Interview with Jim McMahon - Bloodshed
By: Marcus Ingelmo

Evil Dread: Hi Jim, how's the new year treating you so far?
Jim McMahon: Couldn't be better.

ED: Tell us a little about BLOODSHED, the film that you directed and co-wrote with Michael Roy. What is it about and when did the very idea behind it first come to life?
JM: Bloodshed is the journey of two brothers who are, through a series of unfortunate events, drawn into murder. What we were trying to do is create a sense of empathy with the main characters, the brothers, and show how people might be forced into murder through external influences. Don't read too deep into that, though, because I don't think Michael and I were totally conscious of any particular theme when we were writing the story.

What kicked off the entire film was the main location, the house where the brothers live. In February of 2003, I was the Director of Photography on a spec TV show up in Sonoma, California. The show was about various bed and breakfast inns across the US, and it was very boring. Basically, it was something to get a credit on my resume and hopefully make a little dough in the process. At the end of the shoot, one of the inn owners invited us up to a new house that they had just bought, and there it was: old, dilapidated, weird. 2 houses combined to make one; a Frankenstein house.

I started to get very excited about shooting there, which then got the owners excited, and when I brought up how cool it would be to shoot a horror film in their house, they immediately said "YES!" They said the place was MINE for WHATEVER… but only until May 11th. Most exciting is that they planned to tear out all of the existing plaster walls, which meant I could bust up the house, paint it, chop it with an axe, whatever. SICK!!!

So I called up a few people I met recently in Los Angeles and told them that I was going to make a horror film, got them excited, and so on…

ED: BLOODSHED was your first feature length film. Did you feel comfortable in the directors chair or was it a "scary" experience due to all the responsibilities that comes with that role.
JM: Before "Bloodshed," I had never taken a class in directing, but I always knew where to put the camera and basically how the film would cut together, for the most part. I was very aware of how shots are created on a technical level, due to my cinematography and editorial background. But on set, that's the easy part! Where I ran into difficulty was in those situations where the actors were confused and I could only give them "results" direction, where I say "just be more angry" or "don't talk so fast." UGH! What a headache!

When we wrapped the film, I immediately enrolled in a few acting and directing classes. Each day of class, I learned a new skill that would have helped me tremendously, had I taken the classes BEFORE I directed the film! Oh well, live and learn. Now I'm much more prepared for my next film.

It's interesting that I've always been a proponent of learning filmmaking "in the trenches," rather than in film school. Now I see it might have better prepared me to direct "Bloodshed." Or maybe not! Who the hell knows? Maybe I would have been in school instead of making a film, and all I'd have is a diploma!

ED: Since the release of BLOODSHED, you've worked on some other films, but not as a director. Could you see yourself back in the directors chair again or do you prefer to take other jobs when working on films?
JM: I am a director, but I'm also a producer and a writer. Over the years, I've made my living around producing commercial work, and so producing tends to come naturally to me. I feel like there are only so many great stories out there, and so I am happy to produce films for my writer/director friends as I seek out the perfect project to direct. Most recently I produced a small drama entitled "Ciao," written and directed by Yen Tan. We're finishing up post-production on it. (Actually, I'm typing this from the composer's studio in Venice, California.) Check it out at www.ciaomovie.com I warn you though, it's NOT a horror film!!!

ED: I must say that I really liked the two brothers that were in BLOODSHED, played by Íce Mrozek and Christopher Childs. Where did you find those two guys, did you know them from before or did you have auditions etc.?
JM: Oh, those two guys were amazing, weren't they?!?! God, without them I would have been sunk for sure. The entire time we were writing the script, I had those two in mind for the brothers. Íce Mrozek (pronounced EE-CHAY in case you ever see him in Los Angeles) was in my friend Mark Hosack's film "Pale Blue Moon," where he basically stole the show. In person, Íce is totally selfless and usually life of the party, but he has a bit of a dark side as well! It's that combination that I realized would be perfect for the film… and it was. MAN, he is fucking scary in the film, isn't he?

Chris Childs, on the other hand, was a total wild card, and I'm SO DAMN LUCKY it paid-off! I met Chris on my second PA job in LA. I was driving a passenger van, shuttling cast and crew between the parking lot and this huge mansion where they were filming a Miller Lite commercial. Chris had to leave early because of some union issue. As I drove him to his car, he and I talked for probably 5 minutes, and then we talked for another 15 minutes in the parking lot, and that's it. Seriously, in 20 minutes, Chris impressed me so much with his enthusiasm and his personality, that when Michael and I decided to write the script, we wrote Donnie's part specifically for him.

ED: Would you say that there was anything that inspired you to write the film, some events you had heard of, some films that you had seen etc. Also, how much time was spent on developing the screenplay?
JM: Ha! "Developing the screenplay!" That makes me laugh because we wrote two drafts of the script in 3 weeks total. The quick turnaround was due to the deadline with the house (by this time it was early March and remember the house was only ours to use until May 11th). Looking back on that process, we were writing almost by instinct. Michael was a film major at USC, and therefore had a decent background in screenwriting and film theory. I studied Journalism at the University of Montana where I took a screenwriting class in which I think I got a D! Neither of us had really sat down and wrote out an entire feature, but our personalities clicked so we decided "what the hell!"

Regarding the story inspiration, I have a method of invoking intense dreams by locking myself in a room with the heat turned way up. I basically give myself fever dreams, and then when I wake up in terror I write them down before I forget anything. I don't know what sort of health consequences this has, but I find it very helpful when I'm trying to dig into my subconscious.

When I used that method for Bloodshed, I had a dream of a man shaving the face of his younger brother with a straight razor, both looking into the mirror, in a small dark bathroom, lit only by the daylight from a small window. There were no cuts on the man's face, but there was blood in the soapy water in the sink, and as the razor was dipped into the water, the water became increasingly bloody.

The second bit of inspiration came from a story I heard about a mother in a small town who convinced her teenage son to kill her abusive husband, who is also of course the son's father. The son does this and the family chops up the body and incinerates it in the stove. But of course someone finds an unburned bone and it's all a big media and legal mess, and I'm sure all of them are totally messed up in the head now. It's actually a fairly common story, even though it seems quite strange.

And with that inspiration we started building the story in a very similar way that Robert Rodriguez talks about building the script for El Mariachi: utilize the resources you've got. We knew we had Íce and Chris as two of the lead roles, and that we had the house in which to set everything.

The films that inspired me the most were TCM and 28 Days Later, both for their visual style and their intensity. I'll speak more about these later.

ED: If you think back now after that BLOODSHED have been released, did it come out exactly the way you first had imagined? Would you say that it turned out better or worse than you had hoped for?
JM: It definitely did NOT come out the way that I had imagined! I did not have the ability then to accurately pre-visualize the film in its entirety. If I had, I would have done some things differently, but there's no sense in hanging myself on the past. I am pleasantly surprised that so many of the performances and the visual style of the film turned out so well. We planned it out as best we could, but even still, it wasn't until we shot the very first scene that it felt like it could really work.

That said, I'm not sure that my films will EVER turn out the way I originally imagine them. I think good films should evolve over time, improving as each talented collaborator adds to the mix. A great actor is going to bring something to the character that I've never seen before, and the production designer and director of photography will make concrete a world that exists only in my mind. I'm not sure it even COULD be exactly as imagined, but I'm also quite sure that I would not WANT it to be identical. It seems limiting, being the only one bringing the creativity to the table. I relish input from all departments, in the belief that all parts together will make a better film.

ED: How much time was spent on BLOODSHED all together, from the writing process, to shooting it, to the final result?
JM: Yikes. Of course it felt like forever. We started writing in early March, 2003, and shot two months later. We did some massive pick-ups in January of 2004, and I edited in my parents RV for 6 weeks immediately afterward. (I have a quarter-sized scar on my left wrist from the space heater in the RV. A permanent reminder of the film!) Then I found another editor, Omi Vaidya, to re-work the film, and he did wonders with it, cutting out about 20 minutes of footage. Yes, 20 minutes! Adele Hartley somehow got word of the film and contacted me online, I sent her a screener and 12 days later she invited us to premiere it at her festival, the Dead by Dawn Horror Film Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. We of course agreed, and so the official end date was April 2005, when we screened it at Dead by Dawn. So in total, it was a little over 2 years, start to finish.

ED: Your film was pretty suspenseful. Was it hard to accomplish that feel of suspense and tension that the film was supposed to deliver, or would you say that it came easy to you?
JM: The suspense was there all along. The house exuded a creepiness that permeated everything; I just needed to capture it. At times I intentionally made it suspenseful, but at other moments it just worked on its own. We always knew that the end of the film had to be super-intense, and Vincent and I used a lot of handheld camera work and low lighting when things started to go off the deep end. That said, I think most instrumental to the suspense for that scene in particular was the score and the sound design.

ED: What was the hardest part(s) of making BLOODSHED come to life and do you feel that you did learn a lot when making it that have come in handy afterwards?
JM: MONEY. I had to beg, borrow and steal from everyone I knew to get this off the ground. After we got the money, executing the production was much more straightforward. Making a feature film for around $50k, from start to finish, is not easy, but just getting the money in the first place is the real trick.

What did I learn? I learned that the script is the foundation upon which great films are made. We had a hastily written script that could most definitely have been better. If you don't start off with a killer script, you'll be less likely to make a kick ass film. I learned about 200 other things, but we don't have time to go through them all.

ED: How has the response for BLOODSHED been so far and what kind of expectations did you have to begin with?
JM: We didn't really go into this with any expectations, honestly, but the viewer and critical response has been overwhelmingly positive! We've had some surprisingly stellar reviews, the message boards on various sites have been giving us good feedback, and overall I'm quite happy.

ED: I saw that you had a role, as yourself, in Lloyd Kaufman's MAKE YOUR OWN DAMN MOVIE! I haven't seen the film/documentary so my questions is: What are you doing in the film and how come you got to be in it?
JM: I shot Barak Epstein's second feature film, "Prison-A-Go-Go!" and Lloyd has a role in the film as a prison guard. He brought his entourage and they videotaped the entire thing, from the moment they arrived until their last day. I remember getting really pissed off at first because they were disrupting what was previously a fairly smooth-running film, but it's almost impossible to be mad at Lloyd. He's so damn happy and excited about everything!

ED: What kind of movies/genres are you into and what kind of movies would you like to be making in the future? List some of your favorite flicks please and tell us what it is about them that makes them so good.
JM: Well, the two films that I cite most when talking about "stylistic influence" are The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the original of course!) and 28 Days Later. Both have a reality to them that just blows me away, and they pull off an awful lot on just a little. I know 28 Days Later was 6 mil, but in making a film on that scale - it's a huge film - you can BET that they cut a LOT of corners and made a TON of steals and deals.

Personally, I just like great films, in no particular genre. Most recently I watched Funny Games by Michael Haneke, which was a mind-blowing film. I loved the way he played with our expectations, giving us something that we didn't want over and over, and how that was so unsatisfying at first, but so gratifying over time. I love films that have questionable heroes and surprising storylines. A film must move me emotionally or else I typically don't really care about it. Most recently I've enjoyed The Aura, Little Children, Pan's Labyrinth, The Descent, The Lives of Others, The Puffy Chair, Children of Men, Nine Queens and the list goes on and on.

My tastes evolve over time, but right now, I want to direct a film that I would want to see: a kick-ass ride with heart and soul.

ED: What are you up to for the moment and what are you working on? Do you have any future projects in store?
JM: Most recently, my good friend David Lowery has written an OUTSTANDING horror-thriller that he and I have been developing over the past 6 months, and we've finally nailed it! It's one of those films that will be smart, terrifying and hugely entertaining. I'm currently storyboarding it out and will move forward with pitching to studios once it's perfect. Sorry that I can't divulge any more than that, but I'll be happy to keep you and Evil Dread in the loop as things progress.

ED: Sounds great, thanks! Anything else you want to add and say to the readers before we wrap this up?
JM: I'm just thankful that we were lucky enough to make the film, and that we were actually able to find festivals and distributors to put it out into the world. Thanks everyone for your support!

ED: Thanks for all the answers and for taking time to do this Jim! It much appreciated! Best of luck with all your future things to come.
JM: Thank you.

ED: For more info on BLOODSHED, check out the film's official website over at bloodshedmovie.com