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“I Wanted to Turn Splash on Its Head”: Tyler Cornack on Mermaid
Mermaid If you search the phrase “Florida Man,” you’ll get a different result every day. A few days ago, it was “Florida man arrested after human remains discovered in suitcase.” Today, “Florida man charged with DUI after crashing e-bike into tricycle.” Mermaid, the latest from Florida-bred filmmaker Tyler Cornack—who also made Butt Boy (2019), his surreal, cavity-searching debut—explores the myth of this cryptid-like civilian. The film follows Doug (Johnny Pemberton), a lonely drug addict who plans to commit suicide. But just as he’s about to end his life, he discovers something in the water near his beachside home: an injured mermaid.
Doug takes the creature home to nurse her back to health and protect her from those who seek to exploit her. But this mermaid is a far cry from the sea maidens you’ve come to expect in movies like Splash or The Little Mermaid. It’s as if the sea creature from The Shape of Water had its gnarliness cranked up to 11. Cornack merges the bonkers premise of the film with a strikingly naturalistic tone, delivering one of the most delightfully unexpected comedies of the year.
Filmmaker spoke with Cornack ahead of Mermaid’s April 8 release via Utopia. He talked about why the Florida Man myth is worth interrogating, the process of constructing a whole new kind of mermaid, and the film’s pivotal vomit-soaked children’s party.
Filmmaker: Both Butt Boy and Mermaid have outrageous premises and are often very funny, but I found myself struck by how serious the tone felt in both films. Your films balance out the ridiculous, and straight-up stupid—which I mean as a compliment—with a surprisingly naturalistic approach.
Cornack: I discovered that making Butt Boy. I like to take actors and create an environment that’s as realistic as possible, but what’s going on in the world is not happening. It’s like combining the supernatural with the extremely, extremely natural. I find it interesting. It’s a language I’m very intrigued by. I think you find comedy in different ways than you would expect, as opposed to obvious humor. In Butt Boy, you could see that being a very silly movie. The tone creates this other layer of a joke, to me, where the performances are straight. Then you’re doing this wire walk, where you can branch off and find these new ways of making you laugh, because it is played so straight.
Filmmaker: For lack of a better phrase, your films really go there. Are you ever concerned with taking things too far, or do you think it would be too disruptive to your creative process?
Cornack: I don’t worry about that. I want to take it far, as long as it’s within the balance of the world. I find it interesting to play in that world where it’s like, “Am I taking this too far? Am I taking it not far enough? Is it grounded here?” That’s what excites me.
Filmmaker: How do you know when you’ve found that balance?
Cornack: Sometimes you don’t. You can find it in the edit, or when you’re shooting it, you can just feel that it’s not the right world. I always say, “That’s almost too silly, or that’s almost too funny. So let’s play it straighter.” Alternatively, there are times we can go more ridiculous. For example, delivering a line even more insane[ly]. You go back and forth, trying to measure out the two. A lot of times, I’ll get both options: I’ll get a really silly version, and I’ll get a really straight version, and then play with it when I’m editing. For Mermaid, this movie is about a guy who’s a fish out of water, finding an actual fish out of water, and they play with that balance throughout.
Filmmaker: Mermaid is billed as “A Love Letter To Florida.” I know you grew up there, but tell me about your fascination with the state. There’s a line in the film where someone says Florida is “the only place on Earth that can still kind of surprise me.”
Cornack: I’ve always wanted to make a movie in Florida. This is such an indie filmmaker thing, but for Mermaid, I had a location we could film in Florida, in the town I grew up in, and my executive producer is from the same town in Florida. The location was the same beach I used to go to as a kid, and the house we used in the movie is his aunt’s house.
There are so many different pockets and subcultures in Florida. There’s the theme park world, there’s the suburban gated communities. This was the beach town, and it’s these characters that draw me in. As a kid, I’d watch these beach bums, these sun-kissed guys at the bar, telling stories. They felt like they were from another universe. That’s where my main fascination comes from. There’s an energy that anything can happen in these beach towns. Nowhere else in the country has that energy. It’s unhinged.
I had this itch in my head to make something about mermaids, too. I just thought it would be a funny Florida Man story to find a mermaid. Then it went from there. You play with ideas about mermaids, and you think about Florida’s drug problem. Personally, I lost friends to drugs that were, you know, Florida Men. It was all those things combined.
I love beach movies, too, like Jaws, and the Elijah Wood movie, Flipper. Flipper is actually why I put SpaghettiOs in the movie. It’s a lot of childhood stuff. This was a very nostalgic project for me. Splash is another one. I wanted to turn Splash on its head and make it the darkest comedy ever. I was more inspired by beach movies than mermaids, specifically.
Filmmaker: What kind of conversations did you have when it came to designing the mermaids? What did you draw from? It’s much closer to mythological ideas of what a mermaid is.
Cornack: I saw this TikTok video of this guy out in the ocean by himself on a boat, and he was hearing these horrifying shrieks. He claimed it was a mermaid. I’m sure it was a fake, but it had me interested. There’ve been horror [films] involving mermaids, but nobody’s treated them like a wild animal. What if they’re not as beautiful as they’re portrayed in Disney movies? That’s how I approached it with the team. A mermaid that’s an animal first and foremost, and unapologetically one. She’s feral. She’s not gonna budge. She’s just an animal that needs to be in the water.
For the creature itself, I worked with them for four months trying to design this thing, and they ended up falling through last minute. So what was four months became 10 days of prep. I didn’t even know what the mermaid was going to look like, beyond what I had instructed them, until the day we started shooting. Mark Villalobos [of Villalobos Studios], Heather Mages, and that whole team did such an amazing job with so little time. They had a little bit over a week to build the mermaid from scratch. We already started shooting while they were building it. It was very stressful, but it made it a special sort of collaboration.
Filmmaker: In both Butt Boy and Mermaid, you’re drawn to men who seem to have virtually nothing left to live for. What draws you to these sorts of anti-heroes? Do you see them that way?
Cornack: I definitely see them as anti-heroes. I know it’s dark, but people on their last leg who have nothing really left to live for—I find there’s a lot of humor in that, and so many layers to explore. You can play with it if you’re doing something ridiculous, like I’m trying to do in these movies. In Mermaid, Doug’s at his lowest point right when he discovers the thing that can maybe change him. I’m really drawn to the down-and-out guy. I automatically root for them, even with their questionable decision-making. And in my films, these guys aren’t making good decisions. But they’re trying, and something about it speaks to me.
Filmmaker: Many filmmakers would treat Doug as a full-on deadbeat, but I feel like Mermaid really lays bare the humanity within him. He’s severely flawed, and he does struggle to talk to people or own up to his mistakes. But the film deals with him as a guy who just doesn’t have an outlet for his thoughts and feelings and therefore can’t process things, and how that manifests within him. How did you develop that character?
Cornack: Johnny brings so much because he’s such a light, and he’s typically just so silly. If you take somebody like him, and then you have this script where this guy is kind of a deadbeat, he’s automatically going to make it more likable. It was interesting to have somebody like him play the role. Because there’s a dark version of Mermaid where a different actor wouldn’t be as tolerable with the decisions he’s making.
In my mind, Doug’s character has been locked away in this house for so many years. No one ever checks in on him, and he has no one to share his thoughts with. It was great to see somebody like Johnny play that, because all of his quirks and his little mannerisms, as dark as the movie is, they still come out, and you go, “Oh, man, this is just weird.” As opposed to “Jesus, this guy’s a real monster.” He really gave Doug humanity.
Filmmaker: We need to talk about the big moment where the mermaid projectile vomits all over Doug’s daughter Layla’s (Devyn McDowell) birthday party. It’s shot like a warzone where all hell breaks loose, particularly with the slow-motion. Much of the movie feels serious and grounded, and this still feels grounded, but it has that level of outrageousness.
Cornack: I wanted to take things to 11 real quick, and then we can fall back into what we need to fall back into. The scene was a twist in the film where it goes in a pulpier direction. I always intended to sort of shoot it that way. You often have this really grand vision of what you’re going to do, and then you get there, and you have no time, and you have no money to pull off what’s in your head.
It was a lot of improvising. It was just picking off shots. I knew I was going to do it in slow motion because I had the piece of music written. We had this big hose rigged with this black bile, and we just let it rip. The kids had a blast with it. It was a lot of fun for them to see it and just act scared and get all this gak all over them.
