Logan Killiard returns to the ATVA’s with Puppet Love, a film sure to leave audiences on the edge of their seats.
Logan spoke to Brig about the film and the behind-the-scenes making of it.
Logan both stars and acts in Puppet Love. He explained the reasoning behind this.
“With what I’m doing in the film, I wouldn’t want to ask someone else to do that stuff, so I had to direct and act out of necessity. If it didn’t involve weird shit, I’d ask someone else to act. I had a similar situation last year with my atva, where I was doing stupid sh-t and didn’t want to put that onto someone else.”
The film is part Buster Keaton short and part Mission Impossible, with some of the wackiness of a John Water’s film.
“I tried to evoke Tom Cruise. And bought a Tom Cruise mask because of the stunts in it. And the taking the masks off, it’s very Mission Impossible.
When the media office got shut down because of RAAC, some people took stuff to their flat and it was a box of masks. So we went to pick them up earlier in the year and we had dozens of masks, and Tom picked out the monkey mask.
The costuming is also inspired by Don Johnson in Miami Vice. I seen a photo of Danny McBride dressed like him and so I thought I’d do the same thing.”
The film was shot on location and was not without challenges.
“Me and Nathan trekked 20 minutes through narrow trees in a really uncomfortable area where we were crouching through the woods to get a shot… we ended up using half a second of that shot, but we were mainly going there to retrieve something…
One day we had to walk 40 minutes and back, which was a decent hike, to the cliffside, but on a cliffside, wearing a suit, was very challenging.
The second to final shot didn’t have any sound when we looked at the footage later on and we had to end up waiting for another sunny day and just replicating the shot from down low so you couldn’t see the rest of the environment and tell that the shots were filmed 15 minutes away from each other”.
When asked about the film’s themes, Logan said, “I just wanted to f-ck about, I spent a long time writing this and it went through a lot of different drafts, it was just an excuse to do funny sh-t. The theme might reveal itself when it’s played [at the ATVA’s]. It was originally meant to lean into me being a guy who was down on my luck and couldn’t find a job… but then it took on this different spin, with the puppet.
“I wanted to up the ante from last year, and that’s not an easy task after being thrown in a reservoir.”
Logan highlighted the skills of the cast and crew.
“Tom was very good at keeping things safe on set and the crew were all committed to making things work.
“The film’s about a sentient puppet cutting about, doing his own thing. It’s a living puppet, not just me going crazy. It wasn’t originally meant to be in it, but I had the whole thing with the film being based around two sequences, so the puppet was a good MacGuffin. It was meant to be a silent film before the puppet, but with Josh, who voiced the puppet, we ran through all these voices and accents. He was originally going to be French, but we settled on this American accent. I then thought I’d do an accent as well, and tried doing a similar one.
“I really like how Josh handled the whole puppet thing. The last night before the deadline, I was editing and I’d forgotten to write down one of the final lines for Josh to record. And I had to rush to get him to record it, he was very committed as I was sh-tting myself [that the film wouldn’t get finished in time]. I’m so glad I noticed it.”
The one word Logan used to sum up the film? “Dangerous”.
Featured Images Credit: Logan Killiard/AirTV
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