After this year’s Austin Film Festival, I was able to chat with writing/directing brother duo Brett Pierce and Drew T. Pierce about their film The Wretched. We got to the heart of their inspiration for film and for their central horror character, as well as their roles in the process of this dynamic creation.
Kristy Strouse with Film Inquiry, loved the film! Thanks for joining me!
Both: Thank you!
How did the project first get started?
Brett Pierce: Drew and I had essentially made another super low budget feature for a couple hundred thousand dollars, called Dead Heads – it was like kind of a buddy zombie movie. And we just kind of went through that and made all out big mistakes and screwed up a lot. We also succeeded in some capacities, like we got distribution and we learned a lot. And we wanted to make another movie and we just kind of were obsessed with the idea to pull from folklore and do a witch story. Just because we’ve seen so many witch films and we liked them, there’s a lot of really, really cool ones but nobody had built a sort of mythology or a set of rules around the witch. And we were kind of interested in steering it in that direction, kind of giving it rules similar to a vampire, or even Freddy Krueger – they have certain ways that they operate.
Drew T. Pierce: We kind of grew up in love with The Witches, the Roald Dahl story. And we just always thought “what’s the grownup version of that? What’s like the big fun movie version of like a witch story and it’s actually a witch?” And over the years, every so often, they’ll make witch movies, but a lot of times it’ll be a ghost or you’ll often find out it’s a woman who killed her children or something. They are never witchy stories. We always thought that was so cool about the Roald Dahl story. We kind of set out to create our own version.
Brett Pierce: And some of it too, I mean, when we were younger kids we grew up around the production of the original Evil Dead, because our dad was the photographic FX artist for that. Our first one was like a comedy zombie movie and it got lumped in with horror, but it was more of a roadtrip buddy movie with zombies. And we’ve always wanted to make a straight horror film, and I think that was just sort of in our bones, from growing up around those guys. But, yeah, so we just did a lot of digging, read a ton of folklore about various witches from different parts of the world and stuff like that, and we found a couple that we really liked. Some of the visual representations of them and designs, but also some of the rules involving them. So, there’s one witch called Black Annis which is based in the UK. She was a creepy old witch that lived in a tree and stole children to eat them. And then there was another witch called the Boo Hag, which is kind of an aberration, kind of a myth. She basically wears women’s skins and tries to pretends to be like your wife or mother, and the only way to defeat her is to salt the inside of her skin. So, those two ideas we liked so much we just meshed them together for our witch idea.
Interesting! I love that you did so much research. What’s the writing like with you two being co-writers? The creative process?
Drew T. Pierce: What usually happens is we will spend about 3-6 months just talking about a story and trying to plot it out. And once we sort of find an idea, because a lot of times – what’s funny is there’s a lot that ended up in Wretched that were from other scripts. Sometimes it’s about finding enough good ideas where we get really excited and they all sort of stick together. And then there’s this sort of point where all of a sudden you have so many good ideas, you’re like: I have to make this movie.
Brett Pierce: What usually happens is I write a first draft, that’s just kind of really bad. Hey, just give me a shot at it and I blow through it as quickly as possible. And then that’s usually not a very good script. [laughs] And then, because it has some of our ideas and some things that we’re still working on. Then we kind of start working on a second draft but we just pass back and forth. We’ll try to replot it one more time, and just keep handing it back and forth. And that’s when Drew and I start really writing it together. Usually with the second draft by the time we get to the end of it, not that it’s the final version, but it’s usually pretty good and plotted out.
Awesome. Can you talk a bit about how the script evolved over the course of writing it? Any big changes to the story over that time?
Drew T. Pierce: We probably had like 12 drafts, many different sorts of versions. We had completely different versions of the movie. They always knew we wanted to tell a witch story, but we originally had it within a cult that worshipped a witch. We also had a version where it was about Witch Hunters like completely different. Some of the elements sort of carried over, but we got really excited when we came onto the version that is The Wretched. We realized the perfect pairing for a witch monster was basically since she’s a creature that is sort of the anti-family sort of anti-mother, in a way…We thought let’s pair her up against a family, who is falling apart already. So, she’s just sort-of a supernatural representation for real trauma for sort of the real trauma. It was sort of a way to give it a backdrop and sort of structure it.
Brett Pierce: Even in weird ways, I had written a werewolf story a long time ago. Like somebody discovering that somebody next door is a werewolf. And we kind of liked that script, but it never totally worked, and a lot of those basic ideas kind of in a weird way got pulled into this one. So, we had the script and then took all these others good ideas and crammed them into that one.
I was going to ask about that supernatural tie in with what Ben is going through. It works well. How difficult was it finding the right casting for him?
Brett Pierce: It was a hard slog in a weird way because we are an independent film. So, we did have a casting director, but Drew and I were super paranoid about not finding good people. So, we sat through every audition and watched every audition tape, and just looked for whoever felt the best for that character. And with Ben… He was actually cast based on a tape that was sent to us, he was living in New Mexico at the time, his name is John-Paul Howard. And he’d had a small part in Hell or High Water playing Chris Pine’s son, and he was really good. It was a couple of years ago, he was significantly younger in the movie. And he sent us his tape and it was pretty cool, and we asked for some adjustment and he sent us another tape. And he just kind of had something. In a weird way it kind of felt like Drew and I when we were younger a little bit too. Because our parents got divorced.
Drew T. Pierce: Yeah, and a lot of the other actors we had auditioned they didn’t necessarily get there emotionally. The arguments between the father and son just never felt real enough, and you could just feel from JP that he kind of just understood it on another level.
Brett Pierce: Yeah, and then we called him back and offered him the role. It was kind of one of those nice things like… we always try to make sure everyone we work with on crew or cast are nice people. Because, as talented as you are if you’re not nice it’s not going to be a fun production. So, we were like… “we want to give you the part.” [Laughs] “And he was like, I guess I’ll quit my job at the pizza place so I can do this movie.”
Drew T. Pierce: Yeah, the thing we always live in fear with when we are casting is there’s always like this worry that the character you wrote is going to fall into a cliché version of that character. And with Ben, we were worried he’d fall into this sort of angsty teen character that is usually so boring and come off so flat. We knew we needed someone who could bring a realism to that.
Brett Pierce: A realism, but also have scenes where it’s kind of fun. Especially his interactions with Mallory played by Piper Curda.
Drew T. Pierce: It was the same thing with the woman next door who plays Abbie- Zarah Mahler it can come off really lame and hokey, we’ve all seen the person possessed and creepy, walking all weird. When we were casting we were just trying to find people who brought something real or new to it. Not something we’d see a million times.
Absolutely. And I noticed… when the witch would inhabit someone, like Abbie, her behavior was different, her dress and attitude. Was there something to that?
Brett Pierce: Yes, we always wanted it to be like she started as a rock star mom right off the bat. We always liked the idea that the witch is kind of jealous of the fact that women can have children, and jealous of the fact that they can be attractive. It’s something that sort of reoccurs in a lot of classic witch mythology. So, that was an attempt to sort of put a good visual cue to the audience that she was different. It was a conscientious decision. We said, we want- whenever it’s Abbie who is taken on by the witch we want her in red and we want her to be in kind of more fancier attire than she was in earlier in the movie.
Drew T. Pierce: We always thought of when she’s impersonating a woman essentially because she’s probably operated for hundreds of years or thousands of years, she is probably impersonating woman similar to the ideal woman of the 60’s or the 70’s. That’s probably her touchstone, ya know? So, it’s really this like…bad impersonation of what femininity is supposed to be. We thought that was kind of a cool way to go about it. And also, as the movie progressed, and this is sort of under it as we didn’t really want to talk about the rules, that she’s sort of learning and getting better at imitating personalities and people.
Brett Pierce: Yeah, it’s like whoever she takes over she’s getting better at it.
Drew T. Pierce: And by the end, obviously, with ya know, our final character…
[Both laugh]Drew T. Pierce: She’s kind of got it down pat.
Brett Pierce: We also picked a color scheme for that character too, we wanted her to be all in yellow. Because red and yellow tend to represent evil in a lot of cultures.
I love the attention to detail. Since you are co-directors, how does that work-do you have different roles?
Drew T. Pierce: We kind of do a lot of the same stuff. We spend so much time together that we have a bit of the same brain. There’s some telekinesis going on. If there is a difference, I’m a little more visually oriented just because I’m a visual artist. I’ve worked on animation, used to work on Futurama, and I do a lot of the poster stuff. I did all the designs and illustrations. Brett’s always been a bit more story driven, but we both kind of do that too. We kind of share pretty much all of the steps.
Brett Pierce: Yeah, we storyboard through the whole movie before we shoot it, partially because we just like to work that way. Also, with a limited budget on an independent, we want to maximize our shooting time. So, we storyboard and talk it through until we both feel we know the movie in and out. That way when we are on set you could talk to either one of us and get pretty much the same answer. I can talk to the production designer, Drew can too, and we both can talk to anybody in the cast. And it just, kind of makes it easier, with two people doing a job.
Drew T. Pierce: It’s such an awesome job. You definitely hit walls when you are making movies because a lot of times you’re working 16 hours straight everyday. So, the great part is Brett’s a morning person and I’m a night person. So, a lot of times I can’t function, my brain doesn’t even work in the morning.
Mine doesn’t either.
Brett Pierce: He’s stupid at 7-8 am, I’m stupid at 2am. [Laughs]
Drew T. Pierce: It’s a night movie, so there were a lot of scenes we were shooting at night. Sometimes from like 4 or 5 am all the way until 10 in the morning and everybody is just out of their mind that’s when I kind of hit my stride, when my gears start turning. So, it kind of works out that way.
That’s great. I thought the visuals were especially noteworthy, how important was it for you two to nail that aspect of it?
Drew T. Pierce: We love that stuff, we are obsessed with visual effects.
Brett Pierce: Practical effects.
Drew T. Pierce: Yes, practical effects. And just visuals. As I said my day job, I’ve worked on storyboards for commercials and TV for so long, so we were obsessed with how you shoot a movie and the style you shoot a movie. We storyboarded and shot listed every frame, kind of planning as much as you possibly can. Things always change, especially in independent filmmaking, but we basically planned as much as possible that way if we had to change something or lose a shot, or the location drops… something terrible. Which, inevitably always happens, every other day. That way we at least had an idea of the plan we had going in with, so you know what you are losing.
Brett Pierce: I think it was also too, that more horror movies in the last ten years have been incorporating digital effects a lot more.
Definitely.
Brett Pierce: And, I think they’ve done well, but with horror you are always trying to get people to believe in the supernatural or the unnatural, you always want people to feel like it is real and that it is there. And I think, for some reasons with horror it does a disservice and it makes people feel that it’s not really happening, that there isn’t a tangibility to it. We just went into it like… the witch, all the effects, they have to be practical. Just because we can put somebody in full makeup and design with the actors there, so they have something to react to and be scared with, and not just a tennis ball.
Drew T. Pierce: It was so much fun to shoot that stuff on set too. Everybody gets into it. You feel like you are pulling off a magic trick. When it’s digital you are just kind of shooting with nothing there and hoping.
Brett Pierce: There’s always a kind of fear that it’s not going to work, [laughs] because so much work goes into like a three second shot. You kind of feel like you are ten years old and getting ready to do something you shouldn’t do that makes it kind of fun and exciting. I love it. I like simple tricks in movies. If people saw the behind the scenes of how we pulled off some of this stuff they would laugh, because it looks ridiculous and bad.
[Laughs] Well it worked! And I agree, I love practical effects. John Carpenter’s The Thing is one of my favorites.
Both: Yes, we love The Thing!
Brett Pierce: The Thing was a big inspiration for this movie in some ways. Basically, a monster that is impersonating people.
Are there any other movies or directors that inspired you?
Brett Pierce: I think John Carpenter had a big effect on our movies between The Thing and even Halloween visually, how it looks at nighttime and stuff. We shot the movie on anamorphic lenses just because we love how beautiful a lot of his movies look on them. And, obviously, my brother and I are big Steven Spielberg fans. Which, I think, is pretty obvious when you watch the movie, in our attempt to create likable characters that we take to a dark place and kind of destroy over the course of the film. [Laughs] It was kind of us meshing our love for Spielberg with John Carpenter and wedging them kind of together. But, obvious other ones that inspire us- we love Rear Window. We also love Frightnight. We just, love anything that has voyeuristic aspects to it, especially in an horror movie.
I know the movie has been making its festival runs. What’s the experiences been like?
Drew T. Pierce: It’s been amazing, every time we get to show it. You get different reactions from different audiences. It’s really cool because there are fests that are more horror driven, like Fantasia is kind of like a genre fest, and it’s just so fun to see how different audiences connect with it.
Brett Pierce: It’s also so much fun because we made a film that doesn’t really have any like big names in it. Which is usually, like, for Hollywood and for festivals that’s a big draw. We go and we show it and people are so into the movie and characters that they don’t care. They just enjoy the movie. The fest run is like the award for making the movie. I’d say this to Drew all the time, I’d be like, “Oh man, because I love shooting the movie, but won’t it be great when we get to like sit in a theater and show this to be people, eventually.” It’s kind of like the big payoff at the end.
Of course! So, what’s next?
Drew T. Pierce: We have so many irons in the fire right now we are just trying to pick which direction to go.
Brett Pierce: Yeah, we have directions we are going. We have a werewolf script that we’ve written that’s weirdly sort of based on my experience. I had cancer when I was younger and it’s kind of a werewolf story about cancer and werewolves. And like, Predator and The Game. [Laughs] It’s a weird story. But, we are also talking to some people about other stuff that might do, but also always writing our own stuff all the time. Because, we are kind of under the opinion that we’d love to do stuff with someone else, and not necessarily have to be the guys that do everything, raise the money, finish the movie. We always kind of step back to the point and just say- worst case scenario let’s rely on ourselves working really hard on something, putting it together, if we can’t make it happen with someone else.
Awesome! I look forward to seeing what you two do next. Thank you very much for taking the time today, and again, loved the film. Congrats!
Both: Thanks again for supporting the movie!
We want to thank Brett Pierce and Drew T. Pierce for speaking with us so extensively.
To read our review click here.
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