Maggie, the 1999 music-doc vibe of “Shredding” was great. How did you capture that nostalgic vibe so successfully?
Maggie Levin: It was such a joy to enter that space, for which I am especially nostalgic, and to pull from a combination of playing both mostly in a ’99 landscape [and] a little bit in 1995. It’s widely influenced [by] CKY, the kinds of MTV and VH1 stuff that I was watching when I was that age, the age of the horrible teenagers, and also these strange promotional videos that I used to watch from the Spice Girls and Ani DiFranco.
I used to watch a lot of these VHS tapes that my stepmother, who worked for Virgin Records at the time, would get. That’s where a lot of that band interview vibe came from, but I also worked with an amazing team. My DP, Alex Choonoo, actually shot skate videos in that fisheye style, and Andy Holton, who’s a genius editor, and I worked hard to get that analog mess just right.
I thought it was beautiful. I also caught some “Pop-Up Video” vibes.
Levin: Yes! We tried to clear a piece of Sugar Ray’s “Fly” “Pop-Up Video” episode. [We had] not a snowball’s chance in hell of actually getting that cleared, but it was a dream. It was certainly in the script.
I also loved the ending of “Shredding” with that puppet band.
Levin: My very meat-puppet, “Five Nights at Freddy’s” band.
Like a demonic Chuck E. Cheese’s. Tell me about the design and execution of it.
Levin: With anything that’s in short format, I at least think about, “What’s that final image? What are you leaving people with? What’s your punchline to the short?” The gift of playing on the “V/H/S” playground is the gift to go to real extremes, so I had the idea of this image of the “Shredded” kids. Originally, I had thought [of] piles of body parts playing instruments, [but] that would’ve looked like [a] mess.
The idea to give them more form and structure was a collaborative effort between the incredible makeup FX designer Patrick McGee and myself. We talked about directions to take both the ghost gals and the meat kids and how that exactly could manifest. And those are the actual actors, who had their bodies cast and then rebuilt on top of them, so they are puppeting themselves underneath there. I have some wonderful behind-the-scenes photos.
Flying Lotus: [laughs] Oh, you should have kept that one. You should have told nobody that!
Levin: But it’s so cool!
Lotus: Delete that s***.
Levin: I want to post a picture of the kids looking at their own heads — that’s just as weird! … Some of my favorite pictures are the kids kissing themselves.
