PopHorror Let's Get Scared
We’ve been fortunate to review quite a few of Filmmaker Ivan Kavanagh’s films here at PopHorror. You can read our reviews for Son (2021), Never Grow Old (2019), Tin Can Man (2007), and The Canal (2014), as well as our previous interview with Mr. Kavanagh. So when we got the chance to speak with him again, we knew we had the chance to ask some follow-up questions and to find out more about Son, a film about a mother doing everything in her power to help her sick child.
PopHorror: Thanks so much for talking with us today!
Ivan Kavanagh: Sure, sure! You know, I actually read PopHorror.
PopHorror: You do?
Ivan Kavanagh: I do! It’s one of the ones on Twitter that I always go to.
PopHorror: Thank you so much!
Ivan Kavanagh: You’re very welcome!
PopHorror: When did you first feel the calling to become a filmmaker?
Ivan Kavanagh: I’ve always loved movies, you know? I grew up in a household where my father was a real showboat. He’s one of those people who, if you’re watching an old movie, he knows every character actor in it, no matter how small the part. So it’s been always in my blood. I was one of those kids who just never liked going out. I’d rather stay in and watch a movie on TV, you know? Then when I got to my teens, I was one of those video store kids who rented every movie in there.
Then one day when I was about 12 or 13, my mother got a high-end video camera, and I made a short film with my friends. I used two VHS recorders back to back to edit the little film. And that way I knew, the moment I did that first cut from VHS to VHS, and I saw how those two pieces of film, those two shots, formed into something else, something that looked like a real film. I knew then and there that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, you know? I just fell in love with it. I’ve always loved movies. I just adore them. I live for movies. This is like a dream come true, to be able to make movies.
PopHorror: I love that you used to VCRs back to back to edit together your film. I never would have thought of that.
Ivan Kavanagh: Of course, this was way before the digital revolution, and we just didn’t have that kind of equipment accessible, you know? It was the only way to do it. It takes forever. You can’t be quite precise with it. And that timing of VHS, if you can figure it out how far it goes back so you don’t overlap with the next shot. It worked quite well, but it was really, really time consuming and difficult.
PopHorror: The first time you got to use professional equipment must have been amazing for you.
Ivan Kavanagh: Oh! It just transformed my life. I remember back in the mid-’90s, I got a bank loan, and I bought a new computer and a digital camera and a bunch of other stuff, and I made a mad movie studio, you know? And then I went on to shoot three feature films with that equipment. People don’t remember now, but it was such a revolution to have access to that equipment. Before that, you had to go beg, cap in hand, to these production companies, and they would charge you a fortune.
PopHorror: Imagine how hard it was back when they had to physically snip the film with a pair of scissors.
Ivan Kavanagh: Amazing! You say that, but I shot my first feature film on 16mm, and I edited it on an old anheuser myself. That was quite an experience. I never finished it, but it was still amazing. Wow! 16mm film…
PopHorror: I would call your newest film, Son, a horror film. And it wasn’t your first. You’ve also done The Canal and Never Grow Old, both of which were period pieces. Is creating historical films another passion of yours?
Ivan Kavanagh: The historical stuff is because I love to research. That’s almost my favorite part of it, you know? For The Canal, for example, I went to London to visit the British Film Institute. I spent days looking through cans and cans of old films from 1898 to about 1900. I just soaked up the atmosphere of them, you know? I wanted to recreate the look of those films. Then, what I did was, I tracked down an old movie camera from 1916, and I ran some 35mm film through it, and I was able to capture the look of those films.
Then, with the Western, I did so much research for that film. I collected thousands of photographs. I made sure that every costume was authentic. I really, really went out of my way to get that authentic look.
With the period stuff, it’s the authenticity and the attention to detail is what I love, you know? I love controlling every aspect of the film. Every color in the film, every painting, every prop is handpicked by me. It’s all to add to the atmosphere of any given scene. Historical stuff allows you to do that more than anything else. You get to recreate the past in your own way. You get to make your own vision of the past, which is really beautiful, you know?
PopHorror: I love that, for Never Grow Old, you didn’t go with the standard dry, dusty spaghetti Western town. You brought in the realism of the mud. It’s little things like that that make a film stand out.
Ivan Kavanagh: I love that as well. That was the thing that really struck me from the photographs of those times. I looked at a lot of photographs from places like Nebraska. You see those people, and they’re sinking in mud. Their faces are covered in it. It looks like it was such a hard, harsh life, you know? We’re used to seeing in most Western movies that everything is desert. But I wanted a very muddy look to the film, something that resembled those old photographs.
PopHorror: That was one of my favorite aspects for Never Grow Old, watching the wagon wheels slip and the horses hooves sink into the mud.
Ivan Kavanagh: It was a nightmare to shoot in all that mud. We had to dig the horses out of it every day (laughs). We all had to be hosed down at the end of the day. Oh, it was a nightmare! But totally worth it.
PopHorror: Despite making him slog through all that mud in Never Grow Old, you got Emile Hirsch [read the PopHorror interview with Emile Hirsch] to come back again for Son.
Ivan Kavanagh: Emile’s great. At the end of Never Grow Old, we enjoyed the experience of working together so much that he said, “Hey, if you have anything else, keep me in mind. I’d love to work with you again.” And I said, “Well, in fact, I’m doing this next,” and I handed him the script for Son. He was really, really struck by the part of Paul because he’d never played anything like that before. He just relished it. Paul isn’t so sure; he seems like he’s out of his depth. He seems to nice to be this detective, you know? Emile just loved that. I think he’s great. I love working with him. I’m hoping we can work together again.
PopHorror: I did notice that [in Son], he doesn’t play the hero. His character is set back, almost secondary, behind the scenes.
Ivan Kavanagh: He usually plays these confident hero-types. I think it was just as refreshing for him as it was for me for him to play someone who was unsure of himself. I think he did really great. He really showed the vulnerable side of himself. This was something he did in the Western as well.
PopHorror: I totally agree. It was great seeing that side of him. When you wrote the script for Son, you brought in cults and religion and demons, which is a bit of a changeup from the historical pieces. What made you go in that direction?
Ivan Kavanagh: I wanted to keep the audience guessing all the way through wondering if Andi’s [Matichak] character was really insane or if was what she was seeing all true, or was it all a nightmare that we were watching. And the way to do that is to use something that seems like it’s been ripped from the conspiracy theory headlines. You read about them all the time. There are these secret cults that are running the world. And there may be truth to some of them, perhaps. But I wanted to put that in so the audience would immediately think that this was too fantastical. Maybe she is crazy.
The way I constructed the rest of the film after that was to put the audience inside her head so they see what she sees. Then in the next scene, another character will tell her that what she’d just seen was, in fact, not real. She’s insane, you know? The whole idea with the whole cult and following and stuff like that was to try to and fool the audience.
And really, Mississippi, where we shot the film, was a really big influence on the look and the feel of the film as well. I’m from Ireland, and we have a religious history of Protestant and Catholics that’s very deep-rooted. In the last few years, it’s become more secular, although I’m guessing that people still believe in God and go to church. But when I went to Mississippi, I realized that so many of the people there… there’s so much faith. They live and breath their religion. I suppose if you believe in God, you have to believe in the Devil, too. Down there, a lot of them believe that these demons and devils are real things. That and the look and the feel of decay in Mississippi you felt in the film as well, you know? So there was a combination of things that made me want to explore even more into the cult thing.
PopHorror: That reminds me… I just talked to another filmmaker, Chad Crawford Kinkle [read the PopHorror interview with Kinkle], who made a movie called Jug Face.
Ivan Kavanagh: Oh, I love Jug Face! I just watched it on Shudder recently.
PopHorror: I love that movie! And he told me that down south in communities like that, there are people who really make those face jugs. It’s an actual thing.
Ivan Kavanagh: That’s a really weird coincidence. I usually go on Shudder and just randomly click on something, and I clicked on Jug Face, and I really, really liked it. It has a great atmosphere. It’s a really unusual film, you know?
PopHorror: It is! I’m so excited that you like it, too. So David, the character of the little boy in Son, he was just a normal little kid. He so easily could have been like the kid in Brightburn, creepy and weird from the beginning. But David is not. He talks about and does things any 8-year-old kid really does, like ask his mom questions like, “If you had 8 arms, would you hide them beneath your shirt, or would you let them out for everyone to see?” I love that he was like that, because that’s another way to make the audience second guess what was really going on in his mother’s head.
Ivan Kavanagh: That’s another thing I had in mind from the very beginning. I didn’t want him to be Damian from The Omen. I wanted the audience to love him and therefore conflicted on whether they should be following him. It’s not his fault, what he may be. No matter what happens, it’s not his fault. He’s half his mother, and his mother is good. She’s faced trauma in her life and all that stuff, but she’s a good person deep down. Even at the end of the film, he’s still half his mother. I think it was crucial that he needed to be a real kid and that he needed to be likable. You needed to love him and care for him. You needed it for the film to work and to understand why Laura was doing the things she was doing. She was trying to protect her son who was just this lovable kid, you know? You don’t want to see him in pain.
PopHorror: I love the strength of the relationship between them. You can really feel the love they have for one another. Sometimes in genre films, the love between parents and children is implied but not shown, or the parents or the kids are just secondary characters that aren’t really a part of the story. They’re just there as set pieces. But in Son, mother and child would lie in bed together, and she would hold his hand against her face. It’s little things like that that make you think, “I understand where she’s coming from.”
Ivan Kavanagh: I’m glad that came across. That’s great. The way we achieved that was through casting to find the right kid. We spent months casting kids before we found Lucas [David Blumm]. He was just so natural on camera. There was no difference between on camera and off camera for him. He’s got talent. He’s just so natural. He’s the anthesis of the usual movie kid. He’s a real breath of fresh air. And then when I saw the chemistry between him and Andi, it was just amazing. They got on so well.
And then I do a lot of prep with actors. I give them all a complete character history before we even begin. They know everything about their characters from the moment they were born to the moment the films starts. And we also workshop all of these scenes between mother and son, so the relationship and bond had already formed before we even began. That was crucial. I think when you’re dealing with a subject that is as fantastical as demons and devils and the supernatural, I think you need to ground your film in something in reality in order for the audience to go with it, you know?
PopHorror: What’s next?
Ivan Kavanagh: I’ve just finished writing an 8-part TV series called The Vanishing Triangle, which is set in Ireland in 1995. It’s a true crime series that I’m hoping will go into production this summer, and I just finished a feature film with Jon Bassoff called The Disassembled Man which is more of an elemental horror. That’s one I’m really excited about. It will be one of these projects.
We want to send a great big THANK YOU to Ivan Kavanagh for taking the time to chat with us. Be sure to check out our review of Son and pre-order your copy of the film on Amazon now!
Stay tuned for even more PopHorror horror news, reviews and interviews!
