00:01Hey guys, Contributor Joel here again. Recently got to sit down with Natasha
00:05Karmani, the director of Abraham's Boys. The Van Helsing family story. Sees the Van Helsing
00:14family 20 years removed from the big fight with Dracula, the run-in. And got to talk
00:23to her about her process, about adapting Joe Hill's short story. And just kind of how
00:29she came at this story from a male perspective, being a female director. Interesting, great
00:37conversation. Hope you enjoy it.
00:42Hi Natasha, how are you?
00:43Hi, I'm good. How are you doing?
00:45I'm doing great, thanks. I watched it last night, still kind of sitting in it. As someone who
00:53loves horror, I'm here for the Dracula Van Helsing of it all. But we're kind of entering the story
00:59kind of years after what we know them for. When you first were, was this a pitch for you
01:05for the script? Or was this something that you were, that they came to you for?
01:09Well, I had already been familiar with Joe's collection, 20th Century Ghosts, and a big fan.
01:14But I always saw this story as sort of a bit of an oddity.
01:18Yeah.
01:19And I was like, wow, that's interesting. So actually, producers sent it to me and said,
01:23hey, do you think there's anything here, you know, as a film, as a feature film? And so
01:27when I started thinking about, okay, well, where would you expand it out? Which way would
01:31you go? What characters could you bring in? That's when I started getting more excited about
01:35it. So it did come to me in the context of like, hey, do you think there's a movie in here?
01:41My answer was yes.
01:42Yeah. What's it like coming at like a novella? Because there's space before, there's space
01:47after. Where do you, you know, how did you come to the conclusion of maybe kind of winding
01:52it on both ends? Often with short stories, adaptation, often the short story is around
01:58like the end of your first act or the midpoint of your film. And I felt the same with this. I felt
02:03this is really like the midpoint of the movie is Joe's story. And so that very much helped sort of
02:10like play structurally, like, okay, well, this is the middle. And then where do we go backwards?
02:14I know I wanted to bring Nina back into the story. She's just so essential. And I wanted to see the
02:19dynamic of the family. And so I knew that that was kind of like backing up, we wanted to bring
02:25Nina back in. And then it was just a lot of fun, because I got to go back to one of my favorite
02:29novels, which is Dracula. And I sort of pinned all of the sequences with Abraham and read it with Joe's
02:39story in mind. And it was just like, wow, this works so well. Like, this is all there. I'm not
02:45changing a thing. I'm just looking what's already there and imagining it 18 years from now, right?
02:50Like with a slightly different lens to, you know, you take two steps to the left and look at the
02:55material. So that was just a joy. And those are my favorite projects to work on.
03:00Yeah, there's this really cool. So Joe's story, which I love, had this really cool,
03:05like father son generational dynamic. And then there's this, seeing it on film, it really kind
03:11of fleshes out like this masculinity, father into son, generational trauma going on. Was that that
03:19seemed like a very much a conversation that you were trying to have?
03:22Absolutely. I mean, it's so tied into that's Joe's whole take, right? Like, that's what he brought to
03:27the material was this idea of cycle of the of the cycle between fathers and sons that Dracula does not
03:34have. And Dracula also does not really provide a biography for Van Helsing. He just sort of pops into
03:40the story with like this authority figure with all the answers. And so I think what Joe's story made
03:45me ask is like, okay, where the hell did this guy come from? Who is he? What's his deal? Like, how
03:52come he's just coming in and he has all the answers? And where did those answers come from? And so really
03:58using Joe's story to inform, you know, my gut instincts of where he came from, and building out
04:05that biography backwards allowed me to then imagine him as a father and imagine him and imagine the
04:12environment that he would create in his home with sons of his own. And yeah, I think the story is
04:19very much about patriarchy and fathers and sons and what we inherit.
04:25Yeah, it all comes across and I really enjoyed it. And thanks for making it. And thanks for your
04:30time today. Thank you so much. Thank you for watching.
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