Nick Oddo, the Interview

Conducted by Dean M. Watts

   To me, your not so humble reporter, Nick Oddo encompasses all things that are good about the no budget direct to DVD horror wave. First, he has drive. He’s not just laying back and dreaming about doing a film, he made one. No money, little equipment, just a determination to achieve a dream that he saw through. Second, he has experience in the film, television and theater world that helps him take his dream and not only complete it, but to have the skills to see it through properly. And when you don’t have the budget or luxury that major directors are afforded, it’s skill that ultimately separates you from the hacks with digital recorders.

I had a great time interviewing Nick. It was really a conversation on the film I HATE YOU, the world of filmmaking, and two fans of the genre chatting over the phone one evening. Thanks for your time, Nick. We’ll do it again for the next film. Enjoy.

DMW: I missed that your DVD didn’t provide a directors commentary track

NICK:  Oh, I agree with ya, its just probably, what it was, it was gonna be a bit expensive to do. We’re on like a no budget kind of thing, and we barely even had enough money to release the DVD, to be honest with you. I kinda wanted to have a commentary with Marvin and I, you know, most like us arguing, going back and forth remembering how we shot it, who thought of this idea, explaining the idea of the scenes. But it was gonna cost almost $1000 extra.

DMW: What did you do before, and what do you do now, between filming, for livelihood?

NICK:  Well, before I started making films I was doing a little acting, but I'm also into sales. I’m a beer salesman; I sell beer here in New York City. It’s pretty much how I pay the bills, how I get all the equipment I need. You gotta have some money coming in.

DMW:  No doubt. Speaking of, what did you have in the line of investments or investors involved with this project?

NICK:  Really no money was invested in it; it was totally a guerrilla job.

DMW: And your filming experience before I Hate You?

NICK:  Basically I've done a couple of documentaries before I Hate You. I did one that was on there (the DVD) on Times Square; that was actually the first one I did. It went to a lot of festivals, even won a couple, for short documentary. Then I did another documentary about a professional wrestler who’s a good friend of mine, Johnny Valiant.

DMW: Yes, “Luscious” Johnny Valiant! Has that one been shown around?

NICK: Actually we’re going to be screening it here in NY, I believe its Dec. 7^th, in an anthology film archives. I got with them a long time ago and the guy finally got around to checking it out. He wants to screen it in like, a new filmmakers program, “if we won’t mind screening it,” he says. Of course we’d love to screen it! I look forward to that.

DMW:  I love Valiant, love wrestling. I’ve watched it since I was a kid, before it got organized.

NICK: Oh, yeah, who’re your favorites?

DMW: Oh God, Valiant, Bobo Brazil, the Von Erick’s. I stopped watching it mostly since Mick Foley retired. So how’d you meet Johnny?

NICK: You know Johnny’s a good friend of mine. Johnny’s from Pittsburgh, and I'm from Pittsburgh, we’re both transplants here in NY. We met, we were both doing bit parts in a new TV show that had Gabriel Byrne in it, can’t remember the name of it, (Madigan Men) it wasn’t on for too long. (laughs) We both just had a couple of lines, that’s how we met, and we found out when we took the van home that we lived down the street from one another. We found out we were both from Pittsburgh and, you know, we became friends, and we basically went on from there

DMW: You ever think of using him in another film?

NICK: I actually was thinking at first of using him for the main part of I Hate You, but something about a big scary guy, you know. I didn’t wanna do that. I mean, he’s a sweetheart kind of a guy. He’s a stand up guy. I mean, it would be an ironic thing to have such a big guy as a serial killer, but it kind of was like not what I was going for.

DMW: He is a bit on the big side for a serial comic.

NICK:  Exactly. If you see a big guy with tattoos going around beating up people, I mean, what you gonna do? Not to say that Johnny has tattoos. (laughs) I wanted like, an older guy, unassuming, a sweetheart, something you can feel for the guy a little bit. Marvin (Schwartz) did a great job, he did an excellent job. He worked on my first documentary, Times Square: Change. I directed him in a couple of plays, that’s how I met him. We always have the same type of sense of humor, you know, so I wanted to put him in (the documentary). I wanted to show we had a kind of history going, you know, by including him, Ray Lamb, Chuck Corbett.

DMW: I was amazed by the opening scenes, the sequence where Norman (Marvin) rolls a tire through two other tires. How did you guys do that? Was it luck, did you roll it all afternoon or what? How’d you pull that off?

NICK:  It was dumb luck, believe it or not. We went down by the river. I used to hang out down there, by the river, as a boy, schoolboy. It was actually just sold to NYU, so it’s all fenced off, you can’t even get down there anymore. But I used to hang out down there when I used to live in Brooklyn. I just liked it down there. I thought we would go down and shoot down there, film a scene to produce the character. There’s something isolated about it; it’s got the skyline and everything. We saw the tires; I had him run through them, just some wacky play, like the one time he’s on the swing later in the film. Then I said “Why don’t you pick up the tire and roll it, see if you can get it through” and honest to God first time, “you got it”!

DMW: It was lucky he didn’t flip out and ruin the scene.

NICK: He did, actually, that’s why I had to cut it, it almost blows the scene. I cut it just before he jumps around and hollers.

DMW: Tell me about your company BLACKCLOUD PICTURES. Is it a one shot for this film, are you gonna stick with it? And where does the name come from?

NICK: I think I’m going to use it.  I like it.  It came from ah, I don’t know.  Maybe it was something about after 9/11, maybe it was about something I felt going on in the world, you know, stuff under a black cloud.  All the bad things that were happening. I don’t know. I really don’t know.  But I also remember, once I had bad luck and Vinnie Stigma, who is in the, who was with me in the movie and I went on tour with him, Agnostic Front, a band he is in.  And he took me on tour with him and we were having all kinds of bad luck, and he said “Nicky Black Cloud”.  And I loved it and we laughed and just laughing out asses off, and it stuck. 

DMW: What was your camera and sound set-up for the film?

NICK: Started with a 900 Sony, I use a Sony 950, had a 900 awhile back, basically a shotgun mike straight to the camera.  It was a lot of problems for me, I won’t use it again, but that is how I did it. Grab the lights, camera, put the mike up, get the camera up, you know, shoot up and kill people in hallways. They would be lying there and the FedEx guy would come in, wouldn’t blink an eye. UPS guy coming in, neighbors stepping over dead bodies. It’s for real too, a couple of times it happened. People walked by, just stepped over them. (laughter)

DMW: What’s your computer editing program of choice?

NICK: Final Cut. It’s the number one, what most people use, nothing really fancy.  I did have some audio problems. There’s not a lot of bad sound, some stuff on one side. I just learned a lot about that as I go along.

DMW:  We’d talked earlier and you said you wanted to get a 24P Camera.

NICK: I want to, yeah, I really want to. I don’t know where the money is coming for it, how I’m going to pull it off. But that’s my goal. Shoot the next one in color. I shot this one in black and white, because I thought it would be better to tell the story. I love black and white personally, a lot of people don’t, but I liked the way it helped to tell the story.

DMW:  I know you used mainly b&w on your documentary, then would change to color when you were featuring the commerce side of the changes to Times Square. I loved your transitions that way; it was very powerful in pushing your statement.

NICK: The documentary went back and forth, it was a good job. I did. (Transition from b&w to color) Change is the name there, too.  I thought it would help with the story. I even thought about doing it with this one, but I decided there was no reason for it, it wouldn’t help the story. It would be more of a gimmick instead of a gain.

DMW: How did you get the story from idea to film? Marvin shares writing credits on the DVD.

NICK: I was writing the story with Marvin.  We had inspiration working together.  We were just on the phone earlier, working on the next one, bouncing off ideas. That is basically how we do it, over the phone, back and forth, bounce a few ideas off one another. I go to him about this and he’ll say, “I like it, I don’t like it”, that‘s how this one got started. I just told him I wanted to do a serial killer movie about a standup comic.  I thought he was the person for the part.  So we basically did research for all his actual jokes; (they’re) all true, there’s not a false word in (them), you know, about the crowds at the guillotine, coming to watch and all.  It was all true. We are basically trying to, I guess, in a way figure out why we love violence so much. It is sad; Peace on Earth is really great on a Christmas card, but I don’t think there has been a second of it, ever. It’s just sometimes I wonder if that’s why they (became) killers. I was researching other serial killers and all this stuff. To be honest with you, I was never into serial killers, a fan, or anything like that, and I just look at it for what it is. While I was looking into serial killers, it was hard to put the books down. I mean, when you start reading about it, it is very compelling

DMW: My two favorite horror movie themes are serial killers and zombies.

 NICK: Zombies! George Romero! He’s a Pittsburgh man.  I was supposed to be a zombie in Dawn with the Dead. Actually, a good friend of mine was a zombie, in there at the mall.  That‘s were I grew up, over by the mall. When I was supposed to go up there, meet with the extras there, I had a baseball game or something, I don’t know.  I had something to do. I had no choice at the time. But he was in there, a friend of mine. A young mall zombie. 

DMW: Ever considered doing a zombie flick? They’re all the rage.

NICK: I would like to do it; it just doesn’t come into my head.  That’s the problem; you have to go where your head takes you, where your heart takes ya.

DMW:  Back to serial killers, back to the real horror.

NICK: They say something about the world, have an opinion on it.  I don’t know, it’s just real scary, it’s real horror. And all that stuff is just basic. Like a guy knocking on the door, saying he is lost, you’d let him in. You leave your window open sometimes, and some guy just comes right in

DMW: Norman was good at that. Better then doing comedy. (laughter)

NICK: Norman knew how to get inside houses.  That is how you get yourself in.  It wasn’t, he wasn’t a threat, you know. You know, nobody is thinking about anything bad happening, it just goes right out of the guy’s head.

DMW:  With so many cast members having background in theater, was the film a strict script shoot or more improv?  

NICK: My idea basically had been, almost everything we shot, there was something we wanted to accomplish in the scene.  It doesn’t have to be word for word but I want to accomplish what we wanted in the scene. Even Marvin, a lot of things that I would write down, he didn’t agree, couldn’t come out of his mouth, or flow right. Some other actors, like Paul Rusanowsky. Marvin had a couple of scenes there with him that just didn’t come out of his mouth exactly right. It was kinda like making him all tense, doing them over, over, and over again, sitting there. Then he’d say, “I’m just like going to change this”, that’s basically what happens. As long as we got across what we wanted to get across.

DMW:  You offered some interesting deleted scenes. I see a lot of DVDs where the clips are just extensions of scenes already in the movie. But you cut out a few that would have really altered the tone of the film. In particular a suicide scene. Tell me about this scene.

NICK: Actually what happened was, we had a screening here in New York for new filmmakers.  They called me up; they had a date available real soon, so we rushed over together and had the screening. When I saw it I knew, you know, that it didn’t work. You know, we’re talking about it, started talking about it, did a little research.  I realized that none of the true serial killers really kill themselves; it almost never happened.  It really doesn’t fit with what we were trying to say. It goes against the character.

DMW: It’s not the same setting as the rest of the film, either. It takes Norman out of the city, into a wooded area. 

NICK: Marvin’s friend, who had a place up in Merchant, invited Marvin up, and we just thought, let’s just film a scene up there, you know. We actually had to take a bus, take a nice trip out, out to the woods there. Then we staged the hanging. There’s really two main things that I love in movies. I love cemeteries and hangings. (laughs)  I love cemeteries and I love hangings. The Cemetery scene (also in the deleted scenes) didn’t make it either. I just love cemeteries, I just love hangings, I just can’t help it. The cemetery scene had like a voice over at one time. It just didn’t fit in. It just put way too many things in your head. It was out of character also. 

DMW: Bill Santiago. He was great as a counter balance comic beside Normans rants. You played him a lot right before Normans set, and he would get real laughs. Then Norman, and crickets. Is he an actual stand-up comic?

NICK: He, Bill, is a real comedian; he makes a living out of it.  He plays all over the place.  He plays here in New York, and he plays, I believe in San Francisco. Mainly he is on the road all the time. Colleges, clubs, events, private parties.  He’s got a manager.  I was trying to show like, that, he is the kind of comedian you normally see at a comedy club, and heeere’s Norman. You know. Comedy clubs are about, you know, making people drink. 

DMW: I’ve just rented Gloria; haven’t watched it yet, but I’m going to.

NICK: Yeah, I had a small part in that. I’m talked about longer then I’m in the scene. (laughs) I have a scene on the film with Sharon Stone, briefly, were I get killed, you know. Yeah, its fun, you know, got to meet George C. Scott. Sharon Stone.  She was gorgeous and George C Scott was great. 

DMW: Any plans for you to get back in front of the camera?

NICK: I have done acting, little spot parts on A Beautiful Mind, Summer of Sam; a couple of TV shows. Only small bits, never could really make a living out of it, you know.  I got a bigger part in a movie that was never heard of, never got on TV. To get serious with it you almost gotta go to LA. That’s really where it’s at, in LA. I really wanted to be there.  I actually was born in LA, (but) only lived there for a couple of years.  But I went out a couple of other times.

DMW: So tell me what things you can bring to your new project now that you have one under your belt. 

NICK: A lot, a lot.  It‘s been a tremendous learning experience, everything from editing to the planning of it, working with actors, all kinds of stuff. I probably could go on forever. But I think, editing, you know. Definitely working with actors. You’ve got to make them feel comfortable, feel calm, I mean, especially when you are trying to get something on film, wanting it a certain way.  That’s why I give in to improvisation. 

DMW: What’s ahead at the Pioneer Theater screening October 17^th?

NICK: Yes, a screening at the Pioneer. It’s an independent art house, underground films and the like theater. They showed Donnie Darko; it ran like every night when it came out.  It’s like a little neighborhood art house type theater. They’re always interested in underground film. I sent it to the guy, and he liked it.  He said “can you get people interested?” and I said of course! I don’t know for sure, whether we can, who knows? (laughs) But they have this thing called Bizarro Mondays, which they do every Monday, and they would put us on there, and if we do well, they will keep showing us.  That’s nice.  They will put you on their flyer, and on the Marquee, on their schedule. Its nice they liked it enough to do it. 

DMW: Whom do you have as distributors for I Hate You? 

NICK: I got it at a couple of sources here in New York, entertainment outlets.  I just called a guy today. I gave him thirty of them a month ago, and he had nine left.  That was really encouraging, since August is a really awful month in retail. I think we are on about seven sights, Diabolic, Exploited, DVD Empire, a few more. I also sell through the site.  It has just been very slow.  It’s one of those things where you just gotta keep on with it.

DMW:  All right, tell me about your next film. 

NICK: It’s a crime thriller I guess you could say. It’s gonna seem like a normal crime thriller; it’s will materialize into something more violent. A lot of killing. I’m gonna get it together the best that I can. A couple of things I am worried about. I want to have a better camera, want to take it up a level. Want to have a better crew. Want to have some help with crew, want a guy with a boom, try to put it all together. I did everything on I Hate You. Everybody would make fun of me. I would be smoking a cigarette, camera in one hand, cigarette in my mouth, Marvin shouting, “I’ve never seen a style like that”.  (laughter) You have to be in the spirit of what you are doing, if you are doing low budget gorilla like films.

I Hate You will have a screening at the Pioneer Theater in NYC on Oct. 17, at 7pm. 155 East 3rd. Street NYC 10009. This is at Avenue A and East 3rd. Street in the East
Village.