‘Little Sister’ Will Tap Into Your Inner Goth Girl — Even If You Didn’t Know You Had One

In the mood for the perfect Halloween movie without all that ridiculous spooky scary stuff? Ok fine, maybe that’s the point of the holiday. But taking a break for what is being called a “sweet-and-sad comedy”, Little Sister will do just the trick. In fact, it will do many tricks on both your own emotions and those of the goth girl that lives inside you. Because as this movie points out, we all have one.
Little Sister, available now on VOD, follows Colleen (Addison Timlin), a former goth girl and current nun who heads down to North Carolina to visit her family for the first time in years. She catches up with her stoner parents (Peter Hedges and Ally Sheedy) and her brother Jacob (Keith Poulson) who has been badly injured in the war and has chosen to live as a recluse. It all takes place during this exact time of year in 2008: just before the trick or treating, and just before a historic election. It’s a time capsule of sorts, serving as both an interesting way to view that time and a lens to examine where we are (or aren’t) now.
The film will connect with people who have ever gone back to their childhood home, only to revisit that person you were as a teen, simultaneously thinking to yourself, “What the hell was I thinking?” and “That person was awesome, I’d like to be them again.” I spoke to director Zach Clark about his inspiration for bringing all these elements together in the film that never fully goes dramatic nor comedic, but does remain hopeful throughout.

How did this story come together?

These things always come from like 10 different directions at the same time. I had the idea to make a movie about a young nun who used to be goth, who had a brother who had been in the Iraq War, and parents who were stoners. And I had, ages ago, an idea to make a movie about a young girl who’s goth and conjures a demon and the demon just becomes her roommate. That’s the earliest I can trace this thing back to, that I would make a movie with a main character that’s goth. And I saw this photo exhibit, from a photographer who had spent a week living with a soldier who had his face ruined and reconstructed in the war. There’s a picture of him on his wedding day and it was sort of like the ending of The Graduate where he and the bride are looking off in different directions and it’s this very haunting moment. That had always stuck with me, so much so that I wanted to incorporate something similar into a movie. My parents were both children of the 60s, and [I was] thinking about what kind of parents would be the most let-down by having a kid who is a nun and a kid who was in the army. That just seemed like it would make the most sense. So often in movies you’re confronted with free, fun-loving, stoner kids and conservative parents so I thought it was a drastic switch there. I started writing that and and it wasn’t really coming together. My producer, Melodie Sisk, who produced all of my movies, except Modern Love is Automatic, she’s in them, too, she’s a very talented actress, as well, was like, “You should come see my parents’ house. It’s outside of Asheville, North Carolina, it’s on a mountain, and we can shoot in it for free and I’ll show you the homes and businesses of their friends, and we can shoot in those places for free, too.” I went down and took a weekend in January, 2013, and looked at all of these places that we had available to us and those became the locations for the movie. So I wrote everything that happens in North Carolina knowing where it would happen. While developing that stuff, Melodie and I talked about our own respective families and experiences and those stories and relationships got built in as a blender of truth that became the relationships of the characters in the film. All the characters have my immediate family’s first names. I have a sister named Colleen and a brother named Jacob and a mom named Jodie and a dad named Bill, and Melodie’s step-dad’s name is Lunsford so that was the last name of the family.
The connection between Colleen and Jacob is one of the most important pieces of the film. What elements of relationships with your siblings did you include, besides the names, into the relationship that these siblings have?
My brother and myself, we really did connect through music in high school. I’m the oldest, he’s a few years younger than I am, and he started getting the music that I listened to around when he became that age. So, when he was about 13 or 14, he started listening to The Misfits and Danzig and all that type of stuff. I would come home from college in December and one year I was like, “Hey Jacob, we’re gonna see a show together. I’m not going to tell you anything about it, I think you’re going to have a fun time.” I took him to see his first GWAR concert and it’s a transformative experience if you’ve never seen GWAR before. For 4 or 5 years after that, that was our annual tradition, I’d come down and we’d see GWAR together, and that was how I bonded with my brother for many, many years.
Have you heard from GWAR on any of this?
I have not heard from GWAR. We were in touch with them to get the song for the movie, so it’s not like they’re unaware, but we sent them a link to the movie.
Did you grow up with a drummer in your family? Because as someone who did, the way that this movie captures the noises that you hear from somebody drumming in the house is perfect. It sounds exactly like what it would sound and feel like when someone is drumming in the basement.
Yeah, Melodie’s step-dad was a drummer, so she grew up with that in her house. He didn’t perform the drums, but he set up the drums and the drum set that Jacob plays is his personal drum set. That room where he lives is where Jeff, Melodie’s stepdad, goes to do all of his drumming. In recording, our composer, Fritz Meyers, was very specific about having multiple mics set up in the studio and I think he set a mic up like two rooms away, just so we could get that exact tone. Also, it moves between being a score and not being a score and it was really important to have those feel like separate things and knowing when it’s one versus the other.

It’s quite significant that this is set around the 2008 around the election. Did you know that this was going to be released now, in front of this election?
Yeah. I mean, obviously I didn’t know that it would be this particular election, that it would be this exact set of circumstances. But I wrote it in 2013 so I figured we would probably make it in 2014-2015 and it would be out around the time that we’d be moving into the election. My last movie was a Christmas movie (White Reindeer), so you have to make something in December to be released at Christmastime, and I think I really saw in that a certain degree of like, “Oh, it does add a little something to the experience of watching a movie if you can have it exist in and have it be pertinent to a specific moment in time.” Initially, I think it made the most sense for a lot of reasons. The soldier that I saw that affected me, those were from the Bush years and I think it contextualized his story in a way that made more sense to me than setting it current day. The other thing I always say about it is that the amount of faith and belief that we, as a liberal community, put into the Obama candidacy to then have the Obama presidency be fine but have its shortcomings, and be real people competing and failing at various things. To me it felt like an apt metaphor for the the amount of faith and hope that parents put into their children and vice versa and have them become regular, failed human beings that you have to just become friends with, to a certain degree. I feel like it’s easy to condemn conservatives and I wanted to ask, “Are we being liberal enough? Are we being radical enough?” and an array of those questions, to a certain degree. And to make a political movie that didn’t have any politician characters. So many micro-budget, certainly American, independent films skew the political in terms of being about relationships and that sort of thing. And it’s everywhere. If you live in the world, politics are everywhere and they do affect you no matter what you’re doing. So, I wanted to make a movie that addressed that, too.

What was the makeup process like for Jacob? You mentioned that photo – was that something that you went off of? How much research did you have to put into what his face would look like?
Brian Spears and Pete Gerner did our makeup design and application. Brian did a fair amount of his own research into what those guys generally look like and came up with a composite of that. We did makeup tests for it before we even started raising the money to make the movie. We knew it was going to be Keith, so we had a life cast of his head done, we had that makeup designed and we knew exactly what it was going to be before we even had a dollar in the bank account. We knew that the movie lived or died by that being pulled off, “tastefully.” We had it planned and set way before we got most other things put into motion.
It was about a two-hour process in the morning and about 90 minutes to take it off at night. Pete and Keith were put up in the same housing just because they woke up earlier than anyone else and because of the needs of the make up, so it all just became easier for them to put Keith in the makeup at their housing and then take it off at their housing. Most days when we saw Keith, that’s what he came to set and left looking like. Ally Sheedy didn’t recognize Keith at the New York premiere. He was like, “Ally, it’s me, it’s Keith.” And she was like, “Oh, yeah,” because she was only there for a week and that’s what Keith looked like on-set those days.

Was Ally Sheedy someone you always had in mind, how did that come to be?
Ally came onboard while we were shooting the movie. We had someone else in that role who was also great, but she just ended up really, really working out. Ally was such a blessing and such a gift to the movie. She was such a professional, too. I’ve never worked with someone so prepared and so thoughtful about the script. It was to the degree that she would be ready to shoot the scene and she would say, “I want to change a minimal phrase,” or “Can we lose these two words here?” She was phenomenal. I think in most of her big scenes in the film, everything you see of her is take one or take two. We only shot two takes of those scenes with her.
I like that you put the credits a bit deeper into the movie, right after the premise had been established. Was that on purpose?
That was in the script, for there to be this lengthy prologue of sorts and then you would get to the credits. I always like it when movies hold their credits off for as long as possible. There is also a bit of a stylistic jump right after that sequence where we go from being static to being handheld and we’re in the world of North Carolina. So that also made the most sense if we are taking her on a journey from one place to another, that’s the perfect place to throw some opening credits.
And finally, how do you tap into the goth girl inside you?
She’s there at all times. Last night, my girlfriend and I had our annual Halloween celebration and we made pumpkin baked ziti and drank pumpkin beers and carved pumpkins and watched Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. But I’m happy to do that on a Tuesday night. Fall and Halloween, that’s always been my favorite time of year. As a child, I had a skeleton costume one year for Halloween, and I just wore the top half of the shirt for the next three years of my life. There are pictures of me where my parents are like, “You’re a year older, the shirt doesn’t fit you anymore but you insisted on wearing it.” I was a creepy kid, Halloween was my favorite holiday and I’ve always loved all of that stuff. There’s no mistake that the movie opens with a Marilyn Manson quote. I liked all of that stuff a lot at one point in my life. A lot of things I’ve come back around to liking, like that first Marilyn Manson album in the past two years I have really rediscovered as a great record. That stuff feels like home to me.
[Watch Little Sister on Amazon Video]