Exclusive Interview: Jon Russell Cring and Anna Shields Discuss Indie Film Projects

by Brett Parker

Anna Shields was a last minute replacement for the lead role in Jon Russell Cring’s R.I.D., the first installment in his skin-crawling anthology of delirious terror, Creeping Crawling.  Cring really lucked out with this acting discovery, for Shields proves to be the sexually vibrant cherry atop Cring’s sundae of demented and unsettling horror treats.  Instead of relying on gotcha scares and generic familiarities, Cring pushes to build a feverish nightmare fueled by slow-burn disturbances.  Within every step of this crazed fun house, Shields rides each creepy wave with an alarming colorfulness.  With her classical blonde looks, Shields elevates the material with a bubbly alertness and animated resourcefulness thats like watching Jean Harlow trapped on Shutter Island.

What this beautiful star and her horror-flick helmer probably didn’t anticipate was that this collaboration would not only produce a fruitful actor-director relationship, but also a filmmaking team that reflects each other’s passionate drive and creativity.  For as Cring was working to complete the rest of his Creeping Crawling trilogy (with Grubbery and Bugger making up the second and third installments, respectively), Shields presented him with a script for Little Bi Peep, a heartfelt and modern peek at a young woman who lives her life as a bisexual.  Cring not only loved the script, but encouraged Shields to produce and co-direct her very own starring vehicle by any means necessary.  Cring cheerfully showed her the ropes of mounting one’s very first film production all while trying to get his own horror anthology across the finish line.

Linked by the hardships of making a low budget feature and the creative zest in bringing cinematic visions to life, I decided to sit down with Cring and Shields on a recent summer afternoon to discuss both of their film projects.  By focusing on their thematically-different yet equally-inspired productions, the duo was able to highlight the stresses of pre-production, the process of fundraising, and the reasons why any average joe with passion can make their very own movie:

You two worked together on the first installment in the Creeping Crawling trilogy, R.I.D.  How did the actor-director relationship work out between you two?  What did you learn from that specific process?

JON: I found Anna basically because she was recommended to me by my friend James Pentaudi.  I was looking for somebody because someone else had fallen through on the role due to medical reasons.  I needed someone and I didn’t want to cancel my shoot.  I had only two days to go and James said “you have to come meet this girl, Anna Shields.”  When I met her, I knew she had something about her.  She’s kind of has an old Hollywood thing, because she’s beautiful, funny, sexy, yet not afraid to be super self-deprecating and it was a great combination.  When people meet Anna, they tend to surface her.  They think “this is all she is,” but she has a lot of layers underneath her.  I felt like the character in R.I.D. was exactly the same way, for Dori Dixon was a woman who put up a normal front to be like everyone else, yet underneath her there was all this darkness that was bubbling up from the bottom, so I felt Anna was a great choice for that.

ANNA: Meeting Jon, I just felt there was this cool, calm understanding between us, like, from day one.  There was some sort of connection.  I remember right off the bat, right after we read the script together, I compared it to some movie and you agreed and there was this basis off of that and I think it was just a big comfortability factor....

JON: We’re best friends, basically!  Anna and I didn’t know we were best friends until we actually met each other!

ANNA: [laughs] Exactly!  Yeah, so there was this initial connection and it worked great on set, and I think we made something great out of it!

JON: Anna is doing a Hollywood film right now, she has another movie coming up...I mean, some people just have “it!”  They have star quality, they are the kind of people that, if the stars align, you’ll see them on the cover of magazines.  

What do you look for in an actor as a director?

JON: I look for a combination of a seriousness about the material and a levity about themselves.

Anna, what do you look for in a director?

ANNA: Someone who has everything planned out for a movie and is just able to get that across to an actor who also probably has the same ideas but doesn’t really come to that idea right off the bat.

JON: It’s all about being easy to work with.  I always ask Anna about past film experiences, “did your director actually direct?”  And most of the time she says....

ANNA: No! [laughs] 

JON: It’s like the idea of the director has been lost.  What exactly does a director do?  Really all I’m concerned about is performance, performance, performance, and trying to get the actor to surprise me.

ANNA: And an actor just wants someone who can translate clearly to the actor what they need to be doing.   

R.I.D. was completed last year and screened at a premiere in Albany, NY.  What did you guys think of the finished product and how people reacted to it?

ANNA: My first time seeing it on the big screen was the first time I saw it, actually.  I was completely blown away, in a positive way.  In the short interval that we shot it, I was amazed by how good it looked and everything.  It looked exactly how I thought it should look after the first time I read the script.

JON: I was shocked by how tiny Anna’s underwear was!

ANNA: [laughs] I was shocked too!

After R.I.D. was complete, you guys went off to follow your own independent film projects to bring your own unique visions to life.  Jon, I understand that the entire Creeping Crawling trilogy is now officially in the can.  Were there any new challenges you faced while filming the other two that you didn’t experience the first time around?  Are there any mistakes you made on the first film that you went to great lengths to prevent from happening with the other two?

JON: One of the big issues I had on the first film was that it was underpopulated.  Because of a freak snow storm we had on October 26th, we had to change scenes in which we would’ve had a lot of our extras.  Thats one thing about independent film, it can’t look like a porn!  You can’t just shoot it against, like, a black wall and say “that’s a movie!”  Movies are populated, they have a lot of people in them.  That was a big issue on R.I.D. and we wanted to fix that.  So we made sure we went to some great locations on Grubbery and Bugger and we made sure that the films were a lot more populated.  

I’m extremely excited about getting Raine Brown, a horror movie icon who’s all over Fangoria.  She was incredible, she came with a lot of ideas and opinions about how she wanted her character to be and it was really fun working with her.  So Bugger became a very funny story then Grubbery turned out to be a very dark story.  You never really know how something is going to turn out to be until you finish shooting it.  In October, we’ll be doing a run of the films and introducing the world to them!  They will see things in Creeping Crawling that I guarantee they have never seen on film before!  So that’s always exciting for me, to push the limits, surprise people, maybe gross them out, and reveal the human experience.

Will we be seeing more girls in their underwear?

JON: I won’t really get into that, just to say that maybe you’ll be seeing more girls OUT of their underwear!

Anna, right now you are working on your first writing-directing endeavor on film with Little Bi Peep, which is the story of a young woman and her lifestyle as a bisexual.  You are currently funding this project through Indiegogo.  What is the funding process like for a project with a decidedly sexual subject matter?

ANNA: I’ve never done anything on the business side of films before and there’s so many tricks to marketing things a certain way and so we had to find a hook that maybe I hadn’t initially thought of when I wrote it, so we’ve sort of been trying to adapt the movie to that.  But yeah, we’ve been funding through Indiegogo, which has gone pretty well, and we’ve just been trying to get the word out there.  Like any kind of connection you have, you just kind of push this project like “hey, I haven’t talked to you in a while, but here’s this project I’ve been working on...” [laughs] So you try to see what connections your connections have and it turns into this tree of marketing.  We’ve also been talking to a couple of people who could possibly help produce, so its just been this giant web of inter-marketing!

JON: We call it a LGBT, but when she wrote it, that wasn’t what it was initially about.  Anna wrote it as a character piece about her experiences and the experiences of other people that she knows and the LGBT market just seemed obvious for this particular story.  So thats kind of the direction where we’re taking it, but we also want to do something almost like Juno or Ghost World with that kind of look and feel.

CHASING AMY springs to my mind, for that’s a well-known film that dealt with bisexuality.

JON: Yeah, well you know Chasing Amy is very much a straight man writing a story about being gay.  That’s cool, but its a completely different mindset than someone who’s actually in the light.

ANNA: And that’s exactly what I was trying to write about!  It wasn’t just about an LGBT stance, but also a young person’s stance in general.  You know, sexual encounters within the current times of a younger generation.  So it was about me nailing that down, as opposed to someone in their 60s trying to nail it down! 

JON: And its like what you said in the campaign that I found very interesting: “in relationships, you start with sex.”

ANNA: Right, so then what are relationships after sex?

JON: Cause nowadays, its not unusual for someone to have slept with someone by the third date!

Both of you guys have gone through the process of funding a film and trying to put complicated pre-production plans together.  Do you feel these are tasks that any artistic person with passion can pull off, or do you need to be a lawyer or accountant to get this all together?

JON: Any artistic person can!  You have to have the experience of making all the lists, writing down all the names, and doing all the organization.  You have to have that experience to know that it can be done.  Everything has to be demystified!  It has to stop being about inspiration after a certain point and it has to start being about “okay, this is what we need to do to get this done!”

ANNA: Right!  Because so many filmmakers today write their own scripts, buy their own camera, they just do it.  They’re not sitting around trying to rely on big-time producers to get things done.

Anna, what’s it like starting out as a first-time filmmaker?  Are there more frustrations than pleasures?  What kind of things would you warn other aspiring filmmakers about?

ANNA: It can be frustrating, but I think its all going to pay off.  I think I would tell people to never lose any connection they ever made because you’re probably going to need to count on it again!  I think its all about getting out there and talking and just knocking out that self-deprecating way you look at yourself and assume that everyone wants to hear what you’re talking about.  That’s a giant thing that I’m trying to learn.  

JON: Anna is an asshole in training, while I am a professional asshole! [laughs]  I would say Anna is a minor league asshole and I’m trying to get her into the majors!

ANNA: [laughs] Right!  Just trying to vocalize inner-sarcastic thoughts right now!

That brings up an important question: do you have to be an asshole to get a film project done?

JON: Well I think one definition of an asshole is someone who knows what they want to do and believes that they can do it.  I don’t think “niceness” has anything to do with it.  I’m the nicest person in the world, but I also am somebody who believes that they have a voice and believes that other people have a voice that should be heard.

ANNA: And I think either way wins you points, because if you are an asshole, you can go and voice your thoughts to the greatest extent you can or if you’re nice about it, people can be into that, too.

JON: Yeah, absolutely.  I am never mean to anybody, I don’t believe its necessary or important.  But I also don’t let myself be stomped out like a fire.  I am going to burn!  If you’re a pile of embers and you’re mad at me because I’m a fire, thats your problem!  But I’m not gonna bring my fire down just to make you feel better about yourself!  

So when all is said and done, what are your ultimate hopes for the future of your projects?  In a year from now, where would you like to see yourselves artistically and professionally?

JON: After Creeping Crawling, I have a short film that I’m working on called Carnival.  As far as whats happening with Creeping Crawling, I’m definitely going to seek distribution on that.  And, I’m just trying to make bigger and better films.  I want to get more people involved and have more energy behind projects.  I love what Roger Corman did, you know?  There’s a whole generation of filmmakers who wouldn’t be making movies if it weren’t for Roger Corman and his process of encouraging people.  You know, Anna sent me this script and had written something that wasn’t her.  Its like she was trying to make a commercial movie.  And I said to her, “this is SHIT!”

ANNA: [laughs] I think you compared it to Abduction with Taylor Lautner!

JON: Exactly!  It was a terrible script!  It had a plot, but it was terrible!  So I said to you, “write yourself, write what you know.”  And literally, two days later she sent me this incredible script!  She knew exactly what she wanted to write about!  There’s a whole generation of people who need that opportunity for someone to say “look, if you write something awesome, I want to totally get behind that!”

ANNA: I want to see my project in the festivals.  I think this is a big festival piece and that’s kind of what we’re aiming it for.  I also want people from the LGBT community to see it, cause there’s not too many LGBT movies around, so it’d be a reassurance if everyone comes and find that its a good one!

JON: I think Little Bi Peep is going to appeal to everyone because its a movie about sex.  I like sexy movies, I like movies that aren’t afraid to play with that idea of how intimacy and sex relate to each other.

ANNA: But its also about relationships, and the way people misjudge relationships whether they’re just about sex, which a lot of them are, or whether there is something more to them, including the lies people tell each other within them.

JON: Hopefully, someday we won’t even have to say that “this is an LGBT film.”  It will feel like its just another movie.  I mean, no one ever goes, “hey, this is just a firefighter movie!  It’s for firefighters, so we’re marketing it just for firefighters!”  It’s sound just as stupid to say such a thing about a LGBT film, but thats where were at right now in this country, and hopefully we can get past that “firefighter” phase.

You think we’re still in such a “firefighter” phase?  You don’t think people have become more accepting of such subject matter?

ANNA: I think a little more, but I think we’re still in it as well.  Just look at The L Word, its literally named after “lesbian!”  You know?  Its marketed specifically for that.  I think we’re getting more and more into an age where thats more acceptable, but to just throw it into a movie as a minor thing isn’t exactly marketable.

For more information on Little Bi Peep, check out http://www.indiegogo.com/littlebipeepmovie and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2262078/

For more information on Creeping Crawling, check out http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2234035/

To read Jon Russell Cring's previous interview with The Cinephile New York, check out http://thecinephilenewyork.blogspot.com/2012/01/exclusive-interview-filmmaker-jon.html