Photo Credit Francis George

In Michael Dunn's The Bet, character James sit on the couch, watching a news program reported by exuberant puppets. “I never knew the news could be a goddamn re-run,” he comments. Trapped in a morally unambiguous world, James turns to look down at the young woman bound and gagged, lying helplessly on his apartment floor. She, like so many of the others, is old news.

"I usually don’t watch the news just because I do feel like it is always the same thing," Dunn says. "The news tends to sensationalize any kind of violence, or they always leave off with the horrifying stories. Whenever they have the camera on scene, it’s like they have to do the close-up of the blood and the car wreck. They can’t show any compassion for it. It’s just like, “Hey, look. We’re sensationalizing this,” and, that came through with how the puppets were all excited about death and murder and suicide..."

A mix of social commentary and metaphysical pondering, The Bet is a short of simple structure and big ideas, its gritty setting easily reflective of moral decay. As a young women gets tossed back and forth between the kind though detached Henry and ever righteous James, the two men engaged in a bet as to which one of them will kill her, The Bet makes its way into the realm of philosophical horror without much overt violence but with an undertone palpably resonant of evil.

Here Dunn talks about the themes and processes for the production of his premiere film.

SM: In other reviews, critics have brought up the metaphysical volleying, the play of what’s real and unreal. In everyday life, what’s real, the newscasts, are done with the puppets. So, that’s the place to start: When you began conceptualizing, what kind of reality is this? Is it much more a purgatory, a spiritual reality?

MD: It was written very much to be a purgatory, torn between heaven and hell sort of idea, but we tried to set it up if where you didn’t get that aspect of it, it was still something you could watch and see the differences between the two characters, what’s going on with the girl and not really have to understand that. But, if you do understand that, it gives a bit more depth to the film.

It was based on a nightmare that my wife had, and so we very literally took cues from nightmares and dreams, where things aren’t exactly real, but they feel real. With the puppets, it feels like a normal newscast, but it’s being done by puppets. So there are all these sort of weird things where you just go, “It doesn’t feel real, but the story feels real.”

SM: We do get a few Biblical references, particularly in the newscast, and so I was wondering if this spiritual, nebulous space that we’re in, is it meant to come from or be influenced by a Christian background? So these ideas of pure right or wrong, heaven or hell—we’re to assume that there’s where they’ll go.

MD: I’m not particularly religious in one way or the other, so it was taking the ideas of what heaven is and what hell is and bringing them into a reality. The hallway is kind of the purgatory. There’s nowhere for her to go in there. The hell room is loud, in chaos and in noise all the time where heaven is a bit more peaceful. It’s not the typical vision of heaven with clouds and such like that. Even the idea of the angels, they’re not actual angels, they’re the dollar bill, origami angels. There were certain symbols like that in there to suggest that, but it wasn’t necessarily to make any kind of statement about religion or to have any point of view about that. It was just to suggest that whatever you believe there’s maybe something beyond, and whatever that is nobody really knows. I was just taking liberty with the interpretation of what that could be.

SM: Without giving away the film’s ending, there’s a quick flash of an idea that this girl has done something wrong, and she is deserving of what comes to her. Although she seems an innocent character, we’re lead to believe later that this isn’t the case. Was I picking up on that correctly?

MD: That’s exactly what it’s suppose to mean. We took it from the approach that although the audience doesn’t really know why she’s there or what’s going on, and she herself doesn’t really know what’s going on, she’s getting the clues as the audience is—the newscast talking about what happened.—but, she doesn’t really quite latch onto it. Then finally when there are those flashes at the end, it’s suppose to be like her mind realizes what had happened. That’s when she finally accepts what she did and can go on.

SM: You talked about this having come from your wife Michelle’s dream, and I know you’d written a short story of it before working with Chris Smith to get the script working. So, I was hoping that you could walk me through the process of adapting from the short story format into the screenplay.

MD: The short story is substantially different in that everything is told basically from her perspective. It’s flipped to where the guys are just kind of these unknown people who drag her back and forth. Then, while she’s lying in one of the rooms, she has flashbacks to how things used to be— that it used to be a nice world that they were living in, memories of when she was a child, all the good things that had happened in her life, and it wasn’t anything to do with a purgatory type situation. It was more just a comment about how society starts to decay, and as it decays there’s less and less hope, less and less consideration for human life.

The reason I went to that story for the adaptation was that it only had three characters and only three locations. It seemed small enough and feasible enough to produce as a short film. With the girl being gagged and not wanting to show flashbacks, we instead focused on the two guys and let them become the main characters.

SM: In terms of your collaboration, how do you work with Chris?

MD: He made a joke that it’s hard to write something with somebody because it’s hard to share the keyboard. Basically, the way we worked it is that I wrote out the first draft, which had dialogue in it like, “He says something scary here.” He took that, went through it, made his changes, added to it and then sent it back to me. We went back and forth like that over five or six months or so. It was one of those things where you would write something knowing that if it was bad, he was going to pick up on that and change it. It wasn’t as much burden on your own shoulders or his shoulders because we did have that check and balance. He’d write something, and I’d say ,“That’s not working with the theme of this or the tone of this,” and it was the same thing with him.

SM: [Talking about the characters] with Henry (Lou Diamond), his goodness is resigned where James (Walt Turner) is in a constant state of angry anticipation, but neither of them seems to have free will in the situation. They are playing a game, but ostensibly, the rules are set, and they already know what’s going to happen. So the waiting is just an interesting type of torture, and neither is able to change or get out of the situation they’re in.

MD: Someone reviewed it and said that they were both lackadaisical about their situation. That was very intentional. I wanted Henry to feel like a pacing cat in this room, that he didn’t really have anything to do. He just looks out the window and waits for time to go by. He collects these clocks and these angels, and he’s just trying to pass the time because he is completely trapped in this situation. Where (James) is the new guy on the job, and it’s like, “This is kind of fun and exciting,” Henry is down-beaten and tired of having to do this over again.

The free will issue was something that we had in an early draft. There’s a long discussion about free will and the fact that they don’t have free will and the people who show up there don’t have free will. And, Chris Smith said, “We can’t actually explain, shouldn’t explain what’s going on with these people. We just have to show it, and if people get it, it’s going to be a stronger pay-off when they understand. If they don’t get it, it’s still better that we don’t spoon feed it to them.”

SM: Switching over into the technical side of the filmmaking—and, this is just a small aspect of it all—the origami angels, I know that there were four people who had to sit down and build all of these angels. How long did that take, and how many of them were there?

MD: There were just short of 400. Three of the wranglers only did three a piece, so I ended up doing nearly 400 myself. When they appeared in I think our third draft, I was like, “This is going to be so great.” Then I thought, “Oh, we actually have to make these.” So, while we were finishing the script and sorting out all of the production details, I would sit down, watching TV at night, fold 20 to 30 of them a night. We discussed trying to do it digitally and had somebody come in, but the fact of Henry moving across the door was going to create a lot of problems.

The thing that’s funny is that when we shot the scene I was kind of upset that you can’t get the scope of how many angels are actually in there, and the other thing that’s funny is that not wanting to do things digitally, when he first opens the door, because of the way we had our lighting set up, you could actually see shadows of the angels on the shelves before he even turns on the light. So from the point that he opens the door to the whole little bit before he turns on the light, we exported frame by frame—100 frames or so—that I went in and digitally removed all of the angels so that you couldn’t see them at all. So, we ended up having to go the long way on that.

SM: Also a technical question: Courtney Gardner-Stavros’ character, the girl, really gets dragged around quite a bit, and I figure she must have been quite a trouper.

MD: And, she was sick during this whole thing. She had bronchitis and a sinus infection too.

SM: So, how long was the shoot? How did that go down?

MD: Because of our location—we were shooting in a school of theater, so we basically only had Friday nights and weekends. So, we shot over three weekends, one for each of the sets. Friday night we would put the sets up, all Saturday we were painting and dressing the set and then we’d shoot Sundays for 10 hours, break everything down and get it off the property so that they could have school the next day. We were spending, literally from 9 in the morning until midnight, three days over three weekends.

SM: Now, when you and [cinematographer Kurt Rauf] were working, how much storyboarding did you do in pre-pro before going in to shoot these three weekends?

MD: I storyboarded the main shots that I wanted, that I felt were kind of crucial, that popped into my head when Chris and I were writing this. I would go over that with Kurt, and basically from there—if we’re shooting James looking at the camera while he’s giving his monologue while watching TV, and that’s one of the shots I would draw, Kurt would move the camera to other places within that small area and get the coverage. So, I think there are 20 storyboards, and we ended up with, I think it is, 100 actual set-ups. He would take that, “I want the girl on the floor at ground level,” and he would do five or six variations of that basic idea just to give us the variety that we needed.

SM: How did your editing process go?

MD: It was a month of mornings and evenings when I would just sit down, and I started at the beginning and ran all the way to the end, pulling the footage in shot by shot by shot as opposed to editing all of Henry’s room or James’ room. It was something that I did instinctually just because I knew the footage that we had. I’d let a scene play. I didn’t want to do the real quick-cut editing. I wanted a slower, more meditative pace, and so I’d let a scene go and as soon as I could start to feel myself get bored with it, or in my head I felt like something needed to change up a little bit, I’d drop in different scenes. So, it was just watching the film from the dolly down the hallway at the beginning, and then going, “Okay, we need to open the door, and then this is going to happen…”

There were seven edits of the film, and the difference between the first and the seventh edit was shortening everything down because I tend to make it feel a little bit long. Even though the first cut was 18 minutes and the final is 19 minutes, the difference was in shortening individual scenes and extending other ones so that it gave a little more variety.

SM: Was there something within this filmmaking process that sticks out you’ve learned?

MD: Everything. This was my first outing as a director, and I think the biggest thing I learned was not to take so much on for myself. I was building sets—with all these other people—and getting wardrobe and doing the casting and finding the people myself. There were a lot of things I did myself just because everybody else involved was doing so many different things. But, I realized showing up on set that first day, “I don’t even know how I’m directing these people. I don’t know what they’re motivations are.” I’d been so concerned with all the behind the scenes aspects of making the film that I hadn’t really had time to focus on how I was going to direct these actors. So, next time, definitely there’s going to be a lot more delegating.

SM: So, what’s the next big thing?

MD: Chris and I are co-writing a feature called Detox, which is about a guy who kidnaps his ex-girlfriend when he finds out that she’s addicted to heroin and holds her hostage to force her to detox from the drug…While it’s simple in context, there are a lot of layers to it, similar to how The Bet is about a girl being dragged back and forth between two rooms but there are a lot of layers going on as well.

SM: After you get this feature written, where do you see your voice as a director taking you? What do you hope to see develop artistically in your own work?

MD: That’s funny because when Chris and I were developing Detox into what it is now, I was trying to answer that exact question and figure out, when people say, “Oh, it’s a Michael Dunn film,” what they are expecting to see. I like David Lynch films; I like David Cronenberg films; I like David Fincher films. Which are very different in different aspects.

When I was trying to figure out what my style was going to be, I realized that what I’d done on The Bet was probably as close to what my style would become just because it wasn’t something that I forced. It just flowed out, and looking back on it, I go, “Wow, this is the kind of film that I want to see.” So, I think, if anything, it’s not really going to change. It’ll have nuances and subtleties and differences, but that’s what my style will become, appreciating subtlety over the extravaganza.

The Bet releases today on DVD. For more information on the film visit the site here..