Everyone has that first film by a director they vividly remember.
Whether it’s Sam Raimi, Quentin Tarantino or The Soska Sisters, there are those rare first films that just explode across the screen with such raw energy, passion and creativity that they leave audiences stunned and elated.
Christopher Bickel is that kind of filmmaker, and I expect some day soon his name will join the ranks of the great genre directors who truly understand what it is about movies that people love.
Bickel’s first feature, which he made for $14,000 and filmed over a five-month stretch from November 2016 to March 2017 in his hometown of Columbia, SC, is The Theta Girl, and it is simply stunning in its ambition, its originality and its execution.
Bickel, 46, working with first-time screenwriter David Axe, creates a world of endless possibilities fueled by a designer drug called Theta, which transports its users to an alternate dimension where they communicate with a race of other-worldly beings who may not be as friendly as they first appear. In addition, the main characters, including an all-girl pop-punk band and their enigmatic drug dealer, Gayce Delko (a perfectly cast Victoria Elizabeth Donofrio), must contend with a violent group of fervent Christian soldiers who embark on a killing spree after ingesting Theta.
The Theta Girl represents everything that is magical about genre cinema. It’s not a perfect, polished, soulless exercise in art. It’s messy and flawed, much like its protagonists, but relentless in its quest to be one of the best exploitation movies you’ve ever seen.
Bickel comes across the same way as a director. He's no imitator. He blazes a true path, and along the way obliterates expectations by consistently delivering small moments and extended sequences that capture your imagination and make you feel as giddy as if you had taken Theta too.
BVB: Blood Violence and Babes jumped at the opportunity to speak to Bickel about his film and its inspirations, about his leading lady and about the trials and tribulations of filming one of the wildest on-screen orgies you’ve ever witnessed. Enjoy.
BVB: What was the inspiration for The Theta Girl?
Christopher Bickel: The inspiration behind why we did it, or the inspiration behind the story?
BVB: The story, first, because I know David Axe wrote it, but I know you guys are pretty tightly involved, so I was wondering was this something that he came up with or did you guys come up with it together? How did the genesis of the story come about?
CB: Once we decided that we wanted to do a movie, the first thing we did was we brainstormed things that should go into a low-budget movie, and this is sort of informed by my study of the history of exploitation and horror films, mostly from the late ‘60s through the mid-80s.
And, so, kind of having an idea of the things that work in really low-budget films, and sort of elevate them, and then things that titillate the audience and get them talking after the fact. Obviously, on an extremely low-budget, word of mouth is really important. So, we made this list of all these things and kind of the thing that was sitting at the top was the idea that you have to have something that’s either sexy or violent or just nuts every five minutes. So, every five script pages you have to either see like someone naked or getting their throat cut or something.
So, we kind of went into it from that, and I think we knew we wanted to add a little psychedelic too, so that sort of tied in with the drug thing. In a way, that was sort of faking that too knowing that if some of the stuff we did technically wasn’t so great, if it had that psychedelic feel to it, some of that might look intentional. So, that went into it as well. And, um, from there, David just wrote the story. It went really, really fast. I think just a couple of weeks. And he came to me and gave me the script. I made very few changes to it. For the most part, it was mostly, the original story he came up with is what got shot.
He gets full credit for coming up with the story because the stuff we brainstormed was amorphous. It was just like, "Well, we need x number of, you know, violent murders, x number of naked bodies." It was important to us also that we be equal opportunity with the nudity because that’s a classic exploitation trope. There’s always boobs, so we wanted to, you know, have something for the ladies (laughing). Which is funny because the two showings that we’ve done, we’ve had some walk-outs, and that’s always sort of a badge of honor for me. When we showed in Atlanta, six people got up and left after the big massacre scene, the home invasion scene. The last showing we did, three people got up and walked out after just a scene of a penis. Like, they were so offended seeing a penis that they got up and walked out. I thought that was great.
When you guys were brainstorming, what were some of the exploitation film that you were coming up with, that were the benchmarks of the different parts of the structure that you were looking at?
Well, I’m a huge fan of Jack Hill (Spider Baby, Foxy Brown, The Big Bird Cage). He probably influences a lot of what I do. Then, of course, ‘80s splatter stuff. Pieces was a big one. I don’t know that there’s a lot of Pieces in this movie, but it will certainly probably inform everything I ever do.
What else? Blue Sunshine…That was probably an influence with the drug stuff. I don’t know. Well, the idea of having sex or violence every five minutes originally came to me when I was in college and saw Ilsa: She-Wolf of the S.S. for the first time. And I was like, "Why do I like this movie so much?" The movie is ridiculous. The more I thought about it, it eventually occurred to me, it’s because every five minutes, something crazy happens, and it never lets up. You don’t see movies that often that are that relentless, or at least back then. I think maybe attention spans are shorter now, so you get a little more. I think the entire idea of every five minutes there has to be sex or violence or insanity probably came from that movie.
So, Theta is like DMT, right?
Yeah, it’s sort of a cross between DMT and acid and maybe a little bit of Ecstasy. It certainly affects some people — you know, you’ve got that whole after-party where it’s basically an orgy, and it’s because they’re affected that way by the drug. We kind of wanted Theta to encapsulate a lot of drugs, particularly hallucinogens, very powerful hallucinogens.
Gayce Delko is the kind of character that I could see you building several films around. When you and David were plotting this out, was that one of the central things that you wanted to have, a strong female lead character that could basically be the crux of her own franchise?
CB: We definitely wanted a strong female character, but I don’t think there was ever any idea that it was going to be anything that continued beyond this movie. I think that there’s a lot of David in the character. I think there’s a lot of me in the character. I think because of that, people sort of relate to it because Gayce is definitely a flawed character. She’s certainly imperfect, but I think people sort of relate to that. People are imperfect.
BVB: When I was watching it, one of the vibes I got immediately from The Theta Girl was a Tarantino-esque vibe. It just had that swagger and that confidence, and in Gayce I saw a combination of almost Vincent Vega and Alabama Worley kind of in one person, where you’ve got that sex appeal but also that edge, "I’m willing to break the rules, break the law, to get done what needs to get done" kind of thing. She translates so well off the screen.
CB: Right, but I think the other thing that’s important — she’s tough, but she’s also damaged. And you see that fragility every so often, which I think is how people have connected. She’s not this stylized ass-kicker. And there were certain things that were very intentional. Like it’s such a trope where there’s a female lead and a male, and they always get together. We wanted to be certainly like, they do not get together. She says, "I do not love you," but then that sort of comes back to haunt her too when he kind of martyrs himself for her, and she has to live with that. The last thing she said to this guy is basically, "I don’t love you." That doesn’t necessarily mean she did love him. It just means she feels bad for being shitty to a friend.
BVB: How long did it take you to find Victoria Donofrio? Did you know immediately when she tested that she was Gayce, or did you know her already and just feel like she was right for the role?
CB: We got so lucky with Victoria. We had done a casting call, and we had a bunch of people come in. We had it narrowed down to like three different girls that one of them was going to be Gayce. Victoria was not one of them. We hadn’t heard from her. We didn’t know anything about her at the time. We were about to make the decision, and in retrospect, if it had been any of those three girls, I don’t think the movie would have been near the success that it’s been. But what happened was, it was like a friend of a friend on Facebook had seen the post I had put out, like a casting call post. And this person was like, "Oh, I know someone who is trying to be an actress." And they sent it to Victoria, and she got in touch with me and asked if we had already cast for the movie yet. And I said, well, I think so, but do you have a reel or something I can look at? And she had a YouTube video of her doing a monologue and she sent me the link and I watched it, and it was phenomenal. It was so good. I was like, this girl is perfect. I said, look, we’re about to cast this, but is there any way you could come by tomorrow and just do a reading of some of the lines? She said yeah, and she showed up and she was five minutes early, which already was like a big check-mark. I gave her a side, and she read the lines and I was just like, "You’re it. If you want this part, you have it. Like, right now." And she said yeah. It was like the eleventh hour when she came in, and I’m so glad she did. It almost seemed like — I don’t really believe in fate, but it seemed kind of fate-ish that she showed up when she did. If it had been anybody else, I don’t think the movie would have, maybe the movie wouldn’t even exist.
BVB: It doesn’t look like a low-budget film. It absolutely plays like a first film, in the sense that there are, there are some films you watch and you just know, this is something really special. Like the first time you see the original The Evil Dead, the first time you see Reservoir Dogs, the first time you see something like Hobo with a Shotgun, it just says damn the rules, and just goes crazy. But you had this ability in this film to do things that go well beyond your financial means. In the instance of creating the alternative dimension, when they’re under the influence of Theta and they kind of take the trip and they see the other beings and that world, what was your hope in creating that as far as the look? Were you worried about cost at that point, or were you just trying to do something that was both financially practical but also creatively really different than what most people would do to visualize that type of dimension?
CB: I can sort of tell you exactly why it ended up the way it did. In a way, it was just sort of a happy circumstance that we were poor. In the original script, in what you might call the Theta-verse, it’s described differently, and to me, the description in the script is more straight-forward, psychedelic experience where they go through this tunnel of light and they end up in this sort of void and have an interaction with the entity. In the script, it is not described in the way that we ended up seeing the entity. What I realized, when I was reading the script, was that we could probably try to pull off those effects with a green screen, but they would have looked really bad. It would have been so hokey that I think it would have just ruined things. So, what I realized, we have no budget, it’s all really cheap, so the idea was to just run with that and try to make it look cheap. The concept I came up with was to make it look like a high school drama club built a set.
So, I wanted the sun and clouds hanging from strings, and you know, cardboard trees and things like that. And that’s what we went with. And I wanted the costume to look like, not a realistic, sort-of angelic thing, but it looks like it was just made out of cloth and paper. So, I presented it to the guys who were doing our practical and visual effects. Originally, we were going to build a giant stage set, but then they suggested we could actually make that set much smaller and then animate it in after-effects. So, they did that, and I think it worked really well. It looks cheap, but it’s intentionally cheap in the same way a drug trip is like an artifice. I wanted it to look very artificial. So, we did that, and the reason why we did it is because we had no money to do it better.
BVB: See, and I think if you had had more money, I don’t know that it would have looked as cool as it did.
CB: I totally agree with that. It would have looked like every other drug-trip scene from every other Hollywood movie, and it wouldn’t have been that interesting.
BVB: Exactly. I thought the look of it was so special because it made you imagine, in a mind that’s altered, these are how these things might appear. Because you kind of go back to that innocence of that period when that was a big deal, the junior high play, where you did have the cardboard trees and all that, you were so proud of that in school, but that’s your first thought. So when you’re tripping, you go back to that, and you’re in that period of innocence. I thought it was perfect. I loved it.
CB: Thanks.
BVB: Talk to me about your filming style because that, to me — it was so cool. I watch so many movies, and there are parallels between the best of movies and the worst of movies where you can see things that have been aped by directors from other films, and kind of tweaked, maybe modified a bit to fit their particular purposes, but it’s still something, it feels like something you’ve seen before. You have this way of moving your camera. There are these moments throughout The Theta Girl where you’re just carrying the audience along, and it’s exhilarating. I mean, whether you’re moving through the house party, whether you’re taking in all the different aspects of the orgy or even at the end, when Gayce is approaching the church for the climatic showdown between her and Brother Marcus, there’s this fluidity to the way your camera moves that it feels singular. It feels like your own kind of trademark stamp, this is one of the things you’re going to be known for as a filmmaker. How did you come to that? Did that just happen, or was that intentional that you wanted to have that feeling of movement throughout the film?
CB: It’s a little bit of both. I think there’s a certain look to modern indie films where they’re going for this cinematic, they’re obsessed with this cinematic look, which is fine, but I think everything ends up looking very same-y because of that. They’re all going for the same like shallow depth of field thing and lots of, oh the big one is to put cameras on sliders. Nothing against it, but I’m just sort of over it and I didn’t want my movie to look like that. But the other thing is, I didn’t have the money to hire a DP so I had to shoot everything myself, and trying to be the director and the DP meant we had to move really quickly. So, there really wasn’t time to put the camera down on a tripod very often. It just made more sense from a time standpoint to just keep the camera moving constantly. It does, I think, give it more of a documentary feel to it, which wasn’t necessarily intentional, but I think works for the movie. I’ve had a few comments from people saying, "The movie was so realistic." Like, how is that movie realistic? (Laughing) That is so not realistic, but I think what they’re getting at is psychologically, they felt like there was a realism to it because of that documentary style camera work. Again, this was not intentional, but maybe sort of in the way The Texas Chainsaw Massacre works where people say it looks like a documentary because that camera is moving around all the time. It was a cross between trying not to look like every modern independent film, but also not having the money to hire a DP and having to be fast on my feet. I certainly wouldn’t want to switch it up for the next movie. If it works, then I want to keep doing the thing that works.
BVB: How interesting/challenging was it for you to film the house party-orgy scene? How long did it take to film that sequence, and how much fun was that?
CB: It was just a few hours. I wish it had been more fun, but it was one of the first things we shot, and I was really nervous. Nervous as a director, as a camera person, but also having a house full of naked people. I’m trying to just make everybody feel comfortable, and I’m freaking out because I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. Aside from that, it was fun because it was so ridiculous. If anybody was here during the shooting, they would be laughing at how clinical the entire thing was compared to how it looks on the screen. I had one comment, I think, after the first showing, "I can’t believe you filmed a real orgy in your house!" I said, "No, it was very much not a real orgy." It was kind of funny — all those people, all the actors, were mostly art models, and so when they came to do the shoot, I gave a big speech to everybody about what was going on, what we were trying to do, and just to sort of set some boundaries so that nobody was weird or nobody felt uncomfortable.
So, I asked everybody to raise their hand because I was going to go down the line and ask, "Who’s comfortable first being paired off with someone and being intimate, touching them, maybe kissing them, you know, being very intimate," and I would go down the line to finally, "Who doesn’t want to be near anyone else and wants to just be off in a corner by themselves?"
OK, so raise your hands, "Who’s comfortable being paired off with someone and possibly making out and being intimate?" and like every single person raised their hand. I said, "OK, well that’s easy enough," so I paired everybody off. Originally, the idea was that sequence was going to be just a single take going through the entire house, and I realized after we shot it that it just was boring. The scene ended up being like 10 minutes long. It was just dull. How do you make an orgy dull? So, I had to chop it up. But, on set, it was very, very clinical. There was one point where there was a couple in one of the bathrooms, and the guy sort of freaked out, he was really apologetic, because he had gotten an erection and he was apologizing to the girl he was with, and he was apologizing to me. I went to the girl, "Are you OK?" She was like, "No, it’s awesome! Like I’m doing my job right!" So, we all sort of laughed about it, and waited for the erection to go away, and we started filming again.
If there's any justice in the world, the movie gods will see fit to deliver a distributor to champion The Theta Girl and the film will receive a proper release in 2018. When that happens, it deserves to be at the top of your Must-See list. For now, you can keep up with the film's progress by liking and following The Theta Girl on Facebook.
For a complete rundown of all New Releases, plus movie news, interviews and more, visit BVB online at Blood Violence and Babes.com, like us on Facebook @BloodViolenceBabes and follow us on Twitter @BVB_reviews.
This article appears in Jan 11-18, 2018.