Patrick Brice’s Dangerous Validation
Brice talks about having two movies premiere at the same time, plus the art of making audiences feel uncomfortable.
Patrick Brice wants to make you squirm. Two features into his career as a filmmaker, Brice has made a found footage performance piece-cum-Craigslist nightmare (Creep), and a raunchy adult sex comedy bolstered by a healthy dollop of dangling male prostheses (The Overnight). Put bluntly, he’s out to test the limitations of his audience. But that’s not a bad thing: As viewers, the experiences of confronting our personal metrics for unease can be healthy, refreshing and informative. In the specific case of Brice’s films, it can even be entertaining.
By happy accident, both films make their commercial debuts within a week of each other, so it’s safe to say that it’s a great time to be Patrick Brice. Creep has done the rounds on the festival circuit for a little more than a year, premiering at 2014’s South by Southwest Film Festival and getting snapped up by RADiUS-TWC before the company changed their plans and dropped the film last October; it’s being released by both iTunes and Netflix over the course of the next month. The Overnight, meanwhile, has spent considerably less time on the market, having been purchased by The Orchard after playing at January’s Sundance soiree.
Two movies, two genres, two different plans for distribution. As much as Brice’s films don’t look alike, though, they share common themes and goals. Paste had the good fortune to talk to Brice about Creep and The Overnight—how his experiences making the former shaped his approach to making the latter—audience preconceptions (as well as his own), and the emotional side of having two movies available for public consumption at the same time.
Paste: You must be doing great—you’ve got two movies coming out, one on iTunes, one in theaters, and roughly within a week of each other. That’s pretty awesome.
Patrick Brice: Yeah, no, this was not the plan, for sure, but I will take it.
Paste: It’s a pretty good plan as far plan Bs go.
Brice: Totally.
Paste: It’s funny that you say this wasn’t the plan, because they’re coming out so close to each other and they’re also kind of about similar things. As you said, this wasn’t intentional, but do you feel like there’s some kismet going on there?
Brice: Absolutely! You know, both the movies have this kind of motif of trust and trusting people you just met. I think there’s so much—I don’t know—just inherent tension to be found in that. So it’s nice to be able to play with that both in the horror genre and then to be able to play with that in the comedy genre, you know?
Paste: Yeah!
Brice: I feel like I learned a lot making Creep that I was then able to further refine going into The Overnight.
Paste: So that was intentional? Were you trying to make a spiritual follow-up of sorts to Creep? They’re vastly different films, but they do have that thematic nugget there.
Brice: No, I think it just is something that maybe seeped in, you know? I was continuing to finish Creep while I was writing The Overnight, and the process of finishing Creep had a lot to do with screening the movie for friends, and for test groups. So it wasn’t the intention, but that definitely seeped in, you know? My mind was already kind of in that place, thinking about the give and release of tension, and when do you ratchet things up and when do you let the air out of the room?
Paste: Is finding out more about the stranger that you meet online or meet in person something that might interest you enough to seep into another film of yours?
Brice: For sure. I’m not going to rule it out. I feel like I was able to mine that as much as I could with these two movies, but I think it’s something that’s inherently interesting, you know?
Paste: I completely agree. I guess I’m curious, then, where Creep originated from as your starting point in features. Did you have a bad Craigslist experience yourself that inspired it?
Brice: First off, it came from Mark Duplass and I wanting to make a movie together. I had just come out of film school, a specific version of film school—I was at CalArts, which is kind of a film school inside of an art school. So my background was, you know, video arts, and documentary, and it wasn’t necessarily with narrative film. Mark had seen a documentary that I’d made as my thesis project and really liked it, and we started to kind of come up with something that we could make together, and it was out of those conversations that Creep came from. Like, it’s a found footage movie, but it’s a found footage movie because that was the only way we could make it where we wouldn’t have a crew with us, you know, where it could just be the two of us and a camera, and us improvising and discovering this movie as we made it.
Paste: I gotta say, I’ve got my list of questions in front of me and I’m just now realizing how tough it is to talk about Creep as a journalist, because I feel like that movie benefits from mystery.
Brice: I agree!
Paste: Going into that with as little knowledge as possible is really important.
Brice: I think so too. I also think that audience preconception can kind of help a movie in some ways, or I think it helps both of my movies. Both of these movies, I’m kind of playing in genres that I’m not that aware of as a viewer. I think Mark and I have maybe seen The Blair Witch Project, but other than that we hadn’t really watched found footage movies, you know? So I think that there are certain expectations that come from that that we’re subverting in that movie, whether we knew we were doing it or not at the time. So I mean, that’s one of the things that I think separates that movie from other movies in the genre, you know, and hopefully makes it a movie that, like, people who maybe don’t normally watch found footage movies could watch and enjoy.