When I interviewed you for “Starve” (in October 2014) you told me that your next project was this movie, “Cold Moon”. Does this mean you’ve been working on it for the last year and a half?

GRIFF FURST (GF): Exactly, we’ve been working all this time on “Cold Moon”, so it’s good to finally get it out and start selling it to people.

I have to say I enjoyed the movie a lot, but I find it hard to classify, because it has a mixture of several genres. What genre would you classify it under?

GF: I call it “supernatural vengeance”,supernatural thriller. It’s definitely borderline horror, but it’s not The Conjuring. I love James Wan, he’s amazing, but the intention wasn’t to be like that. I think it’s much more like a“Twilight Zone” or “Tales From The Crypt”kind of horror.

It also touches a little bit on drama and gore, though just a tad.

GF: Yeah, there’s almost no gore or language; I still hope it’s scary at times.

You told me the film was going to be (and was) filmed in New Orleans, though it’s set in Florida. Why did you film in N. Orleans? Was it easier?

GF: We have a production company in New Orleans and they have tax incentives. Besides, the town the movie takes place in is very close to New Orleans, just a couple of hours from there. The scenery in Florida is almost identical to the one in N. Orleans, we already had our infrastructure there so we filmed there.

Was any of the characters/events based on real people/events?

GF: I’m sure to Michael McDowell,the author, they were. I know the rattlesnake rodeo is a real event and growing up in the south I’m sure the author based many of the characters on his personal experiences, but you would have to ask the author, something very difficult to do, mostly because he’s dead.

Which member of the cast did you feel most comfortable with?

GF: Uh oh (smiles, looking at Rachele). I don’t think there was a special member of the cast; we were all on the same page, with the same mission:we had a film to make, a great story to tell and very little time to do it.

Rachele Brooke Smith (RBS): Everybody on the cast had a great attitude all the time;they just wanted to get the best project and Griff made us feel comfortable because he knows what it is to be an actor.

GF: But nothing about the process is comfortable; it’s actually pretty miserable, though the actors have nothing to do with that.

What makes the process miserable?

GF: Just the fact that you don’t have enough time. 15 years ago, when I started working in the industry, we had a lot more time and money. Nowadays technology and the internet are making the independent scene shrink. I used to have 25 days to shoot, now I have 18. It’s miserable but I love it. You don’t get to sleep and you’re constantly against the clock, but when you get to rehearse a scene for 45 minutes it makes the rest of the 12-hour day tolerable.

So I suppose the satisfactory part is the final result.

GF-RBS: Absolutely

RBS: When you’re making an independent movie, or any kind of movie, many things can happen, even unexpectedly and you have to deal with them. It’s amazing when something happens and directors like Griff deal with that problem, while other directors would quickly write that off.

Probably because I don’t know this world from the inside, but I’m a little unclear about what you’re talking about.

GF: For example, on our last movie, we’re shooting in consecutive order and one of the main actors fell down, broke his ribs and had to go to the hospital.
He still had many scenes to shoot but couldn’t because he was pretty badly injured. It was nobody’s fault but we weren’t going to get any more time or money, so we had to re-write the script. It’s easy when something happens to just throw up your hands and give up, because at first it looks like an unsolvable problem, but once you realize that kind of stuff happens every day, you constantly have to be in the solution mind-set, of how to figure out a solution for those problems. Like in the cemetery scene, originally scheduled to be filmed in one night, but we ended up shooting it in 7 nights because we had a lot of problems.

RBS: A lot of independent movies are never finished because it’s so hard and challenging that when they run into so many problems they finally give up.

ABADOMOVIEZ: Because they don’t have resources.

GF: Or creativity. Because you never have enough resources, it’s all about being able to make something out of nothing.

RBS: There are so many things that can go wrong that you have to be able to figure out what to do to solve them and go on.

GF: And think and act fast.

RBS: It’s inspiring to work with directors like Griff, who always is, or seems to be, calm enough to solve any kind of problem.

What was the hardest or easiest scene for you to do?

RBS: The hardest scene for me to do was when we were shooting in New Orleans in the winter, when it’s freezing cold, and I had to jump into a pool, which supposedly had heated water, only they didn’t have time to heat it for the day we had to shoot. So the water was freezing cold and I had to pretend
it was so warm and it was summer, but I was freezing.

ABANDOMOVIEZ: It must have been difficult to hide your feelings…

RBS: Yeah, I could feel my teeth chattering and my lips were blue, so it was a little tricky. But I love the whole project. I played Belinda with a lot of love, sometimes I wish I could be her because she’s always so happy and uplifting. I love the rain scene with Christopher Lloyd, one of my first days shooting, a really memorable day for m.

What is it like to work with such a legend? Christopher Lloyd, forever Doc Brown.

RBS: Before we started filming I rented another one of his movies, “Angels in the Outfield” and it was exciting for me to know that I would work with him the next day. However I was a little intimidated at first. Griff doesn’t think this, but I thought he took on his character a little bit, playing a grumpy old man.

GF:Noo, he’s so sweet!

RBS: He is sweet, but the first day I remember thinking to myself: “you can’t let that energy, that feeling of intimidation affect you”. And by the end of the movie it was so cool when he came up to me, gave me a big hug and told me many beautiful things and of course I started crying.

ABANDO: So I take it you don’t feel the same way, you are used to working with big legends like him?

GF: I am, because I grew up in the business, but it’s not even that. I was so focused on what we were doing. But Chris was great. Usually actors with so much experience can be a little temperamental sometimes, but he was such a team player. One day we shot for 17 hours and he didn’t even want to go back to his trailer, he wanted to stay on the set all the time, always working with the script and his highlighter on his hand. The only time he stopped was when we stopped shooting. That’s pretty awesome to me.

What is your next project?

GF: It’s a medical drama called “Sparkle Face”. It takes place in a hospital. It’s about this little girl who’s ill and takes on other children’s illnesses and there’s a question whether she does it for a spiritual or medical reason.

ABANDO: As a director?

GF: I’ll probably produce it and hire a different director. As a director I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do next.

RBS: We have a movie coming up on the Syfy network, in July as well..