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Interview: Mark Neveldine Talks The Vatican Tapes

Neveldine talked to us about his foray into short-story writing and the visual strategies used in The Vatican Tapes.

Interview: Mark Neveldine Talks The Vatican Tapes
Photo: Pantelion Films

Beginning with Crank, their blazingly irreverent 2006 debut, and extending to Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, a sugar-rush opus that doubles as a “fuck you” to franchise vanilla, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (better known as Neveldine/Taylor) have embodied everything those with a predilection for subversive cinema could hope for. They’re playful filmmakers without any pretensions or hang-ups about their crude, socially conscious juvenilia, who make films for sharp, attentive viewers yearning to grapple with an ever-increasing technological overload. Recently, each filmmaker announced an intention to make films independent from one another, at least for the time being. For Taylor, it will be an adaptation of the video game Twisted Metal, and for Neveldine, it’s The Vatican Tapes, a “Catholic thriller,” as he puts it, which utilizes surveillance footage, iPhones, and those breathless, hyper-tracking shots from the duo’s previous films to chart new terrain for the possession narrative. I chatted with Neveldine about his recent foray into short-story writing, the visual strategies used in The Vatican Tapes, and his relationship with cult/indie hero Lloyd Kaufman.

First of all, congratulations on your short story, “Meat-Maker,” included in The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares: The Haunted City, which I recently listened to. Could you talk about the story and how that came into being?

I had a couple of movies in development with Blumhouse and I have a close relationship with Cooper Samuelson, as well as Jason [Blum], and they came to me and said, “We want something that’s very much your style of thought. We don’t want to give you any restrictions, we basically want to tell you it’s set in the city, we want it to be horrific, but outside of that we have no other rules.” I was surprised and excited that they wanted me to do it, so I kinda dove into my psyche. There’s an acquaintance of mine who went through similar experiences in his life, so I kinda dove [laughs] off of that experience and took it to the nth level. It was fun. I really had the creative freedom to do anything and get as dark as I wanted to get.

The story further highlights a theme of possession in your films. I wasn’t surprised when I heard The Vatican Tapes would be your next work, because all of your films seem to have a possession theme to them, where bodies are being taken over by another force. Could you talk a little bit about what drives you to either write stories or make films about bodies that are in trauma or, here, literally possessed?

It’s superficially possession, because I think it’s about control and being out of control. It’s our constant desire to want to be in control, but there are things and factors in this world, and life, where we are simply out of control and have no control of a situation. I think that’s what makes for great stories, where all of the obstacles kind of weigh on us to get to our goal. But that’s an interesting parallel. I certainly never thought of it that way. I feel like The Vatican Tapes is a big departure. But, absolutely, Angela [played by Olivia Dudley] is being controlled by more than possession and she becomes out of control. So it is somewhat similar to Gamer and Crank in some ways, and even Pathology in a weird way.

I always think of the scene in Gamer where Angie’s first seen in Society and you see her being controlled as she moves throughout that world. As I was watching The Vatican Tapes, I felt a parallel there, because this is the first film where you have a woman in the lead, who’s being taken over by a force, but also geared by the church’s male patriarchy and dominance. Did that draw you to the screenplay for The Vatican Tapes, specifically?

It’s funny, I was really surprised when Lakeshore offered me the movie. Truly, I was like, “Do you really want me to do this?” I read the script and I really liked it. I grew up Catholic. I was one of those kids who went to St. Abbey’s School from K through six, went to St. Patrick’s School for seventh and eighth, and went to Immaculate Heart Central in high school, so I knew the catechism inside and out. I had actually read the “Rite of Exorcism” before. I absolutely love The Exorcist, which came out the year I was born. So being that this is a Catholic thriller, there was a very simple, organic attachment to this material. I thought it was really clever and well written and I thought there was a nice twist on it. What I liked about the overall story is that this is an origin story that’s camouflaged underneath this evil-possession film. I wanted to push it a little further—and maybe there’s an opportunity to do more in some other version of The Vatican Tapes with a part two. But I wasn’t interested in bashing the church. I thought, “Wow. There’s the Vatican and Rome is incredibly colorful and there’s a mystery and a history about it.” Not a lot of people know this, but there really are these secret Vatican archives. Secret, of course, didn’t mean secret back then: It just meant private. The translation to us is “secret.” But the Vatican archives are real and there are notes, handbooks, microfiche, photographs, videotape, and film. They have been collecting this for years and years. So I really enjoyed what all of that brought into the story and it would be so cool to have Michael Peña and Djimon Hounsou be the devil hunters in part two. [laughs]

That would be great. As I watched this, I was thinking that there have been a fair number of possession films of late, but what distinguishes yours is the use of technology and how there are no shortage of screens and devices constantly recording. Obviously, the film’s title alone suggests a mediated presence. Could you talk about decisions you made on the film in terms of how you shot it, with not just surveillance footage at some points, but also POVs from iPhones?

Full disclosure: When I first got this script, it was a found-footage movie. And it was an incredibly well written found-footage movie. But Lakeshore had an idea, they said, “Look, we’re not interested in a found-footage version of this movie. We want to move this into a more cinematic experience. Is there a way that you can change the POV and pull it out of that and into the characters?” and I said, “Yeah. Let me give it a shot.” So I told them I would also like to keep some of the elements, not of found footage, but of surveillance and of big brother and of what is so embedded within our culture today with phones and video capture. I wanted to use it in a way, and I wouldn’t call it mixed media by any means, where it’s more organic with what we’re going through today and the way we live our lives and how we see our lives through the lens of an iPhone. So I wanted to use a couple of those moments, but I also didn’t want to overdo it. Everyone’s Skyping and Facetiming now. I wanted to let the audience know we’re in 2015, and that possession is ancient and the Vatican is ancient, but the technology doesn’t have to be. It was fun as far as transitions and ideas to play with, but again, I was excited that Lakeshore wanted to also move it away from found footage, because I wanted to do something a little different, and I was able to do a little bit of both.

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Totally. There’s a sense of a transition from the way physical media works with digital media. Like in the opening, how two shots of stained glass within the church leads to two priests staring at a pair of monitors. But whenever I watch your films, I’m struck by the role of the camera operator. In The Vatican Tapes, there are several times where the camera just takes off running down a hallway.

[laughs]

It’s great, especially the scene with Angela where she basically creates a riot within the therapy group. The camera is constantly moving. Do you fit the script to your ideas for shots or are you a script-first type of director?

So that scene was obviously acquired from the script as far as what was happening and where she was and her psyche and spiritually. The way that I wanted to block it, though, is I wanted to make it sort of a fun, thrilling action scene, so I hired these hardcore stunt guys and stunt women and a couple of actors that I mixed in, and I gave them the sort of tics and psychological issues that people would have in a psych ward. We got incredibly specific with what each person had. Whether it was schizophrenia or manic-depressive or psychosis; each person had their own thing going on. She gets into their psyches, Angela, and she just really fucks with them and brings out the worst in them and uses their psychological defects as an advantage to the devil.

Yeah, I thought that scene was phenomenally shot and much more visually representative of your work with Brian [Taylor] in the past. I think your filmmaking has been misunderstood as participating within a culture, whereas I see it as critiquing or commentating on it, especially in something like Gamer, where the whole movie seems to be satire. I wonder with The Vatican Tapes, going in, whether you wanted to add a humorous or satirical element that’s in your other films, because it seems to be there in part, but it’s not there as much as before.

I know there’s a lot of expectations from people who’ve watched my films in the past. But I did have fun with this film. I let the camera be a character at times in The Vatican Tapes, in the energy of the devil entering her world, and I also used the camera at times to feel the hits and the punches and crashing through the windows. You do feel the hand of the camera operator at times, but I feel like it is very, weirdly organic in this movie. Certainly, I’m having fun at times. I’m well aware of the little, sort of inside, dark jokes that I’m playing in this movie and I enjoy things where the patient would hang himself and then afterward, the camera is still swinging and then we cut away to the surveillance footage. [laughs] But I like to have fun with these things, and I really believe that some of the best humor comes from the darkest moments of our lives.

Speaking of having fun, is that you in the film at one point offering epinephrine to a patient?

No.

It sounded like your voice. I thought that might be an in-joke to Crank.

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Oh my God, I thought you were saying…yes, it’s my voice, but I’m not the actor in it.

[laughs] Gotcha.

Wow, that’s pretty funny that you caught that. I do that several times. And then there’s also, and I don’t want this to be for release before the film comes out, but there’s two really big cameos in the movie for people that aren’t listed in the film. Really big. So there’s definitely some inside jokes that I had and things that I did. That’s what you do in filmmaking: You have fun, you get in the editing room, and you’re like, “Hey, let me be the doctor who says this.” It’s sort of fitting for what I’ve done.

It’s awesome. I also wanted to ask you about Troma and your relationship with Lloyd Kaufman. What got you involved with Lloyd and what compels you about the style of films that he’s making? There seems to be a little bit of overlap at times between what you both do as filmmakers, but each of you are clearly distinct in your visions visually, I would say, more than anything.

The Toxic Avenger was one of the first films that I saw when I was a little kid. I believe I was like five years old and not many of the Troma films had played on cable, but that one did, and it was on HBO. My grandmother and family went to bed and I would go downstairs and turn the TV on, and it was mind-blowing to me. It was just incredibly awesome and fun, but I was also super terrified and I’d have nightmares about being Toxie. But as I got older, I remembered that film and I started looking up some of the Troma films. I got into War and Tromeo and Juliet. I actually auditioned for Tromeo and Juliet in New York City, in the old Troma building on 9th avenue, and I still had not met Lloyd at this point, but I was watching all of his different films. I was just a big fan of the fun of these films and the fact that we have complete freedom and that we can speak our minds and film our minds and just have fun with art. So when we were shooting Gamer, there was a Troma film festival at an Albuquerque theater and I just went to watch Poultrygeist, which is one of my favorite Troma films. Poul-try-geist.

Right, I’ve seen it.

It’s incredible. It’s a horror musical, it’s awesome. Great performances and super fun. So I went to watch that movie and one of the co-writers of Lloyd’s book, Make Your Own Damn Movie, who’s also a stunt guy, recognized me, and told Lloyd, “Hey, this is Mark Neveldine from the Crank movies,” and I got to hang out with Lloyd, who’s like my hero. So I was in shock and shaking his hand and said, “Is there any way I can put you in Gamer?” and we became best friends and drank a lot of whiskey together and we put him in Gamer and Crank 2 and we’ve been friends ever since. Whenever he’s in L.A. we have dinners, with he and his wife and me and my wife, and the same thing when we’re in New York. We have a lot of fun. [laughs]

Sure, well, you’re billed as Mark Kaufman in Return to Nuke ‘Em High Vol. 1.

That is correct. They wanted me in a car-crash scene, where the car flips. We just had fun. I wish I had time to do more than a one- or two-day thing, but I’ll tell you, being on Lloyd’s set is an incredible experience. It’s fun to get out there and do a little performance every once in awhile. I did a cameo on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. They had me come on as a guest star about a month and a half ago. I like to do that once every couple of years. It was super fun, one of the funniest times I’ve ever had. But I like myself being behind a camera or typing on a computer.

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Clayton Dillard

Clayton Dillard is a lecturer in cinema at San Francisco State University.

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