By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Chris McKay made the leap from the animated favorite ROBOT CHICKEN and other TV to features with THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE, and now he has directed another classic bat man in live action. But the real star of his new movie is Dracula’s lackey, i.e., RENFIELD, as he discusses in this RUE MORGUE interview.
Opening this Friday from Universal, RENFIELD stars Nicholas Hoult (MAD MAX: FURY ROAD) in the title role of Dracula’s longtime servant, with Nicolas Cage as the vampire lord. When the duo are forced to relocate to New Orleans, Renfield begins to see a way out from under Dracula’s sharp-nailed thumb, but it’s not going to be easy to escape the ultimate boss-as-monster. Scripted by Ryan Ridley from a story by THE WALKING DEAD’s Robert Kirkman, RENFIELD is a hybrid of horror, comedy, personal-growth story and action opus, the latter involving police officer Rebecca (Awkwafina) and a crime family known as the Lobos, all splattered with a lot of extreme bloodletting.
Obviously Renfield is our hero, but when you cast Nicolas Cage as Dracula, the expectation might be that he’ll be front and center. How did you approach that balance and that dynamic?
The beginning of our movie is the end of another Dracula movie–the third act of someone else’s Dracula movie. It’s sort of like the ending of the Hammer/Christopher Lee HORROR OF DRACULA, where Peter Cushing pulls the curtain down and the sun hits Dracula, and I took inspiration from that for our film. I wanted the audience to understand, look, you know you’re in for a Dracula story, but it’s through the lens of this guy Renfield, and his job starts now. It starts when Dracula needs him, when Dracula’s at his weakest, when he can’t feed on his own and he can’t stalk the night or turn into bats and mist and all that kind of thing to sneak around.
When you’re making a movie, you develop things that are meant to educate the audience, and if you’re doing it right, you’ll let them know what your movie’s about, so that they’re not mystified by these choices that you’re making. And I was hoping that that opening was something that would educate the audience on the math of what our movie is. It’s a story about this guy who has to take care of Dracula.
So when it came to hiring Cage, for me, there’s probably a handful of people that you really, truly want to see play Dracula, and Cage was that guy for me. Obviously he’s incredibly funny and smart and a brilliant dramatic actor, but he also brought a lot of vulnerability to Dracula, which, besides the charm, is the one thing I feel is part of every performance of Dracula. There are always moments of true vulnerability, and that was important to me. So we got lucky that he said yes, and that he understood this is not a movie about Dracula; this is a movie about Renfield, and about this relationship, and Dracula being this toxic boss, the boss from hell. It’s about that dynamic, and Renfield is the character who’s going to grow due to that conflict with Dracula.
It sounds like you’ve been a vampire fan for a long time; is this the first vampire project that has come your way?
Actually, it is the first vampire thing. And yeah, growing up, I read MOVIE MONSTERS by Alan Ormsby; it was literally the first book I read on my own, that I didn’t have someone read to me. The first half is about the Universal monsters, and BLACULA, and the second half is all these makeup tutorials. That made me realize as a kid that, oh, there are all these people behind the scenes who make this stuff and make these decisions about, oh yeah, the Mummy’s got to have sand on his fingers and around his fingernails, and that’s what creates that interesting texture, and Dracula’s got the widow’s peak and the eyebrows, and all of those kinds of things. That made me realize that there were human beings behind them, that movies aren’t these magic dreams you just watch, but somebody makes them. I was obviously very young at the time!
I also grew up reading FANGORIA; that was the one nod to my love of horror movies that my parents were willing to tolerate. Every Christmas, they’d give me a subscription, and I got to read all the articles about these creatures people had created, and about how people made movies, with these incredible pictures from films I couldn’t see, necessarily, because I wasn’t old enough. Those were really powerful for me, and made me want to be a filmmaker.
On that note, I was happy to see the heavy use of prosthetic makeup in RENFIELD. Can you talk about that, and conceiving the various looks of Dracula throughout the film?
You know, I think if the studio was left to their own devices, they probably wouldn’t have done as much practical stuff as I wanted to do, but I was fortunate that they let me do that. I worked with Christien Tinsley, an incredible artist who ran the whole makeup team; besides special makeup, he oversaw every component of it. He did WESTWORLD and other things I thought were amazing and seamless, so when I brought him on, we talked a lot about, when Dracula’s putting himself together, when he’s growing over time trying to get back to full power, he would have bits and pieces of wardrobe and bits and pieces of flesh that were all tied together. So we called the first version “Picasso” because the pieces were not all in the right spots and stuff like that.
The main thing for Cage was, he wanted to make sure that he still had room in the makeup so that you could really see his performance in his eyes. That was important to me too, because I love Bub in DAY OF THE DEAD; that’s an amazing performance, and I wanted to have that even when Cage was completely made up. So Christien and I went through a series of designs and looked through the different stages, and we quickly got to a place with Dracula where you could see more Cage in there. It was very important to me that the white of the flesh felt like flesh, and not something that was made up on the outside. It’s very hard to do indentations into flesh, because you have to build up to go in, and Christien made this stuff that looked like it was still healing, and had all this incredible texture on Cage’s cheeks and forehead and so forth in the later makeups. I was really, really happy with the way Christien did that; he’s such a professional and has a love for filmmaking, he was a great partner and I was fortunate to work with him.
RENFIELD completes a kind of triptych of over-the-top, bloody Universal movies that began with VIOLENT NIGHT and COCAINE BEAR. Are they an especially receptive studio to this kind of movie?
Yeah, I think if you look at what they’re greenlighting these days, they really are taking chances with certain movies, and they allowed us to do a lot of that practical gore. They’re quite generous in that way, and were willing to let us go for it, and let those other filmmakers go for it. COCAINE BEAR is a real throwback to GRIZZLY or something like that, those amazing post-JAWS animal-attack movies. I was very lucky that they allowed us to go crazy with that, and again, I wanted to do as much practically as possible. When I wanted to do a face rip or the arms gag or something like that, Christien had great solutions to problems. We used a little bit of digital to help us in a couple of areas, but for the most part, it was all stuff that Christien and his team did practically. And Nicholas got to turn the arms into Escrima sticks and start beating guys up. To me, it was a dream come true to be able to do almost an EVIL DEAD II kind of thing; we got as close as we could to honoring Sam Raimi.
[SLIGHT SPOILER FOLLOWS…]
Speaking of homages, I loved the repurposing of the footage from Bela Lugosi’s DRACULA at the beginning, so can you talk about that?
[Laughs] Well, first, just selfishly, it’s a way of connecting to the old movies that we all know and love. But also, from a story and character standpoint, I needed a shorthand to tell Renfield and Dracula’s backstory, and what better way than those images? Whether you grew up on these Dracula movies, or just care about Dracula or vampires at all, those are images that have been around in pop culture. You’ve probably seen them in a FAMILY GUY gag, or some other thing; if you didn’t experience that, you might have a connection to it on some other level; you’ve seen a poster or something. So to be able to put Cage on the staircase with the giant spiderweb behind him, one of my favorite images from movies, was a real thrill. It was a fun technical challenge, and fortunately I had a great team who were willing to get into the weeds with me about the lighting of old movies like that, and the lenses and the glass that was used, to try to emulate those things and make it all feel seamless. Again, it was wanting to connect to the past and show a lot of love for those films, but I also really wanted people to understood that these characters have a 90-plus-year history.
