Interview with ‘VelociPastor’ Director Brendan Steere

Without a doubt, The VelociPastor (2018 – our review here) has been one of the biggest surprise breakout success stories of this year, and deservedly so. The wildly hilarious tale about a prehistorically supercharged priest kicking ass and fighting crime is easily one of the most ludicrously fun film experiences horror has seen in ages.

I enjoyed it so much, there was no way I could pass up an opportunity to chat via email with the man behind the madness, director Brendan Steere, and I’m so glad I did. In addition to being sharp, witty, and funny, he’s also incredibly down to earth and humble, and a very film savvy gent, and made for a thoroughly enjoyable interview. Check it out!

PopHorror:  Thank you so very much for taking the time to chat with us, Brendan! Why don’t we start out by telling PopHorror readers a little about yourself.

Brendan Steere: Sure, no problem! I’m originally from Montana, moved to Pennsylvania when I was relatively young. I went to college in New York City at the School of Visual Arts where I shot my first feature Animosity. I lived in Paris and Berlin, but have subsequently settled in Los Angeles. I speak three languages and have a sick punk band.

PopHorror: Nice! As a fellow Pennsylvania-n, it’s hugely encouraging to see someone travel the world and make such a successful breakout. Did you always have a desire to be involved in film?

Brendan Steere: Heyyyyyy, PA-proud! It sounds like a joke, but when I was very little, I very earnestly wanted to be a paleontologist. I read every academic text I could on dinosaurs – I’m not even sure how much of it I was honestly taking in at like ten years old, but it just seemed like this crazy store of knowledge that I wanted in my head. I’m the kind of person that does a lot of wiki-dives late at night just because all of a sudden I’m curious about the governmental system of The Netherlands or whatever (it’s a constitutional monarchy!).

Eventually, I realized that what I was ACTUALLY engaging with wasn’t “dinosaurs”, but Jurassic Park.  I got interested in movies more after that and started shooting them in my backyard for fun with my friends. When I was like 14 or so I saw Reservoir Dogs, and from that point, there was just no looking back: I HAD to be a film director. In preparation, I very carefully spent the next fifteen or so years cultivating no skills besides that. Haha.

PopHorror: Now, I haven’t actually seen your previous film Animosity (2013), but after watching the trailer, it has a considerably different tone than your current monster. What can you tell us about Animosity, and how was the experience making it?

Brendan Steere: Yeah, I can tell you from first-hand experience that Animosity and VelociPastor make a very odd double-feature. Haha! Animosity was my film school thesis, actually. I was one of only two students who went for a feature that year (because of hubris), but I figured that if we had the whole year to shoot something, it was crazy not to go for a feature, because I didn’t know when I’d have the opportunity to do so again. I probably learned more making Animosity than I have on any other film I’ve ever made, and one of those things was that people have to at least understand the pitch of your movie from its logline.

There’s a twist about halfway through the film that recontextualizes everything in the first 45 minutes, but you can’t put what the twist is in the logline, because it destroys the tension and mystery of the first half of the film. You can ask the audience to trust you, but since it was my first movie, like who the fuck was I to ask that? I definitely took that “pitchability” to heart for VelociPastor. I hope more people discover Animosity, even if just for Tracy Willet’s lead performance. She’s astonishing in the film, and I give her all the credit for that. I just pointed her in the right direction and let her go.

PopHorror: Transitioning from something as dark and serious as Animosity to the more lighthearted fun of VelociPastor, was it a hard switch to make? Do you prefer one style to the other?

Brendan Steere: No, I don’t think it was hard. I think one of my weird, defining traits as a human being is that this very light and sweet humor can coexist with this very sincere darkness and cynicism. It’s present in all my art: even my short films oscillate wildly between being these silly romps about demons and Lord of the Rings fanfiction and very deadly serious examinations of the human soul. The same holds true in my music. I have no idea why. It’s just who I am, I guess: the real Brendan is somewhere in that odd dichotomy.

I think you just have to approach each project from the best angle for the material, and let it stand on its own. Soderbergh has a really good way of doing that too, in my opinion – it’s harder to draw directorial through-lines in his work because he’s so committed to the material first and foremost. I have no preference of style. I love both of them for different reasons.

PopHorror: So, let’s talk dinosaurs. It’s been quite the journey for VelociPastor, from fortuitous autocorrect mistake, to a wildly successful YouTube trailer, to a colossal fully-realized feature film. How surreal is it taking it all in?

Brendan Steere: I still haven’t wrapped my mind around it, honestly. A fan from Oregon who owns a sex shop sent us VelociPastor butt plugs yesterday as a gift, so I had to wake up this morning with the knowledge that my art moved someone so deeply that they just had to put it on a butt plug. That’s the very definition of surreal. Haha!

PopHorror: I’m sure you’d love to have a review or interview where Sharknado doesn’t come up, but this, unfortunately, isn’t the one. How difficult is it avoiding those comparisons? I think campiness and fun aside, they’re two completely different films. Was it important for you to forge a unique identity with VelociPastor?

Brendan Steere: I’ll say that not only did we know going in we’d be compared, but we actively took lessons from the Sharknado films to try and forge the identity. I like Sharknado just fine, but it’s far from my favorite movie, and in my opinion, it was because after the initial 15 or so minutes the silliness wore off, and I didn’t have anything to grab onto. I didn’t care for any of the characters, they weren’t doing anything interesting from a filmmaking perspective… it just felt like they didn’t love it.

Maybe that’s totally unfair – I’ve never met anyone who worked on a single Sharknado film, so for all I know they’re really personal passion projects like VelociPastor was, but I don’t get that impression. It comes across as a very “people will click on this”, and while VelociPastor shares at least that part of the “clickbait film” DNA, I wanted to make the film from a place of celebration, not cynicism. And ‘cynical’ is how a lot of the Asylum films come across to me. Sure they make ‘purposefully bad movies’, but the tenor is always very “Fuck these dumb movies, right???” I explicitly wanted to avoid that. I didn’t want to do celebrity stunt casting, I didn’t want to do bad CGI, I didn’t want to make puerile sex jokes, because those things were always the aspects of bad movies I didn’t enjoy. I wanted to tap into the things I loved about them instead: the jankiness of the low-budget, the fun monster costumes, the absurd scope and aspirations of the plots, people being genuinely creative in the pulp-format periphery. That’s what attracted me to these films in the first place, so that’s what I emphasized in VelociPastor, and I was confident that by basic virtue of that, we’d stand out. If we genuinely loved the film making it, I thought that it was possible the audience would love it as well.

So far it seems to have worked. See again: butt plugs.

PopHorror: Stylistically, VelociPastor definitely has a very strong grindhouse/exploitation film vibe. I also pick up some noir film elements, and some of the very vivid uses of color and gore calls to mind the classic Italian horror and giallo movies. Am I completely off base or over-analyzing things here? What were some of your biggest influences film-wise?

Brendan Steere: Giallo for sure! In the sex scene of VelociPastor, I explicitly told my cinematographer to “Give me Suspiria“. I love those films, Argento, Fulci, both Bavas… one of the most fun screenings for me was when we got to screen in Italy. Smack-talking the church takes on a whole different connotation over there. Haha!

I’m not sure if this comes through, but I’m a huge fan of East Asian cinema. The Japanese were doing really incredible things in the late 60s/early 70s with their pinku and horror films, and I watched a lot of them in preparation for VelociPastor, the most notable of which was probably Goke: Body Snatcher from Hell and Hausu. A lot of Hong Kong kung-fu and Korean thriller films, too. I recently got into the Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion films on Shudder and my lord – I wish I’d seen them before VelociPastor. They’re just brimming with visual ideas. They’re swinging for the fences and being creative when they don’t have to, in ways that have no connection at all to the “marketable elements” of the movies, and I absolutely love it.

Two other, eternal influences that I don’t think come across are the two anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion and FLCL (or Fooly Cooly). Evangelion is my favorite franchise of all time (eat it, Marvel), and it’s influenced my editing style since pretty much day one. FLCL was a huge inspiration for how to approach the music in the film.

PopHorror: One of the things I love most about this film is I find new things to laugh at every time I watch. Some of the jokes are blatantly obvious, but there are also some more subtle touches here and there. Do you prefer a particular comedic delivery, or like a solid blend of both?

Brendan Steere: I think it depends on the joke! There are a million things that can be funny in a movie like this (bad dialogue, technical mistake, insane plot twist, hammy acting, etc), and they all have a slightly different angle of attack in my opinion. The basic recipe for a joke is that it’s an “absurd reversal of an expectation”, so sometimes that can be accomplished by letting a boom mic drift into a shot, or leaving in a take where Greg walks into a tree-like a dummy. Haha!

Comedy is also super subjective – so I think it’s just approaching it however you yourself find it funny. There’s not a single joke that stayed in the film that I didn’t personally laugh at in editing, so my own opinion was my basic litmus test on that front.

PopHorror: Without giving away TOO many spoilers, one of the funniest scenes to me is the Vietnam flashback that doesn’t really connect to the story at all. Altair isn’t even a part of the flashback as Father Stewart implies. Could I get you to elaborate on the thought process behind that scene?

Brendan Steere: Oh, you mean the sequence that is somehow my greatest filmmaking triumph? Haha!

Well, remember those ‘backyard movies’ I talked about making with my friends as a kid? For whatever reason, my family had these old toy muskets, and a lot of those childhood films would be war movies because it was pretty much our one prop. The Vietnam sequence in VelociPastor was kind of my last chance to make one of those dumb childhood movies I loved so much about “the horrors of war”, but from the perspective of someone who has obviously never been within a thousand miles of active combat. The joke of it to me is that it’s like this bizarrely innocent vision of what war is that’s trying to be “edgy” and have a “message”, just like the films I made when I was 14.

Also, and of paramount importance to me: it was really god damn funny. I loved the idea of giving Father Stewart some reason to have joined the church, so I just chased the comedy of it. Two bits of trivia about that scene: 1) It’s the only scene I make sure I watch at every screening because it’s my favorite and 2) The monologue that “Ali Your Wartime Buddy” gives in it is lifted almost wholesale from White Christmas. Yes, that White Christmas. My family watches it every year. I adapted the monologue for the actor the night before shooting because I just wanted to see if he’d realize it.

PopHorror: The VelociPastor definitely pokes fun at religion and religious stereotypes, but never in an irreverent or disrespectful way. Were you raised religious in any way?

Brendan Steere: No, not in the slightest. I dated a Christian girl for six years and attended church with her on Easter and Christmas because I knew it made her happy, but that’s about it in terms of my spiritual education.

PopHorror: The film has gotten such a staggeringly rabid response, from fans and fellow filmmakers alike. How surprising has this wildly positive reception been?

Brendan Steere: In a word: very. I always knew there was an audience for the film – I figured we’d get distribution from someone, somewhere – but never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that it would reach the heights it has, and from everywhere all at once. At the very least, I figured that it would be harder to play abroad because the title of the film is an English pun, but by God that hasn’t seemed to stop it for even one second.

On the one hand, the attention is very humbling, and on the other, it’s one hell of a powerful vindication for having worked on and believed in the film for so long. I couldn’t be happier.

PopHorror: The ending definitely leaves plenty of room for a sequel. Could we dare to hope for a VelociPastor 2?

Brendan Steere: Oh hell yeah. I’d love to return to this weirdness. I just love the permissibility of the world: a VelociPastor movie is a movie that has to surprise you with its weird twists and hard left turns. If you want to make a sequence a musical for no reason, you can! Why not? With so many more serious films I’ve written you have to make sure you’re laying narrative track correctly, that everything makes logical sense and could happen in reality, that it’s not tonally confusing… in short, you have to do the un-fun stuff. VelociPastor is about “smash cut to fun”, all the time. I love that kind of freedom in a script.

I’m not sure if it’ll be what I do next, but I certainly want to make it at some point, if I can secure a budget to do so.

PopHorror: So, what is next for you? Anything exciting on the horizon?

Brendan Steere: I just finished my first feature script for myself since VelociPastor four days ago, and I’ve sent it to friends to read and give notes on. I don’t know if that’s what I’ll make next either, but I can tell you that it’s a disturbing found-footage horror film called “Montana“.

It could not be more tonally separate from VelociPastor if it tried. Maybe think more along the lines of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist or The House That Jack Built. I love Von Trier’s movies, so this comes as no surprise to me, but I’m sure it would be for a lot of people who jumped on board with VP.

I chose it because it was the one story idea I had that scared me with its content – I had never attempted to write anything that tiptoed into ‘extreme horror’, and I wanted to see what was behind that proverbial door. ‘A really bad time’, it turns out. I think it’ll freak a lot of people out. I can’t wait to make it.

PopHorror: Thank you again, Brendan! Anything else you’d like to add, places people can follow you online, etc.?

Brendan Steere: Thank you! If people are interested, they can follow me on Twitter @brendansteere and they can follow the film @thevelocipastor! I run both accounts so feel free to come and hang out! I also have an Instagram under the same names if you want to come see pictures of my cat. His name is Cheddars. There’s a small percentage chance that he is immortal, I think. You’ll have to follow social media to find out.

Thank you so much again to Brendan for chatting with us! The VelociPastor is available now on both DVD and Blu-ray from Wild Eye Releasing, as well as most VOD services, definitely be sure to check it out! And for more on Brendan, you can follow him online and on social media at the links above. Keep it tuned right here to PopHorror.com for the latest in horror and pop culture news, reviews, and interviews!