Superhost Brandon Christensen Interview

Automatically transcribed; may contain errors.

hey everybody i'm allison here at popcorn frights film festival in south florida and i am here with brandon christensen who is talking about super host hello how are you i'm good thank you thanks for doing this thank you what's it like to be back it's awesome you know i love coming back to florida for this festival i've made good friends with igor and mark and judith and the whole team so it's you know every time i come back it's like seeing family again so it's great let's talk about super host so where did this come from um my first two films were you know these really oppressive films about mothers being terrorized and stuff like that and and i was kind of like you know i can take a break from that um you know i've got three kids now and there was nothing really new happening in the development that i could exploit exploit for scare so i was just like i'm going to try something totally different and when i was doing um the festival run for z i stayed at an airbnb and i had a situation where i had to deal with the host of it we had to come and visit and do all these things and i was just kind of watching it and i was like man this is such a bizarre experience for both of us like we're both complete strangers i'm living in this place for a couple days and you know he's taking care of the saying we're making small talk it's just this awkward thing and i thought it would be pretty funny to to kind of just see where that could go like what kind of you know you're staying at the stranger's house what if that stranger is not who they say they are you know and it kind of just went down that rabbit hole and uh really when i came up with the character rebecca you know just sort of spiraled into this crazy story about what she's doing and why and so it was a ton of fun it was just nice to do something fun for once you know something you can kind of enjoy the whole time and not feel like crap let's talk about rebecca because she you know it seems like it's a lot of fun but but she's really crazy so how crazy did you want to make her and did you go beyond that or did she go beyond that did gracie do that um it was kind of interesting because i wasn't sure like she really makes or breaks the film you know if you don't i mean it kind of goes back to that just like can you make a villain lovable you know and even though that she's doing some pretty horrible things the fact that she's doing with so much joy and charisma it just makes you kind of root for her so it's kind of an interesting you know situation to be put in as a viewer because like she's technically i mean she's clearly the bad guy but yeah by you know by the end i feel like if i've got you rooting for her you know i've kind of done my job so that was kind of the goal for it and just as far as her performance i mean we were able to really kind of play with it because it was hard to say exactly how far to push certain things and uh so you know gracie was so fun to just sort of try different things and just do all these different uh you know uh just different line reads for everything and and i feel like we found a pretty good balance of creepy and you know totally psychotic so it was fun creepy and totally psychotic great way to describe it um let's talk about gracie she is phenomenal in this yeah if she if you didn't have her how do you think rebecca would have ended up differently um i mean i always kind of wanted to have that sort of spunky personality someone that's trying their best to be as perfect as possible on the surface and then you know you get into a deeper and a darker past um i mean i definitely wanted to keep it fun and playful but gracie she comes from a disney background so she's she's spent a lot of her career in front of cameras pretending to be perfect for disney and when we first talked i was like i want you to channel that because i think that's so funny you know cause like you do these interviews you do the press things and you're always just presenting your best self and i feel like that's what rebecca was doing for these people presenting their best self because uh you know if um if she you know she just she's in the middle of something there's another story in another universe where it's following rebecca's path from the beginning to end and it's it's probably a lot different than what we're seeing because she's doing her own thing and and so it was just really it was just really important to sort of show the crack slowly form in that perfect presentation will we get a sequel uh i'd love to it'd be super fun but i i don't know we'll see ah all right uh for you personally you do a lot of horror so what is the appeal for you um i think it's just uh it's so fun to an illicit reaction with something you know i think comedy and horror are very similar where if you know if a joke lands it can make up you know an audience towel with laughter if you you know if a scare lands makes everybody jump so i think it's a lot of fun to be able to get that sort of instinctual response to something and seeing it um you know play out like that so i think i mean i've been a horror fan since i was a kid you know i grew up on things uh and so it's it's it's just sort of a lot of fun to to sort of i you know i have two boys now i'm hoping that eventually they'd hit that horror phase and they're able to watch the things their dad's making and if i can genuinely scare them that would be really cool i don't know what it would be like growing up in your house that would be very interesting to say the least uh tell me about this house and the location it's gorgeous yeah we got really lucky i actually wrote the film for another house that was in the area it was really modern kind of a cold sterile place and right before we wanted to get the location deal the guy just kind of vanished on me and so i reached out to different friends that i knew had places up in the area and the churco family who i've been there from canada uh he's you know he's kind of a big deal record uh producer and everything but they they said yeah you can come out and shoot for us like they didn't really care about money or anything like that they just thought it was really cool so they were hugely supportive and we basically took over their house for a month shot the film they came out one time to set and saw it and it was it was such a small production i mean the crew was six people you know it was me and a producer curt harder and then the the cast it was so small that we didn't really leave that much of a dent in the place fortunately so um yeah it was just uh you know they were super generous with their place and you know it it was such a super cinematic house you know when they showed me pictures i was like holy crap i had to rewrite the script for it but that was great because we had a place that legitimately was awesome yeah it really was perfect for this film so what's next for you i don't know i've got a couple things cooking um i'm not sure which one's gonna pop soon i've got a few things i'm just uh you know just sort of seeing see what's going to happen well i'm not sure it's always a weird situation where it's like you know i i can go many different ways so i'm hopeful that i'll be shooting something sooner than later though awesome well i'm hoping for a little bit more rebecca because she was awesome and it was certainly left open for that yeah for sure don't tell anyone all right well thank you so much for talking with us [Music] you