Battery Weed at Fort Wadsworth, at the north end of Staten Island, New York, is an imposing structure that seems tailor-made for use in a horror film. Once a military installation and now a public park, Fort Wadsworth was previously seen in Glenn McQuaid’s I Sell the Dead, and when FANGORIA visits the set of Daniel Isn’t Real, the filmmakers and cast have taken over Battery Weed for their last three days of shooting. With its massive stone walls and three tiers of multiple openings, where cannons were once aimed out at the Narrows (the key point of water entry to New York City from the Atlantic), there’s an otherworldly feel about the place, which makes it a natural for Daniel’s creators.
“This place is amazing,” director/co-writer Adam Egypt Mortimer says during a break in shooting. “I had no idea there was this stone fortress in the middle of New York City, and I never would have imagined we’d find a place like this. I can’t divulge too much about what we’re filming here without giving away what the story is all about, but this is an incredible, magical fortress. We’re creating this whole world of mirrored realities and shifting walls.”
As the title suggests, Daniel Isn’t Real (releasing this Friday, December 6 by Samuel Goldwyn Films and Shudder) is all about slippery reality, centering on an imaginary friend who appears to have become sentient. When protagonist Luke was a troubled young boy, Daniel was his playmate, confidant and partner in crime—until the latter term became literal. “Locked away” in a dollhouse and repressed for years, Daniel (Patrick Schwarzenegger) is released by Luke (Miles Robbins) when he’s a freshman in college, having moved out of his Brooklyn home—which has exacerbated his own mental instabilities and those of his mother (Mary Stuart Masterson). Daniel, all aggressive personality and confident attitude, seems to be the cure to what psychologically ails Luke, encouraging him to do better at his classes and with the opposite sex. But is Daniel real? That question becomes life-or-death as he develops into a devil on Luke’s shoulder, and ultimately a handsome monster.
Mortimer scripted Daniel Isn’t Real with Brian DeLeeuw, based on the latter’s 2009 novel In This Way I Was Saved. “The genesis of it,” DeLeeuw recalls, “was trying to imagine what it would feel like if you were needed in the way an imaginary friend is needed, and then you’re discarded but you don’t want to go away. You aren’t ready to be discarded, and you want to retain your place of importance in this kid’s life. So it’s basically about the struggle for who’s going to have control over Luke.”
The author first met Mortimer shortly after moving to Los Angeles about eight years ago. The filmmaker, who had cut his teeth on music videos, was seeking a basis for his first feature, and after reading In This Way I Was Saved, he quickly suggested they collaborate on a feature adaptation. The resulting script proved a bit too sizable in scale for Mortimer’s maiden directorial voyage, so the pair wrote and Mortimer helmed the thematically similar Some Kind of Hate, a revenge/ghost story set in a desert reform school and released in 2015. The response was sufficiently positive for the duo to find backing for Daniel Isn’t Real from Ace Pictures and the genre-centric SpectreVision—the latter represented on set by producer Josh C. Waller.
“The development took a few years,” Waller says. “Daniel Noah [Waller’s SpectreVision partner along with Elijah Wood and Lisa Whalen] worked with Adam and Brian to get the script to a place where we were all pleased. Then we figured out exactly what our budget was going to be and how much we were working with, and…started making cuts, while trying to determine how to get the film we all wanted and not feel like we were sacrificing anything. That’s always the trick; it’s like, ‘We can’t afford to do the thing we all wanted to do, but we still want the same feeling we get from that scene, so how do we do that?’ ”
There were a few other notable changes over the course of Daniel’s trip from novel to screen, one being a shift in point of view. In This Way I Was Saved tells the story from Daniel’s vantage point, but Mortimer believed from the start that Luke was the proper focus for the film version. “That actually felt very natural,” DeLeeuw says. “It wasn’t difficult, even if it was the biggest shift from the book. Another major one was the compression of time. The full first third of the novel is about Luke when he’s 6, and then a third is when he’s a senior in high school, and the last third is when he’s a freshman in college. We compressed the childhood portion to…more than a prologue, but just the first section, and then the rest of the movie takes place when he’s in college. A lot of it had to do with compressing a 300-page book to a 100-minute movie.”
Then there was the question of location. Although DeLeeuw set the novel in Manhattan, Waller was initially hot to shoot the movie in Philadelphia, after a very positive experience directing the David Morse-starring crime drama McKanick there. The script was rewritten for the City of Brotherly Love, and locations were scouted, but in the end, the tax credits didn’t work out and the project was reconfigured again for Brooklyn. They’ve been shooting throughout the month of August, dealing with the month’s typically tumultuous weather.
“We’ve been hit with a lot of rain and thunderstorms,” Waller says. “You just can’t shoot in those, and if there’s an electrical storm, you can’t even go outside your trailer. We lost a full day solely because of this beautiful electrical storm we could all admire, but at the same time, it was like, ‘Noooooo!’ We have a big crew attempting to pull off some very ambitious shit, always trying to beat the clock. Adam brought a lot of ambition to Some Kind of Hate, which they did for, like, nothing, and on this one we have a little bit of money, but that can be misleading. It’s like, ‘We have money!’ and then it’s, ‘No, no, no, you don’t.’ ”
Nonetheless, he’s overseeing a pretty big-scaled shoot today, with the camera and its operator perched on a crane high above Battery Weed’s walls to capture the proper vista. Mortimer notes, “We have incredible fight sequences, designed by a stunt coordinator [Monique Ganderton] who worked on the Avengers movies, and there are practical effects in this movie that are just nuts. I’m not a fetishist for practical, but when you have them at the right time, you can do crazy stuff. And then there are other parts of the movie where it’s a visual effects extravaganza.”
For all that, Waller emphasizes that Daniel Isn’t Real connects on a personal, real-world level as well. “Originally, we were aiming for a Jacob’s Ladder tone for a lot of this,” he says, “and then as the cast came together, and Miles and Patrick and everybody started to bring something of a sense of humor to the roles, it became less insanely dark. They brought a little more light to it, and now it’s hard to place the exact tone of the film. We definitely have extremely dark sequences, with strange body-morphing stuff, but there are also those moments of lightness, so it’s more like reality. There are very honest emotional stakes, and all the actors brought a heart to it that helps set it apart from a lot of horror movies.”
Certainly, many filmmakers have compared their supernatural chillers to Jacob’s Ladder—but they didn’t have the son of its star Tim Robbins as their leading man. “Jacob’s Ladder is one of my favorite films of my father’s,” Miles Robbins states. “When I was reading the Daniel Isn’t Real script, I did find it funny that there were times when I was like, ‘This feels inspired by Jacob’s Ladder a little bit. That would be cool if I did this, like a fun full-circle thing.’ I have a great appreciation for that film, and the work my father did in it. It’s something that has clearly influenced not only this movie, but other horror films in the past. I guess if I’m going to be compared to my father and this movie is going to be compared to Jacob’s Ladder, then I hope to do that comparison justice.”
Robbins, who also appeared in My Friend Dahmer and as the ill-fated Dave in David Gordon Green’s Halloween reboot, is an avowed fan of the horror genre whose tastes run to off-mainstream fare like Let the Right One In and Hausu. “When horror departs from the shocks and scares that are typically associated with it,” he says, “it becomes one of the most powerful tools for social commentary.” Daniel Isn’t Real, he continues, “is a very interesting take on mental illness and toxic masculinity. It’s about a young man struggling with his emotional conflicts. He has experienced some great trauma, but has not been given the tools to confront this trauma. He doesn’t understand his emotions, in a way that many young men don’t. I believe a lot of people in general need better access to the words to describe how they feel, to describe their internal conflicts, whatever they may be. But we live in a culture that discourages men from feeling. Being told to ‘be a man’ is something that leads to a lot of toxic behavior in men, especially young men who are coming into their own adulthood. Luke is entering that stage, and discovering internal issues he is unable to describe and share with the world in a way that is healthy.”
Schwarzenegger—another acting scion—agrees, and believes that Daniel Isn’t Real is very much a movie of its moment. “At the time we’re in right now in society, mental health has been such a growing topic, especially among young men. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen with different school shootings and other incidents in America and around the world, a lot of the discussion has come down to issues of mental stability, and people questioning that and wanting to bring more attention to the issue, and government funding and so forth. I’m not a massive horror-genre guy, but when I read this script, it brought up that topic; it deals with someone who is kind of schizophrenic, has an alter ego, has a relationship with this other part of himself that he doesn’t understand or know how to cope with.”
Nonetheless, even though Daniel may—or may not—by a projection of Luke’s psyche, Schwarzenegger didn’t model any of his performance on Robbins’. “I went totally opposite,” he says. “In the beginning of this relationship, I’m luring him in, he has to trust me, and I have to be his buddy. Daniel is a totally different character from Luke, and that’s usually what your alter ego is. I mean, everyone has another side of them, another voice, that they want to be or that they’re being told to be, and it doesn’t always stem from who you are or what you aspire to; it can be someone totally different. So I wanted to put my own spin on the character.”
Certainly, with an imaginary friend like Daniel, Luke doesn’t need enemies—another theme that Robbins sees in the film. “Like any kid, I manifested things that were not there when I was little, but never somebody with a specific name,” he says. “I have had some ‘imaginary friends’ in my adult life—people who I’ve thought were my friends. I think that’s in the film, the element of people not being what they seem. Everybody goes through a period before they find out who their real friends are; I’m really glad I’m past that, and I know who my real friends are, and I love them all very much. But that’s something a lot of 18-year-olds have to deal with. I think they have a tougher time than we give them credit for.”
