Come to think of it, it’s rather strange that few late night television talk shows have dabbled in areas of the occult outside of public access, given how they’ll air around the witching hour, but the format naturally lends itself to inquiry as Cameron and Colin Cairnes cleverly deploy in “Late Night with the Devil,” inspired in part by the curiosity of their own local TV host Don Lane in their native Australia. Inviting on mentalists such as Uri Geller and magicians like the Amazing Randi, Lane once cursed out the latter when he dared to question other guests after he became a skeptic, leading to an exchange that is given a nod in the introduction to “Night Owls” emcee Jack Delroy (David Dasmalchian), who would be poised to be the king of late night if something weren’t slightly off about him.
Nicknamed “Mr. Midnight,” there is clearly a little darkness around one of the brightest lights of UBC TV as he enters one of the biggest shows of his life in the novel horror film, honing in on a make-or-break moment for Delroy when he needs a ratings boost, but also on an evening where things can get truly spooky on Halloween with half of the attendees in his live studio audience are in costume. He’s got a lineup set to scare with the clairvoyant Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), a Randi-esque magician Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss), and “Conversations with the Devil” author and therapist Dr. June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon) and her prized patient Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), but the Cairnes suggest he’s the one who’s already haunted after taking a year off to grieve his late wife (Georgina Haig), who had the misfortune of contracting lung cancer without ever having taken a puff of a cigarette, and spent time in drowning his sorrows at a mysterious club for men known as the Grove.
No detail is spared in recreating the live broadcast from 1977, but the Cairnes conjure an entire freewheeling era with their gasp-inducing third feature where Delroy’s invitation for the supernatural to overtake his show starts to look like there’s something more sinister at play than a desire to entertain or goose viewership. One actually looks forward to the commercial breaks in the found footage film when it offers a chance to breathe and driven by a wildly charismatic and conflicted turn from Dasmalchian, always such a welcome – and menacing – presence in such films as “The Dark Knight” and “The Suicide Squad,” “Late Night with the Devil” is the last thing you’d want to watch before bedtime if you’re planning to get a good night’s sleep, but it makes for a frightening thriller. A year removed from its premiere at SXSW en route to a celebrated run on the festival circuit, the Cairnes spoke on the eve of the film’s release in theaters across the country about how finding the right time and place for a horror film gave shape to this unconventional chiller, embracing the production style of such a TV show to make a more authentic big-screen experience and having a genre legend lend his voice to help commence the craziness.
What initially led to this inspired bit of madness?
Colin Cairnes: That is a good question.
Cameron Cairnes: We were very haunted as young men.
Colin Cairnes: Two of our great loves are horror movies and jazz music, and we thought to ourselves, “how can we combine the two in a thrilling, entertaining film? And this is the answer. You set the film in a TV studio on a talk show In the ‘70s.” But seriously, with all our stuff, it’s always hard to go back and follow the crumbs to what the source was. We’ve both worked in TV a little — I’ve done some live TV and Cam’s done some behind the scenes as well, so we always knew that that was an interesting world and a tense, exciting, and anxious environment to be a part of, especially back in the day in the ‘70s and ‘80s when things often went wrong, but that was part of the thrill of it. We remember growing up watching a lot of shows where that happened, so we’d always felt that that was just an interesting location.
Cameron Cairnes: We always knew also we weren’t going to have a lot of money. When you’re thinking about making a horror film on a low budget, you’re always thinking and keeping it contained, so keeping it to one location came up perhaps before the idea and it was like, what about a TV studio? What are the parameters of that? And how do we make it scary in that space? The conversation rolled out from there, and it took a very long time to develop and get it right.
Colin Cairnes: For a long time, it was a cool idea in search of a script.
It all came together and as important as a physical setting, this particular time is so rich, not only when it was the heyday of live TV and demonic possession stories, but when as noted in the film there were all these social movements going on. Did it set your mind racing in different directions once you had a date?
Colin Cairnes: It did, because there were so many great characters of that era, all those great raconteurs like Orson Welles, who’d come on and do magic on Johnny Carson, or The Amazing Randi. There were those great celebrities of the time and all that wonderful history to draw on. And I was being a bit facetious before, but we are huge fans of the music of that period, so to be able to bring in the musical styles of the period and to have the show band playing live on set, it all just felt really like just a lot of fun. Also, the film also pays homage to the horror films of that era that we grew up watching on VHS and love dearly to this day, so again, we just knew there was so much to draw on, be it the Cronenberg films or Carpenter, and even some of the films that dealt with showbiz, like “King of Comedy” or “Network.”
Cameron Cairnes: But it’s funny, when you mentioned the date, we did just choose a date and then [decided to] make the film around that. We toyed with different years — I think the first script might have been set ’70 or ’71, early ’70s, which is quite a bit different from the later ’70s. How’d we land on ’77?
Colin Cairnes: I can tell you how we landed on ’77.
Cameron Cairnes: Because of Halloween night?
Colin Cairnes: The film had to happen on a Monday night for Sweeps Week, so the stakes are high and this is the beginning of the week that’s gonna make or break Jack Delroy’s career, right? And it just so happened that 1977 was the only year in the ’70s where Halloween fell on a Monday night, so we thought “’77, that’s pretty much, you’re right in the thick of it.” So that worked for us.
The level of detail is astounding, and that extends to so much of the art that’s in the film. The Mad Magazine parody and all the magazine covers for that opening sequence setting up Jack’s celebrity, where you must’ve had to do photo shoots. What was that like to put together?
Colin Cairnes: A lot of work. That’s probably the only sequence in the film that evolved quite a lot through post-production. Everything else is pretty much what was on the page. And there were no deleted scenes. Most of the dialogue was there. But that scene we rewrote a lot in post-production to get it just right. And a lot went into that with the graphics department and the art department. The “Mad” [Magazine sketch] was done by Lucas Ketner, who does David Dasmalchian’s Count Crowley comics, so David got us in touch with him, and he was fantastic. Even though those [images] are only up there for three or four seconds, to us it was just so important to get those details right for the authenticity and specificity of the story.
Even though you’re watching the set being built, what was it like to step out onto that talk show stage for the first time with the band and live studio audience there?
Cameron Cairnes: You really do genuinely feel like you’re entering that world in that period and it was like that for 20 days of the shoot because the set stayed up for the entirety of photography. Short of us wearing flares and big collared shirts, we really felt like we were in that world and so did the actors and everyone else working on it. When we were breaking between set-ups, we would put ‘70s era music on and had the band there as well. We’re frustrated musicians, so having a set of drums and a guitar that we could noodle on in between takes was [great].
Colin Cairnes: Yeah, we’d get up and play occasionally and it was just proof of why we made the right choice becoming filmmakers and not musicians. [laughs] But for David and the other actors to be able to walk out at the end of a segment, going to the commercial break, and have the actual band they’re playing the music, it was a buzz for the cast and also the crew just to get into the the ’70s vibe in a big way.
Could you actually shoot this in sequence with one location?
Colin Cairnes: We toyed with the idea of doing it completely in sequence, but there’s always reasons why you [can’t], be it availabilities or some gag that needs time dedicated to it perhaps later in the shoot, so we did far as possible and it was great when we could. Having said that, I think Jack’s opening monologue might have actually been shot right at the end because there was only one day where we had the full audience of about 100-plus people and COVID was still a bit of a concern when we shot, so we had to bring the audience in right towards the end of the shoot. Other than that, it was pretty much in sequence.
Cameron Cairnes: Yeah, and in all those scenes where it’s basically our characters sitting around being interviewed, those were all shot in sequence, so it was almost like theater for the actors and they could just get up through the scene uninterrupted. We never had to call “cut.” And sometimes we wouldn’t call “cut” and they’d just keep talking. David would keep extemporizing and be very funny, so we were very free in that regard to just keep things running. We had three cameras shooting the whole time, as you would in a large studio format. The actors loved it, we loved it too, so we were not having to break things up and get reverse angles and all that stuff.
Colin Cairnes: And if a camera move didn’t quite work, or the boom came into shot, that was gold. Which said to the camera crew and sound department, it’s okay for things to be a bit rough because this is live TV. The crew on the night [in the film] doesn’t know what’s coming up and that helps bring some spontaneity or electricity to it. In the end, there were times when [someone would alert us] “boom in the shot.” And it was like, “What are you talking about? We want the boom in shot.” So in that respect, we all had to unlearn some of our craft, but develop a new craft at the same time, try to just channel the way things were back in the day.
Was it fun to play with that kind of camera language?
Colin Cairnes: You’ve got to show restraint because as directors, we love the cool shots, [like] the long tracking shot and although at the end of the film, we take a few liberties with the style 90% of it, we are just three cameras shooting [and it’s either] a group shot, an over-the-shoulder shot, which is kind of boring, but it wasn’t because the more you stuck to those rules and the more it felt like a TV show, the more authentic it felt. And the better it was for the actors, because we’d roll for 10-12 minutes, whatever the segment took, and the longer it went, the more they got into it. You could cut and they just couldn’t wait to get back into it, to be there on that night in ’77.
Though surely many will recognize the voice upon hearing it, it was a really delightful surprise to learn that it was Michael Ironside narrating that opening sequence from the end credits. What was it like to get him onboard?
Colin Cairnes: We felt quite honored. He’s obviously an icon, especially in the genre cinema from that period and beyond, so when his name come up, we thought, “Ah, we’ll never get him, that’s pie in the sky.” But our producers made some calls and the next thing you know, it’s three o’clock in the morning in Melbourne, because of the time difference and we’re talking to the great Michael Ironside.
Cameron Cairnes: Yeah, he was a lot of fun.
Colin Cairnes: He was good fun, and we wanted whoever it was that did that narration to sound like they were there. They remember it. They’re speaking in the present of this really bizarre moment in history. So we wanted a sense of someone who might’ve even known Jack, but still had to have that gravitas and a little bit of objectivity. You need a great actor for that, not just a good voice. And Michael Ironside is both of those things.
“Late Night with the Devil” opens in theaters on March 22nd.
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