Interview with Lowell Dean by Jason Manriquez

Photo courtesy of Lowell Dean

An Interview with WolfCopWriter/Director, Lowell Dean by Jason Manriquez

Here at Fanzine HQ, we continue to marvel at Joe Bob’s efforts to educate the masses about underseen and underappreciated films. One such film is WolfCop, written and directed by Lowell Dean. In a recent interview I conducted with Night of the Cometand Chopping Mall star, Kelli Maroney, she directly mentioned WolfCop as a recent revelation brought to her attention by the evangelizing efforts of Joe Bob. We had the fortunate opportunity to chat with Lowell Dean about working on the film shot in the heartland of the Canadian prairie.

THANKS AGAIN FOR TALKING WITH US. CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF AND HOW YOU BECAME A FILMMAKER? My name is Lowell Dean, I’ m a filmmaker from Canada, from the flat prairies in the middle. Born and raised in Saskatchewan. It’s a great place to grow up, but I always knew that I wanted to make films, and if you are from Saskatchewan, you don’t actually think that you are going to make films, or films of note. So, after high school when I needed to decide what I wanted to do, I just couldn’t give up the desire to make films. I just loved it too much. So, I went to university, actually Saskatchewan University in Regina, one of the few universities in Canada, at least at the time, where you could get a degree in film production and film studies. So, I got a degree there and then began a career working in the industry. It’ s a small industry there in Saskatchewan,nosurprise,andyoudon ’t say, “I am a director,” or, “I’ m a writer.” It’s so small that you do multiple things and, because there are only so many productions happening, you don’t want to give up the chance to work on a project because you’re going

around saying, “I’m only a director.” Even for myself, I pretty much work on whatever comes through Saskatchewan. I live in Toronto now but I have a good connection with the Saskatchewan industry and if they’re making a film here, I am probably doing something on it. Maybe I’ m shooting behind-the-scenes video, or doing interviews, or editing, you name it. So, yeah, I’ m a writer/director first, but being a Canadian filmmaker I’m nimble. I edit, sometimes produce, sometimes [I] bring the coffee. Do whatever you’ve got to do to get the movies made. WOLFCOP IS YOUR SECOND FEATURE FILM. CAN YOU TELL US A BIT ABOUT THE WORK YOU DID PRIOR TO WOLFCOP? After university I did a bunch of short films. But obviously my goal was always to make features, I think that’s most people's goal, or at least it was. Now TV has become the more sexy direction to go. But my goal was to make feature films and the first feature film I was a director on was called 13 Eerie. It’s not widely known, but it’s a cool little indie horror film. It’s actually the biggest film I was ever a director on, 3.5 million, Canadian. It’s a zombie movie that stars Katherine Isabelle, Brendan Fletcher, Brendan Fehr, and Jessie Moss. It was a fun [movie]. I actually began as the director’ s assistant and at the last minute they needed a new director. So, just two weeks prior to the beginning of production I became the director. It was a big jump for me, obviously, from the assistant to directing the film. Prior to that I had only done my short films with friends and family, with budgets of $500 to $1000, on the weekends. So, it was easily the biggest bump, or jump, in my career. And with 13 Eerie I like to say that I was baptized in blood, because it was a big learning experience, going from no money with friends to trailers and professional actors and all this stuff. It was an eye-opener and informed a lot of WolfCop, honestly. 13 Eerie, like most indie films, was a relatively short shoot, 21 days, but that was the longest I had ever worked on a film before. By fluke or bad luck, many of my movies shoot in the winter. With both WolfCopand Another WolfCopI was wearing ski pants for most of the picture. Even though the first was shot in October, it still managed to snow. So, yeah, you can’t really chase the peak [filming] season in Saskatchewan because it is so short. If you get lucky enough that you’re shooting in the summer then just be thankful. It’ s a beautiful place in the summer, but the winters are brutal, and if you ’re doing a lot outside, you’ re just cursing yourself. I always feel for the actors because, as a crew member, I can bundle up, but the actors can’t really do that while we’re shooting. Whenever I see actors shivering or their teeth chattering, I just feel horrible. WolfCopwas a 17-day shoot, and I get PTSD just thinking about it. We moved really fast. If you wanted to be completely accurate, it was a 17-and-a-half day shoot because we did do some pickups. After we were editing we went back and shot some little things. Like we were missing some close-ups for the transformation, like a claw on the ground, or someone writing in a diary, stuff like that. But the actual production, with the crew,

yeah, 17 days. It was intense, and the second film is actually crazier. When I look at it I don’t even know how we did it all. I’m really proud of what the crew was able to pull off in 17 days. It shows how hard they worked, for sure. WHEN DID WOLFCOP FIRST ENTER INTO YOUR IMAGINATION? I’d say right after 13 Eerie because it didn’t necessarily go the way I wanted it to, in terms of the final film. It was a great experience in terms of getting to work on the film, but it didn’t really have my sensibility as a horror film. So, I thought that I needed to make a movie that showed what I think this type of genre [film] could or should be. WolfCopwas very reactionary. It was born out of the desire to make something tongue and cheek but still badass. Something gory, still violent, but that knew what it was and openly embraced being a B-movie. To walk that tightrope on set between taking it seriously and trying to make it be good for what it is, but also, every now and then you do a wink or have a character like Willie, who’s absurd, who’ s commenting on what’s actually happening. Because no one would call a movie WolfCopif they were actually trying to make it serious, Then it would have been called “Wolf of...” something, or “Full Moon...” whatever, but I felt that if we called it WolfCopthen people would know it was a joke. I’ m actually shocked when people don’t get that it’s silly even though we did [try] to take it seriously in some ways, but it was a lot of fun. It blows my mind that we made this movie 6 years ago and people still say nice things about it. So, in the months after working on 13 Eerie, I was writing WolfCop, and a year on, at the end of 2012, we shot a concept trailer for it. Which is on YouTube. I think it looks better than the film itself. We shot it over two days. We had a full cast and crew. Most of the same people that would end up working on the movie. And we used that trailer to promote the idea of the film and to enter contests in order to get the film made. So, from having the idea for the movie just after 13 Eerie until the release of the WolfCop movie, it was less than two years. That [time frame] kind of spoiled me because I just assumed that was normal. Now, I have ideas that I have been working on for 5 years that I’m still, probably, another 5 years from getting made. Leo Fafard, who plays WolfCop, is actually a grip in the industry here, and I’m not sure how or why, but we had cast him in a music video because we needed someone to play a werewolf. He was so good at it, and not just putting up with the makeup, which is a pain. The fact that Leo could do it with such grace and patience, and even more than that. He transformed his personality, the way he moved. He was breaking things on set but we couldn’t be mad. He was ripping things off the walls, he was that committed to [it]. Once I saw that, I wrote the movie for him, I said “I’m writing a werewolf cop movie and I hope you’ll do it.” THIS WAS A DIFFERENT TAKE ON WEREWOLF LORE. WHERE DID YOU DERIVE YOUR OCCULT MYTHOLOGY FROM? The whole thing is just made up. We pulled from historical lore but when I first started writing, it was just [going to be] a bite.

Photo courtesy of Lowell Dean

Very traditional. But you never want to be bored by your own script. So, [at that point] 30 pages into the script, I felt like I had already seen the movie before. It wasn ’t working, so I started researching the occult and werewolf mythology, and why werewolves exist. I don’t know if [it started with] a book or a movie, but I realized that we, as a society, have just fallen into the werewolf bite thing more recently. But earlier werewolf films and stories, from the 20s and 30s, actually started with a curse. The occult curse, the Lon Chaney movies, and [the curse] seemed way more interesting to me. It just felt like the bite had been done to death. But the idea of someone being cursed worked so well with the idea of [the werewolf] being a cop, with the visual I had in my head of the movie before it was anything. A cop showing up at a crime scene and his slow realization that he not only knows what happened, but that he did it and had blacked out and forgotten that he had done it. That was the first scene that came to me before I even had the script. I saw that scene whole. And then the idea that there was a puppet-master, someone that was making him do these things, that’s when I got really excited. I just wanted to see a werewolf in a way that I hadn’t seen a werewolf before. But also, [done] in a way that was respectful and a little cliche with regard to the old werewolf, man-in-a-suit characters of years past. My first draft was more of a redemption tale, with the werewolf almost serving as a metaphor for alcoholism, and that he needed to be sober to solve his problems. As the script evolved, one of the things that grew out of conversations with the producers was that we doubled down on the drinking [and the wolf], and I think with the tone of the film, it’s more playful. YOU SHOT THE FILM IN REGINA AND MOOSE JAW. SO, WAS THE BARN EXPLOSION FILMED IN MOOSE JAW? The barn explosion was shot

about halfway between Regina and Moose Jaw. I had a very particular type of barn in mind, so it was difficult trying to find one that met those criteria. And then finding anyone that would let us blow up their barn proved impossible, so I had to give that dream up. There were a few that said we could gently burn down their barn, but they didn’t want explosions on their property. We ended up building a miniature barn that was the size of a minivan. The reason [the explosion] looks good, in my opinion, is that normally when they build miniatures they make them like that (holds thumb and forefinger about a half-inch apart), but I could walk inside the barn that we built. It was great. And the best part was that we could fill the whole thing with explosives. I said that I wanted the roof to literally blow off, and so it does. It was, sadly, [more economical]. It was hard enough convincing [the producers] we could have a car driving into the wall. But that’s what film-making is all about. It’s what you see and not what you actually do that counts. THE WEREWOLF IN WOLFCOP UNDERGOES A DISTINCTTRANSFORMATION. AT WHAT POINT DID YOU KNOW THAT THE SKIN OF YOUR WEREWOLF WOULD RIP, TEAR, AND FALL OFF? That was Emersen Ziffle, the makeup effects artist. I really wanted him to be happy with whatever it was. I had parameters, obviously, about what I wanted to see, as far as, what shots I wanted. But it was a very open conversation early on, and I asked him what he would do if he could do his dream transformation. And I remember him saying that he wanted to see the human skin peeling back to reveal the wolf beneath, and that worked with the [overall] theme and vibe of the [film]. We watched AnAmerican Werewolf in Londontogether, which is the perfect thing to do, and we made a list of all the things we saw during the transformation, how much time they had to do them. We studied the greats. Then we made a breakdown and realized that we would have a half a day, at best, to shoot our [transformation]. That’s four shots, that’s all we get, so we made a list of the four best body parts to show that no one has ever seen before. And I didn’t even have to say it out loud, it was immediately clear that the only way that we are going to win, or even get into this transformation fight was show something that had never been done. And I had never seen a werewolf penis, so that was that. And that’s why he’s at the urinal. It’ s the only reasonable explanation for him being pants-down and we get to see it. It was all designed for that. AFTER LEO, WHO WAS CAST NEXT? DID YOU HAVE SPECIFIC ACTORS ALREADY IN MIND FOR EACH ROLE? I feel like the character Tina Walsh was cast second, played by Amy Matysio, and a big reason for that is she’s from Regina. She had been following our campaign to get the film made, and even though we weren’t super close friends, I knew of her. One night she just messaged me saying, “What am I doing?” And that’s honestly why she got the role. I admired her work and she reached out to be a part of the film. She was gung ho. And the role of Tina wasn’t originally a

very big part but it became bigger and better because of Amy. She was this great foil to Leo and the part just kept spiraling and growing the more we talked about it. The art department started putting out all of these [props] that indicated how great Tina was, and how horrible Lou was. I started to want to stack the cast with, obviously, great actors, but also people from Saskatchewan. It was becoming a love letter [of sorts] to the province, I don’t know why. So, Sarah Lind was cast next as Jessica Barratt, and it was only later that I discovered that she was also from Regina. We were having a hard time finding Willie Higgins, and he was cast last because, to me, he was always the “Doc Brown” of the movie. His character was so important to me tonally. I saw a lot of auditions, a lot of tapes, and some people would do Willie crazy, over the top, knocking over furniture and screaming. And some people did Willie like they were cast in a Shakespearian play, very serious, and saying the same sort of lines as the others but seriously. But Jonathan Cherry was the one person who was crazy, but controlled crazy. You could see him [in the part]. Where you’d say, “I know guys like this.” He was hilarious. I think that I was halfway into his audition when I knew that he was Willie. Because Willie has to say all the weird stuff that we would all probably say, like, ‘We’re all okay with this werewolf driving around fighting crime?” For a movie that happened so fast, I think everyone brought their A-game for something that was so tonally weird. WHEN DID YOU KNOW THAT WOLFCOPWOULD BE AIRING ON THE LAST DRIVE-IN? Literally, when it was on, when it was airing. I knew of The Last Drive-In. I was a fan, I had Shudder. But I wasn’t always able to watch it religiously, sometimes catching it after the original air dates a week later and stuff. My story is that it was a Friday night and I had gone to see the new Avengersmovie. And, while I was watching it, my phone kept buzzing and it was driving me crazy, and I thought, “Who keeps calling me?” But I ignored it, because I’m in a movie theater watching The Avengers. And then, when I walked out of the theater I had 10 missed calls, and 30 messages on Twitter, and I was like “What the hell is happening?” I thought that someone had died. But then the messages were all about WolfCop trending in the United States and my friends telling me that I was on Joe Bob. And I was like, “You’ re kidding me!” I had no warning. Obviously, I would have stayed home and watched it otherwise, and taped it, and everything. But no, I was shocked, and I immediately went home and watched. It was definitely a pinch-me moment, and weirdly validating. It felt like the movie had had it’ s life, that it had already come and gone. But I guess that’s the luck of making what some call a cult classic, because some people will revisit it. And obviously Joe Bob is the king of digging up old movies, and for him to share it with a whole new audience, I just felt lucky, so lucky to have become a part of such a long-standing legacy with the whole Joe Bob Briggs experience.

2014

21 dead bodies 4 breasts Chest carvin’ Throat cuttin’ Neck rippin’ Face rippin’ Eye stabbin’ One firefight One catfight One wolf cruiser Bullet to the forehead Multiple shape-shifting Inter-species aardarkin’ Pig-faced armed robbers Bedroom handcuffin’ Random flaming pentagrams Close-up penis transformation Aggressive projectile pissing Chain lassos Projectile vomit Ceremonial sword stomach plunging Exploding barn Excellent transformation scene, with slimy claws and close-up face cracking Head rolls Eyes roll Kung fu Shotgun fu Satanic rite fu Cocaine fu

• JONATHAN CHERRY as Willie, the trigger-happy slacker in a bad ski cap. • SARAH LIND as the hot bartender with a sinister secret. • LEO FAFARD as Lou Garou, the WolfCop, for yellin’ at the librarian, “Hey, you got any books on devil worship?” • AMY MATYSIO as the valiant Deputy Tina. • LOWELL DEAN, the writer/director, who comes out of the indie film movement of Saskatchewan. Actually, Lowell

Dean isthe indie film movement of Saskatchewan.