Interview: Osgood Perkins Sings a Bloody Pop Tune with THE MONKEY

Osgood Perkins is proud of the fact that The Monkey isn’t Longlegs 2.0. The Stephen King adaptation goes hard and macabre for belly laughs. The premise is inherently funny – wind up a toy monkey, people die – and Perkins doubles and triples down on that fact whenever and wherever he can.

For the filmmaker, the key to consistency these days is variety. “What we’ve been able to do with these last two movies – and there’s another one coming out in October that we made during these other ones that Neon is putting out called Keeper – I think the idea is just to keep doing things differently,” Perkins told Daily Dead. “Don’t serve the same sandwich twice.”

During a recent interview with Perkins – which, fittingly, begins and ends with death – he told us about exploring loss, destroying body parts, and the inevitability of, “It is what it is.”

Let’s start with a strangely nice moment between Lois (Tatiana Maslany) and the twins, where she talks about death. She explains death matter-of-factly. How’d that speech evolve when you started writing it and how did you see the light or shadow it casts over the film? 

Osgood Perkins: What I connected to in this project was just the idea that people do die, and they do die suddenly, and they do die in crazy ways. It happened to me, so I felt like I was an expert on that truth. I took the opportunity – “espouse” is sort of a grand word – but I just took the opportunity to express my belief in how this stuff works. I gotta put it in the mouths of my characters. What the priest says is as true as what she says, right? There is no real answer. It’s all just talk and thought. We all process it how we process it. I felt Mom’s speech is the most elevated look at life – like, yeah, it ends, and what are you going to do about it? Are you going to sit here and mope about it? No, you should probably dance about it.

You acknowledge the heaviness of loss, but you and your visual effects supervisor, Edward J. Douglas, also remind us we are all just bags of meat, too. 

Osgood Perkins: Bags of meat with a lot of blood in us.

What were your first conversations with Edward about what you wanted to achieve with the body count?

Osgood Perkins: The goal is always to do as much of it practically on camera as you can and then use VFX to clean up and sew things together. For example, the swimmer, that’s plate after plate after plate of practical stuff being sewn together with little things pulled out. Ed didn’t have to add a lot. The art that Ed does so beautifully is shaping the reality of what we’ve already got. He just takes some of the rough edges off, but most of everything we did, we did for real. We did it in the moment, and then Ed helped make it look graceful and smoother.

Was there a particular set piece that kept you and the VFX team up all night? 

Osgood Perkins: Once you’ve planned everything well, it tends to go easily and pretty much to plan. One fun thing was when we did the swimmer, the diver. She dove in, we locked the camera off, got her warm, we sent her home, and then we built a bridge across the pool. My special effects guy went out there in a full It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Green Man suit with a box of body parts and just threw them at the camera for an hour. Then, on that same bridge, we brought out what’s called a “guts cannon” and launched about four times as much blood as is in a real human body. We just kept shooting it. It was a good time.

When you started making movies, as you’ve said, you were making movies for yourself. You wanted to make Longlegs for the audience. How’d you try to achieve that goal again with The Monkey?

Osgood Perkins: I think once you can settle on the rhythm – there’s going to be some heartfelt stuff that ebbs and flows, and then there’s going to be a ridiculous set piece that plays like a Looney Tunes cartoon. The audience will settle into that rhythm. So even if they, God forbid, start wavering in their interest in what I’m talking about, they at least know energetically, vibrationally, and rhythmically that something gory is coming. It’s like a pop song, right? Verse, verse, chorus, verse. When you establish that rhythm and connect with the audience that way, they really feel it. An audience knows when things get slow. If you’re in a room with them and your movie’s getting slow, you fucking feel it.

Were there moments in test screenings of The Monkey where you felt that?

Osgood Perkins: Absolutely. There are moments in every movie, at any point in the process, where you go, “Shit, I really gotta fix this. I gotta make this work better.” Because it’s one thing to shoot a movie, it’s a whole thing to cut a movie, and it’s a whole other thing entirely to show a movie. That’s why the audience is always right. The audience is always right because when they feel it, you feel it.

How’d you make those scenes click? 

Osgood Perkins: If anything, we shortened a lot of things. The priest’s eulogy was probably five times as long as it ended up being in the movie. My scene on the stairs with Christian [Convery] – with Uncle Chip giving advice to Hal – that’s basically a one-act. We ended up cutting it down to their pithiest form. We didn’t really struggle; if anything, we had too much of some stuff. And rhythmically, it just started to sag, so we shortened it.

Great job as Uncle Chip.

Osgood Perkins: Thanks.

Chip says something along the lines of, “We’re going to try our best, and our best might be pretty bad.” Again, it’s another moment of honesty. What did you want that brutal but kind honesty between families to communicate? 

Osgood Perkins: Yeah, it’s just what you’re saying. When you lose your parents, someone’s going to step in, hopefully. Some of those people are going to be great, some of them are going to be angels, and some are going to be duds. Unless you’re in a really negative situation where someone’s trying to hurt you, the idea is that you can’t replace a parent, right? You can’t replace a parent. Whether it’s a great replacement or a shitty one or an honestly shitty one, like Uncle Chip, as matter-of-factly as I can put it, you can’t replace them.

I personally liked Uncle Chip a lot.

Osgood Perkins: Thank you very much. Me too.

You originally wrote the story set in the ’50s and ’80s. When you updated it, how did that change the story? 

Osgood Perkins: It’s funny, I think about it a lot. It didn’t really change it at all, to be honest with you. The kids’ stuff was all ’50s originally, and I didn’t change it. Bill’s malapropisms, when he laments the babysitter – “I was going to marry that girl” – that’s very ’50s to me. People don’t say shit like that anymore. Leaving that kind of ‘50s talk gave it that nostalgic quality I always feel from Stephen King’s stuff, so I wanted that to remain. I left almost everything exactly as it was.

That’s a good example of making something for the audience but also yourself. When you look at the finished movie, how do you see it as a reflection of you or your taste? 

Osgood Perkins: I think the willingness to be ridiculous and make a movie that aligns with my love of things like Chuck Jones animation, Itchy & Scratchy, the sort of elevated sense of humor of The Simpsons, Robert Zemeckis, early playful Tim Burton – those are the things that mean much more to me than John Carpenter or Dario Argento. They’re great, amazing artists, impactful in the genre, but I don’t think about those guys. I think about Death Becomes Her. I think about The Santa Clause from Tales from the Crypt. Those are the things that really amused me as a kid.

How did you want the opening scene to establish right up front, “This is what this movie is”?

Osgood Perkins: I wanted it to show the intelligent humor, to show that we weren’t going to be mean but that we were going to be playful. To get the rules of the monkey out of the way – this is how it works. You don’t want it to drum. That’s as simple as that. There’s no mythology in the movie. I was able to dodge the request for mythology and make it not that kind of movie. We really just wanted to ring the tonal bell – show that it was deadpan, show that it was playful, express the rules, and then kind of get out.

How did you dodge forcing a mythology? 

Osgood Perkins: You just keep saying no, right? Because the baseline expectation from people you’re making the movie with – and they’re not wrong – is, “Well, can we just say a little about where the monkey comes from, how it works, or what it means?” For me, well, the monkey doesn’t do anything. The monkey’s just life and death. It’s a totem for the fact that we all die. It’s like an idol. Because it’s inert, it almost doesn’t even have to be there. If we’re just talking about the fact that everybody dies, there’s no mythology around that. You don’t dig that out of a hole in India somewhere. This is just the way it is. As the priest says, “It is what it is. The word of the Lord.” What’s the monkey’s mythology? The monkey’s mythology is: It is what it is.