Jay Rohr
Writer-director Nick Verdi recently gave us a generous portion of his time to chat about Sweet Relief. His latest release is a low-budget mumblegore horror story presenting a curious tale of people in a small New England town going mad due to an internet challenge.
It’s kind of a grand idea one might not expect from a low-budget horror film. This mumblecore-inspired flick does its best to maneuver within the confines of a scant budget. Despite focusing on a few folks, there is a wider implication of others being afflicted by the same blossoming superstition. This allows the movie to touch on ideas of paranoia, psychosis, and the strange general human inclination towards cruelty as something some people deserve.
Nick Verdi has been making films all his life. With the release of Cockazoid in 2021, his work started to garner attention. It was his first feature to tour a bit, showing at festivals across the United States. This resulted in public reactions, positive and negative, but enough praise to keep him creating.
Of course, nobody talks about the art better than the artist. Below is an abbreviated transcript of our conversation. There is also a link to the YouTube video which contains the full exchange between Nick Verdi and Jay Rohr. It’s close to an hour and contains some interesting elaborations by the writer-director. For a fuller understanding of his process as well as inspirations, check out the full conversation.
Meanwhile, Sweet Relief is available on EVENTIVE.
Film Obsessive: Welcome. I’m Jay Rohr, and with us today is Nick Verdi, writer and director of the film Sweet Relief. It’s a mumblecore, mumblegore sort of horror film. Please tell us about your film.
Nick Verdi: Thank you for having me today. It’s great to be here. So yes, the movie is called Sweet Relief. It’s the name of the this online game that’s at the center of the movie and sort of propels the events into action where it entices children to choose someone they’d like to see die. And if this Mystic online character at the center of the game named The Sweet Angel, if they choose your nomination, then you have to go through with the killing. And if you don’t go through the killing, then you die. Really, the game itself is sort of something that’s referenced a lot in the film, and we see tangents of it, but the movie ends up being sort of about a lot of surrounding characters and the psychic spread of influence from this game and paranoia to the different characters in this small New England town.
You’ve got that set up with this internet urban legend challenge game, but the movie quickly becomes this discordant narrative where we’re following different people around and you’re really good about flat out stating their motivations. Was that intentional?
Yeah, certainly I love, in terms of dealing with characters in films, it’s like people watching. It’s more like if you followed someone in public and you had to judge from their behavior and watching them, that’s all you have from the outside. I love in films when you think you might get a character at first and then their behavior over time shows you don’t know. Or you project a lot onto the person.
I think it lends itself to curiosity while you’re watching this film, because since nothing is totally flat out presented, you have to sort of, you have to engage with the film. You have to watch it and you have to let it unfold and take you where it’s going and it really pays off.
There’s that slow burn. I mean, I really respond well to to movies that withhold a lot, I think when I first encountered some of those more art house or European minded movies, I felt so respected by the film makers when they weren’t showing me everything. I really feel annoyed when I get the sensitive filmmaker feels like they have to remind me of a thing over and over again. You sense the anxiety on part of the filmmaker that people aren’t getting it.
With your film, it reminded me of other similar horror films like Toad Road for instance, where people can really talk about why things happened. Not necessarily, what did we see? But why did people do this there?
Yes, yes.
There’s the character, Gerald, who’s played, played by B.R. Yeager, whom you’ve worked with before on Cockazoid. When you were putting together that character that had to be based on real experience because I’ve known people like that before. Are you drawing from certain things in order to build this world that you’re playing with?
Yes, definitely. I’ve always lived in New England my whole life. I grew up on Cape Cod and a lot of the lines from Gerald come from this one guy. It’s one of those things. You know, these types of guys will really present themselves in a macho way when they’re around.
So like mumblecore is kind of known for being a bit improvisational. It’s open to natural reactions and that kind of thing, how much do you control the moment? How much freedom do you give people to really explore the moment that they’re in?
Yes, so overall I love to have people feel free to play with the dialogue especially if we get a chance to rehearse as much as I’d like, we can really explore those things, but the dialogue for me, it’s like it’s different with every actor. Some actors it’s people that are more used to acting, whatever you write they’re going to stick to the word… other people are much more free to improv. What the challenge is is mixing the two or three or four different modes of acting that people kind of end up doing.
You mentioned rehearsing and preparing people for this part, especially because you know there’s some messed up stuff that happens in this film. Did you just go with the script that you have and the general nature of what you’re trying to create here or did you bring anything in. For instance, the three main young ladies who start out the film, who engage with the Internet challenge, really reminded me of a documentary called Beware the Slender Man from 2014.
So I have not seen that documentary, but I totally had that case in mind.
The Internet can infect people with a certain mentality.
Right. Totally. That was definitely something that I got a little obsessed with, like looking at on YouTube, you know, went down the rabbit hole with different opinion piece type things about it with that… the online phenomenon becomes this shared psychic delusion and the way these things take hold and it’s like a new version of people having religious obsessions with a figure.
The film itself, most of it takes place during the daytime. Was that intentional or was that also or like or was that like a side effect of the limitations of like a low budget?
It was intentional. You know, it’s like the spooky foggy gray sky is also, you know, it’s one of those things that’s maybe more fitting for a horrific event, but there’s something cozy to me about having these things in the movie. And that is where the upsetting things happen. It’s like terrible things happening in beautiful places, right? It’s no longer Transylvania, right?
How long have you been making films?
Since I was so little when I was like, maybe I was born in 94, so my parents had one of those VHS regular size VHS cameras. So that was around me forever. When I was four 5-6 years old, I was making like a Godzilla toy. You know, movies, right? I play the Godzilla movie next to me so I had the soundtrack and then I would have the toys sort of fill in the blanks and then the Universal Monster movies and then use those toys. I always think about how my sense of how to deal with the world is sort of entwined with making movies. So yeah, it’s been a lifelong thing.
When you’re working with your friends, is that like a little bit easier to get them into this or are there occasions where you’re like we settled for Greg, you know?
That’s so funny. I mean, sometimes there might be that feeling. The way I currently — the casting process is a lot of posting on my Instagram who wants to be in a movie and then seeing who responds to that and processing those things.
It’s also very exciting we got Paul Azar in on Sweet Relief who was a, you know a big theatre actor and he’s been in Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia and some other Jonathan Demme films as well. Some Bong Joon Ho films, which was really nerve wracking for me to have that experience working with him. But he was fantastic.
When you did Cockazoid and started to get a little bit of attention, does that help with the production you’re in? Especially when you’re working with low budget, you mentioned before you have time constraints and things like that, right? Do you find yourself improving as a filmmaker? I mean, I know every production has its own particular problems. But coming into Sweet Relief, did you feel better prepared to do what you were doing?
It was the first time I had a feeling people would see the movie I was about to make. Because there had been a response to the previous one, going to film festivals, and the movie having a Letterbox page. And I got to go on letterbox and see all these reviews pop up. So there was more awareness of the world out there, seeing the thing.
Sweet Relief was more traditionally planned a little more strict, a little more written, a little more rehearsed, and planned out… my friend Jack Stratton, who’s really, really great and having Jack and my friend Joey did cinematography. We’ve done three movies together in recent years, but we’ve worked together on different movie projects. We know each other since we were five years old. So we’ve done things our whole life together. And it was just a really solid team we had on Sweet Relief that I had never had before. Between that tight crew and all the actors and ensemble casts that really did a million other things as well. And in that way, it felt like learning a lot about just running the ship with this band of outsiders, which was really inspiring.
I think people make a big mistake when they think about low-budget. They have a tendency to think about it being a limitation, but it forces you to focus on what matters. Because we were talking earlier your budget was $2000 or something like that. You still put together something that’s pretty. So does that refine what you’re putting together?
My ideas are unconsciously limited by my means. Like, if I had to do a car accident, I would think about how to get — fake — a fog machine or smoke and sort of shoot it tight to infer that there was a car accident. I don’t think too big budget because I can’t. So my brain can’t even conceive once I consider something to that degree.
My experience of low-budget, people try to veer into comedy like schlock, and that kind of thing, and that’s great stuff. I love it. I call them beer and pizza movies. I get together with my friends. We have a great time. But I really appreciate that you kept the seriousness to this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. I get that too. And I love those too. And I would love to do that at some point, but no, the one thing that’s never on my mind when I’m writing or conceiving of a thing is its comedy. But I never even considered that… that is something that is the trend in the low-budget horror thing where it’s always farcical, but my temperament is very much more in that art house terrain where I love the deadly serious scenario.
So you you’re going to festivals, you’re getting reactions with this. Where are you going in the future? What have you got planned down the line?
I’m deep in the edit now on another movie that is not a horror movie. The title is something I’m considering changing, so I won’t say it, but it’s sort of more in line with my other love, which is the independent human inner life. Human drama kind of stuff like Cassavetes. Films that are not horror films but have horrific things in them. Still, you know or like Michael Hanna, you know these these human dramas that are about like, these really sharp, intense life stories about people. It’s much more of an experimental narrative. Experimental form, a lesser quality camera shot with the camcorder. I’m really excited about it. I’m still watching it come to life. It feels like a very full exploration of an inner life. I’m just having a great time with it. By the end of the summer I’ll have picture locked and I’m very excited to to be doing that and showing this movie to people and seeing.
Where can people see Sweet Relief?
It’s available video on demand on Eventive. It’s going to be on there for the time being and then it’s going to go in through a wider streaming video on demand streaming release later this year. It played once a day until Thursday, July 3rd, at the Lemley Theater and Town Center: in theaters because it looks really, really good. We got a beautiful DCP made the film look so good in a theater… this anamorphic lens really fills up the wide screen.
All right. Well, thank you very much for joining us. You’ve been very generous with your time and we really appreciate it. Thank you, Nick Verdi, the movie is Sweet Relief. Check it out.
