Mike Mendez kicked my ass a few weeks ago. It wasn’t so bad really, it was just at horror trivia. It turns out that the director of Big Ass Spider – a film I reviewed extremely favorably at last years SXSW Film Festival – knows a lot about horror movies, and frequents the same monthly event that I do, and that he’s better than me. Well, obviously. He directed Big Ass Spider, a witty and genuine horror comedy starring Greg Grunberg as Alex, a Western Exterminator who teams up with a security guard named Jose, played by Lombardo Boyar, to fight a giant spider rampaging through Los Angeles, and win the heart of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s” Clare Kramer.
With Big Ass Spider now available on DVD and Blu-ray, I took the opportunity to congratulate Mike Mendez on his horror trivia win (which I will not bore you with by transcribing it) and ask him some pointed questions about the film’s production and the future of the potential franchise, which could include Big Ass Cockroaches, Big Ass Ants, Big Ass Centipede or, if Mendez has his way, a Big Ass TV series.
Find out more in this, my interview with Mike Mendez, exclusively at CraveOnline.
CraveOnline: So, Big Ass Spider… It’s a fun flick, man.
Mike Mendez: Thank you!
When I saw this movie, I thought to myself, “This could completely revolutionize the low-budget SyFy Channel giant monster movie.”
Uh-huh. Oh, thank you. That’s very kind of you.
“Let’s take the same budget, and the same scale of actors you would maybe expect from that, but let’s make it really good.” I don’t understand why that’s so hard to put together.
That was certainly the intention, but through doing the process, you kind of realize… it took us two years to make the movie while, let’s say Asylum or UFO Films or whatever probably made over a dozen movies in the same time. So from a financial point of view The Asylum really has it figured out, but for me it’s not about the money. For me it’s about making cool movies, so it was much more important for me to focus on actually making something that “I” wanted to see, and hopefully audiences wanted to see. But I understand why the model is the way [it is], and why they make so many, because it’s far more profitable to just keep churning them out than it actually is to spend time and care on one film.
Why did it take so long to finish Big Ass Spider? Did you have to spread out the production, or was it just the visual effects?
It was the visual effects. It was 100% the visual effects. The movie itself was shot in 17 days, and so that was pretty quick, and I’d say the first cut was done a month or two after that. So it was then the year and a half of effects work that really took us twice as long if not three times as long as we were anticipating. Not because the effects company was necessarily slow, but because we kind of got carried away and got overly ambitious, and ended up doing well over 600 effects shots in the film, when a movie this budget, usually, my understanding, has about 40. So that was kind of the thing. We got carried away and it took much longer.
Were there studio executives banging their fists on desks saying, “Damn it, Mendez! Where’s my film?!”
No, the wonderful thing is that Epic Pictures, who produced the movie, was very much on board with me and on the team. So probably those words were saved for the effects company, but they were kind to me at least. We were on the same page of wanting to get it done as soon as possible, but also trying to get the best quality that we could for the price that we were paying.
Was Big Ass Spider the original title?
No, the original title was Dinospider, and then it became Megaspider, and then it became Massive Attack, and then it became Alex & Jose vs. The Giant Spider, and at that point, that’s when I threw a conniption and insisted on it being called Big Ass Spider, which is what I wanted it to be called from the moment I signed on to it. I said, “Look, we’re trying to make something different here that’s not [a] run of the mill SyFy Channel movie. Let’s try to go a little above that and aim a little higher, and I think [unless] if we start with the title we’ll be marginalized right out of the gate.”
So for the longest time the shooting title was Megaspider, so every time I’d run into people who’d hear about the production they’d go, “Oh, when does it premiere on SyFy? Is it for The Asylum?” You know, it was like, come on. We need to change that, so we’re making a statement that we’re trying to do something different. But it was an uphill battle to get that title. It took two years of me pestering them.
