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There was every manner of film at this year’s Tribeca Festival, and I managed to take in thirteen features, four shorts, and an episodic premiere by the time the whole thing wrapped this past June. One of the highlights was the opportunity to interview two of the lead talents behind the new slasher ALL MY FRIENDS ARE DEAD: director Marcus Dunstan and star Jade Pettyjohn. We met at the Roxy Hotel bar and restaurant, a favorite meetup spot of mine, on a Saturday morning. I was, admittedly, running late, but they were so patient and gracious with me and I always appreciate that from stars and filmmakers, whose lives are probably ten times as cluttered as mine.
Its logline says of the film: “A group of college friends rents an airbnb for the biggest music festival of the year. However, their weekend of partying soon takes a deadly turn as a masked killer murders them one by one according to their sins.”
The film, though familiar in synopsis, finds a way to inject new life into a tired formula. The design of the killer is unique, the kills are creative, the victims are fighters rather than training dummies, for the most part, and the twist(s) are welcome.
Marcus Dunstan is perpetually smiling, speaking in a small voice from a large, gentle face. Jade Pettyjohn is excitable, clearly enjoying being at the festival and also talking about this joyous diversion in her filmography. We couldn’t help but jump right in. Unfortunately, I recorded this interview on my phone, which I thought would be sufficient to pick up our conversation alone, but it managed to get the entire breadth of the patrons at the Roxy that day. As I can’t cobble exact quotations from the interview, I’m forced to summarize.
I began by addressing Marcus, asking how he got involved with this project as this would mark the first time he’d directed something he hadn’t written. He somewhat intimated that his fingerprints were on the script, but praised screenwriters Josh Sims, Jessica Sarah Flaum, and John Baldecci. Originally attached to direct was Kevin Greutert, but with the responsibilities of SAW X taxing his time, he suggested Marcus. The SAW family is a blessing in the business, Marcus says, sharing their wisdom and expertise with one another as friends and accomplices.
I asked Jade Pettyjohn about her excitement at being the first actor attached to the production, essentially anchoring the film in her role as Sarah, the newest addition to the group of friends. She mentioned a brief bout with imposter syndrome as she’d never done anything quite so thrilling or firmly in the slasher genre, but quickly shifting to welcoming the opportunity to do something different, or “the things that scare you.” As she began reading the script she was impressed with the unpredictability of the events as they unfolded, despite some of the nostalgia from which the events sprung. Marcus Dunstan echoed this interest in stretching the actor’s limits, noting that horror is “the amplification of pretty intense drama,” noting that under its umbrella fall all of the exercises of an accomplished actor. As Jade brings so much from her filmography prior to the film, she provides a “North Star” for the rest of the cast to look to. As the film was shot in Canada, much of the young cast had already bonded into friendship before filming commenced, allowing Jade the opportunity to use her outsider status as the actor from Los Angeles to give Sarah a believable distance from the other actors’ counterparts onscreen.
As the production was a horror film, many prosthetic body parts end up scattered about the sets. I asked Jade and Marcus if either of them kept any of the prosthetics from the set, and after a moment of stifled laughter Marcus admitted that he may have. “Now imagine I had to write a letter to customs to justify its shipment…” I asked the two of them about the gravitas of screening at Tribeca, which they were both humbled by, and I asked Jade if she was acting as something as an ambassador for the rest of the young cast since she’d been here last year for Francesca Scorsese’s short film “Fish Out of Water.” She agreed that she was in a small capacity while still being “wide-eyed” herself at the spectacle of it all. As fate would have it, #AMFAD would be showing at the same screen that showed “Fish Out of Water” last year and some of her former castmates were planning to attend the screening, bringing the experience full circle.
I asked Marcus Dunstan to expound further upon the SAW family, a motley crew of visionaries who took a little idea and stretched it into a billion-dollar franchise, and he boiled all of the success down to Tobin Bell. He praised the direction the series has gone lately in bringing the familiar face back to screen, anchoring the franchise in its legendary lead.
When I asked about the possibility of further entries in this new world created by ALL MY FRIENDS ARE DEAD, Jade Pettyjohn gushed about Marcus Dunstan as a director and true collaborator on the set. The genius of the production was allowing the actors on set to deliver dialogue in their own unique voice, or that of their characters. The result is a film that is hypermodern that doesn’t sound like a professional screenwriter removed from youth is aping the culture. Marcus referred to the script as “an anvil of dialogue,” and while the information contained therein needed to be revealed, the actors were given the freedom and space to reveal it in the fresh voices of their characters. Jade echoed this sentiment, stating that the freedom given to the characters gave the film an authenticity, and as a common theme throughout is social media and the current generation’s addiction to it as well as identity within it, a reality that the generation that will see this movie can recognize.
We talked a bit about some of the foundational films that a scream queen must screen to step into the genre, though the particulars were completely drowned out by a jazz quartet that had started to play. Before we parted, Marcus Dunstan let me in on a little production secret, however: when I opened the interview with my expectations of the film and when they were shattered, I mentioned a moment in the opening when the college kids are all skidding away in a rickety van towards the concert venue, and a smear of smoothie that was thrown at one of the panel windows starts to run, then is picked up as an animation over a map to show their journey across the country in a chunky pink line. It was a fresh moment that immediately set this film apart from its predecessors and contemporaries, and Marcus told me that its inclusion was actually “a solution. We had to rent that van, not from a picture company, but from Craigslist, and the dude sold it two days before we were done shooting with it. So I couldn’t do any of the car driving, and that was the solution. ‘Well, let’s do this: It’s RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.’ We were told to cut it, get rid of it. So thank you for praising it.”
Much thanks to Marcus Dunstan and Jade Pettyjohn for their time and definitely check the film out if you like the genre. I’ve restrained myself from posting spoilers but there’s actually a lot to unpack once you’ve watched the whole film and I’d love to see them return to this story soon.
ALL MY FRIENDS ARE DEAD is available digitally now on all major platforms and is still screening in select theaters. Until next time, take care of yourselves.
-McEric-
aka Eric McClanahan