[Pride 2020] 13 Questions With Jeffrey Reddick

Since we’re spending a lot of time celebrating fans and films this Pride (heck yeah horror fans and films rock!), I wanted to also celebrate out, proud filmmakers. I reached out to Jeffrey Reddick, most notable for making us fear that Death has us trapped in Rube Goldberg machines. He graciously agreed to discuss his past, his work, and what’s coming up next for him. I want to say thank you to Jeffrey Reddick for being such a positive inspiration (and for making awesome films). I hope you all enjoy the interview.

Often we hear about writers or producers who come from LA, or whose aunts and uncles are executives or casting agents, and there’s no shame in that, but many of us can’t relate to that. Countless horror fans would probably find your story much more relatable. Is it safe to say you faced a few extra hurdles finding success in Hollywood as a biracial gay man from Kentucky?

When I was growing up, I wanted to be an actor, so there were definitely lots of hurdles being a person of color back in the early ’90s when I first moved to New York. Growing up, the only hurdle I faced was getting out of eastern Kentucky without being beaten to a pulp for being gay and a person of color.

I definitely had hurdles as far as the acting went because my agent told me I was an ethnic Michael J. Fox type,  which was a compliment back then – and still is, he’s awesome as an actor – but she was basically telling me that I was too white-acting and light skinned to play “gangsters and basketball players.” Her words, not mine. I realized acting wasn’t going to be a thing for me to do and that’s why I decided to pursue writing, which I’m glad I did, and I still get to have my acting bug scratched every once in a while. That sounded weird.

How does your acting background affect your writing style?

I look at each role as trying to create a character that an actor would want to play, so I try to layer my characters as much as possible, even though a lot of times the character development in a horror film gets stripped away. In my scripts, I really strive to make each role something that an actor would be really excited to sink their teeth into whether it’s the lead or a supporting role. I think my acting background definitely helps me create fuller characters.

Writers often feel connected to their characters, which can lead to not wanting to kill them off. I’ve been guilty of that in fiction writing. Looking at your body of work so far, is it safe to say anybody can die on any page in a Jeffrey Reddick script?

I do get connected to my characters and so I try to make each character somebody that the audience doesn’t want to die, unless sometimes they’re the person that’s just so evil that you want them to die, but I still try to make them a little three dimensional and give them some humor or something that makes you kind of like them. But yeah, nobody’s safe from killing in my scripts. I have a couple new ones where I kill some characters that I love, and yeah, it’s really hard. The funny thing is, I find that in a lot of my scripts a lot of characters end up surviving, like in Day of the Dead and Tamara. Well, not a lot of them, but several people live. I almost had Jesse live in Tamara, but I had to kill him. My personal connection does affect me for sure.

One of the horror cornerstones is the idea of final girls. The queer community especially connects to these somewhat masculinized kickass female characters. In Final Destination, you gave us one of the most popular final boys in Alex. It sure didn’t hurt landing Devon Sawa for the role. Was it a purposeful subversion of the final girl trope?

Yes, I definitely wanted to subvert the final girl trope in Final Destination and focus on a male character. I feel like we haven’t had enough of them in horror films, so that was definitely a purposeful decision on my part – to give us a final guy that we knew and love. Devon is a great actor, and extremely handsome, so I think he was an awesome final guy. I’m glad that this film has kind of made a mark on people, and that is in large part indebted to Devon’s performance as Alex.

We need more final guys.

Who hasn’t been on a highway, noticed a larger vehicle, thought about Final Destination 2, and though, Yep, I’m definitely about to die. Oh, great… You came up with the opening accident idea on a road trip home, what do you remember about that a ha! moment?

Originally in Final Destination 2, there was going to be a hotel fire. The kids were going down to spring break and were going to stay the night in a hotel and it caught on fire. Craig Perry the producer, whose kind of been like the godfather of the series, was like, “Uh we need something a little better than that.”

I was going home to visit my mom and sister and got behind a log truck and I always pull over into the next lane. Then I pulled over and I pulled off the side of the road and I called Craig Perry and I was like, “Whatabout afuckinglogtruck onthefreeway!”

And he’s like, “Calm down, slow down, I can’t hear you. What are you talking about?”

And I said, “What about a log truck on a freeway?”

And he’s like, “That’s it. That’s the idea.”

They say the greatest inspiration comes from life, and that is one of my favorite scenes in any horror film, that opening pileup in Final Destination 2.

Tamara is an anti-bullying movie before anti-bullying was cool. What was the inspiration?

There were two inspirations for Tamara. One is obviously the anti-bullying message, but I’m also a big fan of Carrie, which Tamara is an homage to. The only thing I hate about Carrie was that you have to wait for the last twenty minutes of the movie for her to really start kicking everybody’s ass. I wanted to come up with a way that the bullied character could come back a lot earlier and start exacting revenge.

Honestly, there was a lot of pressure after Final Destination. Everybody’s like, “Write another one like that!” Which is a lot of pressure on a writer. With Tamara, I sat down to write the script that I would love to see. So you know, gay men love sexy hot chicks for some reason; I don’t know why, I haven’t figured that one out, but we do, we love kickass women. In my script, they took this out, but Chloe was actually in the closet, she was a lesbian. You’ll notice in the finished film, that her and Jesse never have any romance between them like you would expect and that’s because she’s a lesbian. They took that subplot out. I had her parents basically showing up at the hospital under Tamara’s spell, and you know every gay character’s worst nightmare is their parents saying, “You might as well stab a knife through my heart when you told me this,” and try to kill you. I had that in the script and they took it out.

Tamara would have been a really queer film if they’d done it as I wrote it, but in the scene where she puts the two jocks under a spell. Since they’d date raped girls, I basically had Patrick rape Shawn in the script. And nobody complained about it – Lionsgate didn’t. Then I got a call like the day before shooting and they were like, “Well how much do you want us to show in this?” I said, “Well it’s what you would show if it was a female character. It’s not sex, it’s rape. This isn’t a love scene, this is a rape scene, so show whatever you would show if it was a woman.”

And then I saw the finished scene and I was honestly really upset by it. I was like, “Now the takeaway is she kissed them and then made them have sex with each other? So now she made them gay? Like that’s the revenge?”

It totally sent out the wrong message and undermined what I had written.

I love the movie, it’s got some great stuff and I love the actors, I love Jenna Dewan, but they definitely stripped out – Lionsgate was so excited about the script, but when they saw the movie, they were like, “Eh, this wasn’t the script that we bought.”

They watered it down. It would have been a lot more hardcore and sexier if they’d have stuck with the original script, but I love the movie a lot.

A Nightmare on Elm Street was a big influence getting you into horror, which led to you working with New Line Cinema. You managed to make Dead Awake, a horror movie about people getting killed in their sleep, not feel like an Elm Street rip off at all. Was there a conscious effort to steer away from certain elements, or was the initial idea different enough that you didn’t feel Freddy looming behind your back?

Nightmare on Elm Street’s definitely a huge influence of mine, but with Dead Awake I wanted to stay away from that world a little bit because obviously there’s no way you can compete with A Nightmare on Elm Street unless you set out to do a proper Nightmare on Elm Street type of movie. With this one, in the script, there was a lot more of the visual stuff that was going around so it leaked into Nightmare on Elm Street territory a little bit more because you never actually saw the Night Hag in my script. It was more this amorphous shape that was in the darkness that could warp what you would see, but when we came down to filming it, we ended up shooting it independently, and we couldn’t afford to do all the visual effects that it would have required. So we ended up having to create a person as the Night Hag and use her; that definitely took away the Nightmare on Elm Street vibes that would have been in there if we had more money to do the visual stuff that I had in the script.

Nightmare is something I love and I have one script that leans into that territory a lot with fantasy and reality blending that I’ll be doing someday soon. For Dead Awake, I didn’t want to get too much into the Freddy world because you can’t top it, but if you’re going to go into it, you have to really do something cool with it.

I don’t recollect any overt queerness in The Final Wish, but it’s a great example of a queer friendly horror movie. It’s got a handsome male lead, fan favorite Lin Shaye as the scenery chewing mother, and no male gazing. Do you approach filmmaking thinking about what an audience wants to see (or doesn’t want to see), or is it more a case of making what you want to see?

The weird thing about growing up at a studio – I was at New Line from age nineteen to thirty – so I grew up blending the creative with the commerce angle of writing. You obviously want to write something that somebody is going to watch, so I try to find more universal themes in my work so that it’ll be something that will tap into something people are afraid of. Like in the Final Wish, feeling like losing a parent. I left home when I was young and my sister stayed in Kentucky and took care of my mom. Even though Mom never said anything and she always supported me, I always felt kind of bad, that I had left my sister to take care of my mom. I just kind of felt guilty about that. So that was something I know a lot of kids can relate to and a lot of adults can relate to.

I do definitely take personal experiences and put them into my films. I think that makes them more universal if you do and with that one, I also wanted to go back to focus on a male lead. I kind of like doing that more. I’ve written a lot of scripts with really strong female leads, and I love them, but I still think we need to see more guys getting scared in films – and naked.

You typically produce works you’ve written, with the notable exception of The Night Sitter. I loved the tone and look of that one, and all the Dario Argento references. How did you get involved with that project?

I was very lucky with that because a friend of mine, Matt Leslie, who I’m collaborating on a project with right now, sent me The Night Sitter – it was some friends of his who had made the film. I get a lot of films sent to me and very few of them are good. I watched The Night Sitter and I just fell in love with it. I’m a big fan of Argento and Suspiria so I loved that.

Matt’s like, “Can you help the guys out?” and I’m like, “I will absolutely send it to everybody I know and try to get it set up.” Fortunately, we did get it released, and I think those guys are very talented. I think we’ll be seeing a lot more from them. A lot of this business is friendships and connections. This was a case of a friend sending me a film that he liked a lot and I just fell in love with it, so really glad that I got that one.

Ever since Hitchcock’s cameos, fans love seeing filmmakers in their own work. You appear in Tamara, Dead Awake and The Final Wish. You’re also a better actor than typical filmmakers, which isn’t a surprise considering your background. Can we look forward to seeing you on screen more?

Yes. For Don’t Look Back, I intentionally didn’t do a cameo in that one because I’m directing it and I didn’t want to – I just felt weird about putting myself in a movie that I was directing. I am planning on doing more cameos and, honestly, a couple of the projects I’m working on now, I’m going to write roles for myself. Not big roles, I don’t want to carry a movie by any means, but I’m definitely going to start putting myself in there more because acting was my first dream. Now that I have a sideways way into it, I’m definitely going to take advantage of that more going forward. You’ll be seeing more than cameos from me in the near future.

Appearing in Dead Awake as Anthony, AKA Friend Who Appears In A Few Group Scenes

You’ve pushed for more diversity in film long before Get Out proved that black leads don’t kill projects. Is it becoming any easier to have your diverse vision for characters realized?

It’s been a struggle. When I first wrote the story for Final Destination 2, Kimberly was African American. And I knew they were shooting in Canada and I knew that wasn’t going to happen, but I’m like, “Well, let me put it in there,” because I tried that in the first Final Destination. A lot of that was just casting. They shot them in Canada and people weren’t back in the day thinking about diversity. I remember getting really annoyed because I was like, “Final Destination is set in New York, the most diverse city in the world, you can’t just have all white kids. My Mom’s white, I love white people, but you got to make the movie look like New York.”

That’s always been my thing. I think you can have diverse stories like Get Out that are amazing, and you can also just have movies where inclusion is diversity. And that’s something I actually do fight for, for all my films, to varying degrees of success. As I’m producing more, I’m definitely pushing that more, and as I’m writing more, I’m making it a point. People want to see people that represent themselves on film. You can drop into any city in any country in the world and go to the mall and you’ll see a bunch of different people there. Films should reflect reality in that way and I’m glad there’s a push for it now. I think the industry is course correcting now for decades and decades of non-diversity and sexism and all this other stuff. The industry is course correcting, so it’s a lot easier to talk about openly now. It’s not just people of color, it’s also gay and lesbian characters, it’s characters with disabilities, it’s everybody. We just need to see more people that look like us.

I think we should be very mindful of also finding people that aren’t represented in film but are part of our society, that’s why I pointed out people with disabilities. We hardly ever see anybody with a disability in a film, or special needs. It’s kind of like an invisible thing. It only makes a film feel more real if you have people in there that represent what our world and our country look like. It’s a good fight and people are really starting to push for it more so I’m really excited about that.

Your next feature, Don’t Look Back (formerly Good Samaritan), is also your directorial debut. What was it like directing your own story?

It was an amazing and scary process, I’m not going to lie. All these year’s you’re like, “Well, people have changed the vision in my story.” Then all of a sudden, you’re in charge of your own story and then you realize – first of all I knew it was hard – but it’s hard. Directing is hard. And there’s a lot of moving pieces. And you also have a budget that you have to work in. Don’t Look Back was shot as an independent film so we didn’t have a huge budget for it. That came with a whole set of obstacles that you have to deal with. “We can’t shoot this thing now that I wanted to do, or this is not how I envisioned a set piece but we can’t shoot it that way because we don’t have the location or we don’t have the days.” You realize that making a movie is a collaborate – I’ve always known that – but making a movie is a collaborate effort.

You realize there’s the movie that you wrote, the movie that you shoot, and the movie that you edit because of what you have in the can. A lot of times the movie that you have in the can turns out to be different than the movie even that you shot in your head when you get an editor in there and you start working with stuff. It’s an amazing journey and process and I have several other projects that I’m really excited about that I’ll be directing in the future. I have a couple passion projects that I want to do and then we’ll see where the road takes me after that.

Don’t Look Back is a full realization of the concepts Jeffrey Reddick created in his 2015 short, titled Good Samaritan, which is available on YouTube.

IMDb lists Don’t Look Back as being in post-production. Like most movies I’m looking forward to, I’m wondering if the Corona Craziness has affected its release.

It did affect us as far as the release, but we’ve got a distributor now, which I’m excited about, and we’ll be announcing all that stuff in due time. We’ll be announcing a release date as well. But we did have to push the release of Don’t Look Back because of the Coronavirus because obviously the world’s been put on hold and we’re slowly getting back in motion. I’m really excited about it and excited for everybody to see it.

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