EnglishInterview - Crabs : Let’s talk with Pierce Berolzheimer
By Mulder, Zoom Virtual Event, 04 february 2022
Mutated by nuclear effluent, a horde of deadly horseshoe crabs descends on a quiet California town and wreaks havoc on prom night. As the deadly crustaceans work their way through the disbelieving populace, it's up to a band of deranged college students and local law enforcement to tackle the threat of the increasingly giant crabs in a love letter to practical-effects horrors like Gremlins and the nostalgic classics of Roger Corman.
We had the opportunity to discover last year the first and amazing Pierce Berolzheimer’s first movie and this month after the French Premiere during the Gérardmer Films Festival to discuss with him.
Q : hello Pierce, Please can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background ?
Pierce Berolzheimer : My name is Pierce Berolzheimer and I am a first-time filmmaker. i got started working as sort of at the lowest rung in the totem pole on a couple features and got promoted to producer just by doing random assortment of jobs and learning on the fly and then the filmmakers that i was working with wanted to see if i had a project that i wanted to get off the ground and so then we went off and Crabs!.
Q : I have discovered last year during the Frihgtfest festival the awesome Crabs movie that you have written, directed, edited and produced. It is a nice tribute to the cult films of the 80s as Gremlins, Critters, Godzilla, Power Ranger and horror movies. Please can you talk a little about the origin of your first movie ?
Pierce Berolzheimer : I really wanted to make a movie that like 14 year old me would really enjoy so i took a lot of the different elements that i loved and squished them all together so i knew i wanted to make a horror comedy and when I was growing up we would travel down to Georgia and there were always these horseshoe crabs on the beach but i had never seen a horseshoe crab movie before and so when the time came i kept on expecting you know as i grew up i thought somebody would make the movie but nobody did. So when the time came to make my own film I’m like okay well now I’m gonna make the horseshoe crabs movie.
Q : In a few words, can you talk to about the main plot of this film ?
Pierce Berolzheimer : So the movie is about these radiated or irradiated horseshoe crabs that attack a small town in northern California and this band of kids and law enforcement that have to try to save prom and then it gets a little bit more out there later but that's the basis.
Q : What can you tell us about the main cast of your movie, Alli Jennings, Jessica Morris, Chase Padgett ?
Pierce Berolzheimer : They're great .The cast was fantastic everyone got along everyone did a fantastic job. I'm really honored to have worked with such a good cast they really all knocked it out of the park and each of them was a pleasure to work with and they each of them brought you know they come from a lot of different backgrounds so they brought really unique elements to the dynamic of each of the characters and you know near the end of the process i really wasn't giving very many notes it was they really embodied what I was looking for if there's any one part of the film. I’m the proudest of, it's the casting.
Q : I really like the actions scenes and the rhythm of your film. How have you found a such great inspiration, some movies, some books ?
Pierce Berolzheimer : Both. One of the biggest inspirations of the movie was Jurassic park and so there's a lot of sort of homages and playing with similar action scenes from Jurassic park in the film and so you know this movie was sort of my love letter to movies that i love and so like the bar scene in Gremlins I ripped that wholesale and put it here but tried to do my own little twist on it and so a lot of the action scenes are actually supposed to sort of resemble other movies that you've seen in the past that you might not have seen in a while and so i really wanted to while you're watching my film Crabs I wanted you to be drawn back to the time when you remember all these other movies like Jurassic park from the 80s and the 90s and so a lot of the action scenes are based directly off of other action scenes and then i just try to throw my own twist what on them.
Q : What can you tell us about your filming locations ?
Pierce Berolzheimer : We filmed in Mendocino in Fort Bragg California which is in the middle of nowhere it's about four hours north of San Francisco and we ran into all sorts of problems like the first week of filming there was a power outage and so in order to do any emails or anything we had to drive about two hours south to send out emails and sorry this isn't during filming this is during pre-production but we were still trying to coordinate actors flying in and you know getting catering and getting the props up there but we couldn't get email because there was no internet because there's no power so even in order to understand how to how to get everybody to location we had to drive two hours south in order to get internet and it was a it was an absolute nightmare but the locations and the towns were perfect locations for the film and I wrote it specifically for those towns my grandmother lived up there and so I knew that the location was going to be a character in and of itself and so i wrote the film specifically for those two towns.
Q : Which are for you the good ingredients to create a good horror movie as this one, the screenplay, the place, the actors.. ?
Pierce Berolzheimer : all of it really, i mean. I think that the premise can hold a lot of weight if you have something that sort of grabs your attention if you have a if you have a like a catchy premise i think that definitely pulls people in immediately but that won't actually hold any weight after you've gotten people's attention so to me it's the characters. I mean the if you don't care about the characters then you don't care about the story no matter how cool the special effects are and no matter how cool the premise is or how interesting the script is like if you can't relate to the people and you're not drawn in by their dynamics then i think the movie will just fall apart no matter how much else you get right and you can have a movie with terrible cinematography and awful special effects but if you care about the characters an audience will forgive that stuff pretty easily in a way that they wouldn't forgive great special effects and you know great cinematography but with poor characters so for me getting the characters right was like the number one most important thing in the whole production.
Q : What was the most difficult scene for you to shoot in this film and why ?
Pierce Berolzheimer : the most difficult shoot was the there's two the bar scene was really hard and part of it was because we were filming between about two in the morning and seven a.m. and a lot of the things we thought were gonna work didn't work and so we spent a lot of time we got about half of what we wanted to shoot done and we didn't have a budget to finish the rest of the shoot so that the bar sequence of the film was supposed to be about twice as long with a lot more things happening and there was going to be you know dialogue and a lot there was going to be a lot more substance to that scene but because of the way that we scheduled it and the way that some of the some of the things didn't work out the way we wanted to that we then had to change other things in order to make what we got work so that was that was difficult and then the other really challenging part was we have this mod we have this montage at the end of the movie where they're building the mechanical shark and it wasn't challenging in a taxing sort of way it was just challenging in a i really hope this works kind of way because when they're building the giant no spoilers but when they're building the giant thing for the end of the film originally that was going to be done a completely different way and we got to the day without almost any preparation and no props and so we were just picking things out of the piles of what was in the shop that we were in it was all found on location all of those props that that they are using in that scene are completely found on location including the pirate ship wheel and all of that and then we built the cockpit using things we found on location and so it was sort of a fingers crossed i really hope this works and we were sort of betting on it working and so if it hadn't have worked it would have been really challenging so there was a lot of feeling like we were rolling the dice there and especially when we do when we like acknowledge the camera directly and the actors speak directly into the camera i believed in it and some of the crew believed in it and some of the crew didn't believe in it and so there was this sort of divide on okay has this completely gone off the rails or are we still aiming at what we're aiming for initially here and i you know i think it worked out great i mean I’m really happy with i think it plays into the right crescendo at the end of the movie in the way that i wanted it to play but it was definitely a gamble and so that was a challenging day too and that was also a night shoot so any cold night shoots are I’m gonna my next film I’m gonna write mostly during the day and mostly in warm climates.
Q : Can you tell us how it is difficult to create actually a movie as this one ?
Pierce Berolzheimer : very, it's the most difficult thing i've ever done in my life it's taken us six years no we're on your seven now we filmed it in 2015. well we filmed the first eighty percent in 2015 the last twenty percent into 2016, 2017 then we spent about two and a half three years on visual effects about a year plus on sound design and at a certain point i was sort of the person that was pushing the whole project forward so like our producing team didn't really know how to do some of the special effects and our budget was really limited so i had to be really creative I moved to Vietnam for almost a year to do some of the special effects so i was living abroad and it took. It was without a doubt the most difficult thing i've ever done and i had no idea how to do most of the film like i was learning on the fly almost every day something was new i didn't know how to do special effects i didn't know how to create creature sounds like a lot of the creature sounds in the film were a combination of one of our actors recording his lines but then i took animal noises from the BBC library and combined it with his vocalizations but i didn't know anything about how to edit sound design or anything like that so it was a just this constant learning process I’m learning about distribution right now and marketing and sales and so it's been the most challenging but also most rewarding thing i've ever done and i've learned more doing this than i've ever learned you know in school or doing anything else.
Q : What can you tell us about the special effects of this movie ? Have you worked with some companies to create them or do them by yourself ?
Pierce Berolzheimer : we worked with companies. We worked with originally for the for the final scene the final fight we were going to build a miniature set and do it as authentically old Kaiju film style as possible but our budget didn't allow for that so i had no idea how to do it but I thought that i could make it work if we did this drone footage and then did it on a green screen and superimposed the drone footage with a wide lens on the drone footage in order to match the creatures and but we had 380 visual effects shots and so the only way to do that was to export the work to Vietnam where we could we could get that many shots for our budget but then we had to do more work in the United States sort of to clean up the work that was done there. So when i was in Vietnam we were we were cutting out each of the characters and rooting them and putting them on the background and then we had to add dust effects and laser effects and all sorts of work that you know i've learned how to oversee the visual effects process but the actual artistry i mean it's like it would be like learning how to paint I mean the VFX artists are artists in the same way that a painter is an artist and there's no way i could take that on.
Q : The film Crabs was presented at the Gérardmer Fantastic Film Festival. how does it feel to have your film shown in France ?
Pierce Berolzheimer : Great, i think we've already sold the film in France too. So, I’m really excited that it's going to be released in France i've been to France three or four times i was really disappointed i wasn't able to be there at the festival. i wish i could have been there but it's been an honor i mean we've shown the film in Germany and France and the UK and we're going to be showing it in Switzerland soon in Australia and the response outside of the United States has been unbelievable in a way that you know i was worried that some of the humor might not translate to different languages but that doesn't seem to be a problem at all and so it's really validating that you know horror fans and comedy fans outside the United States see the movie and get it in the same way that I intended it which has been it's been wonderful that it's been cross-cultural. I mean I’m thrilled that it is being received internationally as well as it is that's that is such a surprise and such an honor that that the international community has enjoyed it and i can't wait for it to come out in France it's gonna be great.
Q : What did you learn and retain from this film ?
Pierce Berolzheimer : i have learned how to take a really limited budget and not be constrained by your budget with your imagination so i had this grand crazy idea that should have cost a lot more than it did and i learned that there's ways to do it if you want to do it you can do it there's there are shortcuts and ways to get what you want in a film as long as you're willing to compromise like as long as you're willing to say okay it's not exactly that but it's this instead you can basically do you can tell whatever story you want regardless of what budget you have like you're not gonna be it might take a long time. it might be really difficult but your budget shouldn't constrain your imagination is one of the biggest things that i learned and one of the best pieces of advice that i ever got : basically any choice because being a director is all about just constantly making decisions and hopefully all your decisions are lined towards one singular vision but it's just constantly making little tiny minute decisions all day long every day and one of the producers one of his two there's two great pieces of advice that i love but one of them is you can either have things done well fast or cheap but you can't have all three you have to choose two so you can have two of any of those at any time but you can't have all three and that feels like the most accurate advice for filmmaking that i've ever heard and the other thing is like as a producer because i was the writer director producer editor on this the best thing you could possibly so the role of the producer is to do everything and then systematically fire yourself better at you than each thing so they can all do it better than you can but in the meantime you have to know how to do wear every hat and so i've learned a little bit about every piece of the process and i hope to take that forward into my next project because all of the pitfalls that made this project take seven years i think will be pretty easily avoided now that i understand how a film is supposed to be made instead of struggling my way through the whole thing.
Q : Do you have some actors that you dream to work with and why ?
Pierce Berolzheimer : i do. I actually i have a list i wrote them down because that was a great question and i didn't have i knew a couple but i really had to think about that some more and i have a very this is my list: Idris Elba, Sigourney Weaver, Clive Owen, Ethan Hawk, Michael Caine, Taissa Farmiga, Djimon Hounsou, John Goodman, Dylan O'brien , Daniel Radcliffe, Adrian Brody and Julianne Moore. To me i love each of them are actors or actresses that whenever i see them, i don't think about them as a person I think about them in the role that they're in so they may some of them may not be the most they're all obviously incredibly famous but they you know i've never really had a desire to work with like Tom Cruise because he's an amazing actor and there's no hard feelings of Tom Cruise but when i see a tom cruise film i see Tom Cruise and so these are actors to me that are so good at embodying whatever role that they're in that me as an as an audience member completely forget that they aren't that character like Ethan Hawk was in this movie that i thought was the best movie of the year a couple years ago called First reformed that is just spectacular and Idris Elba as Luther is one of the most interesting characters i've ever seen and I have a the next project I’m working on I’m writing specifically for Idris Elba like I would love for him to take it on and you know i think Sigourney Weaver like she breaks so many different molds of what it means to be a powerful woman actor like a female lead that she can basically do anything and like Daniel Radcliffe is a really good example where he started as Harry Potter and that was that was who he was he was Harry Potter and his career trajectory has just boomed after that and he never takes on a role that is like a previous role he's always doing something completely unique like Swiss Army Man is one of the
greatest in the films i've seen in the last 10 years like that movie is awesome and he is just fantastic in it and so each of those actors i feel like don't like Taissa Farmiga is she in Final girls made me cry and that's a horror comedy that had me tearing up and so like her just honesty and whatever character she plays is mind-blowing and so each of those actors for me are people that yeah i really get lost in their performance and the idea of getting to work with somebody like that really makes me then as a director get to get to get to tweak that and craft that would just be spectacular and the other actors i want to add to the list are all the people that worked on Crabs! i would work with all of them again in a heartbeat on anything they were they were all amazing.
Q : what advice would you give to a young film enthusiast who would like to make a film ?
Pierce Berolzheimer : I will say do as you can to understand the process of filmmaking before you go off and do it. So while also not spending any money so take your iPhone film scenes learn the basics of how to craft a scene edit it like just learn the basics direct some actors and then the next piece of advice I would say is go make the movie you want to make while also always compromising because the movie you have in your head is never going to be the movie that comes out on screen and if you are stuck if you get stuck with the movie that you have in your head you're going to be frustrated and disappointed and hard to work with and i would not recommend doing that. I would recommend seeing a movie as three different things there's the script there are four different things actually there's the script there's the movie you think you're making while you're shooting it there's the movie you have in your head that you're trying to make and then there's the movie that actually exists at the end of the day and if you think of those as all different like angles on the same thing then you can let one of them go and then focus on something else the other thing i would recommend is to be patient because it is like the number of movies that are set out to be made that actually don't get made is amazing and if i didn't love actually the piece of advice isn't necessarily to be patient. Don't make a movie that you don't want to make if it's not the movie that you are super passionate about it's the wrong movie to make like we almost went into production on a movie that i thought was like the right movie to make as a first-time filmmaker i thought it was the movie that would then get my career started because it was popular with you know as a possession movie and there was a bunch of other possession movies at the time and it felt like oh that's a really popular genre if i and it seems low budget and easy to make like i could if I do that first then maybe later I’d be able to make the movie i really want to make and at the end of the day i was like no if this is going to take me two three seven years i'm really glad i committed to making the movie i really wanted to make because who knows maybe this will be the only movie i ever make i hope not but if it is because i know a lot of people make one movie and then don't keep making movies you want to put out the thing that makes you want to be a filmmaker right like that really excite you and if it's not that don't do it if you're doing it any other reason besides you love the movie and you love the concept then you're making the wrong movie.
Q : Which are your currents projects ?
Pierce Berolzheimer : i've got a couple the first one is the Idris Elba movie that i would it's called Tide and it is a it's a revenge movie set sort of in the middle ages era and it's a fantasy revenge and the way that I’m thinking about it's a very simple story in a very simple film in terms of the narrative but with Crabs! was very complicated there was a lot of actors and there was a lot of special effects and there's a lot of like weird you know science story mixed with animal monster story and there was just a lot going on too many romances and I mean it was a lot to juggle that that level of complexity and so with Tide the way I’m picturing it and I’m writing it is to have it be a very straightforward narrative so that i can focus on making it the best version of that narrative that I possibly can and so I’m going to be really focusing on directing the action lots of planning the getting all of the beats to be as clean as i possibly can so that the story like John Wick is a really good analogy for this film because within the first 15 minutes you know you understand what his goal is and you are sympathetic to him from the very beginning all the way to the end and it's a very simple desire that he has and so Tide is a similar as a similar film.
Pierce Berolzheimer grew up watching horror movies with his dad and taught himself how to make stop motion animation. He then took independent studies in filmmaking and began to work on film sets. In 2014, he co-produced Evan Buxbaum’s dramatic comedy Sun Belt Express and, two years later, James Morrison’s science-fiction film Diverge. Crabs! is his first feature film as screenwriter and director.
Our review of Crabs! is online and can be read here
Synopsis :
Mutated by nuclear runoff, a horde of murderous horseshoe crabs descend on a sleepy California town. As the deadly crustaceans claw their way through the disbelieving population, it’s up to a ramshackle band of students and police to address the increasingly ginormous crab menace.
Crabs!
Written and directed by Pierce Berolzheimer
Produced by Pierce Berolzheimer
Starring Jessica Morris, Dylan Riley Snyder, Robert Craighead, Allie Jennings, Justen Overlander
Music by Mike Trebilcock
Edited by Pierce Berolzheimer, L. Gustavo Cooper
Production companies : Raven Banner
Distributed by Raven Banner (Canada)
Release date : August 26, 2021 (Frightfest)
Running time : 80 minutes
Photos : Copyright Raven Banner
We would like to thank Pierce Berolzheimer for answering our questions