Critics have called his new film “gleefully nasty,” “gross and goofy,” a “frenzied thriller” and a “gore-filled bloodbath”.
His own wife elbowed him in the stomach during a screening and said: “Did you have to go that far?”
But local film-maker Ant Timpson says Come to Daddy, his directorial debut, isn’t messed up at all.
“It’s not completely over the top,” says Timpson ahead of Come to Daddy’s big screen debut at the New Zealand International Film Festival later this month, the event’s biggest local movie.
“It’s far more accessible than some of the other films I’ve been involved in. It’s more of a slow burn that starts picking up speed then goes a bit bonkers.”
Timpson is a familiar face in the local film industry, a key figure who has curated the Incredibly Strange section of the International Film Festival since 1994 (Come to Daddy was selected independently for the festival’s main section) and spearheaded the 48 Hour Film Festival in 2004.
The 53-year-old’s produced many twisted horror films over the past few years, including Deathgasm, The Greasy Strangler and The ABCs of Death.
But Come to Daddy is being hailed as his most accessible film yet. Reviews have been overwhelmingly positive: Indiewire called it as “an absurd gross-out romp that turns into a tearjerker” and rated it a B+, while Film Threat said it was “smart, uncompromising, inventive and just downright hilarious” in a 10/10 review.
It features local actress Madeleine Sami alongside Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood, who plays Norval, a DJ who is invited to return to his home in Oregon to reunite with his estranged father, played by Stephen McHattie.
We’d be spoiling things if we revealed what happens next, but a reviewer from the Playlist called it a “funny exploration of a fraught familial relationship, defying genre and expectation at every hairpin turn”.
Timpson admits things get a little weird after the initial setup.
“I knew if it was going to be a debut film it needed to be something that would surprise me. We’re so jaded and we’ve seen so much these days I want to try and subvert all those expectations people have,” he says. “A lot of thought has gone into keeping it surprising throughout.”
What many don’t realise, says Timpson, is that there is real-life inspiration behind the film.
The idea for Come to Daddy came to Timpson after his dad’s death five years ago.
“It’s a tribute. I wanted to make a permanent testament to him and the kind of film we’d watch together when we were younger,” Timpson says.
“He had such a wicked, dark sense of humor. He would be laughing his ass off at some of this stuff.”
Timpson didn’t expect to be sitting in the director’s chair for the film, which was shot in a small town on an island near Vancouver in June last year.
Initially, he thought Come to Daddy would made as a small film, with a low budget, shot “guerrilla-style”.
But he was persuaded by its screenplay writer, Toby Harvard, when he delivered a beefed-up script that would require a bigger budget. With Wood signed up to star, Timpson secured funding between New Zealand, Canada and Ireland, and agreed to direct it.
“When (he) came back with such a wild script, I thought, ‘This is going to cost a lot more.’ Then I started questioning, ‘Am I the person to do it? Who’s going to put their faith in me as a first-timer?
“I realised it had to be me. That’s what really carried me through the whole thing – having that personal connection to it.
“Once Elijah came on it really kicked into gear a lot faster. “
Once the shoot began, Timpson likens the experience to “going to war”.
“You feel like you’re all together in the trenches and there’s just non-stop chaos. It’s like being blinded on a roller coaster: your stomach is going up and down and you don’t know why. (At the end of) every day, I’d just crash, a sleep-of-the-dead,” he says.
“You’d feel like you’d accomplished so much, you’re so drained, you feel so spent and the next day you’ve gotta do it all again. It’s such a rush. I was in hog heaven – even when it was teetering on the brink of utter chaos.”
He loved every second of it, and says he’s already planning his next film, another instalment in a trilogy about dysfunctional families.
“It felt like a real mid-life electro-shock to the system. It’s made me want to get back in the chair for sure,” he says. “I was kicking myself saying, ‘Why did I wait so long?'”
The big test, though, was its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival, a screening which was attended by many of the film’s cast and crew, and a group of friends Timpson hadn’t seen for a while.
“They were telling me they were nervous that it was going to be a piece of shit (and) they were going to have lie to me afterwards. They were really happy they didn’t have to. That meant a lot,” Timpson deadpans.
Come to Daddy‘s since screened at festivals in Melbourne and Sydney, and has been picked up by a distributer and will get a theatrical release in America.
But Timpson can’t help but chuckle at some of the reviews it’s been getting, especially when he’s made films that are far weirder than Come to Daddy.
He puts it down to film’s tone, and admits: “It does have a certain bent”.
“When people talk about how messed up it is, it’s because there’s so much levity to it. When those violent moments happen, there’s always dark humour undercutting it all,” he says.
“There was a drive to get it to as wide an audience as possible. We wanted it to be a fun ride for people and not mean spirited.”
* Come to Daddy is screening as part of the New Zealand International Film Festival
