Starry Eyes was the kind of film that stuck with me.
It’s a bloody, brilliant horror spectacle, about a desperate starlet who makes a dark deal for the promise of fame. Creepy, gross and well-observed, complete with a complex female character and a crazy good performance from star, Alex Essoe, Starry Eyes is a film you have to see to believe, as long as you’ve got a strong stomach, that is.
As soon as I saw it, I had to write something about it, which I did in December for our Reality TV theme week. It stuck with me and I wanted to talk about it, I needed to share it with other people.
The great things about being a writer is sometimes, just sometimes, when you have questions about a movie, you get lucky enough to ask some of them. I spoke with writer-directors, Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer about their film, their inspirations and the universalities of struggling to make your way in Hollywood.
Bitch Flicks: Where did the story of Starry Eyes come from? What were some of you inspirations?
Dennis: I guess it came from us, Kevin and I, wanting to do a story about transformation, something about the metamorphosis in it. We always wanted to have a sequence in a film where a person slowly goes through a change. So we first approached it with that basic concept but then we also knew that we wanted to really focus on a strong character, a person who also just mentally goes through a change throughout the whole movie and that the mental choices and decisions and changes are just as big as the physical ones. So it really started there and then it was just about the decision of what she would be changing into. We decided, with the kind of scenes and themes that really interested us, that it might be a good Los Angeles story, and if it was going to be a Los Angeles story it might be really interesting if she began a star or celebrity and we could look at the industry. As filmmakers there’s a sense of being on the outside of the industry and scratching to get in, waiting for your big break. Actors often go through the same thing. It was really about having a message to the film and trying to say something, finding an exciting, really viseral way to tell that story
Kevin: As for influences, we were very influenced by Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession , that was a big influence on the performance, we wanted Alex [Essoe] to capture that raw energy that Isabelle Adjani has in that film. That and other things like Polanski films, such as Rosemary’s Baby and Repulsion , and things like Carrie and The Entity, even things outside of the genre like Boogie Nights were great, those rise and fall stories of people desperately trying to make it in the industry. They might do things in that situation that they never thought they would.
BF: Sarah is a fascinating and complicated character, even when we first meet her, she is not entirely likable. She’s vain and believes she is superior to a lot of the people around her. Can you tell me a bit about the character of Sarah?
Dennis: There’s an unspoken rule sometimes in screenwriting that you have write likable characters, you hear this a lot from people, and in recent years that rule has kind of gone by the wayside. What we feel is that you have to write interesting characters and if someone is interesting and compelling you’ll follow them through all the choices they make, as bad as they are. Look at a show like Mad Men or Breaking Bad and the characters those shows follow, people love to watch characters like those. Strangely in movies this doesn’t happen enough and it should, particularly in independent cinema where you can get away with a lot more and break more rules. So, we like the idea of pulling the wool over the audience’s eyes. At the beginning of the movie you think you’re watching the girl next door, the girl fresh off the bus, that she’s innocent and sweet and she’s going to be corrupted. You think that you’re watching that person and that all of her friends are just terrible terrible people out to get her, and it definitely seems that way because the movie is very subjective. But we are very conscious of that arc at the halfway point of the movie. As the movie goes along to start to realize that maybe Sarah, the person you’re following is not such a good person. There’s a trail of bread crumbs along the way and the choices she makes that start to define the person that she really is and you start to realize that you’re watching a person who is figuratively a monster and is literally going to become one. In the end, the friends that you perceived as being bad people are just, people who at the end of the day want what’s best for her. The movie cons you in an interesting way and every time we’ve shown it to people there’s usually a point where we realize that the audience is really on Sarah’s side and by the end of movie, no matter what she’s doing and how terrible it gets, they are always siding with her.
BF: In addition, Sarah may be a little unhinged–we see her fits early on and they serve as a prime for the grotesque things we will see happen to her later. Why were these fits important to the character? Can you tell me a bit about your portrayal of Sarah’s self hatred and her violent fits?
Kevin: It’s not that this company takes her and corrupts her. It’s like the company sees this in her, they see that she’s a little unhinged and there’s this rawness within her, that’s what attracts them to her. That’s what gets her what she wants in the end, by acting out this cult’s will. It was sort of like a statement of how a lot of people, in order to make it in these industries that are very dog eat dog, they’re willing to step all over everybody else and do whatever needs to be done, and sometimes they do some horrible things to people. In order to make that statement we wanted to show that the people who are willing to do these things might not be the best put together people. The cult sees this and exploits it to her advantage.
BF: Besides Sarah, many other characters are difficult to like such as Sarah’s boss and her friends Can you tell me a bit about this? Though you suggest character as “Hollywood types” we also learn they three dimensional human beings. Her boss at the restaurant ogles her, but later gives her heartfelt advice, her friends are catty but seem to genuinely care. Why was this important?
Dennis: I think the mistake that a lot of horror movies make is that they feel like if somebody going to be killed or if somebody’s going to be killed or if somebody’s going to be the competition of a villain, then they shouldn’t be three dimensional. We never approach anything like that, every character had to be real. When we were writing that ending of the movie, that violent climax, we really were very conscious of the fact that these needed to be feel like very real people that she was doing this thing to. Because the movie is very subjective, you’re siding with Sarah, she’s in every sense of the movie, Alex Essoe gives a great performance, so its very easy to side with her but if you stop for a moment as an audience member and put yourself in the perspective of any of the other characters, you really can see it from their side. If you put yourself in Erin’s position for instance, that’s the bitchy friend, she clearly likes Danny, the filmmaker friend, feels that Sarah is trying to move in on Danny or Danny’s trying to move in on her, they’re both actors, they’re both the same age, competing for the same parts, and she might be kind of catty to Sarah but Sarah is already standoffish and kind of cold to her. If you put yourself in Pat Healy’s shoes, the restaurant owner, this is a guy who’s just trying to run a business, it’s his dream, it’s what he believes in and he has this girl that’s coming in late, that’s talking on her cell phone, that’s bad at her job and she’s kind of disrespecting him, she quits, she comes back, she slaps him at work, she’s sick at work. It’s kind of funny when you realize that, though you’re in Sarah’s worldview the entire time, there are these moments where you can step outside of her world and realize that everyone is just caught up in her wake. So these characters had to be three dimensional to reinforce the idea that she’s not a good person and there are these people that seem bad but again, they’re just caught up in her wake.
Kevin: It was important that at the halfway point where she goes to the producer’s house and decides that she’s going to give up her pride or self respect in order to achieve her dreams, from that point on the tables get reversed. When she does this one big thing, it clues the audience in that, okay she’s actually not the best person, and from that moment on, watching her you notice these other people aren’t so bad. It changes your perspective. And she actually gets sick physically so you can see her friends are going like “OK, what’s going on, are you alright?” When things get serious, they turn off all their competitive little shots at Sarah and turn on their concern and Sarah’s just getting worse. So at that moment she reveals her true self.
BF: There is a great reverence in the film for Old Hollywood. Sarah has a collage of classic actresses on her walls and aspires to be just like them. Astraeus Pictures seems to have once had golden years and the Producer’s office is decorated like a scene from an old film. What is old Hollywood legend’s place in the story?
Dennis: It’s really about how Sarah is sort of naive. She’s a person who has talent but she’s also a person living in a very modern world where things are done differently but thinking that she can go about them in a very traditional nostalgic way. She’s probably the type of person who thinks she’d be on Hollywood Boulevard at Starbucks and think that she would be noticed by a producer and the producer would cast her in a big movie. So that was to make her feel like a little girl sometimes. She had these dreams of being like these old starlets from the golden age, but the reality is she’s basically being exploited by this company. We like the idea that she would sneer and look down at her friends who just wanted to go out on the weekends and make Kickstarter videos and would look at things and think I’m doing things the traditional way, I’m doing it the way that you’re supposed to do it, I’m paying my dues, and then the irony is that she doesn’t. She basically sells out and takes the easy way out.
Kevin: I would add to that that its sort of the idea that if you look at Hollywood in say the 1930s and whatnot, production companies used to have exclusive deals with actors, and they were like an MGM actor and they worked exclusively for MGM. We wanted her to have that sort of “I’m doing it the traditional way” feel because in the end Astreus Picture kind of owns her.
BF: The basic story of selling your soul for fame is not a new one. Do you feel this story particularly speaks to us today?
Dennis: We did that consciously. The Faustian idea of selling your soul is a very old idea and you can see it in basically any genre of movies. We definitely wanted a short hand to the concept so people were able to wrap their heads around it quickly and that wasn’t overly complicated. This freed us as filmmakers to really dig a little deeper into that theme. I think as filmmakers, especially with movies about movies, you don’t get into the grounded reality of the situation, we usually focus on the machinations of the studio system, the actual making of the movie. Whereas with Starry Eyes we wanted to show younger people today, working a shitty job and coming home to your apartment and crying with the door shut and you have friends right outside in your living room, and going to parties and hiding in the bathroom. We wanted to show a different side of that whole concept.
BF: The film can be read as an allegory, for how someone might be corrupted by their desire for fame as Sarah makes a choice to sever her relationships with the people she believes are holding her back. Was this intentional?
Kevin: That was pretty much why we set out to do it. The whole point of taking a transformation tale and putting it in Hollywood was to make it an allegory. A celebrity’s not a kind of monster we’re seen in a horror movie. People ask us all the time, what was she at the end, what was that creature, they almost want some real world answer, like was she a demon, was she a vampire, something like that. And we say, no she got the role, she’s on her way to becoming a star at the end. Sometimes they walk away not satisfied with the answer but the answer works on an allegorical level. The allegorical level of the film is almost more important than what’s going on at the surface level of the film, it’s what’s actually wrapped up in the end, the allegory.
Dennis: I think if you watch the film a second time, you’re see that the film basically bookends itself. It begins with a girl starring at herself in the mirror in her underwear, kind of hating herself and really unhappy with her body, and she’s beautiful and talented and she should be happy but she’s not. She feels like she’s at the end of her rope and she needs to get discovered now before it gets too late. And then through out the movie you’ll see that she constantly returns to that room and kind of beats herself up, looking at the pictures of stars on her walls, and at the end of the movie its the same thing only she’s now gotten what she wants only she’s a phony version of it. Now she’s gotten the role but she’s this bald, shell of a person, she’s come full circle. If you look at the end of the movie she’s completely happy but if you look at her at the beginning of the movie, she’s not. So the movie might be this very bleak tragedy in some ways but not for Sarah, she’s gotten what she wants. As the audience, you realize she just didn’t get it the way you thought she would.
Kevin: The whole movie’s about choice and ambition and what people will turn into a weapon and what people will be willing to do to achieve their dreams. The second she looks in the mirror and likes what she sees, her journey’s complete
BF: This story seems so familiar to young actresses. Did any of the actresses you worked with have their own personal Hollywood horror stories? Did any of them inform the story with their own experiences?
Dennis: Nothing that bad but it seems like actors, men and women, women more so, there’s always this prevailing sense something that when you’re on certain sets or around certain people that there might be a sleaze factor. As far as competition goes? We had actors who told us they had best friends and roommates who were up for the same roles they were, who got the roles and they didn’t. LA is a very big town but it’s also a very small community, I think a lot of actors will relate. With a lot of the actors who came in to read, the second the looked at the script they had a story to tell us about something that happened to them or why it spoke to them so much. We had a guy who came to the premiere in LA and stopped me in the lobby and and told us it spoke to him a lot because he was up for a role and one day the producer took him out and started to kiss him and basically just molested him. I think that stuff, maybe you don’t hear about it as much any more but I think it still goes on.
BF: Why were you drawn to this story? Particularly as men when it focuses so much on Sarah’s experiences as a young woman trying to be a star?
Kevin: I think we knew beforehand, writing it that this was an issue women dealt with more in Hollywood. As far as someone struggling to start their career before they get to old or feeling like there’s a ticking clock, like they have to get going before it’s too late, I feel like that pressure is put on women a lot more than it is on men. You watch movies and you’ll have a 50 year old man and his wife will be played by someone who’s 23. I feel like male actors can continue to have a career as they get older, they can play character roles or even leading men roles and their female counterpart is two decades younger than them. I feel like that pressure to strike while the iron is hot or get your career going before you get too old is real issue that women in Hollywood have to deal with.
BF: What is the film’s stance on Sarah’s decision to perform sexual acts to get the role? Are we meant to judge her for this?
Dennis: It’s tough because if you look at the movie, every decision she makes is her own, this is not a person who is being corrupted. We were really conscious of the fact that if you look at the movie closely, you’ll see that Sarah is always in the driver’s seat. If you’re judging anyone you’re judging Sarah, you judge the people around her but you’ll see that they’re only presenting her with options and she’s choosing the wrong ones. We didn’t want her to feel like a victim, the people around her are victims. I think even from the opening shot of the film if you look closely you can see that something is not right with this girl and as it moves on, there’s a series of situations, like when the girl breaks her nose at the pool and she laughs, that she’s just not a great person.
BF: I enjoyed that Sarah was not coerced or tricked into her decision. Though she becomes a victim, with horrific things happening to her body, she continues to have some agency as she has made a conscious decision to do whatever she can for fame. Indeed, instead of killing random people, in the end, she kills the people who she saw as holding her back. Why did you feel it was important to give Sarah this agency?
Kevin: I think a lot of times women characters get exploited in movies like films like this, things are constantly being done to them and they’re helpless to deal with it, and that’s just a form of exploitation, which is fine but we weren’t really interested in dealing with that.
Dennis: I don’t think you see enough movies where a female character really owes her own decisions. She doesn’t have to be sweet, she can be terrible. There’s something kind of fun to make a character like this who makes her own decisions and allows herself to be corrupted, who allows herself to be exploited and is be fine with it in the end. There’s something a little bold about how Sarah does all that in the movies. It’s terrible and you can judge her but its her own choice in the end.
BF: It was interesting that Sarah is already used to being objectified. She works as a waitress at a Hooters-like restaurant which invites customers to ogle her. Why give Sarah this particular day job? Because of this, there is minimal different between Sarah’s daily life and the initial creepiness of her audition process. Tell me about this contrast?
Kevin: It’s like what she says when she’s talking to Danny, “I feel like I’m selling my soul already, it might as well be for something I love.” It kind of helps push her in the direction she makes in movie and also kind of helps seal the believability of her making that decision, that she’s the kind of person who already in her life is taking jobs or doing what she needs to to survive and sometimes it’s not necessarily where she wants to be and she hates it there and feels exploited but she needs to pay her bills- we hear later in the movie that she needs to pay her rent- so it’s sort of like when she took this job at Big Tators you see already that she’s not like one of the other waitresses that’s happily singing the birthday song and stuff, so its clear already she’s not the type of girl who thinks its fun to work in a place like this. so she must feel like she’s exploited working there and that’s why she lashing out at the bosses. She’s doing what she needs to to survive and that job really sets out that character element that she’s someone who will do things that she might not like or might be below what considers her standard but she will do them to survive or if its to get what she wants.
BF: Starry Eyes is not a film for the squeamish, there are several scenes of gore and brutal violence. The film also employs body horror to show Sarah’s transformation. Sarah vomits bugs and disintegrates until she looks like a badly strung-out junkie. Can you tell me a bit about Sarah’s transformation and your use of gore to accomplish it?
Dennis: I think body horror is one of the most effective sub-genres of horror because there’s something coming from inside you that you can’t escape. With a werewolf there’s a way to kill werewolves, with a haunted house movie there’s a way to escape a haunted house but with body horror, you can’t escape your own body and I think because the metaphor of this movie was about this actress feeling like she’s at the end of her rope and she had to make it as a star or its too late, for all the reasons of why we chose to focus on a woman instead of man, if you add body horror into that equation it’s ten times worse, especially if you focus on a character who already has bod issues. You can see in the beginning scene of the movie that she thinks she’s too heavy even if she’s very thin. She pulls her hair out when things don’t go right, this is a person that already has a lot of psychological triggers so to introduce body horror into the movie and to hopefully do it effectively, which I hope we did, to us was just physically unnerving and psychologically unnerving. As horror fans, Kevin and I have seen a lot of what there is to see but there’s something about seeing a person pulling their hair out or pulling their nail of that never ceases to kind of skeeze us out.
Kevin: It’s also like when she vomits up worms that’s coming from inside of her, it’s almost like she’s dying from the inside out, so this whole idea of what we call selling her soul, is really her giving up her self respect and we’re just watching her old body crumbling, but in the end she’s going to be rewarded with this beautiful new body that doesn’t have any imperfections or concern for others. That’s sort of what the body horror was representing here.
BF: Starry Eyes was partially funded through Kickstarter. What is it about this story that people will relate to?
Kevin: I think it works as a Kickstarter film because the whole film is really about someone banging their head against the wall trying to get into an industry that’s very hard to get into and here me and Dennis have been working together for 20 years making films and this is the first one that’s ever gotten a real release. We put a lot of that in the movie, our feelings of trying to get into this industry, so I think this story was a great project to be funded, at least in part, on Kickstarter because everyone on Kickstarter is making films at an independent level or a crowd source level because they’re not getting that money or through the traditional means of the Hollywood system. That’s basically what you’re doing on Kickstarter, it’s people trying to make a film without the Hollywood system.
BF: Part of the reason the film works so well is Alex Essoe’s knockout performance in the physically and emotionally demanding role of Sarah. Tell me about Essoe.
Kevin: Working with Alex was great. This is a film where an actor has to use everything in their toolkit. It goes from a girl being insecure and looking in the mirror at the beginning, insecure and emotional, to the monster she becomes at the end. She really goes the full gamut and does just about everything. It was really important when we were looking for somebody to play this role that it wasn’t about talent, we needed somebody who really understood the material and was game to do this. If you get somebody that is going to have to be in every scene of the movie and do the things that you have to do in this movie from four hours of make-up to crawling out of the ground to freaking out on the floor, there’s a lot of things in here that people might shy away from and if you’ve got somebody that’s not down to take on that performance or doesn’t understand the material, and they’re in every scene of the movie, you’re never going to make your schedule because in a low budget film like this, we really had a tight schedule. If somebody doesn’t understand what you’re doing or is going “why” or “I don’t get it” or saying “I’m not going to do that it,” you’re not going to make your schedule. So it was really important to have someone who really understood the material and was game to do it. Alex, she knew all the references, all the films we were going to tell her to see, she had seen them all already, she loved them all, she saw this as a chance to do the full spectrum of acting, like “why wouldn’t I want to do this movie, I get to do every thing that I’ve learned how to do as an actor” and we were like, yes, totally. So she was great, she never complained she was down to do everything, she brought a lot of her own stuff to the role, she really elevated the role. It’s tough when you have a script, you have a character on a page that you wrote, you look at people and there’s a lot of talented people out there and they may give a good reading but that’s just two scenes, you never know are they doing to come and set and be this character. And she just came and she brought her own ideas and added a lot of nuance to the character, she just became the character. I watch the movie now and think, yeah, Sarah Walker now exists through Alex Essoe.
BF: What is your next project?
Kevin: We are constantly writing every day. I like in the same apartment complex as Dennis and everyday we work on our scripts. We have a few things we’re working on but getting a film off the ground if very difficult and a lot of elements factor into it. We’ve got a few scripts we’re working on and we would like to do and its all dependent on everything falling in the right place to see which one comes together.
Starry Eyes comes out on Blu-Ray on Feb. 3.
Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.