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Welcome to the Projection Booth. I'm your host, Mike White. On this special episode, I'm talking with Stephen McDonald LaBelle all about his twenty twenty four film Head Like a Hole, recently played at the Boston Underground Film Festival. Had a great time seeing it, and I imagine you will too kind of a slow burned black and white horror film has a lot of heart and a lot of entertainment. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you
enjoyed the interview. Can you tell me how did you get involved in filmmaking?
So it's a very long path. Both my parents are One of their best friends is Tibor Tacis, who directed The Gate, a Seminole Canadian satanic panic horror movie, and being quite proud out of their friend, they showed it to me at a very young age, and from that moment onward, I was a huge genre fan. I'd go to my local video store, the Club Internasty Nowlex at
that point I lived in Quebec. I mean I would look at all the incredibly well designed covers for all these genre films of the era, and I just, like, you know, voraciously, just run through these. I was speed running as many horror movies as I could possibly get my hands on. And so I always loved genre film. But I always felt that filmmaking was something that was inaccessible to a certain degree. So I actually I went
to school for health scientists. I have like a pre med degree and then had been in a corporate environment, which is kind of the basis for this movie a little bit, and being largely unhappy with that experience. But I was sat next to a wonderful coworker named Lisa Choi and her husband is a commercial director, and she was like, you love movies, Like, why don't you just like try this out? This is clearly not environment for you. You're
incredibly unhappy right now, and I know it. So I went to I paid on this commercial and I was basically putting VFX track markers on a green screen that it was for like a wine commercial, and it was the most fun I ever had, and I at that point knew that this is the path that I wanted to go on. So it's been a very very long path from kind of like that point A to where I am now point B, and hopefully I have multiple points to go from here. But you know type of tala accidens.
Well, tell me about some of those earlier films that you were making, some of the shorts that you did.
I grew up pretty poor, so I've always been interested
in exploring socioeconomics with what I'm working on. So I made an erotic thriller short called a Ruby, which is about an agrophobic woman who is kind of like in financial dire straits, much like the main character of this feature, I decides to become like a phone sex operator to both like explore herself but also just to be kind of like gainfully employed, and she quickly realizes that she likes this as like a vocation, but unfortunately her downstairs neighbor,
who's completely enamored with her, kind of insinuates himself into that situation. I'd actually love to do a feature about it, but that again down the road. And I made another short called you Don't Want Me Here, which I've dubbed kind of like a gentrification horror movie, which is like Burnt Offerings in a sense that it's about a home that almost has like a biological haunting and it decays
almost it's fed people to rejuvenate itself. So the owner kind of like lures in unhoused folks with the premise of like housing and then dispatches them to rejuvenate his home. I do have a feature script for that, and I'd love to do that as well, and I have like a few other projects as well, but I think that would go on forever if I just kind of like kept rambling about you mean, tell.
Me about you're a writer. I'm head like a whole.
My corrider is Mitchell Burrell, who is a longtime friend, and we discovered that we work creatively quite well together. There's like a level of like I don't want to see like brutal honesty because it we're never like mean to one another, but there's work quite sensitive towards what works and doesn't work. It doesn't work, and we will be very clear with one another but what that is. So we've been wanting to do something for a while.
He produced the short that I had just mentioned, you don't want Me here, and we worked incredibly well together. We have almost different sides of the brain. He has like kind of like the assistant director structure, you know, keeping the train on the tracks kind of personality, and I have the weird ideas that he reigns in a touch to you know, make them palatable hopefully. So we kind of approached writing this in a similar way.
Where he was kind of the the structure of the house and I was filling it with as much as possible, and then together we worked on ensuring that there was like a cohesive vibe to each room within the house that we're building for the script.
I guess if that makes sense.
Well, tell me a little bit more about had like a whole as far as like, I mean, I think I know where the idea where it came from. You know, that corporate drudgery that you're talking about felt very very familiar. I think the black and white athetic works very well for that as well. But I mean, this is your first feature. That's got to be a major hurdle for you to jump.
So I grew up listening to like punk and hardcore, and there is so much of what I appreciate about that was that people would just kind of like pick up their instruments and play. And it wasn't necessarily about the technical precision. It's more of just like an attitude and trying to like communicate like a message and make
something that's like fun and engaging. The sad thing is it took me too long to kind of like extrapolate my love of that to filmmaking and to just say let's go and do this, Like I made this movie by myself, Like there was a location so hour course in myself and Mitch was therefore as many days as he could take off work to join for Otherwise, we
had like one day with the prosthetics team. So I knew it was going to be a lot going into it, but also knew that I had to do it because it'll just be like another year until I say, why don't we try this again, or try to find funding, or you know, years turn into decades and I then I just have never made anything. So I took the plunge knowing that it was going to be a tremendous amount of work, in an incredible amount of stress. My beard used to be black, it is now mostly gray.
My hair has faded and now shaped my head, So there's a tremendous amount of stress that has like kind of gone along with it. But I knew I had to do it. I love that you brought up the black and white because that wasn't an idea that we had going into the movie at all. I found that in post production there's something about it being in color that wasn't working for me, And sometimes you just just have to trust your intuition and augment what you're working with.
I posited, like, why don't we do black and white as a look for this movie. My partner Mitche is like, I don't think that's a great idea because it'll like eliminate a parcel of your audience. Potentially. There's people that just like won't watch black and white movies, and I was completely empathetic towards that, and I do think that some people won't check it out because of that, but
also it makes so much more sense. So we kind of went back and forth talking about it for a little while, and then when he saw it as a black and white movie, when I gave him like a rough I know there's no color, but a color grade for the movie, He's like, Okay, no, this is perfect, and I can't see it as being not black and white. That be said, I was kind of afraid people would think it was like a pretentious decision a little bit, and it's absolutely not, because I'm the least pretentious person
in the world. If anybody has known me, they wouldn't while at that criticism against me. It just made it feel otherworldly, like there's a certain kind of like junk fifties sci fi aspect to this that I think junk. I mean, like in the most nice way possible. I don't mean that derisively at all. That I think allows it to be understood in a similar context to a certain degree while still being its complete own thing. I
don't know how you feel about that. Did I miss anything in my long winded response.
No, I don't think so. I mean, it's just every movie gets made a different way, and I'm always curious as far as how that way gets done. And yeah, I love this whole DIY aesthetic where it's like, yeah, I got the camera, let's go. That also presents its own challenges as far as all right, scheduling, like when it comes to your actors, like how do you find
your actors and how do you deal with them? As far as is it one of these like Okay, we're shooting this weekend, make sure you you know, come by, but get your white shirt on.
That's not too far away from what happened, to be completely honest. The major difference is a sweet shot in a week straight, like seven days in a row, and kind of a mistake because I think the second day, I haven't told anybody that, You're the first person I've told that. At the end of the second day, I was like, oh my god, I made a mistake. I'm wasting everybody's time. This is off the rails and it's not going to work. I didn't tell Mitch this. I
kept it to myself. I didn't want to burden anybody with my fear that this was going to be an absolute dumpster fire. But to get back to the actors, like Mitch, who is the producer, who plays a very like small role of a mostly silent, kind of like auditor of the situation that the characters have found themselves in. I knew he would be available, would be able to take off x amount of like vacation days to fulfill his role. James only needed who's the our cold open character.
He plays the first researcher, even though it's not necessarily the first, but in the context of the movies, the first researcher heed. I did that in like an hour in my spare time. And then we have Jeff McDonald took place Emerson, who's the kind of overlord, main boss of the job that the main character Asher has found himself in. He's from la So we did a casting call for that role, and we've gotten some traction from some good people in like Ontario, which would have been great.
I would have stayed just having to pay for a plane ticket for somebody when we're have no money whatsoever to do this. But most of the individuals who responded could only do like I can only shore on the weekends, like basically what you had said, like, oh did you shoot some of the weekends, They couldn't do kind of like the format that we had wanted to shoot it in.
And then Jeff was just the most As soon as he did a line read when we did our our interview with him, it was just hurt like it felt perfect. There wasn't anything that I wanted to change. He came from stage acting, so I knew that there's this movie's like wal to wall dialogue, which you know, is a testament to his ability to be able to contain or his ability to memorize so much dialogue and just be able to deliver in the short, truncated shooting period that
we had with him. And then we of course have Eric Hansen, who plays Sam, who's the kind of the facilities manager, which is a funny title for somebody who was taking care of a bungalow with an ominous a hole in the basement that needs to be measured he was able to kind of like take as much time off as as were required for shooting. So it was just basically a lot of friends getting together to make
this thing who had the flexibility to do so. And then Jeff MacDonald who flew out for and just stayed
with me while we're shooting. This is a situation where we didn't have pas, so everybody was like it was just so people at the self drift to set normally, say like in Jeff's case, a huge in a normal movie, they would shoot their scenes, then go go off and go back, but like nobody could drive him, so we would just have to like hang out at the house while we're shooting the rest of the material that we've
scheduled for the day, which, you know, hats off. Thank you for not being super frustrated, Jeff mccald, if you listen to this, its very very kind of you two not make us feel like we were stupid. And I work professionally as like an editor, so I know pretty well what can cut together. So it just allowed us to move at such a quick clip that you don't really get to do with more traditional types of productions. I guess you.
Talked about that moment on the second day where you just thought, you know, this is going to be a disaster. How do you get past that.
We had so much invested in it? Like, this movie is made for thirteen thousand Canadian ten thousand American, with a big portion of that being our post production audio, which is a very expensive endeavor. So the actual making of this movie was way less than that it would have been, like say, we made the movie itself for
like seven thousand a US. But like, I'm not a well off person, like to Mitch, I don't want to see to his financial situation, but like it's a lot of money for us, and I couldn't let and I still suffer from imposter syndrome, as you can imagine. I think most creative people think that they don't deserve any attention that they get, and taking compliments is like quite
a difficult thing for a lot of folks. So you kind of just have to like swallow that feeling a little bit and keep going forward and understand and try to take like all the negative moments that can occur on set in Stride, for example, Thankfully nobody's come out saying they've noticed this yet, but our final sequence in our movie, keeping it spoiler free, but it relies on a prosthetics team coming in to do work on our It was our last day of shooting, knowing that it
was going to be a tremendous mess, so we don't want to have to clean it up and then be shooting in there the next day. It would just have been too much work. They canceled on us the night before we're supposed to shoot, and we have Jeff McDonald who's going to be flying back after this that we can't fly back for his scene, and he's a crucial component of this final scene. At that moment, I basically just took I asked everybody, I'm like, I'm gonna take
fifty minutes to myself. I'm just going to go and think about what's just happened and decide what to do. And it dramatically changed what our final sequence is going to be because the prosthetics could now have no overlap with Jeff McDonald's character in this sequence. So all of my ideas were essentially gone, and I just had to reinterpret the final scene in a different way, and we ended up shooting that's the other portion of that sequence A year heart so that the final sequence has a
year's shooting gap in between it. Because they at first the company had offered a very like like it was a very like I don't understand why anybody would lie about these kind of circumstances. But they're like, oh, my father had passed away and I I can't come to set. I was like, I completely understand, don't worry about it, we'll figure it out. We then a reschedule with the same provider. And this is a paid roll, by the way, Like, this isn't somebody who's coming out and doing it for free.
This is a Our budget was dedicated towards this. We rescheduled a day and confirmed that this was going to work with them, and they said yes, and then they canceled again. We shot in September. The makeup date I think was in May, and then we had to find a company that would agree to do it, and we
ended up shooting it in September of the following year. Essentially, the fact that it cuts together is just like wild to be, but like that's an example of kind of how hard it is to do things on your own and trying to roll with the situations that are constantly you know, coming at you, I suppose.
So what are you doing in the meantime between that year, Is that when you're doing most of your post production.
Yeah. I had started editing the film and was putting everything together and just like desperately trying to like coul jewel somebody into doing the prosthetics for it. We'd been talking to somebody, but they kept They're more involved with like actual like union film productions and things of that sort, so they're quite busy. They're like, we can maybe do time here, And whenever I it would get towards that timeframe and I'd try to schedule something with them, it
would just be radio silence. So there's a lot of like wasted time trying to figure out if they would come. And then we found this other company called Locked in the Cellar, which is a local company, and agreed to do it, and we're happy to do it for the budget that we had. I tried to do it a smart way because the prosthetics that were required. I smartly tried to reduce the application areas creatively, and I think people once they watched the movie will kind of understand
what I mean by that. But they were absolutely wonderful to deal with and kind of made all the awful feelings associated with trying to get this sequence finished go away in that moment and it just kind of worked out.
Would it be accurate to say that some of those short films that you had made helped prepare you for this feature and just overcoming some of those weird adversities.
Oh for sure. So I mean understanding like coverage, and my editing work also helped me prepare for that as well, but like understanding like what I need from a scene to shoot at the bare minimum, because like, when you're shooting with such a narrow time frame, you don't have time to get as much coverage as as you would like. You know, it's going to be what's our creative looking
medium shot and what are our close ups? And you don't get too much in between those coverage points, sadly, but you just make it work and hopefully with our limited coverage it doesn't appear limited. That's the goal anyways. So that's your call, I suppose as well, if you're like kind of shows a little bit.
I thought it looked fantastic and I never would have known that there was a year gap in some of those shots, but that you have at the end of this it looks completely cut together, very very naturally.
When it came together, I just felt like such a a sense of relief. And when we were going to this might be jumping ahead, but going to like Boston Underground Film Festival was such an absolute dream. Like when I got the email that they had accepted us, you n actually think like, oh, this is an accident. So
to that did I guess? This is an incorrect email, and I'm gonna get a email that says, sincere, apologies, we did not mean to include you, but it was a real request, which is insane for me, a problematic language.
I apologized, but like it just felt like surreal to be included in such a great festival, and then to see the other films programmed, you kind of feel like the little kid looking up at the grown up movies to a stander green because they have budgets and they look great, and you know, you have Nicholas Cage in The Surfer, you have Ethan Embery and Alan the Wolf. The Ugly Stepsister is such a great movie. I absolutely
love it. I went to that festival as a fan as well and watched as much as I could while I was there. Because you know I'm such a big genre fan, I've lost the threat of your question. I apologize.
I was asking you as far as overcoming adversity. Did you have the luxury while you were doing the post production of being able to show this to other people and get feedback or did you just because you are an editor, do you just know this is how it needs to be? And plus I don't imagine you had too much room to change anything.
No, so we didn't have an ability to like reshoot things. I mean, we technically could have, but I was I didn't feel that was necessary. To be honest, I was mostly happy with the performances and I figured I thought we had gotten the best of what we could have gotten, So I didn't feel a need to cut together this
thing within an inch of its life. In terms of feedback, we kind of just like operated as a team as well, Like the production team existed as like the post production sounding board as well, So I would send to them rough cuts are seen assemblies, and just like ask for general thoughts. And it did impact the editor a little bit, like there are some moments that were cut back for comedic effect. Is what I would say. I removed certain lines that I thought were like vis digital for the
scene and replace them with a look. And Asher's case, a lot of his main character is kind of just observing the absurdity of the situation that he's found himself in. And I've thought that there was like a few lines of dialogue that were like unnecessary and a good look will suffice. So there there was. I didn't send it out to a lot of folks. It was pretty much contained to within our bubble, and then the just trusted
my own intuition. And then there's a part of me that kind of appreciates like a bit of like a shaggy or movie. I know some people will say, oh, pacing issues, but I do feel like there's something to a kind of like more handmade movie. As we're on the like precipice of AI slop being fed to us, it's kind of nice to have something that's like obviously has a scar or a blemish. You know, it just looks handmade to a certain degree, but hopefully not amateurish.
That's the goal anyways, and people kind of like appreciate it or that almost to a certain degree. So I guess the answer would be, I use a lot of the tools I had in my editing toolkit, and then also gave myself the grace to allow things to maybe breathe a little bit more than I would have otherwise.
That makes sense, makes total sense. And yeah, when it comes to the pacing, I mean, you have to have that real balance to make it that that drudgery, that everyday drudgery. But yet things are happening slowly and just building, building, building, and I think you really accomplish.
That, Thank you so much. One of the major challenges was that this isn't a movie about resistance, so Steve's character Asher isn't active, which most screamers are, Like, what's the how is the character activating in this scene? What are they doing? The audience is to see them like activating all the time, you know, pushing the story forward. And I wanted most of the movie to happen to him. And at a certain point he's being paid well and taking up residence in a home so he doesn't have
to pay rent. He's more than well off at a certain point and could leave, but chooses to stay because it's comfortable. He's a very inactive character. And I wanted it to still feel somehow exciting to the audience, and I thought that was a quite a hurdle to get over. But as we were putting together the movie, I was like, I think this works. Whether or not it ultimately works will be the audience's decision, so we'll see.
Yeah, I think it totally works. It reminded me of some of the best parts of like Lost or I haven't watched Severance, but just from what the feel of Severance I get, but especially that whole theme and Lost of Desmond with the numbers that he has to punch in and he has no idea what is going on with that, but he has to do, and then it has to be done at the same time every day, and just that type of what is this as well
as the of that kind of thing. I think that really comes out and head like a hole.
Yeah, Severn's came out I think either before or after we shot. The scripts finished and we shot, and then the season came out, and I was like, this is exactly the vibe of like what I would look for in a TV show. I haven't watched the second season yet, so its spoiler free, but I'm looking forward to checking
it out and it felt perfect. Also as a huge fan of Loss as well, I love just a like compelling mystery that we can explore with a story that doesn't ultimately answer everything, and it has like more thematic importance than it does strict like narrative importance. I would say almost, so, I mean that could potentially frustrate some viewers, but I do think that it's messaging. I don't think I'm a subtle person. I think I said during our Q and a for the movie at Boston that it's
about as subtle as a sledgehammer. A lot of the themes in the movie, which also could potentially turn off some viewers, but I do think there's a lot of different interpretations with how people interact with capitalism in general. I saw on a review recently that Samoo was comparing it to the environmental impact of working like you wish that you can kind of like work and exist with doing as little damage to the world as possible. I was like, that's such a wonderful like take. In reading
of the movie. That wasn't my intention whatsoever. It was to a certain degree, but not like in an ecological sense, and just to see people reacting to it intelligently with their own readings has been so reaffirming, and it's made me feel like I didn't engage in folly for a year through my life. Putting this together was.
The boss soll Underground Film Festival was that the first time you get to see this with an audience.
No, So we premiered at Another Hole in the Head at a prop really titled film festival. It's out in San Francisco. Yeah, I had submitted there just before they're submissions had ended. When we just received our sound mix and I got an EML back like, oh my god, I love your movie. Can you can we play it? But I was like, yeah, of course he didn't realize it was a world premiere, so I think he might
have like programmed it up in the festival. We ended up closing the festival, which is very very cool, But we ended up winning the staff favorite Feature out of that festival, which is very very kind of Georgian's team. And that was I think December of twenty twenty four, and then we had submitted to an assortment of like our spring festivals, and so Boston became our East Coast premiere.
So what is the next festival for this.
It's part of Panicfest in Kansas City. It's one of the virtual screenings, so I think those are accessible April third to the sixth, if I'm correct. We're going to be at Salem horror Fest Saturday, May third at four thirty pm. We're really looking forward to that festival because great programming, great great folks. They came to Boston and introed my movie there, which I love, like two film communities kind of like high fiving. It feels like so
like warm and welcoming. From my perspective, I have to say, like the Boston crowd is is truly like there's something in the water. It's like the nicest folks with like the most unique like perspective. The response that the crowd gave to this film was, you know what, with humor, you're always wondering, like, oh, what's my success rate going to be with like this crowd? And it was like near one hundred percent, Like it was very reaffirming, you're very kind.
Oh that's wonderful as it should be because I know I definitely, you know, clicked with this movie and I wasn't sure at first the black and white might have scared me off a little bit, but no, totally didn't. Just kidding. I have no problem with black and white, of course, but yeah, no, that was It really clicked with me, and I'm glad that it clicked with the audience as well. That's fantastic. I know, like you know, you're gonna be playing festivals hopefully for a while. Here.
Is there a good place for people to keep up on that schedule and see if it's coming near them.
Yeah. So it doesn't have a web presence right now, but I have my personal Instagram which is Stefan Gallian, which is my first name, Stefan and the suffix of Evan Galian slam together. Any nerds out there will hopefully understand what that is. And then I also have Terminal Burrower of Films, which is my brand on Instagram for that as well. That will communicate future screenings. Otherwise, I
looked at the Skies. I suppose we do have distribution for us in Canada, so we will be out in early likely early twenty twenty six because we have festivals up until this year. I would love to release on Christmas if we could have, but I mean I might be too ambitious. I thought that would have been like very very funny. But we will have like a like the usual digital rental period, then you know, the Amazon streaming service, so this is and then end up where all wonderful movies go to be.
I love Doobie to Be's fantastic.
Yes, we will have a physical release. I like, I was very clear with what we're doing our contract negotiations. I'm like, we need to have a physical release, so that will for sure be around for folks who enjoyed the movie.
And you mentioned a couple of scripts that you already have ready. Do you have anything that you're going to start working on soon?
Yes? So I made a short called PK, which is about a parapsychologist investigating the veracity of somebody's claims that they have telekinesis a very like My Dinner with Entering and Hell is kind of the vibe that I was going for with that. So I'm making a feature script that is like very very different from that because I filmed that in like a day and put it out. I mean like did all of it and I think like three days and put it out was like a
Halloween short. So it's like very very unpolished and not to It's not as expansive expansive as I would have liked it to have been. But I'm going to be doing a feature about a similar premise done in a pseudo documentary fashion because I'm a huge fan of like Punishment Park, like the Peter Watkins movie, like Lake Mungo, like Blair Witch a two certain degree is presented as a documentary until it becomes their edited footage of them in the woods. But I think imagine a bit more
of like the interstitial institu interviews incorporated. That's kind of the format that it would be very similar tone, hopefully very very funny and also very very creepy as well. But it deals with like parasocial relationships and parapsychology, is what it been. That's my go to explanation for the project.
That sounds great. I can't wait to see it.
I do have a bunch of scripts. Like I didn't really want to direct originally, I just wanted to write. So I've been writing since, like I I was like twenty five scrip So I have like literally a I don't want to say a drawer full because they exist on a hard drive. But you kind of know what I mean.
Yeah, yeah, we don't put things in drawers anymore. I think we just put them, put them in the cloud, or put them someplace where hopefully we can find them at some point.
The digital ether. Yeah.
Well, Stefan, thank you so much for your time. This is so great connecting with you and talking with too.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. Like, when you make a no budget movie, you kind of like you're curious as to like where it will go and like if anybody will care or if anybody will take the time to amplify your voice. So you taking the time to do this means like the world and I really appreciate it.
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