King of pain

Enlarge Image

A scene from The Aggression Scale.

Enlarge Image

Miller on the set of Silent Night.

Enlarge Image

Jaime King got over her fear.

Movie-making is a mysterious pursuit.

For a few weeks this spring, a film crew, mostly from Winnipeg, converged in Selkirk for a few weeks to shoot a remake of an '80s slasher flick. Calling the shots in the director's chair was a 31-year-old T-shirt-clad guy from Jacksonville, Fla.

It raised the questions: Who is this guy? And how did he get this job?

The answer can be found in director Steven C. Miller's two previous films. His first feature was a zombie movie titled Automaton Transfusion, an impressive piece of work considering its budget of $30,000. His next film, newly available on DVD, was The Aggression Scale, a taut thriller about a home invasion that takes an unexpected turn when one of the designated victims -- a 12-year-old boy -- proves to be a formidable match for a quartet of bad guys. (See the review in today's Tab.) It's a gripping piece of work, all the more impressive for its minimal budget of $150,000, shot in 12 days.

There is an old adage about movie-making: You can make movies fast, good and cheap. Pick two.

Miller would seem to be the guy who disproves the adage.

In fact, his film Silent Night, a remake of the 1984 slasher Silent Night, Deadly Night, was budgeted around $4 million, which makes it the most expensive movie Miller has ever made. It's about a killer in a Santa suit terrorizing a small Wisconsin town on Christmas Eve.

On the phone from Los Angeles, he says that in some respects, the budget doesn't make all that much difference.

"It's funny, because whether you make a movie for $30,000 or $5 million, the machine is still the same and you still have to tell a story, and you still have to be able to tell a story in the amount of time you're given," he says.

"But definitely when you're shooting a movie for $4 million, it's a big jump. I was able to flex my muscles a little bit more with that kind of a budget range, for sure."

One difference: With a larger budget, you can get permits to shoot on the street, as Miller did filming a complicated parade sequence on Manitoba Avenue in Selkirk.

"When you're making a movie for $30,000, there are no permits," he says.

Miller's work inspires comparison to the young John Carpenter, who vividly rendered horror and action on a low budget in films such as Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13. And Carpenter was not above doing remakes either, as he demonstrated with The Thing.

That's something Miller finds inspiring, given that people might view the remake of an '80s movie to be a cynical endeavour.

"I understand the point of view: 'Why don't you make something original?'" Miller says. "The goal for this movie was, yes, it's a remake, but the movie is totally different from the original movie and it felt like an original movie. It didn't feel like I was telling the story with a newer vibe to it -- we're actually telling a new story about a Santa with an axe."

As for shooting in Manitoba, Miller says the locations lived up to the "Friendly Manitoba" inscription on our licence plates, including the Selkirk residents who showed up as volunteer extras in a parade scene featuring dozens of Santa Clauses roaming the street.

"We couldn't have made it as big as we did without the people coming to support the film," Miller says. "We had a great time. It was really fun and everybody up there was really nice and accommodating."

Silent Night was produced by The Genre Company and Winnipeg's Buffalo Gal Pictures and is expected to be released this Christmas.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Gift from Santa-stuntman

ONE of the stars of Silent Night, Jaime King (Sin City), had previous experience doing a remake of an '80s horror movie in Winnipeg. The problem was that King actually injured herself shooting the hostage thriller Mother's Day in Winnipeg in the fall of 2009. She wrote about the experience of fracturing her tailbone in a comic guest blog for the Los Angeles Times, but director Steven C. Miller says she was a tad reticent about the physical requirements of playing a deputy hunting the psych-Santa in Silent Night.

"I think she was a little nervous at first," Miller says. "When you're in the same place where you got injured, you have a little bit of that."

Miller credits Winnipeg actor-stuntman (and the guy who plays his psycho Santa) Rick Skene for putting King at ease.

"Rick really went to the extreme measures of sitting with her and walking her through everything so we made sure she was comfortable.

"She got into it and had a good time."

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 31, 2012 D1