PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Joe Russo and Chris LaMont met in film school at Arizona State University, when Chris was Joe’s professor. They soon forged a lifelong friendship that has resulted in writing several shorts and feature length films together. Their latest screenplay, The Inheritance, is a horror film that not only won a spot on the BloodList, an annual list of the best unproduced horror and genre screenplays, but it’s directed by veteran horror director, Alejandro Brugués and stars Bob Gunton from fan favorite The Shawshank Redemption.
A billionaire on the eve of his 75th birthday, invites his estranged children back home out of fear that tonight someone or something is going to kill him. He puts each of their inheritances on the line, to make sure they’ll help.
To celebrate the release of The Inheritance, I chatted with Joe and Chris via Zoom about how their partnership began, the inspiration behind the film, horror movies, and more!
PopHorror: So, you guys met at ASU.
Joe Russo: That’s true!
PopHorror: Which I am in Phoenix.
Joe Russo: So is Chris. Chris still lives there.
Chris LaMont: I’m in Phoenix right now, Tiffany.
PopHorror: I bet you’re melting just as much as I am.
Chris LaMont: Yeah, that’s why I’m locked indoors writing.
Joe Russo: I will say though, guys, it’s not that much cooler in Los Angeles right now.
PopHorror: But it is cooler!
Joe Russo: It is cooler, that’s true.
PopHorror: This isn’t your first writing project together. Joe, you used to be Chris’ student, which I think is awesome. How did you both come together to start your partnership?
Joe Russo: When I went through the ASU program, Chris was the youngest faculty member there at the time and I took his entry level film program. I raced through my final assignment and finished it midway through the semester and Chris gave me some notes. He saw the potential in it. He made it better. It ended up playing in a film festival and that’s when I was like, his feedback is good! It gels well with my ideas and then the next time our paths really crossed, it was on this low budget horror movie called The Graves. Chris was a line producer on it and he helped me get an assistant to the director position on it. We just really bonded. It was a tough shoot. We were out in the middle of the desert in May, and it was very hot, as we already discerned here.
PopHorror: That’s the worst!
Joe Russo: I think it was just kind of one of those relationships forged in fire, right Chris?
Chris LaMont: Yeah, I think the neat thing too is I love to collaborate. I’m big into collaboration when it comes to film. By nature it’s a collaborative medium. I recognized in Joe his love for storytelling as much as I love to tell stories as well. We just really bonded and we both have tremendous passion, we both love to create. It was just a bonding. Joe is my second wife, to be honest with you. We’ve been writing together for a really long time and the great thing about the work that we do, is that we continue to build. We continue to grow and we’re great, great friends as well.
Joe Russo: Yeah!
Chris LaMont: It’s an absolute pleasure to be able to continue working with someone that you really love, and you really respect.
Joe Russo: Aww, that’s so sweet.
PopHorror: I love that so much!
Chris LaMont: Don’t tell anybody I said that! You’re not recording this, are you Tiffany?
PopHorror: No, not at all!
Joe Russo: It really was a short horror film called Takeout, which Chris had written, and I directed, and that played in a bunch of festivals and won some awards, and that was really the thing that kind of solidified this is a good team. We’ve been working together… Gosh, that was 15 years ago now so we’ve gone from shorts to now this is our fifth produced screenplay.
Chris LaMont: In the last four years, yeah.
PopHorror: Wow! Chris, you co-created the Phoenix Film Festival, which is in its 24th year, right? That’s impressive.
Chris LaMont: Thank you! I was pretty much raised here in Phoenix as a filmmaker, and it was one of the things that really was missing from the landscape, to have a world class film festival. I was in the middle of film production and editing, and one day I said, “Why don’t we have a really great film festival here in Phoenix?” And basically decided to take it on myself with my producing partner at the time, and it’s really been great to see the collaborations, to see the opportunities that film makers here in Arizona and also all over the world who’ve come out. Joe’s had films that have shown there as well and it’s great when you can see all of Phoenix has really come together to support that festival. It’s the largest film festival in Arizona. It’s got world acclaim and it’s one of those things that Phoenix needed, to have a world class film festival because the filmmakers of Arizona, we try really hard. We’re not in LA but we all deserve to have something that really celebrates filmmaking for filmmakers and also for audiences as well.
PopHorror: I absolutely agree! That’s really awesome. So, what inspired The Inheritance and how did the project come about?
Joe Russo: Back in 2018, we were kind of at the height of Donald Trump’s term in office and my go-to composer, John Jesensky, who’s an associate producer on The Inheritance, we were kind of spit balling ideas about wouldn’t it be fun to lock the Trumps in a haunted house? And I wish it was more complex than that but that was the high concept hook that we were like, oh this would be a really neat way into a haunted house movie that felt kind of fresh and different. I love the Vincent Price horror movie, House on Haunted Hill. I’ve always been thinking it would be fun to reboot it again, so this is my way of paying homage to that movie. It has that kind of Agatha Christie, murder mystery, one night ensemble cast. I think you can see a lot of DNA from that. So once we had the high concept idea, we figured out what we wanted to say which was, in a thematic way, family versus greed and kind of explore that within the confines of this concept. Chris and I really started fleshing it out. We wrote it on spec and it went out to the town and we got a great response. We got all sorts of fancy meetings at places like Bad Robot and such.
Chris LaMont: And it made the Bloodlist!
Joe Russo: That’s right! It made this thing called the Bloodlist, which was the annual list of the best horror screenplays at the time. So that was the genesis of the screenplay.
Chris LaMont: I think the big thing too, Tiffany, is that when we went in to start fleshing out the world, we really wanted to make characters that were really real. Very well thought out. It’s easy to put paper cutouts of rich people up on screen but we felt it was really important to create characters that felt real, that audiences could empathize with even though they’re in this one percent situation. I feel really confident that that’s one of the reasons the film came to life and we got really great actors to do this because they all could really see the potential of what those characters were and not just what they represented, but how they actually came to life on screen and how they bring them to life. The acting is in the movie.
Joe Russo: Bob Gunton from The Shawshank Redemption told our director Alejandro (Brugués), and who knows if this lip service or what, but he said it was one of the best screenplays he’s ever read, which is a huge compliment coming from someone who was in The Shawshank Redemption, which I think is maybe the best screenplay ever written. That was a nice day.
Chris LaMont: We’re second! We’re right underneath Shawshank! It’s a hair’s breadth between the two.
Joe Russo: Ace Ventura 2 might be in the middle there, but you never know.
PopHorror: Give yourself more credit than that!
Chris LaMont: Thank you, thank you!
Joe Russo: He did say one of…
PopHorror: Your cast really is fantastic. That’s one thing that I really noticed. I was really impressed, especially to see Peyton List do something like this. I don’t want to give too much of a spoiler, but her kill scene is just amazing.
Chris LaMont: Thank you!
PopHorror: That pool shot! That really impressed me.
Chris LaMont: Our director, Alejandro Brugués, he really worked this film so well. It’s so rich and that kill, everything he did is really him taking a particularly great screenplay and turning it into a really great movie.
Joe Russo: It was fun collaborating with Alejandro on that stuff because he and I did a movie called Nightmare Cinema together a few years ago, a horror anthology. And that was where we first worked together so there was a really nice, warm, familiar conversation where we were going into how do we take certain kills and shape them to the resources we had because I mean, that pool location I think changed three times. Each time we had to come up with a new way to use the location to kill her. I think where we landed is pretty neat. It was fun to watch that one come together.
Chris LaMont: Tiffany, I’ve got to say, my favorite part is though, in the production design of the pool, if you noticed when you saw, is actually the family crest on the bottom of the pool, which always cracks me up. This is a family that puts their crest on the bottom of a pool. That’s how insane this family really is.
PopHorror: I have just one last question for you both. What’s your favorite scary movie?
Joe Russo: Ooohh, Chris why don’t you go first?
Chris LaMont: You’re so mean! So, here’s the thing about Joe and me, is that Joe is the horror guy, okay? And I’m the suspense/thriller guy. Horror films scare the bejeezus out of me. Tiffany, don’t laugh, but it’s true.
PopHorror: That’s the point!
Chris LaMont: I love Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock is my go-to, my inspiration for being in film. But when you’re talking about horror movies, I’ve been scared of Poltergeist forever. The empty pool scene was just devastating as I grew up so frankly, I leave all the scary movie choices to Joe Russo because he has a knowledgeable encyclopedia brain full of horror films.
Joe Russo: Yeah, I’m the horror guy. For me, I think it goes back to two movies and it’s John Carpenter’s Halloween, which I know is kind of a cliche answer but it’s just such a classic. I watch it every Halloween. I’m in awe of it every single time. It is just a perfect, perfect vehicle of a movie. And then as a kid from the 90s, Scream was a game changing movie for me. I always consider it to be a Rosetta Stone for horror because it’s paying homage to so many different things and as someone who was not allowed to see R-rated movies until I was 11 or 12 officially, seeing a movie like that around that age opened up a whole world of horror to me. Not only is it a great movie on its own, but it’s a huge gateway point for me for the genre.
Thank you so much to Joe and Chris for taking the time to speak with us. The Inheritance is coming to On Demand and select theaters July 12, 2024.
