“Beast Beast” is not your typical teen drama. There are no fights about who’s going with who to Prom. No drama about boyfriends and girlfriends. But writer-director Danny Madden’s debut feature is able to capture the awkwardness and the split-second choices that teens are faced with on a daily basis in an honest, often brutal way. And clearly, this honesty is a large part of what attracted Alec Baldwin to the project.
With “Beast Beast” available now in theaters and on VOD/Digital, I got a chance to talk with Madden and Baldwin about this surprising indie drama. Executive produced by Alec Baldwin, “Beast Beast” tells the story of young people and how their lives all intersect in beautiful, sometimes tragic ways. Inspired by his short film, “Krista,” Madden’s first feature film stars Shirley Chen, Will Madden, and Jose Angeles as the three leads in a story that showcases the filmmaker’s penchant for writing honest dialogue about what young people experience.
And Baldwin has nothing but praise for Madden, saying in our interview, “In terms of the writing, the directing, the post, all of it, Dan is one of the best filmmakers alive today. He’s one of the best that’s out there today. We can’t wait to see what he does next. Can’t wait.”
You read my discussion below with filmmaker Danny Madden and producer Alec Baldwin, as they discuss the honesty of “Beast Beast” and how the film doesn’t offer any easy answers. Oh yeah, and find out how “Thunder Road” filmmaker Jim Cummings fits into this whole situation.
Alec, whenever your name is attached to something, obviously the profile of the project is instantly raised. And for “Beast Beast,” this marks like a rare time that you’ve executive produced a project, but you don’t actually appear in it. What drew you to this project and why is Danny’s film something like you wanted to be attached to?
Alec Baldwin: Well, Casey Bader, who worked with me for a while. He and I formed a little company together and he started to bring me shorts and we just had this very simple operation where we looked at shorts to platform into a full feature or the filmmaker would give us a short and we were very drawn to their work and they had another script entirely that they wanted to make into a feature. So we watched Danny’s short. Yeah, we’ve watched his shorts.
I’ve been saying all along that it’s really impossible to make a good movie without a good script. You can make a pretty average movie, but you can’t make a good movie without a good script from the beginning. It’s gotta be there on the page. And Danny is such a good writer and he sent us the draft. We had almost nothing to say. Danny is one of those guys. You want to give him the resources that he needs and just get out of his way because he has such a perfect sense of timing in the film, in terms of when for it to really, really strong and really heavy and when to back off and let the audience breathe a little bit. It’s like music in that way.
His ear for dialogue, where everybody spoke in their own way, not like a lot of times I’ll read scripts and there’s an equivalency of rhetorical ability of the cast, as opposed to people who they struggle for what to say. They’re less articulate. Some are more articulate than others. Some are more confident when they speak than others. And we were just amazed at how his writing of dialogue gave everybody their own voice. We thought that was really powerful.
Speaking of the dialogue, it feels like improv with how natural it sounds, the cadence of teen discussions, the awkwardness, all that really comes through. What was it like trying to craft that dialogue?
Danny Madden: It helps when the three lead parts were written for people specifically. Jose was a friend. Will, I’ve known since the day he was born so long relationship. I think that helps, but it’s also just when we’re all on the day filming, everyone is so thorough, so prepared, but also I encourage people to color outside the lines when it comes to performing and, and we didn’t slate on this film. I was operating most of it just right in their face and we just did all the audio was synched with time code.
And so in that sense that we could stop and I could kind of feed them things. And then we could go from there. So it was very fluid and organic in that way. We just need to be there and playing and get them to bring out authentic versions of these characters.
This is based or inspired, I guess, by your short film, ‘Krista.’ Whenever you see that short films inspire feature films, a lot of times it’s just expanding on what is already there. What stood out with ‘Krista’ is that it’s very different than the feature film. At what point did you know this is going to grow into something much bigger?
Madden: Typically, I’m very storyboard-centric. I come from animation. So every shot deliberately goes into the next. So with ‘Krista,’ it was this experiment in the craft of it. We were pretty happy with how it was turning out in post. And so then I started to sort of expand on it and kind of assemble some bones from like forgotten screenplay ideas that I’d had. But essentially it’s the same, it’s the same concept of this sort of happy-go-lucky girl who goes through these sort of like traumatic events that come to most people in different forms in their lives. And you just learn about the teeth of the world.
Alec, as a parent, what do you think when you watch such frank, honest depictions of teens, does it scare the hell out of you? Or is this something where you’re just happy that something like this exists?
Baldwin: I have an older daughter who’s 25 and I’ve got six small children since I got remarried. The oldest is seven. So we’ve had six kids in seven years. Yeah, it’s pretty crazy. What I love about Danny’s film, in terms of the casting, all these people are fresh. All these people are, you know, you see them and I don’t see a lot of movies with a cast of young people, but I see some, and all these people just knocked me out. They’re all so fresh and raw and real. The casting is everything.
Shirley Chen, I just haven’t seen anybody with her combination of qualities in one young woman. I haven’t seen that in a long, long time. I don’t think I’ve seen anybody with that combination of qualities as Holly Hunter when she started making movies.
The Adam character is fascinating for a variety of reasons. Adam is obsessed with guns and fame, but there’s a lot of nuance to him. He’s not just your prototypical NRA gun-toting, “Dirty Harry” guy. This is a guy who’s got some interesting ambitions combined with a very big love of automatic weaponry. So with that, it could have gone into caricature, but you clearly wanted there to be layers. When writing a character that is this, was it important to you to have those layers?
Madden: Yeah. Well, I’m not someone who’s very interested in one-dimensional depictions of good and evil. The whole point of this movie was to show humanity, right? We know we’re going to hit this kind of, what is, unfortunately, still a hot button political issue, but we’re going to try and scrape away as much of the politics as possible and focus on the humanity. And the only way to do that is to show nuance in how people operate and what their daily life is. Having the influence of your parents and neighbors telling you that this would be a really good thing to do. Nobody’s a saint, nobody’s the devil. That’s the world as I see it. And just trying to tell a story and ask some questions through there.
Baldwin: When you see Will’s character, I saw that being played by a completely different actor, you know, and in my mind, someone who maybe even telegraphs some of the malice more clearly. You would see that he was potentially a guy that just seemed more aggressive. When Will’s doing the videos and he’s trying to set up his videos, he seems more patient. He doesn’t seem as aggressive.
But when you get into the big moment with Will’s character, when you get into that moment in the house, you know, the thing I was hoping people would believe is that he could, he really could go either way. And what I liked about the character was you weren’t sure which choice he would make. You’re not quite sure what he’s going to do.
What I also love about Danny is that there’s no politics in this. No one’s saying guns are bad. I always remember reading about the Cheshire, Connecticut murders. You’re in your house with your wife and your two daughters and two escaped convicts come in and tie your wife down, tie your kids down, beat you. They rape the wife. They rape the kids and they burn the house down. If I were [the husband], a gun might’ve come in handy. I don’t know. But we don’t get into that in this movie, meaning it’s not about guns. It’s about is this idea that young people today are being asked to polish yourself and develop yourself and present yourself in a way that was completely foreign 20 years ago.
It’s hard to deny the vigilante aspect of this movie and the idea about whether or not this is something that should be praised? Without getting into spoilers, it does mirror something that happened last year at a Black Lives Matter protest, where a teen had a gun and murdered people. When you have something like this, that mirrors reality in a way, is that something where you’re glad that you didn’t go too far?
Madden: I think anytime you see stories about a young person and guns, people tend to like use words like “school shooting” or “mass shooting.” And that’s not what this movie is about. It’s about more of a specific kind of like niche thing that happens almost every day in the States somewhere. But yeah, when that case happened, which is pretty similar to it. It’s two people shot. And then the guy is kind of praised as a hero afterward by a lot of the community. And I think that’s where hopefully the conversation can go, is this idea of, where is this coming from? Why is that okay? And how can we come to grips with that?
Baldwin: As an example, someone will want me to do a movie and they’ll send me the script. And then of course they don’t want to have you just read the script. They want you to have the deck, you got to have the deck, the pictures of over scenes we’re going to have. And I always find these decks to be kind of amusing because it’s a deck of like Steve McQueen walking along the road and I’m like, okay, there’s Steve McQueen. We love him. And then the next picture was like, Sophia Loren going in a gondola. I’m like, okay, I get that. And then I’m like, why don’t we just read the script? And then we’ll use our imagination.
But this idea that every young person nowadays, they gotta have a deck, they gotta have a deck about who I am. Let me tell you who I am in videos and on Instagram. Time is running out for the imagination. But, but the idea, I know there are a lot of wonderful things that come with these social media. But that idea that Will’s character doesn’t have that skill, he doesn’t have that skill of how to present himself to his corner of the world and sell himself. And all these fast choices. And because everything now is swipe, right, swipe left, fast, fast, fast, fast, and in the way that people can’t keep up with that in the way that Will’s character can’t really find a way to make that work well enough. We see how he gets a little wound up about it, and I don’t have any answers as to what to do.
Social media is stunting people’s growth because you can’t accelerate human, emotional growth. And I think that a lot of this social media stuff is asking people to become more glamorous, more sophisticated, more winsome, more intelligent, more funny than they were ever meant to be. As if they’re performing, as opposed to living. And the difference between living and performing is what I think is making some of these kids miserable.
At The Playlist, we’re big fans of Jim Cummings. You’ve worked with him in the past and I saw his name immediately in the credits on this. Can you talk about his involvement in “Beast Beast?”
Madden: We’ve been making movies together for 12, 13 years now, just helping each other out. He typically works in a producer capacity on stuff that I direct and then I help him out. I was Creative Director on “Thunder Road,” meaning he was in almost every shot. So, he just needed someone on the monitor and for camera notes. That kind of relationship, that kind of trust has built over the years of Jim. So naturally, he’s like, “Oh, it’s your turn to make a movie. Now I’m coming down to Georgia to help however I can. Should I bring my police uniform?”
Jim always likes kind of poking fun at authority. And I think that’s what’s kind of his claim to fame thus far. So, he came down and Jim will do anything from help load a truck to give notes on dailies and stuff like that. So he’s just an absolutely integral team member. So really it’s awesome.
“Beast Beast” is available now in select theaters and on VOD.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.