Where did the idea for Bite come from?
Originally, I was at my then-fiancé’s family event and her
sister had done a bunch of animal rescue work in Guatemala for about four
weeks. She was right in the jungle, slept with a net over her bed every night,
and would wake up with bugs, spiders and tarantulas all over this net. She came
home and was just covered in bug bites, small ones, big ones, oozing ones. It
was pretty horrific. I just got to thinking, you don’t even know what bit you
down there. In the jungle there’s like a thousand new insects discovered every
year in jungles around the world. There’s things out there we don’t even know
about yet. I thought, what if one of those just got worse and worse? I started
doing some research on the different horrific bug bites and what they do to
people, and the idea sprung from there.
How many different bites and effects did you consider before
deciding what would appear in the film?
It was a weird process because, for one, I’d have to wake up
in the morning and do it a little bit and then stop by a certain time because
it was just so gross. If I did it at night, I wouldn’t be able to sleep.
There’s so many horrific videos on YouTube and gross creatures out there that I
would never want to find in my bed. There’s creatures that cement liquids,
there’s camouflage, there’s things that paralyze you and turn your blood to
rubber in a matter of minutes. There’s just horrific insects out there and it
was hard to pick a few things and go with it. But, we picked a few, everything
from hiving their food to bugs that spray a toxic liquid into predators’ mouths
which becomes a dried cement and kills them. I can talk about that stuff
forever, we just used the ones we found that we could work with the story and
have fun with.
Along with the horror of the infection in the film, there’s
the story of how a looming marriage affects family and friends. What made you
decide to juxtapose the body horror with social conflicts in such a way?
I think the big parallel in it is just her not being ready
to grow-up, have kids and do all the things that society says this is why we
are on this planet. Humans are intelligent enough where we can make up our own
decisions, but it’s only after when she decides she wants to call off this
marriage, doesn’t want to have kids, just slow down and wait that she’s bit by
this bug and has these natural instincts that every other creature around the
world is born with, to reproduce, which takes away the human element of having
kids and becoming a mother, and she all of a sudden becomes this thing she
didn’t want to become. She’s laid millions of eggs around the house and is
raising a million little creatures, so she’s just the ultimate mother. She says
she’s not ready to have kids and, in-turn, becomes super protective of these
things that she lays.
What was the casting process like?
It was pretty fun. Usually you have a casting session where
it is general dialogue you hear 40,000 times, and a lot of people coming out to
audition were first-time actors, which can be pretty grueling. But there was so
much room for interpretation with this girl turning into this creature that it
was kind of fun seeing what everyone did with it. It was really, really fun
watching people come in and act like bugs in their own theatrical way.
Being you had such different locations, what was the order
you shot the film in?
We built the apartment in an auto-garage and slowly shot it
chronologically, so every day when we finished shooting, our team would come in
and put up more goo and more webbing to make it more and more disgusting.
Everything was covered in goo, our cameras, our gear. It slowly got worse and
worse, it turned into this hive. Then, we finished and cleared everything out
and shot the boyfriend’s apartment there. Then, we tore everything down and had
a team build the Hallway and that was the last stuff we shot in December. Then,
in January, we shot everything in three days in the Dominican Republic. It was
amazing to shoot there because anyone would let you do anything.
What made you decide to use practical effects and how did
you decide on the look of the transformation and the eggs?
I had done a move called The Drownsman before, it was
very water-based and we did some of the effects. It’s always tricky with liquid
effects to make them look real. When we started coming up with stuff with the
eggs, the studio was like “how are you going to do stuff with the eggs?” They
were nervous we couldn’t afford it on our budget. I started looking online to
see if there was anything I could find. I found this company that was making
these little pebbles, you’d put them in water and they’d grow into a clear
translucent ball. I bought a pack of them and poured them into a bowl of hot
water and left them overnight. I came downstairs the next day and they
overflowed everywhere. I ordered like 30,000 of them. We had just big buckets
of these eggs and everyday would just swab them with people stirring these buckets
constantly. We didn’t want to have to worry about going into the effects and
seeing if they worked, it was much more fun to see it and know you got it. All
these eggs growing slightly, just enough to push others out of the way. It was
horrible by the end, it just smelled horrendous.
What inspired the super-isolated feeling of the film?
I kind of like the idea that she’s getting sick, she’s
almost blacking out and the insect starts taking over. It’s like a bee going
into a crevasse and starts building a hive. I like this idea that all her
friends are out, not really caring about her that much, and her fiancé thinks
she’s upset and wants to break-up, so he’s giving her a bit of space, and
meanwhile she’s getting worse and worse. She’s creating this giant hive that
she eventually lures people into. It’s kind of a characteristic of a lot of
insects out there, so I felt like it worked pretty well. The other thing being
we had a limited budget and wanted to really utilize what we were planning on
doing. The goal was to make a movie about her, instead of a character piece of
her running through the streets spraying goo, she’s creating this hive and
every time you see her, she’s just deeper and deeper in it.
Has anyone asked you to look at their bug bites since the
film’s release?
You know, no-one’s really approached me that much about
their bug bites. It is winter up here, we don’t have many things other than
horseflies and mosquitos. But, they’re gross regardless. I have had people send
in videos of gross things like giant zits being popped or giant bug bites
getting infected and pussing and what not. It’s not something that I really
enjoy, you know? We’ve had fans, after seeing the movie, think “oh Chad will
really like this terribly gross video of a hospital in India of some horrible
bug bite gone sour.” It’s definitely not enjoyable to watch, I’ve seen enough
bug bites for now.
BITE Opens May 6th, 2016
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