PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Adam Carter Rehmeier swept into mainstream cinema with his fan-favorite film, Dinner in America, but I first encountered Adam’s work with his infamous first movie, 2011’s extreme horror The Bunny Game. Dinner in America couldn’t be more different than The Bunny Game and it really showcases Adam’s broad spectrum of filmmaking. His follow-up projects, Snack Shack, and the newly released Carolina Caroline, continue to open his body of work to wider audiences, which is fantastic.
A young woman joins a charming con man on the run, leaving a trail of crime and passion as they hustle through the Southeast in search of her estranged mother.
Starring Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner (read our interview with him HERE), Carolina Caroline, which is being called a “modern day Bonnie and Clyde,” opens in theaters today! To celebrate that release, I chatted with Adam about working with Kyle (read our other interview with him HERE) again, crafting the script for the film, horror movies, and more!
PopHorror: I loved Carolina Caroline. I have watched it twice already, once at the Phoenix Film Festival and then I watched the screener that they gave me so I’m super excited to talk about it today.
Adam Carter Rehmeier: Great! I’m excited to be here with you.
PopHorror: How did the project come about?
Adam Carter Rehmeier: I got the script from Star Thrower. This is the first project that I didn’t write myself and Tom Dean is the writer who wrote it and when it came to me, the script was a little bit more of a crime thriller. I liked the bones of it and I really liked the first act which played more as a love story. The first act is pretty much intact up until the point where Caroline leaves with Oliver but I wanted to do some overhauling and make the whole movie… I saw it as a love story and I wanted to focus on that and not have it be… There were elements in the original draft that were more like an action movie and then it kind of moved into a crime thriller and I wasn’t as interested in that. I like things where the characters develop more and the relationship deepens in a way so I saw this as a fun way to do a redesign with something that I already did like a lot but I didn’t write. I didn’t have to be precious with anything. If I didn’t like something I could just get rid of it so it was very liberating for me. As you know, I play all over my stuff, whether it’s Dinner in America, or Snack Shack, or my new thing, it’s a labor of love and it usually takes about a year for me to write a script.
PopHorror: It is definitely a love story and Kyle Gallner, who I love, and Samara Weaving are just phenomenal. I feel like this role was written for Kyle because Oliver is perfect for him. What was casting like for those two characters?
Adam Carter Rehmeier: Samara was relatively quick, fast, and furious. I will say for Kyle, I did have to fight a little more for Kyle. Luckily, Samara and Kyra Sedgwick knew that Kyle was perfect for this, as I did. Eventually, I won in convincing everyone this should be Kyle, like it’s going to be infinitely sexier if it’s Kyle, I think. Everybody else, Samara and Kyra both felt the same way about it. Samara is a huge fan of Dinner in America, she watched it with her sister in Sydney and she was like, “Who the hell is this? I want to work with this guy!” That was really exciting. I had seen her in Ready or Not and I really loved Ready or Not and I wanted to work with Samara.
PopHorror: You said that you had to fight for Kyle. Did they have someone else in mind?
Adam Carter Rehmeier: I will say that at one point we had different cast members lined up, at least for Oliver and so often when you’re making a film, if you remember Dinner in America, Dinner in America was not originally Kyle Gallner either. He was one of my top five guys that I was looking at for Simon, but it went through a couple configurations before it came back to Kyle. I had sent him the script very early on and he didn’t read it.
PopHorror: I do remember that!
Adam Carter Rehmeier: He was on his TV show. Something similar happened with this and there was a different configuration with regard to the casting and ultimately, it worked out in my favor because this is the configuration that I wanted for the movie.
PopHorror: Your first feature is the notorious extreme horror film The Bunny Game. Since then, you’ve shifted your filmmaking styles and genres with Dinner in America, Snack Shack and now this one. They’re so vastly different. What drives you to create such eclectic films?
Adam Carter Rehmeier: I’m just interested in all types of films as an audience member. Each time I want to push myself and challenge myself with something so usually it’s some type of mashup of ideas. I’m always looking like, how do I tell a coming-of-age story but it’s also a music movie? How do I do a coming-of-age story but it’s a true coming-of-age story with a little tragic element to it? How do I do a country western movie and off-set with synth-driven scores and counter with a country music soundtrack? I’m always looking to mashup ideas and things together. I find that really interesting. Also, I love looking at careers of filmmakers of the late 70s, early 80s, how eclectic the body of work could be and not repeating yourself while trying different things. I’m interested in that, I’m interested in pushing myself each time. There has to be some component where I’m pushing myself in a new way. For this particular project, for Carolina, it was that I didn’t draft the original script, that I wasn’t involved in that and that liberated me in a certain way to be able to tweak and not be precious with anything that was there. I had a lot of fun doing that. Like I said, with Dinner in America, and Snack Shack, and with my new project, those are all things that I’ve written and they’re very exact. JP [Cinematographer Bernier], Francesca [Production Designer Palombo], and I, we execute everything in a very exact way. With something like this where I’m coming in as kind of a hired gun, it gives me a whole new approach to the work that I’d become more of an active participant just like the actors.
PopHorror: Are we going to see you come back to the horror genre in the future?
Adam Carter Rehmeier: You know that’s a huge area of interest for me so I would, without a doubt, say yes to that.
PopHorror: Well, that’s exciting! You keep mentioning a new project. What is up next for you?
Adam Carter Rehmeier: I’m not at liberty to go into said new project but you won’t be disappointed Tiffany, I’ll say that.
PopHorror: I tried.
Adam Carter Rehmeier: You tried; you got the wall but it’s a good wall because you’ll be very happy.
Thank you so much to Adam for taking the time to chat with us. Carolina Caroline is in theaters now!
