Many people enter the film biz because of a light bulb moment in their childhoods when their minds were opened to the magic of cinema.
For actress-director Lisa Ovies, that moment of revelation struck during a pre-teen viewing of Alien.
“There were no actors on camera, and yet the way the camera moved evoked this crazy emotion in me, and I realized that the camera was just as much of an actor as anyone else,” says Ovies.
In that moment, Ovies “learned the power of storytelling, and the power of image.”
Ovies was the kid who did improv, and turned in film projects instead of book reports. She shot mock commercials and faux news reports on a clunky old-school video camera and edited off of two VHS tapes.
She was around 15-years-old when she started plowing through the work of the filmmakers who’d inform her narrative voice: Robert Rodriguez; Kevin Smith; Quentin Tarantino; and Sam Raimi.
“They’re all warriors that went, ‘I don’t need a studio to do this, I’m going to learn how to do it,’ and they did everything,” says Ovies. “At the time, I thought I was going to do it all, too.”
Ovies laughs immediately after making this audacious statement, but she’s come pretty damn close to doing it all. The Vancouverite is an actress (in Whistler Film Festival alumnus Shooting the Musical and Jeffrey Lando’s Suspension, coming to DVD this month), producer (of Bedbugs: A Musical Love Story and the award-winning documentary Taking My Parents to Burning Man), casting director, writer, art department, and, most recently, director.
Last month, the comedic short she directed, I Wanna Date U, premiered at the Vancouver International Women in Film Festival – and shortly before that, she wrapped on her feature film directorial debut, indie horror flick Puppet Killer.
Puppet Killer’s cast features a parade of Vancouver A-listers: Aleks Paunovic (Numb; iZombie), Kyle Cassie (Deadpool), Richard Harmon (The 100), Lisa Durupt (Murder She Baked), Lee Majdoub, and Gigi Saul Guerrero.
“They’re all crazy,” raves Ovies. “Every single one of my actors signed on before they read my script. They all came in, and we died. I’ve never had a table read where we constantly had to reset because of so much laughing.”
Maybe the laughter comes from the fact that the horror director (an alumna of the venerable Second City in Chicago) hasn’t exorcised comedy from her life completely.
“Comedy is where a lot of my instincts come from,” says Ovies, who also trained in documentary film, production and scriptwriting at Vancouver Film School. “I have a reputation now for horror. I love horror, but I won’t let it define me. I don’t think I’ll ever limit myself as to what kind of film I make.”
As for Puppet Killer, it’s a straight-up horror flick, and the premise is in the title. It’s about a puppet who embarks on a murder rampage.
The idea came to Ovies in 2014, when she was producing Bedbugs: A Musical Love Story. The light-hearted Crazy8s short centers on a woman who befriends the bedbugs in her boudoir.
“I was on set with all these puppets singing, and I started thinking, ‘In a perfect world, what would I do with these puppets on film?’ And I’d kill everyone. I’d kill everyone with these puppets,” says Ovies, laughing.
The idea began as satire, and ended up as serious horror. Ovies and her small cast and crew shot in the mountains last December. “These people pulled off a miracle,” says Ovies.
And she recognizes that there’s a certain level of audacity that comes with deciding to do a horror film – starring a puppet, no less – for her feature directorial debut.
“We would just laugh [on set], and people would go, ‘how do you see this coming out?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t fucking know, it’s a puppet, man, let’s shoot it and figure it out,’” says Ovies.
The audacity paid off. Puppet Killer is now in post-production, and Ovies says the film is already attracting attention from festivals and buyers.
You can see that audacity in other aspects of her life journey, too, like when she visited 22 countries in eight years (“It taught me about empathy and it taught me about forgiveness and it taught me to calm down”), or how she intends to keep acting while also directing and producing new projects, or in those moments at film festivals where, when mere feet away from her idols – including Robert Rodriguez and Seinfeld writer and producer Peter Mehlman– she approaches them for advice.
“I was watching all of these other people meet them and fan and walk away, and I went, ‘nope, this is my one chance,’ so I went, ‘hey, I would love to pick your brain sometime, I’m really eager to learn and I’m humble enough to say I’ve got a long way to go,’ and that changed my life,” says Ovies. “I haven’t had a person say no since.”
• Catch Ovies in Suspension on DVD beginning April 26.
