All this week Paste is bringing you preview interviews with filmmakers who are taking their new films to Sundance. Jeff Mickle was last seen in these parts with his 2013 film We Are What We Are, a re-envisioning of the Mexican horror film of the same name. His new film, Cold in July, stars Michael C. Hall, Sam Shepard and Don Johnson, and it’s about a mild-mannered Everyman struggling to deal with his experience shooting an intruder in his home. We spoke with Mickle about the film, his advice on tackling the Sundance experience, and much more.
Paste: Tell us a little bit about what audiences can expect from the new film—the synopsis sounds fantastic and you’ve got a great cast—I assume it has a little less cannibalism than the last film?
Jim Mickle: Well it’s not horror, you know—there’s elements of that, it’s certainly quite dark, but it’s a little change of pace in a lot of ways. I guess the best way to describe it is as a southern-fried thriller, in the Blood Simple, Red Rock West sort of vein. Whereas We Are What We Are was a much more measured, deliberate take on the role of women in horror movies—and a subverting of some of that, It’s the other side of that coin in a weird way—[Cold in July] is much more an exploration of being a guy and being sucked into your own sort of action movie. Stylistically, it’s very different. We play with a lot of ’80s themes and sounds and looks and tried to create a bit of a world out of that, a throwback to a lot of ’80s John Carpenter stuff. I’m psyched to be able to have We Are What We Are, which is one side of the coin, and this, the opposite side.
Paste: I know you’re probably really tired of this question, and if you’re not then you will be by the time Sundance is over, but tell me about gathering the cast together.
Mickle: I actually haven’t gotten asked that at all. It was cool. We’ve had this movie for upwards of seven years—that’s when I first read the book. Belladonna Productions—we did Mulberry St together in like 2006—they optioned the book then and it’s been six or seven years pushing this thing along, trying to get it going, trying to get a cast that made sense, trying to get somebody to finance something that wasn’t straight up horror. If you’d told us at the time we’d have this cast—at that point Michael I think had just started Dexter—but it was just a different era then, I guess. But through my agent I knew that Michael had read it and liked it. At that point, we’d finished We Are What We Are and crazily enough, just last year at Sundance at a party I met Michael. Pat told me, “Hey somebody wants to talk to you,” and I turned around to hear Michael C. Hall saying, “Oh my god I loved your script!”
We kind of talked briefly there, he left, and then we’re like, “Okay, now we’ve got to really get this movie going,” and it fell in place from there. We Are What We Are was really the thing that allowed financing and the cast to fall into place. So we got Mike on board and then [I heard] Sam Shepard was interested. I flew out to New Mexico where he lives in Santa Fe—and my parents had just moved there—flew out, stayed with them and had breakfast with him one morning. That was an amazingly memorable experience.
As for Don [Johnson]—I’d seen Django Unchained and Eastbound & Down and was blown away by this new path he was going on of really fun characters. It felt like all of a sudden, “Holy shit, this is the guy to play this role.” The character is very much a larger-than-life character who comes into the book halfway through and sort of takes it over. We were looking for someone who could do that but wouldn’t annoy the hell out of you, who would really add something to drive to the story, and Don was that guy. Yeah, it was really one of those dominos things.
Paste: By the way, you are a much braver man than me sending something that you wrote—especially something that you wrote about masculinity—to Sam Shepard. That’s ballsy.
Mickle: I can’t tell you how any times we were like, “You know, we want this scene to be kind of Shepardy.” The fact that it happened that way is amazing. At some point we really killed ourselves—we couldn’t figure out how to make this one scene that was really troublesome. I can’t say how many times we rewrote it over and over, sent it back and forth to each other, threw it in the trash, picked it up again, tried it again. And [at some point] he said, “Oh, do you mind if I take a stab at this?” I was like, “Oh hell yes,” and he went home on his typewriter in his hotel room and typed out the scene where he kind of reworked his dialogue. He brought it in and said, “Is this okay? Do you mind? Is this something you guys are into? Should we run this by Nick first?” I was like, “I think that’s totally fine!” One page, hand-typed.
Paste: Like Keith Richards picking up a guitar and saying, “You mind if I try a little solo on this song?”
Mickle: Yeah, exactly! We shot it all in one long take too.