Interview: Let Me Make You a Martyr filmmakers on their gritty Marilyn Manson revenge thriller

Before embarking on his current train wreck of a tour, Marilyn Manson reigned in the overt theatrics of his live show for a chilly and understated performance as a hitman in the upcoming revenge thriller Let Me Make You a Martyr.

The first feature by writers / directors Corey Asraf and John Swab, Let Me Make You a Martyr is a gritty and stylish film centered on a pair of adopted siblings (Niko Nicotera and Sam Quartin) who fall in love and set out to kill their abusive father (Mark Boone Junior). Meanwhile, their criminal father reaches out to a killer-for-hire named Pope (Manson) to take out his scheming son, which leads all parties to a violent familial confrontation.

Beautifully shot on location in Oklahoma, the film hauntingly brings to life the seedy underbelly of the south, in a town beset by drugs, poverty and violence. The film’s tone is as stark as its backdrop, with a lyricism that owes as much to Cormac McCarthy as it does to the blood-splattered works of Quentin Tarantino.

In Montreal for the film’s world premiere at the Fantasia Film Festival this past July, Asraf and Swab explained how Manson only joined their film at the 11^th hour. With the role of the hitman Pope still unfilled as shooting was about to begin, the duo were frantically searching for an actor when Manson’s name was brought up.

“48 hours before principal photography we were really in a bind,” says Swab. “It was terrifying.  We got lucky because he had this tour he was on, and it was on a two-week break. And his next show was in Oklahoma where we were filming, so it all just worked out. So he showed up, he shot his time, and then we got to take the whole cast and crew to the show and we said out goodbyes.”

Like most of the connections for the film, Manson was brought to the fold on the recommendation of his Sons of Anarchy co-star Mark Boone Junior.

“[Manson] really wanted an opportunity to work with Mark Boone Junior again, because he trusts his tastes, and Boone trusted us,” says Swab. “When we called and said he was coming, he said, “I love this script.” He really appreciates language, so that resonated with him and excited him.”

Apart from the friendly connection, Asraf explains that the subdued tone of the film also spoke to Manson, whose public image is anything but.

“Something that was like our mantra was ‘Oklahoma slow,'” explains Asraf. “Like everyone just slow…down…and…talk. We want the air in between the words. We want to be able to hear what you’re saying, because it’s so important, because it’s so poetic. We don’t want to talk too fast, and things kind of slip through. So if you notice, everyone’s really taking their time, and you have that slooow drone underneath. And when we said that to Manson, he got it. He took that, and just turned it into his own thing. And I hate to use this phrase, because we’re kind of reluctant, because this isn’t a Manson vehicle by any means, but he has this star-power, and when he’s on-screen people are like, “What is he going to do?” Because he’s so controversial. So when you see him, it’s just a different experience. How many rumours have we all heard of Marilyn Manson? You’re only human.

“Everyone kind of has their own relationship with him in a way; if you’ve listened to his music, or grown up watching the news, we’ve all seen him. He’s in the ethos in a way. And we were very conscious of that in the editing room. Because we shot a lot of stuff with him. He was like a powerhouse, he just burned through shit, and he was just amazing. So we really had to take it and refine it, and be really selective about what we used on the screen. He is in the intro of the film and he is in the end of the film, so he’s very present. But we didn’t want to make it a vehicle, and he didn’t want to make it a Mason vehicle, and we really had to respect that. And at the end of the day we’re really happy with how the film came out.”

Despite featuring three cast members of the popular FX show Sons of Anarchy (Manson, Boone and Nicotera), Asraf and Swab claim that they were never overly concerned about differentiating their film from the hugely successful biker series.

“Sons of Anarchy is more of a soap-opera,” claims Swab. “And Corey and I had actually never seen it. I think it’s a totally different feel and vibe. I think once you get into the experience of the film, it kind of separates that.”

Shooting in Oklahoma lends the film a particularly unique look, with its wide-open landscapes and run-down outskirts. According to Swab, they couldn’t have shot the film anywhere else. “It’s home, or at least where I’m from, and it’s where the story is from, and where all the people are from,” he says. “It didn’t make sense anywhere else. And with the budget we had, we needed as many favours as we could get. So when you go to a place like Oklahoma, where nothing like that is being done, you kind of stick a flag in the ground and people open up doors and want to help out.”

Along with the support of the community, the filmmakers often had to think on their toes, at times resorting to guerrilla-filmmaking techniques in order to get the shots they needed.

“We were getting locations an hour beforehand,” reveals Asraf. “It was really difficult to get a church, because we were killing priests. We didn’t think about shit like that.”

“We wrote an ulterior script to give to the church,” adds Swab with a chuckle. “We told them it was about a boy coming to a priest seeking to repent—we made up this whole bullshit story, and they let us in.”

The origins of Let Me Make You A Martyr date back more than a decade—Swab’s first draft of the film was written when he was just 16 years old. Yet it took Swab and Asraf meeting for the film to really begin progressing, as the pair tirelessly worked on the project over the intervening years.

A self-described troubled teen, Asraf attributes his early attraction to filmmaking as an outlet that blossomed from his love of photography.

“I grew up on the internet, I grew up downloading cracked versions of software, and I actually stole my first camera,” admits Asraf. “I kind of didn’t have a lot of money, I was kind of a shitty kid. But I always wanted to be a filmmaker. I was always the weird kid taking pictures; I was always behind a camera. But I never had a script to turn into a film. And we were best friends, so we were like, “We’re going to do this together. We’re going to make this a reality.”

Apart from select festival appearances, future release plans for the film have yet to be announced. Given how long it took its creators to see to fruition, the pair are in no rush to simply drop the film unceremoniously, or worse, let a distributor dictate how to market their film. Asraf and Swab are determined to roll out Let Me Make You a Martyr the same way it was shot—at their own pace, and without compromise.

“We just want to make sure we partner with the right people,” explains Asraf. “We want to make sure we have a certain level of control with the marketing aspects of the film, with the branding of the film, because we don’t want somebody to come on and exploit the Manson thing, or misrepresent the film in any way. That’s really important to us.”