The season finale of “Vamped Out” airs on Babelgum.com this Monday, May 17th, so acclaimed actor Kevin Pollak – who co-created, co-stars and singlehandedly directed the web series – talked to Crave Online about how the idea was born, why it became a web series, and what he learned about directing from Martin Scorsese and Bryan Singer that he didn’t learn from Ron Howard and Rob Reiner.
Crave Online: So “Vamped Out” concludes on Monday. How has the feedback been?
Kevin Pollack: The feedback’s been phenomenal, to be honest with you. Some of the best reviews of my career. I couldn’t be happier because it was the first time I was given this much creative freedom and control, so to find out that people responded as strongly as they did based on having all that freedom and control… But it also means you get all the blame and all the credit, so it’s been ridiculously rewarding. I’m utterly relieved and very, very happy.
Crave Online: I actually do really like the show. So many web series are really hit-and-miss. But I was watching it and wondering: You have such a long career, why was this the project that made you get behind the camera for a change?
Kevin Pollack: Well, I’ve doing this online talk show for a little over a year, and I’ve found the sort of wonderful world of the original content online to be some of the most rewarding aspects of the creative process. Of course, I haven’t quit my day job. I have a couple movies coming out. I’m starting one next week called The Big Year with Steve Martin and Jack Black and Owen Wilson, but what I experienced from my standup career – which is how I started, 30 years ago – was the sort of total freedom and control, all the credit/all the blame, that you have as a standup comedian. You know, you live and die by your own wits. And that sort of control over the content is the standup’s pride and often downfall. But, it’s that creative control of content that I thrived in, and have thrived in all these years, as a standup that I didn’t have ever as a gun-for-hire actor. I mean I’d written and produced for television, and television certainly is a writer’s medium, and I had a couple of opportunities to direct a feature but the material, I just didn’t respond to it.
Crave Online: What kind of material were you offered that wasn’t “Kevin Pollak” material?
Kevin Pollack: It was shortly after The Usual Suspects, when I suddenly had all the street cred as an independent film-backer, in the independent film world which has been thriving for several decades now, and with that kind of monumental presence with that movie I got a couple of offers for independent films to direct. And, you know, one of them was a crime caper and it was… really lame. And another one I think was a comedy, and you know that’s very subjective, because I maybe know too much about what I think is funny. It just wasn’t my sense of humor. And then with this one, when my partner Jason Antoon and I created the show, as soon as we first discussed the initial idea right in the very beginning I said, “I’m going to direct it, and I hope you’re okay with that.” And he was very excited about that. So it happened that way.
Crave Online: What was the original idea for “Vamped Out?” What was the starting point?
Kevin Pollack: The genesis was quite funny. My girlfriend and I were meeting Jason Antoon and his now-fiancé Seana Kofoed, who plays Marie in the series, and we were meeting them for lunch and on the way there and Jamie and I pass a billboard advertising the series “Vampire Diaries” with the hilarious and delightful tag line, “Love sucks.”
Crave Online: It most certainly does.
Kevin Pollack: Yeah. So we sat down bemoaning this, “Oh my God, another vampire series? Why…?!” And Jason Antoon said, “You know with all the Twilight and all the movies and all the books and all the TV shows out there about being vampires, could you imagine being a real vampire? But you couldn’t get hired to be one because you don’t fit the mold? You’re not skinny, or handsome and tired-looking?” And Jamie, my girlfriend says, “Oh my God, Kevin, that would be a great bit for your act!” And I said, “No no, that’s a web series.” I don’t know why, because I hadn’t thought about doing a web series. It wasn’t like I was searching for an idea for a web series, but it might have been because of my experience with the chat show that I came to realize that this idea was too good, and I didn’t want to hand it over to traditional media where they would add water to it and make it awful.
Crave Online: I must admit that one of the things I liked about the series was that even it was a vampire series, and as a result it does kind of cash in on the craze, it wasn’t, at least to start with, really about that. It was a Hollywood insider comedy. How much of that was based on anything you guys actually went through? It strikes me that the vampire craze pretty much just benefits attractive, skinny white people, so there’s not much difference…
Kevin Pollack: (Laughs) – None of us had experienced an auditions and frustrations trying to get into a vampire movie, but because the genesis of the idea was that he was this struggling actor who also happened to be a vampire, and he couldn’t get hired to be a vampire, literally the part he was born to play… Just the irony of that was so beautiful and pure. That immediately lent itself to doing a sort of, say, “Curb Your Enthusiasm…” One of the reviews was “’Curb Your Enthusiasm’ for the Undead.” To me, it’s never interesting enough to do a show just about the insider stuff of show business, and also it wasn’t interesting enough to do another vampire show. So this was an interesting twist to me and to Jason, and then it was about making sure the laughs came from story and not from jokes. You know? The laughs came from situations and character and insecurity, all very human as opposed to ever being jokey and slapsticky. There’s a little bit of slapstick…
Crave Online: The thing I liked was the way that Jason being a vampire affected some of the traditional relationships. Like with his agent. Usually in a comedy the agent talks down to the actor, but here the agent also seems a little scared of him.
Kevin Pollack: Yes, and I will say… You have not seen Episode 6 yet, I’m assuming that’s the case…
Crave Online: No, they kept it from me. I’m as much in the dark as anyone.
Kevin Pollack: Well, this Monday Episode 6 will be available… But I will just say that the payoff and cliffhanger of the first season is such that it really capitalizes on the point you just made, which is, you know, it’s all good and fun, it’s kind of funny, but his relationships are greatly affected by the fact that he may in fact be a vampire, you know?
Crave Online: So does that mean there’s going to be a second season?
Kevin Pollack: Part of the first season was always about, “Will he or won’t he end up being a real vampire?” Because the character I play, Elliot the filmmaker, is definitely filled with his own doubts. And so, we wrote the idea knowing in our minds that we wanted to do a second and third season, that’s why we chose to do it in 6-7 episode increments, which is kind of how they do British sitcoms like the original “Office.” There’s just, there’s something about it. Even a lot of the newer shows now, in the case of “Mad Men” and the ones done on HBO are at most 12 or 13 episodes. So yeah, we’ve broken the stories for the entire second season. The network seems mildly excited about the possibility. I can’t say anything more than that because, you know, until the ink is dry… But they’ve expressed interest, we’ve expressed interest, and hopefully we’ll come to terms and move forward.
Crave Online: Since this is your directorial debut and you’ve worked with so many great directors, did you learn anything in particular from any of them that helped out on “Vamped Out,” or was it all Kevin Pollak?
Kevin Pollack: I have learned a tremendous amount, and in fact studied them when I worked with them. They didn’t just inform my performance as an actor, but rather, I thought, as a storyteller and as a filmmaker and as a writer. The best of them, be it [Martin] Scorsese or Bryan Singer or certainly Barry Levinson… Rob Reiner and Ron Howard were a little more pro-active in terms of really knowing exactly what they wanted and trying desperately to get exactly what they wanted, but the first ones that I mentioned were much more open to whatever the actor’s interpretation was. Scorsese and Bryan Singer as well, very surprisingly. I knew they would be meticulous about their composition within the frame. I had no idea within that composition the actors would literally be free to do whatever they wanted, and that’s what happened, and that’s what I experienced. And that was surprising but also invigorating and challenging, to not only make them proud but to experiment and try to do different performances each take and that sort of thing. So we were very happy with the script but we were very clear with the actors, “Let’s get a couple of takes according to the script until we like it, and then you’re free to sort of really improvise and do what you’d like.” And we found that to be incredibly helpful and fruitful at times.
Crave Online: In the second-to-last episode, Episode 5, we found out that Eliot Finke had won the Academy Award for a documentary called Jesters of the Holocaust. Was that a dig at Jerry Lewis [who directed the famously unreleased The Day the Clown Cried, about a jester in the Holocaust], Roberto Benigni or just documentaries?
Kevin Pollack: You’re good. You’ve done some research or you just happen to be aware… It wasn’t an homage to that ridiculous Jerry Lewis effort, the truth was we needed to film the name of the documentary that he had directed for subtext and context, and then at some point it was decided that we would actually… We made a poster that didn’t end up being in the show. Our art department made a poster. And we knew that it there was going to be this cold opening moment of me, from 22 years ago – not me but my character – winning the Academy Award. So we needed a name of the movie, and Jesters of the Holocaust was the first suggestion by me when we were writing. And we just, we couldn’t beat it. It was the most absurd and the most wrong title possible, and we just couldn’t beat it as hard as we tried, so we went with that. And only after when we started to go with it was it brought to our attention, “You know there’s this Jerry Lewis movie where he played a kind of clown during the Holocaust.” “Oh f***!”
Crave Online: So you have a movie coming out in the summer that you co-wrote?
Kevin Pollack: I have a movie coming out in the summer, written and directed by George Gallo, a great filmmaker. He wrote Midnight Run and wrote and directed some other films, and that’s called Middle Men. It’s really exciting. It comes out in August from Paramount Pictures. And while we were at Cannes a year ago debuting that film, that writer/director George Gallo and I came up with an idea for a movie and wrote it together and he directed it called Columbus Circle. So it’s actually Middle Men that will be out this summer and then Columbus Circle will be out… It doesn’t have a release date yet because we’re still in post-production.
