Fantasia Film Festival 2020: An Interview with Quinn Armstrong, Director of ‘Survival Skills’

Quinn Armstrong’s Survival Skills has proved to be an audience favorite at this year’s Fantasia Film Festival. A parody of police training videos of the 1980s, Armstrong’s film delves deeper into the outmoded teachings of these officers and presents a much more nuanced look into the police training construct as a fresh-faced and naive officer, Jim desperately tries to do the right thing.

I had the great pleasure of interviewing Quinn Armstrong about his covertly complex film. We discussed everything from destroying VCRs, Stacy Keach, 80s satanic panic, and how he views his film during America’s current protests against police brutality.

Sean Coates: As a creative, how have you dealt with life under COVID-19? Are you being productive? Are you procrastinating? Has it stifled or stimulated your creativity and work ethic?

Quinn Armstrong: As far as day-to-day stuff, if you hadn’t told me, I might not have noticed for a while. I spend most of my time inside working on stuff. You can see how pale I am and you can get a sense of how little I go outside (laughs). But it’s been fine for that. I’m very lucky I have my own space, I have my cats here, I have my editing setup so I can work on stuff, so in that sense, it’s been really nice. But it’s interesting to think about what this is gonna mean in terms of people who are making stuff right now.

I feel like the influence of COVID as an idea is going to be more stifling than COVID itself is for creative people. I’ve been talking to friends who are pitching tons of plague TV shows and plague movies and all this stuff and I just… It’s just a wave of ideas that are just pointing out obvious things that are happening right now. In that sense, it has been a little stifling, but it’s been fine for me. I’ve been catching up on movie watching and all that stuff.

SC: Survival Skills began as a short film. Take us through how it developed into a feature.

QA: The feature actually predates the short as an idea. The short we made largely as a proof of concept, to attract funding and investors, but it was also largely made to get Stacy Keach onboard. Essentially what I did is that we didn’t have money to go through a whole casting process and go out to Hollywood and the agencies and do the whole thing, so I paid a casting director $300 just to get a letter to Stacy’s manager and make sure he reads it. That was it. I’d seen Stacy in a play at the Lincoln Center in New York called ‘Other Desert Cities’ that I had also worked on in Seattle when it was in development because I used to be a stage actor for a long time.

In my letter, I talked about the similarities between that character which was this sort of Reagan stand-in older actor kind of guy and the chief in this movie. I sent the letter and heard nothing, then maybe a month later his manager was like ‘send us the script’. That was the entire email, just ‘send us the script’ and ‘send’ wasn’t even capitalized. So we sent the script and then heard nothing and then three months later we just got a single sentence back again that was ‘Stacy likes it’. And we were like ‘What does that mean?’ (laugh). But he got on board and we talked and had a great time. But for people watching through Fantasia, the short is available as bonus content and you can really see that the short was a learning process for us. Particularly in regards to the VHS effect, we used in the short was a digital effect and one of the things we learned is that we can’t use a digital effect.

SC: Is that because it does not look as good?

QA: So for those who don’t know, the entire movie is presented as a mid-80s police training video. So authenticity is really important because… I mean, I don’t want to give too much away, but we move past the training video thing pretty quickly. It becomes something else very quickly so we have to establish authenticity very fast. That’s one reason we wanted to use the VHS effect is just because it looks correct, it looks sort of analog and warmer. The other reason was it creates obstacles for the use of static and tape wrinkles as a storytelling device. If I’m going digital, I tell a VFX artist or do it myself exactly what static, exactly where it goes, exactly what tape wrinkle, and at what rate it goes down the screen.

But what we did instead was shot the movie digitally, we cut it digitally and then took the final movie and put it on VHS. And I bought every single VCR in the greater Los Angeles area from every Goodwill and every thrift store there was. I had about 40 or 50 of them in my apartment at one point.

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READ THE REST OF THIS INTERVIEW ON OUR WEBSITE: https://moviebabble.com/2020/09/01/fantasia-film-festival-2020-an-interview-with-quinn-armstrong-director-of-survival-skills/