PopHorror Let's Get Scared
The Blue Diamond, a short horror/comedy/sci-fi film directed by Sam Fox and written and directed by Fox and Addison Heimann, packs a lot into its 16-minute runtime. Starring horror veteran Barbara Crampton (read our interview with her HERE) and producer Desiree Staples, The Blue Diamond is saturated in grief and narcissism while also doing its damnedest to make you laugh and it succeeds.
After the death of her mother, a woman goes to a 1980s themed ski club.
To celebrate the release of the film, I chatted with Sam, Desiree, and Barbara about making the film, working together, building their characters, and more!
PopHorror: I really liked The Blue Diamond so I’m super excited to talk to you guys about it today.
Desiree Staples: Yay! I love that.
PopHorror: My first question is for Sam. How did the project come about and how did you work with Addison Heimann on the script?
Sam Fox: We’ll start with project coming about… Basically, Des and I had been doing the film festival circuit for three or four years now solidly and it became an addiction thing of now we’re nearing the end, what are we going to do next? Let’s make another film! We were talking about that, and the idea of a ski cabin came up and so of course, ski cabin, ski cult. I had a visual plot in my head. My previous film Fck’n Nuts kind of dealt… All my films deal with my familial trauma in some way or another and Fck’n Nuts dealt with my relationship with both my parents slightly, but I wanted to do something more intimate about my father. He was a narcissist; he passed away 15 years ago and being at his funeral and this feeling like, does everyone here know the same person that I know because we are having different experiences. Using that story structure of a daughter coming to terms with a narcissist parent when they think that they’ve died and I wanted to push this idea of if my dad came back and we had to the chance to finally have the conversation of, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” what that would look like. It was really cathartic and cool then to have someone like Addison, who Desiree went to school with and is a friend of ours, and whose work I really appreciate because he kind of does the same thing of tying in horror/sci-fi/comedy with trauma from his parents and growing up. It seemed like the perfect person to work with on this and it really was because we have the same sense of humor, we have the same like, this is not too much, we can push this further, and he really helped give a structure to a story that was very personal to me and amazing comedy and character. It was awesome.
PopHorror: I love that. I interviewed Addison a few years ago and Hypochondriac is amazing.
Sam Fox: Yes!
Desiree Staples: So good!
PopHorror: I was really excited to see that he had helped write this one. My next question is for Desiree and Barabra. Sam said that she worked with you, Des, on developing this. How did you come to star in it and Barbara, how did you come on board?
Desiree Staples: Yeah, Sam and I have been working together for a long time now, and I often wear different hats, sometimes producing, sometimes acting, and then in a dream world, doing both. We had just come off Fck’n Nuts and I love how Sam combines comedy and horror, and when we were like what are we going to do next, I threw myself into the ring of I’d love to do some comedy/horror with you and then Alison was born. Then we got Addison on board and he knows my voice really well too, we’ve done a lot of work together. It was fun because I think Alison is a different kind of lead than you see too often and that’s what I like to play with too because I have a lot of comedic sensibilities so I like the idea of a socially awkward lead, which was really fun. We got connected to Barbara through Valerie Steinberg and we were talking about this earlier, we were like, “Oh my gosh, would Barbara even consider doing this with us?” And she did! Our dreams came true! It was awesome and just so great to work off of.
Barbara Crampton: I did watch Sam’s other movie Fck’n Nuts and I loved it so much. It was the craziest, wildest, most cool short I’ve ever seen and I was like, oh yes, I definitely want to work with this filmmaker. I also want to do more comedy and I have been lately. People have been hiring me. It’s sort of came out of the blue in a way but it’s been something that I’ve yearned to do now for a while. The script was both humorous and also had a lot of pathos. Sam told me about her relationship with her dad and how it was sort of based on him. Anytime as an actor you really get to play something that’s based on a real person, you get to hear the stories from somebody, that makes it much more real even though it was funny. Just trying to have that challenge of playing the humor and the tragedy of what Sam went through with her dad and growing up. I was really challenged to play both of those themes. I was really excited to do it!
PopHorror: I think when you’re dealing with the themes that are featured in the film, you kind of have to have that comedic relief, where you have those moments… I laughed out loud! I liked that because it is pretty heavy.
Desiree Staples: Totally.
PopHorror: That brings me to my next question. This deals with not only grief and death of a parent, but a parent/child relationship, addiction, cults… Sam, how did you approach guiding Desiree and Barbara through those intense scenes?
Sam Fox: Des, I’m so lucky when I get to work with her because we basically talk every day because we’re also best friends and because of the film festival circuits we’re traveling together so it is like a director’s dream to literally wake up and be like, “Hey, you wanna talk about the script?” and then be with her the whole day. There will be moments where we’re out together and I’ll be like, “See that person right there? The way that they’re acting, kind of like that?” And then what was so hard for me is with Barbara, we had a lunch where I was like, oh my god, there’s all these things that I’ve been processing and thinking of while I’ve been talking with Des every day and I’m like, I’m meeting her for the first time and I feel like I’m just going to vomit out everything on our plates because I’m having these revelations that I’ve never had before. It was a lunch that I wish could’ve never ended because we were also talking about her experience with people like that. It showed me the most valuable thing to a director is intimate conversation in prep that might have nothing to do with rehearsal but just getting to know each other and trust each other and finding out what are the things that hurt you and what was that feeling like. If it has nothing to do with this story, you know that feeling of abandonment. I cherish those and I’m so grateful to both of these actresses for letting me do that. It’s friendship, it’s talking, it’s beautiful.
PopHorror: Barbara is horror royalty so I’m sure that made it easy too.
Sam Fox: Yeah, seriously! I had a panic attack the morning of coming to set because I’m like, wait, I’m about to direct a scene that’s like the most intimate thing I’ve ever… A lot of the dialogue is stuff that I’ve actually had in fights with my dad with someone who I’ve grown up watching and I’m such a fan of. This is a real head fuck. But fortunately, on set, I got there and my AD, who is the sweetest ever, and my DP, and then talking with Barbara and Des, I had the most beautiful support network of people around me that made it… Within 30 minutes I was cool.
PopHorror: I love that. Desiree and Barbara, because short films rarely have the luxury of slow exposition, how do you approach making a character feel fully realized almost immediately?
Desiree Staples: That’s a great question. I think that is a huge challenge with shorts and as Sam mentioned, we did have the luxury of developing the script together, talking about the characters, so I did feel that a lot of Alison I built on parts of myself and similar experiences I’ve gone through with narcissistic people in my life or not feeling like I’m talking to people and feeling alone or like an outsider at times. But I think what was amazing, Barbara and I, I think we met on day two, it was that morning on the soundstage and we had such an amazing world to play with so once me and Barbara got to talk about the script… Barbara’s just such an inspiration. We were just down to the work, talking about the lines, where we wanted to play, and Sam made such a beautiful space that I really felt like we could play. There were lines where we were like, let’s try this and see if it’s funny and it worked. We just were able to jump in and dive in full force, which is what I love to do.
Barbara Crampton: For me, I really felt a responsibility when Sam told me her story with her dad and that was very meaningful for me to hear that from her and gave me an anchor that I could use as a foundation to launch from. It is very hard in a short, for me, I’ve done a few but maybe not as many as these gals, but in a short amount of time, how do you get your character across so that people will really understand and know who you are? I hung my hat on two elements and that was to display the narcissistic traits that we had talked about and were really representative of Sam’s relationship with her dad, and also I wanted to give Desiree’s character a moment where she could have hope that something was finally going to be different because it’s my feeling that when you’re dealing with somebody who’s a narcissist and they don’t know, you’re always in hope that something will be different and something will change and you’ll finally get a reckoning with that person. There’s a moment when they’re talking and she comes out and she’s like, “Here I am!” But then she’s saying, “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry.” I wanted that moment to be really real so that Alison could think, oh, she’s finally got it, oh my god, I’m finally getting what I need. But then no, it’s really not there, and I really wanted to play those things close together so that you could see the two aspects of her personality. For me, I had to be specific, and I had to be judicious about what I could play so those were those two moments. Then the other stuff was just fun and playing in the world and being in the moment and just having a good time.
Thank you so much to Sam, Desiree, and Barbara for taking the time to chat with us. The Blue Diamond is now on Screambox as part of Season 18 of Bloody Bites!
