By MICHAEL GINGOLD
When filmmaker/effects artist Steven Kostanski geared up to unleash a little troublemaker in his new movie FRANKIE FREAKO, he took inspiration from a few past mini-monster flicks. He discusses these influences and more in this interview, conducted following the film’s world premiere at this summer’s Fantasia International Film Festival.
FRANKIE FREAKO, in select theaters starting today from Shout! Studios, focuses on Conor (Conor Sweeney), a hopelessly square guy who gets no respect from his boss, Mr. Buechler (Adam Brooks), or his wife Kristina (Kristy Wordsworth). While watching late-night TV, he comes across an ad for a 1-900 number hosted by Frankie Freako (voiced by Matthew Kennedy), a strange little puppet character who promises to make his life wilder and more fun. Calling that number unleashes Frankie and his pals Dottie Dunko (Meredith Sweeney) and Boink Bardo (Brooks) into Conor’s world, where they run riot–and their misadventures eventually pull Conor into the Freak World (see our review here). It’s the latest expression of the crazy imagination and effects expertise of Kostanski, who began as part of the Astron-6 team and most recently created the extreme gore for IN A VIOLENT NATURE, and previously directed or co-directed the likes of FATHER’S DAY, THE VOID and PG: PSYCHO GOREMAN.
Did you have a longstanding ambition to make a movie in the GREMLINS/GHOULIES mode?
Yes, 100 percent. The one I really aimed for is PUPPET MASTER; I feel like that is my jam, especially in terms of its diverse characters. I’m a big fan of creating unique, iconic designs and having an ensemble, so I was kind of pulling from the PUPPET MASTER roster when doing FRANKIE FREAKO. Probably the closest one is–I guess you can say Dottie’s a bit like Six-Shooter, but I also feel like the FKs [Freako Killers], their straight line of teeth is very much like Torch. So yeah, it has been something I’ve always wanted to do. I tried to pitch it to the other Astron-6 guys, and they kept claiming that nobody wants to watch a little-monster movie. I believe they’re wrong.
You’ve also mentioned GHOULIES III: GHOULIES GO TO COLLEGE as an influence. What is it about that movie that makes it special for you?
Because it’s unapologetic in how stupid it is. And as I age, and become more and more frustrated with the film industry, I realize that being unapologetic for whatever you’re making is the most important thing you can do as an artist. If that’s the movie you want to make, commit to it and be proud of it. I wanted to make a real goofy movie like GHOULIES III: GHOULIES GO TO COLLEGE, and stick to it and not be cynical about it. I love the universe of GHOULIES GO TO COLLEGE [laughs]. I think they put a lot more work into their universe than people want to give it credit for, and it has an energy and a pace to its humor that I find infectious. It’s a movie I can put on and just laugh at at any time. I’m never not in the mood for that movie.
And of course, one of your FRANKIE FREAKO characters is named after GHOULIES III director/creature creator John Carl Buechler.
Yes, exactly. Thank you for catching that. I had one person at the premiere mention that, which made me happy. John Carl Buechler did a lot of Empire Pictures projects and was one of the greats. He’s certainly somebody I’ve tried to model my career after, and I love his design work. The look of his creatures is so distinct and specific. He is a guy who would always do a lot with very little, which is definitely the world I have been in my entire film career. So yeah, I wanted to give a shout-out to him.
You’re wearing a CLIFFORD hat as we speak, so was that an inspiration as well?
Yes, yes. The obnoxiousness of Clifford, I also find very infectious. Committing to a bit is very important in that movie, and it 100 percent commits to having a 40-year-old man play a 10-year-old boy and never acknowledging it, which is a pretty special thing, to pull a move like that and stick to it.
Another film that feels like it was an influence is RISKY BUSINESS, right down to one of the musical cues.
Yeah, a little RISKY BUSINESS. I would say more BODY DOUBLE, honestly, if I had to pick a music cue specifically. I love the erotic thriller movies from the ’80s and ’90s; they were very much an influence on FRANKIE FREAKO, at least in setting up the world that gets derailed by the GHOULIES GO TO COLLEGE vibe about 20 minutes into the movie. But the setup, I wanted to be like BODY DOUBLE or ANIMAL INSTINCTS. I remember specifically sending clips of ANIMAL INSTINCTS to Pierce Derks, my DP, telling him, “Let’s shoot the sexy montage like this.” When Kristina is getting her makeup on and stuff, it’s very much pulling from ANIMAL INSTINCTS.
And you have the theme from RISKY BUSINESS of the repressed guy who needs to come out of his shell, and can’t even use profanity at certain moments.
Yes, exactly. Watching a dork getting his ass kicked is always entertaining. It’s a subgenre that I want to come back, and I feel like now is definitely the time for it, watching a guy like Conor getting beaten on for 80 minutes. Who doesn’t want to watch that?
How did you come up with the specific characters of Frankie and his ensemble?
It was all very much toy logic stuff. It was thinking in terms of, well, if this was scaled down to action-figure size and put on a shelf, would I want to buy it? And pulling from all the different little-creature movies I’ve seen, trying to find iconic looks that had a little bit of DNA from films I love.
Frankie was probably the most workshopped out of all of them in terms of his look. He’s the title character, and I wanted him to be unique. A big thing was his personality. He’s the one doing all the talking, all the emoting and the acting, so he had to be a character you want to look at for 80 minutes. His look definitely evolved as we were designing him. I actually built a proto version of him very long ago when I was just pitching the movie as a concept. I made a version that was like a little more goblinesque, and then I went back, resculpted him, and then resculpted him again. And the third time was the look I landed on where I started giving him hints of the elements of the demon Frankie who shows up throughout the movie. So I gave him little horns and stuff coming out, things that tease that look that comes later.
And then his outfit and hair, all that came after we actually put him together, sculpting and molding and casting. Also, figuring out what his accessories were–his chains, his little cuffs, the sunglasses, all that. We were kind of making it up as we went along, doing it piece by piece. We’d be like, “OK, he needs a shirt, what should the shirt be? It should say ‘Party something.’ “ So we came up with the Party King shirt, and the little leather jacket. And a shout-out to Amazon.ca for all the children’s clothes we ordered for this movie in multiples. It was actually a pretty cheap and efficient way to dress up the puppets.
It was a tight schedule making FRANKIE FREAKO, but we put a lot of time into the designs, trying to land each look for the characters. I was always thinking in terms of, when you line them up, do any of them melt together? That’s part of the reason I gave them the RGB color scheme, so it’s like, Frankie’s red, Boink’s green and Dottie’s blue, so no matter what, they’re going to be distinct. And similarly, the FKs are silver, and Munch is kind of yellowy.
I can give you an exclusive that President Munch, in this universe, is actually what happens to Munchie after those [Roger Corman-produced] movies. In MUNCHIE STRIKES BACK, at the end it says, “Stay tuned for MUNCHIE HANGS TEN,” which never got made. So Pierce and I were riffing on the logic of, what would happen in that movie? And we came up with the idea that maybe he turns into this evil overlord guy who takes over Freak World and becomes a dictator. And so unofficially, he is Munchie turned bad.
How did you find the right voice for Frankie?
We went through a few iterations for that. The issue was, we were not planning a lot of that stuff because we were so rushed. Everybody puppeteering would do their own [character’s] voice on set. Matthew Kennedy did a temp version of Frankie’s voice, which we actually, to jump ahead to the end of the story, ended up using a good chunk of in the movie, because he nailed it on the first go. But everyone on set was doing different voices, and I kind of got fixated on different character types that people were doing. At one point Frankie was going to be a more subdued, British punk-sounding guy. But that didn’t really line up, so we went back to his scratchy, wacky voice. That extended to all the characters; there was a lot of back-and-forth and trying to find the right vibe. I deliberately kept Dottie and Boink a little subdued compared to Frankie, because I wanted to keep the focus on him and give him all the dialogue. I tried to not go too cartoony with everybody, to keep them grounded for the most part.
What went into conceiving the world of the house and then the Freak World?
For the house, we definitely pulled from the erotic-thriller visual design world. I insisted we have those glass blocks everywhere, because that’s such a staple of ’90s thriller movies. So we established that look for our normal world, and then for the Freak World, I definitely pulled from post-BLADE RUNNER knockoffs and the ’89 BATMAN. I pulled from Gotham City in that movie a lot, especially for Munch Tower. And also movies like DOUBLE DRAGON, SUPER MARIO BROS., even a little bit of the ’90s JUDGE DREDD movie, just trying to figure out all the pieces to make this ramshackle dystopia, that still has a Freako vibe with lots of graffiti and stuff.
Any plans for a sequel? Maybe FRANKIE GOES TO COLLEGE?
Actually, the thing we were joking about on set was, we want to do FRANKIE GOES TO HAWAII, or something that’s just a vacation for all of us. Because like all my movies, FRANKIE FREAKO was ambitious and exhausting, and just having Adam glued to the floor for a whole day, I think after that he was like, “The next one has to be easier than this.” Whatever it’ll be, it’ll be real low-effort on our part [laughs]. We’ll just be in beach chairs the whole time while somebody else does all the work. That’s the hope!
But I do legitimately want to keep making FRANKIE FREAKO movies. And we’d love to have him pop up in other universes of mine. I do think there are opportunities for that.
