AN INTERVIEW WITH A MAN WHO MADE A FILM CALLED MEGA PIRANHA

I'm a miserable bastard. I really am. I don't know what I expected from a film starring Tiffany called

Mega Piranha

. The film comes to Planet Earth courtesy of a Californian company called The Asylum, who specialize in things like this; last year they were responsible for

Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus

, starring Debbie Gibson. I didn't see that one, but I did see

Mega Piranha

, probably because I had a thing for Tiffany when I was a kid and this seemed too ridiculous to ignore. Still, I was disappointed. Everything about it is bad. The hero is played by a buff actor/martial artist called Paul Logan, and his one-note performance kind of works, whereas Tiffany's thespian skills are marginally better than Anna Nicole Smith's. "Oh no! Oh no! Oh no!" she cries unconvincingly as she watches the carnage. Does it work? Kind of. Does it matter that she can't act? I'm not sure. Is

Mega Piranha

entertaining? Probably depends how drunk you are. I'll let Asylum's website summarize the plot: "A mutant strain of giant ferocious piranha escape from the Amazon and eat their way toward Florida." That's all you need to know, although I might as well inform you that they become the size of cars and attack a town, then grow as big as houses and (spoiler alert) eat helicopters and ships. Can its awfulness be excused simply because it's called

Mega Piranha

? I don't think so. If you like this sort of thing, you'll probably disagree. I emailed director Eric Forsberg and told him I didn't much like the film but wanted to talk about it, and he kindly obliged. He spoke to me at 8 AM LA time, but had been up since six, and nearly won me over.

Vice: Do you always get up at the crack of dawn?

Eric Forsberg:

It was six this morning. Sometimes I get up at three or four, to write. I have to drive my daughter to school at eight, then I write all day in a coffee shop, then I help my daughter with homework. I used to write all night when I was single. It's tough to do that once you have a family.

What are you writing at the moment?

I'm working on a bunch of scripts. I had a number of projects happening, and since

Mega Piranha

that number's tripled.

Mega Piranha

really put me on the map, it's made millions of dollars.

Really?

Well, sure, it's the number one movie on SyFy [Asylum have some sort of deal with the SyFy channel]. It's got really good reviews, for the most part, and a lot of really good critical attention. Not necessarily from you! But people who were looking for

Attack of the 50ft Woman

were very pleased with

Mega Piranha

, which is a real popcorn movie.

The Asylum commissioned you to write this, right?

Yeah, I'm a go-to guy for The Asylum. They give me a title and tell me either nothing or a couple of words, and in this case they just said, "Make it so the piranha are really huge." And I went from there.

So what did you interpret as being really huge? Obviously, by the end of the film, they're the size of a house.

I wanted them to be able to get larger and larger without ever stopping. Theoretically, they would be eventually as large as any living thing could possibly be to live on this planet. So they had to be stopped before they became the size of, say, an island. And that raised the stakes. I wanted the stakes to be astronomically high from the moment it began until the end.

Are you happy with the film?

Well, I'm always biting my lip wanting to have more time, more money, more resources to do more things, to have more shots, more effects, of course.

How tight are your schedules at The Asylum? How small are the budgets?

Well, it's all very tight. We shot

Mega Piranha

in 15 days. And that includes a few extra days we were given. The original schedule was 12.

Why are you given such little time to make a movie?

Because the green light didn't come from SyFy until late in the game. [caption id="attachment_14835" align="alignnone" width="665" caption="The mega piranhas before they become the size of very large buildings"]

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Do you think if you had more time the film would have been much better?

I think the more money and time you have, the more chance you have of working out the kinks. But I think the thing that makes this movie a success is the energy, and I believe the energy would have been the same. Or you could even overproduce it and the energy changes. I think the energy is close to perfect in this. But yeah, there are individual shots we could have retaken. I mean, we went to shoot in a jungle setting, it was after the rains, and all of the trees had been blown away and killed during the rains, and the jungle river and pond had been drained. And it was just a dry hole in the ground with bulldozer piles all around it and dead trees everywhere. And this was our jungle day. If we had a greater budget, we would have done jungle pick-up days in Hawaii.

How much quality control is there from The Asylum or SyFy? Would they look at it and give you another few days to improve some of this stuff?

See, it sounds like to me that you're looking for it to be a different movie.

I'm not, it's Mega Piranha, I know that. I understand your intentions and I understand the fanbase. But I believe you could still make a brilliant film called Mega Piranha. You know, there's one shot where the same bit of footage is looped five times over, and it's even got the same bit of dialogue on it each time.

Well, now that's an editing thing. That was the most exciting moment of that shot, and the special effects guy, when it was being edited, required it to keep cutting back to the actors.

I guessed that, and I imagine you didn't have extra footage to use.

Well, we did have extra footage, but that was the most exciting bit to use. And that particular special effects moment, I was not part of. There were 150 effects in the movie script, and when we started shooting I was told I had to pick up half of them practically, on camera, no CG. And I couldn't do it. I couldn't do a piranha leaping out of the water and eating a school bus. Get a little bus, a piranha puppet, I just didn't have the time. I was shooting 11 pages of script a day.

I understand, and obviously it's very easy for me to sit here and pick holes, but I did think, as I watched that bit where the same footage is used five times, that it was crazy that you didn't even change the dialogue each time it cut back. Half an hour in a sound booth and you could have recorded new bits of dialogue, no?

God bless you. From the moment we finished shooting until the moment this movie was delivered to SyFy, it was six weeks. Two editors working around the clock, sleeping in sleeping bags in the editing bay. And it was crunched against Christmas—we just didn't have the time. And then we had torrential rains that washed away our locations and shut us up in a studio for a day and a half. But here's the thing about

Mega Piranha

, and this is one of the things that's probably bothering you about it: we were satisfied to take the cheap way out at a lot of points in the movie just to get past it and onto the next moment. And that can be criticized and annoying to viewers, but my feeling is, the movie is what it is. A big old cheesy creature movie. So given that, those things are forgivable by most fans. And even sort of fun. That moment you picked out where it's repeated over and over again, a zillion people are gonna pick that out and laugh, and call it cheesy, but some of them are even gonna like it. So we were gonna accept that. [caption id="attachment_14834" align="alignnone" width="638" caption="Tiffany looking old"]

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OK. Tell me about the acting. Obviously nobody expects Tiffany to be a phenomenal actress. But were you specifically going for hammy B-movie acting, or were you trying to get the best performance you could from her?

Well, first off, the cast was Tiffany and Paul Logan, who's a muscular guy who likes physical combat. The acting is what it is. I developed the Jason Fitch character around Paul Logan, and he performed it in the way that was best for him.

I think he suits the film, actually.

Yeah. And he's this real deadpan brutish hero. For me, that worked better than trying to get lots of different dimensions from him that would perhaps not have played as well. As far as Tiffany goes, she was the light of my life on that set. She's sweet and talented on so many levels. She's just starting out in movies, and I chose to direct her as being pretty desperate, because that energy is a very accessible energy for her, and I think it works for the character. Again, that's what it was. It's Tiffany. The 80s pop star. That was the angle.

Fair enough. She was one of the reasons I was curious.

We might have been able to get a great actress, the next Meryl Streep, but that might have even taken away from the movie. The chemistry in the movie is what makes it a success. That's why it has such a huge fanbase already; it got enormous numbers on SyFy, the chatter on the internet is really positive for the most part. Once in a while I get a passionate comment from somebody that says, "Not only is this the worst movie that's ever been made but Eric Forsberg should be skinned alive and twisted up like a pretzel and thrown into an outhouse." Comments like that are so passionate and violently against me that I'm rather proud. And there's much worse than that out there. If they're gonna hate my guts for making the movie, then let them wanna skin me alive. But for every one of those comments, there are dozens of positives. And I really try with whatever movie I make, that there's something about it that's really, really special. And in this one it was the non-stop B-movie action. And Tiffany played right into it.

OK. Why do you think The Asylum are doing such good business?

Well, for good or ill, they're responding to the public. The Asylum is a real litmus test for what people wanna see. And sure, people wanna see

Avatar

. But that's in a totally different category. The Asylum makes ten to 12 movies a year. A lot of their movies are, I don't wanna say knock-offs, but "mockbusters," and I'm one of their top writer-directors. That's where if there's a big Hollywood film coming out with a lot of press and hype, they make a similar toned film with a similar name, but a totally different movie. I did

Snakes on a Train

, I did

30,000 Leagues Under the Sea

, I did

War of the Worlds 2

, I did

Monster

, which is a mockbuster of

Cloverfield

. And they've done

Transmorphers

and

Terminators

. They're fun, they're violent, there are usually hot girls, and some blood. There are creatures and heroes, and that's what people want. Well, that's what some people want. Enough to keep The Asylum in business.

Titanic 2 is up next I see.

Yes. I'm not doing that one.

I read you're doing a film called MILF.

I just did the story.

What can you tell me about MILF?

It's about college kids who have a hard time with girls their own age and fall for girls' mothers.

OK. I'll keep an eye out for it. Thank you very much for your time.

ALEX GODFREY