The theatrical run of a single film transformed the careers of Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein. Their 2018 sci-fi thriller Freaks starred Emile Hirsch and Bruce Dern, and it pulled in more than $375 million worldwide. The movie’s performance turned the pair from B-movie mavens into Hollywood hot commodities.
Saturday night finds the creators bringing their second feature, Freak 2, back to Vancouver for a screening at the Rio Theatre. The film resumes the story from where the first one ended, with Chloe (Lexy Kolker) having grown older and searching for a friend instead of a mother.
Vancouver Roots
Born and raised in Vancouver, Lipovsky made his first film there. During his teenage years, he attended the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF), where he secured a super pass that allowed him to watch five movies a day. He also gained access to press screenings for three weeks prior to the festival’s opening.
“I remember seeing filmmakers up on the stage, presenting their films and wishing one day that would be me,” he recalled.
The first Freaks was about a girl who couldn’t leave her house and wanted a mom. The sequel flips that. “In the second film, she’s now much older. So she doesn’t want a mom. What she wants is a friend,” Lipovsky explained. “And how do you find a friend, and how do you build a relationship in a world where society wants you dead.”
The Sequel Lineup
The film follows Amanda Crew as a mother and Lorelei Olivia Mote as her daughter, both looking to survive a world that wants to wipe out “freaks” like them as they seek vengeance for their family. The sequel also follows the pair directing Final Destination Bloodlines, the sixth installment of the supernatural horror franchise, which grossed over $285 million at the worldwide box office.
Hollywood Path
Lipovsky 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. They did not win, and they were off the lot. But two decades later, they are in-demand movie directors at work on projects like:
- The Long Lost short story adaptation for Amblin and Universal
- Writers on Chris Columbus’ Gremlins 3
- For Sony the animated Venom movie and Metal Gear Solid
“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 added.
Lipovsky is still pinching himself at how well known he has become in Hollywood. “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 said.
Why Horror Works Now
Stein and Lipovsky credit the summer box office success of Backrooms and Obsession with their own Hollywood rise. They say horror remains one of the few genres where audiences still turn up in theaters for original movies.
“Horror is one of the few genres where it’s normal for audiences to show up in theaters for original movies,” he said. “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.”
The Mother and the Theatre
Lipovsky will be accompanied at the VIFF screenings for Freak 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.
He said that one of the Freak 2 screenings will take place in a 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 that is very special for him to be able to hold it there, with many of the people who made the film and many of his old friends sitting in the audience, just minutes from where the movie was filmed.”
The Details That Matter
This is a personal account of two filmmakers whose careers were launched by a festival premiere. The story is particular and human: the screenings held when they were still teenagers, the theatre they saved, the mother who gave up her own dreams. It gives the industry a human face rather than treating it as a mechanical process, showing instead a group of people who genuinely care about their work.
This series started as a modest science fiction thriller and has grown into a franchise with several installments. The creators have shifted from working outside the studio system to being based at the Sony lot. This weekend’s screenings at VIFF offer viewers a look back at the very first film in the series.
Source material: “How ‘Freaks’ Sent Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein to Hollywood: “That Film Changed Our Lives”,” The Hollywood Reporter.
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