Digging Into ‘Frailty’ with Writer Brent Hanley

Bill Paxton’s 2002 religious horror film Frailty is a cult classic, a Southern gothic, slow-burning descent into hell as one man recounts the story of his childhood and his murderous father, who killed because God told him to. It’s a downright chilling experience as writer Brent Hanley’s script never lets you in on the whole truth, even as the credits start to roll. It’s a terrifying cinematic mind game, and I was lucky enough to speak with Hanley, as well as one of the film’s producers, David Blocker, about their experience bringing Frality to life.

Ahead of a special screening of the film, I spoke with Hanley and Blocker over Zoom to discuss the film’s legacy, why their rating from the MPAA came with an apology, and Texas, the film’s most crucial character.

Let’s Start At The Very Beginning

The making of Frailty began in 1995, when Hanley went to film school in Boston. He was a high school dropout who wanted to make movies. So, he started what he thought would be his first script, which would become the backbone for Frailty. But it looked very different in its earliest iterations. 

“I was going to film school at the time at Emerson, and I started writing what I was calling The Ambulance Story, which became Frailty,” said Hanley. 

“It didn’t have any of the religious stuff in it. It was literally just a noir about this guy who had kidnapped an ambulance driver, and his brother’s dead body was in there. The guy had promised his brother that he would bury him in the rose garden. And that was the premise of the ambulance story,” he explained. “It was just going to be like a breezy noir, a dark hour-and-a-half movie, but more of a crime mystery kind of thing.”

But after taking a screenwriting class, things changed quite a bit, especially after he started showing the script to fellow students and his professor. 

“What [the professor] did is he paired us up, and one of us was to write a screenplay and the other person was to criticize it and give notes,” Hanley explained. “So I started just feeding them pages I had already written… [Then] they started giving me notes and criticizing [the script]. At that point, I was about halfway through [writing the script]. And when they started that shit, it just blocked me up on it, man. It wasn’t their fault, but it just screwed me up.”

So, Hanley decided to work on another screenplay to free his mind and focus on something else. That’s where his actual first screenplay, He Dreams Awake, came from.

“It started my career with Matthew McConaughey because he optioned it,” Hanley said. “But Frailty was what got me the agent.”

After working on He Dreams Awake and giving himself space from The Ambulance Story, Hanley went back to the script after about a year with fresh eyes and a clearer mind. 

“I had this other idea about God speaking to a common man,” said Hanley, and from there, he blended that with his initial idea in The Ambluance Story. “When I came back to it, I felt like the plot was really just thin. It was just this little thing, a little 10-minute interlude that was designed actually to be like Psycho. That’s what I wanted to do. I was obsessed with Psycho and Hitchcock. That all came through with this idea. I love the idea of misleading the audience completely.”

Hanley was a movie lover from a young age, which meant he saw some things a little too early.

“I saw Straw Dogs at age eight. That is not good. I saw Clockwork Orange at age 10. I saw Psycho at age 10 and fucking loved it. It made me not want to take a shower,” Hanley said. But I saw all that shit way too young. So I’m real conscious of that.”

Upon reflection, Hanley says, “You could argue it turned me into an ultra-violent filmmaker or a disturbing filmmaker.”

Regardless, it led to Hanley’s finished version of the script. Plus, he had an agent and one film already under his belt. That’s where Bill Paxton and his producing team came in.

Enter Bill Paxton

The script came to Paxton after the star met producer David Kirschner, who had just acquired the rights to Frailty. “He [Paxton] always had a love of gothic type stuff and stuff that you don’t see in your normal day,” producer David Blocker said. So it only makes sense that Paxton was drawn to the Frailty script.

As an aside, Blocker and Paxton had collaborated previously on films. As Blocker playfully put it, “I kind of wanted to make movies with him and he kind of wanted to make movies with me.” According to Blocker, the pair were always looking for something original.

So, once Paxton read the Frailty script, he immediately called up Blocker and said, “Come to my house right now.” Naturally, Blocker obliged. 

“I drove an hour and a half to his place, and he sat me down with the Frailty script, and I thought the title was kind of a cool title. A third of the way through, I went, ‘Oh my God, this is incredible,’” Blocker said. “And by the time I got to the last page, everything I had read all of a sudden took a whole different insight to, and I literally had to start the script again.”

He added, “I thought it was one of the most original screenplays I’ve ever read.”

So, they got to work, assembling their dream team to bring their horrific vision to life. Kirschner, who also served as a producer on the film, wanted Paxton to direct, and Paxton wanted Blocker as his producer. So, Blocker and Kirschner formed a team where Blocker said, with a laugh, that he “did a lot of the minutiae work that David probably didn’t want to do.”

Joking aside, Blocker explained that “by the time we all got this kind of unit really rolling, we realized we were making something special before we started shooting.” 

If you’re a filmmaker, you know how incredible and rare that feeling is. 

Frailty Filming Gets Underway… In California

With that dream team assembled, it was time to start filming Frailty. The only issue, at least for Hanley, was that they were filming in California when Texas was such a crucial character in the script. 

“I was very bullish about that, and I was pissed,” admitted Hanley. “I bugged everyone to just shoot in Texas. But I will be honest and admit that I agree. I think you guys did a great job. I think that the spirit was there.”

Since Paxton and most of the crew lived in California and had family there, it only made sense to film there despite Hanley’s reservations. To a younger Hanley, his Texas was wide-open spaces and spacious skies. By shooting anywhere else, he was worried he would lose an integral character to the plot. But once he started seeing the footage, his anxieties disappeared. 

“He [Paxton] inverted what I did. He inverted the wide open spaces, and everything became claustrophobic. It worked like gangbusters,” Hanley said. “I admitted that back in the day because I was worried about losing Texas as a character, and I feel like they didn’t. It just got altered, but it 100% works. It is different than what I would’ve done, but at the same time, I can concede that I think it really helped with film.”

More Than Just A Character

But even if it wasn’t shot in Texas, there’s still so much of the state ingrained in Frailty.

“I would say that everybody involved in the film was from Texas,” said Blocker. “I’m from Texas, Bill Paxton was from Texas, Matthew is from Texas. [It was all people] who understood how to make it feel like we were in Texas, even though we were in Los Angeles.”

He stopped and asked me, “Did you think it wasn’t shot in Texas today when you were watching?” I admitted I definitely thought it was Texas, though, as a Maryland native, I’m not the best person to ask. Regardless, everyone involved in Frailty made sure the spirit of Texas was felt in every frame. 

But including Texas was about more than just scenery. For Hanley, Frailty was almost like an exorcism, a way for him to process his upbringing that was marked by constantly dealing with bigotry and toxic masculinity.

“I grew up in Dallas, Texas, which explains a lot,” said Hanley. “I’ve thought about this over the years, and to me, Frailty is somewhat of a personal allegory of dealing with toxic masculinity, racism, homophobia, bigotry, all the things I can’t stand in this world. Frailty was me dealing with that in a lot of ways. I was always the odd man out as a little boy. I never understood it. And I still don’t.

“It’s weird to say that my hatred for racist, bigoted dipshits kind of led me intellectually to Frailty, but I think it’s true!”

Getting Frailty Out Into The World

After filming what they believed was something truly special (and they were certainly right about that), the struggles truly began. Frailty was a challenging film for distributors and the MPAA alike to wrap their heads around. So when they received an R-rating, the team wasn’t necessarily surprised, but they were worried. To most, an R-rating back then meant it wouldn’t perform well at the box office, since that rating limited an entire, younger demographic from seeing the film. 

“And I even said, ‘Well, fuck that. I don’t want the fucking tweens because I didn’t write this for children. I wrote this for adults,’” Hanley said.

But their rating actually came with an apology, as Hanley explained. He told me that in their letter, “They apologized because they said that we had handled all of the violence, so off screen and everything, but the premise itself was R-rated, which you can’t argue with that.”

Blocker added, “No one really knew how to deal with the film when we finished it. Even Lionsgate, the company that released the film, they didn’t really know what to do with Frailty.”

In fact, Lionsgate, like the MPAA, also came back to the team with an apology. Blocker told me, “After the film came out, Tom Warberg came to us and said, apologized and said, ‘I didn’t really understand what the film was and how it really played. We could have done gangbusters.’”

And then there was one last little detail that really threw a wrench into the film’s release. 

“One thing a lot of people don’t know is that we actually were going to release Frailty in October of 2001,” said Hanley. “Now it was released in April of 2002. For obvious reasons.”

Such a close proximity to the very real terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, was regarded as a massive risk, and rightfully so, since this is a film all about committing violence in the name of God. But instead of waiting until October 2003, the release was only pushed to April of the following year.

“None of us wanted it to be released in April of 2002. Traditionally, that’s not when you release a film like Frailty, which should have been released in the fall,” explained Hanley. “And we had begged them, begged them. I remember having this conversation again and again with Bill, and he said, ‘They won’t budge.’”

Blocker added, “I think Bill and I were really afraid they might even go straight to video with it. They just wanted to remove themselves from the whole God telling people to kill other people.”

The Film’s Legacy 

So, the film was released in April of 2002 and grossed approximately $17.4 million against a reported $11 million budget. While it was relatively well-received upon release, it didn’t make an immediate splash. However, in the years since its release, its fan base has only gotten bigger as new generations of horror lovers have discovered this stellar and chilling example of religious horror done through a Southern gothic lens. And the result has been the film finally getting the love and attention it deserves, which isn’t lost on Hanley and Blocker.

“Bill and I, before he passed away, discussed on several occasions how proud we were of the film and how proud we were that we made what we set up to make,” said Hanley. “We both always wanted to make a film like Night of the Hunter, and we did. So for the film to eventually find an audience, I’m really proud of that.”

“Everybody who’s associated with frailty knows it is one of their great films, and it is a classic,” said Blocker. “We wanted to make something that stands the test of time. And I think it has.”

Frailty is available now on 4K UHD from Lionsgate.

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