Few filmmakers are as exciting as Joseph Kahn, who brought his horror-comedy movie Ick to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), starring Brandon Routh, Malina Pauli Weissman and Mena Suvari. Revolutionizing the music video space for decades with videos like Britney Spears’ “Toxic” and Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do,” Kahn is doing the same with his feature films, leaning into truly original storytelling.
Ick is set in an American town called Eastbrook. Back in the 2000s Hank (Routh) was a football star with his cheerleader girlfriend Staci (Suvari). After suffering an injury, Hank’s football dreams are far behind him. He’s now a science teacher at his old high school, but still listens to his favourite 2000s songs on his MP3 while pining over his ex-girlfriend.
For decades this substance called the “Ick” has been growing in Eastbrook, but most of the inhabitants aren’t too concerned about the threat of this thing slowly taking over the town. The only people who see the Ick as a real threat are Hank and his student Grace (Weissman), Staci’s daughter.
“I liked the idea in the setup of Hank and the down on his luck aspect of him, … but to play a new, fresh character, it’s certainly a character that I haven’t played really this before,” Routh told Yahoo Canada in Toronto. “This has that nostalgic but also fresh feel that is unique.”
The concept of Ick has been with Kahn for about 20 years and there was something about the unexplained nature of this creature that stayed in the filmmaker’s mind.
“I love the idea that it was unexplained in my head, it was just a visual, and then I love the idea of taking the idea of an unexplained thing and making a story out of it, where you still don’t explain it,” Kahn said. “That sort of threat, overtime it started off as a concept, but then as I developed it, it felt a little bit more like human nature.”
“When [you’re] younger, you think you have all the answers. You think that you have an answer for every single thing. … At a certain age, you accept the fact that you’re never going understand things. So the Ick itself, on a weird level, is a metaphor of growing older. That sort of fatigue of not being able to really understand things, and how that can sort of be a threat.”
‘Doing music videos I’ve raised different generations of kids’
As you may expect from Kahn, the music used in Ick is perfectly synched to the story, with all the hits we listened to in the 2000s.
“Hank’s life is a music video, he was a 2000s football player in high school, and he got stunted, he’s a teacher now, but his heyday was in the 2000s,” Kahn explained. “He listens to those same songs. He’s been listening to those songs for 20 years. So we’re just hearing a cycle of his life.”
“So on a certain level, when you hear those songs it is nostalgia, but that’s the entire point. Hank lives in nostalgia. Hank lives in the past.”
While many filmmakers shy away from specificity in music, striving to create something that will be “timeless,” Kahn approach is to not shy away from the fact that this is a 2024 movie that references the 2000s.
“Part of this is commentary on the social fabric of what’s happening right now, what was happening then, and the two cultures kind of colliding in a way,” Kahn said. “On a weird level, doing music videos I’ve raised different generations of kids. I’ve made videos for Gen X. I’ve made videos for Millennials, and I’ve made videos for Gen Z, and I’ve seen the swap over of culture.”
“So the exploration of that fine line between Millennial and Gen Z with these songs is fun for me. And it all boils down to one line that [Grace] says in the middle of the movie, ‘Who the f—k is Creed?’ All these songs mean something until she says that line and all the songs mean something else after.”
The ‘genius’ of Joseph Kahn
While Kahn continues to push the boundaries with his maximalist filmmaking, the cast of Ick was also quick to praise his storytelling and how he works on set, including having Kahn as the camera operator, wearing knee pads on set so he could put the camera on the ground.
“Joseph is a force. I feel like he’s absolutely brilliant, I consider him a genius,” Suvari said. “He knows exactly what he wants. He’s able to communicate that extremely well in a few words. I consider myself very technical as well and so it just felt like the easiest communication, seamless language, to be able to work with him.”
“There’s many directors who I’ve felt emotionally disconnected from, because they’re so stuck in the technical aspects of things and they don’t know how to personally be there for you, and Joseph is everything in one. It’s truly exceptional, he’s truly one of a kind. .. There were moments where we had our editor Chancler [Haynes] actively on set, and Brandon and I would be in a gymnasium shooting a shot, and then we had the ability to literally run across the gymnasium to see it, edited immediately. There were so many things that I experienced working on this film that I’d never experienced in my career.”
‘I feel a little sad about the state of movies right now’
In a time when most movies that get released are remakes, or stories that have been successful in other mediums, Kahn is still striving to give us entertainment that truly stands on its own.
“I feel a little sad about the state of movies right now, but I’m optimistic, because I’m obviously still fighting the battle to try to make movies I think are good,” Kahn said. “One of the things I feel really sad about is that everybody has an expectation of knowing everything you need to know about a movie, like a product, before you go into the movie. … You need to know is what you can so you feel like you didn’t waste your time, because we have so many choices.”
“So the problem is, when you have so many choice and you have like thousands of new things, what makes you want to watch something? Very few people go, ‘I know nothing about this and I’m going to accept it.’ Most people go, ‘This is a comedy, so I will expect my comedy. I’m going to pay for that, and I want my comedy for the next two hours.’ Most people go, ‘I want a horror film, and I need to know exactly what type of horror it is, and exactly what type of scare I’m going to get.’ … So it’s an exchange, and that is awful.”
Kahn recalled previous times, like in the 1980s, when genres were being blended together and created for the first time, like Ghostbusters or E.T.
“What I want to do with Ick is create that magic by not letting you know what genre it is,” Kahn said. “If you want to walk into this movie and you have an expectation that it’s a very specific genre, it will never satisfy you, but if you have an open mind and you have an adventurous spirit and you’re open to new signals, this is the movie for you.”