Micucci, Huntington, and Harmon in "7 Stages"
Tribeca 2018: Kate Micucci, Dan Harmon, and Vivieno Caldinelli on “7 Stages…”
“…to Achieve Eternal Bliss By Passing Through the Gateway Chosen by the Holy Storsh”
May 04, 2018
Web Exclusive
Claire and Paul (Kate Micucci and Sam Huntington) are a young, Midwestern couple new to Los Angeles. They’ve landed a sweet deal on a nice apartment, but there’s a catch: a famous L.A. cult leader (Taika Waititi) once killed himself in their tub, and now his followers break into their apartment randomly (and frequently) to commit ritual suicide in their bath. It turns out that’s not a dealbreaker, and Claire and Paul go so far as to aid the cultists to their deaths while hiding it from Detective Cartwright (Dan Harmon), a homicide investigator and aspiring Hollywood screenwriter.
If the plot description and 16-word movie title weren’t already an indication, 7 Stages is perhaps the strangest comedy to come through Tribeca in years. The script started as straight horror before it was picked up and remodeled as a horror-comedy around the talents of Kate Micucci (Don’t Think Twice, The Little Hours, and just about every cartoon your children love.) The film was directed by Vivieno Caldinelli, best known for 2015’s wild Portal to Hell!!!, starring the late, great Roddy Piper. Dan Harmon, creator of Community and co-creator of Rick and Morty, flips sides to the front of the camera, stealing several scenes as a cop who’s not so much an actual cop but a man trying his hardest to embody every ‘80s cop show cliché.
7 Stages is dark, yes, absurd, sure, but also laugh-out-loud funny and surprisingly sweet. It was one of our favorite films out of this year’s festival, and we fully expect it to find a devoted cult audience once it hits distribution. (We’re crossing our fingers for a soundtrack release as well – the movie’s theme song was recorded by the Flaming Lips from a song by Micucci, who writes as one half of the musical comedy duo Garfunkel and Oates.)
We chatted with Micucci, Harmon, and Caldinelli about suffering through hellish heat for their art, the shittiest apartments they’ve ever lived in, and that feeling in a dead-end relationship where you find yourself praying your partner would cheat on you just so you’ll have an excuse to break up with them.
Austin Trunick [Under the Radar]: There was a time, I’m sure, before you were successful, when you had to live in a pretty shitty apartment. Can you describe the worst apartment you’ve ever lived in?
Vivieno Caldinelli: In between semesters at film school I moved to Toronto, just to do some PA work and stuff. It was on top of a Chinese restaurant and a variety store, and the whole place just stunk like old food. It wasn’t that the apartment itself was so bad, but I remember I had to go down to the variety store to buy cereal once. When I poured it into a bowl I saw these kind of weird, flaky things in the cereal. I didn’t know what they were, but I had a couple bites and I noticed the whole box of cereal was full of bugs, and those were, like, their husks.
Kate Micucci: Ewwwww!
Dan Harmon: You’re just eating beetle wings. [Laughs]
Vivieno: There were tons of them. I had thought it was part of the cereal, I don’t know why.
Dan: And you finished! That’s good protein.
Vivieno: Yeah. [Laughs] That was probably my worst experience, I’d say.
Dan: I lived in an attic in Milwaukee. I’m conflicted about characterizing it as shitty, because I was so grateful to that place. It was where I was nurtured, and my landlady was my friend’s mom. I lived in her attic and it was $150 a month rent. It was this attic, half-finished with plywood, and her morbidly obese Labrador would take poops up there next to the mattress where I slept. If you looked at it wrong while it was doing it, it would growl at you. I couldn’t ask it to please stop pooping next to my head – it was there before my head was. And so I just slept next to dog poop on this mattress. But I remember it as this great time. I had a little card table next to that mattress, and I would get up every morning and write this comedy show for a local college radio station. I had to wear a winter coat because there was no heat up there, just a little space heater pointed at me, but I felt alive. I now look at it as a Benjamin Button type of thing, where the peak of his story was when he was 25 and he was sleeping on a mattress on the floor. It really goes to show you that it only takes a certain level of comfort to make you happy.
Vivieno: I remember the first time I went away for school, and I was living by myself. I remember it was 10 o’clock at night on, like, a Tuesday, and I was going to go meet some friends to go drinking. For the first time I realized, I don’t have to tell anybody where I’m going or what I’m doing. It just hit me in that one moment – I was truly free and happy. And yeah, again, I lived in a shitty place, but I was really happy.
Dan: The notable exception being that if you’re a guy, you could not bring a date there. I tried to bring dates up and if I was able to do that – which was an accomplishment in and of itself – they were immediately and for very good reason, like, “I am out of here.” It was like I was sleeping in a plywood shack. One more thing I remember about it was there was this water stain above the plywood piece over my mattress, and it was shaped like a palm tree. I would stare at it and meditate and dream of moving to L.A..
Kate: I’ve had many, actually, but I think one of the funnier situations was when I was in a guest house in L.A., which was actually very nice. The rent was very cheap, considering it as a cute little guest house. The rent was $1000 in cash. So I had the cash in a little envelope, and I saw my landlady was raking leaves in the yard. I said to her, “Hi, I have the rent.” And she turned around, looked straight into my eyes, and took off all of her clothes. I didn’t know what to do, so I turned right back around and didn’t come out of the house for hours, and just left the rent by the doorway. Things just got weird from there, and I didn’t stay very long. [Laughs]
Vivieno: So, what, wait happened? You went and gave her the rent…
Kate: … and she just looked at me and took off all of her clothes. She was completely naked. I don’t know if there was, like, some other wishful thinking that there were other parts of rent that I was supposed to pay.
Dan: In the front yard, though?
Kate: Yeah. It was a very secluded yard, so no one else could see. But then she took down all the curtains, and so I showered in the dark because I was a wimp, and also very poor. I found a new place to live, but yeah, I stayed for five months.
Vivieno: Bizarre! Wow.
Dan: My only way of psychologically explaining that is that she had been an exotic dancer, but was now succumbing to dementia. You tossed some dollars at her and it triggered her taking off her clothes.
Kate: Yeah! [Laughs] Exactly. I feel weird elaborating.
Dan: We feel weird with you not telling us. We just have so many questions!
Kate: I will say that I put myself in some pretty weird situations just to survive, I guess. But I never paid rent the way she wanted me to. How’s that?
Now, Kate, I understand that when this script was given to you it was a horror script, and the pitch was to re-shape it around your talents. Can you talk about some of the ways you adapted the script into the comedy it now is?
Kate: Daniel [Noah, of SpectreVision and Company X] called me out of the blue and told me, “We’ve got this script, and I think it’d be a really fun project if we tailored it more toward your sensibilities.” So, that was really intriguing, because it’s not every day that I get that sort of phone call. I was very excited about it! We met up and we brainstormed about the journey, keeping the story about this relationship that’s gone on too long – keeping that, you know, as the base – and then bringing out the comedy elements. The script was already pretty absurd and bizarre, but not as comedic. Me and Daniel took a pass at it, and then when Viv came on board, he and Daniel went pretty hard at it, too.
Vivieno: I think we found that the heart of it was the relationship between Claire and Paul: sometimes relationships end, but you still care very much about the person. That was really at the core of it, and then we had to strip everything else away and kind of build it with that theme throughout, then bring in all of the jokes and stuff.
Because all of these terrible things are going on around these two characters, it really magnifies just how tender their relationship is.
Dan: You can also see how horrific it is, too. Someone pointed out to me last night that the funny thing about the movie is that the plot stuff that would draw all of your attention doesn’t change – like, that there’s a cultist ghost in a tub – that doesn’t change direction. You never find out, like in Poltergeist or something, you don’t find out what they want and then suddenly the plot thickens. It draws all of your attention to the mundane horror that is “What do you do when you’re in a relationship that requires no fixing, but is broken?”
Kate: And that’s one of the things we talked about with the relationship stuff, when you’re in something and nobody’s done anything wrong. It could have been over for years – and in the case of Claire and Paul, it has been – but you just don’t know how to get out of it. You’re stuck. You almost hope that someone would cheat or something, so you could be like, “Okay, we’re done!” It can be messed up.
Dan: Oh, man, we’ve all been there, hoping that someone cheats on you. That’s crazy and profound.
Kate: It’s dark!
Dan: You’re like, just give me an easy reason to break up with my best friend.
Vivieno: At the first meeting we all talked about that. Yeah, jeez.
Kate: We’ve all been there. [Laughs]
Vivieno: Yeah, and it’s awful.
Kate, you wrote all of the songs for this film. You were writing them for other people to sing here, as opposed to yourself [as part of Garfunkel and Oates.]
Kate: Well, I think it was just the case of this being a low-budget movie. We needed a songwriter, and I was like, “I can do that.” So I wrote a couple songs.
Dan: So, wait – you wrote the Storsh theme? Oh my god.
Kate: Yeah! And then the Flaming Lips took that and turned it into an incredible song for the end credits. It’s really awesome to think that they listened to the little thing I did and made such an incredible song out of it.
Dan, you’ve mentioned that you learned a lot about working with actors during this movie, from spending time on their side of the camera. Can you elaborate on that?
Dan: Well, it’s probably the most unremarkable but blunt force life experience, for me. I likened it to that William Hurt movie, The Doctor, where he’s a doctor, but the movie is about him becoming a patient. I never thought that I hated actors, abused them, took advantage of them – I never thought I was guilty of those things. But, then, actually doing the job, showing up for a call time, and doing that stuff, I was like, “Oh my god, this is really an incredibly challenging job.” I can’t believe how ignorant I have been of what the people in the trenches fighting your war are experiencing. [Laughs] It’s all the more embarrassing when you think you know. It’s not like I ever heard myself say, “Screw these actors, they have an easy job.” I always thought I understood that it was hard to sit in a hot box for 12 hours and pretend to feel one way when in fact you feel another way. But, then, living through it – and especially watching Sam and Kate, who I shared most of my scenes with. They’re playing this plucky couple, and it’s like 108 degrees on set. You show up and Kate’s still having spinach removed from her teeth because she’s just done some scene you haven’t seen yet. They have it worse than you do, but this is what they do and they’re so happy. I was really inspired by that. I don’t know what else to say other than that was incredibly valuable to me. If I never do anything like this again, it’s one of the most important things I could have done as a producer: realize that these people have souls.
Kate: Awww. [Laughs] We actually had a fire marshal there every morning just to give us a warning about heat stroke. So, yeah, the conditions were not ideal, but we made it happen.
Dan: This is part of a problem in Hollywood, which has a huge labor abuse problem, because whatever the budget of this movie was, you could have raised it by $50 grand and treated everyone like humans. But we’re glamourizing labor abuse right now! We’re saying, “God, it was so romantic, how shitty we treated ourselves.” There was a wading pool out front, where people were hosing each other down. And then we made The Searchers. [Laughs]
Is there a film you would pair with this one as a double feature?
Dan: Obviously Citizen Kane. Why would you even ask that?
Vivieno: Oh, man, I don’t know. What I don’t like a lot of the time is touchstones, especially when you’re pitching your own films and making stuff, because I don’t want it to be like anything else. What’s the point if you’re not making something new and unique?
Dan: Highlander. I’d watch this with Highlander.
Vivieno: Oh, you know what? Miracle Mile. I’d pair it with that. I think they’re kind of weirdly similar. They both get dark at the end, and it’s very LA. I think that’d be a good companion piece with this. The same writer-director also wrote Strange Brew! Those are two great movies. Miracle Mile is definitely something special.
***
7 Stages to Achieve Eternal Bliss By Passing Through the Gateway Chosen by the Holy Storsh premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.
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