The wait is over. Prolific television creator Bryan Fuller‘s feature film debut, Dust Bunny finally hops into theaters this week. The genre-defying film follows a little girl named Aurora (newcomer Sophie Sloan) who hires her mysterious neighbor, a hitman whom she dubs Resident 5B (Mads Mikkelsen in a role written specifically for him) to kill the monster that lives under her bed after it eats her parents. Fuller crafts a film filled with the exact balance of gore and whimsy and heart you’d expect from the man behind Pushing Daisies and Hannibal. Nerdist sat down with Fuller after the film’s world premiere as part of the Toronto International‘s Midnight Madness section to chat about re-teaming with Mikkelsen, the origins of his maximalist vision, and how his early relationship with death helped set the tone for his entire creative oeuvre.
Nerdist: At the midnight premiere you said you had a comic book artist help you render the monster and mentioned you were inspired by Highland cows. I would love to hear what the thought process was and how you found the right person to bring that idea to the page.
Bryan Fuller: When there was going to be a Pushing Daisies season three comic book with DC and Wild Storm, Jon Wayshak was the artist that we chose to work with. I love his style, like, if you’ve seen some of his work, it’s all kind of mad, like there is a madness to them, but there’s also a really exciting, heightened quality to how he sees the world and how he sees characters. So my first thought was, I want to see what he does with the monster design, because if you have seen some of his drawings of the Predator or xenomorphs, they’re just a little off. There’s an insanity to it that I love.
So I reached out to him, and I was like, “Want to design a monster?” And he was like, “Absolutely.” He asked what the parameters were and said it should be part highland cow, part piranha, part hippopotamus, and good luck! Then he sent back a drawing that I loved. It had this wonderful, expressive underbite. And it was very Highland Cow-y.
I love Highland cows too. They are the emo of the wild world.
Fuller: Yeah, with the bangs. It all works. The first time I went to Scotland, I saw the Highland cows, and I was just smitten. So he drew it, and then we gave it to Legacy Effects. Who I knew we couldn’t afford, but they were like “we’ll, we’ll help you out.” There were a lot of people who were doing favors in a way that you don’t necessarily see on television as much, because everybody’s like, “Well, this is what it costs” and it’s a train. So let’s see the ticket.
I really loved how the monster, once you did finally start seeing it, I thought it was stop motion at first.
Fuller: Oh, good.
But then I was like, is it a puppet? Then I got Ludo vibes from Labyrinth. I really wasn’t sure. Then when I saw the credits and it said puppetry, I was like, Oh my god. So I guess I’d love to hear what it was like working with a puppet like that?
Fuller: Well, the team at Legacy was amazing. They have a ton of experience with this stuff. I love Ludo. I love a lot of the Jim Henson works. I met Brian Henson recently at The Life of Chuck premiere this spring, and I was like, “You have no idea how much I love your work and how influential it is on this movie.” So it was a combination of our fantastic visual effects supervisor named Craig Lyn ,who worked with different houses and found the right house for us to do it. When it is a full body shot, it is CG, and when it’s partial, there’s a good chance that it’s the puppet.
The opening scene reminded me of Labyrinth also, where plot what’s in her psyche from the way you pan over her toys. It was a nice little homage.
Fuller: We had a wonderful local artist who goes by King Freak on Instagram. He drew all of her drawings, and there were a lot more of them that actually told the story. And I decided not to put those on camera, because there were a lot of spoilers of characters being eaten, and the assassins showing up, and those types of things. I kept all of those, and I have all of those, but we wanted to give an indication of the story without giving too much away.
The movie to me felt like a little bit of the teen angst or early adult angst and whimsy that’s in Wonder Falls with the macabre, but love of life that’s in Pushing Daisies, and then the like internal monsters of Hannibal. It felt like a mix of all of those things. One of the main keys through all of your work is this delicate balance between life and death.
Fuller: Right.
And how much of yourself you give to thinking about death.
Fuller: Right.
And how much you give to life and how the monster in the middle takes you both places. And I guess I’m interested in if you know, when you first had that fascination?
Fuller: Very young. My mom came from a very large family, so there were a lot of uncles and extension uncles and aunts who died when I was a kid. So I was going to a lot of funerals. There was something about going to a funeral as a child and knowing death is supposed to be so far away, and not your problem right now. That was almost a protective sheath of looking at death, and then slowly, as you age, that sheath gets thinner and thinner and thinner, and you’re like, “Oh shit, it could happen any time.” But I think the comfort level with death started with going to a lot of funerals, and also having adults trying to make that a safe space for kids, because they go out of their way to be nice and light, and they don’t want to make you face death.
And yet you’ve just seen a man embalmed often. I went to my first funeral when I was six. It was my grandfather, and there’s no making that nice like they try.
Fuller: Yeah, I had enough curiosity about horror very early on, because when we would go to these funerals, I’d have cousins who would talk to me about David Cronenberg movies that they had seen, and they would describe them. I remember people describing Jaws to me, and I was like, “That sounds awesome.” But I imagined, instead of being on the Orca, they were on The Love Boat. So that was how I was.
You’re probably one of the great maximalists. I imagine TV at the time when you were growing up was very maximalist. The ’70s were very maximalist. When you started working creating your own worlds, was that just always there or is that a purposeful thing you brought in?
Fuller: It was kind of just a flavor barometer, in ways, because strong choices kind of thing. I think it’s heavily influenced by a lot of French cinema, specifically Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro.
I felt a little echo of The City of Lost Children in this.
Fuller: I love that movie. I love Delicatessen. I love Amélie. When I saw those movies, they did give me permission to maximalize in a way that I wasn’t quite aware of where the boundaries were of the playing field. Seeing those works in the ’90s as I was going to film school, I was like, oh, there are no boundaries. There is no fence. It is an open field for us to play in and maximalize and make big choices. That doesn’t necessarily have to mean that the characters are heightened or unrelatable in their choices just because they’re wearing an interesting outfit.
Obviously, I really love your collaborations with Mads Mikkelsen. He’s so tender in this film, and you don’t see him like that much outside of The Hunt or Another Round. I think most people think of him as either a cannibal or, like, you know, an action star or something. Did you write this role specifically to tap into that part of him as an actor?
Fuller: Yes. There’s the scene set outside the elevator in act three, where he’s with Sigourney Weaver. He’s so the Mads that I know in terms of him being very playful and rambunctious. On Hannibal, he was always, you know, very serious and professional about the work. But if we went bowling, he would show the people at the bowling alley that he was stealing their shoes just to get them to chase him down the street. He’s such a playful, boyish man. This movie, I couldn’t have done with any other actor. He kept stepping up every point of the production in a way that was so touching, and if I talk too much about it, I’ll cry. He just kept having my back in a way that an actor that I hadn’t worked with before wouldn’t be able to do.
There’s a fight in the hallway with a guy who has a Wednesday Adams – the Christina Ricci version – style wallpaper outfit. We were frustrated with what we were seeing from the stunt team. Mads has more stunt experience than anybody, and so we choreographed it with my phone and two Bruce Lee action figures in a mock-up of the set. We went through the sequence like boys, doing little boy things as we worked out where we’d put the feet for the feet sequence and the unscrewing of the sconce and those types of details.
We did that in an afternoon in the hotel. Then we filmed it with him acting it out with me doing the camera. Then we gave that to the stunt team. He’s been around a while and has this rock star energy about him, but he’s so warm and caring. I loved working with him on Hannibal, but we reached a new level of intimacy and support on this movie that I was surprised and delighted by.
I love the action sequence with the dragon, specifically because that whole sequence is silent. I’m a big fan of silent cinema. Later you used an iris transition. I was wondering if there were any silent films that inspired that?
Fuller: I love Nosferatu, and there, I love Häxan.
Häxan is my favorite silent film.
Fuller: Häxan is so fucking good. So there was something about writing the script. . .it wasn’t necessarily intentional at the writing phase, because I was just writing the action, but I was aware that I wasn’t doing a lot of dialogue. Dialogue is harder for me than action, because action, I’m just describing what I’m seeing. Then when I have to be like, okay, what are they saying? Why is it important? All of the intellectualizations of the storytelling take over when I’m looking at dialogue. So I love stuff without dialogue. I love being able to just focus on the actors’ faces, and when you have people like Mads and Sophie Sloan. . .
Whose eyes are so expressive.
Fuller: She’s great, yeah, it’s very and it hearkens back to Lillian Gish as a young girl to Drew Barrymore to Chloë Grace Moretz to Fairuza Balk. There was this kind of essence of a young heroine that she captured, and yet was making it her own and in a way that felt signature to the movie and signature to Sophie’s performance and her presence.
You mentioned at the premiere that making a film is more chaotic, yet more intimate than making television. I wondered if there were any moments or happy accidents or things you weren’t expecting that will stay with you going forward?
Fuller: You know the happy accidents, usually, what I remember from them is the people that were finding the happy accidents with me. Whether that is figuring out how to simplify and cut shots on a day with the actors. I loved working with David Dastmalchian and Rebecca Henderson on their segment. Dave is one of my closest friends and Rebecca I had never met, but I knew her wife, Leslye Headland. I knew they were in London, and we had to cast it out of Europe. So I called Leslye, and I was like, “Would Rebecca do this?” We were filming during the strike, and I needed somebody who could improvise and be funny. And Dave, he’s also like a brother. I had my brother Dave and my brother Mads, so the scene in the aquarium restaurant was a lot of fun.
Most of those things you discover while editing when you’re like, “Did I get it? Do I have it?” I didn’t have an editor while we were filming, which is strange and not a good idea, because it puts me in the position of having to go through every shot before I come in to see what I need. When my editor, Lisa Lassek, did start, she was amazing. She lifted and supported and found things that I was worried weren’t working, she was like, “I’ll make it work.”
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Dust Bunny is only in theaters December 12.
The post Bryan Fuller on Monsters, Mads, and Maximalism in DUST BUNNY appeared first on Nerdist.
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