People know I make movies for nothing but the love of it. It's something I have always had a passion for, and I can see myself doing nothing else but making movies for the rest of my life. But how did it all start? Below is a truncated timeline of the important moments that lead up to, and including, my first feature film: "Wrath of the Undead"
THE GENESIS OF A FILM MAKER
In 1987, my Mom took me to the cinema for the very first time in my life. The movie was "Little Shop of Horrors", and it was a moment I'll never forget... I don't recall ever seeing a crowd so big as we cued to buy the tickets. Posters so huge they seemed to be the size of a house stretched from floor to ceiling. The smell of popcorn was thick in the air. Kids ran around screaming with excitement. The atmosphere in the lobby of the theatre was intoxicating. To this day, whenever I set foot in a cinema, familiarity and nostalgia wash over me and I am taken back to that moment in the line with my Mom, waiting to see my first film in a cinema. It's a buzz I've never been able to feel with anything else, I really can't describe it. We entered the theatre, and the lights went down. The biggest screen on Earth opened up before me, and the audio system crackled to life. It was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. By the time I left the cinema, I knew I wanted to see my name up on that screen. I wanted to walk out with the crowd and hear them enthusiastically discussing a film I had made. From that day on, I knew that making films would be the only thing that I could ever want to do. But before I began on that journey, a few more films had to cement this thought within me. When I was a kid, my Dad used to take us to the video store. We could pick anything we wanted to watch, my Dad was always cool with that. If he felt something would be too strong for us to handle at that age, we would be told we couldn't get it. But if he knew the film and was familiar with it enough to tell us to look away during the more adult moments, he'd let us rent the tape. I remember watching "The Terminator" for the first time with him and my brother, and we weren't allowed to watch the scene where Arnold Schwarzenegger cuts out his damaged eye with a scalpel. But later on, my Dad was fixing us lunch and forgot to warn us of the key sex scene towards the end. He walked in at the tail-end of it and was immediately mad at himself, but I didn't know what the hell was going on in that part of the movie - I didn't know what sex was. I just wanted to see an evil robot blow something up. "To hell with this romantic crap" was my attitude towards it. But then, one weekend, I discovered "Return of the Jedi" sitting on the video rack... from that weekend onwards, and for the better part of around 6 months, all I would do was rent "Jedi". It got to the point where the guy behind the counter was just giving us the tape for free, it was clear that I didn't have my own copy of the film and my Dad was paying a small fortune in rental fees every other Saturday on it. I wasn't really familiar with the other "Star Wars" movies at that age, but this one had an enchanting effect on me. I knew there was no such thing as a tribe of talking teddy bears, but the Ewoks really captured my imagination. How could something that doesn't exist be walking around with that Indiana Jones guy in a forest right before my eyes? I still feel that magic of the Endor scenes whenever I see the movie. I eventually realized that through the medium of film, I could imagine anything I wanted and I could share my imagination with others. The fire within me began to burn even more. I just had to be a film director! Later in life, I saw the films "Evil Dead 2" and "Pulp Fiction". Two very different films, but both drew a line in the sand for me; I was going to make movies.
THE FIRST, EARLY STEPS
It's 1991, and the day of my Mom's second marriage. A family member loaned us a video camera to capture the moments and memories of the day. During the reception afterwards, and 20 minutes into the wedding video, the camera was given to me after hours of me begging to play with it... this was the very first time that I had ever got my hands on a video camera, and right from the first frame that I am in control of the thing, you could hear me off-camera barking commands at the other kids enjoying the day as I moved the camera around erratically. At 9 years old, I was already displaying an innate knack for camera angles and frame composition. I don't think my Mom ever finished watching the rest of the wedding tape as after half an hour it rapidly descended into puerile, childish antics - but had anyone been brave enough to make it through the tape until the last 5 minutes of the video, they'd have seen something that is now sadly lost to time... my first attempt at making a film - an Indiana Jones movie, shot with friends in the parking lot of the party venue. A few months later, we got our own video camera. I was forbidden to touch it - this was back in the day when video cameras were expensive as hell, and I was still just a clumsy kid, loving every second of throwing my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles down the stairs just to see what would happen. There was no guarantee that the thing would be returned in one piece if I was to use it. We went to Disney World in Florida around this time, and Mom and my stepfather would be shooting the holiday video. I remember becoming frustrated several times when they asked me and my brother to do certain things, or act in a certain way. Somehow I just knew that it would be more visually stimulating if a different approach was taken to what they wanted to achieve, but hey, what did I know? I remember watching the 2 hours of tape they'd filmed on television in the living room at home after we'd got back. Every now and then, my stepfather would turn to my Mom and ask why she'd filmed something we'd be looking at on the screen, or my Mom would question when he'd shot that particular moment because neither of them could remember doing it. Truth is, when their backs were turned and the camera was foolishly left out of its bag, I was secretly snatching it up in my hands and shooting whatever I could. I remember one part where I told my brother to watch "Family Fortunes" on the television, and I shot a few seconds of him staring at the television on the bed, while I was on my knees taping from a low angle. I stopped recording, and did a close up for a few seconds of the television. Next, I stood up, and did a shot that showed the television and the rest of the room behind it before panning as carefully and slowly as I could to my brother, who was still watching the show. This confused the hell out of my Mom when she saw it because you could hear her and my stepfather in the bathroom talking during these shots. But this brief, throw-away sequence was an important moment for me. Without realizing what I was doing, I was learning how to film a scene, including different camera angle set ups and editing the scene in-camera with each take. Eventually, as I grew older and marginally more responsible with my property, I was allowed to shoot things like barbecues or holidays under the watch of my Mom with the camera. I began to make short films with my brother and step-siblings on weekends. They'd have no beginning or ending, and would never be longer than 2 or 3 minutes in length, as after an hour everyone else was bored and doing other things. But I loved every second of it.
LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION!
After my Mom separated from her second husband, we moved into a new neighborhood not far from where we'd lived previously. My brother and I immediately hit it off with the kids next door, and before long, I was hosting movie marathons at my house for them and my friends. Everyone had the latest blockbusters at home, but I would be showing movies no one our age at that point had ever heard of. I was heavily into horror movies, especially the low-brow, high-gore ones. This was before the days of easy internet access, so I would go through all my tapes and memorize who starred in which movie, and who had made it. Each one of these movie nights would have a theme - John Carpenter was a favorite of mine, and so I did a night dedicated to his work. By the time we'd finished watching "The Fog" and I was getting ready to put on "Halloween", half my audience had gone home, either scared to death or bored beyond belief. I hadn't seen "Halloween" yet, and I was excited to watch a new film. But to keep the rest of my guests in their seats, I put on "Big Trouble In Little China" instead, one of Carpenter's more action-packed movies. The crowd ate it up, and so I was determined to end the night with "Halloween". Fifteen minutes later I was on the couch alone in an empty room. But what a movie to end the evening on! I suddenly knew horror movies were achievable with little money as I had read in a magazine that "Halloween" cost very little to make. I wanted to make a horror film. The next day, I wrote a few lines in a notebook that were the plot of my movie - a monster that stole peoples souls if you locked eyes with it was going to terrify my friends. I stole the video camera from my Mom's closet, got the kids next door along with my brother and a friend who'd come over out of the blue to return some comic books, and we ran off to the playing fields to make my movie. I didn't have a monster costume, so I would use the camera as a point-of-view for the monster attacks. When they looked in the lens, they would die. We spent the whole day shooting an hours-worth of tape. We ran home, excited to see what we'd made. Watching the tape back was horrible - it was completely disjointed, three takes would be done without a break in-between, and I could feel everyone's hearts sink. We were so proud of what we'd done, but it was utterly unwatchable. Everyone left for home. How could I fix this? While we watched the tape, we connected the camera to the television through the VCR, and recorded onto a VHS tape all the footage we had shot. "What if I just recorded the good stuff?" I thought. I began experimenting. A few days later, I called everyone over to watch the film again. This time, I showed them a VHS tape with "OUR HOROR MOVEE" scrawled on the spine. Spelling never was my strong point. After days of recording segments of the master tape bit by bit onto the second generation tape, I had shoddily edited an hour of footage into a 14 minute film. It was heavily flawed, naturally, but no one could believe we were watching the same stuff we'd hated just days before. We loved every second of it. A week later, I showed them the film again, this time on a third generation tape. There was none of the original audio as I had removed the audio cables from the first VCR going into the second VCR that I was recording the new copy on. I had replaced them with ones coming from a CD player, and I looped the "Halloween" theme tune over and over instead. Reactions this time were mixed, but not only had I learned how to edit, but I had also learned how to add soundtracks to my films. The tapes, both the second and the third generation copies, were passed around at our schools, and before I knew it, every kid we knew wanted in on the action. I now had a pool of willing actors... what was I going to do with them?
THE RISE AND FALL OF SUCCESS
Over the next two year, I had shot and cut together over 40 short films. Like all my work before this point, all these are now sadly lost and will never be seen again. I was still stealing the camera behind my Mom's back, and whatever pocket money I could save, I would buy my own tapes for the camera so that she would never know what I was up to. The majority of the films were influenced by my childhood heroes; Indiana Jones, Batman, and James Bond were staple characters in almost every film we made. I'd abandoned my desire for horror film making as none of my friends were really feeling the material I wanted to create. To avoid a mass exodus of my potential cast, I bent to their will and made films for them. Some I was happy with, but others not so much. I loved things I had made myself, but the ones that others wanted to make felt different. Arguments would frequently break out between us as we debated the best way to make the films, and the quality suffered. When other people wanted to use the camera, I could always tell when someone else was filming, and it just never sat well with me. I've never been a dominant person, and at that age, I was always rolling over for people and letting them do what they wanted instead of putting my foot down and telling them how it was going to be. After a few months, I was unable to reach people to be in my films. Demand at school for my stuff was dried up, and I was left with no actors to make my films with, and no audience to enjoy the films with. I began to make films with just myself in them, balancing the camera on stacks of video tapes to hold it steady while I performed in front of it. They were always so depressing to watch - either it was just psychological, or I had subconsciously written the material that way, but a feeling of isolation and loneliness permeated these films. I eventually stopped making fiction films, and instead, began filming what I now recognize as documentary films. My friends were into hanging out with girls by this age, and having PC gaming sessions at each others houses. I would take my camera over, and without joining in on the action, I would capture footage of parties I didn't want to be at, or filming people bash their keyboards with frustration, often doing interviews in-between with the people there. I would cut them together and give to people as mementos of the events. But gratitude for my work wasn't received, and I began to gradually become more frustrated, both as a film maker, and with my friends for no longer sharing their lives with me as we had before. Distancing myself from them, I began to read magazines and books on film making, and eventually discovered the internet to help me learn about the ins and outs of the movie business. I'd also watch more and more films, sometimes watching the same film over and over the same day just to try and gain an understanding of how they'd made it. This was before the advent of DVD, and making-of material was scarce. It was around this time in my life that I moved to The Netherlands. The passion of film making was beginning to dwindle, and without high hopes to continue with it, I left my life up to that point behind me and I began a new one.
RE-BIRTH, AND THE DAWN OF A NEW ERA
On the morning of my 21st birthday, I woke up to find my Mom in the kitchen cooking breakfast. She slid a small, neatly-wrapped package roughly the size of a matchbox across the counter towards me. I opened it. It was a Mini DV format tape. I shrugged - what the hell was I to do with this? I took my breakfast and went into the living room. On the couch was another wrapped present, only it was significantly larger than the last one. I pushed it aside and I ate my food. Mad, my Mom commanded me to open the present. I sighed, and unwrapped it. And there it was - my first ever video camera. I couldn't believe it... second only to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Sewer Playset that my Dad bought me for my 7th Christmas, this was the coolest gift I'd ever been given. I was hyped! This was mine, and I could do whatever I wanted with it. At the age of 21 and living in a new country, my friends were almost all colleagues from the places I worked, and the majority of them were a lot older than I was. The moment I saw that camera beneath the wrapping paper, I was fired up more than ever to make films. But how could I talk a bunch of people in their late 20's, early 30's into being my actors? I brought it up in conversation from time to time, but no one really listened. I had a new hobby at the time, collecting action figures. I started to make films with them, doing voices and moving them around with my hands. I guess you could call those films crude animation, but when I wasn't making these films in my bedroom, I was always filming wherever I went. I'd see potential everywhere for a new film. I never knew what I was going to see next, but I was always prepared to film it. A few years later, a friend of mine loaned me a Mac with Final Cut Pro installed on it, an editing suite for digital video. I began capturing my Mini DV tapes onto the hard drive, and without education in the software, I gradually cut together music montage videos, holiday videos, and stuff for friends. Response to this material was tremendous. Everyone loved the stuff I was making, and before I knew it, I was being asked to shoot parties and events for people. I gained confidence to talk about making films again, and with the editing jobs I had done, people could see the potential within me to make them. Suddenly, selling the idea of making short films with other people seemed like a compelling prospect to those that were interested, and I started to make movies again. None of them were ever finished however due to the commitments of families and careers, so I would cut them into short scenes or sequences and put them on YouTube. They were always well-received, and the internet was bringing my work to people globally. Feedback on the videos was immense from people all over the world. I was now more determined than ever... I wanted to make a real film - feature-length, properly scripted and planned out, and with proper equipment. Toby Hagen, Film Director was here to stay.
"LE CHAT EN PLASTIQUE" & KATAROO PRODUCTIONS
The first ever film that I had envisioned, planned, and executed was a short called "Le Chat En Plastique". The concept of the film was inspired by a casual chat with a French friend of mine. She had shown her sister one of my comedy videos on YouTube while seeing family back in France, but her sister was completely unimpressed. When my friend told me this, I vowed that the next thing I made would make her sister smile. Another close friend, also French, owned a cat made of plastic that we used to have all kinds of fun with. I began to formulate a story - the film would be about the trials and tribulations of a misanthropic plastic cat. It would be in the French language so I could sell the movie to its audience as my first "foreign" film, and would be filmed in black & white in a homage to film noir and French New Wave cinema. I asked yet another French friend of mine to provide the voice of the plastic cat. I would write the script, built primarily on sentences that would mean absolutely nothing, and then my friend would translate them into French. The result was perfect - if you could speak French, the film was completely surreal. If you couldn't, it sounded really impressive when you watched it. I filmed the first half of the movie in a park. In this part of the film, the cat would be thinking about life and the meaning of it. The second part I filmed in the city, and I appeared in the film myself as the idiot human that takes the plastic cat into his home. For such a short film, it took several weeks to make as I had hardly any time to dedicate to the project. But once it was done, I was thrilled. I couldn't wait to show it to my friend, the owner of the plastic cat. I had created a title card for the film, along with end credits. But I had no real stamp on the film, no mark to indicate it was mine. I needed a production company name just to add some authenticity to the whole thing. Over at my friend's house, we were looking up some song lyrics for a French song I liked and that I asked him to translate it. In the chorus, the singer is roaring some noises, and whoever had written the lyrics had also been determined to spell these roaring sounds. I loved one of these spellings in particular, and after respelling it into a more catchy-looking way, the word "Kataroo" was born. It meant nothing, but I loved it. I felt this was apt, given my film career up until that point - ultimately, the films I had made meant little to anyone except me. And I loved them. Having decided on "Kataroo Productions" being the name that I would put in the film, I ran home and quickly added it to the film credits. The next day, I emailed a link to the film over to the owner of the plastic cat, and I could hear her watching it. I was nervous as hell, and watched it online too in an attempt to see if her laughter was matching with the humor of the film. But I noticed to my horror that the first part of the film was still the footage from the rough-cut! I'd trimmed it down, but when I made the final cut before posting it on the internet, I must have included an older version. The pace was slow, and I was terrified that my friend would stop the film before the arguably more interesting second half even began. But after it ended, she actually applauded. She stood up and clapped her hands with a cheer! My first ever standing ovation! She ran over and gave me a huge hug, she couldn't thank me enough for it. I had made it for her, and she had loved it. That was all I could have ever hoped for. But then it got out, and more and more people started to watch it, curious to see what I had made. Compliments flew in, and before I knew it, I was being asked by people if they could be in my next film! Amazing! It was like going back to being a teenager, stealing my Mom's camera and making films with my friends. At this time, there were job cuts being announced at the place I worked, and I knew that if I was going to get some severance pay out of the situation, I was going to put it all into making my first feature-film. In the last few months before I was made redundant, I began to dream more and more about what my film would be like. I had ideas, but nothing I could really sink my teeth into. What the hell was I going to make??
"WRATH OF THE UNDEAD", AND OF THINGS TO COME
I knew I wanted to make a horror movie. But what kind? I toyed with loads of concepts for a horror movie, but I felt almost everything I came up with was beyond my scope at the present time. Most of the ideas were zombie films. I've always been a huge fan of zombie films, since before they became "cool". Should I try and re-invent the wheel? Should I tread a path that others have had great success with? I couldn't come up with a single treatment that I was satisfied enough with to turn into a film. So I scrapped zombie films altogether, and instead opted for my other favorite horror genre - the psycho slasher. After a while, it was becoming clear that none of these ideas were turning out how I'd hoped either. Then one day it hit me... Why not a horror film with both zombies AND psychos?? It made sense somehow, and I immediately found that I couldn't get the ideas for it out of my head quick enough. Over the course of 2 months, I wrote the first draft for "Wrath of the Undead". The story would be about a group of friends getting captured by psychos and right when everything looks bleak for their captives, the corpses of the psycho's former victims rise from their graves with a hunger for flesh and revenge. At the time of writing, the film is just weeks away from shooting. I've never had a child, but I can only compare this feeling of excitement within me right now as expecting the birth of my first baby. I couldn't be happier right now. And this is just the beginning of things to come! I'm already working on treatments for both a sequel and a prequel to "Wrath of the Undead", and a friend of mine and his writing partner are working on a script for a comedy that I could well be filming some day soon. On top of all this, there are prospects for directing music videos for bands that friends are members of, a documentary about the organization of a special event happening soon, including coverage of the event itself. But before any of this can happen, I want to get this movie made and out there for the world to enjoy!
And that's about it! This has been the story of how film set my world on fire, and how I shall just add more and more fuel to the flames for the rest of my life. I hope you liked it. To all other film makers out there, I salute you. It's a hard road to walk, but stand strong and forge on through. Good luck with your projects... I'd love to see them!
Thanks for reading,
Toby Hagen
