Electrick Children
Rebecca Thomas makes her feature length directorial debut this week with her movie Electrick Children, which is influenced by her Mormon upbringing.
I caught up with to talk about the movie, how her childhood influenced the film and what lies ahead for her.
- Electrik Children is about to be released here in the UK so can you tell me a little big about the movie?
The movie is about a fifteen year old girl and she is from a fundamentalist Mormon colony in Southern Utah where she lives a very strict life with her family.
But one day she hears this forbidden cassette tape and she hears rock and roll music on it - a couple of weeks later she turns up pregnant and thinks that the music that she heard has gotten her pregnant.
Her parents arrange a marriage for her and she runs away, the closest town over the hills is Las Vegas. So she stumbles into Las Vegas and meets a couple of punk kids who take her in and she ends up falling in love with one of them.
- You penned the movie as well as directed so where did the idea for the screenplay come from?
I grew up Mormon in Las Vegas and so those experiences are very close to me but I was doing some documentary work on fundamentalist Mormonism and saw that girls often ran away and boys are often kicked out and I found that very interesting.
From a very young age they are expelled from their communities and that is where the initial idea came from. And then the whole pregnancy and cassette tape must have been some crazy dream that I had and I decided to make it a reality (laughs).
- You have slightly touched on my next question really I was wondering how much did you draw on your own Mormon upbringing? And what sort of research did you do for the movie?
Well I was doing documentary film work so I was interviewing a lot of kids, inside and outside of the colonies, and going to lots of different sects of fundamentalist Mormons and fundamentalist Christians and polygamist Christians - so I was seeing a lot of variations of what can happen and sort of conglomerated all of it and came up with my own variation.
I then infused my own mainstream Mormonism into it because that was very personal to me and seemed very specific. I grew up just like anybody else I went to a normal school, played Nintendo and watched TV so it was definitely not to the extent that these people live.
- The movie marks your directorial debut so how did you find directing a picture for the very first time?
Like running a marathon. I have made a couple of shorts things before and the stakes a pretty low so if things don’t turn out right… But with this you have to endure all the way to the end; from the first time you put a word on the page to the last press screening that you go to.
I think it is just about enduring and making strong choices, I definitely found that on set I had to make a decision and make them fast; luckily I like decision making.
- How does working on feature compare to working on shorts?
I think it’s a little bit more fulfilling for me to work on a feature because you get to be around the people you want to be with for so much longer and in that same respect there are people that you know that you didn’t want to work with and you have to work with them much longer (laughs).
I think working with people in general hones your life skills and filmmaking becomes a life activity rather than just an occupation.
For me it is a lot more fun to work on a feature than a short because shorts end and if it is good it’s good but it does have a shorter life span and this has something longer.
- Julia Garner takes on the central role of Rachel in the movie so what was it about this actress that made you think she would be perfect for the role? And what were you looking for in your leading lady?
I was looking for an actress who was virginal, innocent and believing but had to be bold and it was really tough to find someone like that; I cast Julia maybe five or six days before we started production.
I had cast a few different actresses and fired them and got the production into a little bit of trouble but I never felt right about some of the people that I cast; they either had the talent but not the look or they had the look but they were not mature enough so there was always something that wasn’t quite right.
I started asking around different actors ’who could play this main part?’ And I would describe what I was looking for and an actor recommended Julia to me and said ‘she doesn’t have a ton of experience but she seems like she would fit the bill’.
I got her audition and when you get an audition tape from an actor they usually perform the scene once or twice but Julia had done it six or seven times and so I had this thirty minute Quicktime file in my inbox.
But she was fabulous and she did every single kind of variation that I could have asked for - she really wanted it and when you see her picture she is radiating and totally angelic. A couple of days later she flew in we fitted her and then she walked on the set and we started.
- How much did you enjoy working with her and what sort of ideas did she bring to the table for the role of Rachel?
I worked with her in a very simple way as she came on so quickly. But it was the same for the rest of the actors to as we tried to focus on the want and the needs of the characters versus the specifics of where they were coming from, most of the actors were from New York or LA and not from a fundamentalist Mormon background.
So we tried to keep it as general as we could so the clothes and the specificity of who they were anyway would allow for the audience to believe that they really were these people.
But every actor needed something different so I worked with Julia differently that I worked with Billy (Zane) or Rory (Culkin) because they all needed different things. Julia and I had lots of discussions about what the scenes meant and she was a pleasure.
- And can you talk me through the rest of the casting process because you have the likes of Rory Culkin are on the cast list?
I knew from the start that I wanted Rory Culkin to play Clyde. It was pretty simple as I had my casting director contact his agent and he read the script and I was out doing some location scouting when I had a phone call and he was like ‘where do I sign?’ And I was like ‘no where do I sign?’
So we got him on board and he was absolutely wonderful to work with. Liam Aiken also came on really early and he seemed to work out perfectly, especially with Julia.
And Billy Zane came on about a week or two before… he was my casting director’s friend and I had never though about casting him and she was like ‘he is really good and I think he would really love the script’.
And he did love the script and when I met him he was really excited to do the part, he is recently a parent and so we had a lot to talk about with him having a new family of fundamentalist Mormon children under his belt for the part.
- How have you personally found the reaction to the movie?
It is different depending where I am. It played in Berlin and the house was laughing from beginning to end, which I wasn’t totally expecting; of course there are moments of comedy in the film.
I think because they are removed from the reality of fundamentalist Mormonism they could just sit back and let it play.
Whereas when we premiered in Austin in Texas people are closer to the subject as there have been many incidents of polygamist prophets fleeing to Mexico to escape the law and I think that being on their minds they took it with a little more weight.
But there are funny moments in the film and I tried to keep the film sort of magical and light and I think most people respond to it that way.
- And we are always hearing about how hard it is to get movies financed at the moment so how difficult was it getting the money for this movie and ultimately getting it made?
It was sort of miraculously easy. About a little over a year ago I decided that I wanted to make a feature and I didn’t care that I made it for too much money so I decided to make a micro-budget movie. So I set up a Kickstarter account, it’s a crowd fundraising website, so I started this campaign to raise $10,000.
The way that you do it is you use social media or through telephones calls to promote your Kickstarter for small or large amounts of money. And it took a great deal of my time but I started doing that and my producer started doing that.
She stumbled across an old contact of hers and sent him an email and said ‘hey if you have $10 donate it to this Kickstarter’ he saw the website and clicked on the link and donated $5,000, which was a quarter of our total budget.
So of course I wrote to him and expressed my thanks and I said if you would like to read the script let me know and he said that he did so I did a quick re-write and sent it to him.
I got a phone call a couple of days later and it is him, but he doesn’t tell me that it is him, and says ‘you are going to need lights and I don’t know how we are going to get the location in the middle of the desert but it is going to be brilliant. We have to get a good cast.’
And I was like ‘who is this?’ And he was like ‘it’s Richard Neustadter and I want to produce your movie’ And I said ‘oh it’s good to meet you’ and he just said ‘I will give you $20,000 if you want to make it and I will leave you alone or we can make it for a bigger budget’ and I was like ‘well of course I would like to make it for a bigger budget’ - of course I was tenuous about the whole thing at first because I didn’t know if it was real.
And I told him ‘that’s fine but with or without you I am going to start making the movie on September 1st’ and he was like ‘are you sure about that?’ And I said ‘yes’ and so he was on board. So it was probably the fastest way to raise that kind of money (laughs).
- How much was the low budget a challenge when you were shooting this movie?
No matter what budget you have filmmaking is always a challenge because you stretch the budget to the maximum so I would say that it was a challenge.
We shot in twenty five days, that’s about four weeks, and we had two really large company moves from Southern Utah to Las Vegas and then Las Vegas to California. Then Julia is a minor and so I only had eight hours with her a day.
So it was tough because we were out in the middle of nowhere and fighting the weather constantly but I think these are all normal things (laughs). But I had a great cast and a great crew so I really have no complaints about how it all went down.
- Finally what’s coming next for you?
Next I am working on a screenplay or two and one of them… I was a Mormon missionary in Japan for eighteen months and so I speak Japanese and I love Japan so I am adapting Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid but it will be set in Japan.
And then I also have a low budget horror/thriller that I am writing and it’s set in New York, where I am living at the moment, so I hope to be able to do that too.
Electrick Children is released 13th July
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw