By MICHAEL GINGOLD
This weekend is a pretty strong one for debuting genre films, but make it a priority to catch DEAD MAIL, which begins streaming on Shudder this Friday, April 18. It combines a twisty plot with a group of well-acted, offbeat characters and quite a few chills and thrills, and RUE MORGUE chats here with its prime movers.
What does the dead letter department of a Peoria County, IL post office have to do with an extremely tense captivity situation going on in a house on the outskirts? The opening scene of DEAD MAIL hints at the connection, then lets us get to know Bess (Susan Priver) and Ann (Micki Jackson), who work in the aforementioned office, their older co-worker Jasper (Tomas Boykin) and his outside, European contact Renee (Nick Heyman). We also witness the developing partnership between keyboard engineer Josh (Sterling Macer, Jr.) and synthesizer buff Trent (John Fleck), which unfortunately goes south in unsettling ways. With well-caught small-town atmosphere and a gritty film look (even though it was shot digitally), DEAD MAIL quickly hooks you into wondering where this plot and its people are going to go next. (See our review here.) This writer spoke to writer/directors Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy and stars Macer and Fleck just prior to the movie’s world premiere at last year’s SXSW festival.
How did this story first occur to you, and especially the structure in which it’s told?
KYLE McCONAGHY: Joe deserves credit for the origin. We were writing our first film, and he was like, “Hey, I read about this dead letter office. It’s a real place that investigates undeliverable mail.” And we were like, oh God, we’ve got to develop an idea for that. I thought about it, and came up with the opening scene of, at the time it was a woman crawling out of a house in the middle of the Midwest. I told Joe about that, and he said, “I like it, but what if Josh Brolin is playing it instead of a woman?” And Josh Brolin became a synthesizer engineer that we wrote for our friend Sterling, and we just went on from there.
In terms of the structure, for the first act, we just started following the path of this letter and where that took us. And eventually, it took us to that synthesizer engineer.
Why synthesizers? What led you to focus on that subject?
JOE DeBOER: We have a lot of history with synthesizers. One of our early collaborations was centered on music, we had some old analog synths, we really loved bands that used them, so we thought it would be fun to play off a struggling engineer who is battling for his own authenticity vs. a changing and evolving technological industry.
The movie is set in the 1980s; what challenges did that pose to the production?
McCONAGHY: It was a fun challenge for sure. We wanted to make sure it was as authentic as we could make it with our budget, so we scoured eBay for deals, and luckily, there were prop houses in LA that had what we needed. And we had a lot of ingenuity from our production designer, Payton Jane.
DeBOER: Part of what made it possible was, it’s not a glamorized, glitzy 1980s. It’s very Midwestern authentic, as opposed to the more clichéd, stylized ’80s you see in a lot of other films.
McCONAGHY: We were able to use a lot of our own families’ artifacts. The photo album John flips through was an old one that my grandma had or something, and things like that came in handy.
You said you wrote Josh for Sterling?
McCONAGHY: We did, yeah. We had started writing a little bit before we met him, but then I moved to Los Angeles and was lucky enough to work on Sterling’s last directorial effort [DOUBLE DOWN], and we became fast friends. He and I have worked together on several films, and when we went back to DEAD MAIL, we were like, oh my gosh, Sterling has to play Josh. Sterling is not only an amazing actor, he’s a great musician, and he’s just so good in the physical choices he makes. And as soon as we told him about the role, Sterling started watching YouTube videos about soldering and electrical engineering. So we knew it was the right fit.
DeBOER: Sterling probably won the part on the first day on our first feature [BAB]. We were staying at an Airbnb in a remote desert area, and there was this old piano, and he just sat down and started playing jazz on it, and it was like, “Oh, you can do this too.” And like Kyle said, he’s so great with all kinds of physical acting. Dart throwing? He can do it. There’s a million things this guy can do.
STERLING MACER JR.: [Laughs] Oh my God, I need these guys around me 24 hours a day just to make me feel better. Thank you. That’s very kind of you to say.
Sterling, were you involved in the development of the script and your character?
MACER: No, not at all. These guys, the last thing they need is me involved. Kyle and Joe’s writing is so unique and specific to them, even the syntax they put in the characters’ mouths. And the minute I or anybody else would get involved, I think it would become less than what it could be. So my instinct is to go to what they put on the page, and let go of whatever self I can let go of and get into that character, because their vision is so…quirky is not the right word. Asymmetrical, I think is probably the way to put it. They might have a character do something that you’ve seen someone do in any number of movies or whatever, but how they get that person to that point, you’ve generally never seen it gotten to like that.
John, do you agree? Because your character has a very specific way of speaking in the film.
JOHN FLECK: Yes, [in his character’s voice] I speak like this, which is very unusual. No, I’m teasing, but riffing off what Sterling said, as actors, it’s a paradox. You know, we serve the words; it’s about the story and the characters. But I like to make it as personal as I can, and see how I can use that vision and speak through my own eyes and my own mouth, that somehow matches but brings my interpretive way of expressing what Kyle and Joe wrote.
McCONAGHY: The dynamic these guys had was so inspiring. They worked so well together, were obviously amazing actors, but neither of them was the Method type. They had so many intense scenes, but as soon as we called “Cut,” they were back in their conversation about STAR TREK or whatever they were previously talking about. They had a really cool style of working together.
Josh is physically confined for a good part of the film. Sterling, how did you deal with that?
MACER: That was really challenging because, even though I’m not so much of a Method actor, I am subject to…not to get too esoteric here, but psychophysiological stimuli. And so after several minutes of being bound, and my wrists beginning to hurt for real and sitting on a wet floor… Pretty soon, you begin to get a little depressed. It has a real effect on your psyche, which is as it should be. As an actor, you’re able to use that. The professionalism comes with being able to let that go and think, OK, there’s the cut, let’s talk about something else.
John, you bring a great sense of controlled mania to your role. Can you talk about approaching that?
FLECK: Controlled mania! Well, Trent has, you know, strong intentions. After many years of living in a desert, completely isolated from humanity, he meets someone, Josh, that he can trust again and be vulnerable again with. And I guess when Josh doesn’t quite give him what he wants, that’s when what you would call his mania starts–the more Josh tries to get away, the more intense Trent is fighting to stop him.
The movie also has a great sense of place. Where was it shot, and how did you find your locations?
McCONAGHY: We wanted to actually shoot it in Peoria or somewhere like that. We did some preliminary research, financially and otherwise, to see if that could happen. But it made the most sense just to do it in Los Angeles, where most of us live, and we have access to those great prop houses and some pre-made sets. We certainly had to fabricate a lot of our own sets, and all of that was in or around Los Angeles.
What was it shot on?
DeBOER: We used the RED KOMODO camera, with some incredible vintage Zeiss lenses that were used on TAXI DRIVER and some other notable films. We both have a big Technicolor influence; we just love the look of those older films. We love film grain, and we’re both averse to the sharp digital look in a lot of current television and film, so we tried to do everything we could to not have that, and keep some authenticity.
There’s a strong sense of community among the characters. How did you cast the film?
McCONAGHY: We really lucked out with an amazing group of actors. As we said, we had known Sterling, and I worked with Susan Priver on a previous film; she’s a great actor, so we cast her to play Bess. And she knew John and introduced us to him. John and I talk all the time about how grateful we are that that connection was made, because John brought so much humanity to Trent that wasn’t on the page, a new angle that really solidified it. We’ve also worked a lot with Nick Heyman, who plays Renee. He’s an incredible actor, and he’s Norwegian, so we were like, oh, finally, we can give Nick a European role. I believe everyone else was just open casting, and we luckily found amazing people to fill those roles.
Is Norwegian what they’re speaking in that early scene with Renee?
McCONAGHY: Broken Norwegian!
DeBOER: Nick’s is pretty good. The other guy, I guess, thought he was going to say his lines in English, so he showed up not knowing any of them, and it was like, “No, it has to be in Norwegian. Just try to memorize this,” and we used cards!
Can you each talk about either your favorite or most challenging day on set?
DeBOER: The first day on set was, I think, the most challenging, just because we tried to shoot so many pages. We were in the interior of Trent’s house, and it was a rainy, cold day in LA. Everything was moving slowly, and it was a slog. What felt like it saved that day was when this bound man [motions to Macer] crawled out of this bathroom, and over to this Kleenex box, in one take. And it was like, OK, this might be a decent film.
McCONAGHY: There were several moments, that being the first one. They almost always involved Sterling and John, and the crew breaking out into applause and/or crying, because these guys had so many powerful on-set moments. And Joe’s right–when Sterling performed that scene, I was like, oh my God, this film could be special. And the scene with John in the garage, I looked over at the crew around the monitor, and people were crying. These guys had so many intense moments.
DeBOER: And on that day, the night before, we found out our producer had COVID, and we had all just had dinner with him. This was day one. And for crazy reasons, we had to recast the role of Ann, which is obviously a big part in the film. So we cast Micki Jackson 18 hours before she came to the set. And then we had this very ambitious day, and we had problems in the morning–but that moment when Sterling crawled out was pivotal, and it changed the whole morale of what could have been a very difficult, and was a very difficult start.
FLECK: I remember that first rainy day, and wondering, what the hell am I doing here, you know? But Sterling grounded the movie from that point on; just seeing him crawl out, and do all that in one take, you go, “OK, we’ve got something cooking here.”
MACER: That day, that felt relatively easy, believe it or not. It’s physical stuff, so you can really invest, and the emotional is born out of the physical struggle, which tends to happen if you just let it as an actor. So that day for me was psychologically pretty easy. I guess there were two days or stretches, I would put it, that got pretty challenging. I already talked a little bit about this, but just being chained and bound, and the bindings were real and the chains were real, and the water on the floor was real, and pretty soon that became an unpleasant thing psychologically. Especially in a low-budget environment, because we didn’t have all the amenities that a high-budget project has, where people are looking after you in between takes and unfastening you and making sure you’re OK. No, we needed to make the day, so I’d have to stay there and be bound and chained. That was hard after a while.
The crawl out from the door to the mailbox, the first time, really wasn’t so bad. But after a while, that also became a real challenge just on a physical level, because that was no short distance, and again, the bindings and the chain were real–and the dirt was real, the cement was real [laughs].
McCONAGHY: In the edit, the opening scene where Sterling is crawling is kind of truncated, but it was a good, at least 50-yard stretch from the front door to that post box. I believe we talked about, you know, “Do we want to split it up?” And Sterling was like, “No, let’s just do it all in one take.” So there were no breaks. He was actually doing what the character’s experiencing, and it made for a very visceral experience in the film. So thank you, Sterling, for being willing to do that.
MACER: Of course–and I should say they were very grateful and thankful on the day. That’s just what it was, that’s what was required. In my mind, I wasn’t doing something out of the ordinary or exceptional. That’s the gig as an actor, OK? You’ve got to crawl from the door, bound and chained, to the mailbox, on “Action.” That’s what you do; that’s what you signed up for.
