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| Laura Niils and Karl Ilves in Chainsaws Were Singing Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival |
Sander Maran is in a buoyant mood when we connect at the Fantasia International Film Festival, and well he should be. After ten years of hard work, he has finally completed his first feature film, and it’s certainly distinctive. Though not the first movie musical about cannibalism, Chainsaw Were Singing is a lively affair which delivers its own take the Texas Chain Saw Massacre mythology whilst delivering action, drama and romance into the bargain, all accompanied by heartfelt and surprisingly upbeat songs.
“Oh, by the way, this is Peeter,” he says, introducing me to the young man beside him – his little brother. “He's the kid in the film with the crossbow. Right now he's 23, but he was twelve then.”
Peeter look excited to be there, but takes a back seat as Sander explains how the film came about.
“I've been a film buff all my life, so I like mixing all the genres together,” he says, adding that he was particularly inspired by Trey Parker’s Cannibal: The Musical. “Plus there's this sort of an exploitation element to just putting fun stuff into the scene so that you know that you can entertain the viewers no matter what, so basically every scene has something going for it that isn't just drama.
“If I'm being honest here, I don't know anything about filmmaking. I'm faking it, so it's all an illusion. I just felt that it needed this balance between different visuals. Whenever I watch a movie, I get visually bored, so I stimulate the eyes as well as the mind.”
His career in film has been unusually eclectic, including work in sound, acting, direction, VFX, production and more, so when it came to this film he took on a lot of different roles.
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| Always take precautions with your partner Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival |
“I wrote it. I wrote the songs and shot most of it. We had a bunch of people behind the camera. It was like whoever's hands were available and not covered with blood would take the camera over. And then on our film shoot, we had like 15 people or something. We shot the thing, but it just so happened that we didn't have a budget for post production, so I ended up doing the editing, the sound design and the music orchestration. I learned from scratch. And then the VFX and the colour correction. That's how we got to ten years. It was never part of the plan.”
“It was just, who else was going to do it?” Peeter puts in. “Just to clarify, that ten years, it wasn't like he was doing it on the side or something. He had full work days, every working day. It was a constant effort.”
I ask him what it was like to star in the film, even in a small role. “Oh, it was really cool,” he says. “I mean, I was a kid, but still I had fun. I played in Sanders brothers short movies since I was eight, I think, or five or something. It was really cool, especially because our other brother was also there, and for me, it was just like brothers doing cool stuff.”
“It's kind of fun,” says Sander. “You know how there's laws when you bring children on the set? They can only work two hours or something. So you use your little brother, and it's going to be fine. My mom gave us permission, so he would just be there for like, ten hours or something. He was having a terrific blast climbing on trees and stuff when we weren't shooting.”
They also had fun with the special effects.
“We did some horror short films before, and we took the time to craft that aspect of it, coming up with visual gags and doing stuff with the hoses and blood, the special effects. So it was sort of a fascination of ours. The guy responsible for the blood and gore effects was actually the guy from the famous chainsaw ass image, if you've seen that picture, and he was a total blast. He's also one of the producers. But, yeah, we wanted to make sure that we didn't disappoint the viewers who were coming for gore – as well, as, of course, the ones who were coming for musical stuff. We wanted to make sure that the songs worked. Plus we were really intent on, if we were going to make a comedy, it had to be funny. I've seen so many comedies that call themselves comedies because they're just not serious. They're just going around, but they don't make the audience laugh.
“The thing about comedy and horror is that if it sucks, it's kind of funny, and if it's good, it's also funny, so it works either way. But, yeah, the balance between so good it's good and so bad it's good is a delicate one. It’s a fine line. A huge inspiration for us was Manborg.”
I mention that I just spoke to its director, Steven Kostanski, who is also at the festival, promoting new film Frankie Freako, but he says they haven’t managed to meet. We go to talk about the Chainsaws Were Singing cast.
“It was sort of a magical summer in that people were just ready and open to do this stuff,” he says. “Our next summer wouldn't have worked. Most of the cast was just people I knew. I knew the twins personally. They were mates of mine from university, and so that's why they ended up in the movie. And the main character, Tom [played by Karl Ilves], he's one of my long time friends, and also we've collaborated many times before, so he got the starring role, and a couple of other actors I just knew personally. We found Laura Niils from casting. She was amazing.
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| Double trouble from the twins Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival |
“Some of the actors were characters but most of them came up just to die on screen, so we called them kills.”
I tell him that I liked Laura’s work and the way her role was developed because, in keeping with the films theirs is responding to, her character has to be kidnapped, but she still gets plenty to do and plenty of opportunity to fight.
“The main thing is that I wanted to have the main female character to be an interesting character,” he says. “Also, I would say that I don't think there's any strong male characters in the film at all. It's basically a face-off between the good female character and the bad one, which is the mother character. So yeah – but in the basement, I was like, ‘Okay, she's going to be tied up here. What can we do? Oh, let's make it a musical number. That would make sense. Oh, let's put a cute rat in it so that will keep the audience entertained.’ It's all just exploitation stuff here.”
I remark that rats were beautiful. Were they somebody's pets?
“They were mine,” says Peeter. “I had pet rats when I was a child. I loved them. They didn't sing though. That was all special effects.
“Sander has another short movie called Curiosity Kills – it's on YouTube - where I play as well. That's all about a killer rat. It's from 2012.”
Sander nods. “It was one of our first student projects and he acted. I think he was ten in that one. It was one of the first projects that we got to international film festivals. And so that did sort of well. So we figured, okay, we could try maybe making a feature.”
This does not mean that the rats in Chainsaws Were Singing were experienced actors, he clarifies.
“Those were his personal rats. The rat that we used for the short film was called Guillermo and we borrowed him from the zoo.”
They talk further about their influences.
“There’s The Evil Dead,” says Sander. “There's a reference there with the swinging chair. And Peter Jackson's Braindead is one of my all time favourites. Obviously I've seen a lot of horror movies. I actually worked through the 1001 films to see before you die. That's why I ended up loving genre movies, because once you see about 600 serious dramas from Europe. You're sort of, ‘Okay, I'm done with this.’
“I grew up making short films, so the mentality is that you have to have an introduction, a development, and then the culmination. And we shot most of the scenes here that way as well. But when we started putting it together, it didn't make sense because you have to keep the momentum going. So we ended up deleting every introduction and culmination, just kept the middle part of every scene, and that's how the story ended up flowing better.
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| Wild men of the woods Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival |
“Trey Parker trained us in the way that his whole thing was that if you have a song, it has to be integrated into the film so that you can't remove it or otherwise the story doesn't make sense. So all of the songs had to be about something and had to have these points to them or a joke. There are musicals where there's the plot, then a musical number happens, and basically you're on pause. I didn't want that to happen. So, yeah, every character got a musical part.
“I loved doing the medley part, which is from Les Miserables and South Park – Bigger, Longet And Uncut - those were two inspirations of ours. So all of the songs had been established before becoming one. That was really a thing I wanted to do, and I'm so glad we did that.”
After all that time spent on developing the film, they are now fully focused on selling it, even if it takes them another two years – but that doesn’t mean that they’re not also finding time to enjoy themselves at Fantasia.
“It's amazing,” Sander says of having their film selected. “The festival organization and the crew are so friendly and so cool. It's been a blast.”
