I was lucky enough to get a hold of Dead and Breakfast director Matthew Leutwyler and asked him some questions on the project and other stuff he's working on.

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NOTE: This interview has been re-posted in its original format.

CONDUCTED BY: FrighT MasteR
EDITED BY: FrighT MasteR
ORIGINALLY POSTED ON: January 24th 2004

FrighT with Matthew Leutwyler

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Its got a bit of everything. Horror. Comedy. Music. Its a familiar story: six friends are on their way to a wedding in Texas and they stop for the night in this small town. Of course the only place to stay is a Bed and Breakfast run by David Carradine. That night a gruesome murder happens and the gang is suspected by the local sheriff. As the film unfolds we find that there's an evil spirit that's taking over the residents of the town one by one. Its not long before the friends find themselves in the middle of a deadly brawl at the town's weekly ho-down. They get chased back to the B&B where they barricade themselves inside and battle it out with the towns folk.

Love the Evil Dead movies. Especially EDII. But the original idea - and I use the word "original" loosely - came about when i was sitting in a meeting regarding another film with our co-producers at Goal Line. They had recently purchased a property that looked a hell of a lot like the house from Psycho. It got me thinking. There was a small window of opportunity to use the location before it was going to go under a complete remodel so I whipped up the script and cast the film in about 6 or 7 weeks. Then we shot it in 18 days in february 2003.

We are in the final phases of post-production. An answer print should be done by the first week in Feb. We will be premiering the film at the South By Southwest Film Festival (www.sxsw.com) in March then hit a few horror fests abroad. We have been very pleased by the reaction that the film has gotten from many of the programmers for the horror/fantasy fests around the world since that 's the audience that we made the film for.

Michael Mosher, Ralis Khan and Richard Redlefsen. I think they went through something like 11 gallons of blood on the film. It was crazy. It truly was amazing what they did on the budget they were given. A tall order to be sure. And the "chainsaw scene", as it has been dubbed, is truly a work of art. I'll never tell how little time they had to pull that one off because it plays very big.

I had worked with some of them before. Erik Palladino (ER), Ever Carradine (Lucky), Jeff Morgan (The Handler) and I play on a softball team in L.A. Jeremy worked with Erik and I on a film called This Space Between Us and I've always admired him as an actor. I told Gina about the idea at a bar and she was totally into doing a comedy/horror after Jeepers. Diedrich starred in one of my all time favorite films, Office Space, so when he said he wanted to do it I was ecstatic. David Carradine was sent the script by his niece Ever and signed on a few days later. Some of the supporting cast like Mark Kelly (Enus) and I had worked together doing sketch comedy and I always thought he was brilliant. The cast just kind of fell into place.

Ever is quite a bit different than David. She has a real sense for comedic timing. And I also have to say that she was a total pleasure to deal with. We really put her through the ringer. She spent most of the shoot in a tank top covered in blood with temperatures hovering around 30 degrees. She and Erik are in the most demanding sequences, so they would often be working 16 -18 hour days with only one day off a week. It was a real killer for them. Not to mention it was the middle of pilot season and both are always in demand at that time of year so they would have to fly to L.A. one minute and then turn around and head back to our set in Northern California.

Actually, that happened to just about all of the actors at one point or another during the filming which made the shoot even more of a juggling act for us. I thought Mike Devaney, my first A.D. , was going to have a heart attack. Christ ,we even had Sisto shooting episodes of Six Feet Under at the same time. So he was back and forth as well. We knew going in that we were going to have to deal with this problem so we built a mini studio on our location site. The house being the center of much of the action, we built an entire block building facades to work as downtown Lovelock including a working Sheriff station and jail cell about 100 yards to the right. Behind the house we built an entire graveyard. That way in the event of actors having to leave last minute we could move on to another scene without having to do a company move. It saved our asses on more than one occasion. But it was also very ambitious on our nearly non-existent budget.

Always wanted to mess around in this genre. And also, some of these actors are my friends and how often do you get to chop your friends heads off?

Yeah. I do. It's such a difficult balance to walk. Although our film doesn't have too many real scares. Its more gruesome, bloody gore and humor. And of course there is a musical aspect to our film as well. I suppose its safe to say that we owe as much to Michael Jackson's Thriller Video as we do to Raimi's Evil Dead.

It looks like I will be doing another horror next. A straight, scary horror more in the vein of carpenter's The Thing. But I have a couple of other scripts that I'm trying to put together with my company Ambush Entertainment. One is a Thriller that deals with issues of faith and science and the other is a college comedy.

It too takes place in a small town. This time in new mexico. We are co-producing the film with Combustion Studios' Dj Marini and Tyruben Ellingson. They will be handling all of the design of the creature as Ty has been responsible for some great conceptual design work on films like Mimic and Hellboy.

Well we talked about Evil Dead II and Dawn of the Dead, But the first films that really scared the shit out of me when I was a kid were Craven's The Hills Have Eyes and The Last House on the Left, which, by the way, I do not recommend being viewed by an 11 year old. That one probably fucked me up for a couple of years. I love Fulci's Zombi flicks and Carpenter's films like The Thing, and of course They Live.

Come on down to Austin in March for the premiere.