy way of shooting as it was all captured that way in camera. There wasn’t any crushing of blacks in post production. The only reason it was hard to keep the creepy atmosphere consistent was because of the grueling nature of the shoot. It was a micro budget 16mm shoot with almost no crew besides Laurence and me for a lot of the film. We shot over the course of a year when we could find time and money, and we had to sleep in tents, as did the actors. So physically, it was a marathon. Also, I should add that Mark Lee Fletcher’s very original score contributed greatly to the mood of the film. His sound design style of “music” robs the viewer of the safety net of a traditional melodic score. Even by themselves, some of his audio creations are very disturbing to listen to at night.


Tracy -the lighting in that film was excellent. How was that achieved?


Brian - Laurence is an amazing DP. She had done a lot of high contrast black and white still photography before, but Freez’er was her first feature film. She did extensive camera tests and really established the look of the film even before we started principal photography. The other thing she did was maximize the natural sunlight on the farm. We did extensive scouting to see the best time of day to shoot certain scenes. The best example of this is near the end of the movie when the shafts of light pierce through the slats of wood in the barn. It’s very high contrast, and those shafts of light were really from the setting sun; we couldn’t afford a bunch of HMIs to punch through those slats. Since there was only thirty minutes when the sun was in the right position for that lighting effect, the scene was shot over the course of five days. Since 90% of the film takes place on the farm, we could do that. We would be shooting a scene in another place, and then when the lighting was close to being right, we would move down to the barn and shoot a little of the scene when the lighting was perfect.


Tracy - Where does the idea of Dark Remains stem from ?


Brian - I’m drawn to a film idea when there’s something very personal I can pull from. That’s how an idea comes about and gets its hooks in me. For that matter, I didn’t pick the horror genre, but my own sensibilities cause me to create movies which fall into that genre. So, if I weren’t often terrified or spooked out by things alone at night in a house, on a deserted farm, in the woods etc, I wouldn’t have been led to create a supernatural horror film. Experiences directly affect what I’m drawn to or what draws me in. There was a suicide in my family which definitely affected the movie- and my fear/obsession with plastic. And I felt things wandering in my family house alone at night after my mother died. I was terrified that I would turn the corner and see my mother there in front of me. Now why would I be afraid of my mother? She loved me; and I loved her. Then I realized I wasn’t afraid of running into my mother, but something that looked like my mother- a residue of her form, an embodiment of something tragic leftover of her death that really has nothing to do with her as living person or her “soul.” This had a direct inspiration on Dark Remains. With one important exception, the “ghosts” in it aren’t ghosts at all in the traditional sense; they have nothing to do with the once living people besides their physical resemblance. They’re not “spirits.” They’re the embodiments of violent energy from the deadly events which took place. In short, I don’t know what it is, whether it’s external or all in the mind, but I do think something is left behind, which is where the title of the film comes from and what inspired me to make the film. I wrote the first treatment back in 1997, but I made two other horror films before I could raise enough money to finally make it.


Tracy - How long did it take to film?


Brian - We shot Dark Remains for 30 days over the course of two months. We wanted the film to have the most production design possible, and both Laurence and I like to find practical locations that really heighten the atmosphere of the film. In the end, we found a great set of locations, but they were spread out in four cities in North Georgia. So there were a lot of travel and company moves during production. So the only way for it work was to shoot with a skeleton crew for a longer period of time. But locations like the archive room, the rental cabin and the closed prison really add to the film and make it worth it. In any event, I always try to squeeze as many shoot days as possible out of the budget. If I’m going to spend months posting something, I want to spend as much time as I can shooting it and getting it right.


Tracy- What was Dark Remains shot on?


Brian - It was shot with the Sony Cine-Alta 900 HD camera, so 1080i High Def. Laurence Avenet-Bradley, the Producer and DP, did an amazing job with it. She really lit it and approached it like film and pushed the format to the max. Visually, Dark Remains is a very high contrast horror film. The blacks are very black. The light is all source motivated. There are no ambient blue “moonlit” nights. This along with the camera angles, locations and editing makes the film very atmospheric. It conjures a strong mood which accentuates the slow building tension of the film.


Tracy - Are there any interesting stories you can tell us about the production of Dark Remains?


Brian - The old prison was an interesting location to shoot at, especially since it was located 25 yards away from the new functioning prison. One time, Cheri Christian, our lead actress, thought she was out of sight and did a quick shirt change outside only to hear cheering erupt. The prisoners had crowded around the narrow prison widows to watch her. Sometimes audio takes were interrupted by the metal clanks of the prisoners working out in the yard. Since some of the prisoners were on work detail, they could often be found around the closed prison. The females in the cast and crew always went in pairs to the bathroom in another building outside- though I think the stories of “Big Red” also encouraged that at night. Big Red is the real ghost that haunted the prison before it closed and according to the former guards, still does. The art director, Jim Cox, had an encounter with a fuse box opening and closing on its own. And Laurence discovered fresh, soft cookies on a baking pan in the abandoned kitchen. Later, we learned that Big Red had been a prisoner who worked as a cook while alive. So this might be the first undocumented encounter with paranormal cookies. It all definitely added an extra layer of atmosphere while shooting at the prison. After production, Laurence made a cool short documentary BIG RED: The Ghost of Floyd County Prison. It contains a bunch of ghost stories from the prison guards who actually experienced them. It’s on the Dark Remains DVD as an extra.


Tracy - As a whole how do you think the success of independent film makers in today’s society has been?


Brian - I think financial success for true indie films in today’s market is hard. On the festival circuit, I’ve seen some great films which have still not been released here. And when they do get released, they tend to only break even at best. The market has been glutted with films in the last three years, so the price keeps falling. Now that’s financial success. But let’s face it; you make indie films because you have to make films. Then you fight to get the film out there so people can see it. That’s what real indie filmmaking is about. And there are a lot of festivals and DVD opportunities for people to see your film today at a very high quality, even if it’s at home.


Tracy- How has the success of Dark Remains been?


Brian - I’ve been really happy with it. We’ve played a bunch of festivals, and it won three Best Horror Feature awards, including Shriekfest in L.A. It has been the official selection of 17 international festivals including Cinenygma in Luxembourg, the Leeds International Festival in the UK, and the Puchon Fantastic Film Festival in Korea. At Puchon, Dark Remains was the only U.S. film selected for the Puchon Competition. That was pretty cool being the only U.S. film selected for that. Audience response has been really positive, and we’ve had a bunch of good reviews including from Variety, Film Threat and Fangoria. Fangoria was really supportive after they saw the film, especially Michael Gingold. Fangoria ran a four page article about Dark Remains in its 2006 October issue and they selected it as Fangoria’s DVD pick of the month for the December issue. They also sponsored screening of Dark Remains in New York last November before it screened in L.A. in December. So all that was really cool exposure for the film. Then Monarch Home Video put out the film on DVD at the end of last year in the U.S. And this year, it’s been coming out in a bunch of countries overseas, including the UK, where Anchor Bay released it. Sirens of Cinema just ran a three page article about the film in their latest issue with some cool photos. So we’ve been really happy with the exposure of the film and people’s reaction to it, especially considering it’s a film without any “name” actors and a very low budget.


Tracy - Personally I feel that Dark Remains is one of the scariest ghost stories since A Ghost Story starring Fred Astaire..I know you made Dark Remains but …would you agree that this is one hell of a dope ass flick!!!!????


Brian - I’m really happy with what we pulled off for the money. We gave the film everything we had and then some. It was a personal and important film for me, and the reaction has been really rewarding to hear. So I’m excited about it. But, of course, like any filmmaker, I always want things to be better. I’ve lived with the film for a long time in my head- then in making and marketing it. So I probably need some more time in order to look at the film more objectively. But I know Dark Remains played really well with the festival audiences, and I still get e-mails from people overseas who really connected with the film. And that’s the best thing to hear!


Tracy What’s up next for Brian Avenet Bradley?


Brian - I’ve got two very different horror scripts I’ve written that are in the hopper right now. I’m passionate about both, so we’ll see what happens. Laurence and I moved out here to make the transition from low budget to Hollywood low budget. So it’s a big step up and a different process. The goal is to get into production next year and to make the next film our first theatrical feature.