I spoke with filmmaker Francis Galluppi the day after the news broke that he’ll be helming the next instalment in the Evil Dead saga. We were already scheduled to chat about his feature debut, the exceptional desert noir The Last Stop in Yuma County, a smart updating of two Bogie masterpieces (The Petrified Forest and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre). It’s a tremendous picture I don’t feel right formally reviewing because I consider stars Jim Cummings and Barbara Crampton my friends. It’s so good, though, that I wanted to at least interview this Galluppi guy. So I dug into his two short films–the Texas Chain Saw Massacre-tinged High Desert Hell and his high-concept sci-fi piece, The Gemini Project–as well as his accomplished quartet of music videos. And I read the passel of interviews he’s given since Yuma County‘s triumphant premiere at 2023’s Fantastic Fest. They paint a picture of a young artist navigating a repetitious press inquiry for the first time, none of the questions getting at the heart of an emerging aesthetic that is not only film-nerd chic but also in thrall to a very American Romanticism. At the risk of seeming more uncool than I already, naturally, seem, there’s an Ani DiFranco song called “Untouchable Face” that captures a certain Galluppian melancholy. Particularly this lyric block:
Two-thirty in the morning
And my gas tank will be empty soon
Neon sign on the horizon
Rubbing elbows with the moon
It’s a safe haven of sleepless
Where the deep fryer’s always on
Radio is counting down the top twenty country songs
And out on the porch the fly strip is waving like a flag in the wind
You know I don’t look forward to seeing you again
Given Galluppi’s canny use of songs in his films and his forays into music video, I started there, on the subject of music.–Walter Chaw
FRANCIS GALLUPPI: Oh man, my whole life has been music. I went to college for music. I spent my whole twenties touring with crappy punk bands, and then I broke my wrist and couldn’t play drums for six months, so I picked up the T2i and just started like shooting shit around the house and realized, like, “I think this is what I want to do.” But I was always passionate about film, like I was always the guy in the back of the van, you know, with headphones on, watching Hitchcock. And then, um–God, I’m going to sound like such a tool for saying this–it really was The Evil Dead that kind of changed everything for me. That and Texas Chain Saw Massacre, where it was just like, yeah, get a camera and go hang out with your friends in the fucking middle of nowhere and make something. That was inspiring because my whole life, I would have loved to do movies or get into film, but it always seemed so unobtainable. You grow up watching these big spectacles, you know, Back to the Future and Star Wars and stuff, and it just seems impossible. Then you look at Evil Dead and they just did it. You know?
FILM FREAK CENTRAL: Punk rock.
Exactly! Fucking punk rock. They had a blast doing it, and I realized that I wanted to do that. At least make some short films. My buddy, Scott, his parents had a desert house out by the Salton Sea, so I just wrote a script based on that location. Nobody knew what the fuck they were doing.
High Desert Hell? Looks pretty good to me.
(laughs) Thanks. We all learned everything on YouTube. We didn’t have any money. It was just like, you know, you learn how to do sound design and score and colour and the effects just by watching YouTube videos and trial and error. I was lucky enough to have Mac [Fisken], my cinematographer, though–he was the only one who really knew what they were doing. We would’ve really been screwed without him. I mean, really, it was just me just fucking doing it. Committing to it totally, 100 percent. You’re right, that’s really the ethos of punk rock.
What was your introduction to Punk?
My brother got me into it when I was really young. It’s always just been a part of my life. I can’t remember a time before: it was always it. When I was old enough, I went out and bought a fucking crappy $1500 van and it was constantly breaking down, but it was like, fuck it. We’re just going to leave. We’re going to hit the road and we’re going to tour and we’re going to do the thing. There was no, well, let’s give this some thought.
Yikes.
(laughs) In hindsight, it was really stupid. Some of these things… I mean, I want to make movies now, and it makes total sense that I should, but to anybody on the outside, it was like, “Oh, you’re crazy.” It was never about, Can I make a living off this? It was just, I had to do this. I had to, or I was always going to wonder if I could have. I was going to be depressed if I didn’t try. So, yeah, High Desert was the thing that really kicked everything off. It’s where I met my cinematographer, Mac, and he’s done everything since then. All my music videos, short films, now Last Stop.
What’s the book the final girl’s reading in bed in High Desert?
Oh geez, that was so long ago… I think it’s The Exorcist.
I wondered because there’s a strong religious element to that piece.
I haven’t thought about this in a long time, but when we went out there to scout, we went and ate lunch and there was this van parked next to us with all these stickers: “The apocalypse is coming,” or some like, you know, “Surrender to God!” or some crazy shit, and that was the thing that really solidified everything. What could be scarier? You’re out in the middle of nowhere with religious lunatics.
Tell me about the percussive noise score for The Gemini Project.
It was super fun, man. Matt McVeigh, that’s whose cabin it was, he lives in Oregon. He was like, “I have this cabin out in Oregon. We should do something there!” So we wrote a script based on this cabin, and we weren’t going to get a bunch of actors to follow us out to the middle of nowhere, so, okay, Matt’s just going to play everybody, and it’s going to be a clone story. But now we’re thinking this guy’s living up in the cabin up in the woods and stuff, and it’s remote and primitive, so the whole idea with the score was trying to make it with the household items you might find there. The main theme was me playing on my coat rack that I completely fucking destroyed. My wife was pissed… But worth it. There was silverware and wind chimes, and there’s like this clicking percussive noise and that’s just pencils. A lot of weird crap went into that noise.
Talk to me about your trio of music videos for Mt. Joy.
I went to music school with one of the guys who started that band, Sam, who, funny enough, is actually the guy who broke my wrist, ending my music career! (laughs) He’s the reason–well, indirectly–why I picked up a camera, but he still apologizes to me and I’m always like, “No, man, that was a blessing in disguise. It was the best fucking thing that ever happened to me.” It was crazy to watch Mt. Joy just blow up like that, and I loved their song, “Strangers,” so I pitched this idea to them…
What’s more a stranger than cryptids?
Right? Exactly. They dug it and–it was a brutal, brutal… It was the most brutal shoot I’ve ever done.
What?
Oh my God. I didn’t think anybody would work with me again after that. I mean, first of all, it was during COVID, so we barely had any crew. And we shot in Malibu where those caves are, but for us to get down to that location with just the few of us lugging all this shit… Yeah, somebody ended up passing out. It was all a double dolly shot, you know? So we had to bring two doorway dollies and a crane down there, and a Lambda. All with less than ten crew members, and it was so hot and there were so many people on the beach escaping quarantine, right? And it took forever just to get set up, and then you worry about the light, so we just pushed through. After that, we did a company move from Malibu to my house, which is in the San Gabriel Valley, and then the next day we shot in Big Bear. It was all supposed to be shot in Big Bear originally, that would be the smart thing to do, right? But I had the bright idea… Then Covid…pushed things, and then it wasn’t snowing. Anyway, total disaster. By the time we drove up the next day, we shot the forest scene, wrapped at seven or eight at night, then drove from Big Bear to Hollywood Boulevard and had to lug the doorway dollies up these stairs, make fake snow on a rooftop… It was almost a 24-hour day. It was brutal. Just stupid. Fucking terrible.
So of course you go ahead and pitch “Evergreen.”
Needless to say, when it came time to pitch “Evergreen,” I was like, “I swear it’s going to be a four-day shoot. It’s going to be the cushiest goddamn thing you can imagine.” And it was, it was great. We were wrapping in time for dinner, eight- or nine-hour days–I had a lot of amends to make. (laughs)
What I’m finding in your work is a consistent undertow of dread. “Strangers” seems light, but there’s a lot of tension in it, too, a lot of potential for things breaking bad. “Evergreen,” for instance, is light on the surface but pretty existentially devastating underneath.
I appreciate that. I like you saw that in “Evergreen” as well, that life is kind of a nightmare and maybe he made a terrible mistake venturing out into the world. It’s funny. I was watching College, the Buster Keaton film, right after I shot “Evergreen” and realized, oh shit, it’s the same premise as “Evergreen,” right? You screw up your courage to do this scary thing, and it’s just one failure after another, but when it’s time to save the girl, he has to implement everything that he’s failed to get there and finds he’s actually learned a lot along the way.
There’s a guy wearing a “College” shirt in the video.
Yes! My friend Scott! Everyone’s going to think I was doing a nod to College but…
But the story has some personal resonance for you.
It does. [“Evergreen”] came out exactly as I pitched it. But the funny part is I did want it to have a Charlie Chaplin feel to it, a Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd-esque kind of thing with the unlikely hero, the accidental victory, almost stumbling into winning.
And then “Bathroom Light.”
So we finish “Evergreen,” and I was like, “Hey, I have like 400 bucks left and I really like this other song, “Bathroom Light.” After the “Strangers” debacle, will you let me make another music video for you just for that?” And they were like, “Sure!” I don’t know if they were expecting it to be anything; I don’t know if I was expecting it to be anything, but it was such a great, organic experience. I’m very neurotic and my DP and I[,] we prep a lot. We shoot tests. We photoboard. We pre-vis. We do all this stuff. Hours and hours of conversations about every detail. But with this, nope. $400? No lights, borrowing a camera, we used my friend’s daughter, and my friend, Rachel, and we’re just going to drive around and go to all these places without a permit and tell people we’re shooting a student film–“Can we shoot here? No. Please? Okay, fine, you have 5 minutes”–and that was what the whole music video was. We just found the right places and the right lights. I think we maybe brought a bounce, but we never used it. I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to go out there and just kind of wing something. I had such a blast making that video–the absolute opposite experience from “Strangers,” which was so planned that it had to fail.
You had to have the ending in mind…
Oh sure, the rocket and all that stuff. I found stock footage and then we used After Effects to implement it, so then it was just about going out to the desert and finding a location that matched that footage and making it work. But other than that, we just drove around for a day and shot a bunch of stuff, and it was so much fun. So much fun.
I wonder if it’s because “Bathroom Light” is so unforced that it finds your main themes so beautifully: this sense of American Romanticism in nostalgia for a time when we used to be aspirational.
That’s really thoughtful. I don’t know what it is, if it’s just particular movies that have kind of burned into my brain or if it comes from road-tripping with my family when I was a kid or touring with the band. If that’s there, I’m not sure where that really stems from.
“You have to have the right sense of humour, but there’s something so funny to me about planning things meticulously and then seeing every single thing you plan fall apart.”
Let’s start with all the road-tripping in your films, your reference in The Last Stop in Yuma County to Badlands: diners and abandoned places, condemned buildings in the desert.
(laughs) Yeah, I even have a character in High Desert who asks, “What is it with you and condemned buildings?” That’s so interesting, man. I feel like a lot of the things you do, there isn’t any intentionality. It comes from a gut reaction, and you go with what feels right to you. I wonder how much you’re ever in control of things that you gravitate towards or that show up in the things you make. Maybe it takes someone else to point it out if there is something.
Arguably, if you tried to load your stuff with intent, you would end up making pretentious garbage.
(laughs) I have been asked if I would ever write a modern movie. All of my stuff has been period pieces. And I was like, “Oh, God, no.” I… It’s almost that physically I can’t. I couldn’t even imagine setting something in the current day. I don’t feel it. I did notice that every movie I’ve had an old car, and I’ve never really had the money to get one that works, so it’s been, this inability to shoot a modern film, a nightmare I make for myself. The old junkers we find are these 50-year-old beaters that are constantly breaking down in every shot and I’m just insistent that it looks great, it feels right, it’s worth it, it’s worth it. If you see somebody driving in one of my movies and it’s an interior shot, somebody’s pushing it. I have not learned my lesson yet. I will continue to write vintage garbage cars in all my stories.
Isn’t that why your hero dies in High Desert Hell?
My god, man. You’re right. Her car breaks down. That’s so funny. Damn, I didn’t think about that.
Which leads us back to Last Stop in Yuma County and my question of whether this is a Passion Play–like a “Hotel California” where they can check in, but nobody can ever leave, and all the questions you’re asking are only questions of morality and fate. What kind of person do you decide you are before you die?
Jim [Cummings] and I really connected with this idea. What we talked about a lot was that as soon as he gets out of that diner, it’s almost like a cosmic game show: the universe is giving you these signs and testing your morality and asking, “Are you going to take the money? It’s right there. Nobody’s looking. Are you going to do it?” I think we do this a lot as human beings, and we realize how the decisions you make, especially the not-so-great decisions, you’re going to find a way to justify it, because you need to believe you’re a good, reasonable person. You know what I mean? And it’s always bullshit. You get presented with temptation, you’re weak, and then you look for signs to justify your own fucking selfish, greedy, irrational behaviour. And it’s not there. It’s not there until you’re in a sensible mind state and suddenly you realize what you did. That was the idea that we had by centring the story around the knife salesman.
The worst knife salesman.
Oh yeah, he’s fucking awful at it. He doesn’t even remember the special wood the handles are made out of. Mac, throughout, was doing this thing with his shot design where he’s trying to figure out the knife salesman’s point of view from under the table, just to cue that we’re maybe telling this story and not another one. I think the question of fate was a little bit more on the page than what made it off it after we started stripping it down. There’s a handful of moments now…
The bird.
Exactly. I always looked at the bird as the representation of the universe judging you and planting these seeds of temptation and doubt. It’s the emissary of a universe telling you, “Here’s the moment your life could change: take the money and run, or stay and tell the truth.” Do the right thing, even if it means you spend the rest of your life as a failed knife salesman. You know it’s wrong–it’s, uh, you know, you shouldn’t, but you’re fucking… You’re so sad and humiliated, and now you’re justifying the Bad Thing. There were more of these moments that Mac and I sort of talked about where he wrestles with it. He sees it at the very end and gets this moment of, “Yes, I fucked up. I lost the game.”
The theme of “you’re fucked” is of course the foundation of all the films noir you reference, but also stuff like Jules Dassin’s Rififi, which you also reference, and Melville’s Le cercle rouge.
I think about Rififi all the time. That movie–that movie just rips. The entire thing with cutting the hole in the floor in Yuma is just a nod to it, and what people don’t get, I think, is just how funny it is. You have to have the right sense of humour, but there’s something so funny to me about planning things meticulously and then seeing every single thing you plan fall apart.
Like shooting “Strangers.”
(laughs) Maybe I’ll think that’s funny someday, but yes. And Melville I love for a lot of the same reasons. Le Samouraï’s world is so fucking cool: stylish, suave.
And also funny. Jef is a terrible assassin. Just a total idiot. He’s more interested in how he looks in his hat. Jim would be a good candidate for a remake. (laughs)
(laughs) Oh my god. He would.
Super-handsome, super-cool, but his persona is kind of that of a goof who puts himself in awkward situations.
Yeah, man, I’m so glad you mention humour, because I think you have to share a particular sense of humour to appreciate how funny a disaster is. Not for the people in it and not in real life, of course, but in a crime movie especially, or in a horror movie. I always saw Last Stop in Yuma County as a comedy. I wrote it like one–in my head, it was one. These characters are absurd. They’re, they’re, you know, making idiotic decisions, and those micro-expressions that Jim’s giving in that booth make me laugh every time. Me and Jim and my friend Scott were giggling on set every day as we were shooting, but there was a point where we weren’t getting into film festivals, and I called Jim and was like, “Hey man, I think I fucked up. I think we made a movie that just me, you, and Scott are going to find funny.” And he said, “No. Remember, some people think that Fargo is a serious movie,” and that gave me some relief. Watching it finally with audiences that are laughing at the right places and having a good time, well, it’s been a huge weight off my shoulders, knowing we didn’t just all misread the room somehow.
Wasn’t James Mangold’s Identity shot at the same location? I wonder what that place has that inspires these kinds of films.
It’s a good question. Maybe its remoteness. Maybe its timelessness.
Yeah, I think you nail it. You magnify the timeless quality–the being stuck in amber or an hourglass–with your song choices. Talk to me about Paul Maurier’s “Love is Blue.”
That was a song that was on all the time while I was growing up. I have a playlist on my iTunes of a bunch of songs that I’ve always wanted to put in a movie. They all have, for lack of a better word, a cinematic feel to them, you know–they’re all melancholy and nostalgic Americana. Last Stop has a lot of different eras: there’s a Lou Christie song, too, and Roy Orbison. I put all of them in as I’m writing and just hope we can afford the rights. But whenever I get to a place that feels like it’s calling for a needle-drop, I’ll go to the playlist and listen and figure out what fits.
You said somewhere your favourite movie is Rosemary’s Baby. What is it about Rosemary’s Baby?
It’s a perfect film. Honestly, I get asked that a lot, and it’s the one that I use now, but there are a lot of films… It could change each time I’m asked, but Rosemary’s Baby is one of those films where every choice is the right one, from the performance to the direction to everything.
Have you considered that it’s another one-set play about being trapped by fate?
No. (laughs) But you’re right, Rosemary realizes she’s part of this design and she can’t escape it. You have a function in a story that’s larger than you, you know, you’re sort of a function of it. It’s why I love Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, too, I think. Peckinpah and Don Siegel: their stuff is just… How do you describe the visceral feeling you have when you watch their films? I want that. I want to emulate that. I equate the feeling of them to the conversation around moral dilemmas and the self-loathing that comes when you know you made the wrong choice for the wrong reasons and now you’re stuck with the consequences. I mean, it’d actually be worse if you got away with it. Charlie Varrick is another one that makes you feel just broken-down. So gritty and devastating.
Fate’s a cruel mistress.
The first iteration of Last Stop was really focused on the mechanism by which the characters were trapped. How, why, all these machinations have conspired to keep them isolated here: it’s fate. It’s fate, it’s fate that there’s no gas, it’s fate that the truck went off the road, that the knife salesman and the robbers and everyone run out of gas or break down this day right here, the cliff… Everything that happens this day is fate. You know, it all led to this moment, and how much freedom do we really have if the entire universe is working towards you being in a particular place at a specific time? Something about that has always resonated with me. The sense that we all end up at a crossroads where the rest of your life is going to be determined, that was the entire thing pushing this story. I first started pitching it as just an idea of “everything is fate.” Everything predetermined. I don’t need somebody holding up the gas-station attendant to say don’t give gas to anybody. Nope, today’s the day where there’s just no fucking gas, you know? Fate is the word that was ringing in my head as I was writing it. It’s the word that’s always ringing in my head.
