Was there a scene in Cold in July you struggled with that you’re particularly proud of?
Jim Mickle: I’d say the whole thing! [laughs] One scene in particular, where Don has a speech about how if you have a bad dog, you chain it up or put it down. That was something that Sam wrote his dialogue for after we did a million passes at. It was a scene we could never really nail on the page, so we said, let’s let an actor come in here and tell us, is it too much for him, too little for him, and right away Sam said, “there’s another way might want to do it, and if you don’t mind, I’ll try to play around with dialogue a little bit.”
So, he took the script that night and came in the next day, with this one page sort of shift for that, where he didn’t change very much of the dialogue and he wrote really the same scene with small differences, and I just love the way it comes off in the movie. It was one of those big turning points, where if the scene didn’t work, the movie didn’t work. So, that one in particular. In that scene, Michael has these really great moments that he brought in on the set, like offering to do it in his boxers, and Don has some really great ad-libs. That to me is an example of something that, in the book, was really different and we had to keep playing with and playing with to find it, and we didn’t even really find it until the night before, when Sam sort of saved it. And we didn’t really know where it was going to go until on set, where all those moments really came together. But that’s the fun of making movies.
With the synthesized score, the lighting and the music choices (particularly White Lion in the credits), it seems clear that you were influenced by some ‘80s filmmakers, especially John Carpenter. So, I have to ask, what is your favorite John Carpenter movie?
Jim Mickle: [laughs] The Thing! It’s my favorite movie of all time, that’s something I grew up on, and that has never really aged for me. I loved that movie, and kind of all of them. I love that while I was editing – you know you spend all day doing it – and I came home at night, I have these really great Blu-Rays of ’80s movies. I stocked up on a whole ton of them, and just decided to treat myself one weekday, and I got the Blu-ray transfer of The Fog, and They Live and Prince of Darkness. And it was sort of that which created this whole experience of me discovering those movies and those feelings, which got me to push further into those kind of scores. And the movie really came on and took me back to being 14 years old and finding this movie finally available at my VHS videostore that was there when I was growing up, and bringing it home, and popping it in and seeing it for the first time. And I kind of wanted this movie to feel like it could have been in that collection of movies.
What’s next for you?
Jim Mickle: You know, there’s a couple of different things I’m looking at. There’s a Hitchcockian thriller, another ’80s throwback action-horror, there’s a sort of science fiction family drama. And then all those things are kind of swirling, and the thing we’re working on most actively at the moment is actually a TV show, much in the vein of Cold in July. We just started work on that yesterday. And that’s really exciting because, with TV, it’s this whole new world to explore.
Is this Hap and Leonard?
Jim Mickle: It is, yes, though I have to say it off the record until they announce it, which I believe is next week. But if this gets published after that then yes, feel free, it is, but there were a lot of details about this leaked early on which almost blew the entire deal up before it was able to happen.
Final question. It’s safe to say that, with Mulberry Street, Stake Land and We Are What We Are under your belt, Cold In July is a pretty significant change of pace. What challenges did you find in moving out of horror into a more noirish thriller genre?
Jim Mickle: Good question… I was thrown at first by creating a real world, an everyday world, because the idea is that we’re throwing an everyday guy into a film noir plot, and watching him struggle to keep up and do what he thinks he’s supposed to do. In the first few weeks, I struggled with that, because there had always been such a mood and a tension, sort of a sense of dread and darkness, and a fantastical element to everything that we’ve done.
You watch We Are What We Are, and you’ve got cannibalism, but there’s really this creepy, otherworldly world with a fantasy seal. And now that I think of it, there were moments early on [in Cold in July] where I’m like, “Wow, we’re making a movie,” because we’re shooting at a restaurant. [laughs] All those things were tough at first, and I was like, “No, we actually need to have this, so that his journey has a place to grow.” That was an experience I wasn’t quite used to. But I’m glad that we stuck with it to the end, and it was what it was.
That’s all the time we had, but we’d like to thank Jim Mickle for sitting down with us to conduct this interview. Be sure to check out Cold in July, which will receive a limited stateside release on May 23rd!
