Last week I learned about a little film that stars some very big genre names. Mark Hamill, Danny Trejo, Michael Biehn, Jeff Fahey, Tony Todd, and… Sonny Chiba? Now that’s a cast that would make any genre fan’s mouth water. Even more so when one learns these guys are starring in a grindhouse-style sleaze fest about a gang of crooks who reunite years after a botched robbery to eat sushi off the body of a beautiful naked girl (played by Cortney Palm). Last week I joined FEARnet’s equally lovely Natalie Pohorski at the Hollywood wrap party for one of the coolest-sounding films to hit our radar. After the jump, check out the exclusive coverage of director Kern Saxton’s Sushi Girl.
Mark Hamill
On what attracted him to the role…
“Well it was a screenplay that frightened me. It pushed me out of my comfort zone. I never get offered character parts, except on stage and in animation. So that’s why I liked it. It was because I’d never done anything like this before.”
On his character, Crow…
“He’s a sociopath, a sexual sadist. He’s a mess. He’s someone who enjoys torture but a good Andrew Lloyd Weber musical too. He’s a very paradoxical fellow. I much prefer the audience to try and figure him out rather than just tell you everything about it. I find some human behavior a lot scarier than the supernatural. At least the monsters of the supernatural variety have some sort of dignity and class – Dracula and the like. This is just the worst sort of human garbage that’s out there. It’s very Tarantino-esque.”
Cortney Palm
On the difficulty of shooting most scenes lying naked on her back…
“Actually it wasn’t that hard. The designers made it really comfortable for me to be on the table. And then every time we were not rolling it was like, ‘Cover me up.’ Everyone just got numb to the fact that I was there naked. And it’s not really about the nudity. It’s about the character arc and how she develops throughout the film. It was comfortable. Everyone was really respectful and I had a good time.”
Director Kern Saxton
On the film’s premise…
“All I can really say is it takes place six years after a botched robbery. One guy took the fall for everybody else, and he just got out of jail. And they pick him up and bring him to this little restaurant where they have this lavish meal set up on a naked sushi girl. Things ensue from there. I’m not gonna go any further. I’ll let you simmer with that.”
On how the film came to be …
This is like the third collaboration between myself and [co-writer] Destin [Pfaff]. We’d written a movie called Death Valley that we tried to get made. We got a trailer and a couple of scenes done. And we did a short for the Diary of the Dead DVD called Deader Living through Chemistry. Evan Katz, Destin’s friend convinced me to write that into a feature. So we developed that. And as we were working on that, Destin said, ‘We need something smaller.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’ So we decided to try and do something in one room; and that’s what it was. We said, ‘How are we gonna make a one-room movie interesting?’ Originally it was gonna be really colorful. There were gonna be Japanese gangsters and it would be a mixture of Blaxploitation and… It was gonna be a smorgasbord of exploitation. I don’t know what it is with us, but we flesh things out and make them more realistic. We just have this weird strive for quality that makes our small projects turn big. We were gonna do this for fourteen grand originally. Even cheaper than that if we could. Then we were convinced to do it for real. Now we have Mark Hamill and Tony Todd and Noah Hathaway. It’s kind of crazy. This was supposed to be the baby, the little one, that we could do on the weekends with friends. It escalated into something that looks like a million bucks.”
On the difficulty of the three-week shoot…
“It was really intense. When you don’t have a lot of money, you gotta do it however you can. It was a weird situation, because we didn’t have a lot of money but we had this great cast, this great crew. It ran like a real full-fledged production even though it was extremely low budget. And we just stretched every dollar we could and maximized the amount of awesomeness that we could get each day. We ran out of time and we had to rush at the end of some days to make our days to get everything done. It was an interesting experience because normally a movie of this size would have a month to shoot, and we only had three weeks. It’s been a crazy run. This is only three days after we finished shooting. So I still don’t know what the hell is going on. It’s a total circus right now.”
Check out the video below for a look at our night out at the Sushi Girl wrap party…
