Cinema Scholars interviews director Eugenio Mira about the comeback of his debut The Birthday, an overlooked cult favorite starring Corey Feldman in a tour de force performance. After 20 years in obscurity, Drafthouse Films recently released the 4k restoration of The Birthday nationwide in theaters and On Demand.
Introduction
Little did anyone know at Austin’s first Fantastic Fest in 2005, that fan fave The Birthday would fall into obscurity after being lauded at the event. Even after a successful festival run and rave reviews that year, the film ultimately ended up in indie film purgatory with no distribution deal.
Eugenio Mira’s debut feature tells the story of Norman Forrester, a flustered young man attending the birthday party of his girlfriend’s father. As the nerve-racking night commences, Norman soon discovers some peculiar happenings around the hotel venue. It seems a doomsday sect is planning its own special event that night too.
With a timeless vibe and artistic production design, Mira creates an entire universe of mystery and intrigue in The Birthday. Endless hallways, insufferable characters, and a high-concept context all add to the constant sense of confusion and dread. All the while, the insanity of the situation lends itself to many paradoxical moments of comic relief.
Brief episodes of quirky humor aside, Mira uses each oddball moment as a building block in the overall unease. As Norman’s apocalyptic fiasco builds to full crescendo, the high-concept comedy thriller induces both nail-biting and chuckling up to the jaw-dropping conclusion.
Feldman’s Career-Best Performance
In addition to the outrageous story and stylized look, The Birthday also showcases a career-best performance by leading man Corey Feldman. As his character, Norman, finds his way through the outlandish situation, we are reminded why Feldman remains a Gen X film legend.
His disappearance into Norman Forrester is as astonishing as it is entertaining. With each little twitch and skittish glance around the room, Feldman commands every scene in which he appears, which is nearly all of them. Additionally, his earnest and agitated performance adds depth and almost all of the implausible humor to the over-the-top plot.
Into Obscurity
Despite a great reception at Fantastic Fest (as well as Stiges and Fantasia) that year, The Birthday languished with no official release. Soon, however, pirated copies made the rounds on YouTube, prompting a cult following for the forgotten gem.
Famous fans like Jason Blum and Jordan Peele, who selected the film as the 2023 New York premiere at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, helped bring attention to the overlooked “cinematic marvel.”
This year Fantastic Fest came full circle with a 20th Anniversary screening of the 4K restoration of The Birthday. Both Mira and Feldman (in costume and character as Norman, no less) were in attendance at the special event. Unlike the past go around following the 2005 fest, The Birthday screened at Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas for a one-night-only event on October 1st at 20 locations nationwide. The film then opened in select cities on October 11 and is now available on a screen near you On Demand. Here’s to resurrecting lost treasure!
Cinema Scholars’ Rebecca Elliott recently had an opportunity to chat with The Birthday director Eugenio Mira about his storied directorial debut. They discuss what it’s like revisiting the film after 20 years, reuniting with Corey Feldman, and the best pick for a double feature with The Birthday.
Interview
Rebecca Elliott:
Hi, Eugenio. Thank you so much for talking with me today about The Birthday.
Eugenio Mira:
It’s a pleasure.
Rebecca Elliott:
I’m a long-time Fantastic Fester, and I was at the anniversary screening recently. So that was so great, especially since I missed it at the original screening back in 2004. And I was really upset about missing it back then because Corey Feldman was one of my first teen idols, and I missed him at Fantastic Fest! So for years, I was trying to see this movie. All my friends that saw it always talked about how amazing it is, and what an incredible performance Feldman gives. But I couldn’t find it anywhere. So I finally got to see it 20 years later. I want to know, A, what’s it like to see your directorial debut 20 years later? Then B, tell me why this film didn’t get a proper release back in 2004.
20 Year Delay
Eugenio Mira:
Of course. Thank you very much. Well, first of all, it’s surreal because I was 26 when I made the film, and I just turned 47 this year. So I’m in that moment in my life when I’m not that old, not that young anymore. So I wasn’t expecting to have this recognition, validation, whatever you want to call it, from a film that, to me, has always been very close to my heart. To me, I’m not going to lie, the big star of this film is not me nor Corey. It’s the opportunity itself that the movie got made. And that’s something that cannot be reproduced. That’s the description of a miracle, something that you cannot make happen twice.
The fact that we have this second life, it’s completely unexpected. I’m going to be more grateful, to be honest. For a Spanish kid seeing this film distributed and released in the theaters in the US in 2024, when everybody’s just stuck to TikTok and the doomscrolling and all that. It’s like a miracle wrapped in another miracle, wrapped in another miracle. I have no words. And getting to the second part of the question. This is the thing.
There’s always this quality when you have your wishes come into reality. In this case, we wanted to make this film so badly, all of us, including the producer, that I think that we didn’t calculate properly how to place the film in the world. Technical words that now I’m way more familiar with. Like pre-sales and making sure that the financing has a leg already in the future. It’s not just about getting the money, shooting it. That’s exactly what happened. We got the money. Way less than what we needed, but we compensated with all this effort, blood, sweat, and tears. We love the final result. It’s just that we ran out of money.
The production company thinks that they had no good strategy, let’s say that. That’s a long story short. But yeah, The problem is that over the years we had offers to release the movie on DVD, Blu-ray, or maybe theatrically, but we never had the materials. That’s the second part of the story. My producer couldn’t afford to have a proper master. Years after that, the the 20th anniversary was coming closer, I thought that I had the responsibility to make sure that I could at least locate the negative and the mix of the sound and all that and put it together on my own terms and with my own resources.
That’s what I did. I basically forced my old producer by saying, “Hey, I’m not asking for any money. Let me figure out where the materials are.” That’s an Indiana Jones quest because nobody knew where the materials were. It took me months. Then let me put it together and create a new master that’s a proper 4K restoration. And coincidentally, Corey at the same time was connecting with Jordan Peele. And he said, “Hey. He reached out to me. He loved it, and now he’s just going to help us give visibility to it.”
I couldn’t believe that this was happening while I was finishing the 4K restoration of the film. So that’s the story. Believe me, there are a lot of twists and turns over these 20 years, but I’m trying to encapsulate everything.
Casting Feldman
Rebecca Elliott:
Wow. That’s such an incredible story. I love it. The way it’s become this cult favorite speaks to what an incredible film it is, too.
Eugenio Mira:
Thank you.
Rebecca Elliott:
Please do tell me about, back in 2003-2004, casting Corey Feldman. Of course, he’s this ’80s icon. I can attest to that. But he’s so incredible in this. It’s such a singular performance. Can you tell me what it was like to cast him? And then also reunite for the 20th anniversary. He was in full character as Norman at the Q&A that I saw.
Eugenio Mira:
It was already a very special moment. But I wasn’t expecting to reunite with the character. When I was there sitting next to him and talking in three interviews, and then during the Q&A, that was a really surreal trip. Like, literally, like going back in time. It felt very, very strange. But yeah, sorry, I want to answer your question. You said how we got here. Well, basically, I think that this comes out of the hubris of Mikel Alvariño, the co-writer and co-creator of the script, and myself.
We got out of film school and started in 1995. We met in Madrid. And we always wanted to make stuff that nobody was doing. We always aimed for the stars in a way that we wanted to do stuff that was weird. Keep in mind that in the second half of the 90s you got Charlie Kaufman with Being John Malkovich and Terry Gillian going full steam with the studios with 12 Monkeys. Imagine a studio backing a film as crazy as that one with all the resources. The 90s were…People always talk about the first half, and the second half was even crazier, culminating with Fight Club.
Everything felt possible, even for us from Spain. In the early 2000s, we started to play with ideas of what we wanted to do. There was this producer who saw my first short film that we made in the year 2000. He thought that it was shot on 35 mm. We built a set. It had a very Terry Gillian, and David Lynch nature. There was a hallway with doors. Then that guy, he basically said, “Hey, if you can do this for a five, six-week shoot and we can confine it in one place, what it will be like? Could you write something around it?” That was the trigger.
Mikel and I said, “Okay, we know the restrictions. We know that we cannot do Apocalypse Now. But let’s be as audacious and crazy and ambitious as we can.” That’s what we did, basically. That’s how The Birthday was born. The strangest film possible that is questioning itself all the time as it goes along. We wanted, from the very beginning, Corey Feldman to be there. Again, Alvariño said, “Hey, if Tarantino took John Travolta for Pulp Fiction, we’re going to have Corey Feldman.
We’re going to show the world that this guy can deliver something absolutely unexpected. And going counterintuitively to what you expect from this smart-ass kid with the Rayban glasses and throwing in one-liners. That talks like an adult. Basically, we reached out to Corey’s manager, and we sent him my short film. He got back to me. We had this 45-minute phone conversation from Barcelona in 2003, and he said that he wanted to do it. The script had spoken to him very strongly, and he had a very specific vision of the character that he wanted to present to me. And the rest is history.
A Decidedly American Film
Rebecca Elliott:
Wow. History indeed. I also am curious. You’re a Spanish filmmaker. You’re originally from Spain. But this is a film that is English language and presumably takes place in the United States, though I can’t I don’t remember if that’s actually confirmed.
Eugenio Mira:
Yeah, it takes place in Baltimore.
Rebecca Elliott:
That’s right. Baltimore. I’m curious about that decision because you also co-penned the script. So was that always on the page for it to take place in Baltimore? Just tell me about making the decision to frame it in an American context versus Spanish.
Eugenio Mira:
This is the thing, because I’m a kid of the ’70s, in the late ’70s. If you do look back in history, there are no other producers, or directors that work so hard to make films appealing to teenagers. Steven Spielberg, Richard Donner, Joe Dante. Even John Landis with the Blues brothers, which you may argue is not for kids. But it’s so whimsical. I mean, all those films that we loved when we were kids when you look back at them, it’s not like other generations that they look back at… Let’s say you were born in the ’60s, and in your early days, you had this Jodie Foster movie for Disney or Kurt Russell. They’re cute and also, but when you look at the way they were crafted, they were basically TV movies. They were not the most sophisticated films.
But you look at Back to the Future, and people forget that that movie was nominated for best screenplay at the Oscars. I mean, it wasn’t just a film for teenagers or something that you have a love for because you were a kid. What I’m saying is that combined with the ’90s when Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez, David Lynch, and Cronenberg in the late ’80s, You put all these things together.
I’ve been raised by English-speaking movies. I come from an area in Spain, the Southeast, the Valenciana community. Where during my teenage years, I started to interact with kids from the UK or the Scottish, and Irish. We all spoke in Spanish, but we consumed English language material for music. I had a band, and it was like Faith No More, Mr. Bungle. We didn’t have any inspiration coming directly from pop culture in Spain.
In Spain, we had that moment in the ’90s with the Álex de la Iglesia with The Day of the Beast. For the first time, it seemed that there was a bunch of filmmakers making films for us. But during the ’80s or ’90s, Spain couldn’t compete with the power of the UK or the US. That’s basically, we did what we wanted to see. We wanted to follow the tradition of Sam Raimi, Don Coscarelli, or John Carpenter. The Coen Brothers. Do our own thing. But in terms of the stuff that we love so much.
The Birthday Double Feature
Rebecca Elliott:
You just hit, I think, every nostalgia sweet spot for me in that answer. So I think we’re definitely around the same age. I have time for just one more question, and I’m curious, what do you think the best double feature would be with The Birthday? I have my ideas, but I want to hear what you think the best double feature would be.
Eugenio Mira:
I got one. I have two options. One will be Miracle Mile. That’s a movie that I love. That’s because it’s apocalyptic, and it has a third act that takes it completely… like, “What the hell?” And the other one will be an anti-80s movie that is like the adult version of Back to the Future. That is Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married. Peggy Sue Got Married is a film that I hold very close to my heart. Because when I saw it, I understood as a kid that that wasn’t adventure-driven or sci-fi-driven. It wasn’t about the impact that that possibility had on the characters. On Kathleen Turner, and even Nicolas Cage. Of course, it wasn’t as exciting as a feature made for a kid, but in a way, it destroyed my heart.
I was listening to Depeche Mode and The Cure back in the day. So I was a metal, pre-gothic. I never got into the black hair or anything. But yeah, Peggy Sue Got Married, really, really, really hit me hard. It’s one of the direct references about the decadence, discontent, and disappointment in relationships, and thinking that there’s hope to save…Maybe you think they’ve made things differently. The same with Miracle Mile. Miracle Mile is about these two guys that met on the verge of apocalypse. I will say that that will be a triple feature, actually. But either way, those two films would be perfect.
Rebecca Elliott:
Yeah, those are two really good choices. Maybe better than mine, but I-
Eugenio Mira:
I want to know yours.
Rebecca Elliott:
I was thinking the whole time that I would really like to see it play with Four Rooms.
Eugenio Mira:
Ah, Four Rooms! Of course, with the surreal humor. The fact that it’s upstairs, downstairs. The Birthday definitely has And that’s awful. That you didn’t see that coming from… But that’s more than fair. I agree with you.
Rebecca Elliott:
Well, good. Well, maybe we’ll just have to do a quadruple feature one day with The Birthday. Maybe at the next Fantastic Fest anniversary screening.
Eugenio Mira:
Let’s make a festival.
Rebecca Elliott:
All right. Let’s do it. I’m in. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about this amazing film. I’m so glad I finally got to see it at Fantastic Fest with my Corey there and you, of course. So thanks again. Have a great day.
Eugenio Mira:
Take care. Thank you.
Drafthouse Films recently released the 4k restoration of The Birthday nationwide in theaters and On Demand.
