Lucky McKee

With his debut film May, Lucky McKee made a Fast Times at Ridgemont High for weird girls everywhere. Starring Angela Bettis as May, the film is a Carrie-sque tale is about a maladjusted girl who can’t connect with those around her. The film was a bona fide cult hit with Emily the Stranges everywhere and a few people who don’t think everyday is Halloween as well— Roger Ebert spoke up for it and said that Bettis be nominated for an Oscar. Since May, McKee has gone on to do a Masters of Horror episode and a Suspiria- inspired studio movie about witches called The Woods. With Roman, McKee tries his hand at acting. And here’s the hook, the film is directed by Bettis. The film treads in familiar waters as McKee stars as Roman, a socially maladjusted welder who likes to drink beer and spy on his neighbours. Kirsten Bell (TV’s Veronica Mars) is his obscure object of desire. Despite Roman’s shyness and awkwardness, the two hook up. Then Roman accidentally kills her. He keeps her body on ice in his bath tub and gradually disposes of her body piece by piece. While this is going on, a new girl, Eva, moves into the apartment complex and she also develops a crush on Roman. Will this blooming relationship work out better than the last one? Or will she be joining Veronica Mars’ corpse in the bathtub. And just how tall is Lucky McKee?


How tall are you Lucky?
I’m 6’5”

That was the thing that got my attention first in the movie, I was like, ‘Wow, Lucky McKee is an extremely tall man.’
It’s hilarious, the size difference between me and Kristen Bell is just… You don’t really realize it until she’s in his apartment, and it’s like, whoa. Once you see that size difference and the doors close, it’s like, ‘Fuck.’

So Roman is something you wrote in college but it got put on hold and then you made May.
I wrote May in my junior year of college, and Roman just popped out at me in my senior year, and I was kind of intending for it to be something that I would make with my friends on black and white Hi8 as kind of a warm up movie to May. I just never got it together and ended up getting into some other things, and figured it’d be better to give that script to another director just to make the two films more distinct from each other. We tried it a couple different times with a couple different directors and actors, and it’s never worked. And Angela and I kinda clicked and said, ‘Wow, why don’t we just swap?’

Did you shoot this before or after The Woods?
We shot the parts with Kristen Bell, the opening, before I went to Montreal to shoot The Woods, and we shot the rest of the film about a year and a half later, after I was finished editing The Woods. It was kind of a goodbye movie to Los Angeles, and I got the hell out of there.

I’m gonna assume shooting digital with a small crew was a lot of fun and a lot less stressful than The Woods was.
Yeah, I needed it, you know? I needed to get my feet back on the ground, and my creativity got so beaten up working in the studio system and having every single little idea that you have challenged from 20 different angles for no apparent reason. And you just have to repeat yourself, which gets tiresome to work on the same 90 minutes for a year and a half is really hard on your brain and your heart, and stuff like that. And Roman was just the first… When we came back to shoot the brunt of the movie after the woods, it was just the first week or so of shooting, it was just me and Angela, and my buddy Kevin with a camera, in my apartment. It was just three of us. We shot all the stuff of Roman alone, it was just so intimate, you know?

Even though Kristen Bell is in Roman, there weren’t ever strong commercial ambitions for this film were there? Was anyone saying “Oh, we might have a Blair Witch or a Saw here.”
No. We did it for ourselves. Since it was such a small amount of people, and didn’t require a tremendous amount of money, it was just something we felt comfortable with taking a chance on. That’s why we shot the part with Kristen, the opening of the film, ‘cause there’s that kind of a time break in the story there and we said, ‘Let’s just shoot the first 20-25 minutes of the movie and see if it works.’ See if it’s dramatically effective. And it did, and we finally got it together.

Let’s talk about Angela Bettis. I guess the obvious questions would be: Why the role reversal between you two?
It just made sense. And we’ve been through similar territory with May, and become great friends, and just always wanted to work with each other. It made sense. Where she lacked experience in directing, I could help and show her the ropes a little bit, and with acting, vice versa for me. She really held my hand. It just made sense. We already had that working relationship. We just flipped sides of the camera.

The other reversal for this film is how Roman’s kind of ascending from madness, and May was descending into madness.
They’re kind of a photo negatives of each other. Roman starts off pretty consumed by his own brain and just living inside his head too much, and Eva brings this experience of killing this girl that brings him out of his shell. May just kind of sinks into her own brain and goes all anarchy.

You’re a great onscreen kisser. In May you make out with a girl on an elevator and in this one kiss Veronica Mars. You have wonderful technique.
McKee: [laughs] You love that I write these glorious parts for myself. I gotta get action somehow, man. [laughs]

You seem like a real nice, humble and talented guy. So where are all the depressed, rejected misfits in your movies coming from?
From me. Hard times, you know? Mentally and socially, everybody goes through the kind of stuff. I kind of just realized over the years that no matter what, you’re gonna end up with just yourself at a lot of points in your life. And thinking too much about things you can’t control, just kind of dramatizing that kind of stuff as it hits me. But that stuff just comes from what I see and feel.

I have this idea in my head that after May, you must have had all these Emily the Strange girls lining up to date you. Is that true?
No, not really.

Really? I’d think they would keep banging your door down.
I’ve met a lot of girls that really identify with May, but a lot of them would be too shy to be that forward. But you do meet a lot of people that seem to really identify with that girl, and that speaks to Angela’s power.

What’s a date with Lucky McKee like?
Kind of old school. I open doors for girls, and light their cigarettes. I just think women need to be treated like ladies…

…and then back to your place to watch a Dario Argento film?
[laughs] Nothing too twisted. I live in the sticks in Oklahoma now, so it’s usually just like shooting off firecrackers. Or getting into a bottle of bourbon and stumbling around in the woods at night.

Are your movies chick flicks?
I don’t know, I never really thought about it that way. They’re flicks with chicks, I don’t know if they’re necessarily chick flicks. A lot of guys really seem to identify with May, too. Just as many guys come up to me as girls when we go to conventions, or festivals, or something like that.

A recurring theme in your movies is people dying to make a work of art. Do people need to die to create something beautiful?
No, not necessarily. It’s something I was fascinated with at the time I was writing those stories, with the idea that there was so much negativity around death, but the few deaths that I’ve had to deal with in my life so far have completely changed me as a person, in good ways and in other ways. The biggest thing in any of our lives is the impact of death, especially if it’s somebody that you love. It stays with you forever, and there’s beautiful things about it.

Does it bother you that you haven’t made anything that’s garnered the kind of attention that May received?
I don’t know, I mean we’re putting the fourth DVD on the shelf [with Roman]. I’m pretty proud of that. We need to set Roman next to May on the shelf. All we’re trying to do is get ourselves to a place naturally and creatively where we can tell stories that cut deep, and one out of every half dozen, or one out of every ten…Maybe May will be the movie that people remember the most, which is fine. That happens to a lot of directors. It’s not going to stop me from making movies, it’s not something I really think about. I just think about what I want to do next, what I want to get out of my system.

What have you got lined up next?
Just various things, man. I’m working on my website, which is going to have a lot of really, really interesting content on it. It’ll kind of be an online art gallery, and I’ll kind of be a filter for that stuff. Angela and I are going to make another movie together here in the springtime. I’m going to make our first Oklahoma movie so that should be interesting. We’re going to act with each other on that one.

Your first film. All Cheerleaders Die, is that ever gonna be available?
All Cheerleaders Die, my buddy Chris Sivertson and I are going to put that out next year on our own, or maybe license it to a distribution company or something. As soon as he’s done with his Lindsay Lohan movie. that he’s making right now, we’re going to come out here and jump into that, ‘cause we’ll have a couple of DVDs on the shelves by the end of the year. We’ve been holding off on All Cheerleaders Die because a lot of people are saying, ‘We want this because it’s the first Lucky McKee movie’ and that’s just not the case. Chris and I co-wrote and made that film together, it’s a 50/50 collaboration all the way down the line. We wanted him to get a couple films out there so he establishes his name and his style, and we’ll put the film out. But the thing has been aging like wine, it’s hilarious. A zombie movie with football players and cheerleaders.

Cheerleaders who must die?
All cheerleaders must die.