After calling a late-night party hotline that promises out-of-this-world fun, uptight yuppie Conor (Coner Sweeney) must battle the pint-sized forces of evil unleashed through his phone line, led by the maniacal rock’n’roll’ goblin FRANKIE FREAKO (voiced by Matthew Kennedy).
As Frankie Freako prepares to invade Australia’s VOD platforms of July 16, Nick L’Barrow spoke with the film’s co-writer and director, Steven Kostanski, about blending his work as a special effects artist and director, great movie insults, and the movie that inspired him to pursue filmmaking.
Nick: Steven, it’s great to meet you and I appreciate you taking the time to chat!
Steven Kostanski: It’s great to meet you, too!
Nick: I’m a fan of your previous films, and I had so much fun with Frankie Freako, but I do want to start our chat here – is the greatest insult of all time being told you look like a movie star, and then that movie star being Gary Busey?
Steven Kostanski: [laughs] I mean, it’s pretty great, right? I have to give Conoir [Sweeney] credit for that line – all the weird celebrity references! He did a punch up on a lot of the dialogue in the script. Conor’s one of the funniest people I know. That’s why I wrote a whole movie around him!
So, yeah, the Gary Busey reference. The Dan Akroyd reference. All these weird pulls that are so perfectly Conor’s personality, but his reaction to the Gary Busey line makes me laugh every time. It’s like he gets kicked in the nuts!
Nick: It’s a verbal kick in the nuts! The reverence you have for genre films is so apparent in all of your work. As a filmmaker, how do you balance paying homage to those B-movies you loved growing up and making your films feel uniquely like Steve Kostanski movies?
Steven Kostanski: For me, it’s a lot of just intuitive filmmaking. Like, trusting my gut and not over developing or over analysing things. Having an emotional response leads to a lot of the odd choices in these movies. The lines and moments happen because they just sort of happened on the day, and that to me is the true nature of a lot of great cinematic moments or movie personalities. That’s how you get lightning in a bottle.
Frankie Freako – I don’t know what that’s supposed to be. It is its own free flowing thing. But, you build the sandbox, and then you play in it. That’s something I’ve been doing since the Astron 6 days and like, Lazer Ghosts 2. That was one of my favourite experiences shooting anything ever because it was just indulging my love for Empire Pictures-sci-fi-action-horror franchise. I just visually built this landscape and then I dropped those guys into it and let them mess around and say dumb shit! That’s what leads to the magic that ends up on screen, I think.
Nick: As an Aussie, it would be wrong not to mention that our fellow country person, Kristy Wordsworth, is in the film, and she’s brilliant in it. How did she become a part of the project?
Steven Kostanski: Well, she submitted a tape and she was doing an American accent. And she was good, a really great actress. I mean, myself and Conor and Pierce [Derks], our DOP, we all collectively agree that she carries that movie and gives it a lot of legitimacy, considering how much absurd stuff happens around her. Like, her delivery on the monologue at the end of the movie, she sells it. It’s crazy.
But, yeah, she did the American accent, and then we did a callback over Zoom, and she was speaking in her normal Australian accent. And we were like, “Hold up! Can you do your lines but in your kind of natural accent?” And she did and it was perfect. It was exactly what we wanted.
She just embodied this like fantasy goddess that is completely unattainable, completely unreal, on a pedestal, and could only exist in these 90s erotic thrillers. So, we felt that her accent really brought that home and made her feel at odds with the buffoonery that Conor is presenting. You always want to be thinking, “Why is this girl with that guy?”
Nick: When you say Conor is “that guy”, it’s funny because even though he is presented as kind of a loser at the start, I still felt so much empathy for the guy, and I think a lot of that is Conor’s performance. How did the character evolve from the page to what we see on screen?
Steven Kostanski: He definitely evolved as we were shooting. On the page, he was pretty inconsistent. Like, initially he was very angry and I wanted him to be a little off-putting so that the audience is okay with him getting tormented and beaten up. That evolution was more like, he’s not the greatest guy in the beginning, and then he’s learnt a lesson by the end. But, that more so evolved into the fact that he’s just misguided, and the events of the story are a rite of passage that brings him into adulthood and maturity, essentially.
When we started the first few days of filming, I think we were still kind of shaky on what the character was, but on the third day we filmed the scene where Conor confronts the Freako’s in the kitchen, and he’s surveying the damage and trying to be tough, and that’s where we found that he has this dorky dad energy who doesn’t have the confidence in him to make anything actually happen. And that’s when the character started getting really funny.
Nick: Obviously your work in puppetry and special effects, in this film and others, is incredible. I’m curious to know how much your expertise in special effects work informs decisions you make as a director, and vice versa?
Steven Kostanski: I’ve been in a lot of scenarios where you’re bringing a thing to set and people don’t really know what to do with it. You try to explain how the effects work this way, from this angle, with this kind of lighting, and they’re like, “Oh, we want to shoot that a completely different way.” So, when you also direct, and can visualise these things, I’m thinking with a director’s brain too.
For example, if you’re slitting an actor’s throat, you’re going to probably have an appliance on the front of their neck, some blending at the back that might look crunchy, and then a tube running down their back. So, if I’m shooting, I’ll know that I’m not going to film this guy from behind. We’re staying on the neck, and filming it tight enough that the person who’s pumping the blood can hide somewhere too.
I find that if there’s too much disconnect between the building of the effect and the shooting of the effect, that’s when problems come up and things go wrong. So, Frankie was a great way for me to utilise both skills, because I was able to pivot and accommodate for the puppets and the puppeteers.
Nick: It always blows my mind how much work goes into these sorts of movies, and the way you explained it all reminds me of all the behind the scene special features I used to watch as a kid. Were you a special features on the DVD watcher?
Steven Kostanski: For me, there was this show called Movie Magic in the 90s which was the behind the scene documentaries that showed how special effects work in movies. So, there were episodes for like Star Wars and Spawn that showed all the ILM digital stuff they were doing, and the marriage of that with special effects. As a kid, that was really inspiring.
But the big one that I always reference is the Anchor Bay release of the VHS of Army of Darkness that had the bonus features at the end of the tape. So, you’d watch the credits, and after that you’d get trailers and a behind the scenes doc. I got that for Christmas in like 1999, and became obsessed, because I love that movie. It’s one of my favourite movies. But the big thing for me was that it just looked like these average dudes making this stuff, and it grounded the process of making movies for me. I had it in my head until that point that every movie was like ILM and money and resources, but Army of Darkness had these janky rod puppets for skeletons, and stop motion, and Sam Raimi just goofing around with Bruce Campbell. It was clear that making movies was the most fun thing ever. That was really a tipping point.
Nick: I’ll wrap up on this, and I always feel compelled to ask any filmmaker who features this in their films – fart jokes. What is the key to a solid fart joke?
Steven Kostanski: [laughs] What makes me laugh about them is that they piss people off! That’s what I’ve evolved into as a filmmaker, because this is a punishing industry of egomaniacs and pretentious people who are so up their own butts about the artistry of film. So, for me to give those people a headache is half the fun of doing this! Any chance I get to integrate a fart joke, which I know will put a scowl on their faces, makes me so happy!
Thank you to Steven for his time, and to Lightbulb Film Distribution and Walkden Entertainment for organising the interview. Frankie Freako will be available on various VOD platforms from July 16.
