By Ryan Gowland.
Brian James O’Connell
Justin Ware
The comedy group Dr. God began as a team of improvisers assembled for a competitive improv show at Hollywood’s IO West theater. Two teams would perform, but only one team would return the following week based on an audience vote. Dr. God won that night and for the next 20 weeks straight. Seven years later, the members of Dr. God (Sean Cowhig, Neil Garguilo, Brian James O’Connell, David Park and Justin Ware) have become an L.A. improv institution to go along with their own TV show (AXS TV’s MOCKpocalypse) and their first feature, the horror comedy Bloodsucking Bastards.
The hilarious and blood-soaked film stars Fran Kranz (Cabin in the Woods) as a low-level employee stuck at a dead-end job alongside his girlfriend (The Collection‘s Emma Fitzpatrick) and best friend (Cabin Fever‘s Joey Kern) whose luck takes a dark turn when he loses a promotion to a college rival (Game of Thrones‘ Pedro Pascal) only to discover that the entire office is turning into a clan of the undead. Dr. God rewrote the script (but share writing credit with original screenwriter Ryan Mitts) and also appear in various supporting roles.
Creative Screenwriting spoke to Dr. God members Brian James O’Connell (who also directed), and Justin Ware (who also produced) about Dr. God’s journey, their writing process, working with practical effects, improvisation and how Scream‘s Matthew Lillard is the group’s “guru and rabbi.”
Joey Kern as Tim and Yvette Yates as Zabeth in Bloodsucking Bastards
So how did the movie come about?
Brian James O’Connell: Colleen Hard is a producer friend of ours and had been to a ton of Dr. God shows, and she had been working with one of our other producers, Brendan Evans from Maybe This Year Productions, and they had gotten into a partnership with Fortress Features. Fortress had this script in turn around and Colleen read it and said, “you know, I think I have the guys that would be right for this.” She pitched us to them as a one-stop shop.
We went in with the idea that Justin’s a studio-approved screenwriter so Justin would take the lead on writing it and some of the rest of us would help with the script. (He also came on as a producer so he could be a voice for Dr. God in the room – we wanted to get a little more of that). I had directed features before so I would direct and then members of Dr. God would fill in the supporting roles. But also because of our access to the comedy community out here we had access to casting someone like Joel Murray.
They liked our take on the script. They liked our idea of where changes could be made and what could be improved to solve some of the problems they were having. And then they saw my previous feature Angry White Man, that I shot back in 2011 on 35mm for an insanely low amount of money. When I told them how much I actually made that movie for they were like, “Oh, we thought you made that for $2 million dollars.” So they were convinced that we could deliver that kind of quality on a budget and that’s what got them excited.
Angry White Man
When you came on board the project, the original script had already been through several drafts. What did you change?
Justin Ware: I would say the core concept was there and some of the characterizations, especially Evan [Kranz] and Max [Pascal]. For Evan we concentrated a lot on his relationships with the rest of the office, and for Max we really cranked up the corporate speak — it was important to us that Max sound like one of those MBA types who’s obsessed with his own management style and nonsense corporate lingo.
We also streamlined the story, removed extraneous plotlines that are the kind of things that producers and execs always want you to add, but which don’t really matter when you’re watching the movie, such as the police, which we handled in one line instead of a whole storyline. We tend to follow the maxim that you should always leave out the authorities and the media whenever possible.
Why is that?
Brian: When you bring in outside forces, you run the risk of kind of cutting your lead character off at the knees because he’s not really the authority anymore, he’s not really the guy in charge, he’s not really the hero. And then the audience starts asking a lot more questions, like, “How big is this town? Where are we?” Right now it plays like “Anywhere U.S.A. shitty office job” because we want everybody to relate to it.
Justin: There were a few other things we switched around too, some characters we removed or combined, some set pieces we added, typical stuff. And then of course we focused on the funny. The Fortress guys are well known in the horror space and we felt confident about that side of things, we just wanted to raise the bar on the laughs and also the office drudgery, which was unfortunately something we knew all too well.
Basically, we wanted the office to feel like a real office, especially the dumb things that people do to kill time when they’re not working. And it’s always important to get across how people feel about each other in a claustrophobic setting like ours — you want to establish who hates whom, who wants to jump whose bones, who does and doesn’t respect the boss, etc. So we spent a lot of time drawing those connectors.
Joel Murray as Ted and Pedro Pascal as Max in Bloodsucking Bastards
Justin, Brian said you were the one to take the lead on writing the script, so I take it you didn’t write as a group?
Justin: Since my day job is screenwriting, I was the shepherd of the script on this one, but everyone contributed to the final product, including the cast. As for as the writing process, for the first draft we went back and forth with Brian and Sean, working late into the night and then sending it to me to rework in the morning, since I’m the guy in the group who gets up early. Once our first draft was done we sent it off the other producers and then the interminable back and forth and rewrite process began, although this one was less interminable than most because we had a start date. We probably did 10-12 drafts total but most of the last few were polishes.
Brian: I think there was a last polish where all of us just sat around and were like, “All right, is this joke an A-plus joke? If it’s not, is there a better joke here or should we just cut it?” We have a thing where if it’s not at least a B-plus joke we’ll just cut it out. But like all movies, we were writing stuff the day of and tweaking things. You write a movie three separate times. Once when you write it, once when you shoot it and once when you edit it. You’re constantly still writing and re-writing.
Is it easy for you all to work with that many voices in the room or does it become chaotic?
Brian: We’re all very close. We call each other brothers. I think it was Cowhig that figured out that we were the brothers we never had because all of us have older sisters except for Neil who’s an only child. So whenever we work on something it’s just like what’s the best idea? Let’s go with that. There’s no fighting over, “I’ve got to get this joke in,” it’s just whatever the best joke is – let’s do that because it’ll still have our name on it. It’ll still say Dr. God and we’ll all share the credit.
Emma Fitzpatrick as Amanda in Bloodsucking Bastards
Dr. God started out as an improv group, so when did you guys start trying to create movies and TV shows?
Brian: Matt Lillard is a close friend and he has been a guru and rabbi for us. He and Justin met when they were in New Orleans working on a movie called Poolboys that Justin was a writer on, and so they just ended up hanging out a lot and becoming very good friends. We were on the road doing our show, Dr. God Revival, and while we were in San Francisco we all rented a house. We had done our show and were all hanging out in the kitchen and Matt said, “What do you guys want to do next? Is this it? Are you just going to be an improv group? What do you think you guys want?” And we said, “Oh! We probably should think about that.” And he said, “You guys got a lot of talent and I really believe in you guys and I think you guys can take the next step if you wanted to.” And that week we had a “come to Jesus” meeting and stopped having weekly improv rehearsals and started having weekly production meetings.
Dr. God
The movie uses nothing but practical effects, which I love-
Brian: Me too. I’m a big guy on practical. It looks better, it feels better…
Agreed. Absolutely. But with such a short shoot (18 days), how did you pull off practical effects?
Brian: Practical effects actually ended up taking less time. It’s like having good production sound, it saves you a ton of time in post trying to sweeten things and make it look good and you’re not going to have the money to pay for the special effects in post to make it look as good if you just did it in real time. Mark Villalobos, our special effects guy, is great and he works fast and has been doing this stuff forever and since I grew up on these type of movies and loving practical and studying Rick Baker and Tom Savini, he and I developed a pretty quick shorthand. I just told him what I was looking for and he would say, “Oh, I know exactly how to build that, I’ve done it a hundred times.”
Justin: We were all in agreement that at our budget level, we could do practicals that looked good or computer generated that looked like crap, so practicals it was. And we tend to believe that for blood you want that authentic splatter anyway. Really it was Fran and Emma who got the worst of it, but they’re pros and their attitude really carried through to the rest of the set.
Brian: A lot of credit also goes to Matt Mosher, my director of photography, and his crew for making things work and then Scott Kyger, my first assistant director, we split up the schedule in such a way that we back loaded the end of the schedule. We didn’t totally shoot it in sequential order, but we did shoot pretty linearly so that, as things became more and more bloodied up, we wouldn’t have to tear down everything and make it look like it did in the first 20 minutes of the movie.
Marshall Givens as Frank and Joey Kern as Tim in Bloodsucking Bastards
In addition to writing so many drafts, you also improvised a lot on set. How did you balance improvisation with the scripted material?
Justin: Because we’re improvisers, we tended to play on set and we cast actors who were up for the challenge, and everyone stepped up to the plate. Joey Kern, for example, was an alternate line machine, and Joel Murray and Marshall Givens and Zabeth Russell come from improv. Fran was great although he’d be the first one to tell you that he had a hard time not cracking up in some of the scenes. But at least then we knew it was working.
Brian: My thing was always, “Look, let’s get two or three takes of what’s on the page so we know we have it and we know it’s a performance you’re comfortable with and then I’ll give you a couple takes to play around with it, have fun and make it your own.” I think one of my favorite moments shooting that movie is that Joel Murray improvised something for Joey Kern in a scene and Joel wasn’t even in that scene. So that’s the kind of camaraderie we were looking for and we got very lucky in that sense.
So there was a kind of group mentality through the whole shoot.
Brian: Oh for sure, yeah. Everybody was like, ‘Hey, I think we got something here let’s all try and pitch in and make this the best possible movie we can.” We want the set to be light and fun and open and people to feel open and comfortable and come in with ideas. I told everybody from the first day and every production meeting and every table read and on the first day of principal photography: “Look, I’m not an auteur, I’m not a diva, I’m not a dictator. I don’t care where a good idea comes from. As long as it’s a good idea, we’ll use it.”
