Ladybug follows talented artist Grayson (Anthony Del Negro) who desires an escape away from the buzz of a New York lifestyle following a painful breakup. He heads to his family's near-derelict cabin to focus on his next project, but upon his arrival, strange happenings occur. While in this remote location, Grayson learns of a terrible murder that occurred inside, soon finding the same killer to be stalking him too.
This modern horror is directed by Tim Cruz and recently debuted at FrightFest 2024. Cruz sat down with us at FILMHOUNDS to discuss the difficulties of being an indie director, the subtleties of how he instils tension, and the methods Ladybug uses to encourage the horror genre to evolve.
What challenges do indie filmmakers face in capturing an audience?
I think currently we are fighting a two-screen viewing experience and maintaining the retention of your audience has been incredibly difficult. There's a whole new generation, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, that you pretty much have to teach them the culture of watching a movie. A lot of your younger peers that I've spoken to, met or even worked with don't have that same ‘going to the movie theatre experience'.
A lot of them grew up watching their content on YouTube, on social media and so getting folks to watch movies and sit in a room with other people and things like that, I think that's a challenge. Other than that too, while maintaining your artistic vision of how you want the story to unfold. You have to be cognizant of the idea that; “Am I taking my time?”, “Am I being too indulgent in this moment?”, “Am I fetishizing this moment way too much so that I'm losing their attention?”, because as soon as you lose their attention they look down at their phone.
During the production process, how do you avoid becoming desensitized to tension or jump scares, ensuring they still land for audiences?
I'm not an expert on jumpscares or tension, I like to say I'm learning and re-learning as I go along this process. As a director your job is to be the audience's conduit, so as we're watching a take, seeing how the actors are exploring the environment around them, as we're setting the tone – you kind of have to play it by ear if that makes any sense. I'd like to think that I've watched enough movies and I've thought about moments enough to be able to know what I want on the take. The other thing you have to think about is to give post-production as much options in order to expand or contract time. Those are just some of the elements that you have to think about. For me, jumpscares are most effective when you are ahead or behind the point of anticipation and you can manipulate that with the tone of the music, the pitch of the sound but also with the colours that you use in the frame.
One of my favourite filmmakers, horror filmmakers, are the Pang brothers and they made the original The Eye (2002). [A film] about a woman who had an eye transplant and was able to see ghosts after she took the bandage off. One of the tricks they would do is shoot in 16:9, or maybe it was anamorphic – I don't remember, but they'll catch you off guard in the left corner of your screen. Your eye will twitch there and you'll watch and there's lateral movement in the frame and suddenly every hair on the back of your head is standing up, cos you think you saw something and you did see something – and so there are so many tools in a toolbox that filmmakers can use in order to use our minds against us.
As an indie Director, how does it feel to see Robert Downey Jr being paid $100 million for two Marvel movies, when you may struggle to gather funding?
Well, I mean like you know, this is a business. Corporations own the properties and a corporation's existence and purpose is to make more money and build more money. So they have a plan and a formula of how to do it and it's bringing big names in and having all these things. What to me is tragic – and don't get me wrong, Marvel is a form of entertainment that I enjoy too – but what it ends up doing is it locks up some of our best talent. It keeps them in the universe when it'd be great to be able to see actors like Tom Hiddleston. He's an incredible Shakespearean-trained actor, [he] has so much gravitas on screen. Scarlett Johansson, you know she's doing these [Marvel movies] and it's like, these are people from the indie world. They stole our hearts with their first films but now they're busy because they're filming the big tent pole corporate movie. In the landscape of film and entertainment, the business of it, people gotta do what they gotta do, they have to build their careers. But I hope that eventually with the fatigue that comes with only seeing those movies comes that yearning for something intimate, something special and personal.
Would you say it's more disappointing from a creative perspective as opposed to a financial perspective?
Disappointing might be a word. Disheartening… might be [it]. It's like, no of course but you can only let it bother you for so long and then you just got to move past it. It's okay to feel things but maybe it'll motivate us and push us to do more things to get people's attention because that's all we can do, right? How do I compete when someone buys them out for this other project? The only thing that can hopefully draw other artists to our project is the story and the authenticity of our approach. Not to say they're not authentic, I'm just saying this is a much more collaborative process, versus a story by a committee.
What sort of experience have you tried to provide audiences in Ladybug?
For me, Ladybug is very much a love story. My big intrigue for it is about a person's realisation of their truth, accepting their truth and finding love in places that we normally wouldn't expect it. I was reading this book called Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, and there's this quote in it that says; “Love is a room that exists when you choose to step inside it”. And so, in Ladybug it's built on this relationship between two people that normally wouldn't be possible, but in the world of cinema, we can make it possible. It explores that relationship amidst all the tension and horror of impending doom.
I guess that's my approach to Ladybug. It's very low budget, we were locked with our resources, and in my experience right now and reading it it's like “whoa”. I call the FrightFest audience a professional horror audience because these people sit through hours of films and ingest them. They've seen it all and it's incredible being able to interact and learn from them what they took away from the story and their insight – the things that did work, the things that didn't work. Because we don't have a distributor yet, it's quite possible that we are all gonna go back to Los Angeles and lay in some of those changes, because I think it better serves the story if we are actually able to adjust certain elements of the film.
How do you think the use of popular characters entering the public domain, such as Winnie the Pooh or Bambi, has influenced the accessibility and interest in the horror genre?
That's a funny question. We use these characters because they're IP, they're existing, and they come with their own audience. When we pitch ideas, we always try to reference things that exist in the world so that they can reimagine them because of their combination. You know, it's cool, I think it's interesting if that's the stuff you want to tell. I personally love Gods of Horror, I love [the] peculiar ‘Winnie the Pooh is a serial killer'. I haven't thought about it in that light, but I would go to a theatre and watch a filmmaker's interpretation of what that would be. That's what we do, we love cinema, we love new ideas – seeing people's dreams and nightmares come alive!
One of the scariest movies that I list, in influential movies, is a movie by Walter Murch, the one movie he directed called Return to Oz. It's about Dorothy, played by Fairuza Balk (Almost Famous), retelling the story of Oz and people thought that she had lost her mind, so they gave her electroshock therapy and then Dorothy returned to Oz but with the effects of what that did to her brain. It is so terrifying and I don't know if it was meant to be that scary but it is the stuff my nightmares are made of. That movie exists because of the existing IP of Dorothy and The Wizard of Oz.
What film has been your biggest inspiration and how does that translate into your work?
My inspiration changes for me every week, every month. Right now, I'm really exploring grief. You know, personally, I dealt with it too and so in that I was able to experience the small miracle of getting over grief or healing from grief. So that gave me a particular understanding of how certain characters deal with grief and from there on I was like, ‘this is something that is universal', it's something that we will all experience in our lives. It has been a great sticking point or central point in the themes that I explore in the stories that I know.
Whether it's a story that I wrote or something that I am hired to direct, I have to find bits of moments of truth in there that help me add my own flavour, so that's where I draw from. For Ladybug, one of the films that really inspired how I shaped the visual language with Kenzo [Le], my cinematographer, is Michael Haneke's Cache – based on the idea of being watched and watching and the unease one can feel when someone is watching. Another point of inspiration for Ladybug was The Shining and those drawn-out tense moments of what is in the darkness. I don't want to spoil too much but once people figure out some of the things that are in the frame and they start seeing them, they can start talking about the others. We just premiered it over at the Odeon in Leicester Square and it was a massive screen. I'll be honest, when I was framing this movie, my expectations were people are gonna watch this at home, not on a monster screen. On the monster screen, I think people were able to feel that unease when they started realising that there might be ‘something in that corner' but then before they have the chance to look at it I've cut away – or Sarah has cut away, my incredible editor.
Is there a moment within Ladybug that stands out as something you're specifically proud of?
Working with Anthony [Del Negro] was great because he also co-wrote this, he wrote this initially and I was just able to add my humour and perspective. There were certain moments when we hint he may not be himself at certain points. So being able to explore those, and how to photograph it in such a way so that it's a subtle indication that it's not what it's meant to be, I thought was really interesting. Those were the moments when certain compositions and movements were implied that you didn't see anywhere else in the movie, except in those moments. I like to say I like to reward an active audience, and so if you are active in viewing it, you'll see it. It should satiate and satisfy your curiosity and mystery.
I can talk about this because this movie is already released and available but ironically it's actually my sixth movie, but because it was paid for by a studio, or a streamer, it was released before these two movies which we did independently. In What Happens In Miami, one of the small visual things that I did was that any time we were in the present day, the camera rules were that nothing was tighter than a 35-millimetre lens, so everything was 24 or 18. Anything that was in the past, nothing was shorter than a 50-millimetre lens and almost everything but an 85 or 100-millimetre. So the idea was that we compress our memories because they're based on our perspective and so we felt a little claustrophobic at certain times. That was the only indicator that something was in the present or the past, but the audience was almost instantly able to tell when something was taking place.
How has the success of horror classics influenced your overall work?
I mean it's inspiring. The Orphanage is one of my favourites, it would probably be in the top 10 Pantheon of my favourite horror films. But then the success of [films] like Barbarian, Cuckoo, and even Longlegs. I'll tell ya, I love to go see movies with friends, but when I tell my friends we're going to see a horror film, everyone bails. Like Alien: Romulus, I was like ‘Hey guys it's a sci-fi' and they're like ‘Shut up it's a horror film.' But Longlegs, like eight of my friends came. I think that's a success in the sense that they had put out this message that this film was creepy, scary, and exciting, and their curiosity superseded their fear of being freaked out. This is what I want to achieve – I want to be able to make a film where you drag your friends to a theatre and you get to experience it together and then you get to talk about it at the end.
Ladybug had its world premiere at FrightFest on Monday, August 26.
