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Jake West - 2009 (Part 1) My longest, most detailed interview with Jake West to date was done in May 2009, shortly before the release of Doghouse. A very heavily edited version of this was published in the late, lamented DeathRay magazine.
"Which tied my hands in many ways, because it was a made-for-cable project. The Sci-Fi Channel have a lot of strange rules which you have to get familiar with when you do a project for them. You can’t have any real swearing, well, any swearing, because of Middle America and the Bible Belt. You can’t have any drug use." All the things we look for in one of your films! "Exactly. So that took a lot of the ‘Jake West stuff’ out." Was it a positive experience for you, working on that film? "It was a positive experience. Any film you get to make is a pleasure, in terms of learning, from the point of view of the director. You don’t get good at making films by not making them, you get good at them by making them. Certainly, making a Sci-Fi Channel film is very hard work. We’re shooting in Romania with a crew that don’t speak English. We shoot for 19 days and we don’t have the creature shoot ready until the eleventh day. All these things that tend to make you think quite practically about how you’re going to get thing made. So from that point of view, the pleasure was that I got to work with Lance Henriksen and Doug Bradley. You met the guys doing the creature effects, Gary Tunnicliffe’s guys. They were fantastic. There was lots of positives and also there was lots of difficult stuff." Were Sci-Fi Channel happy with the film? "Sci-Fi Channel as far as I know were very happy with it. It got reasonable ratings and it’s a film that they can keep on screening every Halloween. Certainly the feedback we got was good and the lady from the Sci-Fi Channel said to me if I wanted to make more stuff for them she could get me some work. To be hired as a film-maker is a great way to make a living and anyone who moans about it, there’s something wrong with them. But obviously as a film-maker, my ambitions are beyond work-for-hire projects - and that’s why something like Doghouse is such aa breath of fresh air. “Working on the script with Dan Schaffer, we developed that over a year and it had the kind of love and attention that you want these kind of films to have. Pumpkinhead had to be done very quickly on a budget. It was more money than I’d had but you’re paying for a full crew, you’re shooting in a foreign country. It was only $650,000 or something like that so it wasn’t a huge budget. It just felt a lot for me. Because we had, like, film cameras! You came out to the set and I think you saw that we were enjoying it."
"For me, one of the most disappointing aspects was the very shoddy CGI. I shot all of those plates assuming that the creature that was going to be put in was actually going to be quite reasonable. Now I know Sci-Fi Channel sometimes have cheap CGI but the stuff in Pumpkinhead was like Playstation 2. I was very, very disappointed with that work - which I had no opportunity to do anything about, unfortunately. It was all added in after the edit was finished. It was just dropped in and it was just soul-destroying to see that, because obviously a lot of people commented. And quite rightly so because it wasn’t good enough. So that very much turned me off CGI. That’s why, with Doghouse it’s pretty much all make-up and character effects." So what were your career options after Pumpkinhead was finished? "Well, what Pumpkinhead did, because I got paid for it, rather than a film like Evil Aliens or Razor Blade Smile where I had to invest my own time and effort and hope I might get something back one day. Which is not a way of making films and making a living and that’s why I do all the Nucleus work as well, because it generates some cash, and I hire myself out as a freelance editor. Whatever way I can earn money between projects is a way of being able to develop the next project. What Pumpkinhead really did is it afforded me enough money to spend some time developing a project without needing to go off and find other work. “That’s where Doghouse obviously benefited. It meant I wasn’t distracted in trying to develop Doghouse and having to do a lot of other things at the same time. And working with Dan Schaffer was an absolute pleasure because we just click and are on the same level. It was a pleasure for me not to have to write. I’ve always had to get involved with writing my stuff because I couldn’t afford to hire a writer. I love structuring stuff but the actual writing process isn’t my naturally favourite part. I’m not saying that I won’t write again but certainly working with Dan was such a pleasure for me because he’s such a good writer in my opinion. That’s why, when we sent the script out, it got picked up before we’d even shot a frame. For an independent film, that’s virtually unheard of, certainly in the UK." How did you and Dan Schaffer get together? "Basically it was just by pure luck. I did an interview about Evil Aliens for a magazine called Alternative London, which you may be aware of or not." I can’t say it’s made it up to Leicester. "It was available in Camden Market and other places. The journalist on that was a goth girl called Secky - Secretia - and she was just great. We hit it off when we were just chatting. We did the interview and then had a couple of glasses of wine and carried on talking about stuff because we had a lot in common. She said, ‘Have you ever read Dogwitch?’ I said, ‘No, what’s Dogwitch? That sounds cool.’ She said, ‘You’ll absolutely fucking love it, it’s the most hilarious amazing thing!’ When she told me that one of the reviewers who had read Dogwitch had likened it to Evil Dead II, I thought hold on, I’m in. “So she said, ‘Look, I’m friends with Dan Schaffer, the guy who writes it. I think he really loves Evil Aliens as well but I’ll check and I’ll get you one of his comics to read.’ Naturally she just thought that we would click and her perception was correct. I said, ‘If you can get me a copy that would be fantastic, if that’s cool.’ And I thought maybe I’ll never hear from her again, maybe it’s the wine talking and that’s the end of it. But literally the next week, she said, ‘I’m in Camden, are you home?’ And she dropped off the first two volumes of the Dogwitch graphic novels. And I read it and immediately got back to her. “I thought it was absolutely fantastic, some of the best and funniest stuff I had read in a comic book for ages. And I loved Dan’s artwork as well. He’s a great visualist and a great writer which gives him a big advantage I think. Because I loved it, I got in contact independently with Dan Schaffer and said, ‘I think your book’s brilliant, I’m friends with Secretia, if you’re around let’s have a drink.’ And we hooked up, just on that chance meeting. So it was a bit like meeting you and you recommending a bit of work and then meeting the creator of that work. So it was one of those very, very fortunate situations. If that hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t have Doghouse."
"Dan came up with the initial idea when his girlfriend had a really bad cold or really bad flu - and he thought she looked a bit like a zombie! Then we were just throwing some ideas about. I can’t remember this a hundred per cent clearly but I remember us saying what if a bloke had a really bad cold: it would be man-flu. Then that introduced the whole gender thing because Dan is very interested in gender politics and a lot of his work has dealt with that. I think the idea of something we could then genderise and have a battle of the sexes subtext in, seemed a hilarious idea for a horror film. Certainly for a zombie film, it seemed a very fresh way of doing the zombie idea in a way that we haven’t seen done before. “Then you say hold on, has it not been done before? Let’s just check. Literally, it was something we felt had not been done before. Subsequently I found out, from reading things on the internet, that some people think Doghouse is ripping off Jack Ketchum’s Ladies Night. Ladies Night is a project that Stuart Gordon was developing for some time. I met Stuart, ironically; I was on the jury with him at the Fantastic’Arts Gerardmer international film festival in 2008. We were both jury members. I was telling him about Doghouse and he said, ‘Oh, I developed this thing called Ladies Night.’ “But I didn’t know it was a Jack Ketchum novel and things like that. So on the internet I’ve been reading some people saying it’s a rip-off of that but it isn’t, it’s an original idea by Dan Schaffer. Jack Ketchum’s stuff is very, very violent, visceral, super-nasty. But Doghouse was developed very much as a horror-comedy idea with a real sense of Britishness about it. So I hope that it’s not like Ladies Night. It’s always weird when you’re doing something you think is original and then other people starting saying you’re ripping something else off. That’s certainly the case here." What is curious that you’ve got ‘lads go away into the countryside and face off against female zombies’; Lesbian Vampire Killers has ‘lads go away and face off against female vampires’; and the film I saw after I met you the other week, The Scar Crow, has a bunch of lads in the countryside against female ghosts. There’s a microgenre developing there! "That’s interesting. It’s kind of weird because obviously all horror films to some extent have virtually the same set-up: a bunch of people go somewhere and they get trapped and something happens to them. That’s virtually every horror film. Sometimes it’s weird that you might get a cycle of films. But The Scar Crow is a very independent film so obviously most people aren’t going to be aware of that. Not that it doesn’t deserve attention but it’s not going to be in the public eye. “Whereas something like Lesbian Vampire Killers is obviously something which had a huge marketing budget and had a massive presence because it had Horne and Corden, popular comedians. Unfortunately for that film I think the Corden-Horne bubble had burst. It seemed that their TV series didn’t live up to expectations. As I said to you, I really enjoyed Lesbian Vampire Killers on the level of it being just a comedy but I didn’t think it was a horror film particularly. It didn’t have much horror content in it. Doghouse is genuinely a horror-comedy whereas I would say that Lesbian Vampire Killers is a comedy with some... vampires in it!" Is the horror-comedy balance in Doghouse about the same as you had in Evil Aliens? "I think the horror-comedy balance in Doghouse is probably better than it was in Evil Aliens, in a sense, because the capability of the performers in Doghouse allows them to create much more realistic characters who are believable as this group of guys. Whereas I think Evil Aliens was much more a deliberate splatstick. We didn’t have any really accomplished actors, it was just for the glee and gore and fun. Evil Aliens was my homage, my love letter to all the movies that I loved as a kid. And obviously people who got that really got on board with it and loved it and people who hated it criticised it for not being original enough and for being too influenced by things, I can understand where they’re coming from with that but the spirit of Evil Aliens was just to have a good time. “I think with Doghouse what we’ve got is a better storyline and better actors that will bring out subtext - and the subtext is in many ways what will bring out the humour. The humour of the situation comes from the fact that you’re finding these believable guys caught up in this fantastical situation which kicks off. Because they respond to it in a more believable way, I think the humour is funnier. It’s the opposite of the humour in Evil Aliens, in a sense, which was just through the splatstick nature of the thing and the absolute over-the-topnesss of everything. “Certainly with something like Lesbian Vampire Killers, every scene felt comedic. None of it was played for being real. They were treating things as a joke so therefore the whole film was a joke and it did feel more jokey. I don’t think Doghouse has that flavour. I’m very reticent to compare Doghouse to something like Shaun of the Dead because it’s the obvious example that everyone always quotes, because it‘s the most successful British film of the last x years or whatever in the genre. It’s a tired comparison really but what I do feel is that tonally Doghouse is much more on a level of Shaun of the Dead. Because Shaun of the Dead had beautifully observed performances. You can see how comedy can work at a higher level when performances are that good.
“Also I think the female audience will enjoy it. At the moment, with the way the film’s being marketed, that’s perhaps not clear to the female audience. But what the women will get out of it - and a lot of girls who’ve seen the film love it - is that you get to see these blokey blokes terrorised by these women. There’s this feeling. We’re on the edge of this gender politics thing. There has to be an edge to it. Yes, Danny Dyer’s character is a jack-the-lad, he is a misogynistic character, but he suffers because of his views. We do discuss the gender politics in it and it does have a brain in it as well - disguised as a funny, gory horror-comedy. You know, the better horror-comedies work when there’s a little bit more beneath the surface. And there’s not really that many examples. The best ones I can think of are American Werewolf in London and Shaun of the Dead. I think Severance was on the way as well." I have always maintained that an effective horror-comedy is one where, if you take the comedy element out, you still have a decent horror movie. "I agree with you there, Mike. Certainly when you’re watching Doghouse you’ll know you’re watching a horror film, because it is very much ‘in genre’ still. Where I will liken it to Evil Aliens is that I make my films with a love of the genre and that’s definitely there. And it’s proud to be in that genre. I think where some films go wrong is that they’re a bit embarrassed about being in the genre. If you look at Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, those guys love the genre, they know their references. They have respect for the genre, despite doing it as a comedy. Whereas I think Lesbian Vampire Killers felt more like it was a spoof and I think that’s always a danger. “When I saw Lesbian Vampire Killers, it was a fun movie but it felt more like a Carry On film than it did like a Hammer film. Although he production design was very good and I enjoyed lots of different bits of it. But it was just a comedy at the end of the day. It didn’t feel like it had a big horror influence. I met Phil Claydon who’s a terrific bloke and I don’t want to say a bad word about the film because a lot of people just slagged it off. I know how difficult it was for him to get the film off the ground and make it, and all the things that people don’t appreciate. “Obviously that film has become a bit of a target, which may cause us some problems because everyone’s going to want to compare this to LVK, which would be a bad comparison. But you just know that a lot of lazy journalists who don’t like the genre will tar it with that brush, probably in a negative way just because they want to. Which does piss me off a bit because of obviously the amount of work that you have to put into a film to get it to this level. But hopefully Doghouse will reach a wider audience because of who’s in it and the fact that it’s having a lot of support and a wide release. We’ll see.” | ||
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Let’s pick up 
Absolutely. I had a good time.
Whose idea was it?
“You’ve had a little glimpse, a little taster of