Chatting with Director Brad Michael Elmore Part 1
Part I: Wolfman isn’t a werewolf, Morrisonian Dracula, and fighting the patriarchy
Every once in a while a movie will go completely under my radar and then blindside me in the best possible way. That’s what happened for me when I first saw 2019’s Bit from writer and director Brad Michael Elmore. For those unfamiliar, Bit is a horror-comedy about a transgender teenage girl named Laurel (played by Nicole Maines) who travels to Los Angeles to stay with her brother Mark (played by James Paxton). While there, she gets recruited by a squad of female vampires (whose leader, Duke, is played by Diana Hopper). Their number one rule? No men allowed.
Prior to making Bit, Elmore had written and directed The Wolfman’s Hammer (2011) and Boogeyman Pop (2018).
The Wolfman’s Hammer stars Greg Hill and clocks in at a brisk sixty-seven minutes. It is available to watch for free in its entirety on Elmore’s YouTube channel.
The IMDB synopsis sums it up nicely:
The Wolfman's Hammer is a small, grim character drama about a heavy metal loving meth dealer and his flunky cousin and their conflict with a gutter punk and his family. It's gut-shot white-trash Shakespeare.
Needless to say, it’s a very different film from Bit and illustrates Elmore’s versatility as a filmmaker. I highly recommend it.
Elmore’s other feature film is Boogeyman Pop, and it feels like the perfect bridge between The Wolfman’s Hammer and Bit. It’s a horror anthology made up of three stories set within the same town. The three stories are connected via an aluminum bat wielding masked killer. The look and feel of the movie is similar to that of The Wolfman’s Hammer while also including supernatural horror elements as in Bit. Unfortunately, it is not currently available via streaming or physical media at this time. Not being readily available should be considered a crime against humanity.
Now that you’re caught up on his oeuvre, Mr. Elmore was gracious enough to agree to an interview with me to discuss his films. In fact, he was so generous with his time that I’m going to split up the interview into two parts due to the amount of topics covered. I could not be more grateful for that! Without further ado, here is part one of the interview.
You have three feature films that you’ve written and directed: The Wolfman’s Hammer, Boogeyman Pop, and Bit. I personally watched Bit first after learning about it while listening to your appearance on the Werewolf by Night Podcast (now the Bronze Age Monsters Podcast). I watched it and really enjoyed it. I then watched The Wolfman’s Hammer expecting it to be a werewolf movie. It is very much NOT a werewolf movie, but it’s something much better. I thought you might appreciate that.
That’s funny because one of the early proponents of The Wolfman’s Hammer was Chris Weitz who directed the second Twilight movie, and when he tweeted it out he had to keep telling people that there were no werewolves in it. Just by him being involved in that movie and those rabid fans at the time. I just think it’s funny that because I made two genre films afterward that my movie that has ostensibly a heavy metal title almost has to come with a warning like: Hey, there are no werewolves in this. It’s metaphorical.
Yeah, although there is a real hammer.
There is a hammer.
When did you start working on The Wolfman’s Hammer? When did you first start writing that script?
I was twenty-five, so sometime in 2010. I think summer of 2010 is when I wrote it. I just wanted to do something that I knew I could do with no money and my good friend and collaborator Greg (Hill) who I wanted to write a movie for. It was an attempt to do something that was like a mix of high-low culture. How do you do Tennessee Williams in Oregon but with cult movie attributes? Mythic attributes? I wrote it that summer. We started filming late that fall. We had to wait for one of the actresses in the movie to actually turn eighteen to start shooting her parts. The first stuff we shot was in October, but the bulk of the shooting was in the spring in 2011.
You mentioned Greg Hill. He’s fantastic in that film. Is he someone you grew up with?
We met when we were teenagers. He wanted to be the actor, and I wanted to be the movie maker. We lived in Los Angeles together and stuff like that. He moved back to Oregon, then I moved back to Oregon later after I got pretty sick for a while. We reconnected and said, “Hey, no one is going to let us make a movie, so let’s just make one.” I made him gain a bunch of weight. He’s actually not that big of a dude. It was important to make him look like he’s a behemoth.
And he does in that film.
He gained a lot of weight. At first he got like kind of shredded, and I was like, “Dude. This guy is not looking at himself in the mirror. He’s just a big alpha dude. This guy’s exercise routine is beer. You gotta get a little softer there, pal.”
One thing that I found kind of funny is that his character in The Wolfman’s Hammer versus his characters in Boogeyman Pop and Bit are very different characters. He is not especially likable in those other two films. Which did you have more fun writing for him?
The Wolfman’s Hammer for sure. We intended to make movies where he would be the lead, and it’s just really hard to get movies made. You don’t make a follow up like Boogeyman Pop as people are beating down your door. It had fallen through with a few companies, so I decided to do it like I did The Wolfman’s Hammer and just make it. They’re all fun to write to an extent. I think the least fun would be Bit because I don’t think he got there as an actor like I wanted to because we just didn’t have the prep time. As written, Vlad is a little different but I needed to pivot to something a little sillier.
It definitely comes across as comedic in that film for sure.
Intentionally so. He’s ridiculous. He’s like Frasier Crane. The character was always supposed to be pompous and sort of making fun of the romanticization of that kind of archetype of everything from Dracula to his namesake “Manfred” the Byron poem.
He comes across as a guy who has been reading his press clippings for a little too long.
He’s convinced he’s the most interesting person because of his self mythology and the tragedy of his life, but really he’s just a buffoon and a rapist. It’s making fun of the Dracula archetype that started to be built post the publication of this Vlad the Impaler book that appeared big time in Coppolla’s Dracula which I love and even in the Langella one where the romantic figure is more present than the pestilent figure that’s in the book. I always thought it was funny that the more they push the romantic button that he has these three women who are just slaves in his basement. The idea of him being forlorn for a woman and a woman being forlorn for him just seems so silly, but I thought it was a funny thing to make fun of and a good way to talk about patriarchal power and power structures.
I think my favorite sequence in Bit is when we’re getting Duke’s backstory and it rolls into Vlad’s story, specifically when “Rasputin” by Boney M. kicks in. That whole sequence I thought was phenomenal, and I’m curious how you scripted that out. Was it that detailed, or was it something that came more in the actual filming?
No, it was even MORE detailed. The budget dictated some of the changes, but from the jump it’s the thing I’m most proud of because its the thing that was the least fucked with by the producers in the edit and was one of the things from the script that I was so protective of. To my producers’ credit, they knew that was a good thing to leave me alone on. “Rasputin” is written into the script to the second to when the needle drop is supposed to be. Initially I wanted Elton John’s “All the Girls Love Alice” for the front part of that in Duke’s section. I even wrote a letter, but we just couldn’t afford it. So we used the “Down Your Drain” song which I also really liked, but the “Rasputin” thing was always baked in there. The only thing was once the budget came in I knew it had to be more expressionistic. The artifice of it, the reality of it almost being wiped away so we could actually afford to do it.
I’m glad to hear that was something you always planned because I really do love that sequence.
I’ve said this before, but the big inspiration for me for that sequence was Grant Morrison’s Batman because in his run he does this thing where he takes all the elements of Batman from all the different runs and eras no matter how silly and ridiculous and treats them as one man’s biography and tries to unit them. And I thought, “Well I’m going to take all of the popular versions of Dracula that I can possibly stuff in there and make them one man’s biography.” Right? So you got ‘70s disco Dracula from Dracula A.D. 1972 , you got the Coppola one to the Andy Warhal one, the Hammer era, and every interpretation of the Dracula mythos through those decades but then adding in touches of those decades themselves. The point at which he is defeated stops at nu metal Dracula like from Dracula 2000. That’s why it’s all nu metal looking when he’s in the goth club and the industrial vampire hunter dorks come in. It’s all very nu metal imagery from that time of like post-Matrix e-shit from 1999-2002. I just thought that would be a fun thing to do. I’ve seen people ask, “Why not just call him Dracula?” I get that, but 1) I wanted to give him a pompous continental name. And 2) if I call him Dracula, two things happen: he gets too tied into Vlad the Impaler because of the Coppola movie which never existed in the original text. The other thing is that in the universe of Bit, the book Dracula exists as a work of fiction. If anything, it’s possible that it was inspired by the existence of our character as opposed to just being Dracula. I just wanted to make him his own thing. I have my own ideas of who he really is, where he comes from, and why that just aren’t the popular bizarre narrative of just making him a Romanian nationalist. Such a strange pull. It’s just as absurd as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. It’s sort of interesting that post Coppola’s move that it’s an accepted lineage pointing back to Vlad the Impaler that they keep hammering down in everything up to Dracula Untold that I find so uninteresting.
I agree with you on that. It is sort of strange that it has become the accepted lore for him when it wasn’t for almost a century. I also like what you said about Morrison’s Batman. I can definitely see the similarities when they were pulling in stuff like Bat-Mite and Batman of Zur-En-Arrh and making that canon.
Unifying the things that most people would sweep under the rug. What does that look like if that’s one man’s existence? It’s sort of an interesting challenge, and I knew I wanted to do that to the song “Rasputin” because I’ve wanted to use that song in a movie some way since I was a kid.
It’s very fitting. Would you ever want to do a prequel film about Vlad?
No. Vlad is such a buffoon. The world of the movie was supposed to exist just in that movie. There’s a difference between lore and story. I have it in my head that Vlad Manfred Castaneda is actually…this is a big reveal here and possibly an exclusive…King Solomon.
I certainly have not heard that before!
In the movie, if you notice, in every scene he has a ring on. Even when he is reincorporated. Right?
Yes, I did notice that.
That ring is the ring that was given to Solomon to enslave the demons that he used to build his temple. Those demons eventually possessed him, and he has lived so long that he doesn’t remember that he is King Solomon. But I always found the tale of King Solomon to be in that same lineage of “Manfred” in that Great Man story of man against nature and God stories. The Juan Carlos Castaneda stories. That kind of silly stuff you really get into when you’re like a teenager. I thought he was a good antecedent to the Byronic hero. The whole thing is just making fun of the Byronic hero. I like that archetype too, but for this story it was a good thing to make fun of.
When you’re attacking the patriarchy, that’s a good archetype to tear down a little bit.
I mean just the volume of concubines that King Solomon is purported to have in these tales. I just thought it was more interesting to make Vlad so old that he’s part of this totemic past of pre-Abrahamic shamanic mythology as opposed to just making him Vlad the Impaler. I know his whole story, but is that a movie? Not really.
That speaks to me as a big nerd who majored in history.
I’m fully aware of how preposterous I sound, but that was the fun of the character for me. The world and how the world got there and how that encompasses all of the things I’m trying to talk about in relation to power structures and patriarchal structures. Even the patriarchal structure in Bit is really just an easier way to talk about what power means, what it does, who wants it, and the overarching themes of allowing minority voices to have access to power to give power nuance as opposed to being hoarded by some man who thinks he’s great when he’s really just a rapist.
I’m curious when it came to casting the film how directly you were involved with casting Nicole Maines?
There is no element of Bit I wasn’t directly involved with. The script had a section that basically stopped, broke the fourth wall, and said, “Look. This can only be played by a trans actress. Otherwise we’re not doing the movie.” We didn’t have a lot of time or a lot of money, so we couldn’t hold an open casting call and had to rely on agencies to send over who they have. At the time, there was a depressingly small amount of represented trans actresses and in particular ones that who could believably had just graduated high school. Some of them were in their late twenties and early thirties which you can get away with, but then you have to cast older around them. I had also written the part of Mark for James Paxton, a good friend of mine, so the important thing was that I got a good actor who was trans and they could believably read to an audience as someone who just graduated high school. Digging through a list trying desperately to find someone to play Laurel, I saw Nicole’s headshot. Her name kind of rang a bell, but it just didn’t really register to me why. Here was this picture of a young lady with dyed green hair, so I looked at her reel. Her reel at the time was only like one minute from an episode of a show called Royal Pains. I always trust my gut on who I can get to play the lead of a movie regardless of their experience, so I met with her over Skype and we hit it off. I just knew she was who it had to be. There were no two ways about it. At the time, the producers were wanting to look at a couple other people. I had to fight a little bit because they were really pushing for another actress who had a little bit more experience. But I felt like that person had already been used in a movie recently, and it’s like the big disease of things in entertainment which is somebody else had a good idea so let’s do that. And I hate that. No offense to this person, but I felt like we should have our own thing here and not just go after the proven commodity.
I think that paid off.
Yeah, and Nicole was really great. She'd never really done much before and she had to, like, lead this entire movie. She acquitted herself to that very, very well. The producers never fought me on the fact that it needed to be a trans actress. To their credit, they understood and supported that element.
That’s great.
But the actual casting of Nicole took some maneuvering and forceful speech because I knew she was right. Luckily for me, she was more than fine. She was great. The only thing that happened was Laurel was written as a much more droll character, and Nicole has such a large ebullient personality. Very charming. Very funny. Far funnier than you would ever expect. She is knock down, drag out hilarious. So I very quickly pivoted and just sort of allowed Nicole’s natural personality to come out more.
You had great instincts on that because she does a really good job in that film.
We’ll stop there for now. Before we depart, I would be remiss if I didn’t thank my good friend Michael for helping me transcribe the audio for this interview. I am most gracious.
Come back next week for part two!