Jen and Sylvia Soska made a big splash recently at Cannes with American Mary and Kristian caught up with the Soska sisters to ask them about their Cannes experience and upcoming projects. He also learned about their favorite movies, most wanted superpower, and their weapon of choice in a zombie apocalypse.We would like to get to know us Twisted Twinnies better, a lot better. What better way to get to know someone than have one of their good friends - in this case Craptastic Writer, comedian, puppeteer, and now filmmaker with his new FRIENDS FOR LIFE (sidebar: it includes one of our last cameo appearances), Kristian Hanson - to grill the real stuff off of our extra lean asses. Truth, we are after all, starving indie horror filmmakers.
Are you frothing at the mouth and loins for AMERICAN MARY? Fuck, I hope so. Want a few hints about what we have up our sleeveless sleeves? In this piece we talk about the upcoming film, our past first child - DEAD HOOKER IN A TRUNK, comics, zombie warfare, and our worldwide market premiere screening at Cannes. Here's an interview apply --
What inspired you to make a film like American Mary?
Sylvia: After we finished DEAD HOOKER and were working on distribution, I was talking to Eli Roth, who is literally one of the best, most coolest people on the planet and he asked me what other scripts we had in the works. I actually had nothing at the time, so I lied and threw a bunch of ideas for scripts that I thought I could write really quickly. He said that the one about the medical student sounded interesting, so I went with that. The idea came from an April Fools prank I saw online involving identical twins. It had creeped me out so much that I got obsessed with it.
Anytime something scares me, I try to learn as much about it as possible because I find educating yourself is the best way to dissolve a phobia. The more I learned about this misunderstood and scapegoated community, the more I got to really dig what they were about. I used that underground group and mainstream society as a basis for the story with Jen. We were struggling a lot and had been for years to find our place in the filmmaking world and used that analogy for the situation Mary, a struggling medical student finds herself in.
Jen: There is a lot of personal material in AMERICAN MARY. Not exactly literal, but definitely inspired by our experiences working in the film industry. I find the topic of what’s on the outside as opposed to what’s on the inside fascinating. Appearances are incredibly deceiving in life and people rarely turn out to be what they appear to be. Much of that is incorporated in AMERICAN MARY.
You can clickity click right here for the whole Daily Dead piece. Thank you for checking up on our adventures and all the support that you have given us to get to this point, ladies and gentlemen. We're extremely proud of AMERICAN MARY and very excited to start sharing the new film with you all!
-Sylv