"If there really were a zombie attack, you wouldn't be a general in the army or a scientist. You wouldn't be the person who's in a position to figure out what caused this. You'd be in the suburbs. You'd be contending with just what was in front of you."
This sobering observation comes not from an apocalyptic doomsayer, but from first-time director Jeff Baena on his new black comedy Life After Beth. "Personally, I grew up in Miami, and we had a lot of hurricanes. When you're in a hurricane, you're not seeing the eye of the storm, and you're not a meteorologist. You're just in your house with your family with the shutters up. That, to me, is the more realistic version of how it would go down. You wouldn't know what caused the zombie outbreak. You wouldn't know how to stop it."
Instead, the primary witness to the unwanted resurrections is young Zach Orfman (Dane DeHaan, The Amazing Spider-Man 2), who's grieving the loss of his girlfriend, Beth (Aubrey Plaza). No one, except for her parents (John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon), seems to understand Zach's sorrow or his elation when he discovers that she has risen from the grave and is hiding in her mom and dad's house.
Predictably, the joy comes to a quick end. It's not because of her eerie fondness for smooth jazz. True to his word, Baena holds off on explaining what Beth was like before her reappearance.
"Personally, I'm not a big fan of exposition in films. I don't like it when people explain things. I like the idea that there is an explanation, but you're only privy to what you see before you," he says.
The New Ghoulfriend
Baena had some challenges in establishing that Beth's return to the living isn't a positive development.
For one thing, Plaza wears little gory make up and isn't that tall. She also remains the same petite height throughout the film. When asked how he made her terrifying, Baena acknowledged Plaza's contribution and added, "She's actually only 5 feet 4 and a half, I think. It's [Beth's] unpredictable nature and the idea that someone who is so close to you and so important to you can be so devastating both emotionally and physically. Such a threat makes her seem all the more terrifying, as opposed to being some unknown quantity or force."
At the same time, DeHaan, who has appeared in Devil's Knot and played Spider-Man antagonist The Green Goblin and murder suspect Lucien Carr in Kill Your Darlings, plays a sympathetic character for a change.
"He's played a lot of brooding characters, so I think I wanted to sort of play off of that at the beginning, when he is brooding and somber.
"But I know Dane personally and what he's capable of. He's not a brooding person. He's a fun, sweet guy."
The Dark Side of the Sun
Throughout the conversation, the writer-director continually brings up his Miami roots and how his youth in the city is evident in the film, which was shot in Los Angeles.
"Definitely in the urban, upper-middle class Jewish affectations I put on the characters. I definitely think [Miami] is an absurd place. There's a mix of many cultures, and it's really an insane absurd city," he says. "It's beautiful, and the people are beautiful. There's so much about the surface that's beautiful, but the undertones are sort of dark and murderous and sketchy and shady. The deeper you delve into that city, the more unsavory it gets despite its bright, shiny exterior."
In addition to directing the film, Baena wrote Life After Beth and also collaborated with David O. Russell (American Hustle) on the script for I Heart Huckabees. When asked what it was like to move from Russell's idiosyncratic vision to his new movie, he said, "It was actually refreshing. That movie was really heady. This one was just fun and light. There's definitely some philosophical undertones. I was just trying to have fun with it. I think I wrote them both at the same time. They're concurrent projects. It just took me 10 years to make it."
He also adds that juggling comedy and horror isn't that difficult.
"I don't think of this movie as a super scary movie. I think of it as verging on the absurd. The scares that do come are more on an emotional level than in a typical jump scare, as you see in a horror film. I tried to focus more on what the characters are feeling and what would seem funny, different and unique and what would keep you on your toes. Whether that satisfies the hunger for a full-fledged zombie film, I'm not sure."
MovieStyle on 09/05/2014