IN CONVERSATION WITH JASON STEPHENS

With several pop culture characters now coming into the public domain, it seems that the horror genre has truly capitalised on the chance to twist the likes of Mickey Mouse and Winnie The Pooh into something more twisted. The latest character to go through such a transformation is everyone’s favourite spinach, guzzling sailor in POPEYE THE SLAYER MAN. Telling the tale of a group of youths investigating the urban myth of a certain muscular figure rumoured to haunt the local spinach factory, they soon discover a hulking brute all too happy to tear them limb from limb.

GORE IN THE STORE talks to actor Jason Stephens about working in horror since his teens, while also being a California deputy, and how to navigate portraying such a beloved character and the legal ramifications that pop up.

So how did you get involved with Popeye the Slayerman? 

JASON STEPHENS -  Well, Robert Michael Ryan's been one of my best friends since we were eleven years old. We went to fourth grade together, and we've been making movies and little short horror films, Saturday Night Live style sketches and stuff like that with an old handy cam that you put on your shoulder.  That blossomed into doing extra bigger things when we got older and could afford better equipment and all that good stuff. I think we shot our first movie when I was twenty years old, and  Robert became an actor for a while. He did a lot of television commercials and he was on a series called Hang Time and a couple of Saturday morning teenage shows.  And then he was on How I Met Your Mother, more recently. He was a recurring character so he really got into the whole Hollywood acting deal. 

And I was in law enforcement for thirty years, but I also did movies on the side. I'd take a month off and we'd go shoot a movie.  Usually, I was behind the camera; either director, producer, or camera operator. So this time Robert knew that Popeye was coming into the public domain and he called me up and he was like “Hey, we're gonna write a Popeye script. And you gotta play Popeye because A, you're bald and B, you're big. It’s gonna be a really physical role, and I want Popeye to be this menacing guy.”

So I said “I'll do it on one condition. It's gotta be super gory and over the top. If you're gonna do it, do it right.” He's like “We're gonna use a gallon of blood per kill.” “Okay, I'm in.” 

You mentioned that the copyright for Popeye was coming into the public domain. Was that the main reason for making the film or was there already a desire to always do something with Popeye?

JS -  We kind of fell into that subgenre with WINNIE THE POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY. Robert and Jeff knew the people that made that film. So they thought this is kind of a cool little subgenre. They did a search and found out who was coming into the public domain, but Popeye just resonated with everybody. Imagine Popeye being pissed off! I mean, he's kind of a brute anyway, especially the early comic strip version of Popeye. He was a rough and tumble man. He was a drinker and a fighter, a brawler. I mean, he always beat up the bad guys, but he wasn't someone to mess with. So that was kind of why we thought this was a good character to do a horror movie with.

Did you have any pushback from the EC Segar (creator of Popeye) estate? Or even from any Popeye superfans? 

JS -  Some people on fan sites and stuff like that will say “I can't believe you ruined my childhood!” Come on! You know they do it to Santa Claus, they do it to Frosty the Snowman! I mean, they've been doing this since the beginning of time. So you're not gonna please everybody, but it's supposed to be fun and over the top. We're not trying to piss off true Popeye fans.  This is just an imaginary tale. But some diehard Popeye fans will inevitably be pissed off, you know: “He's a good guy!” Well, not really. He was kind of a rough and tumble dude!

So how did you actually get into character for something like this?

JS - It was actually pretty easy. It's like putting on a cop uniform. Once you're in it, you become it. And it's so menacing looking when you're around the actors. He's got giant forearms and it was hot.  Thank God it was forty degrees Fahrenheit where we shot in New York because I would be drenched at the end of the day wearing all the prosthetics and stuff. 

How long did the process of applying the prosthetics for the arms and the face take?

JS -  The arms were actually big sleeves. I had to lube 'em up and force my arms into them, basically. So we used a lot of KY jelly. It took like two people to put them on. They would just basically pull these giant sleeves up on my arms and each one probably weighs about ten pounds. So when I'm holding people up in the movie my shoulders and my arms are burning! You're doing a take, sometimes twenty, thirty takes then you’ve got to get into position for lighting. Then they relight and then they strike it, and then they reset. So it was a lot of work. It was very physical.

It must have been quite claustrophobic with the prosthetics on your face, and then having to smoke the pipe as well.

JS -  Actually holding the pipe in the mouth was the hardest part because the chin was so large and heavy. I had fake lips on too, so I had to bite it with my teeth to hold the pipe in my mouth. That was a real corn cob pipe and we actually put real pipe tobacco in it because they put this fake stuff in there, but it wouldn't stay lit long enough. I'm like, I'll just smoke a corn cob pipe. No big deal!

Did you take any inspiration from the actual cartoons or the comic strips for this at all?

JS -  It's kind of hard to say, because I really don't act like Popeye, you know what I mean? I don't want to give it away, but he doesn't really go after the good guys as much as you think he's going to. As the movie progresses, you kind of realize what the mindset of Popeye is. In that case his tender side, especially in the scene where I'm in my lair and I see the picture of  Olive Oyl and Sweet Pea. I kind of improvised that whole scene. So I took that moment to kind of soften Popeye, so it's not just this brutal killer the entire time.

And did you take any inspiration from the current wave of slashers that are so popular just now? 

JS -  Oh yeah, for sure. We’ve kind of become like a little sub genre of these public domain characters that are coming into play now and are fun to play with and take inspiration from. I watched the other ones and said, okay, what do I like about this? And what don't I like and what can I change? So that's kind of how I drew from that part of it. We want him to be more like Michael Myers, or Jason Voorhees. Someone who's in the shadows and has his lair. Who always knows how to get where you’re going faster than you and cut you off, get you trapped. That was like the fun part of them, so that's how I took a lot of inspiration from the early eighties slasher movies. More so than the newer ones. 

 One of the things that interested me in your very interesting career was you started filmmaking as a teenager. Was it primarily horror you were into back then, or was there also an equal helping of comedy like you mentioned earlier?

JS - We did a mixture. We did horror movies because they were easy to do when you were a kid. Fake blood was easy to come by and fake knives with no blades on them and all that kind of stuff. My dad was really into horror movies when I was a kid. I used to watch all the crazy horror movies, nothing scared me basically when I was growing up. Since I was ten years old, I'd been watching the Jason saga, DRILLER KILLER, CHUD and all these old horror movies. \We made them because they were fun and it's always fun to throw buckets of blood on your friends. But then on the other hand, we also loved comedy. So we did a lot of satire, a lot of sketch comedy. We had a little channel we called After Midnight, for some reason we always started filming after midnight. By the time we thought of the idea, all the parents had gone off to bed but we were going outside and shooting these crazy movies. 

 So, from there you move into an actual directing career, and work with the likes of Robert Z’Dar on DECAY (1998), and Michael Berryman and even Tiffany on NECROSIS (2009). Then there seems to be a gap in your filmmaking.

JS - I had been a deputy since I was nineteen years old, and I just retired five years ago. I did thirty years in law enforcement. I worked on small projects with Robert (Michael Ryan) and a couple of my other friends, but I became a fugitive detective for about five years. And I couldn't take more than five days off because I was flying all over the world, grabbing fugitives and bringing them back to California. Murderers and child molesters and all that kind of stuff. So that was a pretty busy part of my career. I couldn't just take a big chunk of a month off and actually shoot a movie like I was accustomed to. So that was the reason for the gap. I was more career focused at that point. 

Compared to when you first started out, how do you find filmmaking now?

JS -  Technology is just amazing now, but we actually went with old school effects for this. The only CGI we really used was the sign for the spinach factory and some other signs we had to digitize out for legal purposes. It was all real prosthetic effects and real blood. Not real blood obviously, but real blood effects.

True horror fans of the eighties and nineties will really appreciate that fact of it. For the arm sequence, we had to do it in one take. Because once that arm came off, that was that, and we had a guy off set pumping blood through a machine, then it was spurting all over the place. That arm weighed twenty-five, thirty pounds. Steven McCormack, he's like, “Hit me as hard as you can with that. I wanna make this look real.” And I'm like, dude, I can't hit you. I'll break your ribs!

And on that final hit, I missed him. We cheated the camera angle so we can make it look like I hit him really hard, but I actually just went to the side of him and he was like, “Thank God you didn't hit me with it. That would've really left a mark!”

That was my favorite kill to do by the way. I have two favorite scenes. That scene is my favorite kill, and then the scene in the lair is my other favorite scene in the movie. 

Any plans for a sequel then?

They're writing one right now. All the executive producers got together and said, you know what, it wasn't a multimillion dollar kind of success, but it was successful enough. The distributor and all the executive producers want to do another one too. We're gonna head off to the water pasture and actually film a little bit on a boat. So he’ll be a true Sailor Man. 

And can we expect to see Bluto turning up in this as well then? 

JS - Well, he doesn't enter the public domain for four more years. Olive Oyl? No problem. But even Wimpy? We could hint at some of those characters, like the guy ordering the cheeseburger in the bar, but we couldn't use the name. We threw in some Easter eggs for people that really followed the character back in the early days so you could see that's Wimpy. You know it in your mind, but we're not allowed to say it. We actually had to give the script to a bunch of attorneys and they wrote an errors and emissions insurance to deal with the possibility of getting sued for copyright infringement or any trademark issues. They gave us a clean bill of health so we could insure the movie. 

That is a side that I don't think anyone really considers, people just assume that you can do whatever you like with these characters once they enter the public domain.

JS - No, there are a lot of guardrails around them. There's certain aspects of Popeye that we couldn't do either that came in later on. We created our image of Popeye, according to the newspaper print version of him back in the twenties and thirties. That's the character that's in the public domain. The character that came out in the fifties and sixties, the colour cartoon? We couldn't use most of that stuff. A lot of that stuff is still under copyright. Like, when he flexes his biceps and you see the battleship and stuff like that come out, we couldn't even do that. So we just covered up my arms so we didn't have to worry about it. There's certain things that you can and can't do, even in the public domain. 

As you’re fully retired from law enforcement, is this a return to full-time filmmaking now? 

JS - I'm part-time, I kind of pick and choose my projects. Like I said, I'm usually behind the camera. I do local business commercials. Me and my wife have a fitness channel that we do on YouTube. It's for people that are over forty years old, trying to stay fit and healthy after forty, it's called Evolution40Fitness. That keeps me busy. And then I pick and choose my projects. I get that creative itch all the time. It was really hard being Popeye on the set because anytime I was in downtime, I wanted to grab the mic, grab a light but Robert would say no, you're an actor now. You just act. 

Now that you’ve played Popeye are there any other childhood characters that you would like to put your own spin on again? 

JS - I was really into Marvel and DC comics when I was a kid. I was a comic book nerd, I played Dungeons and Dragons and I was really into Japanese animation too. Back then I'd like to kind of take a twist on some of the superhero characters and go evil with them. I think that would be fun. I mean, Superman and Batman should be coming into public domain in the next ten years at least. So they are coming in pretty quick. Especially Superman. I mean they've already done the evil Superman in the comics. So I don't think I'd  touch Superman because you can only beat something to death so many times. How many Spidermans do we have right now and how many Supermans do we have? (Laughing) Come on, Hollywood! Come up with something new!

Iain MacLeod

POPEYE THE SLAYER MAN is available On Digital now