Severance star Zach Cherry is Gary, a coward who isn’t sure he can be loved. He meets widow Ell, portrayed by Maria Bakalova of The Apprentice and Borat Subsequent Moviefilm fame. What can go wrong on their blind date in a small Canadian town? A lot, it turns out in All Night Wrong, directed and produced by Canadian filmmaker Jason James (Entanglement, Mountain Men), which world premieres as a headline presentation at SXSW London on Tuesday evening.
Just check out this plot summary: “Two broken people meet for a blind date and inadvertently steal a car containing $40,000 and a dead body in the trunk. With a killer on their trail and blood on their hands, they’ve got one night to do all the wrong things – for all the right reasons.”
Indeed, a dying wish and a cryptic clue lead the unlikely duo on a journey full of twists and turns, bad choices, awkward conversations, lies, fights, mystery, betrayal, and a dangerous killer. Their neo-noir all-night trip is also full of laughs and touching moments.
Frequent James collaborators Tyler Labine (Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, New Amsterdam) and Emily Hampshire (Schitt’s Creek, The Rig), as well as Ryan Beil also feature in the movie, written by Jason Filiatrault (The Order, Entanglement).
The backers and partners behind All Night Wrong include James’ Resonance Films, Telefilm Canada, Voltage Pictures, Mongrel Media, Goodbye Productions, Big Safari, Anamorphic Media, Creativity Capital, Creativity Media and Koala FX.
James describes All Night Wrong as a mix of “stylish neo-noir thriller with indie rom-com.”
In a director’s statement, he shares: “I’m tired of the John Wicks and the Jason Bournes of the world. I want to see a film where a normal person – like you or I – needs to rob a bank or defuse a bomb or in this case – bury a dead body they found in the trunk of a stolen car and solve a murder conspiracy while on a first date. It’s so captivating to watch real people make the wrong choices over and over again.”
THR talked to James about the inspirations and production process behind All Night Wrong, going into “vampire mode” in freezing-cold Canadian nights, how he cast the two stars, why the film has that stuck-in-time feel, and why premiering it at SXSW London feels special.
You have worked with with writer Jason Filiatrault before and seem to like exploring relationships. How does this film fit in with your past work?
I do a lot of romantic comedies. I love rom-coms, and this script is this amazing mashup of neo-noir and independent romantic comedy. It’s almost like my two favorite films in the world – Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest meets Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. Mash those two movies together, and you have All Night Wrong. I feel we’re in this time where all the stories have been told, and now we get to mix genres and mash things up to create something that’s fresh and new and exciting.
‘All Night Wrong’
Courtesy of Resonance Films
The other thing that drew me to this movie was that it’s almost an anti-romantic comedy in that this couple should not be together. They are coming together for the wrong reasons, and in the end, they find an unlikely friendship, and they discover the thing that they needed to move on in their lives through each other and through this experience in their own unique way. But it’s not a romantic movie. It’s not a, “they’re going to live happily ever after, but they’re going to live happily on their own and in their own way.”
The town itself also feels like a character in the film. Can you talk about that a bit?
When you think of great noirs, they also have a sense of place and a sense of an almost dreamlike quality, where the town is a character in itself.
I was really fascinated with the idea of a liminal space, and this town acts as that, because it all takes place over one night, these characters are stuck in this place, and you see them alone a lot.
I created the town as this liminal space and focused it on certain locations and the specificity of this place. That goes even down to the music. It’s all crappy Canadian rock bands from the ‘70s and ‘80s, which is like the CD player is stuck in this car, and that drives the emotional trajectory of these needle drops and songs. This place is a bit stuck in time, leading into that fucked-up weirdness of these small towns where bad shit does happen.
The movie goes from this weird, seedy love motel to the industrial backwaters, and these long walks and talks down empty streets. All that is punctuated by these other little scenes about the weirdness and strangeness of small towns that we can play with.
And it all starts in a bar…
Gary’s a bit of a scaredy cat, and he takes Ell to this bar that’s on the wrong side of the tracks. It’s away from anywhere that he might know anyone or see anyone. So, that’s where the story leaps off from.
How did you cast Zach and Maria who I was excited to see on screen together and whose characters have such an interesting dynamic in the film?
Actors are my favorite people. When you’re making independent film, the special effects of these movies are the cast and their performances. They’re everything.
Zach came on first. I’m kind of fascinated with sensitive people in a harsh, deceptive world and was looking for a guy who is a beautiful, pure soul. And I love Zach in everything. I’ve seen him in the Marvel movies and his TV stuff, like Succession. And I’ve been tracking his career. He’s always someone that’s stood out in everything he does, and he had already done the first season of Severance. I saw him in this role and reached out and connected, and we talked a lot about the script and the role, and he signed on.
Then we were looking for our Ell character and wanted someone to counterpoint Zach, someone that was unpredictable and a little bit wild and exciting. I’d obviously see. Maria in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, and she was just an amazing fireball, an unpredictable kind of freight train. So, I reached out to Maria and we chatted about the role, and she responded to the material.
Jason James, courtesy of Resonance Films
I just loved pairing the two of them together. From there, I always want to rewrite the script based on who these actors are inherently as people, and so we did. We got their notes on the script, and I met with them and talked with them and worked with the writer on another pass on the script to ground the material and the characters in who they innately are as people.
Do you always look to bring in the real-life personalities of actors?
Even when I’m casting movies, I always watch interviews with actors rather than their previous work. I just want to see who they are and tap into something that feels more natural and honest, more authentic.
Tyler and Emily add more mystery and scary energy to All Night Wrong. How did you cast them?
They both are good friends and frequent collaborators of mine. They’ve been in most of the movies that I’ve made, so I always love working with them. I like having a mix of cast members that are new and fresh and also just people that I’ve made lots of things with, where you just have a shorthand and you can just trust that they’re going to be amazing.
I love Emily, she’s such an amazing performer and such a chameleon. She’s so different in the film from her Schitt’s Creek character. She’s dangerous and unpredictable in this movie, and she plays the mysterious almost femme fatale character.
Who is also a bit of a chameleon…
It’s a movie where you don’t quite know who she is. As a director, whenever I read a script, I always think about perspective and how we are coming into the world, how we are seeing the world and through whose eyes we are seeing the world.
Laura is really fun, because I got to fuck around with perspective a little bit in this film, so you see three different versions of Laura. When you are first introduced to her, it is through the eyes of [one character]. The second time we see Laura, Ell imagines her, which is more romantic. And then Gary is imagining Laura as a darker, more mysterious figure that, when we meet the real Laura, is a little bit more realistic and grounded.
‘All Night Wrong’
Courtesy of Resonance Films
Where in Canada did you shoot All Night Wrong? And was it really winter?
Yes, we shot last winter in the mountains [of the Columbia Valley region of British Columbia]. The movie takes place over one night, so we actually had to go into full vampire mode and shoot all nights for about a month. We would start at 7pm and shoot until 7am every day for a month.
How were the conditions?
It was minus 10 degrees and just on the cusp of where winter was starting and the snow was coming. So, we just embraced the snow and made it a part of the world. It adds to this cold, desolate, isolated feel, which I really love.
What was the hardest part about making the film?
It was a very physical movie. There’s a lot of car action, there are some stunts. And it all takes place over one evening, so the working all hours of the night, the snow, the cold, and just the amount of shots and material we had to get in a short amount of time was very demanding on the crew. So, it was hard in a lot of ways.
Before I let you go, how cool is it to world premiere All Night Wrong in a headline spot at SXSW London?
What’s cool is that the movie is a U.K.-Canada co-production. We shot it in Canada, a lot of the key crew are Canadians, but we did all of the post-production in London. So, last spring I was in London, doing all of the editing, all of the sound, all of the color, going back and forth from Vancouver, where I live, to London for six months.
So, it’s so cool to come back and screen the film in London. A lot of our cast and crew are going to be there. And I just love the brand of films that they choose for SXSW. They’re a little more bold, a little more fun, a little more quirky, and to me, that is aligned with the movies that I want to make and do make. It’s such a fun launch pad for the film.
