Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein had a great script, a miniscule $2,000 budget, and a mission.
“We decided to write a script that could be made even if it was at Adam’s house, with Adam’s son. ... We set forth with the idea that if things came our way, great. But if not, we could still make the movie,” says Lipovsky.
The result is Freaks, a science-fiction thriller starring Emile Hirsch, Bruce Dern, and young newcomer Lexy Kolker. A father (Hirsch) has spent seven years raising his daughter Chloe (Kolker) to fear the world outside, a world where people are not what they seem. When she escapes – via a very sinister-looking ice cream truck – a new world with new rules awaits.
It was almost a very different type of movie.
Lipovsky is a Vancouverite and past winner of the local Crazy8s short-film competition. He and Adam, a Harvard and USC directors’ program alum, met on the set of Steven Spielberg’s reality competition show On The Lot (Lipovsky was the only Canadian chosen out of 18,000 applicants). A friendship and professional collaboration grew, a partnership that most recently resulted in Mech X-4 and a live-action Kim Possible for Disney channel.
But they struggled to get their own projects made. “It was always about needing more money that you don’t have, actors that you don’t have,” says Lipovsky. “So we decided to do it ourselves.”
Eventually they got funding, they got a casting director, and Oscar-nominated actor Bruce Dern came on board in a role that was originally going to be played by Lipovsky. Was it tough for Lipovsky to give up his role to an Oscar-nominated actor? “No,” Adam interjects, laughing, “We are not good actors!”
They didn’t have a lot of money, but what they did have in their 15 years in the industry was “favours, a lot of relationships and goodwill,” according to Stein. “We had people that enjoyed working with us in the past and so we said ‘Guys, we really need your help.’”
The pair had filmed in Vancouver previously but shooting their first independent feature in the city was both exhilarating and crucial, according to Lipovsky. “We knew the secrets of the city but we also had a lot of people here to support us.” People volunteered, like the crew who spent days painting Dern’s character’s ice cream truck. “For such a busy town, there aren’t that many B.C. indies that get made every year,” he notes. “We’re very proud to have done that.”
So why the crazy ice cream truck with the catchy/creepy jingle? “I live in Vancouver but for a while I lived in L.A., and they’ve got these ice cream trucks that look like they’re out of ‘Mad Max’, with music boxes that are broken,” says Lipovsky. “The composer did a great job,” agrees Stein. “He really created this musical feel that had an amazing combination of innocence and dread ... that’s kind of what we were trying to achieve with the whole film.”
The inability to keep one’s child safe is every parent’s nightmare. Being a dad himself guided Stein’s treatment of the initial script. “That fear inspired Emile’s character, obviously. ... Plus when I was writing the script I was totally sleep deprived.” The sleep deprivation, the way the father makes mistakes as he parents his daughter solo: “we wanted to show parenthood in its beautiful parts and its ugly parts, you don’t always see that.”
Freaks is largely science fiction, with superhero-movie elements and some horror thrown in for good measure. But ultimately the film is about family: a father trying to raise his daughter in isolation, another father trying to save his child, and a girl desperately searching for a mother. “That was our intention,” says Lipovsky. “We decided that if it was a small-budget movie it needed to be about the characters. We also knew that if we wanted to get famous people we needed characters that were really juicy … so that actors would want to do the role for reasons other than money.”
Much of the success of the film lies with young Lexy, who has to be both vulnerable and the master of the adults around her. “It was ambitious to have a seven-year-old at the centre of a film, in almost every scene, telling adults what to do – especially Bruce Dern – but she really steals the show,” says Lipovsky. The directors started out as young actors themselves, Lipovsky in TV shows like Goosebumps and Adam in theatre, before going on to direct kids’ programming. “We had a lot of experience with kid actors and we knew there was a lot more depth there than they’re usually given,” says Lipovsky. He credits Lexy’s talent as well as the relaxed, improvisational approach on set with her performance.
There are definite political elements to the film. The pair wrote the movie during the 2016 election campaign, just as “a new wave of xenophobia was brewing.” Illegals being rounded up, children separated from their parents and put into camps: “We were writing science fiction but it became very real very quickly,” says Lipovsky. It’s not unlike Canada’s residential schools history or Jews during the Second World War, Adam adds. “I grew up in a Jewish school hearing stories about World War Two, and recognizing that this pattern that has repeated many times is important.”
Freaks was selected as one of Canada’s Top 10 films at the Toronto International Film Festival. Saying too much about its plot would be giving too much away: but it’s a story that begs for a sequel. “Well, if you want to know what happens next, go see it this weekend,” says Stein. “We have lots of ideas for what happens next but it will only happen if people come to the theatre.”
