\n<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat do Eminem\u2019s \u201cWithout Me,\u201d Lady Gaga\u2019s \u201cLoveGame\u201d and Taylor Swift\u2019s \u201cBad Blood\u201d have in common? They all have music videos directed by Joseph Kahn, who, after a seven-year hiatus, returns to cinemas with his new creature-feature comedy \u201cIck,\u201d in theaters now.<\/p>\n
\n\tKahn updates his Y2K swagger for a 2025 audience in his narrative comeback, which acts as a VFX-fueled meditation on nostalgia, disaster films and Gen Z\u2019s cultural dominance. Starring Brandon Routh, Malina Pauli Weissman, Mena Suvari, Harrison Cone and Taia Sophia, \u201cIck\u201d follows Hank, a high school it-boy turned high school janitor. As Hank and Eastbrook\u2019s graduating class are consumed by visions of an unfulfilling tomorrow, they largely (and hilariously) ignore an invasive alien entity known as the Ick, which threatens to destroy their futures altogether. <\/p>\n
\n\tDays before the wide release of \u201cIck\u201d on July 27, Kahn sat down with Variety<\/em> to discuss his return to feature filmmaking, the power of post-irony and how getting rights to Creed proved almost impossible. <\/p>\n \n\tI started thinking about \u201cIck\u201d right as \u201cBodied\u201d was released to the public. And I wanted to make a creature feature. That\u2019s all I knew. I worked with Sam Laskey, the writer, and we came together and made \u201cIck.\u201d The script was written by about 2019, and I planned to make it in 2020. But then COVID happened. The entire industry shut down for two years. I was originally planning to do this as a mainstream studio feature, and the business completely changed and kind of died and got twisted. My family actually moved out of L.A. for a bit. For two years, I was living in Texas, and then I decided I can\u2019t wait any longer. I think around 2022, I said, \u201cOkay, fine, I\u2019m going to start making this.\u201d I didn\u2019t want to make it with the masks and all that stuff. Because that adds about 25% to the budget. So I literally waited for COVID to be over before I made the movie.<\/p>\n \n\tI\u2019ve been making music videos for 35 years, so I got to see generation shifts. I saw Boomers to Millennials, Millennials to Gen Z, and I\u2019ve seen Gen Z now switching over to Gen A. I\u2019m fascinated by that process. On a certain level, \u201cIck\u201d was a response to my previous movie, \u201cDetention,\u201d which I made about 12 years ago. I remember the focus at one point was all about youth Millennials, how messed up they are, how they don\u2019t respect anything. Now they\u2019re saying the same thing about Gen Z. I know at a certain point, this is all just fear-mongering from one generation to another. So I thought it would be really fun to make a movie about a Millennial aging. When you do fish out of water stories, you exaggerate the water around them. So, from Hank\u2019s perspective, walking back into high school 25 years later, he\u2019s covered with the cultural context of Gen Z. That\u2019s where a lot of my \u201cwoke jokes\u201d come in, because that\u2019s the perception of a Millennial to that world. He\u2019s still clinging on to these old songs in his old life and his old girlfriend. The movie, on a certain level, is about moving on.<\/p>\n \n\tI call it post-irony, and that\u2019s my sense of humor. What I mean by post-irony is that you don\u2019t know if it\u2019s ironic or not. I think the studios have to signal to everyone that they are being funny and don\u2019t trust the audience to make that decision. And frankly, there\u2019s a lot of the audience that can\u2019t make that decision, because it takes a certain mentality and certain sophistication. The studios aren\u2019t in the business of catering to that particular audience; they need the biggest, lowest common denominator possible. Which I completely understand, but it does cut off a certain level of entertainment for certain types of people. These are people who have seen a lot of these movies and can take a little bit more complication. If there\u2019s a joke where I don\u2019t know if that joke was serious or not, to me, that\u2019s a beautiful sweet spot. There are certain types of winking at the audience that you don\u2019t know if I winked at you. To me, that\u2019s the thrilling part, because you decide whether you think it\u2019s funny or not, and you get to decide what the politics and the meaning of all that stuff are.<\/p>\n \n\tPeople used to always accuse me of having an MTV style. But here\u2019s the thing, I\u2019ve been making music videos for 35 years, which is pretty much since the beginning of MTV. So, do I have an MTV style? Or does MTV have my style? I do have an editorial rhythm and a way that I place the camera, and this is simply the way I tell stories. I feel like every generation is more attuned to my language on a weird level. Gen Z speaks my language a lot more than my own generation did, because Gen Z grew up with editing tools and camera phones. The funny thing about the Gen Z audience, a filmmaker from their point of view isn\u2019t just someone that points a camera at someone, they point it at themselves. They spent their entire lives making films. So that sort of editorial rhythm is something that\u2019s very natural for a person that\u2019s grown up with these tools. For some audiences, this film will come off way too fast, but I truly believe that for other audiences it will be natural and rewarding.<\/p>\n \n\tI was thinking about how the modern generation deals with tragedy, like big tragedies. When you actually watch it happen, the world freaks out for two weeks and says, \u201cEverything has changed.\u201d And yes, things do change, but ultimately, things go back to normal. People still live their lives. Now, that can either be an incredible act of stupidity or it\u2019s an act of survival. I don\u2019t know which. I\u2019m a filmmaker. I\u2019m not a sociologist or a historian, so the best thing I can do is satirize this stuff and have fun with it. I don\u2019t even attempt to give you the answers. I\u2019m just giving you the emotional simulation of what it\u2019s like to live in that particular world. That\u2019s what \u201cIck\u201d is. \u201cIck\u201d is a simulation of how we deal with monsters in our own age. That was written in 2018. It was not a reaction to COVID. When COVID happened, I had to go back and add a few more COVID jokes in there, because that\u2019s the elephant in the room, and you need to confront it. Back in the day, even up to 9\/11 for the most part, if something big and crazy happened, there would be a unifying element to society. Not today. That\u2019s part of the satire of \u201cIck.\u201d When the monster attacks, we don\u2019t get along; we grow apart.<\/p>\n \n\tDefinitely \u201cWar of the Worlds.\u201d I would say there\u2019s \u201cThe Blob.\u201d I would say \u201cThe Thing.\u201d It\u2019s a fusion of a lot of different things. The Ick is a very interesting creature because it has elements of Dracula. It has elements of zombies. It\u2019s a super monster. It\u2019s an amalgamation of them.<\/p>\n \n\tThe obvious thing about the VFX is the Ick VFX. But there\u2019s a lot of minor things that people will not realize are VFX that helped make this movie for a very small cost. Like, it\u2019s immensely small. If I made this movie through a studio, it\u2019s a $100 million movie. A lot of that has to do with my ability to apply visual effects in ways that people would never expect. Then I shot it mostly on real sets, which is a huge advantage these days. Because I shot in real towns and real gyms and real high schools, it gives it a much more complex look, because you\u2019re not suddenly going into a virtual world. I hate to give it away, but there\u2019s a whole sequence in \u201cIck\u201d that\u2019s green screen. For instance, the one with the car flipped upside down, nothing is real. That\u2019s a CG car, that\u2019s a CG exterior, that\u2019s CG everything. And that\u2019s an eight-minute sequence. If I had to really flip a car upside down, that\u2019s a safety issue. A car can collapse and kill your actors, so you\u2019re bracing it with all this steel and things that we can\u2019t afford. So all I did was I hung two chairs upside down, and they would get in them. And then the rest is all CG.<\/p>\n \n\tI actually did not go into the movie intending to put in this monster of a soundtrack. I wrote it thinking, just tell a great story. But then, as I told that story, and as [Hank] was pining for his girlfriend from the 2000s, I realized this music is going to be important. It was actually a bit of a debate in my head, because the music that he would listen to is pop punk. A pop punk soundtrack combined with a creature feature? How does that make any sense? Pop punk is a depressing subject matter done in an extremely happy way. And I was like, \u201cOkay, does that even make sense in a horror film?\u201d But I was like, \u201cWell, it\u2019s a funny movie.\u201d So that it essentially turns it into \u201cAmerican Pie\u201d, interspersed with my \u201cWalking Dead\u201d thing. I think it\u2019s weird, but, you know, that\u2019s never stopped me before.<\/p>\n \n\tCreed. It was the hardest<\/em>. It was written in the script. It was an actual plot point. As I wrote it, I sent my music supervisor, Bud Carr, on a quest to get Creed and track Scott Stapp down. Up until the week before we premiered at Toronto, we did not know if we had it. Only in the last minute did we get that right. I was prepared to, like, reshoot the scene and say Nickelback or something, but I couldn\u2019t find any band that really had that sort of cultural impact as when she says \u201cCreed.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What do Eminem\u2019s \u201cWithout Me,\u201d Lady Gaga\u2019s \u201cLoveGame\u201d and Taylor Swift\u2019s \u201cBad Blood\u201d have in common? They all have music videos directed by Joseph Kahn, who, after a seven-year hiatus, returns to cinemas with his new creature-feature comedy \u201cIck,\u201d in theaters now. Kahn updates his Y2K swagger for a 2025 audience in his narrative comeback,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12783,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[6437,2107,596,6434,6435,6436,283],"class_list":{"0":"post-12782","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-crafting","9":"tag-director","10":"tag-disaster","11":"tag-ick","12":"tag-joseph","13":"tag-kahn","14":"tag-movie"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12782\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n\t\t\u201cIck\u201d is your first feature since \u201cBodied\u201d in 2018. Run me through your seven-year journey of returning to the feature space. <\/strong>\t<\/h5>\n
\n\t\tAesthetics and themes surrounding nostalgia are defining characteristics of your filmmaking. How do you view nostalgia as a storytelling tool and a source for visual inspiration for \u201cIck?\u201d<\/strong>\t<\/h5>\n
\n\t\tCamp is another recurring element of your films, and like nostalgia, it\u2019s having a big moment. But when the studios give their take on winking irony, it often devolves into an eye-roll fest. What\u2019s your key to keeping the camp unexpected and entertaining without going overboard?<\/strong>\t<\/h5>\n
\n\t\tThe film moves at such an incredible pace. What was the mentality behind the film\u2019s aggressive editing style? <\/strong>\t<\/h5>\n
\n\t\tIt\u2019s interesting you wrote \u201cIck\u201d in 2018 because it feels so in-step with 2025. What\u2019s behind the satirical angle of the movie?<\/strong>\t<\/h5>\n
\n\t\tWhat were your cinematic inspirations for the look of the Ick?<\/strong>\t<\/h5>\n
\n\t\tYou\u2019ve used VFX across most of your directorial work, and it feels like that comes to a head in \u201cIck\u201d in subtle and outwardly obvious ways. How does your special effects usage differ in this film from your past works?\t<\/h5>\n
\n\t\tThe soundtrack for \u201cIck\u201d sounds like a greatest<\/span> hits compilation of the late \u201990s-early aughts. Did you meticulously select the songs, or did you just throw together a list of your favorites from the era?<\/strong>\t<\/h5>\n
\n\t\tWas there a track that was particularly difficult to get? <\/strong>\t<\/h5>\n