By MICHAEL GINGOLD
A true genre-blender among the Midnight selections at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, TOUCH ME is the second feature from writer/director Addison Heimann, following 2022’s HYPOCHONDRIAC. RUE MORGUE got to speak with Heimann and his stars, Olivia Taylor Dudley, Lou Taylor Pucci, Jordan Gavaris and Marlene Forte, ahead of TOUCH ME’s premiere next Tuesday, January 28.
Dudley and Gavaris play Joey and Craig, codependent best friends and roommates who need to get their lives in order. In an eight-minute monologue that opens the film, Joey describes an encounter with a guy who proved to be an alien being that introduced her to tentacle sex, and the two wind up traveling to the mansion of this man, Brian (Pucci)–where extraterrestrial coupling is just part of the weirdness that ensues. With THE ENDLESS and SOMETHING IN THE DIRT’s Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead on board as producers, TOUCH ME is easily one of Sundance ’25’s more unusual offerings.
Addison, what was the initial spark behind this project?
ADDISON HEIMANN: I think, honestly, all my projects get sparked by a little thing called depression. I was sad, and I watched a movie where there was an alien tentacle monster that made people feel euphoric when they had sex with it. And I was like, “I want that, I want to go to there.” I had been learning Japanese for five years, and became a kind of Japanese cinephile. I was obsessed with pink films, exploitation films of the ’60s and ’70s that had these wildly saturated colors and stories of female revenge. I had also been going through a pretty devastating friendship breakup at the time, so I kind of put all these little pieces together and created this world.
TOUCH ME has a lot going on, genre-wise. It’s queer cinema, it’s relationship comedy, it’s New Age satire, it’s science fiction and it eventually gets into horror at the end. How did you maintain the vision while encompassing all these different genres?
HEIMANN: That’s a great question. I love genre mashup; it’s my favorite thing. I love the stuff The Daniels do, the stuff Brandon Cronenberg does; there’s this sense of fun and play, but it’s also grounded and serious. And I also think that the thing about exploring the subjects I do, these very dark, sinister things that are part of my mind, with this sense of play, is a representation of my morose sense of humor, the way that I and other people who live with OCD and mental illness deal with things, where you can’t help but laugh at the crazy, because if you didn’t, what would you be doing? There’s only so far you can go deep down into your dark soul before you have to laugh at the absurdity of it.
Writer/director Addison Heimann.
So I knew I wanted to create something humorous, and homage these beautiful, wild and crazy movies of the ’70s from Japan. And I knew I wanted to tell an honest story about what it’s like to live with the brain that I live in. It was a tightrope, for sure, from giving Olivia an eight-minute monologue at the beginning to having to walk that line with Brian, because there were so many different ways you could play him, and Lou did it so well. And then to Jordan, who played Craig with such “me” energy–because it is based on me–but with such honesty and humor, and then Marlene, who got to play a psycho with such reckless abandon, but also definitely with moments of groundedness to see where she comes from. We just created this world and trust that allowed us to walk that tightrope.
How did the cast come together? Did you write any of the parts for any of the actors?
HEIMANN: Yes, I wrote Laura for Marlene.
MARLENE FORTE: This is my second round with Addison. I met him during the pandemic, when he put together HYPOCHONDRIAC, which I read in one sitting. That’s how his scripts are. When you start, you just have to finish it, because you don’t know where you’re going with it. You can’t put it down and go have a cup of coffee and come back.
So that’s how we met, and then he sent the TOUCH ME script, not telling me he had written this part for me. I read it and said to my husband, “Oh my God, Addison’s done it again! He’s frightened the hell out of me, and I don’t know what to do with this.” Laura was there, but honestly, I didn’t feel like, “Oh, that’s for me.” But he really has given me the two most fun, juicy things I’ve done in 30 years, and I called him and said, “I can’t stop thinking about this crazy script you wrote. What is this?” He was like, “Do you want to play Laura?” and I said, “Yes!” He always has a very clear vision, which is why you can trust the craziness on the page, since it usually comes from a very personal, grounded place.
HEIMANN: How about the rest of the cast?
LOU TAYLR PUCCI: It came to me through Rustic Films, through David Lawson Jr. and Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, who I just worked with on DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN and had worked with on SPRING a long time ago. They pitched me this thing I could never, ever have imagined, and then I read the script. I had to read it three times, which I never do, because I really didn’t get it [laughs]. I just knew it was weird, but I didn’t know how this science fiction world worked. I had to ask a lot of questions of Addison to figure this out. I talked his ear off, just asking questions for like three hours. Then he asked me, “Are you gonna do it?” And I was like, “I don’t know. I think I’ve just got to sleep on it, man.” And then all those questions were answered. And the next morning, I woke up and was like, “Yeah, let’s do it.”
What I was looking for from Addison was just that he knew his world that he created, inside and out. And he did. He explained it in such easy detail that it blew my mind and made me think, “OK, I can trust him. He has the vision to make this movie.”
Olivia, I notice you’re also credited as a producer. What was your total involvement in this project?
OLIVIA TAYLOR DUDLEY: I, similar to Lou, came to this through Rustic Films. My good friend David Lawson called me one day and said, “Hey, I know you’re into weird shit. Do you want to read this script about alien sex, and will you do it? I need to know in the next day what your thoughts are.” I was like, “What?” I was leaving two days later to go film a different movie, so I had to make a decision really fast. So I went home and read it, and absolutely fell in love with it, but I also thought this had better get executed perfectly, or it wouldn’t work.
Then I met Addison, and we talked for like two hours straight about our shared mental illness and all these different things. And at the end he was like, “Oh, wait, do you want to do the movie?” And I said, “Oh yeah, let’s talk about the movie. I absolutely love it.” Then I then left and shot that other movie, and had just a couple of days between that and TOUCH ME. So I didn’t have a lot of prep, but I knew Addison was going to be a wonderful creative partner.
Then throughout the process, he really involved everybody. He was so generous and selfless on set and made it clear to the whole cast and crew that it was everybody’s movie. I came on as an executive producer during post, and was in on the edit and the sound design and the color and everything like that, because it’s my favorite part. And Addison was a wonderful partner to have on this journey.
JORDAN GAVARIS: I was the last one of the cast to come on board, and I only had about two weeks from getting the script to the beginning of principal photography. But I knew Addison a little because my husband Devon Graye was one of the stars of HYPOCHONDRIAC, and I loved that film. I thought, Jesus, this is a really promising filmmaker. He’s quite special. We’d actually had a coffee prior to him sending me the TOUCH ME script about something completely different, and he happened to mention the film, and I said, “My God, that sounds amazing.” I love science fiction, and have worked a lot in that space–I did ORPHAN BLACK for five years–and I’m no stranger to outlandish circumstances. But what I liked about Addison’s script is you have these really wild circumstances, but at the center of it all are so many beautiful personal relationships. From reading the first five or 10 pages of the script, I knew I had to do it because I thought Addison, and I said this to my manager: “Addison Heimann is going to make an extraordinary movie one day, and it could very well be this one. And if I don’t do this, I’m an idiot.”
And I got this. I’m also a bit of a cinephile, and I love Japanese movies. I was a really big fan of HOUSE, and I think we even talked about some of the tonal references. The absurd mixing with hyper-realistic relationships and high drama and a colorful palette; all those were things I had always wanted to be able to do for a director. I’d always wanted to be able to play in a sandbox like that, and Addison seemed to believe that I could do it.
Getting back to that eight-minute monologue, that’s kind of a daring way to open a film. And I’m sure a challenge for you, Olivia. So can you talk about the choice to start with it and how it was to shoot it?
HEIMANN: On everything I do, I love borrowing different pieces from different films that I’m obsessed with. I watched RESURRECTION, and halfway through is that crazy fucking monologue Rebecca Hall has where it’s one single take of her telling this insane story. I got so sucked into that, and it shifts the movie in such an incredible way that I wanted to try and do that, but to place it at the beginning. I think the best way to enjoy this movie, which no one will ever do, is to know absolutely nothing about it. Like, not even know it’s about aliens, because the way it’s written, you’re supposed to believe Joey’s story is not real, because it’s done as a kind of an ERP exercise where you overexaggerate what happened to you. But then you find out later it’s the actual story.
I knew this movie was going to be a crazy journey that everybody goes on, and because it’s so crazy, I wanted something grounded at the beginning to really shift your focus. I wanted to put you into this world, and for the monologue to set up that world, and it’s like, OK, this is the movie we’re doing–boom, let’s go. And I wouldn’t have had the confidence to do it if I hadn’t seen Rebecca Hall fucking nail it in RESURRECTION.
DUDLEY: Honestly, that was the scariest thing when I read the script. I’ve done so much genre that all the weird stuff in the movie, that didn’t worry me at all. I was like, yeah, this is my wheelhouse. But an eight-minute monologue to kick off the film scared the crap out of me. I only had about five days to prep that, and I’m dyslexic, so memorizing is the hardest thing in the world to me. I was terrified, and all I did for like five days straight was read that monologue over and over and over.
And Addison did a wonderful thing and put that on day one, first up! So that was the first thing we shot for the film, 9 a.m. on a Monday morning. And the first take is what’s in the movie. It was very hard, but also a great access point into Joey and figuring out who she was on day one, and Addison trusted me with it. He didn’t really give me any direction ahead of time; he was like, “You got it, you can do this.” And that kind of trust is the only reason I pulled it off. I think if he had micromanaged the performance before I did it, and had a lot of thoughts on how to do it, I might have been in my head even more–and I was in my head a lot. Like, I was dry-heaving outside after the first take, because I was like, “I can’t believe I did that.” Eight minutes is a long time to have a camera rolling and nobody talking, and I have the ADHD as well, so my brain was going a million other places. I don’t know how I pulled it off, but I did, and it’s like a fever dream now.
I’m a big fan of RussellFX (Josh Russell and Sierra Spence); how was it working with their prosthetics creations?
DUDLEY: I’ve worked with them on a couple of things, and they are just so game to do anything. Addison hired a bunch of weird artists for this who have a vision, but also really enjoy collaborating. I loved having them on set.
GAVARIS: This was a film I don’t think anybody took because they were like, “I want a paycheck” or “I need to fill some time.” This was a movie every single person involved took because they love Addison and they loved the script, and wanted to realize this absolutely insane vision, and they were no exception. They were integral to making sure that even though we didn’t have millions and millions of dollars, this was still going to be really cool, and would satisfy our inner 12-year-old who would geek out over something like this.
I’ve done a lot of greenscreen work, but I hadn’t done a lot of practical effects, where the blood has to hit just right or things are exploding. I mean, I had a gel cannon in my face, covering me in goo over and over. These were the things that the cinematic romanticist in me was so excited to do, because that’s what I imagined moviemaking to be when I was a kid, and now everything’s gone digital. This was a throwback, and the movie’s better for it.
HEIMANN: I love that you just casually talked about the gel cannon, not actually mentioning our first take when it only hit you and completely avoided Olivia. Jordan just got everything in his face, and Olivia looked at him and started laughing, and then the entire crew was laughing. We have it on camera where Jordan’s just like, “Fuck all of y’all!” [Laughs] It was one of the best moments.
How weird was it doing the alien tentacle sex scenes?
DUDLEY: Not as weird as you would think. At that point in the shoot, we’d all gotten to know each other very well, and Addison ran a wonderful, safe set and did an amazing job with our intimacy coordinator, Sasha Nicole Smith, and everybody to make sure I was comfortable. It was a big conversation ahead of filming, and while we were filming, to make sure everything would be comfortable for everyone. And it was; it was honestly a really fun day.
All the tentacles were puppeteered. We only had so many of them–we didn’t have a full creature, so it was a bunch of people puppeteering these tentacles around me for an entire day. It was one of the most interesting, weird days on set, but also super-enjoyable, because I had to really trust in Addison’s vision, and at that point I was fully on board.
Then when we were in the edit, and it came together, I was like, “Oh wow, this is really beautiful.” Thank God this worked, because if it didn’t, it would be such a weird scene, and I’d just have to, I don’t know, quit acting or something, because it was such a tight line to walk to make that work. And I’m really proud of it.
