TIFF 2021: Interview with Director/Writer Blaine Thurier and Actress Alanna Bale of KICKING BLOOD

As far as vampire films go, Kicking Blood is a unique take on the genre with its incorporation of addiction into the mythic creatures’ storied folklore. The film does a great job at creating a narrative that actually adds creative ingenuity in the genre, while embodying a socially conscious sense of realism that comes as a pleasant surprise. Director and writer Blaine Thurier and actress Alanna Bale spoke to Film Inquiry during the 2021 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, where the Canadian film had its world premiere recently.

Blaine Thurier (director/writer)

Wilson Kwong for Film Inquiry: I think the combination of vampires and addictions is just so unique and interesting, and something I haven’t really seen before. How did you come up with this idea, and which idea came first?

Blaine Thurier: Well, I was just trying to think of what my next movie was going to be and just going through hundreds of ideas. I started thinking about old-timey monsters, mummies, and Frankenstein. And then I thought vampires, well that’s pretty cool. There are some interesting themes in there. They’re immortal, and what does that say about mortality? They have to live in the dark, and then it occurred to me that they live like addicts. And they’re an internal cycle of addiction, hangovers from getting high as [expletive]. I just thought there was a lot to explore there. Vampires say a lot about us as humans, sort of a mirror to humanity.

And because there have already been so many films and stories about vampires, were there certain films that you drew inspiration from when making Kicking Blood?

Blaine Thurier: No, I try not to think about other films. I try to just put it directly from my unconscious onto the page. And I’m sure influences slip in there somewhere, but my filter doesn’t always catch them. But before we shot, we did watch a bunch of movies. One thing that we really loved was Under The Skin. In a lot of ways, we realized, after we’d written the script up, it follows a lot of the same themes as our movie. And as far as vampire movies go, we really liked Werner Herzog‘s Nosferatu the Vampyre. That one was really weird and poetic and full of art, and beautiful, weird, and creepy. But nothing like our film at all. I mean there’s also the Only Lovers Left Alive comparison. I loved that movie, but we felt like we had a bit more of a story and a bit more hope and redemption.

In terms of preparing your actors for the film, I guess there’s both the vampire and addictions aspect, depending on the character. Were there certain things you had them do in preparation for the film?

Blaine Thurier: There was a lot of talk about what does a blood high feels like, and it’s hard to find a drug that compares. But I just asked them to think about it as a sort of euphoria where the fabric of reality in the universe opens up to you and you feel this incredible influx of pleasure from everywhere. And for Luke Bilyk, who played Robbie the alcoholic, we talked a couple of weeks before shooting and he had read a big stack of books about alcoholism and withdrawal. He knew every detail and every step that happens in the process of withdrawal. And so I’m pretty confident that we depicted that pretty accurately.

He does a really excellent job for sure. The entire cast is excellent! Just moving on to the actual shoot itself, I know the film was shot in Sudbury during COVID. I assume that came with challenges? Or because so much of the film takes place late at night, did it in some ways make it easier too since less people were out and about?

Blaine Thurier: Yes, very good point. In the early stages, I had always thought of it as taking place in a bustling city and having to hide in plain sight. So we weren’t going to get that with our budget or during lockdown in Sudbury. And Leonard Farlinger, him and I had worked on the script for a long time together, and we looked at Sudbury and found spots. It was really poetically desolate during lock down. There’s spots with broken down factories, chain link fences looking into train yards, and no sounds but dogs barking in the distance and snow banks everywhere and darkness and freezing cold. And we thought this is actually kind of perfect for our story, in that it underlines the disconnection from humanity and the loneliness and the loss of your soul that you would think would go along with being a eternally addicted, soulless vampire.

If you were able to set the film in a bustling city, do you think the overall narrative of Kicking Blood would’ve been different than what you ended up shooting?

Blaine Thurier: I don’t think it would have changed the narrative. It would’ve changed the look and just the atmosphere of it. But we would have just tried to say the same thing in a different way. It’s just a different aspect of it; you are disconnected from humanity and yet you’re completely among them.

The thing I liked most about the film was actually its tone and atmosphere. The overall feel and music just helped create this really cohesive tonal quality, and I was wondering how you collaborated with your cinematographer and music team on the film.

Blaine Thurier: Well, you set some overall guiding principles and then hire the right people, let them know what these principles are, and they discuss and add their own thing. So, Jonathon Cliff, our cinematographer, came up with this beautiful lighting scene with lots of gorgeous, almost neon reds and blues that really juxtapose the dark gray and black desolation of outside. Justin Small and Ohad Benchetrit did our soundtrack, and they just know and can execute really good music, and they found this sort of ethereal, atmospheric, almost completely tonal take on it. Yet there is rhythm and melody in just the right spots. So I guess the shorter answer to your question is you just hire creative, smart people and let them go within a framework, a pretty broad framework.

Do you see Kicking Blood as a horror film in many ways? There’s certainly a lot of scary elements to it, but it doesn’t feel at all like a typical vampire film.

Blaine Thurier:  We wanted to pick the aspects of vampire mythology that were most interesting to us, the ones that might actually mean something about who we are as people. And the things that did not interest us were bats and coffins and castles and mirrors and garlic and all that. What did compel me was, as I said, the idea of being immortal and addicted and you have to live in darkness. You can’t see the sunlight and you have no soul, and would there be just the tiniest spark left to compel you to try to recover from your addiction and reconnect with your soul in the end.

Alanna Bale (actress)

To start things off, what was it like to play a vampire, particularly because they carry so much historical baggage to them in cinema?

Alanna Bale: Honestly, I was really playing more of a woman with an addiction and I had to remind myself that I was playing a vampire because the entire movie vampirism is used as a metaphor for addiction. So we’d be working the scenes for example, Luke (plays Robbie) and I, and a line would come up about sucking blood or something. And I would have to remind myself that this is a vampire movie. I think that it escaped my mind pretty often because the vampire lore that Blaine and Leonard (co-writer) places in this movie, it’s ambiguous and it’s pretty nuanced. And there was a lot of room to play with what it means to be a vampire. And personally, I just started from the baseline of, she was a human and then just grew from there.

Were there any vampire characters you had in mind when developing how you would play the character of Anna?

Alanna Bale: No, and I think it depends on project to project, but for this one in particular, I treated the script as its own entity. And sometimes I’ll pull from external sources, like film or television, if I need something to inform my choices. But everything that I needed was written in the script and from lived experiences. So I didn’t think it would serve me to pull from other stereotypical vampire films.

One that that has always interested me about vampires is how they might appear a certain age physically, but can be hundreds of years old, like Anna. How do you approach that as an actor, particularly the way you carry your physical presence in the film?

Alanna Bale: Yeah, Anna is somewhere between 300 and 400 years old, and I think at this point she’s so jaded by life and I think that really informed me. It’s not so much that she seen everything and is this all knowing, all powerful being. She’s just numb to the world because she’s been around it for centuries and centuries. So I think that was the main thing that formed to me. And obviously tonally, the lighting in it is pretty dark and dim, and romantic. I think that that played a huge effect on how I played the character because you can’t be over the top and bubbly and sparkly on film when you have this abrasive light in your face, and it switches to a cool blue and then goes to a dark black. The lighting really helped me.

Did you get a chance to discuss your approach to the character with your two other vampire co-stars? It seems like everyone worked within this similar tone, and there was some level of consistency in how the film’s vampires would be.

Alanna Bale: So, I blame COVID for this. Before filming, we didn’t have a chance to meet up or speak because we weren’t allowed to meet in person. We did a few read-throughs over Zoom, but I intentionally didn’t want to know how they were going to procure their vampires, just because I think that each one of us has a specific characteristic, and I didn’t want that to bleed into informing how I play Anna as a vampire or vice versa. So we didn’t really have a chance to debrief before filming, but I think it was actually a good thing.

And how was the experience of shooting the film during COVID?

Alanna Bale: So, we were actually in a peak pandemic mode in Sudbury while we were filming and there was a rise in cases. We were on complete lockdown, and people are going to kill me for saying this, but it honestly helped me because Sudbury in the winter is already pretty desolate. There’s not a lot of people on the streets because it’s negative 30 degrees out there, and add on top of that, the lockdown. So for my character in particular, she’s been pretty secluded and isolated from other humans for so long because she can’t go out during the day. I think that the feeling of being a bit trapped due to COVID, it really informed the film and it looks great too; these empty, barren and desolate streets. If we didn’t film during the pandemic, then we’d probably have to block off sections of the street for people walking by, but we didn’t have to do any of that because everyone was inside anyways.

From an addiction standpoint, you mentioned using that as a starting point for developing Anna’s character. Did you do a lot of research in that respect?

Alanna Bale: I think that addiction is pretty prevalent, whether you suffer from it or you know someone that does. It’s everywhere and you don’t have to look far to find it. So I found that to talking with Blaine and reading the script, and drawing from life experience, everything that I needed was there. In terms of research, I think the most useful tool is lived experience. And so I was able to draw from that a lot.

What about the physical aspects of addiction, and the idea of being addicted to blood. How did you come up with how that would look like on screen?

Alanna Bale: That’s an interesting question, and I think it’s an acting technique question. The most useful tool for me are actionable verbs or images. So for example, if you’re going through withdrawal, you feel like your skin is crawling or like you have a burlap sack on you. So just those images I would drop in right before going through the withdrawal period in the film. And to me, that is more actionable than thinking in my head. “I’m going through withdrawal.” It’s not as cerebral, it’s more of a feeling.

And now that the film has premiered and you’ve seen the finished product, was there anything about it that surprised you or was different from what you anticipated while filming it?

Alanna Bale: I think that one thing that really struck me when I watched the movie, because I hadn’t seen it before the premiere, was the inclusion of the soundtrack and the score. And obviously having not seen any clips, the effect of the lighting was huge. I think that it made it so much more dark and moved it more towards the horror genre than I anticipated while filming, even though while filming, I knew it was in between genres and horror was one of them. But it really brought it home with the score and the lighting.

Kicking Blood had its world premiere at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival.