Well, outside of the tone, the big thing that I gained from working on horror film was how to shoot really quickly with no money. I learned how to be able to go into a production and know exactly what shot I need to get and how the shot needs to look and what performance I need to get out of the talent at a very quick pace.
I'm a film guy. I love it. When I read the screenplay, I knew that there would be no HD camera that could achieve the look that I wanted for this film. I wanted it to be dirty, and 16mm provides all of that with the look and the grain. That's what I worked for, and that's what I wanted, and that's how I'd seen the movie in my mind.
I called all of the producers and although we didn't have enough money to do that, I had to actually know which shots I wanted to get because we only had at most, one or two takes and then we had to move on.
Being a black filmmaker, one of the things I wanted to do with the movie is make sure I told it from a different perspective. I wanted to take myself out of it as a black male. I wanted to look at this movie through the eyes of Tully, to understand what he was thinking, and feel what he was feeling as much as I could.
