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Deadly Outpost: Flying Lotus on Ash
Eiza González in Ash With 2017’s Kuso, the first feature from polymath Steve Ellison (a.k.a. musician Flying Lotus, a.k.a. rapper Captain Murphy), a respectable claim is made to the title of history’s most disgusting commercially released film, with such amusements as vomit baths, sentient wart coitus and a large talking cockroach residing in the prolapsed anus of funk godhead George Clinton. Ellison’s comparatively dialed-back followup Ash restricts itself to a combustible head, giving Scanners a run for its money, faces that liquefy like so many crayons under a blowtorch and a malevolent amoeba extracted from a waking patient’s skull via robo-surgery—without anesthetic. Any maturation in his sophomore outing has more to do with form, as the lifelong autodidact—Ellison got his feet wet making stop-motion shorts with his action figures in his boyhood years—shows off the array of new skills he picked up to realize a project requiring a higher degree of technical ambition and ability.
Ash’s premise follows an august tradition of sci-fi lock-ins, with amnesia-stricken terraformer Riya (Eiza González) awakening to find that her base on the far-flung title planet is littered with corpses she has faint recollections of dispatching. The only survivor is the enigmatic Brion (Aaron Paul), who offers a helping hand as they scramble to escape the facility before its oxygen reserves are fully depleted. The simple confinement of the single location belies the intricacy of craft at play in a film determined to differentiate itself from its proudly worn influences: Alien, The Thing, Event Horizon, Beyond the Black Rainbow, Annihilation. On top of composing two scores (one he’d use, one he’d scrap), sketching designs for miniature fabricators and inventing elaborate backstories for the spacesuit costuming, Ellison went deep down the YouTube tutorial rabbit hole to develop a fluency in DIY CGI. With its novelty and the quality of its design work, from the labored-over texture of loose flayed flesh to the obsessive tweaking of a vast “cosmic fractal” suspended in the sky, Ash stands out amid the pack of cost-efficient B-movie programs currently filling genre festivals.
Splashes of psychedelia conjoin Ellison’s work in film and music—it all grasps for the mind-expanding enlightenment awaiting on the astral plane. From his salad days as FlyLo, cooking beats and crafting druggy bumpers for Adult Swim, through his spiritually searching discography—2014’s superlative You’re Dead! leads listeners on an aural safari through the afterlife—his work has bridged the gap between bleary dorm-room philosophizing and true profundity, its headier flashes of transcendence always paired with base pleasures. (As his rapper alter ego Captain Murphy, he most freely indulges his cinephilia and conveys his low/high sensibility with nods to Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, deep-cut kaiju detritus, El Topo and The Dark Knight.) As Ellison puts it, all his creativity pours forth from the same well of inspiration, the big decision being the artform through which he chooses to channel it.
A couple of weeks before the world premiere of Ash at SXSW, Ellison spoke with Filmmaker about amateur-friendly CGI coding, his stance on AI, his relationships with a handful of high-profile collaborators and the bane of his time on set with what he now calls the “great player-haters of the sci-fi genre.” The film is out in theaters on March 29 from RJLE Releasing and Shudder.
Filmmaker: It’s been more than eight years since Kuso premiered at Sundance. Were there more challenges in getting this production off the ground?
Ellison: Oh, Kuso was way easier to make. I paid for it, and it was my brainchild, whereas Ash, I didn’t write it, and because the script [written by Jonni Remmler] needed a real budget, there was a lot of work to be done in casting and packaging. I’m really new to all that, the hierarchical aspects of the film industry—how things operate, who’s actually in control. I didn’t know any of that going in. That was the real learning curve of the experience, so I’m just glad I could learn all this while surrounded by good, cool people.
Filmmaker: Did getting deeper into the business end change how you think about filmmaking?
Ellison: One hundred percent. I’m grateful for this experience, making this, and I’d be honored to do another. But at the same time, considering the toll it takes on your person, on you and your family and your mental health, I’ve realized that the project itself really has to be worth it. This is very different from making an album, but that doesn’t mean it’s been all bad. The big takeaway here, end of the day, was that filmmaking is the most creatively rewarding process for me. You’re potentially at the helm of every art form. You can learn how to do everything. And that’s not easy, wielding that. It’s a beautiful challenge.
Filmmaker: To that point, you’re credited with additional visual effects on Ash. Kuso was effects driven as well, but did you pick up new skills this time around?
Ellison: Absolutely. The big one was that I learned how to use Unreal Engine. When I first got the script and it was agreed that I’d for-sure direct, I started trying to draw storyboards on my iPad, create concept art, make some preliminary things. But nothing was coming out how I pictured it. I was researching how to get the fidelity better and better and better, and I kept seeing people mentioning Unreal Engine, which is a video game design program. I’ve always wanted to be able to make video game cinematics, and that’s what this does—you can make the game itself or just the cinematics. It’s a 3D application, and a lot of modern video games are made with it, AAAs and indies.
Filmmaker: I always assumed you’d need to know how to write code to work with this stuff.
Ellison: You don’t have to know code to make the cinematics. There are certain aspects and functions in the engine where knowing code will bring out a fuller potential, but part of the appeal is that the programming is node-based, a different language that’s simpler to pick up than C++, where you have to write everything yourself. It wasn’t easy; it took a lot of time, but I was motivated. I also had YouTube and watched a lot of tutorials. So, with free tools and patience for trial and error, you wind up getting addicted pretty fast. You can see things coming together so quickly, and the better you get at it, the more you can make happen. I ended up making my own game, Christmas Carnage, on the engine while I was messing around, and we put it out for free a few years ago.
Around that time, I was working on cinematics for Ash. This was after we’d wrapped, and I wanted to give a frame of reference to the VFX crew. One example was the spaceship flybys. I did all of those the first time around in Unreal, and sometimes they’d send stuff back, and on a couple shots, I’d think, “Hmm… I kind of prefer mine?” The giant fractal, the cosmic pattern over the horizon, that was me in Unreal, too. And in those cases, the VFX team would work on top of my designs and definitely did its thing. This was so cool—I never expected to be doing this stuff or that I’d even be able to. But we were a small production; we knew what we wanted to make happen. I didn’t want to compromise, and this was the way you break out from the limits of [our] budget. I cobbled up some creature designs, some ships. It gets to be fun, really.
Filmmaker: Where are you on AI? Some people seem like they want to farm out what we’re talking about here to automated processes.
Ellison: People are scared, and I can’t blame them. But at the same time, I come from the music world. I’ve been doing this long enough to remember when it wasn’t cool to make music on a computer—that was a compromise. Same deal with CGI, at first. I understand the knee-jerk reaction, but this might not be the hill to die on. There’s not a space for the conversation in a creative sense yet. It’s all still soundbites, people looking for the one quote to sum it up. I can see every aspect of the issue.
Filmmaker: A lot of filmmakers talk about CGI kind of uneasily, that you have to surrender some measure of control to the VFX designers, and you get back what you get back. But it sounds like you were able to regain that control, to an extent.
Ellison: I’m also lucky enough to know some people from music videos more experienced with VFX. That’s huge, being able to call up a friend and just talk particle simulations for a while.
Filmmaker: I’d say the creative seeds for this can even be traced back to your 3D concert tour in 2017 and the visual accompaniments created for it.
Ellison: Yeah. There are a few things in Ash where the thought was, “Well, people are going to want to know it’s my movie, that it’s still me in here.” I dropped some things in just so you know, oh yes, this is the total Flying Lotus stuff right here. If you’ve been to my shows, there are parts that will be a little familiar to you. I just didn’t want it to be a bore. Because, look, I know I’m not Christopher Nolan. This isn’t the smartest fuckin’ sci-fi script ever written, but I needed it to be entertaining. It felt like a video game when I read it, so I wanted to pull that out, make the film handle like that. I love Dead Space, Silent Hill; those were both big influences in the cinematography and design. The Backrooms games, liminal spaces, those, too.
Filmmaker: On that note, let’s talk corridors. It’s unavoidable that H.R. Giger looms over hallway design in sci-fi movies, but nobody wants to come off as an imitator. How’d you conceive of the space base set?
Ellison: This was the hardest thing in the world because, yeah, your impulse is to try to do Alien. But I said to everyone, really to myself, “We can’t do it, guys! I know, I know, but if it looks too much like Alien, this won’t be worth doing at all.” One advantage was that in a lot of these movies, the characters are actually on spaceships. You don’t see so many movies set in an already established facility on another planet, and you can play up the differences with that. It should be a place where, if you’re going to leave Earth for the rest of your life, it feels like a home, at least a little bit. So, they’re bringing in personal things to give these rooms more of a domestic feel, and the result is a weird, prefabricated piece of a larger ship that you can tell has been lived in for some time. Any really specific Giger stuff, I just tried not to go there. But I am a huge fan; I have some of his original drawings up in my house.
If I could change one thing, it would’ve been for all the characters to have some kind of breathing apparatus instead of space helmets. These helmets are the great player-haters of the sci-fi genre. Everything was so difficult—getting audio, reflections; people straight-up cannot breathe in there. The suits aren’t so functional that they have cool air in the helmets, so we had to jerry-rig some fans. You need the little lights to stay on without flickering, and you have to watch out for glare. The gear in Dune that they figured out was great. Just put a couple things up their noses? On set, I kept thinking, “Damn, why didn’t we do that?”
Filmmaker: The bodies of the spacesuits have a distinctly visceral look to them, almost like a synthetic ribcage. What went into their design?
Ellison: A lot went into it that we didn’t get the chance to explore in the narrative. I was building this lore during the time I spent waiting to make the movie, and I was thinking about the equipment they have, the Earth it came from. These characters work for a private company; they’re not NASA, and this company isn’t even the biggest in its industry. There’s a new race to colonize planets, and this company has the cheapest Chinese manufacturing, the budget version of everything. And the idea was that these suits, they’re built with the organs of each character’s deceased relatives, some weird fucked-up stem cell usage, body parts and plasma from the right donors. We wanted to incorporate this but couldn’t find a natural way to work it into the story. But hinting at that backstory set these suits apart.
Filmmaker: The medi-bot is also unusual, looking sort of like an evil mechanical spider.
Ellison: It was always meant to be scary. It’s a medical bot; it should be much prettier, the experience should feel like using an Apple product, something to put people at ease. But again, the budget version of this came out a little fucked, a little rinky-dink.
Filmmaker: The first effect out of the gate is the quick-melting heads. How do you get that tactility?
Ellison: It starts out practical; then, we take it into PhotoShop. I’m a big PhotoShop head. And Kuso, by the way, was how I learned PhotoShop. I got all my ideas for everything from that: cutting up gore, stretching faces, cloning heads, chopping it up. And this time around, we had a great VFX house [PRPVFX], too. I went out to New Zealand to work with them and did a lot of the post there as well. It was all in the same building, so I could go look at some effects, work on some music, tinker with the sound design, jump back and forth, throw stuff from one department to the other. This was so much fun, man, probably my favorite part of the filmmaking.
Filmmaker: How did the creation of the film and its score follow one another? Can you hear the music while you’re on set? Do you start to see scenes while you’re composing?
Ellison: Oh, I had a totally different vision for the music while I was making the movie. I thought —and maybe I don’t want to give this away, but whatever—I was going to do a straight-through cosmic jazz soundtrack, some Miles Davis Bitches Brew bent toward sci-fi, which I don’t think we’ve seen before.
Filmmaker: #ReleaseTheJazzCut.
Ellison: I know! But it just wouldn’t work. The movie that was revealing itself didn’t match that sound. I had to follow what the movie was telling me and what I’m capable of.
Filmmaker: The shoot itself was in New Zealand as well, yeah?
Ellison: Yup, all in the studio, which I believe used to be a door manufacturing plant. It was cool having a home base we had full control over, but to be honest, getting down there was a production call. Our producer is from New Zealand, the taxes were right, all the producer-y things led us that way. If it were up to me, I probably would’ve just stayed in LA if I could. I’d have access to all my people. Actually, we did get some shots outside—beautiful location in Bethells Beach, just one day in this forest. We needed a scene with a complete dramatic contrast to the rest of the film, lusher and earthier. The studio was in Auckland, just outside of downtown, and I don’t know if people know this, but Auckland’s basically like San Francisco. This is not Lord of the Rings country. Aside from those exteriors, we built the parts of the planet you see back in the studio, all practical. The interior of the facility was an actual build too, the only modular part being the bathrooms, though the section where they go into the walls was kind of modular, and that was my favorite set to work with.
But the exterior, the surface of the planet—that was all fabricated, and we were able to hide a lot of it in the darkness. Then, we made layers of miniatures to build it out further. We had a miniature of the facility built, and from that, we got these really detailed scans that were really useful once we got into the CG. Some wider shots of the landscape were miniatures built by this one dude in Canada, Adam Makarenko. He was one of the first people I discussed the movie with, a true genius, and he can build whole exoplanets in his garage. He photographed some really cool stuff, and we were able to incorporate that in post, blending these worlds in different mediums through the foggy atmosphere.
Filmmaker: The pièce de résistance comes at the grand finale, when Brion mutates as he gets overtaken by the virus. Walk us through that one.
Ellison: You gotta finish strong. I was thinking video games, Resident Evil, the kind of boss battle where you think you’ve killed him, but then he morphs into another, even more powerful final form. And hey, let’s have some fun, full-tilt. So, for the design, we came up with a lot of different stuff. We were experimenting with different ways of movement for the character, and I was thinking that the whole fight would be to a beat, every blow matching the score like a music video, because the performer in the suit during that scene had a background in dance and was crazy good at pop-and-locking. Some of that came in handy while we were shooting—wearing the prosthetic suit, it’d be hard to see all the detail of his trippy motions, so we told him he had to really go crazy with it. But yeah, a lot of iterations of this creature. At one point, we had him floating on some Evil Dead craziness. Then there’s the split-open face, which we had to work on a lot. We tried to get some good profile shots so you could appreciate it. With that, we had to find a balance of floppiness, where the flaps of skin hanging off aren’t so heavy that they won’t move, but not so light that you can’t see the weight on it. And one other cool thing: we pitched the sound it makes so it would be in the same key as the score.
Filmmaker: There are three names in the special thanks section of the credits that I’m curious about. The first is Terrence Malick, who’s generally understood to be an elusive guy. Did you get notes on this movie from Terrence Malick?
Ellison: Aw, not on this, but he’s been a mentor to me for a little while. He knows Kahlil Joseph, and we met through him—that’s how he reached out to me for his film Song to Song. His camp asked if I’d be interested in doing a cameo, I think because I was going to be at that year’s Austin City Limits. I chatted with Ryan Gosling for a second; that was all I filmed, but after that, I tried to stay in touch. He invited me out to look at a VR project he was working on, and someone he works with lives two doors down from me, so we’ve kept up. It’s actually crazy, I got to be the one to show him VR for the first time. It was beautiful to watch, man, like he’d seen an angel. This was a man in awe. [Quavering voice:] “This… this is amazing!” He was blown away. This made me so happy, to share this with him.
Filmmaker: The second is Ryuichi Sakamoto. You two knew one another before he passed away?
Ellison: Yeah, I got to work with him on some music. When I was leaving for New Zealand to get going on the film, I was wrapping up an album we’d worked on that still has yet to be released, and that’s when he passed. I was in the middle of one song, and getting that news just took the life out of me, and then I felt weird about finishing the project. But I’m not done with it; I still want to get back to it, share it with everyone. It’s about more than just me, I get that. It was a drag, though. I considered a lot of things I hadn’t thought about before: how it would look, how it would affect people emotionally, would it seem like I’m trying to profit off his passing? It just didn’t feel right at the time. Not the vibe.
Filmmaker: The last one is John Carpenter. Ash shares so much DNA with The Thing. Did you feel any nervousness about showing it to the man himself?
Ellison: He came over a little bit ago. He came to my house, dude. John Carpenter. We made some music, and it was killin’. I wanted to write something for Ash with him because aspects of the soundtrack were definitely inspired by him. I’ve always admired the fact that he’s been up against time and budget, doing things himself, and always made it work. There were times in New Zealand when I didn’t have personnel; I felt out of my element, far away from home and my studio at home and tried to tap into his spirit. Also, at this time, I was watching Halloween a lot. So, yeah, reached out, tried to get him involved and hopefully some of the stuff we’ve made together will be dropped as a remix, maybe. He’s as awesome as you’d want him to be, and my God, no one talks that much shit. He’s always been real, and now that he’s getting up there in age, he truly has no time for it, does not give a fuck.
