Zach Lipovsky has done good business with gory horror movies.
Lipovsky and longtime collaborator Adam B. Stein’s 2018 dark sci-fi thriller Freaks, starring Emile Hirsch and Bruce Dern, was an unlikely box office hit, having made over $375 million worldwide during its theatrical run. “That film changed our lives,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter from the Sony Pictures studio lot in Culver City, California.
Freaks effectively transformed the filmmaking duo from B-movie mavens to hot commodities in Hollywood after the dystopian drama world premiered at the Vancouver Film Festival (VIFF). “I grew up in Vancouver. We made the first film in Vancouver. And as a teenager I went to the Vancouver Film Festival, and got a super pass to not only see five films a day, but go to press screenings for three weeks before the festival,” Lipovsky recalled.
That festival play gave a young Lipovsky a crash course in world cinema. “I remember seeing filmmakers up on the stage, presenting their films and wishing one day that would be me,” he added. After Freaks –— which featured 7-year-old Chloe (Lexy Kolker) being locked in a ramshackle suburban home by her protective and paranoid father, played by Hirsch — Lipovsky and Stein are returning to Vancouver with their follow-up Freak 2 to screen on Saturday night at the Rio Theatre.
“The first film was very much about a girl who can’t leave her house, and really wants a mom. And in the second film, she’s now much older. So she doesn’t want a mom. What she wants is a friend,” he explained. “And how do you find a friend, and how do you build a relationship in a world where society wants you dead,” Lipovsky adds as he teases Freaks 2.
Paramount Pictures has already picked up the sequel where Amanda Crew is a mother and Lorelei Olivia Mote plays her daughter, as both look to survive a world that wants to wipe out “freaks” like them as they seek vengeance for their family. Freaks 2 also follows hot on the heels of Lipovsky and Stein directing Final Destination Bloodlines, the sixth installment of the supernatural horror franchise that grossed over $285 million at the worldwide box office.
“It’s very hard to believe I’m sitting here on the Sony lot where we have our first look [deal] now. And we have a whole building of people now working with us to make movies, which is very surreal,” Lipovsky adds as he and Stein met nearly 20 years ago as rival competitors on On the Lot, the Fox filmmaking competition series from Steven Spielberg and Mark Burnett.
“We didn’t win, and we were off the lot,” Lipovsky recounted. But, two decades later, he and Stein are in-demand movie directors at work on projects like the Long Lost short story adaptation for Amblin and Universal, as writers on Chris Columbus’ Gremlins 3 and for Sony the animated Venom movie and Metal Gear Solid.
Getting known around Hollywood still has Lipovsky pinching himself. “Over 20 years of making movies, you get very used to things not happening, and very used to people saying something’s happening, and then it doesn’t happen. So when things start to click into place, your brain has a very hard time trying to accept that it’s actually real,” he added.
Lipovsky also puts himself and Stein becoming bankable in Hollywood after Freaks and Final Destination Bloodlines down to the recent summer box office success of breakout horror pics Backrooms and Obsession. “Horror is one of the few genres where it’s normal for audiences to show up in theaters for original movies,” Lipovsky argues. “It’s the voice of the authors that are creating the work that audiences are becoming attracted to, and even more so when the work is original, and Hollywood is definitely starting to pay attention to that.”
Lipovsky will be accompanied at the VIFF screenings for Freaks 2 by his mother, who as a single parent cast aside her own aspirations to become a movie director to work as a TV producer at Knowledge Network, a local Vancouver network. “Becoming a director back in the [19]80s wasn’t really a career path for many women, and she’s always been there by my side, and for her to see the kind of levels to which I’ve been able to create movies has been amazing,” he recalled.
One of the VIFF screenings for Freak 2 will also be at the city’s historic Park Theatre, an art deco movie house that Lipovsky helped save from closure as a private investor along with Osgood Perkins, Mike Flanagan, Sean Baker and Finn Wolfhard.
“It’s very special to be able to do the screening there, with a lot of the people that made the movie and a lot of my old friends in the audience and within minutes of where we shot the movie,” he insisted.
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