00:12Breathe in, breathe out.
00:19Remember, you are safe, you are capable.
00:28I mean, I did the interviews for Never Been Kissed, so the Never Been Killed sort of idea is a
00:35cool thing.
00:36And obviously, The Last Kiss is a great homage to old school 50s and stuff like that in terms of
00:42that song.
00:43But can you talk about looking at the concept and flipping it for what you wanted to do, but also
00:50with the characters like Laurel?
00:52Because she goes against the grain of many different ideas.
00:56Yeah, absolutely.
00:57You know, when I first read the script, I just fell in love with just the centralizing of the kiss
01:03as like the main source of the magic and the main source of the horror in this movie.
01:09And to me, it was really just digging into the kind of the mythology around the kiss that we have
01:14in our culture and then like making that Laurel's, you know, her journey of being a teenage girl and kind
01:20of dealing with the anxieties around kissing and, you know, putting that into a slasher, a kind of a supernatural
01:25slasher, you know, sandbox and playing with it there.
01:44But also playing with the high school motifs and playing against all those ideas.
01:48Can you talk about that and looking ahead, developing the characters, making them your own, but also keeping the mystery?
01:54Yeah, a hundred percent. You know, it's we really definitely. Yeah, we when we were looking at this movie, we
02:00were like, oh, this is let's say this is Final Destination meets Never Been Kissed.
02:04You know, like, let's do that genre fusion. Let's have some fun with them, both of those worlds.
02:09So, yeah, we really wanted people to, you know, walk into the movie being like, oh, this is so fun.
02:13It's so cute. And then just kind of slap him in the face a little bit with some of the
02:17horror elements that come into it later.
02:19But developing the characters. Yeah. You know, for me, you know, Laurel, I really wanted to make sure that she,
02:27you know, we didn't just I think horror movies can really go into just like, oh, you know, this is
02:31all about trauma and this is all about, you know, and of course, you know, there's an incident that occurs.
02:36So there's certainly an inciting incident for Laurel that is traumatic.
02:40But we really want to make sure that that wasn't all she was, that, you know, she could still actually
02:44enjoy her friendships and have fun with Poppy, her best friend.
02:48And like to have some of that levity, even within like essentially a horror mystery that we're developing with her.
02:54And she has to kind of solve these clues, gather these clues and solve this mystery.
02:58So, yeah, we really want to weave a really delicate balance with both of them.
03:03Well, it's also being creative. That's the one thing about working with Blue Mouse.
03:06You have to you have to know what you're doing. You have to find exactly the right way to do
03:10it.
03:10But you also have to execute it. Could you talk about that?
03:14Yeah, absolutely. That part was really fun. We call them death flashes.
03:18You know, what's the visions that she sees when she kisses people?
03:21And that to me, you know, again, this whole entire film, I wanted to really give it an aesthetic homage
03:27to kind of 1960s Disney fairy tales, again, around a whole theme around kissing.
03:33I was like, OK, I'm going to combine fairy tale and make it dark slasher. Right.
03:36So for me, it was really developing the look with my cinematographer and my producer.
03:42And we played with a lot of different color palettes at first, but it was actually my producer was like,
03:47let's just like go for it.
03:48You know, like we go full Yoko on this thing. And so we were like, OK, let's go color.
03:53Let's go, you know. So, yeah, my inspiration was Maleficent and Sleeping Beauty.
03:59So we went purple and we went neon green.
04:01And let's really differentiate these visions from the real world in like a fun way.
04:19I mean, in the Tulsa, you were talking about Poppy, you were talking about Poppy and Laurel and the way
04:23that works is really beautiful because you have the actress playing Poppy has such an effervescence.
04:30And yet, you know, could she have done something? Could she have not?
04:33Yeah, absolutely. Yes. You know what? I love that you use the word effervescence because that is exactly the word
04:38I use to describe her in the script.
04:41This Poppy needs to be effervescent, need to be bubbly, you know.
04:44And so she kind of brings in the counterbalance to like Laurel's more heaviness of like the burden of like
04:50having these visions and feeling responsible to save her friends.
04:53And so Poppy kind of brings in that comic relief and, you know, they can balance each other out a
04:57little bit and she can bring the fun out in, you know, McKenna's Laurel a little bit more.
05:02But yeah, but we also wanted to, you know, there was a delicate, you know, weaving as far as like
05:08how much because Poppy's not just the not just the fun, you know, because she does kind of get into
05:14more serious emotions.
05:15And it's really about her friendship with Laurel and how seriously she should take, like whether her best friend is
05:20actually, you know, maybe mentally ill.
05:22So, yeah, I think, again, Arkira is an incredible actor and she did a really great job of being that
05:28like floofy, fun friend, but also like weaving in that sense of concern when she starts to realize that maybe
05:35Laurel isn't in her right mind or she starts to suspect that.
05:39But it's also using music. You use music in a very specific way. Could you talk about picking because you
05:44pick very specific, but not expected needle drops in many ways?
05:49Yeah, I love needle drops. It's really such a big, huge part of like the process that I love, especially.
05:54And we had to find a lot of the songs kind of actually during production and not wait till post
05:59because, you know, there's a really there's a few cues that are very important to the actual story.
06:04And also, you know, for for some of the dancing stuff that we also get to do.
06:09Yeah, you know, you know, there's there's all kinds every every cue, every needle drop serves a different purpose. Right.
06:14You know, there's character introductions and there's also mood setting and there's also.
06:19So for me, most of the choices around needle drops or even score really is about like, what is the
06:24character experiencing in this moment?
06:26How can we you know, how can we describe the character by the songs they're listening to, they're singing to?
06:32But then also, like, what experience do I want the audience to be to be experiencing emotionally?
