34th Annual Philadelphia Film Festival: An Interview With ‘Dead Giveaway’ Director Ian Kimble

It seems like only yesterday Jill (Ruby Modine) was planning brunch with her best friend, Lia (Mikaela Hoover). In fact, it was yesterday — a simpler time when Jill didn’t have a dead body in her bed or any memory of how he got there. For more on Jill’s predicament and what it was like to produce his first feature film, here’s director and writer Ian Kimble with the scoop on Dead Giveaway:

Rachel Bellwoar: Dead Giveaway is a feature film version of your short film of the same name. What storylines were you most excited to expand on, given the longer runner time?

Ian Kimble: The most exciting thing was packing more crazy stuff within the same period of time. The movie doesn’t expand past the original parameters of Jill waking up and then eating brunch, so it was a lot of fun to throw more hijinks at the characters in the same time frame. It really amped up the madness these girls were suffering through.

Bellwoar: Besides getting to add stuff in, were there any choices you made while filming the short that you were glad to get a second chance to improve upon?

Kimble: For sure. I think something is learned with every project, so there were plenty of moments in the short where I’d wished I’d used a different camera angle or something. There’s also been projects I’ve worked on in between that made me think “oh this shot would work great in DG.” Even with this feature, there’s plenty to learn before I work on my next project.

Bellwoar: How long did the casting process take and did Ruby Modine and Mikaela Hoover audition together or did their chemistry really come across during filming? 

Kimble: Ruby came on first, actually quite some time before we actually ended up shooting. Maybe a couple of years. (She’s got a good story about how she almost gave up on this and then I called the next day to tell her we were setting dates to shoot. You’ll have to ask her to tell you.) When I got to talk to Mikaela about it, she was just getting finished shooting Superman and needed a break, but she really dug the script. She’s a big horror fan, so we clicked quickly over that. Once the two of them were together it was like fireworks. They’re both so funny and talented, so it made my job incredibly easy.

Bellwoar: When you first made your short in 2015, The Flight Attendant didn’t exist yet (nor had the book that TV show was based on been published). Did that change how you approached this feature at all, in terms of the shared plot point of a young woman waking up to a dead body beside her?

Kimble: Not at all. Dead Giveaway already had a solid tone that I think stands out more than other similar projects. I knew we had a good thing going, so there was really no need to pivot.

Bellwoar: At one point in the movie, Jill starts wearing a Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! shirt and in the press book you mention Clockwork Orange, but were there any other films that inspired Dead Giveaway?

Kimble: Good eye! I love that shirt. I think there’s a thousand movies that inspired me in one way or another, but Heathers, Jawbreaker, Pulp Fiction, Oceans 11, and Breathless are the ones that really stand out as having a major impact.

Bellwoar: So much of the plot depends on Jill getting her memories back from the night before. How difficult was it to figure out how much to reveal when and maintaining that suspense?

Kimble: It was a lot of fun to figure all of that out, actually. Pretty much whenever I was writing, if a scene started to feel stale or forced or if I started getting bored, I knew it was time to throw something else in there, be it a random person showing up or a flashback reveal. The script went through a crazy amount of revisions, but that’s what it takes. It takes time to mold things and time them properly. I really loved that process. I’ll miss doing it with these characters.

Bellwoar: Thanks for agreeing to this interview, Ian!

Dead Giveaway makes its world premiere at the Philadelphia Film Festival on October 17th. A second screening is scheduled for October 26th.