MATT GREEN does it all. Already with years of film production experience to his credit, Matt has wended his way through a multiplicity of disciplines vital to the art of filmmaking – special effects make-up, visual effects, production design, propmaker, camera operator, actor, writer, producer, editor, and director – giving him more than a solid footing and understanding of the storytelling craft; not to mention surviving every possible iteration of good and bad with the filmmaking world where “I’ve had one where the producer completely screwed me out of everything, and I’ve had one where it was the best experience of my life, and I had one where I spent no money and made the best movie. It’s just weird, weird how this business works in a strange undulating way. It’s always this creature that’s never the same thing twice.” With several short and nine feature films already to his directorial credit, not to mention his stint as a teacher at the Tom Savini Special Make-Up Effects Program, as well as being a familiar panelist at the famed Dragon Con convention, Matt now delivers perhaps his most ambitious project to date, his very first horror anthology EVIL LITTLE THINGS. From beginning to end, EVIL LITTLE THINGS is well done and well-executed. It’s engaging. There’s no gratuitous gore, no gratuitous blood. Everything is well thought out and visually postured and crafted with noticeable attention to detail.
Written by Yasmin Bakhtiari and Nancy Knight, with Green wearing both the directing and editing hats, EVIL LITTLE THINGS takes us into a vintage toy shop with Jason, a young boy who’s looking for a toy as mom’s way to pacify him after some unsettling encounters at home with his stepfather. Using expository transitions between each of the three “stories” framed with Jason being regaled with tales of each toy he looks at by the creepy-vibed toymaker, we are transported in time and space into the “wickedness” that comes thanks to an evil leprechaun named Patrick O’Malley tormenting a family, an overly possessive porcelain doll named Patty, and a clown named Giggles who apparently just needs a friend. We also are treated to a look into our young protagonist’s life and the dysfunction he endures at the hands of an abusive stepfather (played by none other than Zach Galligan of Gremlins fame).
Thanks to cinematographer and co-editor Roman Weaver, each story has a distinctive look and tone and would work well if each was a standalone episode, yet there is a cohesiveness that makes each feel connected almost like siblings in a family; individual but not separate. Some nice period flashback sequences unfold in black and white while Weaver doesn’t hesitate to use dutching, ECU, and slo-motion tools in the visual toolbox to further the story. Music and sound are creatively interwoven to create a full-bodied tonal bandwidth that complements Weaver’s visuals. Like Green and Weaver, Angelo Panetta also does double duty, here as both composer and sound designer/re-recording mixer. Particularly standout within Panetta’s atmospheric work is what we hear in “Blood for Gold” with our evil little leprechaun, with the incorporation of the beautiful lilt of traditional Irish music serving as a contrast to the unfolding terrorization by the wee little man wanting his gold.
Boasting a cast that includes an unsettling performance by the ever-likeable Zach Galligan as the “evil stepfather”, Geoff McKnight delivering an indelibly creepy toymaker, a breakout performance by Mason Wells as Jason, Courtney Lakin as the fire-scarred Abby who is as obsessed with her doll Patty as Patty is with Abby, Hannah Fierman as Jess who has moved back into her family’s old home in Georgia which was founded by the Irish, and L.A. Winters as Jason’s mom, EVIL LITTLE THINGS never goes overboard into traditional horror gore but rather propels us with psychological terror punctuated with keenly structured visuals and some eye-popping rich visual effects, the latter most notably in the Patty doll segment entitled “Be Careful What You Wish For.”
I had a chance to speak with MATT GREEN in this exclusive conversation about bringing EVIL LITTLE THINGS to life for “the big screen”. Going deep into not only this film and his filmmaking process but the industry in general, Matt talks about the visuals, the origin of the story and anthology structure, the casting, music, and going beyond this film into the industry and how relationships and connections can you serve you well in the indie fiml worldIn addition to his visual command of storytelling, Matt is engaging and enthusiastic, passionate about every aspect of his craft, calling on his own creativity and ingenuity to “make it work”. . .
The one highlight that people at least have to look forward to during this pandemic lockdown, is all of the films popping out on digital and streaming, of which EVIL LITTLE THINGS is one. I am enamored with this film. Long a fan of the anthology format, what I most appreciate here, Matt, is how you make each one of your three stories, the leprechaun tale, the Patty doll obsession, and then Giggles the Clown, very distinct in look and tone. You use music, particularly in the leprechaun segments, so incredibly. It’s beautifully done. Then you’ve got your black and white footage interspersed and you bring in slow motion. Very distinctive. Very cohesive. I’m curious as to how this story came to you.
Nancy[Knight] and I have known each other for about 20 years off and on because she has been speaking or running panels at Dragon Con which, as you know, is the second-largest convention in the country. I was lucky enough when I was 12 to have wandered into a comic store that, it turned out, the guy who owned the comic store had just opened the day before. He started Dragon Con several years later and I’ve now known him over the overs. So at the first Dragon Con, I got to go as the makeup guest, even though only about 400 people showed up. It was a tiny little convention. Makeup and special effects have always been my main side thing. So we got to know each other over the years through that, and then, I guess it was three or four years ago, Nancy came to me and said, “Hey, I’ve got this friend who writes books,” because she and Nancy write a lot, “And she wants to write and turn them into a movie somehow.” I’ve actually heard that a lot where people come to you a lot with, “Hey, I want to make a movie,” and then they never want to make the movie. So I met her and it was kind of a cursory, “Hey, let’s have lunch.” We never did [have lunch], but then the next year came around and she came up again, and she said, “This time let’s, right now, set a date and have lunch.” So we went and had lunch in October of whatever, four years ago, and the first thing I told her was, “Look, be prepared to lose your money because as the guy who she wants to spearhead this, I don’t want someone to lose their home or something over making a movie.” So my first thing is always, “Hey, here’s the worse possible scenario.” But long story short, we had the meeting and she seemed like she was for real. We started writing and it took the next six months.
I was the one who suggested the anthology, because her short stories, and the second in the film, the one with the Patty doll the girl had wished for, she wanted to turn that into a feature. I read them both and said, “Look, there’s not enough story here. We could flesh it out, but it might be boring because you’re fleshing out something that doesn’t have enough meat to it. So let’s do an anthology.” I came up with the wraparound idea with the abusive father; that was actually from an idea that a friend of mine had for a one-minute short film, and I called him and said, “Hey, can I steal that from you? We’re never going to make [our film].” So I turned that into that part, and then Nancy had the idea of the toy store, and then we just wrote the scripts and we spent six months kind of batting them back and forth and whittling a lot of it down. The whole bit at the end of the leprechaun story with the fireplace and the big fight, I wrote all of that in one sitting one day because we didn’t know what to do to wrap that. I tend to write big and then think later, “I’m going to trim it down,” and then when I end up shooting, I go, “How am I going to do this?”, and I end up making it big. So one of my strengths as a special effects coordinator in the real world, in the film industry, is that I have a lot of access to people and things that a lot of low budget filmmakers don’t have access to. So I can call up my friends who have pyro licenses and guys with equipment and so forth. For instance, in the leprechaun story it’s raining the whole time outside. So I call up my friends and we built us some rain rigs and put them outside the windows. You’d never do that on a low budget movie because it would take too much time an effort. In short, we wrote it out and, this actually I think a mistake on my part, I said, “Let’s shoot this in three sections and that’ll give it a chance to regroup for each one.” So we did the wraparound, and then we did the one story, and then we did the other story. I think that was kind of a mistake because you lose your momentum.
Each one of these segments, these specific stories, the leprechaun, Patty, and Giggles, is very visually distinctive. Color plays a big part. Each one of these has a different look. Interestingly, I love how you and your DP Roman [Weaver] get us right in there with the POV of the human and then the evil thing, so that we go back and forth and we really get to feel and see from Patty’s perspective, from the leprechaun’s perspective, but also from the human perspective. So I’m curious how the two of you developed your design and the entire visual tonal bandwidth?
First of all, I couldn’t afford a production designer. I had my prop master and my wardrobe, and so when we get together I do tend to say things like, “Hey, let’s pick our color palette for this one and try not to stray from it.” But in a super low budget, you can’t. When we rented the hotel room for the character Abby’s hotel room, I can’t go in and say, “We’re going to change the carpet color.” But I try to stay away from certain things if I want to add certain things. I tried to make the leprechaun look darker in visual tone and keep the Patty episode a lot lighter because I knew when I had the dress on her, the crazy convention dress and the bra and wig, I said, “This thing’s going to pop. It’s really going to jump out at us, so let’s try to make the whole episode more of that,” until we get into the ending, where we’re in the hotel and it’s really evil and dark, so I took that tone. I tried to have almost no light in some of these shots. It’s also really hard at 3:00 in the morning to not make noise in a hallway at a hotel when you’re shooting! But, Roman and I and the other creatives, we got together and just said, “Hey, how do we do this? How do we get to change our visual style in each one?” And it’s not really that hard to do if you think about it. I think a lot of people who do anthologies actually do them the same way I did, which is, because they’re low budget, you do them at different points [in time]. So you’re already talking about a different headspace when you come back from shooting. I had a different producer on one segment than I had on the other two because she wasn’t available. That helped a lot as far as just having somebody to know different people and so forth. Part of it is conscious and part of it was just trying to get it done. The other problem is that you’re making a movie that essentially you’re going to put in a 21 day total to shoot, and that’s not a lot of time at all. I’d kill for one of these movies where somebody gives me eight weeks to shoot something, because just every day, you’re fighting the clock. I shoot for the edit. I don’t shoot a lot of extra stuff. So I’m using what I want. It also helped that I knew that Roman and I were going to edit because then I know that he knows what I’m thinking. When we go to the edit, I’ll let him do the first pass so I’m not too close to it. Part of it is instinct from doing so many movies. Am I talented? I hope so. I try to let it speak to me, if that makes sense.
It makes perfect sense. I so appreciate what you did with the leprechaun “Blood for Gold” segment on multiple fonts. Number one, you may not have a production designer, but the way you constructed that living room for the ultimate encounter is perfect; she’s desperately trying to find the leprechaun and catch him, baiting him with the gold coin, diving, looking behind the sheet-covered furniture, boxes, things like that. Really nicely done and you kept the camera in tight, so we really get a sense of somebody just moved into a house, it’s cluttered, and then a small leprechaun can hide anywhere he wants. The whole ambient tone of the room works. And the camera moves quickly and appropriately for the shorter eyeline of a leprechaun. That fireplace is gorgeous. The kitchen is fabulous. So you feel that sense of history which goes back to the legend of the Irish and the Stone Mountain area where this story takes place. But then we have the flashback sequence and you do true black and white. You’re not doing sepia-toned, you’re doing true black and white, and that starkness is so spectacular.
It helped that the location was actually a bed and breakfast that Nancy knew the owners of and it was very old. I think that thing’s one of the oldest buildings in Stone Mountain. So it helped that we had all this old furniture and we didn’t bring in much of our own. We just kind of grabbed stuff from other rooms and pulled things together until we got this. I wanted a cluttered look and we got the cluttered look. Because it was supposed to be Irish I actually tried doing it with a green tone and it didn’t work. I did try sepia once. But sepia, to me, always feels like the old west. It was the wrong timeframe. So yeah, we just went with black and white and that was it.
It really pops. And then you bring in some slo-motion. You also picked the perfect time of year to shoot, because obviously it was colder, so you’ve got more barren trees in the area where you’re shooting, so it looked really good. But then you complement that and pump up the visuals and the tone with beautiful music. I think having Angelo [Panetta] doing music and sound on the film really worked to your advantage, especially in that flashback sequence, because it’s very romanticized. It feels more upbeat. You get a little Irish lilt in the music, but then you also get the exaggerated sound of crunching leaves as the girls are walking and running through the woods which melds with the music. Just wonderful.
One of the things that he did was my favorite thing in the score is that little music box on the back of the leprechaun when she’s trying to get in front of it. Angelo is so talented. I met him at Dragon Con. We were on a panel. We stayed friends and then when he saw the film, we screened it at Dragon Con, he came up to us afterward. Because I had a temp music track on there, he said, “I want to score this movie.” And we said, “We can’t afford you.” And he said, “Well, what’s your budget for sound design?” I said, “We can’t afford you.” So he looked at me and goes, “I’ll do both of them and I’ll give you a price on both,” and he did. Now I’ll probably never get another composer because we have a great relationship. He actually sat here with me while I was doing the temp score because he came to the house before the screening that day and I was still throwing the temp score, and he said to me, “You’ve got a really astute view of how you view music.” For me, part of it is, I don’t understand music to save my life, but I’ve been listening to scores since I was 10 years old. It’s all I listen to. And it evokes a lot of emotion in me as far as music. So we were really able to boil down what we both wanted because we both speak that language, even though I couldn’t tell you a thing about a note of music, I understand the language of film music really well. I think that’s the most important part of the film, as far as when you’re making a film. If you move beyond acting and the obvious stuff, when you’re in post, if you can’t get your music to deliver the right tone, you don’t have a film.
Music is very, very important to films. That’s been one of my big passions. I always appreciate the music, the score. But I really love that Angelo did your sound design, your mixing, and your music, because I really think that gave him, in this particular instance, a great sensibility of where to pump up, pull back, and it worked really, really well, but most notably, in the leprechaun story.
To me, this is the thing that a lot of people mess up when they’re making movies as far as music is concerned, it’s not knowing where to put music. I’ve seen big movies that put music where they don’t need it, in places where you need to let the audience make their mind up on how to feel because that’s what music does. It tells you how to feel, but if you always tell me how to feel, I’m never feeling on my own. And to me, that’s really important to pull back in some areas.
There’s nothing worse in a film when the music is leading you, telling you how to feel, especially when it’s patented trope music. That drives me absolutely bonkers. Very appropriately with EVIL LITTLE THINGS, when Angelo throws in tiny little Irish lilt motifs that move into strings, and then go into almost a song of a siren or the wailing of a banshee. It really captured the Irish folklore within the story. Beautifully, beautifully done, and I just so appreciate that, Matt; I so appreciate that within the entire film, but that segment in particular. Now, I’ve got to ask you, because of your creature makeup effects work, how much of the visual effects were practical? Did you go into CGI?
There’s no CGI. There are some effects, like composing a fire, in a couple of shots, but there’s no CGI in the film. I removed some wires and things like that, but nothing that would be considered computer graphics. In fact, my favorite shot in the film, from an effect’s standpoint, is when the leprechaun is falling down the chimney towards the camera. That was two days of filming in my driveway. I had a friend come over and we built this chimney. We hung it from my upper porch and my neighbors all stood outside and watched every evening as we dropped a fiery doll down there at our house. No one said, “Hey, you could start a fire like that.” But I’m known for doing stuff like that. One time, I blew something up in my yard at 3:00 in the morning. This was years ago and my neighbor came over and he goes, “Oh, it’s just you,” and he walked back inside.
Oh my God! Now, the Patty doll is just beyond creepy. The face is beyond creepy, the cracks, the way it chips away, and then, of course, the porcelain veneer that you end up putting on our live-action actor to make her into a doll. Did you do all of that process yourself?
No. When you’re directing, anything else is one job too many, believe me. So I used Roy Wooley as the makeup effects and creature guy. He’s really good. I’ve known him for a long time, and once again, somebody who came to me and said, “Hey, can I do your effects?” And I said, “I can’t afford you.” And he goes, “I don’t care. Let’s do it anyway.” I’ve been doing films since I was 10 years old and doing them professionally since I was 18, so it’s nice to have all these relationships. But yeah, Roy is amazing. He came out and he built the leprechaun, he built the Patty dolls. We had four heads to the Patty doll.
I see the differentials because in some scenes, there aren’t as many cracks and then we have the really horrid deep dark tone with the blazing red eyes and just brown and disgusting.
Then you’ve got the one with the little face missing with the little creature underneath sort of moving. And the computer screen, that was just to give it a little something extra, and nobody ever questions why the face is put back later, but that’s movies for you.
Then you’ve got Giggles the clown. You’ve got a basic clown to start with which we really only see in profile, something I thought was interesting. We don’t see a real full frontal of the clown until that moment under the bed with the fangs, the teeth, and blood dripping out.
Well, that’s the only creature I did for the film and the reason was, Roy had already moved on to something else and that was an after shoot later. There’s just the shot of the clown with the big teeth and all that stuff. We did it on the floor in my office. I put some black paper on my desk edge and Roman came up with his camera. We just shot that shot five or six times until we got the right push into the mouth.
It looks fabulous. How challenging was your casting for this? And how fun was it for you to have Zach Galligan be a wraparound here?
That came from me being on panel at a little convention here. Zach was sitting beside me, and I asked him. I found out that he had moved to Peachtree City here because everybody’s moving to Atlanta to work. My wife owned a restaurant at the time, and I said to him, “Hey, if you ever come back, can I buy you some soup dumplings? And let’s have a talk.” He came over and we had an hour and just talked about movies and Hollywood. I kept his number and when this came up, I gave him a call and he came out. His one day of shooting was a lot of fun. He’s a great guy. We had a ball. We couldn’t afford much time with him and he’s not a main character, but just having anybody in here of previous genre noteworthiness does help when they go, “Who’s in it?”. Casting Zach was just a little attempt to have somebody in there to kind of push us forward a little bit. I think it helps.
I think it does, and I think this is an unexpected role for him. He’s always a nice guy, the guy next door, the guy who’s the victim. A really nice, nice turn by Zach.
Oh, he loved this. When he read it, he called me. He goes, “I get to play the bad guy! I never get to play the bad guy!”
I’ve got to ask where you found Geoff McKnight, the doll maker, toy store guy?
Geoff has been around me for, gosh what, 10, 12 years. Geoff’s amazing. I did a film called, A Zombie Invasion, which is a $6,000.00 Omni feature film, available on VOD right now. It’s a cheesy little movie because we had no money, but me and some friends just said, “Let’s just make a zombie movie,” and it worked. It’s great acting. Geoff came in and I saw him and said, “You’ve got to play this crazy guy. I’ve got this film.” He did and we hit it off and we’ve done a lot of short films together. He’s kind of in my circle of actors I use a lot. Geoff’s just got this creepy vibe when he wants to turn it on that just comes off beautifully. He wanted to take it far creepier than we did and I pulled him back a little because I didn’t want this guy to be unlikeable.
He’s just kind of creepy weird, and the fact that it looked like he hadn’t washed his hair in a year, really helped. Perfect are the intonations of his voice and his vocal cadence. A real standout and that set an interesting tone before we even get into the stories. Another structural aspect is that I love how each one of the stories starts off light and nice, and then things get really weird.
I’ve got to call out Mason Wells, the little boy who plays Jason. Six years old and he can act like that! I don’t know where that comes from. He’s been acting for about a year. His family’s Russian and he was born here. He blew my mind. In the scene where he screams out, “Mom!!!” before, you can see the gears turning in his head like, “What do I do? What just happened? What do I do?” You can’t get a six-year-old to do that. That’s a natural talent he has. His mother in the scene is L.A. Winters, Lisa Winters. She is one of the original Doublemint Twins.
Mason is standout. His innocence and his inquisitiveness. As he’s talking to Geoff’s character in the store, he is just so sweet. And when he’s talking about Giggles and that Giggles needs a friend. Just perfect. Of course, as you’re watching this, you’re thinking, “Kid, it’s a clown. It’s a clown. Clowns do not end well.” Besides no money, what was the most challenging aspect of bringing EVIL LITTLE THINGS to life?
Really just the day to day, and it does come down to money really. But it’s not having enough people to cover all the bases, so I have to be a producer and director at the same time, which is not as easy when you’re doing a small film. I’m just having to make sure that every day, something is there. For instance, at least twice a day, I get pulled aside, with someone saying, “Hey, we don’t have this thing that we needed,” or I ask for something that I thought we had and we don’t have it and somebody’s got to figure that out, and usually it means me powwowing before they can go away and make it happen. There were things that we didn’t have and that’s when I get creative. That’s the best thing about low budget filmmaking. It forces you to go, “Hey, I don’t have what I need. How do I get what I want?” I work on a show right now. I work on MacGyver. I’m in the special effects crew on MacGyver, and we have, I don’t say an unlimited budget, but for all intents and purposes, we do. If we need something, we get it, and it’s nice. But I’m never overly creative with that, because I just go, “I’m going to get it with this.” It’s just that thing where you go, “I don’t have this.” With EVIL LITTLE THINGS, my puppeteer for the leprechaun is someone I’ve known for 20 years and he used to work for Rick Baker out in L.A. I said, “Hey, I need a puppeteer who knows what they’re doing. Come over and do this for me.” And he gets there and we don’t have anything to move him across the floor. We tried putting him on a towel and slide him across the floor and I said, “We need wheels.” So we sent somebody to the hardware store, to the local Auto Zone, and bought a some wheels and a cart. That was quick think of “how do you fix that”. And it worked out. He was able to run around like crazy. So just little things like that, where you’re just solving problems, that’s the hardest aspect. We had no ego problems on this show. There were no bitchy actors or anything like that.
How long was your editing process on this one?
I think we edited for about two months. We finished the film and we just started cutting when I got a job that was going to take me to the Dominican Republic for three weeks. So I let Roman edit while I was gone; just do a whole cut of the whole movie straight through. That way, I could come back and not have my fingerprints on it first, which was good. And then we just went through and slowly started whittling and whittling until we got through. So yeah, probably two months. And that’s considering also that we had a screening at Dragon Con. I don’t care what filmmaker you are, until you see it with an audience, you don’t sit there and go, “Oh, that’s too long,” or, “That’s too short.” There are little things that make you realize that you can feel their reactions. We screened at Dragon Con and I was like, “Oh, I’m cutting 10 minutes out of this,” and I did because there was a scene that I realized, watching it with them, that I was giving a bunch of information that I’d already given to everybody. So this entire scene went away. It’s always funny when you do that and you think to yourself, “I could have saved myself a half-day of shooting.” B ut really, you can’t know that. After we had our cast and crew screening, I realized there was about a five-minute section that was just boring. Iwould ask everybody afterward, “What did you think? Was there anything you didn’t like?” And everybody would say, “Yeah, you kind of got a little slow right about here.” Nobody could put their finger on what it was, but you can tell when your audience just knows about what it is, and I knew what it was. So I went and cut out like three and a half minutes. For lack of a better term, I always call it “editorial masturbation”, where it feels good to the filmmaker, “Oh, that’s moody,” or, “Oh, that’s cool,” but then you realize later that the audience doesn’t care, and the quickest point from point A to point B in a scene is all that matters. I try to keep each scene in any film between two and a half and three and a half minutes. You should never have anything longer. Shorter is okay if you can convey what you want. I try to keep everything about that.
The film moves along at a clip. You never get bored. Nothing ever feels tedious, and you have things perfectly timed for when something happens.
Thank you. Another nice little thing that I’ve learned, and a lot of people don’t say this, but the very last thing you leave your audience with should stun them. I’ve walked out of movies where the movie wasn’t that good, but the last thing made me talk about it. Whereas, if you walk out of a really great movie, but the last five minutes were just like the epilogue and things were just slow and they just wrapped the story up, it doesn’t make you go, “Wow.” So I always try to end on something where it’s like, “Boom.” When I told the story of the father, I said, “If we end on this, we end on a note where the audience will be like, “Oh, that was cool.” And I think we get a nice laugh out of Jason yelling, “Mom.”
A cut to black is just a perfect final shot and moment of the film. So I have to ask you, given the situation that we’re in with this Covid situation, do you have anything in the pipeline? Or are you kind of on hold in advance to see what happens?
My next film, at the moment, it’s called The Basement, which is going to change because somebody burned that title last year. I don’t like to have the same title as something else. But it’s really this sexually charged dark thriller that a buddy of mine wrote. That was to be my next film. I’ve got someone of actual name value attached at the moment. We were supposed to shoot that next month. MacGyver was winding down. I was just getting ready to start pulling the trigger on things and this happened. So it’s probably going to get pushed back until later in the year, but the beauty of it is, because there’s this big hole left where we’re all not working, that when this is over, the film industry is going to need content really bad and I think everybody’s going to get to work a lot. They’re all going to be scrambling. So I think filmmakers are going to be lucky because financiers are going to go, “I don’t care what it costs. Get it done.”
by debbie elias, exclusive interview 04/15/2020
EVIL LITTLE THINGS is available on DVD and Digital
