You imagine that Amy (Kailee McGee) and Lola (Ellyn Jameson) couldn’t be closer in “Best Friends with the Devil,” otherwise it seems like the latter would ever find herself at the base of a hill in a place she doesn’t know, meeting someone she doesn’t either when she first shakes hands with David (Hugo de Sousa). As it turns out, Amy has been gone for days, enough time for Lola to grow concerned when her phone calls have been unreturned and print up “Missing” ads, one of which caught the eye of David, who thinks he last saw her out hiking and asks Lola if she wants to retrace their steps.
It’s a leap of faith on Lola’s part to join David on the trail, knowing nothing about the man who says he bonded with Amy over the fact that both were recovering from a divorce, but it increasingly appears as if she may know just as much about Amy as she wanders in the wilderness, spooked by a stray sandal that turns out not to belong to her friend but equally unsettled when she receives a phone call from none other than Amy that makes her wonder not only about the guide she has directly in front of her but how she could’ve been so wrong about her friend as well, confiding in David that there was once a time not so long ago “she wouldn’t even go to a yoga class without me.” In the darkly amusing short, it seems the stretching still occurs in Lola’s mind, putting herself in a precarious spot psychologically as well as physically when she doesn’t know where David is taking her and she really doesn’t know what’s going on in her life in general.
De Sousa, who previously mined the potential for an existential crisis in some mundane experience in “The Event” (co-directed with Frank Mosley) in which a friend kept delaying watching his buddy’s movie for no good reason, sets up another deviously clever anxiety trip, bringing along a group of very talented collaborators along for the ride including cinematographer Sarah Whelden and makeup and production designer Kelly Wilcox, who have teamed before on such recent films as Jessica Barr’s “The Plan” and Katie Aselton’s “Their Town.” We were fortunate to catch up with the trio at SXSW where “Best Friends with the Devil” made its world premiere and with the film making its west coast bow this week at Palm Springs Shortsfest, we finally are able to share that conversation about the unconventionally terrifying short, De Sousa writing a role for himself that he may have regretted giving his character’s fate and finding the right location for criminal behavior in Griffith Park.
How did this crazy thing come about?
Hugo de Sousa: I wanted to make something that was aesthetically the opposite of “The Event,” [which] was shot in my house with two people, a two-hander in the middle of the night, and they’re whispering to each other, so [I thought of] two people on a hike, just to go outside and shoot outside my apartment and then the first idea was someone is missing and then the second idea was that one of them gets a phone call that changes their dynamic. I really fell in love with those two ideas and after that everything came together very quickly. I reached out to Sarah and Ellyn, the actor in the short, and hey both said yes and after that, I just really wanted to make it.
Sarah, what made you say yes to this?
Sarah Whelden: Honestly, it just came down to being such a fan of Hugo’s after seeing “The Event.” I remember specifically seeking him out at a film festival to say “hi” because I was just a fan and hoped we could maybe make something together someday. And then he sent this script that was clever in much the way “The Event” was, but also just so visually rich. I saw so much opportunity in the script to explore as a cinematographer [since] there’s so much unsaid that we can tell visually. We just had a great first meeting together and it felt like we were immediately on the same page, like we’d already had ten conversations about the film.
How’d Ellyn Jameson come into the mix?
Hugo de Sousa: She’s amazing. I was such a fan from seeing her work and we had some mutual friends. She also saw “The Event” at a festival, so when I reached out, she immediately said yes ad that was a really lucky break. And she was unbelievable to work with. She really didn’t give us like a bad take and everything was just incredible.
Hugo, did you have a location in mind from the start of this?
Hugo de Sousa: I did because this was shot at Griffith Park, and I just knew about this little back entrance to the park where every time I hike there, I never see anyone. So I went there with Sarah and we loved the how it looked. It looked very lush and green and I had a trail in mind immediately as soon as I wrote it, which helps get things going. If you write something, but you don’t have the locations, you’re like, “How can I get this going? But I knew exactly where we could shoot it.
Sarah Whelden: It was really collaborative with Hugo and I. We spent a ton of time along that trail together and then once Kelly came onto the project, she would be there, which was really helpful to just have another stand-in. And the script was in constant movement itself as we were blocking out how and where we wanted to film it. We blocked out the scenes in three or four different locations, but we knew we’d have such a tight schedule that we knew we needed to come in with a really strong game plan in order to get everything done. Because we’re shooting it from daytime through dusk, we also were really conscious of having to return to these same spots, [so we’d ask ourselves] how much time are we just walking, bringing the crew [along]? So that went into the design of how we were going to approach it. We knew we needed a really small team, and to be set up in a way that we could just grab the equipment we needed and go.
Hugo and I would talk about where the story needed to go within a certain context and then I might try something and then I’d show it to Hugo and we’d make some adjustments and try something else. And then we’d go away for a few days and we’d come back and Hugo would say, “Okay, I’ve been thinking about it and I really like what we did here, but I want to adjust this. I don’t know how many times we revisited that trail, but every time it felt like we were unlocking the story and by the time we got there [to make the film], it really was just letting Ellyn do her work within the framework we designed. Despite a lot of challenges, it went pretty smoothly considering how much we had to cover.
Hugo de Sousa: It was arduous to shoot there because we had to move our stuff around and I got dragged a lot [as part of the story] so that was something Sarah and I had so many conversations before beforehand. Once we got there, we were just executing a plan and watched Ellyn elevate everything that we planned.
Kelly, because you did the makeup, that’s such an incremental process on this, what was that like to work on?
Kelly Wilcox: It was pretty wild because we were on trails and just had to be down in the dirt, putting on makeup, but it was really fun. Ellyn and Hugo were down to get dirty and bloody. It was a lot of fun.
Hugo, was this a situation where you came to regret writing yourself such a gruesome part?
Hugo de Sousa: Oh yeah, definitely I regret it. I think it was the last time that I act in one of my films. It’s a blessing sometimes because you don’t have time to go and watch the monitor and you have to really trust your team, which is really important. But maybe next time I’m not going to choose to get dragged and get hit in the head.
Was it difficult to do a phone call like that as far as getting the energy right on set to accentuate later?
Hugo de Sousa: It was really hard. I was in front of Ellyn, leading her in the film as my character was leading her character down this trail and as soon as we panned to her, I had to kneel down and walk around the camera while delivering Amy’s dialogue [on the other end of the phone call] to her. And then I would show up in the scene at the end, so it was hard to do because it was a long take, but it was so worth it because that long take is the best part of the movie. But it was a really tight space, so it was hard to manage so many people in that little space.
Sarah Whelden: It’s interesting because there’s two phone calls in the film and the spinning [for the second scene] was pretty easy. We only did it twice and then we were like, “Great, that’s done.” But the first phone call, which is also a long take, I don’t know how many takes we ended up doing, but we did it all the way up to lunch and we came back [after] and we kept doing it. Then there was actually a camera malfunction on the first take [where we thought], “Okay, I think we got it.” Honestly, it was a blessing in disguise because we ended up doing two or three more, [including] the one we ended up using that was by far the best. The choreography of it was really difficult and it took us a while to figure out with Ellyn and Hugo’s movement and the light kept not cooperating. We just had so little space and so few people that we needed everything to go just right. It was like this magic moment. We put a lot of time into it and it took away from time that Kelly had for makeup resets and the blood and all that, but the time we put into that was so worthwhile because that first phone call really is the film and it needed to be done exactly the way It is for the film work.
Hugo de Sousa: [Our sound designer] Alex Bologna is also amazing. He came in and made all those shots come come to life. He knew exactly what we needed and some of those bird sounds [now] really make me laugh.
Kelly Wilcox: They heighten the tension.
The film works so well. What’s it been like to start seeing audiences react to it at SXSW?
Hugo de Sousa: I feel very lucky and I feel proud because our budget was really modest compared to most shorts here [at SXSW], so I hope that inspires other filmmakers. If they write something simple, they can also get into South by Southwest. It feels incredible. I just can’t believe it and I just feel really lucky that we got in.
“Best Friends with the Devil” will next screen at the Palm Springs Shorts Fest as part of the Shorts Program “High Anxiety” on June 27th at 2 pm.