Recently we had the chance to talk with Brett and Drew Pierce about writing, life behind the camera, working together, and their new horror film The Wretched.
Horror Geek Life: So, how did you two get into this movie-making business?
Brett: It pretty much starts with our dad; he was the special effects artist on the original Evil Dead. We grew up around him and Tom Sullivan, the other effects artist, and Sam Raimi, all those guys on The Evil Dead, and they finished the effects in our basement. This got us jazzed about making films because our dad made one in the basement with his friends, so that’s where it started.
Drew: Yeah, those guys were our heroes, the ultimate independent sort of film success story, so we just grew up with the legends Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell. All of those guys, kind of making their trek to Hollywood while we went to high school, we watched them grow and grow. We always loved those movies so much, we wanted to take a shot at it ourselves.
HGL: Did you two always want to work together, or did that just develop over time?
Brett: It’s weird, it was never really a question. We’ve always been so close, we just naturally started doing it. I think when I was in high school I said, I want to direct movies, and I tried to make stuff and realized I was always recruiting Drew to work on them. He was doing just as much work as I was, so it never made sense for us to go down separate paths because we work so well together. The nice thing is, he has a totally different skill set than I have. He’s a storyboard artist and a character designer for a lot of feature films and animated shows, whereas I, when I moved out to L.A., got more into production, being on set and producing stuff and a lot of writing. Even though we write together, I usually take the first shot at the draft, but it was kind of like the perfect mix for us to get stuff done.
HGL: Let’s talk about your movie The Wretched. Where did the idea come from for this film?
Drew: We’ve always been obsessed with mythology and creatures in general, so we’re always pitching ideas back and forth. We stumbled across a couple of witch mythologies that we thought were so interesting; we’d never seen a movie about a sort of witch creature with a sort of mythology backdrop. We found this one bit of mythology called Black Annis, about an English witch who lives beneath a tree and we found this other bit called a Boo Hag, about a witch that steals people’s skin. We thought these were so interesting, so we basically took those and put them together with a couple of ideas we had. We felt like we came up with our own set of rules for a creature, the way zombies and vampires develop a set of rules, so that got us really excited.
HGL: The practical effects in the film look great. Can you talk a bit about both the challenges creating these effects, and also getting them to look good on film?
Brett: Yeah, there was no question right from the beginning that we wanted to do everything practical. Drew and I love practical effects, even going back to our dad on Evil Dead, growing up on movies like Fright Night, the original Halloween, we just love the real stuff more than anything, but it was challenging.
One of the biggest challenges of practical effects is because CGI took over so much, there are many people who have gone into that craft the pool of people that are good at it is much smaller. It was a challenge finding someone, and being an independent film the budget is tight, so you’re trying to find someone to pull off Hollywood magic for the cost of peanuts. Drew comes from an animation/character background, so it was really great going into it, and our effects artist Erik Porn was excited about it. Drew came in with a bunch of designs for the witch, and then we would also storyboard the sequences that entail the witch. One of the biggest complaints practical effects artists have with us filmmakers is we’ll take forever to make something look cool and then you’ll shoot it from all different angles and only one angle looks good, the rest look terrible. It was challenging from that perspective, to get the right angle all the time, but it was just pre-planning and putting all the time in before you started shooting so we were all on the same page.
HGL: There is a wonderful sense of dread that hangs over the film, from the beginning right to the end. How hard is it to transfer something like that from the page onto film?
Drew: That is something we learned a lot about as this was our first horror movie that we’ve made. Our first film was Deadheads, a zombie comedy that was kind of masquerading as a horror film. It was a real challenge, there’s a lot of tricks to building tension and scares and I think we learned quickly that there is no way you can short shift the scenes that have that kind of tension. It’s an independent film, so the challenge is you’re filming four or five scenes a day, sometimes more, and a lot of times with a horror sequence you have to devote an entire day to building the tension or the scare. We had to learn to spend enough time, take enough shots, build it up enough, to get it done right.
Brett: You really don’t know until you’re editing, you’re not sure, especially at that point because you have no music or sound effects. If you ever try to watch a horror movie with no music or sound effects you’re like, this movie’s terrible, no one’s going to like it.
Drew: It’s like watching one of those multi-cam comedies without the laugh track in there. They pause, waiting for the laugh and are like oh no, this is bad. Once you get the music and score in there, Devin Burrows did our score and did an amazing job, it just creates everything you’re going for.
HGL: That’s a really good point. For the two of you, you’re both so close to the movie for so long, you won’t really know how it all plays out until you put it all together in the editing room.
Brett: Yeah, and that’s the scary part. You never really know until you get into the editing room and even then, you don’t know completely until you show it to an audience. One of the best part of filmmaking is that struggle, when you first watch the cut of your movie, you just want to slit your wrist, it’s so painful, you feel like such a failure. However, the best part is it’s a process, you have to slowly build up all the elements, and there’s something about trying to make the scares work without full music and sound effects. If it’s only a little bad in spots, then you know it’s going to sing when it gets all that in there, so you’re almost handcuffing yourself to do a better job with the rhythm of the edits. It’s a building process, it’s exciting.
HGL: You mentioned the score and the lighting, both of which are so important in a horror film. Where the two of you hands-on in that regard or did you leave it to the talents of others?
Brett: In the case of the score by Devin Burrows, Devin is like my best friend from second grade. He’s always been an accomplished musician, teaching himself all these instruments. He was a DJ in high school, we used to go to terrible raves in Detroit, so yeah, he always had this really good talent for music. We’re huge film score buffs, I grew up listening to film scores through my dad as opposed to listening to pop music so before we even starting shooting we talked about the score, what sounds would be good for the movie.
Drew: Yeah, there was a lot of talk about Psycho, and even Jaws, because we knew we had this background sound. Like the marina scenes in the movie, that we wanted.
Brett: He’ll do pieces of music that aren’t even scored for the movie and say, I think this feels like the film, and send it to us, and we would hand these pieces back and forth until we got there. In the case of the lighting, we found a DP by the name of Conor Murphy, and how we got him was actually a good story.
Our original DP backed out, a month and a half before shooting, he’d been attached to the movie for almost a year. Drew found Conor’s reel on video and we called him up and he said, “Hey guys, I’ve always wanted to make a witch movie,” and we were the first feature film that he’d lit, so it was like a grand experiment. But, he ended up being the third Pierce brother. We ended up spending a month with him in a cabin because we got snowed in, drinking whiskey and eating chili, storyboarding the movie, it was a really good experience.
HGL: So what other projects are you guys working on now?
Brett: We’re working on a bunch of different stuff, actually. We’re out in Los Angeles, and everybody is bundled up and hiding from COVID but will still do pitch meetings on the phone. We’re pitching a lot of stuff, writing, but we’re really itching to make this werewolf movie we’ve wanted to make for a long time. I think when you make a witch movie with a lot of practical effects, you want to top that with something ten times as hard, so the werewolf movie is what we really want to do next.
I want to thank Brett and Drew for taking the time to talk with us.
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