Question: How did Fear of Clowns arise?
Kevin: After Hunting Humans there was a break. I suppose I would call Fear of Clowns distributor bait, and I guess it worked! I’m very self-critical and I do a lot of analysis of what I do. I think too much, quite honestly. With Hunting Humans it is definitely original and contains characters and dialog based on my personality. I thought, I really needed a higher profile. There is no money as it is in making independent movies in general. My producers representative keep saying “Look, 99 percent of all film-makers lose money on their first movie, and it doesn’t get distribution. You got distribution on Hunting Humans and made slightly more than it cost in the North American distribution alone.” So we were already in the black, and then we sold foreign. That wasn’t a lot of money, maybe only 5000-6000 dollars, but it was all profit at that point. I made money on my first film, which is news in itself, but I needed a bigger profile. Being a big fan of John Carpenter’s Halloween, I thought about a traditional kind of iconic horror villain. I’d like to do a script based on a Michael Myers-type villain. I didn’t consider it pandering, because it really is the kind of stuff I like to do. I would not right a script or direct a movie based on a romantic story, because that is not what I really want to see myself. Even if a romance movie was the only thing that sold, I wouldn’t make one. I don’t what to do something I have no heart in. I wanted an iconic villain that was different enough to put out there. I was talking to a friend of mine named Lynn who is afraid of clowns. I thought, “Wait a minute. Has anyone ever done a clown horror movie?” All I could think of was Stephen King’s It. I also remembered a movie I saw in my teens that I remember being scary. It took me forever to hunt it down but I finally did - it was Victor Salva’s Clownhouse. That movie was pretty scary but it was about some people who dressed up like clowns as a disguise. None of them are a force-of-nature Michael Myers or Shivers kind of villain. That’s pretty much where the idea for Shivers came from and I created a character Lynn who was an artist and scared of clowns. The first version of the script was more supernatural. I made it seem that the things she was painting were coming alive and killing people. I didn’t really like where that went, so I rewrote the script to the current form. Honestly, the screenplay is decent but I knew before filming started that once Shivers was captured the audience would not care as much about what happens, even to solve the mystery of why he was doing what he was doing. I thought I may lose the viewers when the Shivers action died down, especially with how cool he looks. Is the audience going to care enough for the next 15 minutes to find out why all that happened? I thought, I can either take a few more months and solve that script problem or I can hope to fix it in the editing room. I had some confidence from my experience when shooting commercials, where I had enough editing skills that was able to fix a problem in the editing room. But this time, I could not fix that problem in the editing room! Once it loses that ending, that whole movie stops making sense to a large extent. For example, in the original screenplay, Shivers does not hear voices. He is much more crazy in the final edit. In the last 12 pages of the script, there are hints as to who is really pulling Shivers’ strings and why. I basically pulled that whole part out of the final edit. [ed. note: For the curious, the director’s commentary on the Fear of Clowns DVD discusses this more.]
But, was the film a total loss? Look, I called it distributor bait. It got distributed by Lionsgate! I can’t call it a total lose. However, as a creative endeavor, I think it is a bit of a mess.
Question: What about the sequel, Fear of Clowns, 2?
Kevin: The movie Fear of Clowns, 2 is a sequel to the movie, not a sequel to the screenplay. At least I did get in why the Lynn was afraid of clowns. It was in the screenplay for the first one, the story line about the her in the hospital, but that made that movie too long and those scenes had to be cut. I was glad to be able to get that back into the second movie.
Shivers did not die in Fear of Clowns, 2 but he is dead in the screenplay for the third one! At the end of the second one, you see a shot of the woods and you hear Shivers breathing heavy, proving he is still alive. There were sound issues in that film, because it has not been professionally mastered, so maybe that sound did not come out clearly. The cop sees a trail of blood, indicating that Shivers escaped. I’ve written about 20 pages of the script for Fear of Clowns, 3 but I don’t know if I’ll actually shoot it.
I was thinking of doing a Fear of Clowns comic book at one point. Then I could do anything I want, since a shooting budget wouldn’t be a restriction, but that never materialized. A really decent artist I know charges under 100 dollars a page, so 24 pages is less that 2400 dollars. That’s not much compared to the cost of a movie. For example, Fear of Clowns, 2 cost 46000 dollars. That was my own money! That was the first movie where I paid for everything out of my own pocket.
Here’s the thing. When I got the Fear of Clowns, I deal, I thought I was being Punk’d. I got a phone message saying “This is ... from Lionsgate. We saw the Fangoria article about your movie and we loved the poster. Give me a call.” I say to myself, “Who left that message? That’s pretty clever, they even left a fake phone number with an LA area code!” So I call the number, to see who it was, and the voice on the other end, probably a secretary, says “Lionsgate, how can I direct your call?” I ask for the fellow, and she says “Let me try his extension.” Then I actually talk to this Lionsgate guy and he asks “Can I see a screener of the movie?” Sure! He said, “I’ll level with you, we all have been talking about it and we can’t believe that name hasn’t been taken already for a movie. And your poster’s great.” I sent him a screener, and a couple of weeks later, I heard back from him. He said, “We like it. We want it. But we can’t buy it from you because we don’t deal with individual film- makers. However, here are a few producers representatives that you might want to talk to.” I wasn’t real happy with my producers representative from Hunting Humans. He was okay but I think he did some shifty things that I can’t prove without doing an audit. Lionsgate says “Here are some producers representatives that we recommend and deal with and place a lot of movies for us. Do your research and call one of them up.” I picked one and got one of them a copy of the movie. The one I picked is the one I currently have. They are very good, very up front, and did not make me sign the kind of agreement that my producers representative from Hunting Humans did. He had me sign this agreement that I am your producers representative for this amount of time. The new producers representative added a clause, at my request, saying, if you want out of this contract just give us thirty days notice and you will be done. I said okay. They were very up front, very good.
Their first offer, before I even wrote the script for Fear of Clowns, 2 was “we will give you X dollars for Fear of Clowns, 1 and Y dollars to write and direct Fear of Clowns, 2.” In their offer, basically Y was twice as much as X. In retrospect, I probably should have taken it. At that point, I didn’t know that the movie industry was about to collapse. I could see how hot the first one was. This was a good offer, it would pay for the second movie and much more, but it was going to pay for a million dollar movie. It wasn’t that kind of money. So I thought, I’ll take the money I made from Fear of Clowns, 1, go and make Fear of Clowns, 2 even better than the first one, and get an even better advance. That would be even better money but at that point the movie industry hadn’t crashed. In retrospect, I could have taken the money and made a 5000 dollar She’s-trapped-in-one-room-and-being-attacked-by- Shivers movie. I do have some creative pride in what I do, I’m trying to do better-and-better-and-better, so I wouldn’t do that. But I wasn’t that happy with the way things worked out with the DVD production. It seemed very cheap. They didn’t use a lot of my Making Of special features, cutting it down to a half-hour. I had an hour and 15 minutes in the Making Of feature. Also, the out-takes were cut down, including the originally filmed ending, which I thought fans would be interested to see. It was poor footage in the sense that there were missing shots and it did not use the intended music, but it was an interesting piece. So, I think I should have taken the deal instead of trying to over-achieve.
Question: How expensive was the car-on-fire stunt in Fear of Clowns, 2?
Kevin: In Fear of Clowns, 2, in three weeks of shooting, we did some insane stuff! We blew up a car, did eighteen killings, and shot a ton of fights. That car was my old red sports car. It didn’t work and sat in my driveway for four years. My wife kept saying, “When are you going to get rid of that car?” I told her I was going to destroy it in a movie. It looks great and adds production value! Have you seem the J. J. Abrams movie Super 8? They were always saying “Production value!”, “Production value!” You are always looking for production value. That car looks fine, but we had to tow it over there to the eastern shore of Maryland where Fear of Clowns, 2 was shot. There was only supposed to be a small fire in the backseat. I wasn’t there for the preparation of the stunt, but here’s what happened. The pyrotechnics expert, a fellow named Johnny, had two trucks, one with propane tanks for the controlled burn of my red car, the other with gasoline fire bars which was to be used as a back-up. Johnny also played a small part in the film, as one of the three punks who breaks into Shivers’ basement. He was the guy with the spiked hair. Anyway, his truck with the propane rig broke down on the way to our shooting location, a farm on the Eastern Shore. He had to abandon his propane rig on the side of the road and he arrived late with the gas rig. This was on a July 4th weekend. Being a smart and considerate citizen, he called the police to warn them when they towed it, that it was full of explosive propane tanks. They asked if he had an explosives license. No, he did not, so actually he was later arrested and spent several days in jail. Anyway, he showed up late to the set with the “back up plan” of gas fire bars. He decided to pack 60 gas bars into the back seat of my car. This was in the July heat with the windows partially rolled up. He’s talking to the crew about fire safety procedures but he didn’t realize, nor did I, that gas fumes had built up inside the car - another reason why propane is better. He lit the car through a partially open window with the end of a shovel handle, which was kept afire with a piece of cloth. The car exploded! The windows of the car exploded glass outward as soon as the fire lit the fumes inside the car. The panels of the car exploded outward, one hitting him. I filmed it in slow motion, so you can see all this, even though in reality it is almost instantaneous. Holy crap! (The video is on youtube under the user miraco12.) The “explosives expert” was covered in extra gear, a mask, extra gloves, and so on. Still, he sustained burns, probably untreated during his jail stay, over his hands and arms. It was a total disaster. I confess, at the time I was not thinking, “Is that guy still alive?” but rather “How do I salvage this scene now?” That much fire looks like a trap, like Shivers intentionally lit the fire to trap them. That would not make sense. It was supposed to be a small fire, possibly caused by some accident. Just enough of a distraction that the guys guarding Lynn would leave her to go check it out, so Shivers could try to kill her. But with a large fire, it makes my characters all look stupid, since any intelligent person would know a large fire is a distraction set by Shivers. So, I was pretty irritated at that. We had firemen there, but first I asked Johnny, if they put this out, can you restart it? He says “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” Okay, I tell the firemen to put it out. After they put it out, I tell Johnny to restart it. He can’t get a fire going to any comparable extent. At one point, he even threw a gasoline can into the small flame that was going. I’m wondering “Where did this guy come from? This is not professional.”
Luckily, Dave Mun, the DP, was very experienced and came up with a solution. The fire basically melted the car, so there is no way to try to reshoot the scene. Dave had the idea to mount a fire bar on a C-stand near the car and shoot through the flame. It worked great. I was panicking and would not have thought of that. This is one reason why hiring a good experienced DP is important. Mun is a good guy to have on the set.
This interview with Kevin Kangas is continued in Part 3.
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