Devolved is an upcoming indie satire/homage to classic nerds vs jocks high school films, done in a fashion that – when everything is working – is reminiscent of the high-concept parodying style of South Park (my review). The story concerns a high school class trip gone wrong, that finds a group of students stuck on a deserted island where they soon descend into socially divided madness. (the film opens in select markets March 4)

The film marks the feature debut of John Cregan, one of the men behind the scenes at Severin Films, the distribution company that gifted the world with James Nguyen’s batshit so-bad-its-life-changing crapsterpiece, Birdemic: Shock and Terror. Generally speaking, I wouldn’t expect an interview with a filmmaker you’ve never heard of, regarding a film you’ve never heard of, to be of much interest. But I think catching a filmmaker right as they’re emerging into the world is a really intriguing moment; a bit like talking with someone who has just graduated from high school or college. You’re catching them at a crossroads. With this frame of mind, I talked with Cregan about the trials and tribulations of birthing his first feature film, and walked away with a fairly enlightening, candid, and funny look behind the curtain.

CHUD: What was the genesis of Devolved? Where did the idea come from?

JOHN CREGAN: I was a couple of years out of film school, and realizing that any script I wrote with a chance in hell of making myself was going to have to be downsized in terms of production needs. Lost was very popular at the time, and I thought the idea of using the stranded-on-an-island trope would be a good small scale concept for a high school satire.

Thematically speaking, I’d always been struck by a drunken conversation I had the night of my senior prom with a guy on our football team that I’d always gotten along well with. He was filled with this fear and trepidation about confronting post-high school life, having sort of spent the last four years living life to the max without a lot of regard for the future. So the idea was to set up two groups that were diametrically opposed in worldview — one group wanting high school to go on forever, and another group that was trying to get away from the first group as fast as possible — and then trap them on a deserted island that sort of served as a stand-in for a high school.
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CHUD: Was the Lord of the Flies parody as intentional as it seemed, or did that simply happen organically because of the nature of your concept?

CREGAN: It was intentional in that I knew that I wanted the situation to degenerate by the third act into a parody of Lord of the Flies. I tried to plant some early clues that it was where this was headed. For instance, the identical-looking goth band couple (Jan & Erica) is a tribute to Samneric.
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But when you have a group of people on an island, they are naturally going to do many of the things that the characters do in early on in Lord of the Flies; have elections, build a signal fire, etc. Many of the same things happen in the first season of Lost. So a lot of it is organic, I guess. In the end, I wouldn’t say the first hour in Devolved is meant to specifically parody Golding’s novel. Just really the last 20 minutes.

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CHUD: I was going to point out that Chris Kattan’s character (the lone adult) was a riff on the injured and delirious pilot from Flies, but I just remembered that that character is only in the 90’s film version, not the novel. You win this round, Cregan!
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Do you think this is a story you would have been interested in telling, were you not forward thinking about budgetary constraints and logistical feasibility?
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CREGAN: But you know what? Yeah, the Kattan thing was a TOTAL parody of the 90s version’s addition to the plot. You’re dead on there.
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CHUD: Yes! I won the interview!
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CREGAN: The idea of the Kattan character was to write an adult character into the story that could provide the popular kids with an oracle-like prediction of their future. I actually wrote it with one of my childhood heroes, John Riggins (of Washington Redskins fame) in mind.
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And, from a strategic point of view, the idea was to have a smaller part that was geared for an older actor with something of a name that could be shot out relatively quickly. Which was a trick I picked up from making so many featurettes starring Jess Franco, the international dean emeritus of groovy low-budget filmmaking. He did it with Klaus Kinski a couple of times. In a lot of ways, editing the pieces (mostly for Blue Underground) that I did in my mid-20s – hundreds of interviews with older cult and genre filmmakers – was as good a method of preparation for directing a low budget movie as my three years at USC was. I was subjected to hundreds of hours of discussions with a lot of great and somewhat unsung filmmakers. And they were mostly talking about how to make something work without any money.
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This sort of bridges into the next question. At that stage in my career, I would have been pumped to make Devolved regardless of the budget, because I felt like I had sort of figured out a few things about my writing in the rewrite process (both bad and good) and wanted to see how it would work on the screen.
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It was sort of the first time I wrote something that “worked” all the way through. This was about 8 scripts into my semi-career. I mean, it’s still a very imperfect movie with a lot of rough edges, many of them directly related to me screwing certain things up along the way, but it does sort of hang together in the end. So I was excited to make it because I felt like I had made this little jump in my development, and hoped by making it I would make more little jumps along the way.
And I think that jump occurred precislely because I was forced to write something in a limited space. Having a small group of characters, in a situation where I wasn’t allowed to bring anyone else in, forced me to make due with the elements I had. By stripping everything down, it demanded that I hone the action in a way I hadn’t done before. Sort of like when Rick Rubin takes some aging rock vet who’s misplaced his Id and says “okay, Mr. Diamond, for the duration of this entire record I will only permit you to use an acoustic guitar with three strings missing, a zither, and a single maraca.” You have to focus on the bare DNA of the writing.
I actually stripped things down even more doing shooting and editing, in order to put more focus on the comedy side of things.
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CHUD: This being your first film, what surprised you most about the actual production process? Were there things you foolishly expected to be easier that bit you in the ass? Or things that you braced yourself for that in fact turned out to be a breeze?
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CREGAN: In the ass-biting department, the biggest challenge was shooting on the beach. They seem so gentle and unassuming when you’re scouting them, but when you arrive with your little army to shoot, you find out it’s one of the more inhospitable places to shoot a movie known to man.
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The sand bogs everything down. I guess films with more of what some film historians would call a “budget” rent these little mini-tanks to move around the sand, but that was most definitely a luxury we couldn’t afford (though I saw some pictures, they seem pretty hot.) And then there’s the high wind and omnipresent sunlight. Being someone who hates anything beach-related (save for the album The Beach Boys Love You), I was unaware you needed to put sunscreen on your lips. The resulting swelling meant I spent a large part of production with a Mick-Jaggerish pout, which I have to say sort of worked for me.
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And being low-budget, we couldn’t really “lock down” the beach, so we had a lot of intruders. Windsurfers. Dogs. Shrimpers. Local drifters. Oh, and a camera helicopter shooting the Transformers sequel on a nearby beach – which we ended up using in the movie as part of the final scene without their knowing it. Thanks, Michael Bay!
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Also, editing the actual movie, right after shooting it, was a bad thing. The first cut of the movie just wasn’t very good because I didn’t have a chance to approach the footage in the way an editor needs to – with a fresh eye, unprejudiced by the travails of making the movie. I really should have gotten the other editor to do the first cut. If I had it to do over, I would have passed off the footage and spent 8-10 weeks in an isolation tank watching the first hour of Nixon on an endless, Clockwork Orange-esque loop to clear my mind. I hear that really works. In terms of bracing for things, shooting with the RED was definitely something people had tried to scare the crap out of me about before production. To hear some camera people talk, you’d think the RED camera was at the center of a vast Illuminati-backed conspiracy to destroy the medium from the inside out. But we never really had any problems.
Because we used two cameras at all times, the one time a camera went down, we just shot with a single camera for an hour while they got the other one back up and running. And being able to cut scenes together while in principal helped me figure out what we needed to pick up right then and there – since we couldn’t afford to come back for actual pickups.
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CHUD: You mention you had originally written the Kattan role with John Riggins in mind. Did you attempt to get him? Were any of the roles written for particular actors you knew, or was this straight up casting-call from top to bottom?
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CREGAN: No, we didn’t attempt to live out my deepest non-marital fantasies by contacting the hero of my halcyon youth. The whole film was cast cold – with nothing written for any particular person in particular. 

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Regarding the four main actors (Lindsey, Gary, Robert, Chris) you don’t really get to audition people in low-budget situations. At least our low budget situation. You’re sort of lucky they agree to work with you.
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I did tailor a couple of the supporting teen roles after we cast the actors. For instance, we tried really hard to get a couple more people of color into the cast, but we just came up empty on that front. The part of Ivan (the exchange student) was originally written for a Vietnamese person. But we only had two Vietnamese people show up for the audition, and sadly they were, shall we say, very early on their paths to becoming full-fledged Thespians. So when Roman Marshanski (who’d been in a great piece on Tim & Eric) showed up, I rewrote it for a Russian exchange student.
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CHUD: Let’s talk hypothetical, and optimistic here… twenty years from now, after building a successful oeuvre as a filmmaker, where do you think Devolved will fit in? Almost no filmmakers burst out of the gate fully formed, John Huston-style, but do you think Devolved is reflective of where you will end up, or more to the point – where you want to go? A mission statement of sorts, like Evil Dead was to Sam Raimi or Blood Simple to the Coens or Bottle Rocket to Wes Anderson? Or do you think it is a foot in the door, mostly establishing that you know what you’re doing? Like Caged Heat to Jonathan Demme, if you will.
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CREGAN: Oh, definitely fully-formed. This is as good as I get, people. Drink it in.  

No, I would put it more in the Caged Heat column. Actually, I think it’s presumptuous to even put it in that column, since Caged Heat is fucking incredible. Maybe this is more my Dementia 13.
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I do think of Devolved as sort of my AIP film, a rough little movie made with meager resources, but has something cool going for it that will have an audience. This may sound sort of overly sunny, but Devolved in its own weird way has a lot of heart. It was a lot of people doing their jobs for the first time — myself included — and doing the best they could at an early stage in their careers. The good thing about working with a youthful cast and crew is that you get a lot of enthusiasm. You swap experience for gusto. And that can be a good tradeoff on a low-budget film.
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Devolved is sort of an example of one of the two or so kinds of movies I feel like I could make well. The thing with me on movies like Devolved is that I have to fight what I call my “Pat Proft Gene.” Which is unfair to Pat Proft, because he’s worked on some great things and I hear is a very nice person. But by that I mean that you have to make sure the comedy stays grounded and doesn’t get too goofy. There’s a fine line between “funnily absurd and “amusingly silly.”
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When you’re doing teen satire, I think you need to make sure it’s actually funny, as opposed to wry or quirky. Otherwise you’re probably only preaching to the converted so to speak. If you’re making a movie with a satirical point, you should try to make sure its aimed at the people for whom the point is intended. That was my goal on Devolved. So I have a lot of sophomoric jokes mixed in there by design. But I think I can do comedies at other speeds.
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I lately have been gravitating towards a more conversational, character-based kind of comedy in my writing. I really hope I get to make something along those lines. But if it’s another Devolved, I’d be happy to do that too, because I think I’d make a lot of improvements. You have to have perspective if you’re going to be in a career that involves putting things “out there” for public consumption. Even John Huston spent years in the studio system as a screenwriter (actually two separate stints), working with a lot of amazing people and getting really, really drunk before getting his first chance as a director. Not that I’m remotely putting myself in that class, but having a sense of film history is important when going through the early stages.
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Since it’s just you and me talking, the truth is I that I’d like to go on to two kinds of movies; Judgian/McCarey-like/Altmanesque-satires and stuff that would probably fall more along the lines of Wilderrific/Sturgesteeped humanistic comedy category. But those are just goals, and reality seldom meets those kinds of standards.
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I think the most important thing I’ve figured out lately is that you have to stay within yourself and do the things you do well, rather than reaching outside of your comfort zone and trying to subconsciously remake some famous movie someone else has already done. That’s when you begin to develop your own style.
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I just hope I get a chance to apply what I’ve learned on something in the future. For instance, I have some really innovative ideas regarding Craft Services.
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Cregan will be touring with Devolved for a series of Q&A premiere dates, including stops in Los Angeles (March 4, Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 7:30PM), Syracuse (March 7, Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, 7PM), New York City/Brooklyn (March 9, reRun Theater, 10:00PM; no filmmaker appearance / Q&A), Washington D.C. (March 9, E Street Cinema, 8:00PM) and Boston(March 10, Coolidge Corner Theater, 7:30PM).