Julius Ramsay (Right) on the set of The Walking Dead.
Last night, filmmaker Julius Ramsay premiered his first full length feature film, Midnighters, at the Los Angeles Film Festival. The pic is set on a fateful New Year’s Eve. Lindsey and Jeff Pittman face a strained marriage when a random accident spins their lives into an out-of-control nightmare. The harder the two characters try to get themselves out of the mess, the further they fall.
It is a fascinating pressure-cooker of a movie that features not a single dull moment. We will have a review up shortly, but suffice it to say we loved it.
We were fortunate enough to get to speak with Ramsay about working on the project with his brother, screenwriter Alston Ramsay, the influence of the greats like the Coen Brothers and Alfred Hitchcock, and we even got to hear about other upcoming projects too.
Let’s jump right into the two part conversation here.
HorrorBuzz: Can you tell us how this project came from?
Julius Ramsay: Yeah, Midnighters was a three year collaboration between my brother and myself. It was based on an original idea he had and we developed the story together and he wrote the script. We originally tried to get traditional Hollywood funding, and that wound up starting to take a very long time. So, with the assistance of our other brother, there are three boys in my family, three brothers from North Carolina, the three of us raised the money from a lot of individual pieces coming together and that’s how we got the money together.
I come from a background in television. I had worked in the TV space for a very long time but had always wanted to make a film. I wanted to make a film that harkened back to the films of our youth like Shallow Grave and Blood Simple and you know even Alfred Hitchcock. We had wanted to make a movie with a little supernatural element thrown in too. I like to think of Midnighters as a sort of gothic fairy tale.
HB: It was fascinating to watch how one small problem became ten huge mistakes. How did you develop the idea? Was it just inspired by those films you mentioned or…
JR: My brother had read an article about a woman who was driving home late at night and she hit someone. The person like, got lodged in the windshield and was stuck halfway in. She drove home, parked her car in the garage and left him there, in the garage in her windshield and over the nest two days she listened to that person screaming as they slowly and painfully died.
HB: Wow.
JR: We had both read the article but he took the germ of the idea and developed it into a story. We wanted to do a film about a relationship and the kind of faultiness beneath the surface and what would cause said relationship that seems okay on the surface to begin to explode, and how would it explode in a very short amount of time. I think that is a way that a lot of people live their lives. There are things that people ignore, and then they let it catch up with them when there really isn’t a solid foundation in their lives. Something extraordinary happens or a life-changing event, something impactful and everything kind of blows up in their face. It seems like it comes out of nowhere, but the truth is that things had been eroding and building for quite some time.
HB: Did you film this on location?
JR: Yeah we shot the movie on location in Rhode Island in the town of East Greenwich. But we used a couple locations around the state.
HB: The film has a number of moments where the audience HAS to be all in with the action, fully believing the story. Were there scenes in the film that you had to massage or that were a problem to pull off?
JR: As a director and as an editor for I think that every scene has to work. If you are doing a scene and it’s not working and you can’t get it to work then you need to cut the scene.
There is a while sequence in the film that we actually cut. It was halfway through the movie and they are all in the middle of the chaos and suddenly there is a knock at the door. It’s this couple that they are friends with that they had forgotten that they had scheduled to watch the new years game with.
These people were just going to show up in the middle of all of the craziness.
It was kind of like comic relief in a way, a funhouse mirror of Jeff and Lindsey (The main characters) like what could be if they weren’t so messed up. We had it where the one wife is in the kitchen with Lindsey and the husband is in the living room with the guy and they are spending the whole time trying to get rid of them. It was a whole sequence that lasted three minutes at least but when you watched the film it was such a left turn. It made no sense, totally took you out of the film, so we had to cut it.
HB: What projects influenced you? You mention Hitchcock.
JR: I would say Shallow Grave by Danny Boyle was a huge influence on our making the film. As well as the early films of the Coen Brothers. Then there is another movie called The Disappearance of Alice Creed. But I would say Shallow Grave was the most influential if I had to pick one.
HB: Have you found distribution yet?
JR: We are doing the film festival circuit right now. We have gotten a lot of interest though, and that is the next step in our journey. We are getting close.
HB: The movie has potential to go far. There wasn’t a moment that I wasn’t fully engrossed in the movie.
JR: Oh thank you so much.
HB: What do you have planned after this?
JR: Oh My brother has a number of other scripts that we are looking at. I think that my next project will be a sci-fi thriller about the pursuit of someone that has genes that hold the key to biological immortality. That is the project that I have been focused on in addition to getting Midnighters out into the world.
HB: Well, listen, I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us about Midnighters, hopefully we can hear from you again when the next project gets off the ground.
JR: Oh it’s my pleasure, I’m a huge fan of the site.
HB: What? Really?
JR: Yeah I used to work on The Walking Dead and when you guys covered it I would read about it.
HB: Hey do you know Jaremy Aiello?
JR: No, who is he?
HB: He won an Emmy for sculpting Bicycle Girl.
JR: Oh my god he made Bicycle Girl?
HB: Yeah.
JR: Man so he is a real talent. Yeah I didn’t get to go to Georgia in Season one. We were editing in LA and they were all in Georgia. That is still one of the best zombies they ever did.
HB: Agreed.
We also have this new, exclusive clip from the film for you to dig into.
It was a pleasure talking to such a cool, approachable filmmaker on a project he was clearly passionate about. Again, we can’t wait to share our thoughts about the film with you. Until then check out the trailer below.
| Midnighters | ||
| RATING: | UR |  |
| Runtime: | 1hr. 34Mins. | |
| Directed By: | ||
| Written By: | ||
