Sean Keller - Exclusive Interview
Sean Keller - Exclusive Interview
The screenwriter talks about how he and and Jim Agnew work together to concoct some of the most-anticipated upcoming horror movies.
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Screenwriter Sean Keller is living the dream of all horror fans -- he gets to write the scripts! Find out the latest on Giallo (Dario Argento), L.A. Gothic (John Carpenter), and Teratoma (Ryuhei Kitamura).
Staci Layne Wilson/Horror.com: So, your movie Giallo is directred by Dario Argento… are you a lifelong fan?
Sean Keller: [click his image to enlarge it] Oh, of course. Not to betray my age too much, but I remember the ads for Suspiria. I saw it while watching Saturday Night Live as a little kid. And it had nothing to do with the damn film, of course but just like the head turning around and the skeleton and the pulsing and breathing. And I said, 'What the fuck is this?' And so I was really freaked out by that and it wasn't until years later that I realized he was the same guy who made these other weird films that I loved and I had to play catch-up in the video evolution.
Q: I remember the first time I ever asked somebody, 'Who is Dario Argento?' And now I feel so stupid for that. How could I not know who he was? Then again, I got to discover him in the first place, which many people do not.
Sean Keller: Yeah. I totally leaned on the older high school film nerd who worked at my local video store, and he was steering me towards all of his films. And so it was really cool.
Q: It must be a real dream come true, because I know Adam and Jace and when they wrote Mother and Tears, I got to read the script before it was shot. Then I watched the film was very interesting to see what Dario does from script to screen. What surprised you or challenged you, as far as what he did with your story?
Sean Keller: What Dario always adds to everything is just style. It was such a "pinch me" moment when he said he would do it. We [Jim Agnew] worked on the script a little bit with him, but it was a spec of ours and so we walked into an awesome film. And we were a little bit surprised about how most of the character bits are kind of nonexistent I was a little bit surprised because we wrote it and we thought it would be there but then we shouldn't be surprised.
We wrote Giallo as a homage to the history to the history of giallo cinema. We wrote it, like Sergio Martino, like all of these references that we had, and we wanted to make a real cool kitchen sink giallo, because we were sick of little girls with wet hair in the way that the direction in horror was going. A couple years back we didn't know what to do. And my partner said we should just do the 70s Italian cop flick. And I was like, "Really?" Jim said, "Yeah we need to do a giallo. And we'll call it yellow." We wrote the script and we sent it over to Dario, and it gets translated into Italian, and immediately he sends it back. And he's like, "I would love it let's do it. I even love the title we'll call it Giallo." I was like "Oh yeah, we were going to call it Yellow. But okay, if you want to call it Giallo…" We were just kind of setting ourselves up, to be yelled at by anyone who says that's not a real giallo.
Q: How did you and your partner meet originally, and how did you start writing scripts together?
Sean Keller: we both worked in the same bar. He was a DJ, I was a bartender.
Q: Okay, so alcohol was involved?
Sean Keller: Alcohol and girls and yeah it was sitting around at last call, kicking people out and bitching about Hollywood. I was an actor and had just started writing and had written a couple of bad Sci-Fi Channel movies. Not unlike our friends Adam and Jace. Jim had been producing and so I came at him from an acting point of view. He's got a producing point of view and so together. We worked together great, and he said I've got an idea and I want to do a movie. And he's like, "Will you help me with it?" And he told me a thumbnail sketch of it and I said, "I fucking love it. Let's do it." And we sat there and wrote it and that was L.A. Gothic, the one John Carpenter is attached to. [With Argento and Carpenter] those are the guys that made us horror movie fans. It's weird. It's super cool.
Q: Both are different personalities to say the least. Now how closely did you work with them or are you working with them. As far as script or are you just kind of like handed off? Did you get to go on set?
Sean Keller: With Dario, I did not get to go on set. I did not meet him until after the film was done. My writing partner Jim, though, was on set. He shot second unit and helped produce. He actually got to be the hands of a killer in an Argento film! I didn't get much of a chance to work with Dario unlike how we worked with John Carpenter, we spent a long time working with him, and he's the coolest guy I ever met.
Q: Drinking beer watching basketball?
Sean Keller: No, none of that actually it was actually everything everyone says we sat down and worked. Now granted for like an hour at a time, [there was] the chain in the cigarettes but it was great. He is totally cool.
Q: I have not done my homework on this, so give me a little fill in on L.A. Gothic.
Sean Keller: L.A. Gothic is definitely a love letter to the horror cinema. it is like Monster Mash… it's sort of like Creepshow meets Entourage. It's got vampires, and there are zombies. Everything that you would traditionally see in a gothic old style horror flick, but it's all in L.A. and most of them are celebrities.
Q: John Carpenter, definitely can direct comedy. And so can Dario Argento… but not intentionally.
Sean Keller: We had some comedic scenes written in, an actually there is a fair bit of comedy in Giallo. And we wrote it to be funny, and we were hoping it would work and really kind of nervous about the translation. And apparently people are laughing their asses off and now they are saying it's unintentional laughs… and I know those are pretty fucking intentional laughs! I mean, we wrote kind of a preposterous back story, because one of the great things about giallo cinema, is that they tend to be a bit ludicrous. And so we really wanted to be true to that instead of the story that was just kind of off-the-wall. And apparently when that part plays, people laugh. And a lot of detractors are saying, "oh it's unintentionally funny," and that such a crime. People are fucking laughing at our film. It makes me very happy!
Q: I know; anything that gets people enjoying a film on any level definitely good.
Sean Keller: The people who are laughing their asses off aren't thinking about work. They aren't thinking about the fact that they don't have their rent, or anything else. They are having a good time at the cinema, and that's the best compliment we can have.
Q: How did Adrien Brody became attached to Giallo?
Sean Keller: We had an initially gone to Elsa Pataky who was his girlfriend at the time to play one of the leads and so he had read the script we then were trying to back him in saying, "Hey you want to do it you want to do it?" and it took a little finagling but he was really into the idea of doing a film with Dario. Just because he got it. He was a fan of the films of the Suspiria and of Tenebrae he said he really liked the Opera, which was funny. I love Opera, but I don't know of too many people who like it. But so he got it right away and was ready to just go for it, which was really cool to have an actor of this quality and Argento flick. I think he did a pretty fucking sweet job. He is a really deranged cop and plays him really unhinged and weird, so it's fun.
Q: For the signature Dario Argento murders scenes, what would you say is your favorite in the film. And why?
Sean Keller: It's in the flashback the stuff that I said that was kind of preposterous. I don't want to blow it for everybody, but there is a kid killing a grown-up in a ridiculously violent sequence that I love. It was my favorite thing to write, and it was my favorite thing to see on screen and a fact that we got a kid who looks just like Brody to play a young version of him is really cool. I thought that was really awesome to find an Italian in casting. You never know what you're going to get, so this worked out really well for us.
Q: When is the film coming out?
Sean Keller: I have no clue.
Q: Really? I thought it was supposed to come out sometime this year.
Sean Keller: There is no distributor. There are several European distributors have picked it up. I know it has distribution in Spain and France, Germany. I believe England is set up as well and it is playing fright Fest here shortly. But as far as the domestic, I have no idea when that will happen.
Q: And so as the writer what is your feeling about that? Are you wanting to get it out, or is it like, "I'm on to my next thing"?
Sean Keller: I'm on to my next thing. I mean, honestly. I would love it if people saw it and loved it but if they don't, you know more people talk about having seen an Argento film then have seen them. And so it's not gonna bother me if it's not a big release. I mean, that is so completely out of my control. If I worried about that kind of stuff, I would not sleep well. I know a lot of people who do worry about that stuff. And they don't sleep well.
Q: And acting: Is that still something that you're interested in?
Sean Keller: Yeah, I act here and there. I was trying to get some in Giallo, I didn't get in that one. I was pushing John Carpenter into giving me a role in ward right now up in Washington. So will see, because we did a pass on that script. Antoine Fuqua just optioned one of our scripts and just hired us to write another one for him. So we're doing a couple of cop movies now. We're branching out of horror and doing some other fun stuff. We've got a gangster movie with him that it's casting right now.
Q: So when you write something that is maybe out of your comfort zone, not horror, do you actually go and look at gangster movies?
Sean Keller: Well, I just love genre films. I love them all, and I love cop flicks. I love gangster movies. I love Westerns. All these things, I don't really differentiate from one geek realm to the other. I love sci-fi, and so we are working on sci-fi project right now. That's a spec of ours, we just want to make the movies that we want to see. We will always do horror because horror, for one, is kind of easy. Just because we love it so much. It just sort of comes out, we start writing something serious and dramatic and all of a sudden it turns bloody and awful, really fast, usually. But we really like stretching and trying something new stuff like this gangster thing. We wrote for ourselves to possibly produce and direct and it was our first real foray into a drama. It's a crime drama. The Tokarev. It’s name of the Russian side arm that integral to the plot. But it's one of those things where we didn't know what we were doing. And just did it anyway. And apparently everyone really liked it. Our phones are still ringing about that script.
Q: So how do you guys work, how do you come up with the idea, is it that somebody comes up with the idea and then another person writes it?
Sean Keller: Jim is such an idea guy. He is great with that. He is a freaking genius, and so he is the one with the producer’s mind. And I am the actor and I write characters. But we worked together at the same time in the same room. He comes over every day, and we worked from 10 a.m. until 2, when I have to go pick up my kids from school. We are not quite nine to fivers, but we are Monday through Friday five days a week, grinding it out four or five hours a day, every day. And we write, really Fucking fast. We crank out scripts in two weeks yeah it's like really fast. I'm not kidding. We've got another one called Teratoma that Kitamura is attached to and director right now it's a piece of body horror. That's really, really gross, and cringey.
Q: I liked Midnight Meat Train. I was one of the few…
Sean Keller: I loved it. I thought it was really fun. I don't know why that film got such a bad rap. I acted in another film that shot in the same train, right afterward. And I talked to them about that… I said "Dude, did you get the blood out? No you didn't get the fucking blood out of the train, okay?" [laughs] I was playing some homeless dude in this silly indie comedy called Miss Nobody and there are blood stains all over the inside of the train. Anyway, I've heard Kitamura's great. I can't wait to meet him. I'm hoping that we get that film set up soon.
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