“I liken the film to like a great rock song,” Kriv Stenders describes to me about his newest movie, Kill Me Three Times, in a relaxed Australian accent. It sounds exactly like the kind that puts you at ease, like you’re sitting on a beach with a beer in your hand.
“[It’s got a] great kind of opening, a really cool chorus, a great bridge, great guitar solos and a grand finale. So it’s just so much fun when you can work with material that presents itself to you in that musical kind of way.”
Hailing from Australia, Kriv Stenders began his career making dark, arthouse films but rose to prominence with the family film Red Dog in 2011. It was hailed by critics and became a commercial success, ranking in as the eighth highest-grossing Australian film of all time. “I saw [Red Dog] and War Horse within a day of each other, and felt that Red Dog achieved much of what Spielberg’s film was aiming at,” wrote Garry Couzens of The Digital Fix, “with much less sentimentality, anthropomorphism and self-importance, more laughs and with an hour’s less running time.”
With Kill Me Three Times, Stenders’s rock ‘n roll aesthetic is reminiscent of the likes of Guy Ritchie and Edgar Wright, but with his own unique twist that puts you in the seat of a Corvette and stomps on the gas pedal.
In fact, that’s exactly how Kriv approaches movies. “They’re intense, vicarious experiences,” he tells me. “It’s like getting into a sports car and driving really fast somewhere and enjoying the ride.”
The first thing I want to remark on is the film’s photography. The lush Australian landscapes was breathtaking. What led you to shoot there as opposed to the original Ireland location?
Kriv: The writer is Irish, James MacFarland. I’m Australian, and live in Australia. I’ve pretty much made all my movies there. [laughs] It was purely because, yeah, I’m an Australian filmmaker. WA Screen and Screen West have a very lucrative funding body that gave us a really great big chunk of finance, so that’s why we shot it over there on the western coast of Australia.
I’m freezing right now in New Jersey, so it was just gorgeous to look at.
Kriv: Oh good! [laughs]
Kill Me Three Times was like a sarcastic puzzle. It was like watching a Rubik’s cube get solved by a jokester. As an artist, what was the biggest challenge in bringing this project to life?
Kriv: I think the biggest challenge really was about tone. Balancing the violence and the dramatic elements of the story with this overall, I guess this kind of stream or sort of spine of the humor. And trying to find the right rhythm, and the right kind of way to play the notes. Obviously, a big factor that helped us was casting Simon Pegg as Charlie Wolfe. Once we did that, suddenly this film had a kind of a life, or a heartbeat. It was something I could kind of pin the humor on, and that was Simon and his portrayal of Charlie Wolfe. So it was a challenge in one respect in finding that tone and sticking to it.
The tonal juxtaposition was my favorite part of the film, actually. You termed it as “murder in the sun.”
Kriv: Yeah. A sun-scorched neo-noir thriller.
That’s awesome.
Kriv: [laughs]
That reminds me of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, but Kill Me Three Times is anything but that. This movie is like a riot.
Kriv: It wasn’t difficult [to maintain the tone], it was more difficult to find it. Once we found it, it was just a lot of fun. My analogy is music. When you make a movie, it’s very much like making a piece of music or a song. You have to find the rhythm, you have to find the notes, everybody has to be in time with each other. So all the performances have to be sort of calibrated to this rhythm, or this kind of harmony. The way you play the notes, how you press down on the lines or the performances.
But once again, once you sort of find that, it’s so much fun. I liken the film to like a great rock song: a great kind of opening, a really cool chorus, a great bridge, great guitar solos and a grand finale. So it’s just so much fun when you can work with material that presents itself to you in that musical kind of way.
You mention Charlie Wolfe. Out of all the characters, it’s clear that he might be the show-stealer. What went into making that particular character? He’s such a rich character, he could star in his own series.
Kriv: Yeah, that’s the great thing about working with Simon. Because I’m a big believer that comedic actors make great villains. There is a way to cast [them]. There would be the generic way of casting a hitman — a good looking guy, in a suit — but we’ve seen that a thousand times. What I loved about Simon was that it was clearly a role he hadn’t played before, but he was up for it. That juxtaposition of someone who has a following and a fanbase with a certain kind of body of work behind him, to make this step is really exciting.
Again, to me that was kind of the trick of the movie. To make this character someone you wanna be around! Even though he’s the worst guy, the baddest guy in the room! [laughs] He’s almost your favorite! I think that’s just a delightful thing to give an audience.
Beyond Simon, you assembled quite the cast. What was it like working with them? Did they meet or surpass any of your expectations?
Kriv: First of all, they’re lovely people. Each one of them. Really lovely human beings. Just nice to be around. Everyone kind of came on board with the right spirit and saw the film the same way. They understood that it was a cartoon set in a movie world, not in a “real world,” and they enjoyed themselves.
It was each one of them, from Sullivan Stapleton to Teresa Palmer, the legendary Bryan Brown to Callan Mulvey, and to Luke Hemsworth, they all sort of knew their place in the story and embraced it. It was kind of like a, what I call a “great dinner party,” with great conversation. [laughs]
It certainly looked like you had fun making the film, and in beautiful Australia of all places.
Kriv: Yeah we did, but you know every film is challenging. We had a tight schedule, Simon’s schedule meant we had to shoot him out in two weeks. We had to shoot the beginning and the climax in the first week.
Oh, wow.
Kriv: Yeah, that’s kind of a bit of a challenge, you know? But that sort of thing galvanizes you as a filmmaker, it galvanizes the crew, and really keeps you on your toes. Your focus is so much more sharper, and therefore your decision-making is so precise. Every hour, every day is precious and you can’t waste a second of it.
Your last film was the family film Red Dog, a critical and commercial hit. What was it like to approach Kill Me Three Times after that film? How big was the change in your artistic voice?
Kriv: I love movies. I’m very privileged to be able to make them. And I love all kinds of movies. I guess I’m the type of filmmaker, my ambition [is], to make all kinds of films. I think you learn so much from each film. Hopefully you become better after the journey of each film. So to me, the shift was really fun. Red Dog was a big shift for me then, up to that point I had been making very dark, heavy arthouse films. So Red Dog was a complete left-hand turn from what I’ve done before.
Kill Me Three Times actually wasn’t that much of a shift from what I’ve done before. It was clearly going to be a commercial film, for a wide international audience with an international cast. It was just great kind of fun to do something for an adult audience, that played with violence, that wore its influences on its sleeves, and had its tongue very firmly in its cheek. Once you make those decisions when you read the script and go, “I know how to unlock this” or “I know how to decode this script,” it just becomes so much fun.
I’m an aspiring filmmaker, and Kill Me Three Times is exactly the kind of movies I hope to make. But what do you see yourself tackling next?
Kriv: Ironically, I’m in preproduction on the sequel to Red Dog. Which has got the working title of Blue Dog right now, so I’m going back to that material and that world. As a filmmaker, that’s just such a wonderful thing to do, to be able go back to a story world or a universe and continue to tell and embellish that story. So that’s my next project. We start shooting in May.
But for me, in time, I just did some television last year. And that was an incredible adventure. I think movies and television are movies. I’m really interested in that development. I think stories now can be told on all kinds of canvases. Television really is just long-form movies. So I find that very exciting, and I hope to continue that strain of work as well.
What are the differences, to you, when it comes to directing television to movies? Do you have any preference?
Kriv: I love movies, they’re digestible. They’re intense, vicarious experiences. It’s like getting into a sports car and driving really fast somewhere and enjoying the ride. Television [meanwhile], is like reading a book or a novel. Putting it down, and pick it back up again, and that’s also so pleasurable. So to me they’re different pleasures, there’s different delights you get out of both mediums.
With television, you can really explore characters. You can basically create characters from the ground up, and I find that really exciting.
I have to agree. The more time to spend exploring characters is quite the advantage. It’s quite the writer’s medium.
Kriv: I also think it’s becoming the director’s medium as well. Audiences now, their standards have been raised, you know? Mad Men, True Detective, Fargo, The Knick, House of Cards. To me, cinema has seeped into the television language, the lines have been completely blurred. As a filmmaker, I find it really thinking.
What is Kill Me Three Times ultimately about to you? As both an audience and the artist. Obviously we know what it’s about, but what do you think it has to say with its heart, however dark it may be?
Kriv: [laughs] I don’t think it has any deep social message or moral, I think it’s really just about a bunch of bad people doing terrible things to each other. Hopefully the good guys who are in that struggle find a way out. To me, the film is just a joyride. The key word is joy. It’s having some fun through other people’s misfortunes. [laughs]
So the film is a demonstration of schadenfreude?
Kriv: Yeah! [laughs] Exactly!
Kill Me Three Times is set for release on April 10, 2015 from Magnet Releasing. It is available now on various VOD platforms.