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Nightmare on Mulberry Street: An Interview with Writer-Director Jim Mickle & Co-Writer/Actor Nick Damici

“It’s a neighborhood movie,” says Jim Mickle, director of Mulberry Street.

Nightmare on Mulberry Street: An Interview with Writer-Director Jim Mickle & Co-Writer/Actor Nick Damici

“It’s a neighborhood movie,” says Jim Mickle, director of Mulberry Street. This gritty NYC horror film, set in a rickety apartment building on the lower east side, places its emphasis on the diverse, resilient locals who live there. Some of them have been tenants all their lives, and they all form a funny, wisecracking community of oddballs. There’s Charlie (Larry Medich), the old guy who lives upstairs with his portable respirator, and Clutch (Nick Damici, who co-wrote the script with Mickle), a gruff but neighborly ex-boxer who has an unspoken affection for his upstairs neighbor, Kay (Bo Corre), a foreign woman who works at the bar down the street. Meanwhile, Clutch’s daughter (Kim Blair) just got back into the city and is making her way from Harlem to the downtown area. They aren’t caricatures, but lived-in, believable individuals—perhaps because they were based on some actual people that live upstairs from Dimici.

Gentrification is taking its toll on these working class New Yorkers, and eviction notices have gone around so the characters are already in a state of nervous anticipation. Mulberry Street allows us time to get to know these people and their daily struggles. When the monsters appear, it’s a lethal problem on top of everything else they have to deal with as hard-boiled urbanites. Set within a 24-hour period, Mulberry Street is unrelenting. A rapidly spreading infection is transforming humans into freaky rat creatures, and as the streets are taken over, our heroes hole up Night of the Living Dead style. But in much the same way the neighborhood is dying, the menace is breaking down the doorways and dragging their neighbors off into the night.

On an ultra-low budget, Mulberry Street has tremendous ingenuity suggesting a city under siege, with helicopters, police cars and barricades holding back the frightened masses. The monsters themselves are freaky-looking, slimy and matted in filthy hair, as jittery and quick as crack addicts. But the heart of the movie lies in its love for the denizens of the lower east side, a group that is rapidly disappearing from the Big Apple. The DVD of Mulberry Street has some fascinating extras (FX tests and storyboards drawn by Mickle), but no feature length commentary. The House Next Door wanted to catch a few stories from Damici and Mickle, and also hopefully inspire horror fans to seek out this creepy low budget gem.

Jim, before this, you’ve been a grip and electric, and a storyboard artist. Did you go to film school?

Jim Mickle: I went to NYU and graduated in 2002. Even when I was in school, I got a ton of jobs as a storyboard artist to the point where I almost dropped off to do that. Luckily, I stayed on because September 11th happened right before I graduated and dried up every indie in the city. That was where I was making connections, but all of those movies were erased for two or three years. I became a PA for probably a year on a Jennifer Lopez movie, Spider-Man 2, so many movies, then I started getting grip work for a year. NYU sends you out the door with this feeling like, “Go make your first feature!” On graduation day, Marcia Gay Harden spoke, saying spread your wings, and then you have to go out an experience the frustration of the real world. The hard part is the transition. The minute you start taking on some other career, it’s over. Even if you’re completely broke you have to keep one foot in just to stay involved in the business.

Almost every movie I worked on before was a first time director. It’s the worst. They’re rich, they never went to film school, they never did anything and have no idea, just blowing their money on some vanity project. It was so frustrating being a grip on those films, because it was like sending a ship out to sea and the captain of the ship had never been out on a boat before. I still felt like, “What the fuck am I doing?” on Mulberry Street, but at least you have a sense of lighting, or why something is taking so long, or whether it is taking too long. All the things that usually trip people up got me too, but at least I could say, “All right, I’ve been in this situation before. Here’s how we can deal with it.”

How did you guys meet, and what led to your collaboration on Mulberry Street?

Nick Damici: A friend of mine, this teacher at NYU, asked me if I’d be interested in doing a student thesis film called Mickey Lee in 2001. It was like an after-school special with me as a crazy school bus driver and thirty little kids. I went up to Connecticut and did that for two weeks. Jim was a friend of the director, and was working on it too. It was a great shoot—we’re staying in cabins, and every night we’d have drinks by the campfire. The guy who owned that property was crazy, which [got] Jim and I talking about doing a movie there. I wrote a script off that called The Phlebottomizer. We filmed a trailer for that with Victor Argo, but it never came to fruition. We kicked around other ideas over the years, until finally Jim called me up while working on a small, low-budget movie. He said, “Y’know, man, we can do this.”

Mickle: It was a film being made for very little money by a couple of people working at Manhattan Theater Source. They owned all the equipment. One of them was the sound guy, one was the director of photography, one was the director, and they were all actors. They said, “We already have everything. Let’s just make this movie ourselves.” They were having more fun than I had ever seen on a movie set, so instead of going for the big break and waiting for the big money to arrive, let’s just do something very simple, in one or two locations. I was on that shoot for a week, and by the time I came back Nick already had half the script written.

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Damici: I wrote a zombie script called Dead of Night, which we were gonna do as a back-to-the-roots throwback horror movie in Pennsylvania.

Mickle: It was all night exteriors, snow, zombies—and we were trying to figure out how we could even afford to bring people out there, putting them up in hotels. That alone came out to $40,000. On top of that is food and gas. We realized we didn’t have the budget. So I thought, “Well, there goes that idea.” Nick came back to me a week later, though, and said, “Y’know, we could still do it. But we shoot it right here.”

Damici: My buddy Tim House, who plays the super in Mulberry Street and is our main producer, money-wise, said he thought he could come up with maybe ten grand. I said, “The only way we can do this is if we shoot the whole movie in my kitchen.” Literally, that was the original idea. These people are in their apartment, and crazy shit is happening out in the street. From there, it grew, and we ended up using the neighborhood. The brunt of it was using this building and the kitchen. We took that script and reworked it into Mulberry Street.

Mickle: It started off in the first couple drafts as a straightforward zombie movie, where a rat bite starts spreading the infection. At some point, it became obvious that we could make them into these rat zombies, rat creatures, rat-zoids—I’ve seen every description of these things online. It seemed a good twist, and allowed us to do our own thing.

Damici: It was interesting how the creatures became less important. It became more about the story, and people surviving this disaster.

Mickle: It’s cool to see the reaction to that. Some people get that and embrace that, and some people refuse. “That’s not how I like my horror movies! Don’t even try it!” When we first finished Mulberry Street, we had seen it so many times that we didn’t know if it was good or bad. But regardless, I was glad that we were trying something different. I’m a horror fan and the thing I hate recently is that so many movies are remakes that do the same shit over and over again.

Did the characters evolve along with the premise?

Damici: All of the characters pretty much changed. I’ve lived in this building for fifteen years now. The two brothers were based on these two old guys who lived upstairs. Charlie’s still up there and we see him every day. Frank was his brother. Died of emphysema. The hospital bed my father was in [playing the fictional Charlie in the film]—we borrowed it from [the real] Charlie. He still had it. [The character] Coco was based on this guy Tom who was here when I moved in—a transvestite and a crack addict, crazy out of his mind, bringing homeless guys to his place. Finally he got thrown out, then he died of a heart attack not long after. A lot of the characters were brought in from the reality of the apartment building.

Mickle: The archetypes stayed from the Pennsylvania script. That was more Night of the Living Dead, with the characters you expect to see in the zombie movie. Bringing it here, we found people in real life who made interesting characters in this situation.

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Damici: Kay was originally going to be a New York character, but I knew this actress Bo Corre [originally from Sweden]. This movie is such a New York piece, and there are so many foreigners here now. I ran into her one afternoon—she was working at a flower shop and I haven’t seen her in ages. We talked for a few minutes, and when I got back home I said to myself, “Woah, she could play Kay!” I ran right back out and said, “Hey Bo! Read this script!” The other actors are good friends of mine, like Timmy and Larry Fleischman, and we’ve done stuff together.

Mickle: Nick’s dad played the old guy, Charlie.

Damici: That was a no-brainer for me. I didn’t know if he could do it physically, since in the past couple years he had two triple-bypasses. But I asked him and he said, “Yeah.”

He had never acted in a movie before, but you must have known that he’s such a character.

Damici: Oh yeah. 20 years as a bartender…I knew he’d be fine. He’s very photogenic, so I figured once he relaxed, he’d be fine. I thought he stole the movie.

Mickle: He caught on really quick. The first take or two he was nervous, but then he realized he should just be himself. By the end, he was rocking.

How did you guys collaborate on the script? What was the back-and-forth between you both, and the different strengths you bring to it?

Mickle: That was all Nick. He did all the writing on Mulberry Street.

Damici: No, no, we’ve developed a system. I used to write with Victor Argo all the time. He could never put anything down on paper, but I would write and it was like having an editor there, or whatever you want to call it. Jim and I have taken it a bit further than that. I have the ability to pound shit out, and I don’t have an ego about what’s on the page. If you want to change it, we change it. Bang, and then we keep going. We went through 45 drafts.

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How did you handle the horror element? When you have rat people scuttling around, how do you make it scary—not funny?

Mickle: For a long time, I was drawing sketches to figure out what these creatures look like. When you’re making a zombie movie, you have to find a way to make them look or seem different if you want to be relevant. I started sketching rat ears and noses on them, and at first they looked goofy. But if you darken them and do silhouettes, it becomes moody. My biggest gripe with Signs is that up until it showed the aliens, it was like a Hitchcock movie. The minute they showed it, all the tension was drained. I always hated that moment.

Damici: Least scary aliens I’ve ever seen! Any alien I can beat to death with a baseball bat, hey—if that’s all I gotta do, we’re safe.

Mickle: We kept our monsters in the shadows, mostly suggested. Besides, if you have good actors who can really look scared you can play scenes off of their reaction more than trying to scare the audience with showing the monsters. Our main aesthetic throughout was keeping it realistic and character-driven.

You got some amazing footage during the Fourth of July and a parade up in Harlem, where you create the illusion of a city under siege with all the barricades, police cars, ambulances, fire trucks, helicopters and crowds. It gave you immediate production value, and with sound design it felt tense and scary. But I’d like to talk about some of your other footage in and around NYC. How much was serendipity and how much was planned?

Mickle: A lot of it was serendipity and patience. We shot almost 80 hours of footage, budgeting for four or five days with just me, a cameraman and the actors to get whatever else we needed. The inflatable rat you see in the beginning—we chased it all around the city. Q104.3 announces in the morning where the union rat is, and always by the time we showed up they had taken it down. We also have a lot of shots looking up, which is good for a horror movie anyway—but it helped us if we were shooting on a Friday night, which is so busy downtown with people everywhere. If the camera is looking up, the city seems empty. That, combined with some great sound design like creepy wind, goes a long way towards creating the illusion.

You have scenes with Clutch’s daughter Casey (Kim Blair) walking through Central Park on her way downtown. I heard about how you got shots of the empty playground during the day, catching that right before it was about to rain. But it is always so busy there. How were you able to piece together that sequence?

Mickle: That was almost completely made up as we went along. We shot two days with Kim after principal photography. By that time, we were completely exhausted. I only had some loose storyboards and ideas, and knew we’d figure it out as we went along. We lucked out by going through the park and stealing pieces of footage. It’s the kind of thing where if you were able to look one inch to the right, you’d see people running around.

Kim Blair perhaps has the most challenging role. Everyone else has a chance to play with dialogue and scenes, but she has to basically walk through the city and react to what’s happening. It’s amazing, because she’s probably the second most important character in the movie, and yet for three-quarters of the movie she has no dialogue. How did you find her?

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Mickle: She was my first girlfriend in college. She’s great. When we did the trailer for The Phlebotomizer, we had a couple of other actresses lined up. They fell through, so I called Kim at the last minute, wondering if this was going to be weird. Literally, we were there with our cameras ready to go. I called her up and asked if she could come do this thing, and she said she was going to leave town, but we sounded desperate so she said yes. She’s so good in that, and her chemistry with Nick was amazing. So many actresses who are touted as the next big thing have no depth, no real understanding of anything, and here’s a girl with amazing presence. There’s no way to shoot her where she looks bad. Light always seems to hit her in the right way. She’s amazingly well trained, and has a background in the theater, so casting her was a no-brainer. We knew we had Kim, and these other great actors, and just figured out a way to write them into the script.

Jim, as a grip and electric or even as a storyboard artist working on other people’s films, you’re able to make a living but nevertheless it’s tough to not work when you’re a freelancer. You’re not earning vacation pay or anything. Obviously commitment goes a long way but what enabled you to give three and a half weeks of your life to shoot Mulberry Street.

Mickle: Complete serendipity. I got a call to edit a commercial that paid decently and enabled me to purchase a G5, which is what we did everything for Mulberry Street on. I hooked up with a financial company that considered me their in-house video guy, so I’d shoot for them and use their DVX-100 for B-unit stuff. I lucked out, doing a couple of editing jobs for three months, saving up, and setting a deadline where we would absolutely be shooting by [a certain] date. That’s it. The money wasn’t much, but it got us to the wrap day, and it took us a year to edit. I’d literally spend time cutting a corporate video, hitting render, then skipping over to cut a scene on Mulberry Street, hitting render, and going back and forth. That’s what enabled me to keep making our film during that time. It was just luck. As soon as we finished the movie, they were like, “Oh, you made a movie? You don’t need us anymore!” They went away and I spent six months last year without getting a single job.

Let’s talk about your director of photography, Ryan Samul. Many DP’s on low budget jobs can be really difficult. If they have a million dollars, or even one hundred thousand dollars, it’s not enough—and it’s never enough. You were working with much less to make Mulberry Street. What was the dynamic between you and Ryan, and was he cool with running and gunning?

Mickle: He had moments where, as anyone would have, he would get frustrated. In retrospect, you wonder how he wasn’t freaking out every day. We had worked with a guy named Jason Velez, the key grip, who owns his own lighting truck, and we were lucky enough to be able to come in and borrow a few lights from him. Those were the only movie lights we had. The style of the movie was built on what we were readily able to get: china balls and fluorescent lights from home depot that we could rig into a battery. This is the kind of movie we were going to make, it set the tone, and we embraced that.

Those things have an integrity and beauty all their own. If you watch John Cassavetes films, they aren’t necessarily pretty, but there is an intense, scrappy, raw sense of reality to them. Mulberry Street is a beautifully shot film, and I think it’s because of that tone. Also, Ryan Samul has a good eye.

Damici: One great story about Samul, among the many: There’s a scene where Charlie goes out into the hallway. “I can’t hear! I’m gonna go see what he wants!” Frank shouts not to go out in the hallway. Boom, he goes out and the rats are there, and he slams the door shut. The crew’s all there, looking to Samul, saying, “You’re the DP—where’s the camera gonna be?” He runs over to the door with duct tape, and tapes the camera to the door and walks away, saying, “There it is.” You see the result.

Mickle: I saw that shot on his reel.

Damici: The other story is we wrapped shooting the apartment, second time in. We’d taken two weeks off, came back and shot here again. It’s all done, we are wrapped, done, over! I got the equipment in the front room. My apartment’s a fucking mess. “Let’s go to the bar and have a beer, man!” It’s a gorgeous summer night, and we’re crossing Houston Street. We see this beautiful full moon. Me, Jim and Samul stop in the middle of the street. I look up and say, “Ryan, look at that fuckin’ moon…!” I turn and see he’s running back towards the apartment to get the camera and shoot it. That’s total commitment, and the shot’s there in the film. But he’s crazy, too—running up and down that rickety fire escape for those shots at the end of the movie. He scared the shit out of me.

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But your actors were running up there, too.

Damici: Anything we were doing, he did ten times more—with a camera in his hand! Jumping across to the other roof to get the shot. His instincts were great. We did shots in this alley, got thrown out, had no electricity, and Samul got it lit with truck lights and flash boards. He was always saying, “We can do that!” That’s what he really likes to do.

Mickle: Ryan and I worked on Trans-America together. At the end of the day, we’re doing a close-up of someone standing in the yard. The DP says, “All right, put up a 20x silk.” Just to give you an idea, this is the biggest pain in the ass to rig. It takes four or five people to put up. This was our last shot of the day, and did we really need to do this for this girl’s close-up? Ryan and I spent so many days together like that, griping, “You don’t need this. Why?” I think he has a good understanding of being on the other end of that, in terms of knowing what not to ask for. Half of the shoot on Mulberry Street, we had no grips. It was just Ryan running around doing lights and coming back to the camera. On the days he brought people on, he thought of the easiest ways to do it. When everybody’s working for free, you don’t want to kill anybody. Another thing he did that was brilliant was lighting for 360 degrees. We knew we’d never have the time to light Nick perfectly here, then light the other person perfectly for the next shot. We were able to move very fast. I remember Ron Brice, who played Coco, would finish his scene and walk off, but immediately we’d be back on him saying we’re ready again. He’d be like, “Are you kidding me?” He said later that sometimes it was moving so fast that he wasn’t used to it. But hats off to Samul for that. He’s the guy that should make it—he’s done a couple million-dollar films since then.

What was your experience shooting at the bar where Kay works, Tom & Jerry’s? Filming in any bar in Manhattan is tough, because you have a limited amount of time.

Damici: We shot sometimes when they were open, and stayed into the morning blocking out the sun when we’re shooting crazy stuff. It would be seven o’clock in the morning, broad daylight, when we’d shoot scenes with rats attacking people there.

Mickle: We’d come in at midnight or two shooting stuff on the side, or in the basement, and the minute the bar closed, we’d go to work. A couple of times we had extras, but that was the bane of the shoot. Twenty-five people would be scheduled to arrive, and six would show up. When we tried to use real bar patrons, after one shot, they’d be ready to go home. I’d be like, “No, we need you the whole night!” Every scene in the bar is desperately trying to shoot around the fact that nobody was there, and it was a constant struggle. I think the music and confusion of it makes it work.
Damici: The bar stuff works for me, but mainly because we deliver with Big John (John Hoyt). He’s a real guy, works security at a strip club over on 11th Avenue, so he’s been around and knew what he had to do. When the rats are attacking and he comes in beating them down with the frying pan, wielding it like a ping-pong paddle, especially in that last shot where he backhands one of them.

Mickle: Originally, we had a bat with nails driven into it. Then I saw a really cool movie called Of Unknown Origin starring Peter Weller, where he’s going crazy thinking there’s a giant rat in his apartment, and he grabs a bat and starts driving nails into it, so it was already done. We looked around and found this special effects company out in Los Angeles, which sells you the real thing and a foam version of it. Like, you can buy a pipe wrench, or a frying pan…I was excited by all the things we could get. We were inspired the beginning of Irreversible, where they bash in the dude’s head with the fire extinguisher. It’s the sound of that blunt object hitting the face, and being able to see it and not cut away. So he’s smacking people in the face with a rubber frying pan, and we didn’t have to cut.

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Damici: The unsung heroes are the stunt guys, man. Adam Morrow and Steve Bodi.

From the script stage, were you aware how downbeat and melancholy the movie would feel? This becomes very intense for the viewer, because you get attached to these characters and many of them don’t survive.

Damici: From the very beginning…

Mickle: We had a moment where [a main character] gets ripped out of a car, and it’s such an unexpected moment. One of the best things about Nick as a writer is he’s not afraid to throw out the craziest ideas. Sometimes you’re like, “I don’t know, man.” But two-thirds of the time, it’s a great idea. Great films like Alien kill off major characters early, just when you think you know what direction the movie’s going.

Damici: We said right from the very beginning, “Everybody dies.” Some people make it, because I didn’t want to have the cliché where every single person gets killed. But we made a choice. It’s not a happy movie.

One of the things I loved about the 1970s Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Donald Sutherland are all these great scenes, like when he tells the joke about General Rommel, or chopping vegetables in the kitchen with Brooke Adams. You see these very human moments that will be taken away from us when the pod people take over. Mulberry Street also has its characters living through what we associate with New York, and a certain lifestyle of the Lower East Side, where everyone living in the same apartment building, they know and take care of each other. When everyone is dying, it got me reflecting on what is actually being lost in our city nowadays. Was this something you hoped to achieve, or did it naturally happen while making the movie?

Damici: It was essentially planned. We knew things would not work out okay, and the heroes were not going to win. Night of the Living Dead wouldn’t have the same impact if the hero lived. That’s our future, if we don’t change something. This world is gone, though. We were cheating by saying that way of life still exists now. I remember the real Charlie and Frank. I’d carry that old guy up the stairs when he was sick; he weighed one hundred and twenty pounds. He’d make jokes about feeling like a baby, and he’d make me stay in his apartment and have a shot of vodka with him. We had to nail it to those real estate motherfuckers, to say they’re killing the entire character of the city.

Mickle: We wanted to capture that inevitable sense of New York right now. The neighborhood is changing.

Is that one of the reasons you called the film Mulberry Street and not Attack of the Rat Monsters?

Mickle: We had to fight tooth and nail to hold on to that title. Lions Gate didn’t want to change it, but when we were sending it to festivals, our reps kept telling us this wouldn’t fly and nobody would be into it. They didn’t think we were capitalizing on the heat around horror movies.

Damici: You have to deliver on a title like Rat Zombies on Mulberry Street, but it wasn’t that movie.

Mickle: Ultimately, more than a horror movie, it’s a neighborhood movie.

Damici: The death of a neighborhood, slowly but surely…

You had an excellent festival run showing at Fant-Asia in Montreal, Sitges, South by Southwest and Tribeca—and then you had a nationwide theatrical run through After Dark Horrorfest. How did that come about?

Mickle: I have no idea! (laughs) We had our world premiere in Stockholm, then South by Southwest where everyone almost unanimously turned us down and had nasty things to say about it.

Damici: Our sound was fucked at that festival because of some technical bullshit.

Mickle: Ti West’s movie Trigger Man has the same problem, where something was wrong with the speakers. We wondered if our film would never see the light of day, but in European horror festivals, people were eating it up. During Tribeca, supposedly Lions Gate saw it again. We were able to sell to Lions Gate, and weren’t sure how they negotiated it with After Dark Horrorfest, but I never knew anything about that until I randomly went to the Fangoria Web site. While we weren’t involved in that process at all, certainly we embraced it. Our little $60,000 DV-movie would be on 350 screens, a theatrical release, and a big push.

Damici: I remember taking my father to the theater, seeing the premiere on 42nd Street. The guy’s never acted before, he’s 78 years old, and here he is sitting there watching Mulberry Street on the big screen, larger than life. That was the best part for me.

Jeremiah Kipp

Jeremiah Kipp is a New York City based writer, producer and director with over ten years experience creating narrative and commercial films.

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