Miraculous is a pretty good description of BLOODSUCKER coming together. Immediately after seeing SCUM, Michael Schwartz, a writer friend of mine, was inspired to work together on something. He threw out the idea of a _______ flick. I initially had an aversion to it, but upon opening my mind, I saw an angle that was very interesting to me; hyperrealism, drop all the baggage.

In August 2023, Michael wrote a number of iterations of the script and we continued a back and forth to get closer to a unified vision. By September we had a solid script; great characters, good dialogue, dramatic, and doable. Though I was about to go into production on DOMINATOR and was not in a position to split my focus towards producing BLOODSUCKER, so the idea sat for some months.

End of November 2023, Alex introduced me to Dylan, I was immediately captivated by his eccentricity and their dynamic together. I was determined for us to make something together. There was only one problem, Dylan had a one way flight back to Switzerland in 25 days and we had yet to conceive of the idea.

AMBITIONS: There were two things I wanted out of this movie, a twist (which I did not feel I had ever strongly executed before) and to have a great majority of the film be sit down, dialogue while still being engrossing. The second one seemed like quite the challenge to me, though it would simplify production a great deal. 

WRITING: With less than 20 days left to execute the film, my mind was completely blank. Complaining about this to K, she suggested, “Why not just make them ________?” Referring to the script Michael had written months earlier. It was a stroke of genius.
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I thought back to something I had heard Dylan say when we had spoken. He was berating a violinist performance he had seen the night before, from the man’s shoes to his seeming lack of respect for the traditions of the art form. I sought out a track which would serve as reparations, which lead me to the Heifetz performance.
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I was aware it would be douchey to repurpose the ideas which Michael had spent so much time developing, but I was adamant that the film had to be made and the window was incredibly tight. He was understanding.

I knew the constraints; the actors, the locations, the goals, the timeline. So I whipped up a script in a day and sat down with Alex and Dylan to discuss. We had a 4 hour heated back and forth, I was very protective of it. Ultimately we changed about 10 words.

ENGINEERING: The technical challenges of the film were quite clear: the transfusion and suspending someone upside down. But I knew that getting them right would elevate the film significantly.

For the transfusion, I made a blunt needle retractable and gave it a hidden intake from which we pumped pomegranate juice via handheld syringe.

For the suspension, we used a full body harness, some climbing rope and carabiners, which we secured to a pipe in the ceiling via axel strap. This may have been overkill, but it was important to me that the hands swung correctly and the rig was not irresponsible.

EXECUTING: The moment we moved into production, we realized one of our supporting actors was leaving for the holidays in 3 days time. This was unanticipated. With the odds of recasting in time being extremely slim, everyone pulled off a Hail Mary to make themselves available for small windows within the 3 days to shoot those scenes; an hour here, an hour there. We pulled it off.

All other shooting was very straightforward. For the dialogue scene, we converted a space to appear as a restaurant and bribed 4 extras with loads of wine and pizza. We flipped them on each single to make it appear as if there were more people.

ASSEMBLY: The edit was straightforward, with one exception: a lens flare. It was something that I did not even notice as I see them all the time, my filmmaker friends also did not notice, but every non-filmmaker who I tested the film with couple not look away from it. It appeared as a floating red dot opposite of the candle. Like a bug flying around or perhaps a sniper offscreen. It basically hijacked the film for anyone who could not immediately explain it.

The solution? I just painstakingly composited it out of every single shot in the dialogue scene. You can catch a number of artifacts if you look closely, but it does the trick.

TAKEAWAY: Do not say ‘No’ to serendipity. And cozy up to flying by the seat of your pants, that shit just works.
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- Mory