Low Budget, High Achiever: An Interview with Director/Co-Writer Adam Stovall on his debut feature "A Ghost Waits."
It’s one thing to make a film. It’s another thing to sell it. It’s yet another thing to sell it to a renowned distribution company, who also releases it as a flagship title on their new streaming platform. Adam Stovall has managed to hit these milestones with his debut “A Ghost Waits,” released by Arrow as both a stacked blu-ray, and on their brand-new streaming platform, Arrow Video. Stovall’s film, co-written by and starring MacLeod Andrews (“Doctor Sleep,” “They Look Like People”) is a love story about Jack and Muriel (“Search Party’s” Natalie Walker), a house cleaner and the ghost he falls in love with. Think “Clerks” meets “Beetlejuice.” We sat down to talk about his journey after an introduction by a mutual friend (Hi, Karl).
So when Karl told me he had a friend who made a horror movie, I thought it was a short film in a local festival. When I found out it was a feature releasing on Arrow, I had to do a double-take.
It doesn't make any more sense when you're in the middle of it [Laughs]. It's my first film. I never made a short before this really. I tried to, and it fell apart in spectacular fashion.
Care to elaborate?
It was like 30-something pages, which you just shouldn’t make. I knew that I was gonna have to raise money and there's no way to monetize a short film. So I thought “Well, it's always kind of weird to me when people spend $30,000 on a short film. What if I can raise something around there and I'll just make a feature?”
It all comes out of resourcefulness, really, and admitting what you don't have. We made this for less than a base-level Mercedes and it was all about simplicity. I think a lot of low-budget films try to dress up with bells and whistles to distract you from having no money, but the problem is those bells and whistles are bought in the dollar store, so it still feels cheap.
I love what James Cameron was doing in his early career, where he had low budgets but it never felt that way. Now, I’m not James Cameron at all, but I could at least say “Let's get people.” To me, the best effect is a human face. So let's just keep it simple. Let's never try to pretend we're making anything more than we are, and tell something dramatic. Let’s lean into our strengths. That's kind of where we got to make the feature for very little money instead of a short.
We had spent a year trying to make another movie, an existential horror film, and we got close. The closest we’d gotten on anything. When that didn't happen, I took it really hard. We had met an investor in the process, who was really excited to make something. When I had the idea that became “A Ghost Waits,” he and I got on the phone. I didn't have a script at the time, I just told him the story as I saw it and he gave me X amount of money. It was, relatively speaking, a very small amount, but in terms of film investment you're not gonna own half a movie at this small number anywhere else. After he put that in, my mom realized she could match it. So I started crying and then I started writing the script [Laughs]. I realized I usually have three years to write a script, because nobody gives a shit about someone they never heard of writing a spec script in their apartment. But in this case, I had investors and people that were working on it, so we were going to make it soon and I just hit the ground running.
And so I wrote what we shot, then once I edited together the assembly cut I realized it didn't totally work. Then it became about rewriting the first act. I said “Okay, everything beyond minute 34 works, but how do we plumb what was there to set up the payoffs that we didn’t realize exist. Then how can we better explore some of these themes? It still took three years to write, but it was just a matter of shooting, then pickups, and then more pickups. But we had a script when we started and it was mostly fine [Laughs].
Why shoot it in black and white?
I love old movies and their black-and-white aesthetic. And I knew that I might never get to make a second movie, which doesn't mean you can put all of your ideas in one because those [kinds of] movies are a mess. But you start making choices and say “Okay, if I make one movie, and it's the only one I ever make, then what choices can I make now that I’m still proud of in 20 years? At least I did that.” Making a black-and-white movie was one of those things and I really wanted to do it. I was at a location scout with my Unit Production Manager Chenney Chen and I told her “Hey, I think I want to make this black-and-white” and she said “No, absolutely not.” It’s a really hard sell these days. We got turned down from festivals and distributors just for that reason. So we shot it in color, and we planned to put it out in color. I still have a mock-up of what Muriel is supposed to look like in color. [Cinematographer] Mike Potter had a minimal lighting rig, and was using his camera, a Blackmagic Ursa Mini which is a 4K camera, and my camera, a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema, which is a digital 16mm camera. Then I shot the pickups with only my camera and we used natural light. So, when I was cutting and color-correcting it, it was never as visually cohesive as I wanted it to be. Looking back, it’s entirely possible nobody would have known the difference, but I would, which drove me crazy.
One day MacLeod asked if I had thought of making it black-and-white and I said “You beautiful bastard, I have!” We dropped a black-and-white LUT (color-correction algorithm) on it, and the moment we saw it, we knew that’s what it needed to be. We got a great deal from Aharon Rothschild, this amazing colorist. I spent 2 days in his apartment in Brooklyn working magic. It made sense in black-and-white the way it never did in color. When you’re making a movie, the right decision just announces itself sometimes. That’s how it was with Natalie [Walker]. Once she sent in her taped audition, I knew that was Muriel.
Speaking of which, Muriel is lit completely differently, even in the same scenes as Jack, which creates a startling effect. How’d you do that?
When we were talking about our approach, I wanted something that felt like classic horror, which I love. I’m a big James Whale fan and Ingmar Bergman is my favorite director. The really stark lighting is a way to put a character into a separate reality as the person they’re sharing the frame with. There was a light right out of frame for Natalie and Sydney [Vollmer, who plays a ghost named Rosie] to give it that stark effect.
Aside from Whale and Bergman, were you influenced by any other horror films or filmmakers?
I have a rule that you should never remind the audience they could be watching a better movie. I think a lot of modern American filmmakers are making movies more because they love making movies and less because of what they want to say. It’s the Brett Ratner thing of “Let me into your club, and one day I’ll earn it.” Fuck that [Laughs]!
The key inspirations behind the movie were a webcomic and a videogame. My friends Brian and Jenn Price had me over to play “P.T.,” a haunted house puzzle game designed by Guillermo Del Toro and Hideo Kojima. I had them cracking up laughing because I was reacting very naturally to a haunted house. It was so creepy. Like “Nope, not gonna check out the sound of a baby crying over there. I’m fine.” They were laughing so hard, it made me think I’ve never seen a movie with a character like me in a haunted house. The other thing was a webcomic called “Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal” where a man asks a woman what the most American movie is, and she says “Ghostbusters,” a movie where you have demonstrable proof of the afterlife, but it’s really about growing a small business and dealing with bureaucracy. If ghosts mean there’s an afterlife, I’d have so many questions. Those 2 things formed the spine, but I’m just like anyone else who grew up watching too many movies, and now my brain is a hard drive of every movie I’ve seen and every song I’ve heard.
Just like so many people, but you’re actually doing things with it.
[Laughs] So when people compared it to “Beetlejuice,” it didn’t occur to me, but it made sense. It’s one of my favorite movies so I’m sure it played into it, but it was never conscious. In this case, I was writing it so fast, my north star was “What’s interesting?” I’ve seen a lot of ghost movies, so what have I not seen? What do I want to explore that hasn’t been explored?
I was a film journalist for a while. When you watch 300 movies a year, there comes a point where you want to burn down the 3-act structure. It’s so much easier to not write than to write, so if the idea’s been done before I can just pop some popcorn and watch it. So I just wanted to do something I haven’t seen before. Especially when you’re making things for no money, all you really have is resourcefulness and inventiveness. If “A Ghost Waits” was a ghost story you’ve seen a million times before, but for less money, nobody would want to talk about it. I’d like to keep doing it even as our budgets get bigger. It’s fun to be restlessly curious about genre.
Edited for content and clarity.
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