Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on January 13, 2006, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
“I communicate with women really well, for some reason,” says director Lucky McKee. “I guess it’s because I had a great mom and a sister who was just a couple of years older than me growing up. I believe it’s due to the fact that I’ve been around good women in my life that I have the ability to communicate with them in a unique way. I like filming women, I love women, I think they’re just about the best thing there is going!” he laughs.
Continuing in the vein of McKee’s May, which spotlighted a fully dimensional antiheroine performance by Angela Bettis, and The Woods, his still-unreleased feature set in an all-female school, the director reworked the central relationship in Sick Girl, his entry in Showtime’s Masters of Horror series, from man-woman to woman-woman. Specifically, it explores what happens when entomologist Ida Teeter (Bettis) decides to return the attentions of Misty Falls (Erin Brown), a lonely young woman who has become romantically fixated on her. They fall passionately in love on their first date, but something else also becomes attached to Misty: a bizarre species of bug that has recently become part of Ida’s collection, and gives Misty a bite that causes her to begin mutating. At first, there are no external signs of the transformation, but Misty’s wild behavior swings lead Ida to question just who this girl is whom she has allowed to come live with her.
“The bug kind of serves as a metaphor for rushing into a relationship too fast,” McKee explains. “All of a sudden you move in with someone, and this person completely transforms before your eyes. May is about that, to a large extent—you meet somebody, and you like a specific part of their personality, but the more and more you get to know that person, there may be things about them that you don’t like. In May, she cuts away the things she doesn’t like. Sick Girl is kind of a further exploration of those themes.”
McKee was first inspired to work with Sick Girl writer Sean Hood in changing the script’s orientation for one key reason: “Initially, it was just because I wanted Angela to play the main character,” he reveals. “I liked what Sean had set up structurally, and I just thought it would be more interesting if it was about two women. I felt it would be more intriguing to make it a genuine story about two girls in love as opposed to an exploitation sort of thing—which is all well and good in itself, but I wanted to do it in my style. I tried to create a genuine relationship between these two people.”
The director admits to another, more unlikely inspiration when it came to reconceiving the lead character. “I love romantic comedies, so it’s kind of a deconstruction of that form,” he says. “Angela and I watched a lot of ’30s, ’40s and ’50s movies, and she took that kind of mannerism and cadence and tied her approach to that. She took most of the contractions out of her speech—instead of can’t, she’d say cannot—and created this three-dimensional character out of what I wrote. We really wanted to go for a stylized performance—though everything Angela does is stylized to a certain extent. Angela always does something different, in every role. She’ll always be my lead if I can possibly have her.”
Impressed by Brown’s brief turn in The Lost, a feature he produced and his May editor Chris Sivertson directed, McKee cast the actress (see interview here) as Misty. In fact, the Sick Girl ensemble is chock full of familiar faces from the director’s past work. “I got to cast Marcia Bennett, who played the twitching math teacher Mrs. Mackinaw in The Woods, as Lana the landlady,” McKee says. “She’s one of my favorite actresses I’ve ever worked with; I was almost in tears when she and Angela stepped into their first shot together. It’s just what a director wants: working with people you completely trust, to do one take with them and know you’ve got it. My father’s in the film, too; Dad got his SAG card on this one! And I got to use Jesse Hlubik, who was in May, The Lost and the very first movie I made, All Cheerleaders Die [a slasher romp he directed with Sivertson]. He’s like our Bruce Campbell, basically.”
McKee got to work with the real Bruce on The Woods, but genre fans have unfortunately been unable to see the fruit of that collaboration thus far. Filmed over two years ago, the David Ross-scripted film (starring Agnes Bruckner and Patricia Clarkson in the ’60s-set tale of a school plagued by strange forces in the surrounding forest) was plunged into limbo when MGM, parent company of its production entity United Artists, got swallowed up by Sony Pictures last year. A fall 2005 release was announced and then dropped, and the film still has no definite place on Sony’s schedule. McKee is philosophical about the situation: “I’m just moving on and making other stuff. The Woods is a cool movie, but I finished it many months ago and it’s just sitting there. It’ll come out when it comes out. I’m glad it’s a period piece,” he adds, “because if I had made it present-day, it would be a period piece by now!”
On the other hand, he has no problem stating that the experience of shooting Sick Girl was a far more enjoyable one than making The Woods. Although he came on board the Masters project as a replacement when Roger Corman had to bow out for health concerns, McKee notes, “I had enough time; I had a couple of months to get the script soaked into me, work over the revisions with Sean, prep all my shots—it’s the most prepared I’ve ever been for anything. I was well-prepared on May, but that was my first real film, and this time I had a couple of movies under my belt. I feel I kind of graduated with Sick Girl; it’s like my thesis project.”
And he’s thrilled to be a part of a Masters ensemble largely made up of filmmakers nearly a generation older than he is. “I was shocked that they thought of me, because I haven’t done very much stuff,” he says. “It’s an honor to be part of that group; I turned 30 while doing postproduction on an episode of Masters of Horror—it was a trip! It was a total honor, and what I didn’t have in experience I tried to make up for with energy and preparation. I really worked my ass off on this thing, and put everything I had into it. The Woods was such a not-fun experience for me, making that first studio picture—it took two and a half years to make a 90-minute film, and there was so much corporate interference; it just wasn’t pleasant. So to be able to bust out a one-hour horror movie with all of my people, the way I wanted, given total creative freedom—it was a dream at this age to be able to do that. And it has made me want to do more down-and-dirty independent films. I’d rather make two or three of those a year than one studio film every three years.”
McKee, who is currently attached to helm the Circle of Confusion company’s Red—based, like The Lost, on a Jack Ketchum novel, and scripted by The Grudge’s Stephen Susco—also has another “down-and-dirty independent” feature on the way. He teamed with Bettis yet again last year on Roman, an inversion of May in which the actress took the helm and McKee plays the lead role of an introvert whose attraction to a pretty young woman takes a very dark turn. While that movie, The Woods and The Lost all await release, McKee is looking forward to Sick Girl giving him his potentially largest audience so far. “It has been way too long since I’ve had another movie come out after May,” he says. “Masters of Horror was the best experience I’ve ever had; Mick [Garris, creator and executive producer] and all those guys were gracious enough to let me use so many of my people. I hope I get to do another one.”
