Bleeding follows Eric, a 17-year-old grieving the death of his brother. When his cousin, Sean, the hot-shot son of an alcoholic cop, gets pulled into the lucrative, deadly world of using and selling Blood, Eric will do whatever it takes to save him from the same fate that swallowed his brother whole.
With a debt to a vicious dealer and no way to pay it back, Eric and Sean break into an empty house and find a sleeping girl locked inside. What seems like an answer to their prayers brings new danger, a link to their past, and revelations that will test the bonds of blood and friendship.
Written and directed by Andrew Bell, Bleeding is a dark, allegorical drama, and as the film streams on VOD in the United States, Peter Gray spoke with the filmmaker (and cast member) about the origins of his story, what were the non-negotiables when it came to establishing the world build, and the leap of faith he took along with his crew in executing his vision.
There’s an immediate thought we have with any story that centres itself around vampires, and you’ve very much taken that and subverted expectations. How the concept first come to you? And what social or political parallels were you intentionally or unintentionally drawing?
It originally started off as a short film that I was going to do for grad school, which was more about these two 14-year-old kids going out and smoking a joint for the first time in the woods, and they stumble upon this girl in a cabin. That was in 2020, and we had the vans packed, ready to go, and then COVID hit. We had the film cancelled. We kind of waited and waited for the world to go back to normal, and it took longer than we thought, so the thesis got cancelled, and I ended up fleeing New York and going to the Seattle area, where I grew up. I think like so many of us I went to my childhood home, and so many things that I went through in the early 2000s came flooding back. I kind of realised the idea that I was working on I could weave some of those dynamics into a feature.
I started thinking more about the opioid epidemic, and I was watching that kind of slowly unfold back then. Words for allegorical storytelling seemed like the backdrop for it, and it seemed like a really good opportunity to play with that line of who is and who isn’t a monster. I think our addicts are changing more and more, but addicts and addictions get really demonized, when a lot of the time the worst ones are those that are taking advantage of desperate people. Not the desperate people themselves.
There’s a very specific world that you’ve built here. There’s lore here. When you were establishing this world, were there any non-negotiables for you in terms of this lore or logic?
Non-negotiables? I’m not sure I’ve ever been asked that question before. That’s a good one. We wanted to feel really as raw and real as we could make it, you know? The monster makeup and the different vampire iterations we went through, we quickly threw them out, as we we didn’t want to a Joss Whedon-vampire face kind of thing. Eventually we even decided not to do that. We decided to really lean on physical performance and nurture that. I guess a big thing was how we approach the monsters themselves? The way we used light in the film was something we wanted to be really consistent, and have it mean something in the way we used it. Those are the big things that come to mind.
You have this horror story, but it’s also very much a coming of age movie as well. In terms of balance, did you find that one was overtaking the other as you were crafting it?
Yeah, it was a balance we were constantly thinking about. That was always the kind of the film we wanted to make. We always described it as a “coming of age, horror/thriller.” That was always the blurb whenever we spoke about it. It was always purposeful. There was going to be both things through different iterations of the script. After we shot it, we started to think how do we bring horror in? Are we focusing more on character development? Our film starts with a little bit of white text over black, and that was never in the script. That was something we found during our second full editing pass of the film. People were getting hung up on questions about the world and not being able to connect to the characters as much as we wanted them to. We figured out if we just gave a little bit of information that feels organic at the beginning, it’s a way to then shut the brain and go along for the ride.
We thought a lot about the rules of the world, and how to communicate that without being too expositional. Just trying to hook with a scare at the beginning. To let people know that this is a horror film. (But) there’s going to be some character development. You’re going to hang around a little bit for that, and then it’s going to hopefully punch you in the face. I just wanted to then give a lot of attention to our kind of set pieces.
Talking about the lighting before, one of the great things was the outside world and the dichotomy of the inside of the house. When you’re coming up with this approach of this drug-fueled world and the eerie stillness inside the house, are there any specific cinematic or cinematographic choices that helped reinforce that for you?
I think I was just embracing shadow a lot. Not being afraid of black in the frame. Then when we were outside, we were shooting in upstate New York in the summertime. It’s a little bit more full. We decided to really embrace the light out there and let it have its own power.
As you said that this was a short feature originally, and here you get to really expand on that. Are you having conversations around bodily autonomy and exploitation and class? Things like that? How much context is planned versus how much reveals itself as you start to write this story?
I think that’s something you discover in the writing process. It was always in my mind a little bit to tell a story, very indirectly, about me and my friends growing up. Getting into trouble, being dumb kids, doing stupid things and finding ourselves in situations that we shouldn’t be in at 17. That was always driving the script from page one. Peripherally, those were all the things that were happening, whether we realised them or not growing up, and I think they all kind of came into the script as we went. Some of those elements came out stronger and strong as we brought on collaborators. We didn’t really have any money, so a lot of the people that we’re pulling into the film, from our producers to production designers to our DPs, they’re all connecting with it because of some kind of theme behind it. They’ve dealt with these things in their own way, with their families, with their friends. So I think these department heads came on and started bringing their own point of view.
And working with so many different collaborators, was there a big creative risk that you took where you had to have that conversation of, “Look, we’re all going to take this leap together.”
I honestly think just doing (the film), you know what I mean? It was a first film for so many of us. We had all made shorts. A lot of the people in the camera have been working in advertising and things like that, but making a feature? That was a first for almost all of us. We didn’t really know what we were getting into. We were just jumping in feet first. We shot this in, like, two weeks! You’re used to a sprint on a short film. You shoot some weekends and you think, “Oh, for sure, that’s a marathon.” But, no, this was like sprinting a marathon (laughs). It was really hard.
We bonded a lot. I especially connected with our two lead actors, Jasper (Jones) and John (R. Howley), who play Sean and Eric. They came up with me the weekend before we started shooting to the cabin in upstate New York, and the plan was just to rehearse. By the time we got there we had already talked about the script so much, in conversation and on Zoom, so we got there and we just hung out. Went swimming, explored the woods, went into the little town and shopped at thrift stores. Just bonding. They became really good friends, and I think that was important for that kind of leap of faith. That feeling that we’re in this together. It’ll be hard and crazy, but we’re going to walk away with something amazing that only we can do together.
When looking at the sequences you’ve imagined as to how they’re going to look or play out, was there anything from the beginning that stayed the way you expected? And was there anything that completely changed during filming that we see on screen?
Everything changed and everything stayed the same (laughs). It’s in your head, and you spend hours and hours and days and days going through Airbnb listings for your low budget movie, trying to find locations, and figure out what’s going to work. A big thing that changed for us was that we brought on our producer, Kenny (Kenneth F. Green), late in the process, because Nick (producer Nicholas Santos) had a baby, and he wasn’t able to be there in person. He was our producer. We needed a ringer here, because I’m acting in the (film) too. I’m doing a lot. I needed some help. I’ve never done this before. So we bring up my buddy Kenny, who had been in the writing program at Columbia with me, and he became a godsend. We had a location fall through, actually we had two fall through during our shoot, and he was like, “Oh, my parents just moved into this house in upstate New York. There’s boxed everywhere. I haven’t moved in their stuff. Maybe we can use that space?” So we were able to take his place. We ended up doubling, almost tripling the space. Our amazing production designer just got so much out of it. You kind of shoot from the hip and figure things out as you go. I think it worked out pretty well. Happy accidents happen out of necessity.
Bleeding is now available on VOD services in the United States.
