Heart Eyes oozes with blood and charm. The slasher pic delivers as both a romantic comedy and horror movie, just in time to make Valentine’s Day a little more fun this year. Director Josh Ruben takes cues from Jason Lives and Sleepless in Seattle, making meet-cutes and bloodbaths a damn fine pairing.
The titular killer is here to ruin Valentine’s Day. No lovers are safe. Everyone in Seattle is on edge, including Ally (Olivia Holt) and Jay (Mason Gooding) as they fall for each other—both literally and figuratively. Co-written by Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day), Heart Eyes is a sincere love letter to slashers and rom-coms.
Ruben stages some familiar genre tropes with great enthusiasm, similar to his directorial debut, Werewolves Within. Recently, the filmmaker spoke with Daily Dead about his latest acclaimed film.
[Editor’s Note: Minor plot points and scenes are discussed, so if you want to remain entirely spoiler free, feel free to read this after checking out Heart Eyes for yourself. That said, if you’ve seen the latest trailer / clips, there are no major spoilers discussed.]
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As a big fan of Werewolves Within, what did you learn about crafting a murder mystery or slasher mystery from that movie that you applied to Hard Eyes?
Josh Ruben: There was a great Craig Zobel show called Mare of Easttown. I remember an interview where he was asked about how he approached the mystery, the whodunit aspect of it all. I believe he would have actors do takes less suspicious, more suspicious, most suspicious. So, there were a couple of opportunities where I would just pick a random actor, a random take, a random moment, and say, “Just play this a little more suspicious, just so we have the option of you being shady so we can throw audiences off the scent.” I think it worked. I didn’t really think terribly much about it beyond just guiding whether or not someone was too telling, which really was quite rare in a scene.
I imagine in post, it’s good to have all those options too, right?
Josh Ruben: Absolutely. You don’t overdo it with the options so as not to waste time. Ultimately, your actors are going to give you options. Even before you start the scene, there’s always just going to be some kind of despondent, deep-thought, neutral look that could read for just about anything. We had plenty of that. But you just want to make sure you have five more from each actor for the entirety of the movie for you to be able to Tetris it all correctly.
Since we’re talking about editing, for the drive-in sequence, there are a lot of moving pieces to put together in post-production. How’d it come together in the editing room?
Josh Ruben: It was definitely the most daunting and the largest sequence I’ve ever shot, hands down. It’s a war sequence. It’s a fight sequence in a war. It might as well be that. So you just kind of break it down into shots in your mind. The goal was really not to ever repeat any shot twice, and that was very, very helpful. This action’s going to carry us here. That will earn us a jump cut to this moment. That will earn us movement into this following shot.
There were a couple of moments where we would grab a standalone beat of someone rushing into their car. We’d do it a few times. We would find our way in via our camera operator, someone like [cinematographer] Stephen [Murphy], to go, “Let’s whip this way this time. Let’s travel with someone else so that as they come in, we’re finding this person, and then we back out of frame.” That type of action is super useful. And then you just hand it to a genius editor like Brett Bachman to do with it what he will, and it works out.
I definitely had a fairly good sense of how the action was going to play out in my mind. The most daunting it got was when I got on set and there were like 75 cars. They were quite widely spaced apart. I was like, “Holy shit, that doesn’t feel like a maze and doesn’t feel scary.” When it gets darker, I don’t quite know if this is going to work. Once our crew started to move the cars in closer and it felt a little more contained, then it started to come together. Luckily, it worked out. I’m most proud of that, of anything I’ve put on film.
And you got His Girl Friday playing at the drive-in.
Josh Ruben: And that was a late addition, too. The fact that there’s this romantic classic with Cary Grant, it just adds to the texture of it. I’m so pleased. We tried everything, you know, Dirty Dancing, Moonstruck, The Vow. We talked about everything from Casablanca to horror films like My Bloody Valentine. It’s always a rights issue. Essentially, a film has to fall under fair use or reach a point where the licensing isn’t cost-prohibitive. That film just adds such an elegant texture to it. Also, His Girl Friday, that dynamic is Mason and Olivia’s dynamic, it just works really well.
You clearly love screwball comedy, too. What do you look for in pace and rhythm?
Josh Ruben: I’m not thinking so much about pace and rhythm. Sometimes for comedic delivery in the edits, sure. But when we’re on set, everything is about playing the romance for real, playing the terror for real, and never getting caught trying to be funny. Then you’re golden. Everything else is just icing.
The horror elements are emphasized by everything [Specialty Costume & Mask Designer] Tony Gardner and his team bring to the Heart Eyes Killer, the way he looks, Stephen Murphy’s lighting, Jay Wadley’s score, the production design – it’s a full concert. But if your characters are committing and not winking, then you’re home free.
With the killer, how many iterations were there with your costume designer? Were there wildly different concepts?
Josh Ruben: There were several versions of the mask and the costume. Jaindra Watson, our costume designer, didn’t have a finalized mask early on, so we just worked with whatever iteration Tony was working on at the time that we liked.
She tried everything – from super modern, sexy fashion model to leather, kinky My Bloody Valentine to Hellraiser. I really wanted a Hellraiser vibe, like kinky leather, but we wondered, is it too Bloody Valentine? Too shiny? Too much? Too erotic? We explored gas masks, helmets, nails, spikes, pipes, tubes.
At one point, because I love and I’m so inspired by Jason Lives – and this movie is a bit of a homage to the fun horror of it all – we even had a hockey mask version of the emoji. How close can we get to it? But that was too on the nose. We finally found something sickly and repulsive – almost Freddy Kruger, workshop thing – with the asymmetrical heart eyes, the metallic rims, the stitched head, the oxidized blood on the mouth. Once we aged it properly, we knew we had something.
When you had that final mask, what tests did you and Stephen do to figure out how best to light your killer?
Josh Ruben: Darkly, engulfed in shadow, edged by blue moonlight, playing with shadow and shape. In daylight, the mask is uneasy, almost a reptilian face, but once the mask reacts to darkness, it becomes instantly ghoulish. We all got goosebumps when we saw it in the dark for the first time.
There’s always the question of when to reveal the full look of a killer. Did you debate that?
Josh Ruben: I didn’t think much about it. I just knew I wanted to show him fully after his third or fourth kill. I wanted him shot like Jason. I wanted him to walk like Jason, a Kane Hodder-like physicality.
How about photographing your heroes and how they should carry themselves? Were there references to Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan?
Josh Ruben: There were two North Stars to Stephen: I wanted it bright and colorful so we could earn where we go. You have to do Nora Ephron before you earn your Jason Lives. You have to look at the classics. Sleepless in Seattle, My Best Friend’s Wedding, and Pretty Woman were shot on film, with beautiful anamorphic lenses. We didn’t shoot on film. But once you shoot a film with anamorphic, the lensing by nature is slightly imperfect. You have lens flare, which I adore, which not everyone does. That level of imperfection gives it that slight homage to the cinematic quality of those early rom-coms. It was important that we homage them in that cinematic fashion. I wanted them beautifully lit but not too much in shadow until they needed to be. I didn’t want it to look like a Tide commercial. I don’t want everything evenly or overly lit.
Don’t make it too clean.
Josh Ruben: Ugh! Repulsive! Come on! Not my favorite…
You have the classic rom-com shopping montage. It felt really satisfying to see that in a movie again. What’s the art behind making a shopping montage?
Josh Ruben: I’m so glad you said that. That scene was on the editing room floor, then back in, then out again, and then finally, back in again. I thought if we could make this thing work, we could really give this movie texture, but then, no, we need to keep up the pace and get to the scary stuff sooner.
Once we found the right song and context of Ally getting ready without being too tonally disperate, we knew we were cooking. The art of it? Honestly, the girls were in control and having fun. Gigi Zumbado, who plays Monica, was DJing. Olivia would be in a new outfit and entering the scene from the dressing room, not knowing what song would play. I didn’t even know what song would play. Gigi would hit play, and Olivia would react in real time. I would sidecoach and improvise a bit. Keeping it light, fun, and improvisotional, that’s the key.
Did test screenings confirm you had to keep it?
Josh Ruben: By the time we did the two big test screenings, it was locked in and the dressing montage was there to stay. In the series of smaller feedback screenings with buddies – Mike Flanagan, Kate Siegel, Radio Silence, Molly Elfman, and Axelle Carolyn – we learned what would or wouldn’t work from these filmmakers we trust implicitly. The process is invaluable. Originally, the scene was way too genuine. There’s a big speech in front of a mirror. People were like, “It’s not that great of an outfit for her to go, ‘Oh, girl, go get it!’ She’s still very formal.” That’s by design. We needed Olivia warm and comfortable for these fighting scenes. There was math in constructing that.
That’s a great crowd of directors. What was a note from them that really helped?
Josh Ruben: The most memorable [note] was from Zelda Williams. It was about the van scene with the hippies where Ali and Jay discuss their lives, where you understand the characters’ layers. Zelda said, “It’s too genuine. You have all this action, running, and then suddenly, here comes the monologues… There’s that couple in the back, so what if you heard that couple fucking the whole time to undercut it?” Genius. So my editor Brett and I built a soundscape, and when we brought it to our sound designers, who worked on Lord of the Rings, by the way, these very proper movies. They were like, “Are you sure you want more… fapping?”
[Laughs] Sugar makes the medicine go down.
Josh Ruben: Exactly. She was totally right. Forever grateful. Any bit of advice folks offered to subvert, whether a scare or reveal was working, we were scrutinizing everything. We are genre fans and wanted to make something we would want to see. You know, pay $80 a night to get your ass out of the living room and see a movie. What would inspire us to go? That’s how we got here.
Well said. My final question comes from your cinematographer, Stephen Murphy. What is your favorite flavor of Duck Island ice cream?
Josh Ruben: Oh, my God. Did you talk to Stephen?
I told him today we were talking. He said lovely things about you.
Josh Ruben: Oh, I love that. My favorite Duck Island flavored ice cream… Oh, my God. It’s been a minute. There’s one with coffee crumble or coffee rubble in it that was so good. Everything at Duck Island is good. Oh gosh, Greg Gilreath, my producer’s favorite, it’s got a name like birthday cake. I have such a horrible memory. But anything chocolate, anything with coffee crumble, peanut buttery, anything from Duck Island, that was the automatic yes. It’s fantastic.
Is it something you’re just eating a lot on set?
Josh Ruben: It was the place to go in Auckland to get ice cream. Of course, it was winter. Winter there is like winter in LA, so it wasn’t terribly cold. But it became a running joke for me to walk all the crew through the day, like, “We’re going to kill this person today. And then he’s going to come smash through this window and do this and that. And then we’re going to wrap. And we’re all going to go to Duck Island.” I would always button my bullshit with, “And then, obviously, we’re going to go to Duck Island.” So, it became a running joke along with me singing the first line of Smash Mouth’s “All Star” sometimes to break the tension. If things got really intense or high tension, I would just be like, “Somebody….” Gotta keep people on their toes.
Is that a good piece of direction? If an actor’s nervous for a scene or if there’s a technically challenging scene, just drop Smash Mouth?
Josh Ruben: Usually, it’s pretty good. I haven’t yet had it happen where I’ve dropped a little Smash Mouth when someone was clearly nervous or trying to do some deep work, the bubble of which is burst by me singing Smash Mouth. I’m glad I haven’t pissed too many people off by doing it. But I’m the captain, and if the captain wants to listen to Smash Mouth, he’s gonna. If he wants to sing it, for that matter, he’s going to sing.
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Photo Credit: Photo by Christopher Moss, Courtesy of Screen Gems