This past Friday Peck School of the Arts partnered with the Milwaukee Film Festival to host It Follows (2014) producer Rebecca Green for a screening of the film and a Q&A with Milwaukee Film’s School Programs Coordinator and UWM alum Ian Cessna.
The event was planned by The Center for Student Experience and Talent to give students a fun screening and an informative look into what it’s like to be a producer.
It Follows is a horror movie based and filmed in Detroit that follows teenager Jay after she contracts a supernatural sexually transmitted curse from her new boyfriend. The supernatural entity takes the ever-changing form of an average person and follows the victim at a constant walking pace. The entity is kept unknown yet relenting, never stopping until the victim is either killed or the curse is passed on to another unsuspecting sexual partner.
The film was made with a $1 Million budget, which to the student filmmakers in attendance feels like a massive budget but is relatively small for a film of this scale. The movie takes creative risks with the camera and a premise not typically seen in the genre.
“I knew it was different,” said Green. “It’s just a different take, usually (in horror) it’s like don’t have sex and in this movie, it’s have sex.”
Green referred to “the rules” in horror movies in that difference. Made popular by the 1996 movie Scream with the famous quote “You can never have sex, you can never drink or do drugs, and never, ever, under any circumstances say ‘i’ll be right back’.”
Green graduated from film school in 2001, fresh off an internship with Killer Films where she worked on the Academy Award-winning film Boys Don’t Cry (1999). She then moved to LA where she took temp jobs to break into the industry, Green ended up working with Lionsgate, a powerhouse of horror in the early 2000s. After years of working in the industry in post-production and producing as well as some work with the Sundance Festival, she got the opportunity to work on It Follows in her home state of Michigan.
Through this Q&A film, students could learn about a possible career path outside of film school. When asked what she wished she had learned in film school Green said “personal financial planning”. Students also heard about film acquisitions and being a part of the production in the role of a producer.
Green described a scene in the film that she had a lot of influence over, after reading the script and feeling that the curse was too vague for the viewers a scene was added where the man who passed this entity on to Jay describes “the rules” of this particular horror.
“I told David we have to stop here right now and explain things because nothing’s really making sense. You’re going to lose the audience”
The Center for Student Experience and Talent puts on events like these for different career pathways to build community and offer experiential learning opportunities for students.
The upcoming sequel, They Follow is set to shoot this year.