Crazy wonderful film – what was the original brief and how did you develop the narrative?
It’s great you liked it, we’re glad! The creative team gave us a lot of freedom to come up with ideas to bring this great story to life. There were three scripts and we suggested to merge them into only one. We thank them for the vote of confidence.
We went through a lot of exorcism references such as docs, movies and we strongly believed that this mood would create a great contrast to the funny and cheesy moments of the boy’s possession. Balancing these two worlds was our main challenge. We also added a second layer to the story hiding easter eggs throughout the spot. All of them, inspired by classic and iconic Rock and Roll album covers.
Did you shoot and cast in Argentina?
We shot in São Paulo, Brazil. In the very beginning of the project we thought about taking it towards Emily Rose’s Exorcism but then, we decided to embrace São Paulo’s raw and industrial atmosphere. Maybe this choice gave the spot more personality. Rock and Roll has definitely an urban soul. Originally we were supposed to shoot the exorcism at the house but when we scouted the abandoned warehouse we knew that we had found the place. So we ended up establishing two parallel story lines: the duel at the warehouse and the family at home.
We always had this gut feeling that an Argentinean casting would be the right choice for the film. We ran auditions in Buenos Aires but as we were shooting in São Paulo, we decided to give it a try and ran local auditions too. As we expected, the Argentinean casting was way better. So we flew the boy and the exorcist to São Paulo and cast local talent for the supporting roles.
Casting is great, is he a professional dancer? Did you have specific people in mind or did you run auditions?
He’s not a pro and actually we didn’t want him to be. We were willing to get something fresh and wrong from his dance moves. It was more important to cast a charismatic kid that could move his waist rather than a good dancer. To help the boy with the basic moves we brought in a choreographer a couple of days before shooting. On set we had a synth so we could change from one music to the other suddenly and let him react spontaneously.
The exorcist was a left handed professional guitar player with loads of attitude when playing. As a bonus, he resembles a younger version of Neil Young.
Love the flash cards – what was behind your random pick of whacky visuals and illustrations?
Rock and Roll album covers are really cool. Was a great pleasure to re-create some of them. We could keep shooting those covers for years.
