Last Straw is a survival thriller set during one violent night at a rural American diner. In this interview with director Alan Scott Neal, the filmmaker discusses his influences from Straw Dogs and Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden, crafting violence and blood from postmortem photographs, and how his experience directing short films and working in casting departments helped him helm his directorial debut.
Hi, I’m Shaurya Thapa of Borrowing Tape, and I’m here today with Alan Scott Neal, director of the 2024 horror survival thriller Last Straw. So, Last Straw is a major point in your career because this is your directorial debut. But you have made short films before, and you have worked in the casting department for movies like Uncut Gems and TV shows like Euphoria. So how has the experience of making your own full-length film been?
Last Straw was a long time coming. Taylor Sardoni (the writer) and I started working on trying to get this film made out of film school. We had various iterations of it set up at different companies with larger budgets, but then the pandemic hit - budgets shrank, investors pulled out - so we decided to do it down and dirty for next to nothing.
Given the budget constraints and the tight shooting schedule, it would have been impossible to have made this film if I didn’t have the practical on-set training from my short films and the day-to-day practical experience of working with actors in the audition room. It taught me how to talk to actors to get something specific and truthful in an efficient manner. It also taught me how to improvise when I was in a tight spot, and a scene wasn’t working.
Last Straw seems like a home invasion thriller but inside a diner. So, were there any particular horror or thriller movies that inspired you while making this?
Story-wise and thematically, my way in was to look at Last Straw as a crime thriller wrapped up in a home invasion film. Both of my brothers are police officers in a small rural Virginia town and so I was constantly referencing stories and events I’ve heard anecdotally from them over the years.
I love Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, which is a proper home invasion film, but with a psychological bent with other things on its mind and was a big inspiration for this one. Yes, Last Straw starts with the necessary genre tropes, but I really tried to push the realism of the violence and psychological profiles of the characters and how living in a small-town brimming with violence forces them into their own specific corners and to how it leads them to making certain choices.
Visually, the biggest inspiration for Last Straw was Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden. Specifically, how he used the camera to tell different perspectives of the same events in new ways and then to build upon and enrich those scenes when we see them from a different point-of-view.
What were some of the logistical challenges while filming around a diner?
Every surface is reflective in a diner. Every. Single. Surface. Which becomes a practical issue when shooting at night with lights. We had to get clever with our shooting angles and placements of lights, but we were also able to utilize some of those reflective surfaces to get some interesting shots while still tethering them to the character’s emotional experiences.
The other challenge of shooting in a traditional diner is it’s a tight, confined space. The main dining area is, at best, a 400-square-foot rectangle. And to keep things from visually feeling repetitive, you really have to reveal parts of the diner one-by-one. No wide shots early on in the film. I set out with a rule to never repeat a shot twice, and I can confidently say we didn’t. It was a fun, unique challenge to see the same scenes from different perspectives and to really make them feel different each time we come back to them.
How long did principal photography take you, and where was Last Straw filmed?
We shot for 20 days with 12-hour days door-to-door in Germantown, NY (about 2 hours north of New York City). We knew there would be no going back to reshoot scenes that didn’t work. And we did not shoot coverage. There was only ever going to be one version of this film, and it had to work. Otherwise, we didn’t have a movie. On the weekends, Andrey Nikolaev, the director of photography and I, pre-shot the scenes for the week on our phones and edited them to make sure we were telling the story in an efficient and emotionally engrossing way. There’s a version of the film where Andrey and I play all the characters, shot on a phone, completely during daylight hours.
What’s the inspiration behind the film’s title, Last Straw? Were there any alternate titles while writing the film?
The original title of the film was called The Late Shift. It had that title from the day it was written until right before we screened [it] at Sitges and Beyond Fest. Our producer, Dane Eckerle, came up with it, and I think thematically, it makes a lot of sense given that it’s a film about people reaching their boiling points and the choices they make in those moments. And also, it’s a bit of a nod to the aforementioned inspiration, Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs.
This is a film that has its fair share of blood and I tend to ask this question with any director who has dabbled in a violent film: Were there any interesting anecdotes in achieving the realistic feel and texture of the fake blood?
A few years back, I saw an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It featured postmortem photographs of murder victims by Dr. Edward E. Smith, who was coroner for Franklin County, Ohio. They’re macabre, haunting, and beautiful photographs. I saved a few for reference for the film when I started my conversations with Doug Sakmann, the SFX on the film (who very sadly recently passed away).
I wanted to bring authenticity to the screen when it came to the violence, and I studied the crime scene photographs to really get a sense of how blood pools and splatters, as well as how bodies look when they’ve been in situ for a prolonged period of time. And as mentioned, both of my brothers work around this kind of violence in their day jobs, so I was constantly sending them photos for feedback.
Do you think you'll stick to horror or thriller for your next film, or would you go for another genre this time?
I’m certainly drawn to thrillers and the next one will be a combination of crime and thriller again. I’ve got another film in the works with Taylor Sardoni - it’s a bit Green Room meets The Town… with body parts. And then I’m working on a feature with Angela Wong Carbone, which is a bit True Detective meets Silence of the Lambs except with an unstable main character investigating serial killings of Chinese women in her hometown and her own father for corruption.
Watch Last Straw