A father (Paul Rudd) and daughter (Jenna Ortega) accidentally hit and kill a unicorn while en route to
a weekend retreat, where his billionaire boss (Richard E. Grant) seeks to exploit the creature’s miraculous
curative properties.
Death of a Unicorn is the feature film directorial debut of Alex Scharfman, and leading up to it’s release in Australian cinemas on April 10, Nick L’Barrow spoke with the writer/director about using actual unicorn mythology to build the world of the film, and the Richard E. Grant line that he found funniest!
Nick: Alex, thank you so much for taking the time. This movie is such a blast. I had so much fun. But one thing that really made me laugh in particular was every time Richard E. Grant’s character finished a sentence by calling someone “amigo”. How did you end up landing on that as his, in a sense, catchphrase?
Alex Scharfman: [laughs] Man, like, you have no idea how much that touches my heart! I’m going to tell my editor that, because I remember that started as a little flourish that when we were casting the movie, I was trying to think of who would say this? And when he came on board, we just knew it would be him saying it.
I remember when we shot the scene where he’s in his sick bed, and I think that’s the first time in the film he says ‘amigo’, my editor just strung out all of the takes where he said ‘amigo’, and we just thought it was the funniest thing ever!
His character was a really fun voice into this look at someone where there’s a lot of cultural appropriation. He’s wearing a Japanese Hanten, he has these African masks and artwork around his place. And it’s through the lens of appreciation, but he’s totally not self-aware that his cultural consumption dresses up the colonialism of it all.
I don’t know exactly when ‘amigo’ first came into the script, but Richard said it with so much conviction. He really knows how to deliver a joke in the most deadpan, earnest way. It’s so precise and specific in his interpretation of dialogue.
Nick: How much fun was it then to write your antagonists? They’re all so disconnected from our version of reality, but they have to believe that their truths are certain too. There’s a lot of fun complexity to Richard, Will [Poulter], and Tea’s [Leoni] characters.
Alex Scharfman: Yeah, I mean it’s a challenge, you know? It’s a movie that exists in a heightened, kind of theatrical, context. That was always the fun part of it, and yet, within that, you want to find the real psychological grounding for their dynamic as a family unit.
I think as long as they were all grounded to each other, they could all kind of be in the stratosphere, or a little bit more heightened. I got so lucky with all of those actors who really understood how to play the jokes with a straight face, and just deliver something that was crazy, but also resonates, hopefully. It makes it so much more funny when they’re so unaware.
Nick: You obviously get to play around with the mythology of unicorns in this film. I’m curious to know how much of the world you built in this film came from research into established mythology, and how much was you getting to play around your own creations and interpretations?
Alex Scharfman: It’s both. I had no relationship to unicorns prior to writing the script [laughs]. The movie really started with the seed of the opening sequence, and I had no idea where it was going from there. There was just something about that scene, and the idea of hitting a unicorn with your car that was really potent, because I’d never seen that before.
That led to me researching a lot of unicorn mythology. And then the fun became how to synthesise that down and re-contextualise certain elements, which felt like playing ‘telephone’ with the past, you know? We think rainbows, so how could something like that be grounded into something that feels more animalistic? Maybe there’s an opalescence to the meat?
A lot of Eastern cultures often associate unicorns with, like, celestial bodies, so that was sort of brought in. I knew I wanted the film to be in the Canadian Rockies. I really like that sense of wilderness. So, then we went with the Aurora Borealis for the celestial associations.
So, some of it was invented, but it’s all rooted in research to some degree. It was about the idea of trying to connect it, somehow, back to lore. And honestly, pulling from a lot of different cultures. That’s the fun thing about unicorns, is so many people and so many cultures have had unicorns in their history, so we could pull our own version together in a way.
Nick: How much did the research influence the actual design of the unicorns? And what was the process of then bringing them to life?
Alex Scharfman: That was tremendous. I mean, that was the thing I got really sad about when it was done – designing the creatures. Because we had to start building the VFX models and the puppets. But, oh man, designing them was the most fun.
It was all very research based, but we wanted them to feel like real animals, and give them this sort of prehistoric kind of bent to them. So, like for example, when you look at a rhinoceros, or an elephant, or a mastodon – what would the horse version of that be? And that lead to looking at Icelandic horses because they have this wintery coat. And then we looked at different horse breeds, including prehistoric ones that were called Equis Gigantis – which were these enormous horses.
And when you combine that with the unicorn research, people would describe them as having these elephantine hooves and a tail like a boar. So, we started pulling all of these references together to find a through line. And to keep it grounded, I didn’t want them to have fangs. We ended up finding out mandrills have really interesting flat teeth at the front which looked like horse teeth, and then they have these fangs because they’re carnivorous. And because horses mouths don’t open very wide, we looked at wolves.
We worked with WETA Workshop in New Zealand for the early designs, as we were writing the script. And then our partners of Zoic Studios kind of redid those designs. And then with those 3D models, we built the puppets in Budapest. It was crazy seeing them in these poses that they were going to move around with.
But one big thing was, ‘How do we not just make this feel like a horse with a horn?’ And so, the challenge for our animators was how to make it look like they were prowling, because when horses move, it’s not intimidating. So, they looked at big cats and ultimately had to “break the horses’ spines” to give them more of that predatory look.
Nick: That’s so impressive, and it looks amazing on screen! Another thing I noticed with this film is that you wear so many of your influences on your sleeve. There is a distinct feeling of a Spielberg or Ridley Scott film here. I worked at a Blockbuster, so the video store was a huge part of my life, and I get the feeling it would have been for you. What were the films you were renting on repeat growing up?
Alex Scharfman: It’s so funny, I remember at one point when Netflix were still doing the DVD delivery, so Blockbuster implemented this unlimited rental policy where you could take out as many DVDs as you wanted! And I was in high school, and I just took all my savings and bought a DVD burner, and my brother got this illegal software, and we would just go back and forth to Blockbuster and rip all these DVDs. Sometimes like eight a night! I still have some of those DVDs.
But this movie is a real love letter to Spielberg, and [James] Cameron, and Ridley Scott, and [John] Carpenter. When I was writing it, and started thinking of the film in the context of that, I got really excited, because I got to explore a creature feature, in a new context, but in the way they would make the movie, too. I got to make a movie that was like the movies that made me fall in love with filmmaking.
I can’t tell you how many times I watched the making of Aliens, and all the behind-the-scenes featurettes. I grew up with no connections in the film industry. There are no professional artists in my life. But as a teen, I watched these featurettes and realised that someone gets to make these things that were an escape for me.
But, man, I could rattle off all the films… Alien, The Abyss, The Thing, Close Encounters [of the Third Kind], Jurassic Park. But I also love the more contemporary creature features like, Attack the Block, The Host, Shaun of the Dead was one I loved when it came out.
Thank you so much to Alex for his time, and to A24 and NixCo PR for organising the interview. Death of a Unicorn is in Australian cinemas April 10.
