‘Falling Stars’ Directors Talk World Building On A Micro Budget

Witchy folklore is a perennial subgenre. No matter how bloodthirsty or child-hungry they are, these stories continue to appeal to the horror community at large. But with so many witch horror films out there, how do you make one that stands out? Director Richard Karpala and Gabriel Bienczycki figured out just that with their feature film Falling Stars, a microbudget horror feature that sees witches deeply engrained in contemporary America.

Read the full synopsis:

On the night of the first harvest, three brothers in the American West set out to see a dead witch buried by their friend. When they accidentally desecrate the body, they learn the only way to stop a curse on their family is to burn it before sunrise.

Dread Central spoke with Falling Stars directors Richard Karpala and Gabriel Bienczycki about how this film came from a dream, the importance of world-building, and much more.

Dread Central: So just to start off, I’d love to hear a little bit more about where this story came from for you. 

Richard Karpala: Yeah, I’ve been saying that of the scripts I’ve written, this is the only one that started as a dream. 

DC: Woah, really?

RK: Yeah, there was this image I had of a star falling. Dreams are weird because they already tell you what the world is without anyone telling you, you just know that these are witches. So I didn’t know if it was going to be a short story or something. I was living in LA at the time, and I was about to leave. I was going to move to Prague, and I was like, if I don’t do something, I’m going to regret it for the rest of my life. And I wrote this thing really fast. 

There are several ways I write. Sometimes I spend months and months agonizing, and sometimes it comes out in this really fast emotional burst. So that’s kind of what Falling Stars was. And I like those projects a lot where it just comes out of you. Then I called up Gabe and I sent it to him. I said, “Please read this because I think this is something that we could do and we could do it on weekends.” And then we just went from that point. But it was really a process of one step at a time. Once it’s out there on a page, you have something and you can do something, which is exciting.

DC: Gabe, what was your first reaction reading the script and seeing this world that Richard had built?

Gabriel Bienczycki: Richard and I have worked together on a few projects before and he’s been sending me scripts or ideas for scripts over the last years. A lot of them had really cool world-building, had cool ideas, but they were not fully formed or they were just scenes or kind of beginnings of scripts. This one was just completed, and I read it in an hour and a half, and it was just really obvious that it was a unique concept. The world-building was fantastic and felt really cohesive and felt like a lived-in place.

It was something that did not require a million-dollar budget and a studio involved. So it was just like, yeah, let’s do it because we’ve discussed many different ideas and many different things, and doing a period piece on the pirate ship or this and that, that would take forever to take off the ground. 

RK: I forgot about that one. I sent you that. It was called 1889, and it was about cannibals on pirate ships.

GB: So in comparison to the cannibals and pirate ships, this was something that we could do essentially in our backyard with a bit of work. So I’m always down to do something fun. It just felt like something that we wouldn’t need anybody else’s approval or convincing to do it. So we just started doing it and one step at a time we did it.

DC: That’s amazing. You’re mentioning the world-building, which is one of my favorite things about Falling Stars. I was wondering how it was to balance giving the audience information but never trying to make it an exposition dump. You hit really well here as we learn the rules of this universe.

RK: Yeah, it feels good when you’re learning as you go. It’s like a moving escalator or something and you’re just picking things up along the way. I think what was important was that it wasn’t entirely coherent because there’s a character who asks his friend, do I burn it? No, don’t worry about it. And then he goes to his mother and she brings out a book and his mother says, you need to burn it by sunrise. Like the characters, you should be hopefully getting kind of thrown back and forth in terms of what’s supposed to happen. One of the important parts of the story was just to make it feel like reality. We don’t all have a consensus anymore on how we’re supposed to approach problems in the world. So that was really definitely baked into the script.

DC: Awesome. Well, and like you said, your characters all feel like normal people. They live in trailers or small houses, they’re blue-collar working-class people. And so I wanted to hear more about finding your cast.

GB: Yeah, we went with a very grownup and conventional method of finding the cast. We actually didn’t know any of the actors beforehand, so we worked with a casting agent. Some people we’ve cast in previous projects, but the brothers were new to both of us. And so we worked with a very talented casting director, Danny Dunitz. It was, to us, a fairly new experience to audition the number of people that he was able to throw our way. And they’re all very adequate and they pushed very hard. So it was difficult to kind of dismiss people for various aesthetic reasons or this and that. So that’s kind of heartbreaking. But we were very happy with the cast that we found. Richard, do you want to talk about how Rene [who plays Adam] became the central character?

RK: The initial thought was the oldest brother is the foundation for this whole thing because Adam looks up to him and then Sal is kind of caught between these two and wants to go his own way. What we thought was going to happen was the casting would start from the oldest to the youngest. And I think I had written Adam pretty young in the script. I think it was 14 or something. He was really young and it was really obvious to us how hard that would be logistically. I mean to say nothing of just the time that you spend that you have with younger actors, let alone finding someone that fills out this sort of role that you’ve seen in your head. 

So Adam in Falling Stars is quite a bit older. We built the entire cast around Rene because Rene just blew us away completely. I mean just beyond all of our expectations. First of all, Rene wore this jacket on their body during the audition which became the jacket that they wear in the film. And I said, “Please don’t use this jacket for any other film ever.” And Rene said, “I promise I won’t do it.” It’s just things like that where actors bring something personal to the role that isn’t always quite obvious to the filmmaker, and I think that’s good. I think there should be room for that. And each actor brought something like that. 

I remember talking to Shaun who plays Mike, and Mike has these symbols on the back of his ears. There are these small tattoos, and we didn’t really talk too much about it, but he just asked if it was okay for him to have them. I said of course. I mean, this is who you feel Mike is. And so Mike should have complete freedom to do that. And those are just the little things that maybe aren’t obvious to audiences, but they’re very important for the actor.

DC: I love that though. Again, that helps it feel even more like a lived-in world. I also wanted to talk more about the cinematography and how you handled some of the effects that we see in this and some of the things we don’t see and how you worked, Gabe, as the DP, to get these moments that are really tense but aren’t necessarily have a jump scare or a creature.

GB: So the cinematography is, again, a result of the approach. We obviously didn’t have a lot of VFX. We didn’t have a lot of fancy locations or this and that, so we worked with what we did have, which was desert and darkness and human imagination. And so yeah, we sort of decided to go efficiently with being afraid of what you don’t see. 

I’m a cinematographer and I always strive to make things really pretty and there’s not a lot of opportunity. Again, everything is dark and people sit in the car at night, so we shot it on a RED camera, we shot it on amorphic lenses to give it a cinematic look. Flares are pretty, the light is pretty when there’s light, but there was not a lot of opportunity to show beautiful sunsets and the desert in its majesty. So it’s an ensemble piece. Cinematography is in the backseat, I guess, and as long as it’s competent, it’s invisible, just like sound. I think for me, it’s always a pain to not let cinematography be the biggest star.

But yeah, I think it’s this film lives in the mystery and what we don’t see, and I think that’s a very valid approach in shot making and the absence of things is very important in how you compose and being the imagination and leading the eye towards something that should be there to create a dissonance through the film. That is a technique. Again, it’s not the most spectacular or flashy one, but I think for this application, it was the right tool.

DC: Was shooting at night such a pain?

GB: Yeah, we shot with battery-powered lamps in a place where there was basically no cell connection. We didn’t have a generator. I mean, we did have a generator, but we didn’t run it because the lights we had were able to run on batteries and it was easier for sound.

I think we run into recharge stuff here and there, but in general, yeah, it was very, very minuscule. We were in Joshua Tree and it was summer, so the nights were shorter. But it was fun. Shooting in the desert was good. It was summer, so it was the nicest time of the day to be there at night. During the day, if you touch the buckle from your seatbelt to your skin, it would burn. It was like everything you touched was just poison. So we were actually happy to sleep through the day and be up at night. It’s just all dusty and complicated, and there are bugs and scorpions and whatnot.

DC: Oh yeah, just scorpions, just poisonous bugs that as bugs just wandering around, whatever. It’s fine.

RK: You feel a bit immune to it when you’re filming. You feel invincible. Nothing’s going to happen to you. It’s weird.

GB: Yeah, adrenaline.

DC: My final question for you both though is would you make another film in this universe if you ever got the opportunity?

RK: Absolutely. That was a question raised. I call Falling Stars the sort of ground of this world, and there’s also the air and there are other things. There’s so much to explore in this world, which I think is always exciting, especially as a viewer, right? You’ve just kind of tapped into something and there’s even more waiting. That’s always exciting. So in my head, for some reason, it was called, what was the name of it? I’m forgetting the name of it.

GB: Andromeda. 

RK: That’s it. But that’s the sky version of this film. That’s probably a different beast, to be honest. This was really out of just, I mean, I know all films come out of sheer willpower. You have to force them out into the world, and are they all going to be like that?

DC: All movies? Yeah, I don’t know. I think they might be.

GB: I just feel like there are filmmakers who are in a place in their careers where they get to knockoff at five. Not everybody works 18-hour days, but it’s just we are in this place, and I think some directors just do it to themselves too, right?

RK: You have also the benefit, I think, now to make things easier. I just read an interview with Greg Araki and Richard Linklater. They talked about how when they were making films in the 1990s, everyone was pretty crazy because they were trying to do everything on 16mm, and just that cost alone and that method of shooting, it takes a certain kind of insanity. We’re sort of now coming up in this generation where we have access to all this great equipment that, and the barrier into it is maybe a little bit lower. I think at the end of the day, you still have to be pretty crazy like us to want to go into it. And good, because this is really important to us. I can’t imagine doing anything else, honestly.

Categorized: Interviews